Dear Commons Community,

President Donald Trump shared his reaction to the Supreme Court dumping the Texas lawsuit challenging the election — and it wasn’t pretty (see tweets below).

He ranted after midnight last night about getting “screwed,” boasting he “got more votes than any other sitting president in history” — yet “purportedly lost” (because Joe Biden got 7 million more votes).

So Trump “intervened” on behalf of the Texas lawsuit seeking to toss all the votes in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, which happened to vote for Biden. The suit was backed by 17 other red states (“wonderful states,” the president noted in his tweet).

But the court tossed the suit Friday because Texas “lacked standing” to challenge votes in other states, it said in a brief, unsigned order.

In “a flash” the suit was “thrown out and gone, without even looking at the many reasons it was brought,” Trump angrily tweeted. “A Rigged Election, fight on!” he added.

He complained bitterly that no court has yet judged his complaints about election fraud on their “merits” — even though there is absolutely no evidence of election fraud. “It’s a “legal disgrace, an embarrassment to the USA!!!” he tweeted.

He grumbled that the Supreme Court “really let us down,” and has “no wisdom, no courage!”

Twitter marked the tweets about a rigged election “disputed.”

The president didn’t detail how he might “fight on.” But Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuiliani, the mastermind behind Trump’s failed legal assault on election results, told Newsmax yesterday that more suits will be filed.

Sorry, Donald, join Melania and start packing for your move to Mar-a-Lago!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

As expected, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit backed by President Donald Trump to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory, ending a desperate attempt to get legal issues rejected by state and federal judges before the nation’s highest court.

The court’s order was its second this week rebuffing Republican requests that it get involved in the 2020 election outcome and overturn the will of voters as expressed in an election regarded by both Republican and Democratic officials as free and fair. The justices turned away an appeal from Pennsylvania Republicans on Tuesday.

The Electoral College meets Monday to formally elect Biden as the next president.

Trump had called the lawsuit filed by Texas against Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin “the big one” that would end with the Supreme Court undoing Biden’s substantial Electoral College majority and allowing Trump to serve another four years in the White House.

In a brief order, the court said Texas does not have the legal right to sue those states because it “has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections.”

Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, who have said previously the court does not have the authority to turn away lawsuits between states, said they would have heard Texas’ complaint. But they would not have done as Texas wanted pending resolution of the lawsuit, and set aside those four states’ 62 electoral votes for Biden.

Three Trump appointees sit on the high court. In his push to get the most recent of his nominees, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, confirmed quickly, Trump said she would be needed for any post-election lawsuits. Barrett appears to have participated in both cases this week. None of the Trump appointees noted a dissent in either case.

Eighteen other states won by Trump in last month’s election, 126 GOP members of Congress and Trump himself joined Texas in calling on the justices to take up the case that sought to stop electors from casting their votes for Biden.

The four states sued by Texas had urged the court to reject the case as meritless. They were backed by another 22 states and the District of Columbia.

Republican support for the lawsuit and its call to throw out millions of votes in four battleground states based on baseless claims of fraud was an extraordinary display of the party’s willingness to subvert the will of voters. The House members backing the suit included House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy of California and Minority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana.

“This lawsuit is an act of flailing GOP desperation, which violates the principles enshrined in our American Democracy,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wrote in a message to Democrats on Friday.

A few Republicans have expressed concerns about the case. Many others have remained silent even as Trump endlessly repeated claims that he lost a chance at a second term due to widespread fraud.

“Texas is a big state, but I don’t know exactly why it has a right to tell four other states how to run their elections. So I’m having a hard time figuring out the basis for that lawsuit,” Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander told NBC’s Chuck Todd in an interview for “Meet The Press” that will air Sunday.

In sum, the courts again decided that there has been no evidence of widespread election fraud.  Trump has lost “the big one”.

Tony

Brandon Bernard

Dear Commons Community,

The Trump administration yesterday carried out its ninth federal execution of the year putting to death Brandon Bernard, a Texas street-gang member, in the slayings of a religious couple from Iowa more than two decades ago.

Four more federal executions are planned in the weeks before President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration.

As reported by the Associated Press.

“The case of Brandon Bernard, who received a lethal injection of phenobarbital at a U.S. prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, was a rare execution of a person who was in his teens when his crime was committed.

Several high-profile figures, including reality TV star Kim Kardashian West, had appealed to President Donald Trump to commute Bernard’s sentence to life in prison.

With witnesses looking on from behind a glass barrier separating them from a pale-green death chamber, the 40-year-old Bernard was pronounced dead at 9:27 p.m. Eastern time.

He directed his last words to the family of the couple he played a role in killing, speaking with striking calm for someone who knew he was about to die.

“I’m sorry,” he said, lifting his head and looking at witness-room windows. “That’s the only words that I can say that completely capture how I feel now and how I felt that day.”

As he spoke, he showed no outward signs of fear or distress, speaking lucidly and naturally. He spoke for more than three minutes, saying he had been waiting for this chance to say he was sorry — not only to the victims’ family, but also for the pain he caused his own family.

Referring to his part in the killing, he said: “I wish I could take it all back, but I can’t.”

Bernard was 18 when he and four other teenagers abducted and robbed Todd and Stacie Bagley on their way from a Sunday service in Killeen, Texas, during which Bernard doused their car with lighter fluid and set it on fire with their bodies in the back trunk.

Federal executions were resumed by Trump in July after a 17-year hiatus despite coronavirus outbreak in U.S. prisons.

Todd Bagley’s mother, Georgia, spoke to reporters within 30 minutes of the execution, saying she wanted to thank Trump, Attorney General William Barr and others at the Justice Department.

“Without this process,” she said, reading from a statement, “my family would not have the closure needed to move on in life.” She called the killings a “senseless act of unnecessary evil.”

But she stopped reading from the prepared text and became emotional when she spoke about the apologies from Bernard before he died Friday and from an accomplice, Christopher Vialva, the ringleader of the group who shot the Bagley’s in the head before the car was burned. He was executed in September.

“The apology and remorse … helped very much heal my heart,” she said, beginning to cry and then recomposing herself. “I can very much say: I forgive them.”

Earlier inside the death chamber, Bernard lay on a cross-shaped gurney with IV lines running into both arms. He looked back when a U.S. marshal picked up a phone and asked if there were any reasons not to proceed. Bernard reacted calmly as the marshall put down the phone and said the execution could proceed.

Bernard didn’t exhibit the labored breathing and constant twitching of others executed previously had. A minute after the lethal injection, his eyes slowly closed and he barely moved again.

About 20 minutes later, faint white blotches appeared on his skin and someone entered from a chamber door, listened to his heart, felt for a pulse, then walked out. Seconds later, an official said Bernard was dead.

Alfred Bourgeois, a 56-year-old Louisiana truck driver, is set to die Friday for killing his 2-year-old daughter by repeatedly slamming her head into a truck’s windows and dashboard. Bourgeois’ lawyers alleged he was intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for the death penalty, but several courts said evidence didn’t support that claim.

Before Bernard’s execution, Kardashian West tweeted that she’d spoken to him earlier: “Hardest call I’ve ever had. Brandon, selfless as always, was focused on his family and making sure they are ok. He told me not to cry because our fight isn’t over.”

Just before the execution was scheduled, Bernard’s lawyers filed papers with the Supreme Court seeking to halt the execution, but the high court denied the request, clearing the way for the execution to proceed.

Bernard had been crocheting in prison and even launched a death-row crocheting group in which inmates have shared patterns for making sweaters, blankets and hats, said Ashley Kincaid Eve, an anti-death penalty activist.

Federal executions during a presidential transfer of power also are rare, especially during a transition from a death-penalty proponent to a president-elect like Biden opposed to capital punishment. The last time executions occurred in a lame-duck period was when Grover Cleveland was president in the 1890s.

Defense attorneys have argued in court and in a petition for clemency from Trump that Bernard was a low-ranking member of the group. They say both Bagleys were likely dead before Bernard set the car on fire, a claim that conflicts with government testimony at trial.

The case prompted calls for Trump to intervene, including from one prosecutor at his 2000 trial who now says racial bias may have influenced the nearly all-white jury’s imposition of a death sentence against Bernard, who is Black. Several jurors have also since said publicly that they regret not opting for life in prison instead.

The teenagers approached the Bagleys in the afternoon on June 21, 1999, and asked them for a lift after they stopped at a convenience store — planning all along to rob the couple. After the Bagleys agreed, Vialva, the oldest of the group at 19, pulled a gun and forced them into the trunk.

The Bagleys, both of whom were in their 20s, spoke through an opening in the back seat and urged their kidnappers to accept Jesus as they drove around for hours trying to use the Bagleys’ ATM cards. After the teens pulled to the side of the road, Vialva walked to the back and shot the Bagleys in the head.

The central question in the decision to sentence Bernard to death was whether Vialva’s gunshots or the fire set by Bernard killed the Bagleys.

Trial evidence showed Todd Bagley likely died instantly. But a government expert said Stacie Bagley had soot in her airway, indicating smoke inhalation and not the gunshot killed her. Defense attorneys have said that assertion wasn’t proven. They’ve also said Bernard believed both Bagleys were dead and that he feared the consequences of refusing the order of the higher ranking Vialva to burn the car to destroy evidence.

The first series of federal executions over the summer were of white men. Four of the five inmates set to die before Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration are Black men. The fifth is a white woman who would be the first female inmate executed by the federal government in nearly six decades.”

I think Bernard’s execution was an act of barbarism.

Tony

D-Day, 9/11, Pearl Harbor

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday was a day of hope in the fight against COVID-19 as an Advisory Panel to the Centers for Disease Control approved the emergency use of a new vaccine.  However, this good news was overshadowed by the number of Americans who die of the disease becomes gloomier than ever: Over 3,000 American coronavirus deaths in a single day were recorded on Wednesday, more than the number of Americans who died on D-Day, 9/11, or the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The crisis across the country is pushing medical centers to the breaking point and leaving staff members and public health officials burned out and plagued by tears and nightmares.

All told, the crisis has left more than 290,000 people dead nationwide, with more than 15.5 million confirmed infections.

The U.S. recorded 3,124 deaths Wednesday, the highest one-day total yet, according to Johns Hopkins University. Up until last week, the peak was 2,603 deaths on April 15, when New York City was the epicenter of the nation’s outbreak.  

Wednesday’s toll eclipsed American deaths on the opening day of the Normandy invasion during World War II: 2,500, out of some 4,400 Allied dead. And it topped the toll on Sept. 11, 2001: 2,977.  And the toll during the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941: 2,041.

New coronavirus cases per day are running at all-time highs of over 209,000 on average. And the number of people in the hospital with COVID-19 is setting records nearly every day.

A U.S. government advisory panel yesterday endorsed widespread use of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine to help conquer the outbreak. Depending on how fast the FDA signs off on the panel’s recommendation, shots could begin within days, inaugurating the biggest vaccination campaign in U.S. history.

As reported by the Associated Press, here are stories from around the country of how Americans are dealing with the worsening crisis.

In St. Louis, respiratory therapist Joe Kowalczyk said he has seen entire floors of his hospital fill up with COVID-19 patients, some of them two to a room. He said the supply of ventilators is dwindling, and the inventory is so thin that colleagues on one shift had to ventilate one patient by using a BiPAP machine, similar to the devices used to treat sleep apnea.

When he goes home to sleep during the day at the end of his grueling overnight shifts, he sometimes has nightmares.

“I would be sleeping and I would be working in a unit and things would go completely wrong and I would shock myself awake. They would be very visceral and very vivid,” he said. “It would just really spook me.”

In South Dakota, Dr. Clay Smith has treated hundreds of COVID-19 patients while working at Monument Health Spearfish Hospital and at Sheridan Memorial Hospital in neighboring Wyoming.

He said patients are becoming stranded in the emergency room for hours while they await beds on the main floor or transfers to larger hospitals. And those transfers are becoming more challenging, with some patients sent as far away as Denver, 400 miles (644 kilometers) from the two hospitals.

“That is a huge burden for families and EMS systems as well when you take an ambulance and send it 400 miles one way, that ambulance is out of the community for essentially a whole day,” he said.

Smith added that some patients have gone from thinking “I thought this was a hoax” to “Wow, this is real and I feel terrible.” But he also has seen people with COVID-19 who “continue to be disbelievers. It is hard to see that.”

“At the end of the day the virus doesn’t care whether you believe in it or not,” he said.

New Orleans’ health director, Dr. Jennifer Avegno, described a recent visit to a hospital where she watched doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists and others risk exposure to the disease in a long, futile attempt to save a dying COVID-19 patient. Some broke down in tears afterward, she said.

“These are seasoned emergency and critical care personnel,” she said. “We do not cry very often — and especially not a number of us all at once.”

In Illinois, where authorities recorded an additional 196 deaths Thursday, Dr. Meeta Shah at Rush University in Chicago said medical workers are already beleaguered and waiting for the “other shoe to drop” from holiday gatherings.

“Every day you think, ‘Today is going to be awful,’” Shah said.

In Virginia, Gov. Ralph Northam, a doctor by training, announced a midnight curfew and expanded mask rules to require face coverings be worn outdoors, not just inside.

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf temporarily halted school sports and other extracurricular activities, ordered gyms, theaters and casinos to close and banned indoor dining at restaurants.

In Idaho, Gov. Brad Little didn’t order a statewide mask mandate or enact additional restrictions despite the public health agency announcing that COVID-19 is now the leading cause of death in the state. But the Republican governor warned that if hospitals continue to fill and the state has to initiate “crisis standards of care” — when life-saving treatment would be reserved for patients most likely to survive — car crash victims could be treated in hospital conference rooms and diabetics with infections could be denied beds.

Little was among the first governors to publicly wear a mask in the spring and has encouraged others to do so, but anti-mask sentiment is intense in the conservative state.

In New York City, which was ravaged by the virus in the spring, one doctor sounded a note of relative optimism, saying that at least physicians are more capable of managing the virus now.

“Early in the spring we did not know enough,” said Dr. Jolion McGreevy, who directs Mount Sinai Hospital’s emergency department. “We really are operating from a place of knowledge, now — which is a big leap from where we were in the spring.”

Let’s hope that the new vaccine is deployed efficiently and we can stem this tragedy.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, who defeated President Donald Trump in one of the most bitter presidential elections in U.S. history, are Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” for 2020. The selection was announced yesterday by NBC News’ Lester Holt.

Trump, who continues to make baseless fraud claims and continues to challenge an election that has already been certified by all 50 states, was on Time’s shortlist.

Biden and Harris were in a crowded field of other contenders including  Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s leading epidemiologist, who survived a White House attempt to discredit him, and the health care, postal and sanitation workers who put their lives on the line during the Covid-19 crisis, Time said.

Also on the shortlist, Time said, were the racial justice movements that organized nationwide demonstrations after the death of George Floyd in police custody, members of which Trump disparaged repeatedly as “thugs” and “anarchists.”

But in the end, Time’s editors decided that Biden, who was President Barack Obama’s vice president, and Harris, the nation’s first woman and first Black and South Asian American elected vice president, were the people who had the most influence on the world during a year when the presidential contest became for many Americans a referendum on Trump’s much-criticized pandemic performance.

Congratulations to Biden and Harris!

Well-deserved!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House Task Force on the coronavirus pandemic, is supposedly seeking to have a role in the Joe Biden administration.  She had a sterling reputation as a former U.S. Army physician, a globally recognized AIDS researcher and an Obama administration holdover, before her involvement with Donald Trump.  As has been the case with so many others during his administration, it appears Trump has damaged her reputation or at least frayed it a bit.  In the early months of the pandemic, she and Anthony Fauci were frequently brought before the press to inform and make recommendations about dealing with the pandemic.  When their professional judgements ran counter to Trump’s ideas, they had to take professional stands.  Fauci did.  Birx did not.  Both were then relegated to secondary roles in the pandemic fight.  Fauci has been able to maintain an audience for his views but Birx has stayed in the shadows. Below is an article describing her situation, courtesy of the Associated Press.

Tony

—————————————————–

The Associated Press

December 10, 2020

WASHINGTON (AP) — When Dr. Deborah Birx was brought into President Donald Trump’s orbit to help fight the coronavirus pandemic, she had a sterling reputation as a former U.S. Army physician, a globally recognized AIDS researcher and a rare Obama administration holdover.

Less than 10 months later, as Trump’s time in office nears its end, the White House coronavirus task force coordinator’s reputation is frayed. And after serving every president since Ronald Reagan, her future in the incoming Joe Biden administration is uncertain.

Over the course of the pandemic, Birx drew criticism from public health experts and Democratic lawmakers for not speaking out forcefully against the Republican president when he contradicted advice from medical advisers and scientists about how to fight the virus.

On everything from Trump’s aversion to masks to his dangerous suggestion that ingesting bleach might ward off the virus, critics and backers say Birx stepped carefully to try to maintain her influence in hopes of pushing the president to listen to the scientists.

“The president’s departure from reality become so extreme that it put her and others on the task force in an untenable position,” said Michael Weinstein, who heads the AIDS Healthcare Foundation and got to know Birx professionally after she was named the global AIDS coordinator in 2014.

“History will have to judge whether they enabled the president by giving him credibility based on their expertise or whether she and the others did more in helping prevent more people from being hurt by the craziness,” he said.

Birx has made clear that she wants to stick around to help the Biden administration roll out vaccines and persuade the American people to be inoculated.

She has reached out to Biden advisers in recent days as she tries to make the case for a role in the incoming Democratic president’s virus response effort, according to a person familiar with the Biden team’s personnel deliberations and a Trump administration coronavirus task force official. Both spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal discussions.

Birx has conveyed that, at best, she envisions herself in a scaled-back role as Biden shapes his own team. Biden has already appointed transition co-chair and Obama administration alumnus Jeffrey Zients to serve as White House coronavirus coordinator. But Birx’s reluctance to publicly challenge Trump when he downplayed the virus has left some in Biden’s transition skeptical that she retains credibility with the public, according to the person familiar with Biden transition deliberations.

Speaking at a Wall Street Journal CEO conference on Tuesday, Birx, a public servant for 40 years, said she planned to remain in government but has yet to hear from the Biden transition team about how or if she’ll be used on the pandemic.

Birx was pulled away from her ambassadorial post as the U.S. global AIDS coordinator to assist the task force. She worked alongside her mentor, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, who was less hesitant to directly contradict questionable statements by Trump. She was appointed to the AIDS post in 2014 by President Barack Obama, and it is up to Biden whether to return her to that position.

“I think the one thing I bring to this is really understanding epidemics around the globe,” she said.

The Biden transition team declined to comment. A White House task force spokesman said Birx was unavailable for comment.

Birx certainly had fans in Biden’s orbit before and immediately after she was tapped to serve as coronavirus coordinator in the Trump White House.

Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, called Birx “great.” Former Secretary of State John Kerry, who will serve as a special envoy on climate for Biden, described Birx at her 2014 swearing-in ceremony to serve as the U.S. global AIDS coordinator as someone who “embodies the best of what it means to be a pioneer, to be a practitioner, and a public servant all rolled into one.”

In her coronavirus task force role, Birx faced criticism for defending Trump after he suggested during an April briefing that ultraviolet light and ingesting disinfectants could serve as treatment for the virus. Birx explained that Trump “likes to talk that through out loud and really have that dialogue.”

Birx urged Trump to follow the data as he pushed to relax social distancing restrictions. She wasn’t above flattering the president. She faced criticism after she said in a television interview early in the crisis that Trump’s “ability to analyze and integrate data that comes out of his long history in business has really been a real benefit during these discussions about medical issues.”

Jeremy Konyndyk, now a member of the Biden transition’s Health and Human Services team, applauded Birx’s appointment early in the crisis. But Konyndyk, who led USAID’s Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance in the Obama administration, soon became a critic.

“My confidence in Dr. Birx has been eroding in recent weeks,” Konyndyk tweeted after Birx defended Trump’s decision in April to suspend funding for the World Health Organization. “But with this, it is lost. This statement is not credible as public health analysis, and is clearly not intended to be.”

Weeks later, Konyndyk tweeted that Birx “has repeatedly undermined her scientific credibility, publicly, in order to shield the President.”

By late summer, Birx’s stock in Trump’s eyes also diminished.

Trump was irate with Birx for what he called a “pathetic” response to criticism from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The Democratic speaker said in early August that she had “no confidence” in Birx for not pushing back harder on the president as he repeatedly diminished the impact of the virus.

Days later, Trump brought on as a pandemic adviser Dr. Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist and fellow at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution and a critic of virus-related restrictions on the economy. Birx’s public role at the White House was sharply reduced after that, and she spent recent months traveling the country urging states to be more aggressive in fighting the virus.

In recent days, Birx has herself become more pointed in her criticism of Trump.

Asked during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday about officials in the Trump administration repeatedly flouting public health experts’ pleas for Americans to avoid large gatherings and commit to wearing face masks, Birx voiced concern about leaders “parroting myths.”

“And I think our job is to constantly say those are myths, they are wrong and you can see the evidence base,” Birx said.

 

Dear Commons Community,

Leonard Cassuto and Robert Weisbuch have a new book coming out in January entitled, The New Ph.D.: How to Build a Better Graduate Education.  This morning they have an op-ed in The Chronicle of Higher Education that provides a look at the state of the Ph.D. and make recommendations for improving it for the sake of students, most of whom will never be able to get academic appointments in colleges and universities.  The op-ed opens:

“Imagine an entering cohort of eight doctoral students sitting around a table in a seminar room or a laboratory conference room. They’ve just arrived at graduate school, and they’re eager to see what their new adventure will hold. They all know that the academic job market is depressed, but most are hoping for a college or university teaching job of some kind.

Now let’s flash-forward in time. According to recent statistics, four of the eight (50 percent!) will not complete the Ph.D. — and those are pre-Covid-19 numbers. Of the four who do finish, two will not get academic positions and will seek jobs elsewhere. The remaining pair will get full-time faculty jobs, most likely at teaching-intensive institutions. Perhaps they’ll get tenure-track assistant professorships, though the chances for those positions have been shrinking. And maybe one of the two will get a tenure-track position at a research university like the one where those eight students assembled years earlier.

Yet all eight of the first-year students at the table will be trained according to the professional needs of that single one who might snag a job at a research university. The curriculum of most graduate programs in the arts and sciences emphasizes research, above all, and is contoured to prepare students to compete for the rarest and most competitive jobs that sit atop the academic status pyramid.

This status quo presents a picture of incoherence of process and goals. The Ph.D. simply isn’t working right now. The degree is taking longer and longer; graduate-student cohorts are less diverse than in most social sectors; the curriculum is frequently haphazard, and so, too, is the way doctoral students are advised and trained to teach. No one is really in charge, and assessment is almost entirely lacking.

But above all, this most prestigious of degrees isn’t serving students because it doesn’t prepare them for the realities that they will face in their professional lives. We should expect holders of the highest academic degree not simply to know a great deal but to know what to do with it, both within academe (teaching, for instance, is one enactment of knowledge) and beyond it.”

They proceed to make recommendations for making the Ph.D. more valuable for doctoral students.

“We need a Ph.D. that looks outside the walls of the university, not one that turns inward. There’s nothing new about a public-facing Ph.D. Its roots lie in the American academic past, before the Cold War expansion of academe created a temporary demand for professors, along with the illusion that this demand would endure forever. Engagement of multiple and diverse publics is a much older aim of American education than the model of pure scholarly replication.

Such an emphasis on public use and usefulness is coiled into the DNA of American higher education. Most private colleges and universities were founded by religious groups seeking to improve society through learning and the good works of their educated students. And the public good was a prime tenet in the founding of state universities beginning in the 19th century.

This idea of usefulness explicitly included the arts and sciences. Public universities fulfilled the language of the 1862 Morrill Act, which calls for both “liberal and practical education.” As John Dewey put it in 1917, a discipline “recovers itself … when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method cultivated by philosophers for dealing with the problems of men” (and women, we would add). That’s a worthy credo for the tradition of American higher education.

And it is one that the Ph.D. can fulfill splendidly — if we let it. Graduate students and Ph.D.s are highly resourceful people, but we don’t see their resourcefulness often or broadly enough. Doctoral students learn to work with information in sophisticated ways and to communicate to different kinds of audiences. But too many can get stuck because they aren’t aware that they possess those skills.”

I think Cassuto and Weisbuch are providing important insights into an issue that higher education has to address.  The present pandemic may hasten its response.

Tony

Dear Commons Community.

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has compiled a gender and race snapshot based on recent U.S. Department of Education data on the makeup and salaries of full-time faculty members in higher education.  Below is an excerpt.

Tony

————————————————————————————————————

This data snapshot provides an updated demographic profile of full-time faculty by academic rank and institution type, highlighting disparities among women and people of color in an effort to analyze demographic breakdowns and salary differences. The snapshot draws upon data from the provisional release of the Fall 2018 Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) Human Resources survey component and from foundational research by Martin Finkelstein, Jack Schuster, and Valerie Conley to understand the demographic breakdown of the faculty and the disparities that persist. Throughout the report, we have followed the terminology used by IPEDS for ease of data comparison.

This analysis shows that the proportion of women faculty members in academia is increasing, but that disparities remain.

• Even though women now account for 47 percent of full-time faculty members (compared with only 32 percent in fall 1991), they are overrepresented in non-tenure-track positions (see figure 2 below).
• Further disparities are apparent in the representation of women among full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty members within higher academic ranks, as only 32.5 percent of full professors are women.
• Salaries for full-time women faculty members are approximately 81.2 percent of men’s, with women earning $79,368 and men earning $97,738, on average (see figure 3 below).

A comparison of the proportions of full-time faculty members in each IPEDS race and ethnicity category with the broader US adult population (ages 24–64) shows that the composition of the faculty does not mirror the US population as a whole.

• Underrepresented minority (URM) individuals—those falling in IPEDS race and ethnicity categories other than white or Asian—make up only 12.9 percent of full-time faculty members across the country, despite making up 32.6 percent of the US population aged twenty-four to sixty-four (see figure 7 below).
• Among full-time URM faculty members, underrepresentation is particularly pronounced among the Hispanic or Latino and Black or African American categories.

The AAUP’s analysis confirms that women faculty members continue to face unique challenges in academia with respect to employment, advancement, salary, and job security, and that higher education is by no means immune from systemic racism. The pay and opportunity gaps identified in this data snapshot are the result of many factors beyond gender, race, and ethnicity, and closing them will require innovative and sustained efforts.

Dear Commons Community,

Scott Carlson has a sobering article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, reporting on the financial position of colleges and universities as seen by two major investment ratings agencies.  To sum up, “it ain’t good.” Here is an excerpt from the article.

“Two financial outlooks for higher ed appeared yesterday, and their most compelling parts were the longer-term prospects for the nation’s colleges and universities — because the near-term picture should be clear to nearly everyone by now. It is not promising

In their predictions, both Moody’s Investors Service and Fitch Ratings note the various ways that institutions are in pain right now: The pandemic has undercut tuition revenue, as colleges have seen sliding enrollment or have had to discount tuition heavily to bring in students. The proceeds of auxiliary services — such as student housing and dining — “remain the hardest-hit revenue stream,” Moody’s says, given that such income can account for 5 to 30 percent of a college’s operating revenue.

The years ahead for higher ed could be tough.

The result will be revenue declines of 5 to 10 percent across the sector in 2021, both credit-rating agencies predict. Some universities have been able to refinance debt or borrow so they have more cash on hand, a step that will be “critical” to their survival, Moody’s says. But colleges’ and universities’ high fixed costs — the salaries of faculty and staff members, for example, or debt and lease obligations — limit their ability to reduce expenses to absorb the shocks and “fundamental changes” coming for the sector, the agency says.

And that’s where things get a bit more interesting. Here are some of the key themes about the longer-term forecast:

Financial strain on all sides. Among those fundamental changes is the macroeconomic slowdown. The loss of businesses and jobs will plague the nation’s economy well beyond the arrival of a vaccine. “We expect that it will take until 2022 in the U.S. before economic activity fully returns to pre-virus (4Q19) levels,” write the analysts at Fitch, a pattern that could affect state and family budgets alike.

Even if economic activity quickly reverts to normal in the summer and fall of 2021, the recovery may be uneven and hampered by “any lingering economic impact and consumer caution,” says Moody’s. “Net tuition revenue and state funding are likely to remain suppressed in fiscal 2022, holding back a sharp sector rebound.”

Moody’s also predicts that research funds will dry up. The largest research sponsors are preparing for budget declines, recognizing the challenging revenue environment. That will further strain budgets as universities decide how best to support research through the lean funding years ahead.

Colleges’ endowment managers could also have to wrestle with a volatile investment market, with unclear effects on donors’ generosity.

So, in short, this will be a long haul.

A few glimmers of hope — potentially. “Meaningful changes” in higher-education policy — student-loan forgiveness, say, or another stimulus package — could sharply raise colleges’ prospects, Fitch notes. But the rating agency also expects that the administration of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. will run into resistance from Republicans, and a stimulus package is likely to be capped at $1 trillion.

The new focus on hybrid learning could lead to new revenue streams, but it will also increase competition. “Virtual learning is here to stay, but is not expected to evolve into the primary academic mode of delivery post-pandemic,” says the Fitch report.

Colleges’ futures will diverge more sharply. The reports don’t discuss consolidation in the sector, but that is a prospect beneath the surface. For years now, the rating agencies have released reports indicating that colleges will struggle perpetually into the future if they are less selective, under-endowed, or located in rural or demographically declining areas. Many of those colleges — smaller private institutions highly dependent on a residential experience — now face pressures to merge with larger and stronger institutions, or to close.

Meanwhile, the sector’s winners will continue to win. This year, “the strongest institutions with the most prominent market positions saw stable to growing enrollment, though growing price sensitivity was evident across the sector,” Fitch’s report says. “We expect the more highly selective and flagship research universities to weather these challenges better due to their strong demand profiles, greater revenue diversity, and typically larger financial resources.”

Of the above, I believe that mergers and consolidations are in store for many small private, tuition-driven colleges.  I also believe we will see major consolidation of academic, administrative, and student services in the public university systems.

Tony