Dear Commons Community,

Large public university systems are beginning to join the list of colleges that will require students and/or employees to be vaccinated against Covid-19 this fall.   

Rutgers University, a public institution, was the first in the nation to announce a vaccine mandate, on March 25. Until last Thursday, just two of its public peers had followed suit. But now a wave of public colleges, led by  the University of California and California State University said they, too, would require vaccines.  As reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The California systems are hedging their bets by waiting until vaccines are formally approved by the Food and Drug Administration to make their mandates official, avoiding questions about the legality of requiring vaccines that remain under emergency-use authorization, or EUA. But on Friday the University System of Maryland and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor announced requirements without such contingencies. The Maryland system will require all on-campus faculty, staff, and students to be vaccinated, and Michigan said it would require the vaccine for residential students.

Those announcements may mark a watershed moment for public colleges that have hesitated to take similar action. (The California State system, in particular, has a penchant for trailblazing, having been one of the first to declare last May that its fall semester would be fully online.)

Whether to require vaccination is a thorny question for any college leader to navigate, but it’s especially so for those at the helm of public institutions, which are bound by state policy — and state funding. Six states — Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Montana, Utah, and Texas — have enacted legislation that prohibits government agencies, including public colleges, from requiring people to receive a Covid-19 vaccine. (The governors of those six states are Republicans.)

New Jersey has not announced such a ban, but the prospect of legal action has cropped up at Rutgers University, which on Thursday fielded a letter from an anti-vaccine advocacy group asking it to withdraw its requirement. Rutgers’s mandate, lawyers writing on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network asserted, “violates federal law, international laws, civil and individual rights, and public policy.” (Rutgers’s position, a university spokeswoman wrote in an email to The Chronicle, “is consistent with the legal authority supporting this policy.”) ICAN sent a similar letter to Princeton University, a private institution.

To require the Covid-19 vaccine or not will be a controversial issue at many colleges and universities in the coming months.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The moon will be a little “pink” tonight (April 26, 2021).

The first supermoon of the year will arrive officially at 11:33 p.m. ET, according to the Farmers’ Almanac.  You can start viewing it a little after sundown depending upon your location. The full moon will be a supermoon, when the moon is within 90% of perigee, or at one of the closest points to Earth.

This week’s supermoon is dubbed the “pink” moon because of its timing close to flower blooming season.

There is another supermoon coming this year on May 26. It is expected to appear bigger and shine brighter than the April moon, according to forecasters.

Take a few minutes to enjoy the moon tonight!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

As we see the pandemic ravage other parts of the world such as in India where there are an estimated 300,000 new infections everyday, there is pressure on President Biden to assist by sharing technology and vaccine production with other countries.  It appears that intellectual property laws are a stumbling block.  Michelle Goldberg on Friday reviewed this complicated issue in her column (see below) in the New York Times.

There should be a way to get around intellectual property if President Biden and his administration have the will to do so.

Tony

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The New York Times

Biden, the World Needs Your Help to End the Pandemic

The president should keep his promise on vaccine patents.

By Michelle Goldberg

April 23, 2021

Last July, during the presidential campaign, Joe Biden promised the universal health care advocate Ady Barkan that he wouldn’t let intellectual property laws stand in the way of worldwide access to coronavirus vaccines.

“The World Health Organization is leading an unprecedented global effort to promote international cooperation in the search for Covid-19 treatments and vaccines,” said Barkan. “But Donald Trump has refused to join that effort, cutting America off from the rest of the world. If the U.S. discovers a vaccine first, will you commit to sharing that technology with other countries, and will you ensure there are no patents to stand in the way of other countries and companies mass-producing those lifesaving vaccines?”

Biden was unequivocal. “It lacks any human dignity, what we’re doing,” he said of Trump’s vaccine isolationism. “So the answer is yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And it’s not only a good thing to do, it’s overwhelmingly in our interest to do.”

Yet now that Biden is in power, his perception of our interest doesn’t seem quite so clear. Last year, India and South Africa requested a waiver from World Trade Organization rules governing intellectual property for technology dealing with the pandemic. Dozens of mostly developing countries have since joined them. A handful of rich nations, including the United States, oppose the waiver, but there’s a widespread belief that if America changes its position, other countries will follow. Much of the world is waiting to see what Biden does.

There’s an enormous consensus in favor of a waiver. It includes dozens of Nobel laureates and the former leaders of Britain, Canada, Costa Rica, France, Malawi, New Zealand and many other countries. Ten Democratic senators have asked Biden to accede to India and South Africa’s request. Representative Jan Schakowsky of Illinois is helping to organize a letter from members of the House, and so far almost 100 have signed on.

Most major health and human rights NGOs have joined the campaign for a waiver, including Doctors Without Borders, Partners in Health, Human Rights Watch and Oxfam International.

“This is, I think, one of the first promises broken,” Asia Russell, the executive director of the Health Global Access Project, an international advocacy organization, said of the Biden administration’s failure to support a waiver, at least so far. She compares it to the administration’s brief refusal to lift Trump’s refugee caps. “That was pretty completely reversed,” she said. “And this one has not been. And we’re in a pandemic. If not now, when?”

To be fair, this issue is more complicated than that of refugee admissions. It’s easy enough to dismiss arguments from Big Pharma that lifting intellectual property protections will stifle innovation, given the enormous public subsidies that underlie the creation of the vaccines. “U.S. taxpayers have invested huge amounts into making this happen,” said Schakowsky. But other arguments deserve to be taken seriously.

Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and a vaccine expert, isn’t against lifting the waiver, but thinks intellectual property isn’t the most important barrier to expanding vaccine access.

“It is an issue, but I wouldn’t put it at the top of the list,” he said. “Even if you were to liberalize all the patent restrictions completely tomorrow, it wouldn’t make a difference for this pandemic, I don’t think. And the reason is because the biggest problem is the technical know-how.” He argues that giving countries the formula for the vaccines won’t be enough if there isn’t a work force trained to make them.

Hotez is working with a company in India to produce a billion doses of a “people’s vaccine,” a low-cost, easy-to-manufacture Covid inoculation that’s finishing up Phase 2 trials. He’d like the U.S. government to help him produce five billion doses.

“These new technology vaccines are exciting and they’re very innovative, but with a brand-new technology, it’s difficult to go from zero to five billion very quickly,” he said.

But while a W.T.O. waiver isn’t sufficient to solve the vaccine shortage, it would be a start. In a recent letter to activist groups, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the director general of the W.T.O., acknowledged that there is “untapped production potential in the developing world. Getting the intellectual property and technology transfer dimension right is clearly critical to unlocking this potential.”

Many of the world’s most accomplished public health figures believe that a waiver is a first step in allowing this process to begin.

“Every day we don’t put progressive policies in place is a day lost to saving more lives, so more people die,” said Russell. “Because you can’t flip that switch overnight — you need six months, one year, beyond, to gear this up. It doesn’t take forever, by any stretch. But the longer we say it will take too long, it will take much too long.”

Right now, widespread vaccination is freeing many Americans from a year of terror and isolation, even as new waves of the pandemic ravage countries like India and Brazil. Low- and middle-income countries say that a temporary change to global trade rules will help them defend themselves. Does the Biden administration really want to stand against them?

You can argue that America needs to help vaccinate the world to stem the evolution of new variants, or to reassert global leadership at a time when Russia and China have been engaged in much more effective vaccine diplomacy. But the real reason to do everything possible to help countries get the vaccines they need to combat this plague is the one Biden articulated to Ady Barkan last year.

“This is the only humane thing in the world to do,” he said. So he should do it.

A torchlight procession in Yerevan, Armenia on Friday to mark the 106th anniversary of the massacres in which about 1.5 million ethnic Armenians were killed during World War I. Credit…Karen Minasyan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Dear Commons Community,

President Biden visited history yesterday to declare that the killing of 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman rulers during World War I was an act of genocide.  None of his predecessors had ever made such a declaration in order not to offend Turkey and its government.  As reported in the New York Times.

“Each year on this day, we remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring,” Mr. Biden said in a statement issued on the 106th anniversary of the beginning of a brutal campaign by the former Ottoman Empire that killed 1.5 million people. “And we remember so that we remain ever vigilant against the corrosive influence of hate in all its forms.”

After years of avoiding the topic, the United States now officially views the killing of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire a century ago as genocide.

The declaration by Mr. Biden reflected his administration’s commitment to human rights, a pillar of its foreign policy. It is also a break from Mr. Biden’s predecessors, who were reluctant to anger a country of strategic importance and were wary of driving its leadership toward American adversaries like Russia or Iran.

The Turkish government, as well as human rights activists and ethnic Armenians, gave a muted response to the news, which leaked days in advance, describing the move as largely symbolic. Later on Saturday, the country’s foreign minister summoned the U.S. ambassador to protest the declaration, state media reported.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has repeatedly denied that the killings amounted to genocide, had lobbied hard to prevent the announcement, mounting a conference and media campaigns before the anniversary on Saturday.

But in a call on Friday, Mr. Biden told Mr. Erdogan directly that he would be declaring the massacre an act of genocide, according to a person familiar with the discussion who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose details of the conversation.”

Interesting move on the part of President Biden!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Last year I read David Blight’s biography, Frederick Douglass:  Prophet of Freedom,  about the life of probably the most famous abolitionist of the 19^th century.  In reading Blight, I came to realize that I did not know enough of the political and social dynamics of the period particularly the time after Thomas Jefferson and before the Civil War.  I have just finished reading Robert Elder’s Calhoun: American Heretic, an engrossing biography of one of the most enigmatic figures in the 19^th century.  He was elected to Congress in 1810, served as Secretary of War, as vice president under two different presidents, and as secretary of state.  He is best known for arguing in favor of slavery as a “positive good” and for his doctrine of “ state interposition” which laid the groundwork for the South to secede from the Union.  In recent years, colleges and communities have disassociated themselves from Calhoun’s name.  However, his story is one we should try to comprehend in a period that was quite different from the 21^st century.  Elder quotes from John Stuart Mill near the end of his book:

“ John Stuart Mill rated Calhoun as one of the best ‘speculative political thinkers’ America had produced…and the act of silencing ..political beliefs deprives us of an opportunity to strengthen the basis of our own beliefs….If we dismiss, forget, or mischaracterize Calhoun, we deny ourselves a useful critic of many of our assumptions”.

If you are at all interested in Calhoun, the statesman or the person, I think you might enjoy Elder’s work. Below is a review courtesy of the New York Times.

Tony

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New York Times

John C. Calhoun: Protector of Minorities?

By Andrew Delbanco

Feb. 16, 2021

Calhoun:  American Heretic
By Robert Elder

Coming so soon after a neoconfederate mob rampaged through the Capitol, a respectful biography of the ideological father of the Confederacy may feel as welcome as an exhumed corpse. But the young historian Robert Elder has given us just that in “Calhoun” — an illuminating account of the life of the notorious white supremacist as well as his complex afterlife in American political culture.

John C. Calhoun was a zealous defender of slavery. His name has lately been stripped from a residential college at Yale (his alma mater) and from a lake in Minnesota named in his honor when he was secretary of war. His monument in Charleston — a glowering bronze figure in a cloak spread like eagle wings atop an obelisk — has been removed to an undisclosed location, as if in a witness protection program.

Already in his own day many people would have sent Calhoun into oblivion. But others who loathed his commitments nevertheless held his intellect in high regard. John Stuart Mill, who knew no “doctrine more damnable” than the idea that “one kind of human beings are born servants to another kind,” considered him “a speculative political thinker superior to any who has appeared in American politics since the authors of the Federalist.” Herman Melville, who regarded slavery as a “sin … foul as the crater-pool of hell,” took Calhoun as a model for Captain Ahab, a dark and wild genius whose defiance (“I’d strike the sun if it insulted me”) makes everyone around him seem small. Even some passionate abolitionists predicted that Calhoun’s posthumous reputation would be “without that element of contempt and loathing which must mingle with the memory of his Northern imitators and tools.”

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Born in the South Carolina backcountry in 1782 and educated in New England, he arrived in the House of Representatives in 1811, where the Virginian John Randolph sized him up as a combination of “cold unfeeling Yankee manner with the bitter and acrimonious irritability of the South.” Outraged by British impressment of American sailors into the Royal Navy, he banged the drum for war, declaring that “the liberty of our sailors and their redemption from slavery” were at stake. Twenty years later in the Senate, he denounced a federal import tariff as a punitive tax on Southern planters and a subsidy for Northern manufacturers. When President Andrew Jackson proposed a “force bill” to compel South Carolina to comply, Calhoun replied that a nation united by force is no different from “the bond between master and slave; a union of exaction on one side, and of unqualified obedience on the other.” Like many before him — including slaveholders among the founders — he saw no contradiction between using slavery as a damning metaphor and sustaining it as a defensible practice.

In 1820, he remarked to his friend John Quincy Adams, who regarded slavery as a “merciless scourge,” that the enslavement of Black people was “the best guarantee to equality among whites.” Calhoun believed that by maintaining a docile class of dependent laborers, slavery solved the chronic problem of conflict between workers and employers. In the wage-labor system of the North, exploited whites — “galled,” as his disciple James Henry Hammond later put it, “by their degradation” — would inevitably become a force of contention and raise the risk of revolution. (The historian Richard Hofstadter called Calhoun “the Marx of the Master Class.”) But in the South, the dignity and tranquillity of white people, rich and poor, were secured by the degradation of Black people. Especially as he grew older, Calhoun rationalized these shameless arguments with pseudoscientific claims that Blacks were the natural inferiors of whites.

By the 1840s, “Free-Soilers,” some of whom shared Calhoun’s racism, were demanding that the Western territories must be reserved for white settlers and closed to Black slaves. Calhoun regarded this demand as an intolerable attack on the constitutional rights of Southerners. His mission became “the protection of one portion of the people against another” — by which he meant protecting the South from the North. He regarded this struggle as a fight for democracy against tyranny.

Although the antebellum South controlled huge wealth in the form of human chattel, Calhoun correctly foresaw the region’s decline into an electoral and economic minority. His conception of minority had nothing to do with what the term means today — a historically demeaned or disregarded group. He meant, as Edmund Fawcett puts it in his recent book “Conservatism,” which devotes several searching pages to Calhoun, “an enduring regional or social ‘interest’ large enough to bear weight in the nation but too small not to be out-votable.” Calhoun’s particular interest was, of course, that of his own slave-owning caste, but he believed that at issue was the general principle of minority rights.

Concern for this principle is what led John Stuart Mill, despite his personal revulsion at the interest Calhoun sought to protect, to respect him as a formidable thinker who challenged the utilitarian ideal of “the greatest good for the greatest number.” Fearing for the lesser number, Calhoun developed his idea of the “concurrent majority,” whereby “each interest or portion of the community … separately, through its own majority,” would possess veto power in a government requiring “the consent of each interest either to put or to keep the government in action.”

Underlying Calhoun’s political thought was his conviction — derived in part from the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions written by Jefferson and Madison — that the states were not subsidiary parts of a permanent union but sovereign members of a compact subject to continual revision. To resolve inevitable conflicts between state and national governments, he proposed different means at different times in his life — from his early idea that states should have the power to veto or “nullify” acts of Congress, to his desperate proposal just before his death in 1850 of a dual national executive, each with veto power over the other. If conflict proved irresolvable, the ultimate recourse was secession.

Calhoun always denied he was a disunionist and did not live long enough to witness the guns of South Carolina firing on United States forces in Charleston Harbor. But he became permanently associated with that act of what President Lincoln called domestic “insurrection.” His “real monument,” Walt Whitman wrote after the Civil War, was not his gravestone, but “the desolated, ruined South; nearly the whole generation of young men between 17 and 30 destroyed or maim’d.”

That was not the end of Calhoun’s legacy. With the repeal of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, a series of new monuments — culminating in the grandiose Charleston statue — went up as symbols of what white Southerners called “redemption” and Black Southerners experienced as renewed degradation. By the mid-20th century, Calhoun, whose racist premises were often brushed off or silently endorsed, became a hero to conservatives aghast at the expansion of federal power following the New Deal. The right-wing theorist Russell Kirk credited him with having revealed “the forbidding problem of the rights of individuals and groups menaced by the will of overbearing majorities.”

In his lucid book about this complex and contradictory figure, Robert Elder wisely refrains from assigning Calhoun to a stationary spot along the political spectrum. He points out that echoes of Calhoun’s ideas have not come exclusively from the right. In the 1990s, for example, when the liberal legal scholar Lani Guinier put forward the idea of “a minority veto on critical minority issues,” she was proposing a version of Calhoun’s “concurrent majority.” This time, however, the outrage came not from the left but from conservatives who attacked her for favoring group identity over majority rule.

Elder finished writing this valuable book too soon to add that with Donald Trump’s brazen effort to overturn election results where Black voters — so long disenfranchised by heirs of Calhoun — helped determine the outcome, the cause of states’ rights suddenly became the cause of the left. Almost two centuries ago Calhoun wrote that “the states must have the power really intended by the Constitution, in order, not to destroy, but to save the Constitution and the Union.” In one of the supreme ironies of American history, all those who cared about the fate of the nation in the waning weeks of 2020 could have counted themselves among his followers, if only in this respect.

Caitlyn Jenner

Dear Commons Community

Caitlyn Jenner has officially thrown her name into the running for governor of California.  Jenner — an Olympic hero, reality TV personality and transgender rights activist — announced “I’m in” on Twitter,  joining a growing list of candidates seeking to oust Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom from office.

“California has been my home for nearly 50 years. I came here because I knew that anyone, regardless of their background or station in life, could turn their dreams into reality,” reads a statement from Jenner on her campaign site, launched yesterday morning. “But for the past decade, we have seen the glimmer of the Golden State reduced by one-party rule that places politics over progress and special interests over people. Sacramento needs an honest leader with a clear vision.”

As reported by the Associated Press, Axios, and other media outlets.

“The 71-year-old is reportedly running with a team of “prominent GOP operatives including Tony Fabrizio, the top pollster on Donald Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns, and Steven Cheung, a former Trump White House and campaign communications hand who worked on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s successful 2003 recall campaign,” according to Axios.

In a press release, Jenner said California’s taxes are “too high” and lambasted current Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D) “over-restrictive lockdown” response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“This is Gavin Newsom’s California, where he orders us to stay home but goes out to dinner with his lobbyist friends,” she said.

She also emphasized in the release that as a “compassionate disruptor throughout my life” and “a proven winner,” she believes she’s “the only outsider who can put an end” to Newsom’s “disastrous time as governor.”

 Newsom, a first-term Democrat, is facing a likely recall election this year, though officials still are reviewing petition signatures required to qualify the proposal for the ballot. County election officials are required to submit their final signature tallies to the state no later than next Thursday.

Jenner, who came out as a transgender woman in 2015, released a statement that sketched an outline of what her agenda might look like. Cutting taxes. Repairing the economy. Fighting special interests and California’s Democratic-dominated politics.

Still, with her name recognition and ability to attract publicity, she could overshadow other GOP contenders, including former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, former U.S. Rep. Doug Ose and businessman John Cox, who lost to Newsom in a landslide in the 2018 governor’s race.

“The politics of celebrity are going to enter in this in a big way, just like they did in 2003” when Schwarzenegger was elected, predicted David McCuan, chair of the political science department at California State University, Sonoma.

“She’s remained silent on many of these issues, and she doesn’t have a record of political participation,” he added. Schwarzenegger “was political royalty. And he had a presence that was as large as the galaxy. And as a result, he upset the whole race” in 2003.

The emerging contest had failed to attract a nationally recognized contender before the entrance of the 71-year-old Jenner, who won the decathlon in the 1976 Summer Olympics and is widely known from the popular reality shows “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” and the spin-off, “I Am Cait.”

However, she is untested as a candidate and little is known about her positions on critical issues facing the state, from the coronavirus pandemic to managing the economy. She has ties to former President Donald Trump, who remains broadly unpopular in California outside his GOP base, as well as his former political operatives who are helping her organize her campaign.

Jenner credits herself with advancing the movement for equality. But the LGBTQ advocacy group Equality California said it would oppose her candidacy, citing her ties to Trump and Republicans who have sought to undercut transgender rights around the nation.

She also has faced speculation that she’s entering politics to steer attention to her entertainment career. And California has a much stronger Democratic tilt than it did in Schwarzenegger’s run in 2003 — registered Democratic voters outnumber Republicans in the state by nearly 2-to-1.

Hours after Jenner announced she would run, Faulconer took a lightly veiled swipe at her lack of experience in government.

Speaking with reporters in Huntington Beach, he described himself as “somebody who has won elections and knows how to get results.”

Ose said he looked forward to debating their “ideas, positions and solutions.”

Jenner supported Trump in 2016 but later criticized his administration’s reversal of a directive on transgender access to public school bathrooms. She also split with Trump after he said transgender people would not be allowed to serve in the U.S. military.

The team advising Jenner has included Trump’s former campaign manager, Brad Parscale, and GOP fundraiser Caroline Wren, who also worked for Trump’s campaign.”

Jenner will attract a lot of attention as a candidate. Whether she can actually win the nomination is another matter.

Tony

Click to enlarge

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education reported earlier this week that since the World Health Organization declared a pandemic in March of 2020, institutions of higher education in the United States have shed a net total of at least 570,000 workers, according to preliminary, seasonally adjusted figures from the U.S. Labor Department. Put another way, for every nine workers employed in academe in February 2020, at least one had lost or left that job a year later.

Mirroring trends in the larger economy, certain workers in higher education have endured a disproportionate share of the losses. Workers with limited labor protections, like those providing administrative support or working in food service, were particularly hard hit. So were employees of color, who saw outsized losses relative to their share of the overall work force. Job losses were worst in the early months of the pandemic, when higher ed shed hundreds of thousands of jobs in a relatively short period. Despite a significant increase in recent months, the net loss in jobs remains so large that it’s erased more than a decade of job gains for the sector, with higher ed’s work force now matching its size in February 2008.

The chart above says it all!

Tony

Dear Commons Community

The US House of Representatives passed a bill yesterday that would make Washington D. C. the 51^st State.  The bill now goes to the US Senate where its future is cloudy at best. It will need in all likelihood an abandonment of the filibuster rule which is not likely. It will also be subject to judicial review. Below is an article that explains the legislation courtesy of  the Associated Press.

Tony

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WASHINGTON (AP) — A decades-long movement to reshape the American political map took a further step Thursday as the House of Representatives approved a bill to make the nation’s capital the 51st state.

Approval came by a 216-208 vote along strict party lines. Republicans oppose the idea given that the new state would be overwhelmingly Democratic — and the proposal faces a far tougher road in the Senate, where even full Democratic support isn’t guaranteed. 

The legislation proposes creating a 51st state with one representative and two senators, while a tiny sliver of land including the White House, the U.S. Capitol and the National Mall would remain as a federal district. Instead of the District of Columbia, the new state would be known as Washington, Douglass Commonwealth — named after famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who lived in Washington from 1877 until his death in 1895. 

An identical statehood bill passed the House in 2020, but died in the then-Republican-controlled Senate. Now, with the 2020 elections leaving Democrats controlling both chambers of Congress and the White House, Republican senators may resort to a filibuster to stymie the statehood bill. 

The Senate is split 50/50 with Vice President Kamala Harris as the tie-breaker. But it takes 60 senators to break a concerted filibuster attempt. Senate Democrats could vote to tweak the filibuster rules and slip the statehood issue through a loophole — but that would require total unity and some moderate Democrats have expressed opposition to that strategy. 

Perennial swing vote and Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia had already publicly stated that he will not vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster. Manchin is also one of a handful of Democratic Senators who has not openly supported the D.C. statehood initiative. 

For now, though, Democrats and statehood advocates are celebrating their House victory. 

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser tied the statehood issue to America’s ongoing reckoning over police brutality and longstanding issues of racial injustice. 

“This vote comes at a critical time when Americans nationwide are eager to deliver on the promise of liberty and justice for all,” Bowser said in a statement. “For centuries, an incremental approach to equality in America has delayed this promise for too many. Now is the time for bold action.”

Kentucky Republican Rep. James Comer called the measure “flatly unconstitutional.” 

“It won’t withstand judicial scrutiny, but it will cause massive confusion for years as it’s reviewed by the courts,” Comer said in a statement. “Democrats are pushing D.C. statehood to pack the U.S. Senate with two progressive senators so they can end the filibuster, pack the Supreme Court, enact the Green New Deal, and create the socialist utopia the Squad dreams about.”

The bill received strong support from the White House, which has called Washington’s current status “an affront to the democratic values on which our Nation was founded.”

During Thursday floor debate, a succession of Republican representatives decried it as a cynical and unconstitutional power-grab. The country’s founding fathers, “never wanted D.C. to be a state and then specifically framed the constitution to say so,” said Georgia Republican Rep. Jody Hice. 

But Virginia Democratic Rep. Gerald Connolly pointed out that Kentucky was once a part of Virginia, and was carved out as a state by Congress. 

Connolly argued that the federal district was a theoretical concept when first conceived, not a community with a higher population than two U.S. states. 

“When the constitution was written, this place didn’t exist,” he said. “When people say this is not about race and partisanship, you can be sure it’s about race and partisanship.”

During a March hearing by the House oversight committee, GOP representatives claimed D.C. was unfit for statehood and proposed a variety of alternatives that included absolving Washingtonians from federal taxes and “retroceding” most of D.C. back into Maryland. 

Opponents also contend that Congress lacks the authority to change D.C.’s status, despite every state other than the original 13 being admitted to the union via congressional vote. 

Zack Smith, a legal fellow at the Heritage Institute, a conservative think tank, said the measure becoming law would unleash a wave of lawsuits. 

“You’re basically looking at a lot of litigation,” Smith told The Associated Press. “Every legislative act of this new state would be called into question. … Things would be in a state of flux for years.” 

D.C. has long chafed under its relationship with Congress, which has the power to essentially veto or alter any local laws. Its population is larger than that of Wyoming or Vermont and its estimated 712,000 residents pay federal taxes, vote for president and serve in the armed forces, but they have no voting representation in Congress. 

The limitations of D.C.’s reality were put in stark relief last summer during a series of protests over the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and against general police brutality. After a night of widespread vandalism, President Donald Trump usurped D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s authority and called in a massive multiagency federal force to downtown. The law enforcement forces cleared peaceful protesters from a public street so Trump could pose for a photo outside a church. 

Ravi Perry, head of Howard University’s political science department, said the events of last summer were a crucial turning point for the perception of the D.C. statehood push, intertwining the issue with the country’s ascendant racial justice movement. As recently as 2018, nationwide polls had shown the majority of Americans to be lukewarm at best on the topic, but those poll numbers changed dramatically in the past two years, he said. 

“People have started to see D.C. statehood as the racial justice issue that it is,” said Perry, who is also on the board of the pro-statehood group D.C. Vote. “There’s been a major sea change, and a lot of that has been motivated by Trumpism.”

Daniel Greenstein

Dear Commons Community,

Daniel Greenstein, the chancellor of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, will be  unveiling the details of a plan to consolidate six of the system’s 14 public universities into two new, combined institutions.  His plan has been in the works for the past year.  A document outlining the plan will be presented to the system’s Board of Governors for initial approval on April 28.  Below is an article reviewing this development, courtesy of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Tony

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The Chronicle of Higher Education

A System Leader Sells His Vision for Remaking Public Higher Ed

By Lee Gardner

Daniel Greenstein is excited, grinning, talking a mile a minute. As chancellor of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, he’s days away from unveiling the details of a plan to consolidate six of the system’s 14 public universities into two new, combined institutions. Over the past nine months, the system has held hundreds of meetings to gauge the possibilities for how the new entities might function and hash out the details. The resulting document will be presented to the system’s Board of Governors for initial approval on April 28.

It’s not surprising that the prospect of reimagining public colleges might spike Greenstein’s adrenaline, or that he would face resistance to his plans. In 2018 he came to the system, known as Passhe, from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where he spent six years as director of postsecondary success, doling out grant money to try to encourage bold thinking around higher education. He arrived in the Keystone State with the mandate to apply some of his experience to a system that has lost nearly 21 percent of its enrollment since 2011 as many of its campuses slid toward insolvency.

Greenstein is energized by the chance to rethink how a system works beyond laying off a few administrators and merging back-office functions. At the same time, he also faces the task of trying to solve a tangle of problems that many other public-college systems face, including a dwindling number of high-school graduates, increased competition for those that remain, ebbing financial reserves, and a fraught relationship with state government. The future of Passhe may

Consolidations are an increasingly popular strategy among state systems looking to improve efficiency or save money, though the actual benefits of such maneuvers remain modest, even elusive. But Passhe has run short of appealing alternatives.

During a videoconference interview, Greenstein shares data from the pending report that lay out the system’s dire finances. “There’s a lot of red on the slides,” he says. Several of the system’s institutions have been struggling financially for years. The National Association of College and University Business Officers recommends that institutions maintain a 2 to 4 percent annual operating margin, a ratio involving operating expenses and revenues. In the 2016 fiscal year, five Passhe universities failed to meet that standard. By the 2020 fiscal year, 11 failed.

Greenstein zeroes in on Mansfield University of Pennsylvania, which lost $7 million on its academic programs last year, and nearly $2 million on its auxiliary services — prior to Covid-19. The university has lost 47 percent of its enrollment since 2010 and “has too many programs for the 1,500 students it has,” he says. “It doesn’t have enough students in the dorm to pay the debt service on the dorm buildings.”

The financial difficulties of one institution belong to all. Passhe’s finances operate as one big bank account, Greenstein says. For years, system campuses that have enjoyed enrollment growth, such as West Chester University, have subsidized the financial losses of campuses that have been shrinking. But such cross-subsidization isn’t sustainable. If one train car falls over a cliff, Greenstein says, “it pulls harder on all the other trains.” If nothing changes, he adds, the system’s financial reserves will be completely exhausted by 2027.

Last summer, Greenstein won approval from the system’s board to begin exploring the possibility of merging several of the system’s most-troubled universities. By fall, the plan had coalesced around combining two groups of three Passhe campuses — Edinboro, Clarion, and California Universities of Pennsylvania in the western end of the state, and Mansfield, Lock Haven, and Bloomsburg Universities across the northeast. In the broad strokes, each new, combined entity would share accreditation, leadership, and academic programs while maintaining their own names and local identities. In the finer details, Greenstein hopes that the consolidated institutions can offer students more options for majors and better supports.

On one hand, Greenstein, the former postsecondary technocrat, sees an opportunity to improve how public higher education can work, and maybe even carry out some of the ideas he tried to foster at Gates. On the other hand, he’s trying to effect a major change under trying circumstances in a state that has often had a hands-off relationship with public higher education, says Joni E. Finney, the former director of the Institute for Research on Higher Education at the University of Pennsylvania and now an adjunct professor of education: “I think his back is against the wall.”

Dissolving the System?

The high stakes around Passhe’s fate have grown tense recently, sometimes because of Greenstein himself. He found himself under fire last month for suggesting during a hearing of the state Senate’s Appropriations Committee that if the system couldn’t consolidate the six institutions, he would recommend to the board that it dissolve the system entirely.

Greenstein’s remark was “a cherry on top” of months of stress and concern for professors across the system, says Jamie S. Martin, a professor of criminology at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and president of the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties, the faculty union. More than 40 professors have already received notice that they may lose their jobs as part of the consolidation, and the possibility of dissolving the system introduced more uncertainty into an already anxious situation. Many professors heard it as a threat, Martin says: “He’s telling us if we don’t get on board, we’re going to be the cause of what happens next.”

Martin and her colleagues weren’t the only ones a little taken aback. “It was shocking,” says Lindsey M. Williams, a Democratic state senator who represents the Pittsburgh area. “When you say something like that, it puts a lot of fear into students that are attending those institutions, parents who are looking to send their students to Passhe institutions.” She adds that Greenstein doesn’t “have the friendliest audience in the state legislature to begin with.” Republican majorities in Pennsylvania’s General Assembly over the years have not prioritized investing in higher education, “so we have to be careful about how we just say things like that in a hearing.”

Greenstein has no intention of dissolving the system, but his remark wasn’t just a Swiftian modest proposal. It was one of the possible paths — a “risk framework” — considered by system leadership and presented to the Board of Governors as an option last summer. If you’re going to exhaust the resources of your universities, “aren’t you better off springing them to allow them to go native into the higher landscape and maybe survive?” he says. When system leaders gamed out that scenario, West Chester and Slippery Rock Universities and a few of other Passhe institutions whose operations have been sustainable over the past decade would survive, and probably even thrive. Many of the rest would quickly close, putting thousands out of work, diminishing access for students, and hollowing out communities. “It would be a horrible thing,” Greenstein says.

Another option called for further reducing the size of the universities that are already shrinking. But “right-sized” institutions would have fewer programs, fewer services, and even less allure for prospective students. “They continue to compress and compress and compress,” Greenstein says, “and what’s happened to Cheyney and Mansfield and Clarion is that this has a continuing negative effect on enrollment.” Regional public campuses are also critical providers of skilled workers for their areas. Local health-care facilities don’t need just the one kind of physician assistant that the local college can afford to train, for example. They need them all.

The system could do nothing and maintain the status quo, but keeping the 14 universities at their current sizes and configurations would require huge amounts of additional funding to keep the lights on — funding that is unlikely to materialize, observers say. The system could try to close foundering universities, but closing a public campus is a notorious political poison pill, and successful attempts are vanishingly rare. Any individual Passhe campus’s closure would devastate its surrounding community economically, and closing several Passhe campuses could devastate the system’s finances, too. Greenstein estimates closing one medium-size Passhe campus would cost at least $250 million, in part due to absorbing the campus’s debt, and calls it “the quickest way to exhaust our reserves.”

Raising the idea of dissolving the system publicly was valid, maybe even necessary, says Karen M. Whitney, a former president of Clarion and interim chancellor of Passhe who currently serves as interim chancellor of the University of Illinois at Springfield. “The question is, in any system in higher ed, what’s it good for? What’s the benefit of coming together versus going it alone?” she says. “He was laying it at the feet of his audiences: Are we better off together, or are we better not together? That is a serious question that should not be just reacted to in a moment.”

‘The Toughest Place to Lead’

Over the past nine months, Greenstein and other system leaders have orchestrated a process aimed at determining what a reimagined Passhe might look like. More than 200 working groups drawn from the six campuses that will be consolidated met repeatedly to figure out not just how the new, combined entities would function but also how they could improve.

The committees were charged with determining what essential functions needed to be in place on move-in day in August 2022, but they were also encouraged to “take an opportunity to really design around the student of the future,” he says. “Let’s use this opportunity to selectively integrate the best-of-breed kind of stuff.” The final plan should retool the institutions’ operations in their academic, administrative, and student-support functions.

Greenstein acknowledges that it hasn’t been easy. “It’s hard at an emotional level — they’re often maybe designing themselves out of their roles.”

The Passhe-consolidation process has been notable for being more collaborative and upfront than most such processes, says Robert E. Anderson, president of the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. Often when a state or public system consolidates, it involves “agreements between the parties who have to sign off on having this move forward, and then most of the details taking place with trained professionals behind closed doors between the institutions that are involved,” Anderson says. “What I’ve seen here in Pennsylvania is them being very transparent, as far as meetings with all of the different entities.”

Martin, the union president, says that the process hasn’t been transparent or collaborative enough, and she’s concerned about the number of faculty jobs that may be lost. Greenstein arrived at Passhe determined to cultivate a better relationship with its unions than his predecessors, and made some strides, successfully negotiating a new “phased” retirement program and a new contract with the faculty union. But the consolidation effort has changed things, Martin says. “It just seemed as if it was this pretty dramatic shift away from working together to solve problems to ‘I’ve decided this is how it’s going to be,’” she says.

A survey conducted last month by the union shows widespread unease. Among nearly 1,500 professors surveyed at the six universities, less than 8 percent were supportive of consolidation, and only 7 percent of respondents believed that the process had been transparent.

Greenstein realizes that this is a difficult process and people are anxious. “These are real, human responses,” he says. “I understand it at an intellectual level, but also at a compassionate level.” But, he adds, since September, he has had at least one meeting a day about consolidation with students, faculty, staff, General Assembly members, or others, and met with union representatives at least 80 times. “So I just disagree,” he says. “I understand where the narrative comes from. If you don’t like the outcome, you attack the process and the people.”

This is what the gritty work of transformation actually looks like, says Whitney, the former Clarion president. The work Greenstein embarked on when he arrived three years ago is “past the bright, shiny, hopeful imagining stage,” she says. “And then it’s not yet done to where you can say, See, you all, this is what we accomplished. It’s in the middle. And that is the worst place; that is the toughest place to lead through.”

A Statewide Problem

One of the biggest challenges Passhe, and Greenstein, face is Pennsylvania’s laissez-faire handling of its public colleges. Pennsylvania State University, Temple University, the University of Pittsburgh, the commonwealth’s community colleges, and Passhe all function as separate entities, with no state-level coordination. That has led to decades of internal competition rather than cooperation, with proliferating campuses cannibalizing students and resources from the others with no holistic approach or goal in sight.

That’s one of the main reasons Passhe has found itself in the hole it has, and why it has found it necessary to try to climb out on its own.

“The problems of Passhe cannot be solved within Passhe,” says Finney, of the University of Pennsylvania. “This is a statewide problem, and Pennsylvania is not treating it like a statewide problem.”

The commonwealth’s laxity regarding the status quo isn’t a matter of mere oversight. It’s also a question of will. “There is no executive or legislative appetite to take it on,” Finney says. “Everybody wants to maintain a campus [in their district], and nobody wants to go up against the behemoth of Penn State University,” the de facto flagship.

And Passhe has suffered, Whitney says. Penn State and other public-college systems have opened more campuses, even as the number of high-school graduates in Pennsylvania has dwindled and state support has often waned. “Passhe has been a whipping post that’s allowed other organizations to just skate by, and that’s not right,” she says.

If there’s anything that both system and union leaders agree on, it’s that Passhe is underfunded. Over all, Pennsylvania ranks 48th in the nation in public support for higher education as a percentage of state revenue, according to an analysis by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, known as Sheeo. Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, has overseen spending increases for public higher education, including an additional $65 million for Passhe since he took office, in 2015. But Pennsylvania’s overall per-student state appropriation in 2019 was still $4,661, 57 percent of the national average, according to Sheeo data.

In 2019 the General Assembly formed a Higher Education Funding Commission to re-examine the formulas by which public colleges receive public support in Pennsylvania, though the commission has no legislative oversight. It met twice before Covid-19 hit, temporarily suspending its activities. “Pennsylvania does have a complicated system of higher education, and I don’t see that changing,” says Williams, the state senator, who sits on the commission. “But we have an opportunity now to make changes in terms of how we invest.”

Williams is one of thousands of Pennsylvanians eager to see the details of the consolidation plan. She’s particularly interested in how the academics will work. Greenstein says that the consolidated institutions will offer students twice as many programs as the individual universities do now. But, Williams wonders, will the trade-offs be worth it if those additional programs are online? “I had one student leader tell me that, if it was prior to the pandemic, they might have been more excited about the opportunity,” she says. “But after having a year of virtual classes, they want their major classes to be in person, on campus.”

If the Board of Governors adopts the plan at its July meeting, Greenstein’s work isn’t over. There are two key policy options in public higher education, he says. First, public colleges need restructuring. Second, public colleges need more money. In Pennsylvania, as in many other states, what often happens is that neither approach wins over the other, so neither happens. For Passhe to succeed, ultimately, “both of these things need to be true — we need to transform ourselves,” Greenstein says, “and the state needs to invest in us.”

Dear Commons Community,

Today’s is Earth Day,  a global celebration that focuses on green living. The brainchild of Senator Gaylord Nelson and inspired by the protests of the 1960s, Earth Day began as a “national teach-in on the environment” and was held on April 22 to maximize the number of students that could be reached on university campuses. 

The History Channel has an Earth Day website describing its significance, history and events going on around the world.

Let’s all pitch in and save our precious planet!

Tony