Stanley Aronowitz

Dear Commons Community,

Stanley Aronowitz died earlier this week at the age of 88 as a result of complications from a stroke. Stanley was a teacher, scholar, activist, union leader, and a good colleague here at the CUNY Graduate Center.  He was one of a kind in his views on labor, work, unions, class, education, and American politics.  My association with him began in the 1990s when we were on several CUNY-wide committees together.  He was also active in our Ph.D. Program in Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center where we came to share some of our experiences.  We were both born and raised in the Bronx and we both worked in the trades in the early part of our lives.  Stanley was a metal worker and I was an iron worker.  He joked about how we ever became professors.  At the Graduate Center we were on a number of panels together to discuss education, technology, and social policy.  It was not easy sharing a stage with Stanley because his larger-than-life personality and activist views dominated any discussion.  Below is an obituary that appeared in Jacobin, and written by a former student, Jaime McCallum, who is now an associate professor of sociology at Middlebury College.  It captures Stanley’s personality well.

May he rest in peace!

Tony

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Jacobin

Stanley Aronowitz Knew That Freedom Begins Where Work Ends

By Jamie McCallum

August 18, 2021

Stanley Aronowitz died this week at the age of 88. He hated work, loved life, and brought his overflowing, exuberant approach to social problems to picket lines, classrooms, and vacation. A fighting left needs more people like him.

In the summer of 2004, as a young graduate student, I emailed Stanley Aronowitz asking for a meeting to discuss an idea for my doctoral dissertation. He replied that there are three reasons to be a professor: June, July, and August. He asked me, politely, to write him again in September.

That was the moment I realized I wanted to be a college professor, which eventually, by incalculable strokes of luck years later, I became — much to Stanley’s dismay.

Stanley had what he called “the last good job in America,” the college professor. It provided reasonable income and autonomy at work, a degree of free expression. He had a union, of which he was a leader, and he loved the job much of the time.

Yet in the essay “The Last Good Job in America” that eventually became a book, he stakes out what I take to be the abiding concern of his entire intellectual career. Written in diary form, near the beginning, he faux-complains about caring for his sick daughter, Nona — he had to “minister to the puking” — which interrupted his workday. It is a day which, when he finally gets around to laying it out, sounds downright leisurely by today’s standards. “Except for the requirement that I teach or preside at one or two classes and seminars a week and direct at least five dissertations at a time, I pretty much control my paid worktime,” he writes.

Stanley was a distinguished scholar of labor, work, unions, class, education, American politics, and Marxism. What sewed these issues together for him was a concern over our collective control of time, time which is so central to our individual concerns of daily life as well as human destiny as a whole under capitalism. He felt that labor unions had surrendered the fight for shorter hours, forfeited their original mission, and were, as a result, doomed to bargaining — “collective begging” he always put it — over a narrow slice of bread-and-butter issues.

Stanley came from the trade union movement. At times, he seemed to be at the center of things, as when he was appointed by Bayard Rustin to coordinate labor support for the March on Washington. By his own account, though, he was a persistent thorn in the side of union officialdom. As an organizer and a proud shit-starter for the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union in north New Jersey, he was “exiled” to Puerto Rico by union leadership where, thankfully, he finally had time to reflect.

When he eventually returned to the states, his experience as a unionist and a voracious reader of history and social theory transformed into a coherent critique of work — including what he saw as work’s apologists, the unions themselves — in False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness. Part critique of the postwar labor movement, part reflection of the Western Marxism of the Frankfurt school, it is the most wide-ranging exploration of working-class consciousness I’ve ever read.

In it, he lays the foundation of his concern with the classed nature of “leisure or unbounded time.” “The distinctions between the private and public realm that constitute the real basis for the cultural autonomy of the working class are constantly being undermined,” he wrote. “Yet the resistance to such invasion is the fundamental condition for the development of a working class movement capable of charting its own historical course.”

Eventually, he landed a full-time teaching gig at the City University of New York (CUNY) in sociology — a discipline he, incidentally, always distanced himself from. Stanley hated the taxonomy of the social sciences, insisting the boundaries were arbitrary, rigid, and mostly for professionals rather than genuine advancement of social phenomena.

Somewhere, sometime, someone will write a full reflection on his life’s work. They will wade into The Crisis in Historical Materialism, an underappreciated reconsideration of Marx in light of the demands of the New Left. What many argued were strategic blind spots of the old union left — the ignorance of “merely cultural” demands for gender, racial, and sexual justice — Stanley saw as cause to rewrite Marx’s seminal argument about the force that served as the engine of historical change. In Stanley’s mind, it wasn’t that Marx was incorrect about the central role of class struggle; it was that Stanley’s definition of what constituted class struggle was far broader than the old man’s.

It was a theme he revisited in How Class Works in 2003, the year I met him, in which he argued for the “sundering the traditional sociological distinction between class and social movement.” Genuine social movements — struggles to “overcome divisions between black and white, native and foreign, men and women, to create a workers’ movement independent of capital” — were, in his telling, synonymous with class formation.

In Stanley’s mind, it wasn’t that Marx was incorrect about the central role of class struggle; it was that Stanley’s definition of what constituted class struggle was far broader.

Future Stanley historians will also have to contend with his careful analysis of the role of technology in the workplace, as he elaborated in The Jobless Future (coauthored with his good friend William DiFazio), and notably in a coauthored book chapter called “The Post-Work Manifesto.” Stanley was less recognized as a scholar of education, though it didn’t stop him from writing two books on the topic, The Knowledge Factory and Against Schooling. I long wondered why he never wrote something extensive about sexuality. He often grappled with the topic when dealing with social theory and labor, and saw much value in studying the libidinal and erotic theory of Freud and Reich in working-class studies.

And then there was that time in 2002 he ran for governor of New York as a Green. George Pataki won the race, but Stanley finished a respectable fifth with 41,797 votes — nearly three times as many, it should be noted, as Andrew Cuomo.

Seizing the Essence of Everyday Life

I went to study sociology at CUNY because I had read False Promises while working for a labor union. As a professor, he vacillated between close readings of the texts and of no readings of them at all. His classes sparkled either way. A good teacher imparts knowledge; a great one inspires you to ask better questions. My time studying with him was a high point of my intellectual life.

Stanley was one of the most charming men I’ve ever met, with a brutal wit, an impossible smile, and guileless eyes — even when he was giving you shit. He was the first person to tell me, casually without prompt, that my hairline was receding. During the oral exam period of my graduate study, for which he was a main evaluator, he made a money bet with me that my analysis of Antonio Gramsci was substantively worse than his. (He later graciously declined to accept my payment of $20 when a fellow graduate student confirmed he was “more right.”)

When I informed him of my intent to accept a job as a professor, he warned me to turn it down. “They’ll never give you a moment’s rest to think,” he said. The last good job in America, turns out, wasn’t good enough for him anymore. (I took the job, not his advice).

I got closer with Stanley after I joined the Board of Directors of the Left Forum, which he cofounded. Left Forum was a new version of the Socialist Scholars Conference, an annual gathering of the US and international left. I was brought on to help bring younger people of different political tendencies into the fold. As an aspiring intellectual, I sat around tables with Frances Fox Piven, Bill Tabb, Rod Bush, Nancy Holmstrom, Stanley, and many other luminaries who made up our organizing crew. I felt like I had been selected for an all-star team without ever having competed in a game.

Stanley seemed almost uninterested in the conference panels we put together on labor and work topics, even if he was on them. By contrast, he championed our forays into cultural studies, or, as he liked to call it, “the essence of everyday life.” We prioritized panels on art, medicine, sports, and even once convened our own classical music concert.

Stanley’s preoccupation with art, music, and movies — always “movies,” never something as pretentious as “cinema” — was explored at times in his formal scholarship and served as a background condition to all his work on critical theory, labor, and unions. He thought the trade union movement had lost sight of their role in transforming the quotidian experiences of everyday life. The simple fact of automatic dues deduction meant that union organizers no longer collected membership fees face to face, a symbol to Stanley of a larger break between workers and their organizations.

He never missed an opportunity to denounce the Wagner Act, often considered the height of the New Deal’s labor victories, as the law that pacified class struggle unionism. It did so, as he wrote in False Promises, by formalizing the union as a state-sponsored administrator of formal rights rather than as an organic expression of working-class aspirations. To him, this compromise was not only a strategic dead end in the long run — it was one more betrayal.

He chose this old classic labor hymn for the epigraph of his book:

“The cloakmakers’ union is a no-good union,

It’s a company union by the bosses.

The old cloakmakers and the Socialist fakers

By the workers are making double crosses.

The Dubinskys, the Hillquits, the Thomases

By the workers are making false promises,

They preach socialism but they practice fascism

To save capitalism by the bosses.”

Where Freedom Begins

To know Stanley, to love him, was to argue with him. I ended up resigning from the Left Forum Board, along with a few other folks, but Stanley stayed on. We all took it personally. Then just two years ago, Stanley agreed to meet me — in the summer! I was visiting New York City and wanted to pick his brain about a book I was writing on labor time.

We met at 9 AM for breakfast at one of his favorite delis in Queens. I ordered a coffee and a donut. He ordered eggplant parmesan and a large Coke — “because of the free refills,” he said, smiling.

The point, Stanley thought, was not simply to abolish work, but to redefine the realm of necessity so that it included all the good things of life — like lots and lots of free time.

At our meeting, he continually returned to a passage of Marx’s which he had memorized like scripture: “The realm of freedom actually begins only where labor which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases… the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.”

This time, I took his advice. I ended my book by reflecting on this passage. The point, Stanley thought, was not simply to abolish work, but to redefine the realm of necessity so that it included all the good things of life — like lots and lots of free time.

Stanley had no “mundane considerations.” His books, lectures, speeches, even breakfast chats, were full of life. He burst into song in class and at meetings, was always the loudest person in the room, and, for better or worse, talked openly about intimate details of his life to virtual strangers. He put the “vulgar” back in “vulgar Marxism,” he once told me.

A fighting left needs more people like him: a fierce critic from the inside, a lovable opponent, who’s as comfortable in a classroom as on a picket line. As many workers as he brought into the unions, he brought students into the academy and activists into the Left. It would be impossible to live up to his grandeur. But to honor his legacy we should try, anyway.

Jamie McCallum is associate professor of sociology at Middlebury College and the author, most recently, of Worked Over: How Round-the-Clock Work Is Killing the American Dream.

               The Summit research station, which sits two miles above sea level on the Greenland ice sheet. (Credit…Josh Haner/The New York Times                                               

Dear Commons Community,

Something extraordinary happened last Saturday at the frigid high point of the Greenland ice sheet, two miles in the sky and more than 500 miles above the Arctic Circle: It rained for the first time.

The rain at a research station — not just a few drops or a drizzle but a stream for several hours, as temperatures rose slightly above freezing — is yet another troubling sign of a changing Arctic, which is warming faster than any other region on the planet. As reported by the New York Times.

“It’s incredible, because it does write a new chapter in the book of Greenland,” said Marco Tedesco, a researcher at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. “This is really new.”

At the station, which is called Summit and is occupied year-round under the auspices of the National Science Foundation, there is no record of rain since observations began in the 1980s. And computer simulations show no evidence going back even further, said Thomas Mote, a climate scientist at the University of Georgia.

Above-freezing conditions at Summit are nearly as rare. Before this century, ice cores showed they had occurred only six times in the past 2,000 years, Martin Stendel, a senior researcher at the Danish Meteorological Institute, wrote in an email message.

But above-freezing temperatures have now occurred at Summit in 2012, 2019 and this year — three times in fewer than 10 years.

The Greenland ice sheet, which is up to two miles thick and covers about 650,000 square miles, has been losing more ice and contributing more to sea-level rise in recent decades as the Earth has warmed from human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases.

The surface of the ice sheet gains mass every year, because accumulation of snowfall is greater than surface melting. But overall, the sheet loses more ice through melting where it meets the ocean, and through the breaking-off of icebergs. On average over the past two decades, Greenland has lost more than 300 billion tons of ice each year.

This year will likely be an average one for surface accumulation, said Dr. Stendel, who is also coordinator of Polar Portal, a website that disseminates the results of Danish Arctic research. Heavy snowfall early in the year suggested it might be an above-average year for accumulation, but two periods of warming in July and another in early August changed that by causing widespread surface melting.

The warming that accompanied the rain last Saturday also caused melting over more than 50 percent of the ice sheet surface.

Dr. Mote said that these melting episodes were each “one-off” events. “But these events seem to be happening more and more frequently,” he said. “And that tells the story that we are seeing real evidence of climate change in Greenland.”

Something to think about!

Tony

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick blames unvaccinated Black people for Covid spread in his state pic.twitter.com/CfwajqECLM

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 20, 2021

Dear Commons Community,

We do not expect much in the way of truth and honesty from Fox News pundits such as Laura Ingraham but on Thursday, her program reached a new low when guest Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick  blamed unvaccinated Black Americans for the spread of coronavirus in his state (see video above).

Dear Commons Community,

If you watched the news on any of the major media outlets this past week, there was hour by hour coverage of the Afghanistan withdrawal.  Surely this is a tragedy but the media is putting too much of the blame on the Biden administration and trying to push our country to become involved again in a never-ending war.  The major blame for all of this is not Biden and United States but the Afghanistan government and its military that completely abandoned the country and left it to the Taliban.  Below is an analysis  courtesy of the Huffington Post.

Tony

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Biden, Allies Frustrated With Media’s Hawkish Coverage Of Afghanistan Withdrawal

By Daniel Marans

As President Joe Biden ended his news conference on yesterday afternoon about the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan, a reporter called out an especially bellicose question.

“Why do you continue to trust the Taliban, Mr. President?” the reporter said.

Notwithstanding the militant group’s poor human rights record and ultra-conservative Islamist ideology, multiple U.S. administrations have successfully negotiated with the Taliban. The Taliban have complex interests. As Biden noted yesterday, the organization is at war with the faction of the self-declared Islamic State (also known as ISIS), which is competing for power in Afghanistan.

But the reporter’s criticism-masquerading-as-query was the culmination of a week’s worth of dramatic finger-pointing and fretting from a Washington press corps that usually prides itself on neutrality.

Although the White House’s failure to foresee the rapid fall of the Afghan government and prepare accordingly has exacerbated the chaos of the U.S. withdrawal, Biden and his allies are furious with what they see as reporters’ and pundits’ unduly hawkish coverage of the exit.

“The media tends to bend over backwards to ‘both-sides’ all of their coverage, but they made an exception for this,” said Eric Schultz, a deputy press secretary under President Barack Obama. “They both-sides coverage over masks, and vaccines, and school openings and everything else. Somehow [the Afghanistan withdrawal] created a rush to judgment and a frenzy that we haven’t seen in a long time.”

Matt Duss, a foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the de facto leader of the party’s progressive wing and Biden’s rival in the 2020 presidential primary, offered a similar assessment.

“The extent to which the media is privileging voices who have gotten this wrong for years is ridiculous,” he said. “What we’re seeing is an attempt by the Washington foreign policy establishment to expiate its sins of over 20 years by putting this on the Biden administration.”

Journalists who cover the Pentagon spend an inordinate amount of their time with current and former military officials, many of whom go on to lucrative gigs with military contractors that profited from the Afghanistan War. It’s that kind of chumminess that contributed to the media’s amplification of the specious case for the Iraq War in 2002 and 2003.

As The Intercept has chronicled, the problem of media bias toward foreign adventurism is especially acute among talking heads paid to discuss military policy on television. Former U.S. military generals often inveigh against the withdrawal on cable news with just their past military titles rather than their current careers as contractors who stand to profit from an extended presence in Afghanistan.

A source close to the White House identified this dynamic to HuffPost. “They are elevating the Blob, whose members spent years lying about progress in Afghanistan (and who often have financial conflicts of interest),” the source said, using the “blob” colloquialism that refers to the Washington foreign policy establishment. “The result is that many in the press are left effectively endorsing the view that the U.S. should have sent more American service members into Afghanistan to fight and die to stop another Taliban offensive ― despite supposedly being impartial.”

This president himself vented similar frustration Friday during remarks at the White House. “People now say to me and others ― many of you say it on air ― ‘Why did we have to move because no Americans were being attacked? Why did we agree to withdraw 2,500 troops when no Americans were being attacked?’” Biden said.

Biden noted that in the past year the dearth of casualties was thanks to an agreement that then-President Donald Trump made with the Taliban promising a timeline for withdrawal on the condition that the Taliban not attack U.S. forces.

He then noted that if the U.S. reneged on its commitment to announce a timeline for withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban would escalate their offensive and the U.S. would have to respond in kind.

“The idea that if I had said on May the 2nd or 3rd, ‘We are not leaving. We are staying,’ does anybody truly believe that I would not have had to put in significantly more American forces ― send your sons and your daughters, like my son was sent to Iraq? To maybe die ― and for what, for what?” Biden asked incredulously.

That’s a question that much of the media has rarely interrogated — until now. News broadcasts on the three major American TV networks ― NBC, CBS and ABC ― have barely mentioned Afghanistan at all in recent years, according to data compiled by media monitor Andrew Tyndall.

The Washington industrial complex is always going to be more in favor of having a muscular military approach. Eric Schultz, senior adviser to former President Barack Obama

Even in 2020, the year in which Trump negotiated his agreement with the Taliban, the three networks mentioned Afghanistan just five times.

At the same time, now that Biden is taking a step that U.S. presidents have been very reluctant to take, he is facing a tidal wave of either negative coverage that omits critical context or outright condemnation from many of the same journalists who ignored the war under Trump and for years before.

For example, one White House correspondent passionately asked Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, why Biden did not see a national interest in keeping troops near the borders of Pakistan, Iran and Tajikistan.

Richard Engel, the chief foreign correspondent of NBC News, has assigned himself the even greater task of defending the U.S.’s ability to create a functioning military and nation-state in Afghanistan.

Responding to Biden’s suggestion that “nothing could have fixed Afghanistan,” Engel tweeted, “I wish he’d come to Kabul more recently, even six months ago.”

For all of his optimism about the United States’ ability to shape politics in countries as different as Afghanistan, Engel apparently had little to say about the Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers. The 2019 papers, which made public more than 2,000 pages of government documents discussing the war, reveal the degree to which U.S. military and civilian leaders considered the war unwinnable but lied to the public about the progress they were making.

To critics of the Washington press corps’s coziness with the national security establishment, some reporters’ selective indignation about the withdrawal is nothing new.

“The Washington industrial complex is always going to be more in favor of having a muscular military approach,” said Schultz, who is now a senior adviser to Obama. “That will always be the gravitational pull in Washington.”

What is novel is the willingness of many Democrats, including Biden himself, not to be cowed by hawkish Beltway voices and their chorus in the media.

Biden’s own transformation from an Iraq War proponent and member of the foreign policy “Blob” in good standing to an early and outspoken skeptic of Obama’s surge of U.S. troops in Afghanistan is remarkable.

He has stuck to his guns while under attack in the press, laying out a case for the limits of American military power in an interview with ABC News that would have been unthinkable at the height of the “global war on terror.”

“The idea that we’re able to deal with the rights of women around the world by military force is not rational. Not rational,” he said.

Schultz says that Biden has learned from the experience of Obama, who had to contend with the national security establishment’s skepticism of his decision not to intervene in Syria and his nuclear nonproliferation agreement with Iran.

“As a Democrat, I’m very relieved and encouraged and heartened that the White House knows they’re speaking to the country, not just Playbook subscribers,” Schultz said, referring to Politico’s popular inside-the-Beltway newsletter.

Dear Commons Community,

President Joe Biden is standing firm by his decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan, despite chaotic scenes of the Taliban rapidly seizing control and the U.S. rushing to airlift diplomats out of the country.

Behind his confidence is a political bet that a war-weary U.S. public will stick with him and enable him to weather a firestorm of criticism, not just from his Republican opposition but also from Democratic allies who promise to investigate failures surrounding the withdrawal.

Public support for the withdrawal has fallen from earlier this year, but pluralities indicate that Americans still want U.S. forces out, according to two new surveys.

A Yahoo News poll found that 40 percent support the pullout, while 28 percent oppose it. (In July, 50 percent favored the pullout.)

A Morning Consult/Politico poll found that 49 percent support the withdrawal, while 37 percent oppose it. (In April, 69 percent backed withdrawal.)

The criticism has been heaviest over the execution of the withdrawal, including the failure to evacuate U.S. personnel and partners in time for the rapid Taliban takeover. Republican lawmakers, and some Democrats, have compared it to the fall of Saigon, South Vietnam, in 1975.

Biden needs all the political capital he can muster — to spend on signing an infrastructure bill and a $3.5 trillion social safety net package at the core of his domestic agenda, which his party is counting on to survive a difficult midterm election cycle next year.

Democratic strategists say Biden is on solid political footing, arguing that Americans will ultimately see the issue as a simple choice between continuing the occupation and ending it.

“No one likes where this ended up, but it’s hard to see Republicans winning elections on a campaign promise to go back to war in Afghanistan in 2022 or 2024,” said Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic consultant who has worked for the party’s House campaign arm and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid.

Republicans see little opportunity in digging in on a pro-war position, particularly after 20 years of money and lives lost trying to build a democratic state that collapsed like a house of cards as soon as U.S. forces left.

Chris Hartline, a spokesman for the Senate GOP campaign arm, said of the politics of the withdrawal: “It’s hard to tell how it’ll play in the long run.”

But he said the situation paints Biden as a “weak leader” who operates with a “nonchalance” on issues like the border, inflation and now Afghanistan. Taken together, he said, Biden appears “weak, disengaged or just plain lost.”

Matt Gorman, a Republican consultant who has worked on presidential and House races, said the issue of Afghanistan resonates with voters insofar as Biden’s opposition can tie it to his leadership on matters that affect them day to day.

“The biggest political risk here is that it compounds with inflation, gas prices and crime. This is all making Biden look like a bystander,” he said. “He’s watching events and not leading them.”

But to Biden’s allies, the decision to pull out and absorb the short-term pain was a mark of leadership that his three predecessors who oversaw the war lacked the courage to practice. In a speech Monday, Biden said that Americans shouldn’t be asked to step up when Afghanistan’s own armed forces wouldn’t and that he won’t “pass this responsibility on to a fifth president.”

He defended his decision in an ABC News interview published Wednesday.

“The idea that somehow there’s a way to have gotten out without chaos ensuing, I don’t know how that happens,” Biden said. “I had a simple choice. If I said, ‘We’re going to stay,’ then we’d better be prepared to put a whole lot, hell of a lot more troops in.”

His remarks channeled weariness with war among the public, with voters in both parties turning against wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which were launched after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks nearly 20 years ago. Trump capitalized on similar sentiments in his 2016 campaign.

Likely voters support the withdrawal by 51 percent to 37 percent, according to a new poll by Data for Progress, a progressive firm that has been cited by the White House.

“Even with the negative coverage of the last few days, Data for Progress and other pollsters still find net support for withdrawal,” said Sean McElwee, the group’s executive director. “Ultimately, the American public does not support permanent overseas occupation.”

I believe that Biden and the Democrats will weather the Afghanistan withdrawal situation by the time the midterm elections come in 2022.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Helgoland:  Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution is a new book by Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist who has held positions in Italy, France and the United States.  Rovelli has written several books (Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Reality Is Not What It Seems, and The Order of Time) on physics and the cosmos and in Helgoland, he provides lucid insights into quantum theory and several of the physicists who contributed to its formulation.  The book’s title comes from the name of a “treeless island” in the North Sea where Werner Heisenberg had his breakthrough insights on quantum mechanics.  Rovelli also uses quantum theory as the basis for exploring the mind and reality claiming that all facts are relative and based on interactions not on one universal law or vision.

If you have not read a Rovelli book, you are in for a treat.  He writes with a flair and a light almost poetic style on topics that are dense by nature. He has done it again with Helgoland on a topic that Richard Feyman has been quoted as saying that “nobody understands quanta”.

I found it an interesting read that provided me with new insight to fundamental questions in the world of physics.  If you are at all disposed, I recommend it.

Below is a New York Times review.

Tony

New York Times Book Review

Dear Commons Community.

Former President Donald Trump once again showed his ignorance yesterday in an attempt to sow doubt about COVID-19 vaccinations.  

The former president appeared on Fox Business and said he was “proud” to have taken the COVID vaccine, while falsely claiming that when he left office, the coronavirus “was virtually gone.” 

He threw in some xenophobia as well, using the racist term “China virus” to describe the pathogen.

Trump dismissed the recommendations by the Biden White House that Americans get booster shots eight months after receiving their second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines, in order to combat the delta variant of the virus.

“That sounds to me like a money-making operation for Pfizer,” Trump said. “Think of the money involved. A booster shot, that’s tens of billions of dollars. How good of business is that? If you’re a businessman, you say, ‘You know what? Let’s give them another shot.’ That’s another $10 billion of money coming in. The whole thing is just crazy.”

The president also once again showed that he doesn’t really understand the concept of evolving guidance based on new information.

“You wouldn’t think you would need a booster,” Trump said. “When these first came out, they were good for life. Then they were good for a year or two. And I could see the writing on the wall, I could see the dollar signs in their eyes.”

Conservative columnist George Will had the right term for Trump – “a bloviating ignoramus.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education had an article earlier this summer entitled,”A Mass Exodus: Inflexible Remote-Work Policies Could Bring Major Staff  Turnover”.  It described that colleges and universities experiencing large losses of staff,  are examining policies requiring them to work on on-site versus remotely.

At least 570,000 workers, or one out of nine workers in academe, lost or left their job since the coronavirus pandemic began, according to preliminary, seasonally adjusted figures from the U.S. Labor Department. Now employees have some leverage in a tightening labor market, and work policies are one of many factors driving sky-high turnover levels. As reported in The Chronicle article.

Eliminating flexibility could lead to a “turnover tsunami” on college campuses, Rob Shomaker, senior vice president for the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, or CUPA-HR, said at a recent event.

In recent communications, interviews, and released policies, colleges like Drexel University, Virginia Tech, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and the University of Illinois at Chicago have acknowledged that flexibility could attract job applicants, improve staff retention, and lift employee morale.

The University of South Florida even tied flexible work policies to the campus’s goals to advance in national rankings. “The global marketplace for talent is evolving toward flexible work, creating more competition for top performers who can help us reach our aspirations for Top 25 U.S. News & World Report rankings and AAU eligibility,” campus officials wrote in one message.

The rise of remote work across the country means that colleges will compete for applicants with businesses and organizations nationally, not just with local industry, meaning that this could be an area where colleges keep pace with other employers — or fall short.

Staff aren’t indentured servants. They’re professionals — constant free agents.

It’s already a key issue for job candidates, college leaders said at the CUPA-HR event on Wednesday. The large majority of recent potential applicants to Amherst College asked whether there were remote-work options, said Lisa Rutherford, chief policy officer and general counsel at the college. In the last three months, every recruitment effort that Bryan Garey, vice president for human resources at Virginia Tech, was involved in included a conversation about flexible work, he said.

Even before the pandemic, Boston University heard from applicants that flexible work was a priority. The inquiries since then have only increased, said Natalie McKnight, dean of the college of general studies. When the university’s website published an article about the future of remote work, the comments flooded in:

• “BU has two options. Adapt and remain competitive in order to retain its top staff and attract the future workforce, or, don’t adapt, and witness a wave of staff leave and struggle to hire the next generation.”

• “Increasing job flexibility, especially for those with children, is the only way to retain loyal employees.”

• “If BU wishes to retain talented staff, an official flex work policy is essential. This should be a no-brainer decision that can easily improve morale, employee well being, and productivity. I foresee a mass exodus to other area institutions or sectors should a formal flex-work policy not be established come fall 2021.”

The high cost of living in cities and towns where many colleges are located marks another challenge. Erwin Hesse, executive director of enrollment management at Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies, leads a team of people, most of whom are in their 20s. He knows that when the pandemic hit, some entry-level staff members left Washington, D.C., and its high cost of living, to live with family.

The team has performed well, and applications for prospective students have gone up, he said. “We’re killing it right now,” he said. “We’re doing what we need to do. We’re connecting with prospects.”

Now the School of Continuing Studies is considering changing employees’ work modality to telework or remote, he said. If such a change does not proceed, Hesse said, his staff would need to move back to the Washington area — and he expects some would seek employment elsewhere.

“My biggest concern,” he said, “is losing people.”

A university spokeswoman, Ruth McBain, told The Chronicle that Georgetown intends “to provide as much flexibility as possible to balance operational needs with individual circumstances, while also ensuring we continue to achieve our educational and research missions.”

Back to ‘That Old World’?

When people leave higher education, said Justin Lind, who works in institutional research at Stanford University, it’s not because they stop appreciating the good things about the sector.

He himself values the missions of equity and knowledge-generation. But such missions may be “no longer enough to compensate for the downsides,” he said, like less-competitive pay and unaffordable housing in some college towns.

At Stanford, the “affordability crisis” in the Bay Area made staff members want remote work well before the pandemic, Lind said. Employees were commuting long hours from more-affordable areas, he said, and his colleagues could work one day a week remotely.

During the pandemic, employees showed they could function remotely five days each week. “People said, ‘We don’t want to just go back to four days in the office,’” Lind said. “Everyone knows we can do this work well. Let’s not go back to the status quo.”

“I suspect in my group, there will be enough flexibility that we won’t lose people because of rigid come-back-to-work policies,” he said. “But I’m sure across Stanford at large, lots and lots of people will suddenly say, ‘I don’t want to go back to that old world.’”

In a statement provided by a Stanford spokesman, the university’s vice president for human resources, Elizabeth Zacharias, wrote that the university will assess staff experiences and infrastructure needs and test in-person, hybrid, and remote flexible working arrangements.

There are benefits to these arrangements, including retention and work-life balance, she wrote. Still, remote work may not be effective “in certain settings when the university returns to full operations,” she wrote. “Our goal is to find the right balance of flexible work to meet our operational, unit, and individual staff needs.”

Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s admissions and enrollment office has lost four people over the last few months. Two moved for career growth, said Andrew Palumbo, dean of admissions and financial aid, and one went to graduate school. The fourth moved closer to family. Each of those transitions made sense, Palumbo said. “Staff aren’t indentured servants. They’re professionals — constant free agents.”

Still, he said, offering flexibility — in addition to mission-driven work — is a way that colleges can compete for talent. His office is allowing employees to work four days in the office and one day remotely, and while operating a hybrid office will be more challenging for supervisors, Palumbo said people will value the flexibility.

“As people look around,” he said, they’ll want to know “not just what are the hours I’m going to work” but also “what is the quality of time I’m spending at work.”

The University of West Florida told supervisors and department heads to return to their offices by July 6, with exceptions for “permanent remote workers” and those with Americans With Disabilities Act and Family Medical and Leave Act paperwork on file.

Jeffrey Djerlek, associate vice president for finance and university controller, is expecting his team to come back to the office fully. He asked his direct reports how teleworking and hybrid scheduling were working for them.

One thing surprised him: They said they would prefer to be either fully remote or fully in person rather than a hybrid mix. Such a mix felt “too complicated” to nearly everyone he talked to, he recalled. It would be difficult to remember to send and bring information and files back and forth between workplaces.

Djerlek knows of colleagues elsewhere in higher education who are seeking early retirement instead of coming back to campus. He said he can count 10 people in Florida’s university system who have left or plan to leave by the end of the year.

“They got a little taste” of not coming into the office, he said. “Now they understand the balance of life. It’s more important now.”

Greater Balance

Many staff jobs in higher education are student-facing, and the remote-work decision for such positions has a different calculation than for behind-the-scenes jobs like data analysis and technology.

Advisers in the honors college at the University of South Florida will begin rotating back into the office later in June before a full return in August, said Reginald Lucien, director of advising.

His team is “here to support the students where the students happen to be,” he said. “They want to be on campus, and they want to engage on campus.” Students will have the option to meet remotely, but advisers will take those meetings from campus, he said.

Lucien draws a distinction between that work and more-administrative tasks, which “could be accomplished via dual modality.”

He said he expects some flexibility to continue, however, after the pandemic. If employees need to take an hour to drop off a pet at the vet, or take care of a sick relative, “it’s going to be easier.”

Though people are “all over the spectrum,” many of Kevin Grubb’s colleagues in Villanova University’s career-services office hope for “some version of flexibility,” he said.

The priority is to make decisions focused on students’ best interest, said Grubb, associate vice provost for professional development and executive director of the career center.

Balancing personal lives and family obligations has been much easier with a more flexible approach, said Brandi Scott, director of the multicultural student center for equity and justice at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She said she hopes higher education — and employers more broadly — have learned that from this experience.

The center will pursue a hybrid schedule moving forward, primarily due to continued Covid-19 safety concerns, Scott said. One team will be on campus on Monday and Wednesday, and another team will be there on Tuesday and Thursday. There will be a rotating support staff on Friday.

The sensitive conversations that Scott’s center once led in intimate settings are taking place online. Students have attended virtual events in larger numbers than expected, Scott said. After the murder of George Floyd last year, hundreds of people participated in a community gathering on Zoom.

It demonstrated to students, faculty, and staff, she said, that this challenging work could be conducted virtually.

It is my sense that as we move to a blended university, most colleges will implement more flexible work rules that will allow their staffs to work remotely either fully or partially.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

NBC News is reporting that over 8,000 students and hundreds of employees in a single Florida school district have tested positive for Covid-19 or may have been exposed to the coronavirus, school officials.

Hillsborough County Public Schools said in a statement that 8,400 students and 316 staff members are in isolation or quarantine.

“Isolation refers to individuals who have tested positive for COVID-19 while quarantine refers to those who have had close contact with a positive case,” the statement said.

The school district called an emergency board meeting for today at 1 p.m. to discuss measures “up to and including mandatory face coverings for all students and staff.”

The district, which includes Tampa, serves over 200,000 students in more than 200 elementary, middle and high schools, according to its website. It is the seventh largest in the country.

“We must continue safety practices community-wide as we work to combat this virus,” Superintendent Addison Davis said Saturday.

The deaths of two teachers and a teacher’s assistant from Covid in Broward County rattled residents as children began to return to classrooms, even as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis challenged school districts that flout his ban on mask mandates for schoolchildren.

Florida broke its record for daily confirmed Covid cases this month.

Speaking Friday to MSNBC, Davis said the district would mandate masks while allowing parents to opt out.

“We’re going to make sure we still follow every statutory requirement, all the legal ramifications,” Davis said. “But at the same time show that sensitivity with Covid in our community and put mitigation strategies in order to be successful.”

The announcement of the emergency meeting did not mention whether opting out of the proposed mask mandate would be considered.

Please learn the lesson of the need to vaccinate and masked-up!

Tony