Dear Commons Community,

Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska announced yesterday she will run for re-election in 2022, setting up a race against a primary challenger endorsed by Donald Trump.

Murkowski said in a campaign video that she would work across party lines to help Alaska and “stand up to any politician or special interest that threatens our way of life.” Trump has vowed revenge against Murkowski and other Republican lawmakers who supported his impeachment over the Jan. 6 insurrection.  As reported by the Associated Press and other news media.

Murkowski told reporters in Anchorage yesterday there will be “plenty of people on the outside who will be gunning for me, who will suggest that I am not right for Alaskans. I would put that directly to the people of this state.”

“It’s very easy to get distracted by people on the outside. It’s very easy to get distracted by those who would say they’re going to do something,” she said later. “My focus needs to be on the people of Alaska, serving them and asking for their permission for continued service.”

Murkowski is the only Republican senator who voted to convict Trump at his impeachment trial to face reelection next year. The race will be closely watched nationally as an indicator of Trump’s lasting influence with GOP voters after his 2020 election defeat and will show whether Republicans remain willing to punish lawmakers who they believe have been disloyal to the former president.

In addition to her impeachment vote, Murkowski called for Trump’s resignation after the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, in which hundreds of his supporters stormed the building in an attempt to stop the certification of President Joe Biden’s election victory. Trump has since said people charged in the attack were being “persecuted so unfairly.”

Murkowski, 64, had been coy about her reelection plans to this point even as she had been raising money. So far, she has outraised her Trump-backed opponent Kelly Tshibaka, according to fundraising reports.

Murkowski filed paperwork with the state Division of Elections on Friday. She said campaigns are “too darn long” and she figured announcing about a year out from the general election was “plenty of time.”

Tshibaka has not yet filed with the office but has filed a statement of candidacy with the Federal Election Commission.

Murkowski’s announcement came days after she touted the passage of a massive federal infrastructure package that she called consequential for growing the economy and jobs. She was among 19 Republican senators who joined all the Democrats in backing the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill.

“Those who are pushing back and saying that a Republican cannot support this measure have not looked at what this legislation is going to do for this country,” she said Wednesday.

Murkowski has been in the Senate since 2002, when her father, Frank, selected her to finish his unexpired term after he was elected governor. A Murkowski has represented Alaska in the Senate since 1981.

Tshibaka, who has sought to cast Murkowski as an “enabler” of Biden’s administration, said Friday that it was “now official that Lisa Murkowski won’t relinquish the Senate seat her father appointed her to 20 years ago, but it’s just as clear that Alaskans are fed up with her.”

“It’s time for new conservative leaders with courage and common sense to lead our nation forward, and I stand ready to step into that responsibility,” Tshibaka said.

Murkowski has bucked the Republican Party before. She lost her 2010 primary to a conservative candidate but went on to win the general election with a write-in campaign.

After the Jan. 6 riot, Murkowski called on Trump to resign the presidency, telling the Anchorage Daily News, “I want him to resign. I want him out. He has caused enough damage.”

Trump, during his impeachment trial earlier this year, was acquitted of the sole charge of incitement of insurrection.

Murkowski was censured by the Alaska Republican Party in March for her vote to convict, but the National Republican Senatorial Committee endorsed her. In July, the Alaska Republican State Central Committee endorsed Tshibaka, a former commissioner of Alaska’s Department of Administration.

Alaska Republican Party Chair Ann Brown said in a statement Friday that Tshibaka “has captured the support of conservatives around the state and is working hard to win.”

Murkowski said she has been a Republican since she was old enough to vote and has support from Republican colleagues. But she said it’s “not about seeking endorsement from a party as much as seeking endorsement from all Alaskans.”

Murkowski was the lone Republican to oppose advancing Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in a procedural vote, expressing unease with the sexual misconduct allegations made against him, which he denied. She voted “present” in the final 50-48 vote that elevated Kavanaugh to the high court.

Trump won Alaska with 52.8% of the vote last year, while Biden got about 42.8% of the vote. Tshibaka has gotten support from Trump allies and announced recently plans for a fundraiser with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida for February.

Alaska voters last year passed an initiative to end party primaries and institute ranked-choice voting for general elections. Under the system, the top four vote-getters in a primary race, regardless of party affiliation, will advance to the general election. A state court judge earlier this year upheld the new voting process. That decision has been appealed to the Alaska Supreme Court.

A number of candidates have already filed with the state Division of Elections for the race. The list of candidates on the division’s website does not yet include a Democrat.

Lindsay Kavanaugh, executive director of the Alaska Democratic Party, said Alaskans “deserve better than to choose one side of a proxy war between Mitch McConnell’s candidate and Donald Trump’s candidate. Democrats reject both of those Republican brands.”

Democrats will have a candidate in the race “who will be a clear choice for Alaskans,” she said in a statement.

I wish Senator Murkowski good luck in her re-election bid!  The Republican Party needs her!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In a message from beyond the grave, apartheid’s last president F.W. de Klerk offered his apology, “without qualification” for the misery caused by apartheid.  In a video shared posthumously yesterday, the F.W. de Klerk Foundation described the address as his “last message to the people of South Africa”. 

Below is his obituary as provided by the Associated Press.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Two artificial intelligence programs DeepMind and RoseTTAFold are taking the prediction of protein structures to new heights.   One year ago, software programs first succeeded in modeling  the 3D shapes of individual proteins as accurately as decades-old experimental techniques can determine them. This summer, researchers used those AI programs to assemble a near-complete catalog of human protein structures. Now, researchers have upped the ante once again, unveiling a combination of programs that can determine which proteins are likely to interact with one another and what the resulting complexes of the cell look like.

Here  an excerpt from an article on this development that was published in  Science  this morning.

“It’s a really cool result,” says Michael Snyder, a systems biologist at Stanford Uni-
versity. “Everything in biology works in complexes. So, knowing who works with who is
critical.” Those relationships were hard to reach with previous techniques. The new
ability to predict them, he says, should yield an array of insights into cell biology and pos-
sibly reveal new targets for the next generation of therapeutic drugs.

Mapping proteins’ shapes down to the atomic scale has until recently required costly
and slow experimental techniques, such as x-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic
resonance spectroscopy. Those experimental techniques, if they work at all, typically only
produce individual protein structures.

Computer modeling experts have worked for decades to speed things up. Their recent
success has depended on deep learning algorithms, which use databases of experi-
mentally solved protein structures to train
software programs how to predict structures for proteins based on their amino
acid sequences.

Last year, two groups, one from a U.K. company called DeepMind and the other led
by David Baker at the University of Washington, Seattle, created rival AI programs
that both now churn out predicted protein structures by the thousands (Science, 30 July,
p. 478). The software also produced structures for a handful of known protein com-
plexes, mostly in bacteria ( Science, 16 July, p. 262). But in eukaryotes—organisms from
yeast to people—the interacting partners are often unknown. Identifying them and pre-
dicting how they come together in a complex was too high a bar for the original programs.
Now, both research groups have tweaked their programs so they can solve structures
of protein complexes by the hundreds. Online this week in Science, Baker and his col-
leagues use a combination of AI techniques to solve the structures of 712 complexes
in eukaryotes.

To find proteins that may form complexes together, the team began by comparing the
amino acid sequence of all 6000 yeast proteins to those from 2026 other fungi and
4325 other eukaryotes. The comparisons allowed the researchers to track how those
proteins changed over the course of evolution and identify sequences that appeared
to change in tandem in different proteins. The researchers reasoned that those pro-
teins might form complexes, and that they changed in step to maintain their interac-
tions. Then the team used its AI program, called RoseTTAFold, along with DeepMind’s
AlphaFold, which is publicly available, to attempt to solve the 3D structures of each set
of candidates. Out of 8.3 million identified coevolving yeast protein pairs, the AI pro-
grams identified 1506 proteins that were likely to interact and successfully mapped
the 3D structures of 712, or about half.

“These interactions span all processes of eukaryotic cells,” says team member Qian
Cong, a biomedical informatics expert at the University of Texas Southwestern Medi-
cal Center. Among the highlights, Cong and Baker say, are structures for protein com-
plexes that allow cells to repair damage to their DNA, translate RNA into proteins in
ribosomes, pull chromosomes apart during cell reproduction, and ferry molecules
through the cell membrane.

“It’s a great example of the promise” of 3D structures, says DeepMind’s John Jumper,
one of AlphaFold’s lead developers. By revealing precisely how proteins interact
with one another, the models should help biologists visualize how previously unknown
complexes carry out a multitude of jobs within the cell.

“These models give hypotheses for experimentalists to test,” Cong says. And because
disrupting these interactions could offer new ways to intervene in a wide variety of
diseases, she adds, “it also gives you a lot of potential new drug targets.”

More are likely on the way. Last month, Jumper and his colleagues posted a pre-
print on the bioRxiv server describing a new version of their AI, dubbed AlphaFold-
Multimer, which mapped structures of 4433 protein complexes. Analyses within the AI
program that gauge the confidence level of each fold suggest the structures were accu-
rate up to 69% of the time.

The bottom line, Baker says: “It’s really an exciting time for structural biology.”

Indeed it is an exciting time for structural biology as well as for the positive application of AI.

Tony

Fiona Hill during the 2019 impeachment hearings. Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading Fiona Hill’s new book, There Is Nothing for You Here:  Finding Opportunity in the 21^st Century.  As you might recall, Ms. Hill was a major witness during Donald Trump’s impeachment hearings in November 2019.  She gave credible testimony and was unflappable during cross examinations. This book is part memoir and part social commentary.  She served as deputy assistant to President Trump and as senior director for European and Russian Affairs on the National Security Council.  She presently is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, having left her policy positions in the U.S. federal government.

Ms. Hill takes us on her life’s journey from an impoverished childhood in Bishop Auckland, a coal-mining town in North East England.  Her father and just about all of the adult men in the town lost their jobs when the mines closed and had to take menial employment to make ends meet.  The title of the book, There Is Nothing For You Here, is her father’s advice to leave Bishop, Auckland, to make a life for herself someplace else.  She is a good student and embarks on a blue-chip education in England and the United States to become a Russian foreign policy expert.  She provides keen first-hand accounts of people around her especially Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.  She does not flatter them to say the least.

Throughout the book, she comments extensively on democracy, gender issues, educaton, and basic human rights.  The last fifty pages are devoted entirely to social issues.

I enjoyed Ms. Hill’s story as well as her observations of the powerful people with whom she worked.  The social commentary is interesting but has been said many times by many other authors.

Below is a book review that appeared in The New York Times.

Tony

————————————————————————————————–

The New York Times Review of Books

In a Memoir, the Impeachment Witness Fiona Hill Recounts Her Journey From ‘Blighted World’ to White House

By Jennifer Szalai

Oct. 1, 2021

The arresting title of Fiona Hill’s new book, “There Is Nothing for You Here,” is what her father told her when she was growing up in Bishop Auckland, a decaying coal-mining town in North East England. He loved her, and so he insisted that she had to leave.

Hill took his advice to heart — studying Russian and history at St. Andrews in Scotland, sojourning in Moscow, getting a Ph.D. at Harvard and eventually serving in the administrations of three American presidents, most recently as President Trump’s top adviser on Russia and Europe. “I take great pride in the fact that I’m a nonpartisan foreign policy expert,” she said before the House in November 2019, when she delivered her plain-spoken testimony at the hearings for the (first) impeachment of President Trump. But for her, “nonpartisan” doesn’t mean she’s in thrall to bloodless, anodyne ideas totally disconnected from her personal experience. She wrote this book because she was “acutely aware,” she says, “of how my own early life laid the path for everything I did subsequently.”

Sure enough, “There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century” weaves together these two selves, slipping back and forth between the unsentimental memoir reflected in its melancholy title and the wonkish guide promised in its inspirational subtitle. The combination, however unlikely, mostly works — though by the end, the litany of policy prescriptions comes to sound a bit too much like a paper issued by the Brookings Institution, where Hill is currently a fellow. When recounting her life, Hill is a lucid writer, delivering her reminiscences in a vivid and wry style. As much as I wanted more of Hill the memoirist and less of Hill the expert, I began to sense that giving voice to both was the only way she could feel comfortable writing a book about herself.

Looked at from afar, Hill’s story seems like a triumphant tale of striving and accomplishment. Born in 1965, she grew up in a “blighted world.” Her father followed the men in his family into the mines when he was 14; as the industry started to collapse in the 1960s, he found a job as a hospital porter. Hill’s mother worked as a midwife. As late as the 1970s, Hill’s grandparents lived in a subsidized rowhouse without “mod cons,” or modern conveniences, including indoor plumbing. Her grandfather had been pierced by the “windy pick” — the pneumatic drill — and had to wear a brace around his pelvis “to keep his battered insides in” for the rest of his life.

Hill recounts all of this with immediacy, tenderness and a good bit of gallows humor. She recalls how the people of Bishop Auckland started calling the crumbling town “Bish Vegas” — finding scraps of comedy in their depleted circumstances was how they reconciled a degraded present with a once-bustling past. She describes working a string of part-time jobs to help her family, including one at a medieval banquet hall, where she had to wear a ruffled costume that kept falling down her skinny frame. Her mother crafted a bosom for her from pantyhose stuffed with tissue — “this worked well enough,” Hill writes, until she slipped on a patch of “wayward

Costumes are a recurring motif in the book, as are self-deprecating glances at previous humiliations. Growing up, Hill wanted her clothes to disguise her family’s financial need, but they were more likely to give it away. Her mother sewed her a pair of trousers from heavy fabric left over after making window treatments — earning Hill the school nickname of “Curtain Legs.” Hill interviewed for a university spot wearing a homemade skirt with a heraldic pattern and a cardigan that was “nice,” she writes, “if you were 80.” Later, she had the resources to fashion the kind of self-presentation she wanted. She recalls being in a shop in 2019 with her mother, who yelled out: “Hey, Fiona, there are some suits on sale over here — might you need one for that impeachment thingy you’re doing?”

As for that “impeachment thingy,” Hill doesn’t say much about the actual hearings, though she has plenty to say about Trump. Instead of making the usual insider-memoir move of fixating on all the brazenly outrageous behavior — the bizarre comments, the outlandish tweets — Hill notices his insecurities, the soft spots that, she says, made him “exquisitely vulnerable” to manipulation. Yes, she writes, the Kremlin meddled in the 2016 election — but unlike the #Resistance crowd, which insists that such meddling was decisive, Hill is more circumspect, pointing out that Vladimir Putin wasn’t the force that tore the country apart; he was simply exploiting fissures that were already there.

Just as concerning to her was the way that people around Trump would wreak havoc on one another by playing to his “fragile ego” — spreading rumors that their rivals in the administration had said something negative about Trump was often enough to land those rivals on what the president called his “nasty list.” Hill says that watching Trump fulminate made her feel like Alice in Wonderland watching the Queen of Hearts, with her constant shouts of “Off with their heads!” In Hill’s telling, Trump’s norm-breaking was so flagrant and incessant that she compares him, in her matter-of-fact way, to a flasher. “Trump revealed himself,” she writes, “and people just got used to it.”

But neither Trump nor Putin — who was the subject of one of Hill’s previous books — is what she really wants to talk about. What she sees happening in the United States worries her. Economic collapse, structural racism, unrelieved suffering: Even without Trump, she says, none of the country’s enormous problems will go away without enormous efforts to address them. Hill the expert points to heartening examples of benevolent capitalism at work. But Hill the memoirist knows in her bones that the neoliberal approach, left to its own devices, simply won’t do.

The 1980s were a pivotal decade — for Hill, and for the world she knew. Her own career was on the rise, but the people around her were losing hope. “Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan helped to drive the nail into the coffin of 20th-century industry,” she writes, combining her memories and expertise, “while ensuring that those trapped inside the casket would find it practically impossible to pry the lid off.”

Dawn Marie Picciano Divano

Dear Commons Community,

Today we honor and thank all the men and women who served in our armed forces. They gave unselfishly to protect us and secure our way of life.

We are such a better nation because of them!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

A new private start-up university, the University of Austin, is planning to open soon in the Texas capital in response to what some perceive as a culture of censorship on college campuses. 

Pano Kanelos, the incoming president of the University of Austin, announced the formation of the nonprofit university earlier this week on the Substack newsletter platform in the publication “Common Sense”.

Kanelos, the former president of St. John’s College, a small private school with a curriculum focused on classics from Western civilization, said he is helping establish the university in response to institutions that produce graduates who are “incapable and unwilling to participate in the core activity of democratic governance.” He said the university will be focused on “the intrepid pursuit of truth” and exposing students to “the deepest wisdom of civilization.” As reported by the Austin-American Statesman.

“The reality is that many universities no longer have an incentive to create an environment where intellectual dissent is protected and fashionable opinions are scrutinized,” Kanelos said. “At our most prestigious schools, the primary incentive is to function as finishing school for the national and global elite.”

The University of Austin, also known by its abbreviation UATX, is not offering degrees and does not plan to offer an undergraduate degree program until at least 2024. The school is still in the process of securing land in the Austin area for a physical campus, and it is seeking millions in donations for scholarships and to help establish its programs.

The institution also is seeking accreditation from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board and initial accreditation through the Higher Learning Commission. Heather Berg, director of communications and strategic projects for the commission, said the accreditation process can take between one and seven years.

The school said it might offer other programs in partnership with an accredited institution until it is accredited.

The founders of the school include former Harvard President Lawrence Summers; former ACLU President Nadine Strossen; Arthur Brooks, former president of the American Enterprise Institute; and journalists, academics and other former university presidents. UATX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The institution’s headquarters is near the University of Texas at 2112 Rio Grande St., and its website estimates that the land for the university will cost between $25 million and $100 million. According to its website, the founders chose Austin for the university location because Texas is seeing an increase in talent and capital and the city is “a hub for builders, mavericks and creators.” 

“If it’s good enough for Elon Musk and Joe Rogan, it’s good enough for us,” the website says. 

In summer 2022, the institution plans to offer a summer college program called Forbidden Courses, in which students will discuss “provocative questions that often lead to censorship or self-censorship.” In fall 2022, the school will offer masters programs in entrepreneurship and leadership, and then programs in politics and applied history, and education and public service.

“UATX will recruit elite students from top schools, teach them the classical principles of leadership and market foundations, and then embed them into a network of successful technologists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and public-policy reformers,” the website said. “Students will then actively apply their learning to the most urgent and seemingly intractable problems facing our society.”

The school is planning to launch its four-year undergraduate program in fall 2024. The first two years of the liberal arts program will include studying philosophy, literature, history and economics before joining as junior fellows one of four university academic centers: the Center for Entrepreneurship and Leadership; the Center for Politics and Applied History; the Center for Education and Public Service; and the Center for Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.

The university website said the school also plans to develop master’s programs in technology, engineering and mathematics, as well as doctorate programs. Classes will be offered largely in person with a mixture of “lecture, seminar discussion, and small tutorial sessions,” according to the school.

The institution has received the funds to launch the university, but officials are looking to secure about $250 million more, according to the website. It said the school will be creating a funding model that “reverses higher ed’s lopsided priorities of building up a bureaucracy,” including streamlining or outsourcing student affairs, athletics and other “extraneous services.”

The university is not yet taking applications. That will begin in the spring for Forbidden Courses. According to the website, the university will not factor race, gender or class into admission decisions because it “stands firmly against that sort of discrimination.”

Good luck UATX!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Conservative pundit Ann Coulter who supported Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign, now characterizes him as “abjectly stupid.” She also accused him of betraying his base on a recent podcast appearance with Andrew Sullivan.

“I was well familiar with what a narcissistic, ridiculous, tacky, vulgar, arriviste this guy was. That I knew about. The one thing I underestimated, in fact, did not see at all, is I had no idea how abjectly stupid the man is,” Coulter admitted. “I didn’t think he was a genius, but I didn’t think he was that stupid.”

Coulter’s big gripe is that he ignored campaign promises he made to his loyal followers, a group she characterizes as “these poor, left-behind Americans who were waiting their whole lives for someone to care about them. And he says he cares about them and he not only betrays them, but he lies to them.”

To her, the “big lie” to Trump supporters was the promise of the giant border wall, which she considered key to any 2020 election victory.

“The one thing he’s got to do is build the wall. My theory was, if he doesn’t build the wall he loses reelection. He didn’t build the wall; he lost reelection,” she said.

She also questioned his intelligence for emphasizing that border wall above everything else.

“I couldn’t imagine anyone could be so stupid to run on one thing. … He’s just a very, very, very stupid man,” she said.

By contrast, Coulter has found things to like about Joe Biden. Back in September, she praised the president for keeping another promise Trump broke and getting American troops out of Afghanistan, according to Business Insider.

I am not a Coulter fan but her comments on Trump are welcome.

Tony

Adam Kinzinger

Dear Commons Community,

In an interview with Rolling Stone, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) thought he might have to use his own gun to save his life when trapped in the U.S. Capitol on January 6th while supporters of Donald Trump were searching for lawmakers. 

“There was a moment where I was like, ‘Man, there’s a real sense of evil.’ I can’t explain it any further than that. And I’m not one of these guys that feels evil a lot. But I just felt a real darkness, like a thick, bad feeling,” Kinzinger said. “And there was about a 15- to 30-minute time frame, where, at one point, you realize they’ve breached the Capitol. I know if they can breach those outer lines, they can get anywhere, including my office.”

Kinzinger said he had already been “targeted on Twitter” that day and earlier.

“And people know where my office is. So I barricaded myself in here, thinking, ‘If this is as bad as it seems, they may end up at my office, breaking this crap down, and I may have to do what I can,’” he said.

Kinzinger said he spent six hours in his office that day, “hunkered down, with my gun out, prepared to defend against my own party.”

He had a bad feeling about the day even before it began, and told his staff to stay home because he was worried about violence.

“I knew there was going to be violence. I didn’t necessarily know they were going to sack the Capitol, but I knew there was going to be violence. In fact, I warned [House Minority Leader] Kevin McCarthy two days prior to it. And he was very dismissive of it, of course,” Kinzinger said.

This is what our country came to during the presidency of Donald Trump. Rep. Kinzinger deserves a medal for his honesty.  He is a person of values who called out Trump and the Republicans who supported the insurrection on January 6^th.  It is a shame he won’t be running for re-election.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Erik Gilbert, a professor of history at Arkansas State University, had an op-ed in The Chronicle of Higher Education, highlighting the predatory practices of online program managers who prey on colleges and universities that use their services to offer degrees.

The predators here are the online program managers, or OPMs, private companies that help colleges that lack the capital, expertise, or self-confidence to launch online programs. Their deals with colleges are often subject to nondisclosure agreements, so the details of the arrangements are hard to nail down. But in general, OPMs provide the money needed to design the new program and offer guidance on how to move an existing face-to-face program online. Once things are up and running, they handle marketing and recruiting. In exchange they want a cut of the action. Usually that means they get 50 percent or more of the tuition, but it is sometimes far more than that. In one disastrous arrangement, Concordia University at Portland — which has since closed its doors — paid HotChalk, an OPM, 75 to 80 percent of the tuition dollars that an online master’s degree in education brought in.

His conclusion:  “OPMs are engaged in a harmful, parasitic relationship with higher education.” Gilbert raises an important red flag and higher education would be wise to heed his cautions in entering into agreements with less than scrupulous OPMs.

An excerpt from Gilbert’s piece is below.

Tony

—————————————————————————-

“… in my world the OPMs are not peddling expensive degrees in nebulous fields like positive psychology. Here, the OPMs want master’s degrees that provide a desirable credential in fields that lend themselves to scalability. The archetype is the master of science in education. In most states, a sure way for teachers to get a raise is to earn a master’s degree. This makes the MSE a credential with a direct and immediate return for its recipient. It’s also a big market — not only are there lots of teachers, there is also a lot of turnover in the field, so the pool of people who want these degrees is large. Better yet, the programs don’t require labs or anything that can’t easily be done online. Low-cost, high-volume programs like this draw OPMs like flies to honey.

Here at Arkansas State, our relationship with Academic Partnerships, an OPM, began in 2009 (it was then called Higher Ed Holdings), with a master of science in education program. In the fall of 2010, we reported a 10-percent jump in our overall enrollment to a then-record high of 13,438. The College of Education’s enrollment increased by 43 percent, which our press release discreetly attributed to growth in “distance learning.” We had already learned the first rule of OPM Club: Never acknowledge that you use an OPM.

Now, 11 years later, Academic Partnerships “manages” virtually all of our graduate programs in education, including the Ed.D. In other areas they have cherry-picked the moneymakers like the master of public administration and master of engineering management.

This fall we have an enrollment of 13,772. That’s down a bit from our record highs five or so years back, but compared with similar institutions, that number looks pretty good.

But all is not well. Back in 2010, when we experienced our 10-percent surge in enrollment, just a few of our programs were run through Academic Partnerships. This fall though, our “distance learning” students are roughly 40 percent of our enrollment.

Despite a nominally stable enrollment, we have been lurching from one budget crisis to another.

According to an investigation published recently by the Century Foundation, our situation is not unique. In a finding characterized as a “bombshell,” the author describes universities like mine as having been “taken over from within.”

Based on a dozen responses to public-records requests the foundation sent to public colleges they knew had extensive OPM involvement, researchers found that “an OPM brings in around 40 percent of all students at both Southeastern Oklahoma State University and Arkansas State University; and at Lamar University in Texas, over half of the school’s total enrollment is recruited by an OPM.”

If this small sample is representative of what’s going on at OPM-partnered colleges nationwide, that’s a lot of the market in the hands of the OPMs. It’s also a lot of colleges under the thumb of private businesses.

The financial consequences of this are grim. Besides the fact that OPMs take a large chunk of tuition from these programs, it’s also the case that most students in these programs don’t pay the same fees as on-campus students. That’s a big deal at midtier institutions like mine, where fees are a big source of revenue. Here at ASU, the rule of thumb is that it takes three students in an OPM-run program to create the same revenue as one on-campus student. Online students don’t live in dorms, they don’t buy meal plans, and they don’t get parking tickets, all of which reduces auxiliary revenue. As a result, despite a nominally stable enrollment, we have been lurching from one budget crisis to another.

Covid bailout money may have insulated us, temporarily, from the consequences of our entanglement with Academic Partnerships. But now it seems the chickens have come home to roost. We are currently engaged in a program-viability study that is almost certainly a prelude to cuts. Even though we have a slightly larger enrollment than we did in 2010, it seems we can no longer afford some of the programs we supported then.

A key part of the OPM business model is to offer degrees through traditional brick-and-mortar colleges. Many of the players in the field started in for-profit education and then scuttled to the OPM model when the for-profit industry came under federal scrutiny. Online education is often presented as an innovative way to offer higher education without the expense of maintaining a physical campus (at least, it was before Covid exposed it as the dreary, impoverished cousin of real education). But people are justifiably leery of 100-percent online, for-profit colleges. A physical campus lends an aura of credibility that online for-profits lack.

The genius of the OPM model is that it combines for-profit colleges’ money-making, credential-generating, easily scalable programs with the apparent respectability of being associated with a public institution that has an actual campus and a football team. Best of all, it shifts the cost of running the campus (and money pits like football programs) to in-person students and the public. The cost of paying for reputationally essential but unprofitable academic programs like math, languages, or philosophy are borne by the college. So too are athletics, federal compliance, accreditation, diversity offices, dining services, student-health services, lazy rivers, parking, and so on.

But, as the number of on-campus students paying the fees that support the brick-and-mortar façade shrinks, the system’s contradictions become more apparent. When the roughly 7,000 students in traditional on-campus programs are paying for a campus that was created with 12,000-plus students in mind, that’s a big and unequally shared burden. That we are contemplating program cuts is a sign that our “partnership” is placing unsustainable strains on the institution.

These sorts of strains lead colleges to ethically dark places. At Lamar University, according to the Century Foundation, the existence of a steering committee on which half the representatives are from Academic Partnerships suggests the company’s outsize influence on institutional affairs: “Tuition and fees analyses pepper the agendas. Admission policy changes are also discussed, with [Academic Partnerships] representatives emphasizing the ‘revenue impact’ of admissions policy in discussions with the Lamar team.”

As the number of on-campus students paying the fees that support the brick-and-mortar façade shrinks, the system’s contradictions become more apparent.

Why are colleges so quick to embark on such dicey deals? For many of them, it is likely because there is often a surge of money or new enrollments to make it look like they will do well. Others are probably concerned that if they don’t jump at these partnerships, another nearby college will, taking students and revenue with them. Deans are under particular pressure to bring in money. And once colleges have signed these deals, it is hard to get out.

Things seem to have taken a disturbing turn at the University of Southern California, where the dean of the School of Social Work has just been indicted on bribery charges. She is accused of engaging in illegal activity not for her personal gain, but to shore up revenues to her program after the initial flood of cash from a deal with the online program management company 2U dropped off. In a tweet, Kevin Carey cautioned that the USC situation shows that “universities should beware of what might happen when they turn their deans into businesspeople charged with monetizing their valuable brands however they can.”

I don’t know what the solution to this is, but some transparency would be a start. Universities are cagey about their deals with online program managers. OPMs themselves prefer to operate from the shadows. There is a reason for this: Both parties know the details of their relationships look bad. Right now, there is no requirement that colleges report their connections with OPMs. Students don’t know when their programs are run through an OPM. Nor do students, the public, or state and federal authorities know what percentage of the tuition from these programs goes to the OPM. If, as seems possible, an institution like mine is sending a fifth or more of its tuition revenue to a for-profit partner, that’s a big deal. I hate to saddle anyone with an additional reporting requirement, but this needs to be public information.

Transcripts also need to reflect how a degree was earned. If it was earned entirely online, that should be stated on the transcript. Advocates of online programs claim that they are the equivalents of their face-to-face competitors. If that’s true, there should be no objections.

OPMs are engaged in a harmful, parasitic relationship with higher education. Because a veil of secrecy obscures these deals, it’s impossible to know how widespread the problem is and how many colleges are in so deep that their OPMs are the ones calling the shots. It’s time to bring the details of these troubling relationships into the light.”

Michelle Wu – Credit…Josh Reynolds/Associated Press

Dear Commons Community,

Journalist and writer, Eileen McNamara, had a guest essay in The New York Times over the weekend entitled, “Michelle Wu Proved That Boston Isn’t the Same Old Boston Anymore.”  Her essay focuses on how the ethnic politics of Boston has shifted at least for the time-being. She comments:

“The election of Ms. Wu, a 36-year-old lawyer, represents a seismic shift to a political landscape in which “white” and “male” were prerequisites to be elected mayor since the position was established here in 1822. Ms. Wu will join at least 11 women (and possibly 13, depending on election results) as mayors of U.S. cities with a population of more than 400,000.

It’s a long way from the Irish domination of the mayoralty that began in 1884 with the election of Hugh O’Brien, a native of County Cork. The office was held without interruption by men of Irish descent from 1930 to 1993, when Thomas Menino became the first Italian American to claim the job.”

The 2021 election was most interesting in many parts of the country in terms of the diversity of candidates, many of whom were winners.

Ms. McNamara’s entire essay is below.

Tony

The New York Times

Guest Essay

Michelle Wu Proved That Boston Isn’t the Same Old Boston Anymore

By Eileen McNamara

November 3, 2021

Time to retire the tired old tropes about Brahmin swells, Irish ward heelers and the petty parochialism that for too long has defined this city on the national stage. A Taiwanese American woman from Chicago is about to become the mayor of Boston, a town that, until Tuesday, had elected only white men to that office.

Michelle Wu defeated Annissa Essaibi George, a City Council colleague whose father is from Tunisia and mother was born to Polish parents in a German refugee camp.

The election of Ms. Wu, a 36-year-old lawyer, represents a seismic shift to a political landscape in which “white” and “male” were prerequisites to be elected mayor since the position was established here in 1822. Ms. Wu will join at least 11 women (and possibly 13, depending on election results) as mayors of U.S. cities with a population of more than 400,000.

Ms. Wu and Ms. Essaibi George, both Democrats, emerged in September as the top vote-getters in the nonpartisan preliminary election, which included not a single white man among the five candidates. By winning the runoff on Tuesday, Ms. Wu will succeed acting Mayor Kim Janey, who in March became the first Black Bostonian and first woman to occupy the position, after Marty Walsh stepped down to join the Biden administration as secretary of labor.

It’s a long way from the Irish domination of the mayoralty that began in 1884 with the election of Hugh O’Brien, a native of County Cork. The office was held without interruption by men of Irish descent from 1930 to 1993, when Thomas Menino became the first Italian American to claim the job.

That was almost 30 years ago, but like most caricatures of this city, the idea of Boston as more Irish than Guinness stout retains a stubborn hold on the national imagination. In fact, Boston has been a majority-minority city since the turn of this century, when census figures first confirmed the percentage of non-Hispanic whites had dropped below 50 percent (to 49.5 percent). The latest census data shows the city becoming even more diverse, with the proportion of Asian, Hispanic and multiracial residents on the rise.

That reality stands in stark contrast to images of Boston that are seared into memory — white women in housecoats and hair curlers throwing rocks at school buses full of Black children, and a white teenage thug assaulting a Black lawyer with an American flag on City Hall Plaza during a demonstration against a federal court order to desegregate the public schools through busing. Those photographs are more than 40 years old, but their power to define the city as insular and racist remains undiminished.

To be sure, the legacy of that era lives on in a public school system abandoned by those opposed to integration, leaving behind a student population that today is only 14 percent white. Under Mayor Ray Flynn, control of the chronically underperforming schools shifted in 1991 from an elected school committee to a panel chosen by the mayor, a change many denounced as a move that disenfranchised minority parents. A nonbinding question on the city ballot Tuesday asked whether voters should again be allowed to elect its school committee, as voters do in every other city and town in Massachusetts. (It looked poised to pass.) Ms. Wu supports a hybrid model with a majority of the committee elected by voters and a number of experts appointed by the mayor.

It is a measure of how much Boston has changed that Ms. Essaibi George, who grew up in the city’s Dorchester neighborhood and taught in the public schools, failed in her bid to brand the Chicago-born Ms. Wu as an outsider. Ms. Wu first came to Massachusetts to attend Harvard. A Suffolk University/Boston Globe/NBC 10 poll last month found that 59 percent of likely voters said it did not matter to them whether a candidate was Boston born and reared.

The election of an Asian American woman will not erase the high cost of housing, the rise in crime or the racial disparities in education, wealth and medical outcomes that persist here, as they do in most major American cities. But Ms. Wu comes to the job with bold plans to address gentrification and climate change and to reform the police, many inspired by her former Harvard Law School professor and mentor Senator Elizabeth Warren. Some of those ideas Ms. Wu cannot adopt unilaterally. Her proposal to reintroduce rent control, outlawed statewide by a ballot initiative in 1994, would require the approval of the State Legislature and Gov. Charlie Baker, who would most likely oppose it.

And, for all the hype about the historic nature of this race — two women of color vying for mayor in a city whose politics have been long dominated by white men — public interest in the campaign was anemic at best. Many Bostonians sat out the election, with turnout not expected to top 30 percent of the city’s 442,000 registered voters.

Ms. Wu should not be misled. Those stay-at-home voters will be paying close attention when she takes the oath of office in two weeks. Politics in Boston might just have gotten more diverse, but it is still this city’s favorite spectator sport.