Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading Leslie M.M. Blume’s book, entitled, Fallout:  The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World. It focuses on the reporting of John Hersey for the New Yorker one year after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.  Blume lays out how the American government and especially the military restricted access to Hiroshima and Nagasaki for months after the bombs were dropped in August 1945.  In addition to the massive loss of human life due to the detonation of the bombs, the tragedy of lingering radiation was never fully revealed until Hersey visited Hiroshima and subsequently published his article in August 1946. 

While an undergraduate in the 1960s, I read Hersey’s article which was subsequently published as a book.  He details the lives of six victims of the bomb in Hiroshima.  It is a stirring and emotional ride that makes evident the horror of atomic weapons.  It was a wake-up call for the world that humankind had entered a new phase in its evolution and its potential for destruction.  Blume quotes Albert Einstein:  “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

Blume also refers several times to President Harry Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb.  Essentially, Truman’s view was that hundreds of thousands of American and Japanese lives would have been lost if the United States had to launch a ground invasion of Japan in order to end World War II.  I had read A.J. Baime’s 2017 book entitled, The Accidental President:  Harry S. Truman and the Four Months that Changed the World, this past summer that supports this view.  And as I recall, it was never clear to Truman or the military leaders the devastation and especially the radiation fallout that the atomic bomb would bring.

Below is a New York Times book review of Fallout.

I would also suggest that one read Hersey’s Hiroshima (it is only a little more than 100 pages) before Fallout.

Tony

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The New York Times

The Reporter Who Told the World About the Bomb

By William Langewiesche

• Aug. 4, 2020

Seventy-five years ago, on the bright clear morning of Aug. 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, immediately killing 70,000 people, and so grievously crushing, burning and irradiating another 50,000 that they too soon died. The numbers are necessarily approximate, but even from within the deadliest conflict in history, such devastation from a single, airdropped device raised the stakes of war from conquest into the realm of human annihilation.

For a moment the Japanese had no idea what had hit them. But President Harry S. Truman soon provided an explanation. Returning from the Potsdam Conference, and broadcasting mid-Atlantic from the U.S.S. Augusta, a battle-weary cruiser, he said: “Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. … It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.”

Three days after Hiroshima the United States dropped additional evidence on Nagasaki, and Japan surrendered. Afterward, as part of a clampdown on information — an extension of routine wartime censorship — little mention of realities on the ground was allowed by American authorities beyond the obvious fact that with one bomb each, two cities had been smashed. And so what? In the United States the hatred for the Japanese far exceeded that of the hatred for the Germans; racism aside, the Japanese had dared to bomb Americans on American territory. Days after the bombings a Gallup poll found that 85 percent of Americans approved of the attacks, and another survey, made after the war, indicated that 23 percent wished that more such weapons had been dropped before the Japanese surrender.

Among those harboring no love for the enemy was a reporter named John Hersey, who had covered the war in Europe and the Pacific, and had described the Japanese as “stunted physically” and as “a swarm of intelligent little animals.” Hersey was over 6 feet tall, lanky, handsome, a graduate of Hotchkiss and Yale, and a modest, retiring man. He lived in New York, and was a rising star in the city’s publishing circles. When the war ended he was 31, had recently returned from a posting in Moscow and had just won a Pulitzer Prize for “A Bell for Adano,” a war novel set in Sicily. Preferring fiction over straight reporting, he spent much of his subsequent life writing novels.

But first there was this matter of the atomic bombs. Hersey despaired when he heard Truman’s Hiroshima announcement on the radio: He understood the ominous implications for humanity. At the same time, he felt relieved. The bombing, he guessed, would end the war; one such hit would prove to be plenty. He was outraged therefore when three days later the United States nuked Nagasaki; he called that second bombing a criminal action.

For weeks afterward little was known about the consequences in Hiroshima and Nagasaki beyond reports of impressive physical devastation. When word of widespread radiation sickness began to circulate in occupied Japan and the first Western press reports slipped by the censors, the accounts were categorically denied. In late August 1945, The New York Times ran a United Press dispatch from Hiroshima, but only after deleting nearly all references to radiation poisoning; as published, the article asserted that victims were succumbing solely to the sort of injuries that one would expect from a conventional bombing. An accompanying editorial note stated, “United States scientists say the atomic bomb will not have any lingering aftereffects in the devastated area.”

Less than two months earlier, a group of United States scientists had worried that the world’s first nuclear explosion, the ultrasecret Trinity test in New Mexico, might ignite the atmosphere. That did not happen. Yet in a narrow sense, the scientists were right about lingering effects at the blast site: Surprisingly soon after the bombings, the residual radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki dropped to levels that allowed the cities to begin to recover.

But that was only half the radiation story. The other half consisted of tens of thousands of people who had absorbed dangerous doses on the mornings of the bombings and were now sickening and in some cases dying. The U.S. Army officer who had directed the atomic bomb program, Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves, dismissed reports of dangerous radiation as propaganda. “I think our best answer to anyone who doubts this is that we did not start the war, and if they don’t like the way we ended it, to remember who started it.” This was obviously a non sequitur. By the fall of 1945 accounts of radiation sickness had become indisputable even by Groves. Called to testify before a Senate committee on atomic energy, he resorted to claiming that radiation poisoning “is a very pleasant way to die.”

Hatred blinds people. Hatred makes people stupid. John Hersey was different. He was a New England sophisticate who had attended his exalted schools on scholarships, and now stood as evidence that if imbued with discipline and a deep education in the humanities, patricians can be molded as well as bred. He was physically brave. As a war correspondent he had willingly exposed himself to great danger. The Army formally commended him for having rescued a wounded G.I. on Guadalcanal. Characteristically, he explained that helping the man to safety was the best way he knew to remove himself from the fight. No one believed it. War correspondents move forward into fights. Hersey moved forward a lot. But he was not a Hollywood tough guy. He was quiet, self-effacing and empathetic. Throughout his experience with battle, and despite the slurs he had written about the Japanese, he distinguished between the idea of a hated enemy — the Japanese as a swarm — and the reality of whatever individual was currently bringing him under fire. “Was he from Hakone, perhaps Hokkaido? What food was in his knapsack? What private hopes had his conscription snatched from him?”

After the United States dropped the atomic bombs, Hersey wrote that if civilization was to mean anything, people had to acknowledge the humanity of their enemies. As the months passed he realized that this was the element still lacking in descriptions of the devastation. It was a failing of journalism, and an opportunity for him. With the backing of The New Yorker — specifically of the magazine’s founder and editor, Harold Ross, and his colleague William Shawn — he flew in early 1946 to China, and from there found his way into Japan, where he managed to obtain permission to visit Hiroshima. He was there for two weeks before returning to New York to escape the censors and beginning to write. The result was an austere, 30,000-word reportorial masterpiece that described the experiences of six survivors of the atomic attack. That August, The New Yorker devoted an entire issue to it. It made a huge sensation. Knopf then published the story in book form as “Hiroshima.” It was translated into many languages. Millions of copies were sold worldwide.

Today it exists as something of an artifact, a stunning work that nonetheless has lost the power to engage largely because the stories it contains have permeated our consciousness of nuclear war. Few people read the original source anymore. That is unfortunate, but now — 74 years after the book’s publication, and 27 years after Hersey’s death — help has arrived in the form of a tightly focused new book, “Fallout,” that unpacks the full story of the making of “Hiroshima.” The author is Lesley M. M. Blume, a tireless researcher and beautiful writer, who moves through her narrative with seeming effortlessness — a trick that belies the skill and hard labor required to produce such prose. Her previous nonfiction book, “Everybody Behaves Badly,” was a purely literary work about the background of Hemingway’s first novel, “The Sun Also Rises”; though Blume’s attributes as a writer were fully apparent, the book suffered from requiring readers to care about Hemingway and his narcissistic excesses.

Such burdens are absent from “Fallout.” The subject of nuclear war is too important not to fascinate, and though we have avoided it for 75 years, the possibility now looms closer than before. “Fallout” is a warning without being a polemic. In the introduction Blume writes: “Recently, climate change has been dominating headlines and conversations as the existential threat to human survival; yet nuclear weapons continue to pose the other great existential threat — and that threat is accelerating. Climate change promises to rework the world violently yet gradually. Nuclear war could spell instantaneous global destruction, with little or no advance warning.”

Blume reminds us that Hersey’s work still best describes what that would look like on an intimate level; like his original reporting, “Fallout” is a book of serious intent that is nonetheless pleasant to read. There are knowable reasons for this, including Blume’s flawless paragraphs; her clear narrative structure; her compelling stories, subplots and insights; her descriptions of two great magazine editors establishing the standards of integrity that continue at The New Yorker and other high-end magazines today; the oddball characters like General Groves who keep popping up; and most of all, the attractive qualities of her protagonist, John Hersey. In a world sick with selfies, Hersey’s asceticism still stands out.

“Fallout” does suffer from two flaws. The first is the claim that the United States mounted an important cover-up to hide the realities of radiation sickness from public knowledge. Blume’s publisher chose to hype this claim in the subtitle — a mistake — and then, in a letter accompanying the advance proof, went so far as to describe the cover-up as the biggest of the century and a “cloak and dagger tale.” It must be embarrassing for Blume. It’s obvious to anyone who has been around the U.S. Army that whatever ineffective obfuscation occurred during the months following the atomic bombings resulted from the same old stuff — a mixture of authentic ignorance, reflexive secrecy and incompetent military spin. The book’s second flaw is the unnecessary claim that Hersey’s work altered the course of history, changed attitudes toward the arms race, and has helped the world avoid nuclear war ever since. This is just silly, though there are indications that Hersey himself may have believed some of it in his old age. If so, given his contributions to humanity he may be excused. But what altered the course of history was the acquisition of nuclear weapons by countries other than the United States — particularly the Soviet Union in 1948 — and the certainty of retaliation should ever a nuclear weapon be used again. Were it not for that threat it seems likely that the United States would have struck again against other foes — North Korea, Russia, China, North Vietnam, Cuba, somewhere in the Middle East? — despite the suffering described so powerfully in Hersey’s “Hiroshima.”

But against the scale of the subject these are quibbles, and do not detract from the excellence of Blume’s work. She ends the book with an exhortation that connects with our time: “The greatest tragedy of the 21st century may be that we have learned so little from the greatest tragedies of the 20th century. Apparently catastrophe lessons need to be experienced firsthand by each generation. So, here are some refreshers: Nuclear conflict may mean the end of life on this planet. Mass dehumanization can lead to genocide. The death of an independent press can lead to tyranny and render a population helpless to protect itself against a government that disdains law and conscience.” She continues in a similar vein, finishing with the optimistic assertion that the opportunity to learn from history’s tragedies has not yet passed.

To which an appreciative reader can only think: We’ll see.

Members of the Sackler Family

Dear Commons Community,

The Department of Justice announced a multi-billion-dollar settlement with Purdue Pharma on yesterday, following a years-long investigation into the drug manufacturer accused of sparking the nationwide opioid crisis.

But several state attorneys general say federal prosecutors let the Sacklers, the family who owns Purdue Pharma and made billions of dollars exploiting opioid dependence, off the hook and failed to deliver justice.

“This settlement provides a mere mirage of justice for the victims of Purdue’s callous misconduct,” Connecticut Attorney General William Tong (D) said in a statement. “The federal government had the power here to put the Sacklers in jail, and they didn’t. Instead, they took fines and penalties that [Purdue] likely will never fully pay.”

As part of the $8.3 billion settlement, Purdue pleaded guilty to three federal criminal charges, including conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government and violating federal anti-kickback laws by paying doctors to write more prescriptions for OxyContin, a painkiller Purdue manufactures.

The settlement also requires Purdue to become a public benefit company that will be owned by a trust and “function entirely in the public interest,” according to a statement issued by the Justice Department. Any profits Purdue yields by selling OxyContin and other drugs must be directed toward “state and local opioid abatement programs,” the DOJ said.

Attorneys representing states, families, Native American tribes and other entities suing Purdue say using proceeds from OxyContin sales to curb addiction to that very drug is bizarre and inappropriate, and that Purdue should instead be sold to a private buyer.

In a letter sent to U.S. Attorney General William Barr last week, a group of 25 state attorneys general spoke out against a potential settlement with Purdue, specifically its then-rumored transformation into a public benefit company.

“The Sacklers’ proposal to cloak the OxyContin business in public ownership compromises the proper roles of the private sector and government,” the attorneys general wrote in their letter. “Thousands of Americans have died, and it is a top priority of every State to enforce the law against the perpetrators whose misconduct caused the opioid crisis. The last business our States should protect with special public status is this opioid company.”

‘Allows Billionaires To Keep Their Billions’

The settlement also leaves the Sacklers’ vast wealth largely untouched, as they have reportedly moved as much as $13 billion out of the company in recent years and into offshore bank accounts in anticipation of the financial fallout from thousands of lawsuits.

And that $8 billion settlement? Purdue probably won’t pay much of it.

Here’s why: the company filed for bankruptcy in September 2019. Though the settlement includes a $3.54 billion criminal fine, that bankruptcy status means the money likely won’t be fully collected, The Associated Press reported.

The settlement also requires Purdue to make a direct payment to the government of $225 million as part of the $2 billion criminal forfeiture. The Justice Department said it’s willing to give Purdue credit for the remaining $1.775 billion based on the money it is expected to funnel to state and local governments as a public interest company.

Purdue has also agreed to pay $2.8 billion in civil penalties. Separately, the Sacklers will pay $225 million in civil damages, according to the DOJ.

“I cannot support this deal,” North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein (D) said in a statement Wednesday. “The opioid epidemic is a scourge leaving addiction, death and sorrow in its wake.”

“Purdue Pharma is as responsible for creating this crisis as any company and the Sacklers as any family,” he continued. “This settlement does not force the Sacklers to take meaningful responsibility for their actions. A real agreement to resolve these cases would force the Sacklers to pay more and would provide funding to help pay for the treatment and programs people need to get well.”

Though the DOJ stated in its announcement that the Sacklers have not been released from any potential criminal liability, several state attorneys general expressed skepticism that the family would ever be held accountable.

“While our country continues to recover from the pain and destruction left by the Sacklers’ greed, this family has attempted to evade responsibility and lowball the millions of victims of the opioid crisis,” New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) said in a statement. “Today’s deal doesn’t account for the hundreds of thousands of deaths or millions of addictions caused by Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family. Instead, it allows billionaires to keep their billions without any accounting for how much they really made.”

‘DOJ Failed’

Some experts said Wednesday’s announcement was similar to Purdue’s 2007 settlement with Virginia prosecutors who had accused the company of deceiving doctors about OxyContin’s addiction risks. The company ended up only paying a modest fine of $600 million while Purdue executives pleaded guilty to misdemeanors.

Fining a corporation instead of sending its executives to jail is essentially granting “expensive licenses for criminal misconduct,” then-Sen. Arlen Specter  (R-Penn.) said at the time, according to The New Yorker.

The Trump administration has been pushing to finalize a deal with Purdue ahead of the Nov. 3 election, hoping voters see the settlement as a win against Big Pharma, multiple lawyers familiar with the matter told The New Yorker earlier this year.

“The timing of this agreement mere weeks before the election raises serious questions about whether DOJ political leadership was negotiating in the best interest of the American public,” Tong said in his statement.

“DOJ failed,” Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey (D) tweeted Wednesday. “Justice in this case requires exposing the truth and holding the perpetrators accountable, not rushing a settlement to beat an election.”

“I am not done with Purdue and the Sacklers,” she added, “and I will never sell out the families who have been calling for justice for so long.”

This settlement is a disgrace and indicative of all that is wrong with our justice system.  It is rigged to protect the wealthy people of this country even when they are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. 

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Former President Barack Obama delivered a blistering rebuke (see video above) of Donald Trump last night, telling voters that the current president’s actions have had severe consequences on American society. It was the best takedown of Trump so far in this election cycle.  It was incredibly uplifting to see Obama skewering Trump’s failures and frailties while praising Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

“They [Trump and associates] embolden other people to be cruel, and divisive and racist. And it frays the fabric of our society. And it affects how our children see things. And it affects the ways that our families get along. It affects how the world looks at America. That behavior matters. Character matters,” he said.

Obama made the speech during a drive-in campaign rally for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in Philadelphia. He praised his former vice president for his empathy, decency and competence, and his ability to lead the nation through the COVID-19 pandemic ― qualities he emphatically reminded voters Trump does not possess.

Obama said a Biden administration would begin to restore America’s reputation in the world as a nation that “stands with democracy, not dictators,” and that leads by setting an example in efforts to overcome threats like climate change, terrorism, poverty and disease.

“And with Joe and Kamala at the helm, you’re not going to have to think about the crazy things they said every day,” Obama said.

“It just won’t be so exhausting. You might be able to have a Thanksgiving dinner without having an argument. You’ll be able to go about your lives knowing that the president is not going to retweet conspiracy theories about secret cabals running the world or that Navy SEALs didn’t actually kill Bin Laden,” he added.

Trump has persistently amplified disinformation throughout his presidency, and last week he refused to condemn the dangerous QAnon conspiracy theory, which holds that a satanic cult of liberal elites is running a pedophile ring that Trump is secretly working to stop.

He also retweeted a baseless conspiracy theory that Obama ordered the killing of SEAL Team 6, the unit best known for capturing terrorist leader Osama bin Laden in 2011. When he defended that decision during his NBC News town hall, host Savannah Guthrie told him, “You’re the president. You’re not like someone’s crazy uncle who can retweet whatever.”

Obama told voters that with Biden in charge, America would have a president who doesn’t threaten and insult anybody who doesn’t support him.

“That’s not normal presidential behavior,” he said. “We wouldn’t tolerate it from a high school principal. We wouldn’t tolerate it from a coach. We wouldn’t tolerate it from a co-worker. We wouldn’t tolerate it in our own family ― except for maybe a crazy uncle somewhere.” 

Watch Obama’s  full address above and listen to every word!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Associated Press is reporting that Pope Francis became the first pontiff to endorse same-sex civil unions in comments for a documentary that premiered today, sparking cheers from gay Catholics and demands for clarification from conservatives.  As reported.

“The papal thumbs-up came midway through the feature-length documentary “Francesco,” which premiered at the Rome Film Festival. The film, which features fresh interviews with the pope, delves into issues Francis cares about most, including the environment, poverty, migration, racial and income inequality, and the people most affected by discrimination.

“Homosexual people have the right to be in a family. They are children of God,” Francis said in one of his sit-down interviews for the film. “You can’t kick someone out of a family, nor make their life miserable for this. What we have to have is a civil union law; that way they are legally covered.”

While serving as archbishop of Buenos Aires, Francis endorsed civil unions for gay couples as an alternative to same-sex marriages. However, he had never come out publicly in favor of civil unions as pope, and no pontiff before him had, either.

The Jesuit priest who has been at the forefront in seeking to build bridges with gays in the church, the Rev. James Martin, praised the pope’s comments as “a major step forward in the church’s support for LGBT people.”

“The pope’s speaking positively about civil unions also sends a strong message to places where the church has opposed such laws,” Martin said in a statement.

However, the conservative bishop of Providence, Rhode Island, Thomas Tobin, immediately called for clarification. “The pope’s statement clearly contradicts what has been the long-standing teaching of the church about same-sex unions,” Tobin said in a statement. “The church cannot support the acceptance of objectively immoral relationships.”

Catholic teaching holds that gays must be treated with dignity and respect but that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered.” A 2003 document from the Vatican’s doctrine office stated that the church’s respect for gays “cannot lead in any way to approval of homosexual behavior or to legal recognition of homosexual unions.”

Doing so, the Vatican reasoned, would not only condone “deviant behavior,” but create an equivalence to marriage, which the church holds is an indissoluble union between man and woman.

That document was signed by the then prefect of the office, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, and Francis’ predecessor.

One of the main characters in the documentary is Juan Carlos Cruz, the Chilean survivor of clergy sexual abuse whom Francis initially discredited during a 2018 visit to Chile.

Cruz, who is gay, said that during his first meetings with the pope in May 2018 after they patched things up, Francis assured him that God made Cruz gay. Cruz tells his own story in snippets throughout the film, chronicling both Francis’ evolution on understanding sexual abuse as well as to document the pope’s views on gay people.

Director Evgeny Afineevsky had remarkable access to cardinals, the Vatican television archives, and the pope himself. He said he negotiated his way in through persistence, and deliveries of Argentine mate tea and Alfajores cookies that he got to the pope via some well-connected Argentines in Rome.

“Listen, when you are in the Vatican, the only way to achieve something is to break the rule and then to say, ‘I’m sorry,’” Afineevsky said in an interview ahead of the premiere.

The director worked official and unofficial channels starting in early 2018 and ended up so close to Francis by the end of the project that he showed the pope the movie on his iPad in August. The two recently exchanged Yom Kippur greetings; Afineevsky is a Russian-born Jew now based in Los Angeles. On Wednesday, Afineevsky’s 48th birthday, the director said Francis presented him with a birthday cake during a private meeting at the Vatican.

But “Francesco” is more than a biopic about the pope.

Wim Wenders did that in the 2018 film “Pope Francis: A Man of His Word,” which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. “Francesco,” is more a visual survey of the world’s crises and tragedies, with audio from the pope providing possible ways to solve them.

Afineevsky, who was nominated for an Oscar for his 2015 documentary “Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom,” traveled the world to film his pope movie: The settings include Cox’s Bazaar in Bangladesh where Myanmar’s Rohingya sought refuge; the U.S.-Mexico border; and Francis’ native Argentina.

“The film tells the story of the pope by reversing the cameras,” said Vatican communications director Paolo Ruffini, who was one of Afineevsky’s closest Vatican-based collaborators on the film.

Ruffini said that when Afineevsky first approached him about a documentary, he tried to tamp down his hopes for interviewing the pope. “I told him it wasn’t going to be easy,” he said.

But Ruffini gave him some advice: names of people who had been impacted by the pope, even after just a brief meeting. Afineevsky found them: the refugees Francis met with on some of his foreign trips, prisoners he blessed, and some of the gays to whom he has ministered.

“I told him that many of those encounters had certainly been filmed by the Vatican cameras and that there he would find a veritable gold mine of stories that told a story,” Ruffini said. “He would be able to tell (the) story of the pope through the eyes of all and not just his own.”

Francis’ outreach to gays dates to his first foreign trip in 2013 when he uttered the now-famous words “Who am I to judge,” when asked during an airborne news conference returning home from Rio de Janeiro about a purportedly gay priest.

Since then, he has ministered to gays and transsexual prostitutes and welcomed people in gay partnerships into his inner circle. One of them was his former student, Yayo Grassi, who along with his partner visited Francis at the Vatican’s Washington D.C. embassy during the pope’s 2015 visit to the U.S.”

Bravo, Papa Francesco!

Tony

Kung Flu Donald

Dear Commons Community,

While regularly criticizing China for undercutting American business interests and ranting about the “Kung Flu” pandemic, President Donald Trump has maintained a bank account in The People’s Republic for years in hopes of pursuing business deals in the nation, The New York Times reported this morning.   

The Times noted that Trump maintains just three foreign bank accounts — the one in China and two in Britain and Ireland that are largely used by the companies that operate his golf resorts in Scotland and Ireland. The account in China, which had not been previously reported, is controlled by Trump International Hotels Management and as such doesn’t appear on the president’s public financial disclosure paperwork.

The company paid $188,561 in taxes to China from 2013 to 2015, the Times added, although it reported only a few thousand dollars in income to the Internal Revenue Service (reporting overseas income is required by law).

Alan Garten, a lawyer for the Trump Organization, confirmed that Trump held a Chinese bank account and told the Times it was opened “with a Chinese bank having offices in the United States in order to pay the local taxes.” He said the Trump Organization had opened an office in China to explore hotel deals, but it had remained inactive since 2015 and the bank account had “never been used for any other purpose.”

The revelations would seem to undercut efforts by both Trump and top Republican lawmakers who have spent months trying to use similar information about Hunter Biden, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s son, to paint the former vice president and his family as too “soft” on China.

The GOP has long made false assertions about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, including his work on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, in an effort to smear the Biden family and claim he “cashed in” on his father’s tenure in the Obama White House.

“He’s like a vacuum cleaner — he follows his father around collecting,” Trump said recently about Hunter Biden’s work abroad. “What a disgrace. It’s a crime family.”

There is no evidence that either Biden has engaged in wrongdoing.

The article is the latest in a series of New York Times reports based on copies of two decades worth of Trump’s tax returns, which the president has refused to release for the entirety of his first term in office. The documents, which were provided to the Times by someone with legal access to them, include details that Trump paid just $750 in personal income taxes in 2016 and again in 2017 and none at all in 10 of the 15 years before that.

Kung Flu to you, Donald!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Faced with a steep rise in Covid-19 cases, the local county health department has issued an emergency “stay in place” order for all undergraduates at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, effective immediately. 

The decision by the Washtenaw County Health Department — which was supported by university officials — comes after a series of dorm outbreaks that fueled a dramatic increase in cases of the virus on campus.

The surge in infections on the campus contributed to a “critical” situation overall in Ann Arbor, according to local health officials, who noted that university students now represent more than 60 percent of local cases.

Some of that Covid spread is a result of Michigan students partying irresponsibly. But university leaders have also been roundly criticized for failing to take enough precautions when reopening.  As reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“The 14-day health-department order allows students to attend class, but they cannot socialize. The order will not affect the University of Michigan Wolverines’ football schedule.

University officials on Tuesday pledged to provide additional safety options for students and instructors, including moving more undergraduate courses to online instruction for the remainder of the semester.

This latest effort to control Covid at Michigan may or may not work. But in the meantime, frustrations on campus are growing.

Sophie Clark is a University of Michigan freshman who lives in Mary Markley Hall. The mixed-gender dorm houses hundreds of students and has long had a reputation for a lively social scene.

That’s not a good thing during Covid-19. In fact, Clark calls it “terrifying.”

“People have been going to parties every weekend, they’ve been having parties in the dorms,” Clark, 18, said. “Pretty much nothing has been done about it. Students who get caught with other students in their rooms haven’t really faced any punishment.”

Coronavirus cases are soaring at Markley Hall, and that increase is part of a larger surge happening all across campus. Michigan reported more than 900 new Covid-19 cases during the past four weeks.

More than 100 students in Markley have been relocated to isolation or quarantine housing because of either a positive test result or possible exposure to the coronavirus. At all dorms combined, a total of 259 students are isolated or quarantined.

The rising student cases have strained the surrounding Ann Arbor community — at times overwhelming community testing sites.

Critics say the university’s fall reopening has been a disaster.

“We continue, day in and day out, to remind administrators of the issues that we’re seeing on the front lines,” said Soneida Rodriguez, a resident adviser at one of the university’s smaller dorms. “The policies are not working, this is not going well, and we’re not seeing change quickly enough.”

Rick Fitzgerald, a University spokesman, said via email that Michigan is “rapidly following up on documented nonobservance of public health rules. Measures range from educational conversations to housing probation and contract termination.”

The two-week stay-in-place order for all undergraduates comes on the heels of an emergency order directed specifically at Markley Hall residents. Last weekend university administrators joined county health officials in announcing a 14-day quarantine for all residents.

The university ordered students to attend classes online for two weeks, and to “only leave your room when necessary to obtain food, use the bathroom, or in the case of emergency.”

The quarantine order said that a “high proportion of residents” had not participated in mandatory Covid testing, which therefore made more drastic action necessary.

Your metrics of success should not be, How quickly can we get things open? It should be, How quickly can we get this spread of Covid-19 under control?

Were those irresponsible students “scared straight” by the quarantine? Not necessarily.

About 15 minutes after the notice arrived, Clark saw three female students leaving the residence hall. The trio were headed to a party, Clark said. And they were laughing about it.

In an interview with The Chronicle, Clark expressed frustration with her fellow students, but she was also appalled at university leadership.

“It’s negligence,” Clark said of the administration.

“They have the option to enforce housing guidelines,” she continued. “They have the ability to punish students with more than just a slap on the wrist … they have the power to actually promote safety. But they’re just not.”

Fitzgerald, the university spokesman, said Michigan “has been closely monitoring conduct and accountability for reported COVID-19 related violations since the beginning of the semester, with a strategic focus on residence halls. Each reported violation is addressed within 48 hours with assignment of restorative measures along with probation or even contract termination depending on the nature of the violation. In most cases, our students are very responsive to restorative measures as we have had a very low occurrence of repeat offenders.”

Student partying is probably not the only reason for Michigan’s dorm outbreaks. Other possible factors include the university’s decision to reopen student housing at 70 percent capacity — a higher percentage than some other colleges.

The university also failed to aggressively enforce its safety measures for move-in day, such as requiring students to show a negative Covid test result. The Michigan Daily student newspaper also documented multiple instances of students roaming the hallways without masks on, even when housing staff was nearby. A two-person limit on riding the elevator wasn’t enforced either.

“There’s just no follow-through,” one freshman student told the newspaper in August.

Michigan’s fall semester began with resident advisers expressing frustration over unsafe working conditions. The administration was at times dismissive of those concerns.

When resident advisers asked for more Covid testing, for example, Robert Ernst, director of University Health Services, questioned the effectiveness of large-scale testing.

“Having a test doesn’t prevent you from getting Covid,” he told the RAs at an August town hall.

The following month, RAs at Michigan went on strike. They refused to work for nearly two weeks, until a deal was reached that gave them priority status for surveillance testing, while also providing each RA with a box of 50 masks, every 45 days.

But Rodriguez, the resident adviser, said those concessions haven’t fixed an underlying problem: The university appears more concerned with giving students the full “college experience” than with protecting public health, she said.

“They’re trying to justify the tuition price,” she said.

One example cited by Rodriguez: continuing discussions about whether to reopen common areas in the dorms, such as study lounges, workout rooms, and dining halls.

“I don’t think having this mass reopening of common space is the right approach, which is what they want to do,” Rodriguez said. “Your metrics of success should not be, How quickly can we get things open? It should be, How quickly can we get this spread of Covid-19 under control?”

The university said that while it has examined the possible reopening of common spaces, “there is currently no date identified when they are scheduled to reopen.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Teachers find themselves at the heart of the national crisis — responsible not just for children’s education and well-being, but also for essential child care as parents struggle to get back to work.

In 2017, women comprised more than three-quarters of public-school teachers, in a profession that remains stubbornly underpaid and undervalued.  The New York Times has a featured article this morning that examines the roles that teachers are playing in our schools as they cope with the pandemic.  Here is an excerpt.

“In 2018, the starting salary for a public-school teacher averaged $38,000. In more than 1,000 districts, even the highest paid public-school teachers with advanced degrees and decades of experience earn less than $50,000. A 2010 report from McKinsey looked at the state of teaching in America compared with other developed countries, like Singapore and Finland, and concluded that their schools attract more teaching talent in part because they offer more competitive pay with bonuses tied to performance.

On the Global Teacher Status Index, a survey that examines respect for teachers among the general public in 35 countries, America fell in the middle of the pack — ranking at No. 16, far behind China, Malaysia and Taiwan.

Working at a private school instead of public does not improve pay, either. In fact, private schoolteachers often earn less, though their working conditions are often better. What does substantially increase a teacher’s salary is working in a high school classroom instead of elementary or preschool. Male teachers are also far more likely to teach older students.

Now the coronavirus has placed those same underpaid teachers at the heart of a national crisis as the U.S. looks to teachers not only for children’s education and well-being but also as essential child care as parents try to get back to work.

“Our public education system is a massive hidden child care subsidy,” said Jon Shelton, a historian of the teaching work force at the University of Wisconsin.

It’s no wonder teachers have faced widespread pressure from parents, community leaders and government officials to return to their classrooms for the new academic year. Districts across the country have been left to chart their own course, pitting the risks of returning to in-person learning against the disadvantages of remaining virtual. This month New York City became the first big city in the country to reopen its schools, with a hybrid of in-person and remote learning, after weeks of delays and uncertainty. On Sunday, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced he would close schools in nine zip codes that have seen a rise in coronavirus positivity rates.

Coronavirus Schools Briefing: It’s back to school — or is it?

Below are three stories from teachers across the U.S. about the complex roles they have played in their students’ lives since the virus first kicked up and how they’re managing school now.

The Community Worker

“You don’t just have to talk about academics, you can share how you’re feeling.”

— Jardy Santana, the Bronx, New York

Jardy Santana, 34, teaches English at Mott Haven Academy Charter School, a school predominantly serving families involved in the child welfare system in the Bronx, which is run in partnership with the New York Foundling. She has been teaching for 12 years, including 10 at Mott Haven, and this year has been her hardest.

For her, the onset of remote learning last spring brought a weighty realization: Each student has very different needs in the virtual classroom. She began checking in individually with her fourth-grade pupils. Some needed help accessing food. Some needed a shoulder to cry on (virtually) when their family members were sick. Some needed individualized help with their reading.

Ms. Santana joined the school’s food program, distributing meals to families so she could see her pupils and offer them air hugs at a distance. She kept an eye out for those who missed class, and texted them to say they could rely on her for emotional support.

“I said, ‘If you’re feeling sick, if a family member is sick, I’m here. You don’t just have to call me to talk about academics, you can share how you’re feeling.’”

One of Ms. Santana’s students didn’t have internet access at home and relied on New York’s public Wi-Fi booths. It was clear the student was worried about her classroom performance suffering, Ms. Santana explained, so they worked out an arrangement: When getting internet was tough, the student could call Ms. Santana and dictate writing exercises to her over the phone. These phone calls tightened their bond emotionally, too. They discovered they had the same birthday, so they celebrated remotely.

Ms. Santana was intent on countering the gloom around them — especially the incessant noise of sirens — by bringing levity into the virtual classroom. One afternoon they had a dance party instead of a lesson. “It was extremely hard on the kids to not see each other, not have their friends, not have their teachers around,” she said.

Ms. Santana was relieved to see her students’ moods lighten on spirit days. She celebrated “Crazy Hair Day” with them on Zoom by designing a makeshift headband, and “Crazy Accessories Day” by digging out an old pair of glasses from her dresser. One morning, they were prompted to send a photo of something in their home that was providing them with emotional support. Ms. Santana sent a picture with her Kitchen-Aid, because baking Dominican cakes with her children has brought her joy on particularly high-stress days.

Over the summer, Mott Haven Academy wrestled with whether to stay virtual or go to a hybrid model in the fall, like so many New York City schools. But its surrounding neighborhood in the Bronx was one of the hardest hit by the pandemic: 2,804 Covid-19 cases and 253 deaths per 100,000 people. The school decided to remain virtual until the neighborhood’s daily infection rate went below the 3 percent threshold identified by the city as critical for school reopening.

When classes commenced this fall, Ms. Santana woke up at 5:30 in the morning with nervous energy. Her son, a third grader at Mott Haven Academy, was equally excited for the first day of school, even though his reunion with friends would be limited to video. He proudly showed off his apartment work space, with his mom in the background greeting her own class.

More than a decade into her career, Ms. Santana holds tight to the passion that drew her to the classroom. She decided she wanted to be a teacher in first grade. She had immigrated from the Dominican Republic to the U.S. when she was six, and neither of her parents spoke English. They bought her a chalkboard, and when she came home from school each day, she taught them the same lessons that she had received from her endlessly patient first-grade teacher, Mrs. Iglesias.

Helping her parents puzzle through foreign words felt challenging — but not compared with her long days during the pandemic, paired with long evenings of child care. “I’ve never worked this hard and put in this many hours,” she said.

But as the new semester begins, she is learning to set boundaries and focus on her own family as well. “Sometimes I have to say, you did your job as a teacher, now you’ve got your mom hat on,” she said. “This is Ms. Santana time, this is Jardy time.”

The Union Activist

“I can empathize with what families are going through.”

— Sarah Pamperin, Green Bay, Wis.

Sarah Pamperin, 33, is a bilingual teacher in Green Bay, Wis., working with Spanish-speaking sixth-grade students at a Green Bay area public school. For her, the early weeks of the pandemic were a haze of nonstop work, all of which felt insufficient to meet her students’ needs. She worked with student services to deliver food, books and jump ropes to their porches. She texted and called them to see how their families were doing.

Her school is near a meatpacking plant where many of the parents of her students work. In April, it was the site of a major Covid-19 outbreak, resulting in numerous parents being hospitalized. One former student had a parent who died.

Hoping to help her students process the fast-moving news, she assigned them an essay to write on the pandemic, but her students found it too draining to discuss. The personal stress they were under made it hard for them to focus on academic progress at all.

“There was a lot of emotional turmoil and we couldn’t do a whole lot of curricular teaching,” she said. “Those were some of the darkest weeks of my life.” Instead of spending her time focused on lesson plans, she found herself consumed by her students’ emotional well-being — contacting those who had to temporarily stay with other relatives, texting with children whose parents were hospitalized.

Ms. Pamperin is an active union member, but she’s less focused on teachers’ rights and more focused on using her union position to promote the needs of bilingual and non-English speaking parents in her district, pushing for widespread use of a phone app that allows teachers to communicate with families in their native language. She has fought to improve her school’s teachings on racial injustice.

This summer, when her district decided that schools would continue remote rather than in-person learning in the fall, she “obsessively” tracked which students didn’t have internet access. Through her union, she also asked the district to create learning pods — small clusters of students who could study together daily — but the suggestion was rejected. Some feared this would make the district liable for coronavirus outbreaks.

She has also scrambled to balance caring for her students with tending to her own sons (ages 2 and 4), one of whom has autism. Her husband has a good job repairing medical equipment at a hospital, but during the early weeks of the outbreak she found herself wishing he could stay home to help her with child care.

“I was envious of my husband, to be honest,” she said. “Even though he was working in a scary environment, he at least got to leave the house every day.” She also acknowledged, though, how privileged she was to have steady income, unlike so many.

Ms. Pamperin feels that her personal struggles allow her to connect more deeply with students. She knows what it is like to care for a developmentally disabled child; she also has personal experience living with economic challenges, like more than half of her students.

“It’s helped me to take more of an activist stance for families, instead of just saying, ‘Yeah, that’s a real bummer,’” she said. “I can empathize with what families are going through.”

Champion for the Disabled

Caitlin Hernandez working on her Braille Note Touch Plus.

When Caitlin Hernandez, 30, was in graduate school, she was asked the same question over and over again: Can someone who is blind really be a teacher? The doubt she heard made her all the more certain she did want to go into teaching, so that her students — many of whom have autism, dyslexia, A.D.H.D. and physical disabilities — would have a role model who really knew what they were experiencing. She wanted them to learn from her success, not to question their own aspirations.

Ms. Hernandez typically starts out every school year introducing herself as someone who is totally blind and has been her whole life, then reads a book called, “My Three Best Friends and Me, Zulay,” which has a blind protagonist. (This book was not written by a blind author, but Ms. Hernandez is currently writing her own young adult novel about a blind person.)

Then came Covid, and Ms. Hernandez’s blindness made the adjustment to virtual learning all the more challenging. She teaches special education to second, third, and fourth grade students, as well as kindergartners, at Rooftop School, an alternative public school in San Francisco. She is accustomed to using hands-on tactics, like counting out objects with her students in math class. These tactile learning techniques are no longer possible on Zoom.

Before the pandemic, she started her days taking an access-a-ride service to school, arriving just before class started at 7:50. Now she “rolls out of bed” and starts with an 8:30 Zoom session, offering one-on-one reading assistance to one of her students.

In Her Words: Where women rule the headlines.

In the pre-Covid classroom, Ms. Hernandez had an assistant who kept an eye on the students and ensured they were paying attention. Now that classes are remote, that assistant functions as a “back seat Zoom driver,” helping to monitor the chatbox and unmute students while Ms. Hernandez reads her lesson plan. Ms. Hernandez uses the Zoom app on her phone, which is linked to a Braille display. In the afternoon, she offers 30-minute larger classes, and smaller group reading exercises for just two or three students.

She misses being in person with her students, which helped establish trust. “There’s this in-person connection we have of being like, ‘I’m also disabled, so I get that it’s hard but we’re going to do this together,’” Ms. Hernandez said. “I tell them, ‘I got you, I’ve been there.’ And that looks very different over Zoom.”

It is not just Ms. Hernandez who is experiencing the difficulties of remote learning. She has heard from her disabled students that they are struggling emotionally. They depended on their in-person classes both for structure and community.

“The nature of the pandemic is that everything is so unpredictable, and that’s hard for autistic people because structure is so helpful,” she said. “I hear people say, ‘This must be great for kids with autism because the classroom is overwhelming.’ It’s really not. They’re missing out on being with folks who engage them.”

Most troubling to Ms. Herandez is the widening gap between her students who get support from their families at home, and those who have to push themselves through virtual learning and even provide child care to their younger siblings, because their parents are struggling too. “It’s not equitable,” she said. “Some students have support at home and others just don’t.”

Ms. Hernandez has seen her students struggle to focus during virtual classes. Sometimes they wander away from their computers, or forget to mute themselves while calling for a snack. She knows that privately many of them are suffering, especially those with parents who lost jobs. Ms. Hernandez has provided comfort and structure by arranging activities they can do together virtually.

“I asked the kids what books they had at home that they really enjoyed,” she said. “Then I would go download it so we could read together.”

God bless our teachers!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump showed just how much he is afraid of Anthony Fauci by attacking him on twitter and on a campaign call yesterday.

“All I ask of Tony is that he make better decisions,” Trump tweeted. “Also, Bad arm!”  The latter comment refers to when Fauci threw out the first pitch to open the Major League baseball season in July.

Earlier in the day, Trump said that people were tired of coronavirus mitigation efforts, according to multiple reporters listening in on a campaign staff call two weeks out from Election Day. He also claimed, without evidence, that if the administration had listened to Fauci, one of the nation’s premier infectious disease experts and the longtime head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, “we’d have 700,000, 800,000 deaths.”

“People are tired of COVID. I have these huge rallies. People are saying, ‘Whatever. Just leave us alone.’ They’re tired of it. People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots,” Trump said, adding, “Fauci is a nice guy. He’s been here for 500 years.”

While Americans are certainly tired of COVID-19, polling shows a majority are committed to taking precautions to try and reduce its spread. According to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll, 67 percent say it should be mandatory to wear a mask in public. Another 60 percent say Trump is not following the advice of medical experts closely enough.

A National Geographic/Morning Consult poll taken earlier in October found that 74 percent of Americans said they always wear a mask when leaving their home.

Trump’s handling of the pandemic, which has killed more than 220,000 Americans and resulted in the president himself being hospitalized earlier this month, has been criticized since the coronavirus appeared early this year. The Yahoo News/YouGov poll found that 59 percent of respondents say the president underestimated the risks.

“Every time [Fauci] goes on television there’s always a bomb, but there’s a bigger bomb if you fire him,” Trump added. “This guy’s a disaster.”

Anthony Fauci is everything that the President is not.  Fauci is honest, humble, and admits to the public if he is wrong.  Trump, on the other hand, is a liar, a pompous ass, and is incapable of admitting wrong.

Trump fears truth and genuineness!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

It should come as no surprise that President Trump tries to control what Dr. Anthony Fauci says about the coronavirus.  There have been hints that Fauci is not allowed to appear on news shows without a signoff by Trump and company.  Last night in an interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes, Fauci lays bare some of the insanity and pettiness that he has had to live with from the White House.  Here is a recap of his interview.

“In his bluntest interview yet, Dr. Anthony Fauci confirmed Sunday that the White House has been controlling when he can speak to the media during the pandemic, the latest example of rising tensions between President Donald Trump and the nation’s top infectious disease expert.

Fauci sat down to speak on “60 Minutes,” in which he spoke more candidly than in the past about his growing frustration around President Donald Trump’s COVID-19 response and getting involuntarily caught up in politics.

“During this pandemic, has the White House been controlling when you can speak with the media?” Dr. Jon LaPook, CBS News chief medical correspondent, asked the doctor.

“You know, I think I’d have to be honest and say yes,” answered Fauci, a member of the White House coronavirus task force. “I certainly have not been allowed to go on many, many, many shows that have asked for me.”

LaPook then called Fauci “one of the most trusted voices in America” who, in a time of much-needed transparency of information, is barred from speaking to the public.

“You know I think there has been a restriction, Jon, but … it isn’t consistent,” Fauci said.

The comments come about a week after ABC’s “This Week” host Jon Karl said that the White House refused to allow Fauci on the show despite the doctor being willing to appear. At least two other networks ― CBS and NBC ― also tried and failed to book Fauci for their respective Sunday morning political talk shows that week.

White House communications director Alyssa Farah tweeted Sunday that Karl’s allegations were false and that Fauci appeared on several TV news shows earlier in the week. She also said that Karl never requested another member of the coronavirus task force in Fauci’s place.

But Karl pushed back, tweeting that Farah was “not telling the truth” and attaching an image of an email he allegedly sent her asking if Vice President Mike Pence, Dr. Deborah Birx or several other public health officials would appear on the show if Fauci were unavailable.

“The truth matters,” the host wrote to Farah. “The requests for Dr. Fauci and the other members of the task force were made directly to you ― multiple times.”

Fauci, who is notoriously apolitical, has been growing more visibly frustrated as the president continues to undermine him and other public health experts on safety protocols and potential treatments throughout the pandemic ― even after the president himself tested positive for the virus following multiple superspreader events.

The Trump campaign released a new ad last week featuring what appeared to be Fauci praising Trump’s response to the pandemic. The ad features a video clip of an interview the doctor gave on Fox News in March, when the pandemic was beginning to lead to lockdowns across the country.

“I can’t imagine that … anybody could be doing more,” Fauci is heard saying right after the video’s narrator praises the president’s response to the pandemic. The doctor said his words were taken out of context ― which he reiterated in Sunday’s interview ― and demanded the ad be taken down, but the Trump campaign continued to run it in key battleground states.

“I do not and nor will I ever publicly endorse any political candidate. And here I am, they’re sticking me right in the middle of a campaign ad, which I thought was outrageous,” Fauci said. “I was referring to something entirely different. I was referring to the grueling work of the task force that, ‘God, we were knocking ourselves out seven days a week. I don’t think we could have possibly have done any more than that.’”

“Did the steam start to come out of your ears?” LaPook asked the doctor.

“It did, quite frankly,” Fauci answered. “I got really ticked off.”

Trump is jealous of Fauci because he knows that the American people believe in and defer to Fauci when it comes to the truth about the pandemic.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has an article this morning describing the dire financial situation which Manhattan’s New School is  facing and which has been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.  For the past century, the New School has produced great social thinkers including Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, and Erich Fromm.  Its Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science was founded in 1933 as the University in Exile for scholars who had been dismissed from teaching positions by the Italian fascists or had to flee Nazi Germany.  Founded in 1919, the New School is now facing very difficult decisions with its survival at stake.  Here is an excerpt from the article.

“In 1918, as another pandemic roared through the country, now entering its second year at war, a group of prominent intellectuals drafted a proposal for a new kind of university in Manhattan, one that would break with hundreds of years of tradition in higher learning. What became the New School for Social Research only a year later would not emphasize degrees or Latin or pander to youth or privilege. Instead, it would concentrate on meeting the demands of an increasingly turbulent and urban world.

The moment was perfectly tuned for this sort of innovation. The growth of cities, the rise of labor, the stirring movement of the suffragists all required an evolved understanding of the country’s power structures and political arrangements.

The Ivy League, steeped in the values of the ruling class and plagued by a chauvinistic uniformity of thought, was unlikely to supply it. Those schools would not produce a talent pipeline of union chiefs, reformers, housing advocates, social critics — antagonists of an unjust existing order. The New School would generate leaders who prioritized the needs of the common citizen.

Over the course of the next century, the university grew to include five distinct colleges and claim faculty members (Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, Erich Fromm) who were among the most distinguished thinkers of the 20th century. But like so many institutions rooted in progressive purpose, the university would learn all too painfully that idealism is expensive.

By the time the coronavirus arrived to darken the fortunes of so many universities around the country, the New School had already been dealing with longstanding financial difficulties. It would soon face a budget shortfall of $130 million and was set to draw down its endowment by an astonishing $80 million, nearly a quarter of its total value.

To put that figure in perspective, the president of Princeton said in May that spending anywhere above 6 percent of the university’s $26 billion endowment — roughly $1.5 billion — was “not sustainable.” The New School had reached the point of existential crisis long before Princeton ever would.”

These are difficult times for all higher education.  We hope for the best for the New School.

Tony