Courtesy of The Chronicle of Higher Education

Dear Commons Community,

Colleges are beginning to ring the alarm bells again as the Omicron and Delta variants rear their heads as winter and indoor activity on the campuses take hold.  Cornell, Georgetown, and Northeastern are all dealing with a boom in the number of COVID-19 cases and have raised worries about colleges’ capacity to isolate and contact-trace positive cases.  As reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Northeastern tallied an average of 23 daily positive cases last week, and then 50 on Monday alone. On Wednesday, Georgetown saw its largest single-day, new-case total of the pandemic, 34. And Cornell recently registered more than 900 active cases, prompting the university to move finals online and halt in-person activity.

At Georgetown and Northeastern, at least half of recent positive cases show preliminary signs that they’re the Omicron variant, said Ranit Mishori, chief public health officer at Georgetown, and Jared Auclair, technical supervisor for the coronavirus testing lab at Northeastern. Those samples still need to be verified through full genetic sequencing. At Cornell, researchers fully genetically sequenced a sample of positive tests from last weekend. Ninety percent of them were Omicron.

The current spread of the coronavirus is “different from any other time in the pandemic at Cornell,” said Peter I. Frazier, a professor of engineering who does mathematical modeling for the administration’s anti-Covid planning efforts.

On at least a handful of college campuses, Omicron has arrived. Although they have not reported serious illness among students, these colleges are seeing rapid spread that seems to dodge precautions that worked reasonably well before the advent of Omicron, including very high rates of vaccination. At Cornell, 97 percent of the on-campus population is fully vaccinated. Between December 7 and 13, 98 percent of infections were among the fully vaccinated, Frazier said.

Vaccinated people’s vulnerability to these infections may reflect their shots’ waning effectiveness as they hit the six-month mark, Mishori said. A booster shot could re-up their immunity. Other experts The Chronicle spoke with pointed to the possibility that in communities with high virus transmission, people may be exposing themselves to the coronavirus frequently enough that it breaks through their vaccine protection.

The new surge’s dynamics have raised worries about having enough capacity to isolate and contact-trace positive cases, in case Omicron spreads quickly and causes huge case numbers. Early studies suggest the variant may cause milder symptoms than other variants of the coronavirus, and vaccination seems to provide longer-lasting protection against hospitalizations and deaths.

But that’s no reason to let the virus run free, university leaders say. “The more cases you have, the more chances you have to infect people who are at risk, and our community, or any community, has a lot of them, whether they’re old, immunocompromised, or have other high-risk conditions,” Mishori said. “Yes, it’s a smaller proportion of our community, but we certainly have high-risk individuals who, if many more people around them are sick, it puts them at high risk. And then we would see more hospitalizations and more deaths.”

Beyond Cornell, Georgetown, and Northeastern, over the past week, several other colleges have reported case surges or the presence of Omicron on campus, or both. More campus outbreaks may appear in the coming days, said Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. These surges may be driven by the Delta or Omicron variants or both, Benjamin predicted.

If American higher ed squeaks by without another reported outbreak, it’ll be because so many colleges are already letting out for winter break. That looming break is a relief, Mishori said. At Georgetown, as at Cornell, students who tested positive are currently isolating on campus. Some may not be able to leave for the holidays. Everyone else is encouraged to take a test and then head to their destination. Over the break, leaders can regroup and consider what Covid-19 protocols they’ll need for the spring of 2021.

And they’ll need strong ones. Modeling from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests that the country may see a large wave of infections as soon as January, just as college students are returning for the next term. Stanford University has already announced it will begin its winter quarter, which starts January 3, with two weeks of online instruction.

Vaccinations, boosters, indoor masks, and limits on large indoor gatherings will likely become the norm.  Here at CUNY the Chancellor’s goal for 70 percent of all courses be taught in-person in Spring 2022 will likely have to be reviewed.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has proposed codifying into law the state Board of Education’s ban on critical race theory, with provisions that would defund schools that hire CRT “consultants,” and would allow parents to sue districts over CRT and recover attorney fees.

In workplaces, to the extent that existing Florida civil rights law doesn’t protect employees from being subjected to “racism” in corporate diversity training, DeSantis’ Stop WOKE Act would seek to address that, he said yesterday.  As reported by The Huffington Post and other media

“We believe this corporate CRT is basically corporate-sanctioned racism and they’re trying to shove it down employees’ throats,” he said, describing CRT consultants as a “cottage industry” that charge a “king’s ransom” for their services.

“If you’re in a company and someone’s telling dirty jokes, that could be considered a hostile work environment,” he said. “Well, how is it not a hostile work environment to be attacking people based on their race, or telling them that they’re privileged or part of oppressive systems, when all they’re doing is showing up to work and trying to earn a living?”

If DeSantis’ measure (the full name is the Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act) passes the GOP-controlled state legislature, Florida would become the 10th state where legislators have approved anti-CRT laws. DeSantis’ office called it the “strongest legislation of its kind in the nation.”

There’s no universally accepted definition of “critical race theory” outside its grounding in academia. The GOP contends that CRT is any teaching that probes racism or casts the nation’s history in a negative light, while schools generally counter that CRT, as the concept is understood in higher ed, isn’t actually being taught to young students.

Lately, Republicans have even argued that social and emotional learning and equity training are a bait-and-switch for what they call critical race theory.

“Just understand that when you hear ‘equity’ used, that is just an ability for people to smuggle in their ideology,” DeSantis said.

Florida’s governor has made a major political issue out of CRT in the state’s public schools. In June, he directed the Florida Board of Education to ban CRT, and has vowed to get the state’s GOP apparatus involved in local school board races.

He argued that his newest legislative proposal, particularly the avenue for legal recourse, is a way to give parents more control over their children’s education.

The governor’s office said the legislation would give parents a “private right of action” to sue a school district on the basis of unlawful discrimination if they learn it’s teaching CRT, and then recover any legal fees if they’re successful.

DeSantis said districts that violate anti-CRT rules are more likely to fear a lawsuit than a fine because the legal proceedings may uncover evidence of CRT being taught in schools.

“When they say they’re not doing CRT and then you have all this information showing that they are doing it, it really is an uncomfortable position for them,” DeSantis said. “So I think that gives parents the ability to go in and ensure that our state standards are being followed.”

The Stop WOKE Act would codify into law that “no taxpayer dollars should be used to teach our kids to hate our country or to hate each other,” he said.

DeSantis, who’s considered a potential 2024 presidential candidate on the GOP side, rolled out his legislation in Wildwood, Florida, surrounded by activists with anti-CRT and anti-woke signs. He took the opportunity to denounce Marxism and “woke ideology.”

The president of the Florida Education Association, the state’s largest union with more than 150,000 members, said in a statement that educators should be able to teach history accurately to their students.

“Teachers should have the freedom to teach honest, complete facts about historical events like slavery and civil rights without being censored by politicians,” FEA President Andrew Spar said. “The governor’s announcement today goes against this fundamental American value. All Florida’s children should receive a fact-based education that doesn’t change depending on their ZIP code.”

The union previously came out against the state Board of Education’s CRT ban, which specifically bars the use of The New York Times’ 1619 Project and similar teachings in curricula.

De Santis is wrong in his assessment of CRT.  However, as an issue, it will continue to be in the news for years to come.

Tony

bell hooks

Dear Commons Community,

bell hooks, whose wide-ranging writing on gender and race helped push feminism beyond its white, middle-class worldview to include the voices of Black and working-class women, died yesterday at her home in Berea, Ky. She was 69.

Her sister Gwenda Motley said the cause was end-stage renal failure.  As reported by NBC News.

Starting in 1981 with her book “Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism,” Ms. hooks, who insisted on using all lowercase letters in her name, argued that feminism’s claim to speak for all women had pushed the unique experiences of working-class and Black women to the margins.

“A devaluation of Black womanhood occurred as a result of the sexual exploitation of Black women during slavery that has not altered in the course of hundreds of years,” she wrote.

If that seems like conventional wisdom today, that is in large part because of the enormous impact Ms. hooks had on both feminism and Black women, many of whom had resisted aligning with a movement they felt was designed to diminish their experiences.

“I think of bell hooks as being pivotal to an entire generation of Black feminists who saw that for the first time they had license to call themselves Black feminists,” Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term “intersectionality” as applied to race, class, and gender, said in an interview. “She was utterly courageous in terms of putting on paper thoughts that many of us might have had in private.”

Womanhood, Ms. hooks said, could not be reduced to a singular experience, but had to be considered within a framework encompassing race and class. She called for a new form of feminism, one that recognized differences and inequalities among women as a way of creating a new, more inclusive movement — one that, she later said, had largely been achieved.

She applied a similar, and equally trenchant, criticism to Black antiracism, which she said was often grounded in a patriarchal worldview that excluded the experiences of Black women. But she also recognized, in books like “We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity” (2004), that such a worldview resulted from centuries of oppression and exclusion of Black men.

Ms. hooks resisted the title “public intellectual,” but by the 2000s she had achieved celebrity status. Her books, written in a flowing, jargon-free style, were required reading across a wide range of college courses. She appeared onstage with actors like Laverne Cox and activists like Janet Mock, and on the bookstand of the model and actress Emily Ratajkowski, who cited Ms. hooks as inspiration while writing her recent essay collection, “My Body” (2021).

Part of Ms. hooks’s appeal was the sheer diversity of her interests. Her work, across some 30 books, encompassed literary criticism, children’s fiction, self-help, memoir and poetry, and it tackled not just subjects like education, capitalism and American history but also love and friendship.

In “Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom” (1994), she argued that the American education system had been constructed to quell dissent and shape young people into productive workers — and that it was therefore up to teachers to push against the grain by showing students how to use knowledge to resist.

She did just that in her own classes, instructing her students to see critical thinking and reading as liberating acts.

“She was a foundational influence on how I understood the possibility of my becoming a writer,” Min Jin Lee, the author of the novel “Pachinko,” who took two classes with Ms. hooks at Yale, said in an interview. “She taught me how to read. But more than that, she taught me how to read as a global person.”

bell hooks was the pen name of Gloria Jean Watkins, who was born on Sept. 25, 1952, in Hopkinsville, Ky., a small city in the southwestern part of the state not far from the Tennessee border.

Below is  her obituary as published in The New York Times.

May she rest in peace!

Tony

—————————————————————————————-

The New York Times

bell hooks, Pathbreaking Black Feminist, Dies at 69

By Clay Risen

Dec. 15, 2021

Though her childhood in the semirural South exposed her to vicious examples of white supremacy, her tight-knit Black community in Hopkinsville showed her the possibility of resistance from the margins, of finding community among the oppressed and drawing power from those connections — a theme to which she would return frequently in her work.

Her father, Veodis Watkins, was a postal worker, and her mother, Rosa Bell (Oldham) Watkins, was a homemaker. Along with her sister Ms. Motley, Ms. hooks is survived by three other sisters, Sarah Chambers, Valeria Watkins and Angela Malone, and her brother, Kenneth.

Her early education took place in segregated schools, though she moved to white-majority schools once the state integrated its education system — an experience in navigating complex racial and gender hierarchies that she later drew on in her memoir, “Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood” (1996).

She was an avid reader, vacuuming up books and reading long past her bedtime. She dreamed of becoming an architect, and of leaving small-town Kentucky behind.

“Gloria learned to read and write at an early age and even proclaimed she would be famous one day,” her sisters said in a statement released after her death. “Every night we would try to sleep, but the sounds of her writing or page turning caused us to yell down to Mom to make her turn the light off.”

Ms. hooks began her climb at Stanford University, from which she graduated in 1974 with a degree in English literature. While still an undergraduate, she began writing “Ain’t I a Woman,” its title borrowed from a speech by the Black abolitionist Sojourner Truth.

She received a master’s degree in English from the University of Wisconsin in 1976 and a doctorate in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1983, with a dissertation on Toni Morrison.

Her first book was a collection of poems, “And There We Wept,” which was published in 1978 while she was teaching at the University of Southern California. It was the first time she used the pen name bell hooks — in homage to her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks, to whom she was often compared as a child. She insisted on rendering it in lowercase letters to emphasize, she often said, the “substance of books, not who I am.”

After teaching at a number of institutions, including Yale, Oberlin and the City College of New York, she returned to Kentucky in 2004 to take up a teaching position at Berea College. A decade later the college created the bell hooks Institute as a center for her writing and teaching.

By the 2010s she had entered semiretirement and was spending her days writing, meditating and visiting with her neighbors in Berea, an intellectually vibrant town in the foothills of the Appalachians.

“I loved how open her table always was with such hard conversations, mediated by her incredible balance of encouraging patience and absolute honesty,” the novelist Silas House, a friend and Berea instructor, said in an email.

Especially in her later work, Ms. hooks emphasized the importance of community and of healing as the end goal of movements like feminism and antiracism. Some criticized this position as papering over deep social divisions.

But Ms. hooks, who described herself as a “Buddhist Christian” and spoke often of her friendship with the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, insisted that love was the only way to overcome what she called the “imperialist white supremacy capitalist patriarchy.”

“I believe wholeheartedly that the only way out of domination is love,” she told the philosopher George Yancy in an interview for The New York Times in 2015, “and the only way into really being able to connect with others, and to know how to be, is to be participating in every aspect of your life as a sacrament of love.”

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, Representative Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), the chair of the House rules committee, slammed Fox News hosts for publicly downplaying the attack at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 after privately pressuring former President Donald Trump to stop his rioting supporters.

“I think it’s notable that as of the start of the meeting, that there has been zero mentions on Fox News of their hosts’ texts to Mark Meadows,” McGovern said during a rules committee hearing Tuesday. “And that’s despite the fact that one of the hosts that texted him was live on the air all morning.”

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot revealed during a meeting Monday that Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Brian Kilmeade each reached out to then-White House chief of staff Meadows during the siege, imploring him to persuade Trump to do something to end the violence.

“I’m glad these hosts privately pushed to stop the violence on that awful day,” McGovern continued, “but what I’m upset about is what they’ve publicly said ever since: That what happened that day somehow wasn’t the fault of Donald Trump and his allies. That what happened really wasn’t a big deal. That all this is being overhyped.”

“This would be a good time for these hosts to use their platforms to tell the American people the truth, just like they were privately texting Mark Meadows the truth on that terrible day,” he said. “But I have to say that their silence is deafening.”

Fox News let over 16 hours pass before even mentioning the damning revelation about the texts, liberal watchdog Media Matters observed. The conservative network broke its silence on the messages shortly after McGovern’s remarks, when congressional correspondent Chad Pergram mentioned it briefly. He did not name the cable news channel’s hosts involved or reveal what they wrote.

Hannity suggested in a Jan. 6 message to Meadows that Trump should make a statement to ask people to leave the Capitol. Ingraham said the president “needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home.” And Kilmeade said Trump was “destroying everything you have accomplished.”

Many Fox News personalities, including the three who texted Meadows, would later go on to play down the attacks and question who was behind them. Hannity and Ingraham promoted false claims that rioters could have been left-wing militants, in contrast to their private pleas that Trump call off his supporters.

The two hosts were also vocally opposed to an investigation into the Jan. 6 riot, claiming it would be used as an excuse to attack Trump and his followers.

Despite their personal involvement, and even though Hannity hosted Meadows himself on his show, neither Hannity nor Ingraham mentioned the explosive revelation on their prime-time broadcasts Monday. Kilmeade, who was on air for nearly three hours Tuesday morning, also ignored the subject.

The select committee voted unanimously Monday to recommend holding Meadows in contempt of Congress for failing to comply with a congressional subpoena. It is now up to the full House to determine if it will refer the matter to the Justice Department to pursue criminal charges.

The Fox News hypocrites need to come clean with their viewers.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Cornell University issued a red alert Monday indicating that there was now a high risk of contracting COVID -19.  

Cornell President Martha E. Pollack, has also announced that the campus would nearly shut down. Finals moved online. In-person activities, such as sports events and a graduation ceremony planned for this week, were canceled. Libraries and gyms were closed, and students were encouraged to take their meals to-go from the dining halls. Students could leave campus if they had tested negative for Covid-19 within the last 48 hours. Students who didn’t know their status should get a test as soon as possible. By last night, the number of active cases on campus was 903.  As reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education  and the  Cornell Daily Sun,

Through preliminary testing, Pollack wrote, the university had identified evidence of the Omicron variant in “a significant number” of students who tested positive on Monday. She stressed that evidence of the new, highly contagious variant was preliminary and that the university was waiting for further testing to confirm its presence.

Last year, Cornell brought students back to campus, but with limited in-person activities and socializing. Though case numbers remained relatively low, other colleges reported soaring case counts and several faculty and staff members and students died.

This year was supposed to be different. News from campuses about the virus had been mostly quiet in the fall, with most students vaccinated and case numbers staying relatively low. At Cornell, the alert level was green just last week, indicating very little risk of transmission.

Then came the Omicron variant, which scientists believe is much more transmissible than previous variants. In addition to Cornell, George Washington and Georgetown Universities said this week that they had detected the Omicron variant in their communities. GWU, along with Smith College and Wesleyan, Brown, and Syracuse Universities, are among the small number of colleges that will require a Covid-19 booster shot. Meanwhile, dozens of colleges have revoked employee vaccine requirements since a federal judge blocked the Biden administration’s order that required some colleges, as institutions that contract with the federal government, to issue vaccine mandates.

“We feel like we’re sort of at the tip of the spear,” said Benjamin Cornwell, chair of the sociology department at Cornell. “Campus is eerily empty. It’s like being in an airport at night — and it should be.”

In the spring of 2020, when the coronavirus was raging and campuses had only recently made the abrupt pivot to remote work, Cornwell was a co-author on a paper that shed light on how interconnected college campuses are, making them potential vectors for the virus.

“That’s all coming back to me very fresh,” he said yesterday.

But at that time, he and Kim Weeden, his co-author, used data on how much students crossed paths with one another in classrooms throughout the day. Since then, Cornwell said, colleges have come to believe that the virus spreads more in dorms and at social gatherings than in classrooms. He speculated that the recent surge at Cornell was related to travel after the Thanksgiving break and parties that typically happen at the end of the semester.

At Cornell, “virtually every case” of the Omicron variant was identified in fully vaccinated students, Joel Malina, vice president for university relations, said in an emailed statement. “We have not seen evidence of significant disease in our students to date,” he said.

This is a scary situation that will likely repeat itself in the weeks and months ahead.

Tony

Keechant Sewell

Dear Commons Community,

Keechant Sewell, the Nassau County chief of detectives, will become New York City’s first female police commissioner.

Chief Sewell’s appointment, which is expected to be announced today, was seen as one of the most important decisions for Eric Adams, the incoming mayor, as he begins to fill out his administration.

Her selection was confirmed last night by Evan Thies, a spokesman for Mr. Adams. Chief Sewell, 49, was chosen from among a field of rumored candidates from within the New York Police Department and from larger police departments around the country.  As reported by The New York Times.

Mr. Adams, a former police captain, ran as a centrist in the Democratic primary, promising to address a troubling rise in violence and to rein in police abuse. He will be counting on Chief Sewell to help him strike that balance.

Mr. Adams said in a statement that Chief Sewell was “a proven crime fighter with the experience and emotional intelligence to deliver both the safety New Yorkers need and the justice they deserve.”

Chief Sewell comes from a department that has about 2,400 uniformed officers — less than a tenth of the size of the roughly 35,000 officers employed by the New York Police Department.

A person close to Mr. Adams said he had been impressed by Chief Sewell’s confidence and competence, and her experience working undercover. Her interview process was rigorous and included a mock news conference about the shooting of an unarmed Black man by a white police officer, the person said.

In 23 years with the Nassau Police Department, Chief Sewell, who grew up in Queens, worked in the narcotics and major cases units, and as a hostage negotiator. She was promoted to chief of detectives in September 2020.

Chief Sewell has been viewed as a rising star in policing circles, said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, which advises departments on best practices.

“This is a case of someone identifying her early on in her career and moving her up,” he said. “This is someone who has experienced every part of the department from patrol to internal affairs.”

Mr. Adams will announce her appointment at Queensbridge Houses in Long Island City in Queens, where Chief Sewell lived as a child.

“I grew up in Queens,” Chief Sewell said in a video interview with The Post. “This is my city, and now this being my department, I feel like I’ve come full circle.”

Mr. Adams has said he is considering Philip Banks as deputy mayor for public safety, and Mr. Banks helped oversee the hiring process for police commissioner, according to two people familiar with the matter. Mr. Banks, a former chief of department, retired in 2014 amid a corruption scandal. He was never charged with a crime.

In January, Chief Sewell will take over the New York Police Department at what could be the most consequential moment in two decades. A national crisis of trust in American policing has emboldened efforts to reduce the department’s footprint, even as murder and shooting rates remain higher than they were before the pandemic. The relationship between the department and the city’s police unions is strained, and there have been growing calls for more transparency over policing tactics and disciplinary procedures.

Mr. Adams, who will become the city’s second Black mayor, has criticized the left-wing movement to defund the police and has pledged to remove guns from the streets; he has also insisted that the city will be more proactive in removing abusive officers from the department.

Chief Sewell will also be the third Black commissioner to lead the city’s Police Department.  

Congratulations and the best of luck to Chief Sewell!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

As a mob of Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows received text messages from multiple Fox News hosts and the president’s son, urging him to convince Trump to issue a statement condemning the violence, according to the House select committee investigating the attack.

The text messages are among thousands of documents Meadows has turned over to the committee, according to Vice Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., who revealed the messages Monday evening as the panel gathered to pass a resolution to hold Meadows in contempt of Congress.  As reported by Yahoo News and Reuters.

Cheney said Meadows, who served as Trump’s chief of staff during his final months in office, turned over thousands of emails and text messages as part of a previous agreement to cooperate with the panel, but he has refused to testify, despite being ordered to do so by a subpoena. Meadows’s attorney said the former top White House aide believes his testimony is protected by executive privilege.

“Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy,” Cheney said as she read out loud a text message from Fox News host Laura Ingraham.

“Please get him on TV. Destroying everything you have accomplished,” wrote Brian Kilmeade of “Fox & Friends.”

Sean Hannity, another Fox News star, asked if Trump could “make a statement” asking “people to leave the Capitol.

Cheney also described multiple texts Meadows received from Donald Trump Jr. similarly urging the president to take action. “He’s got to condemn this s*** ASAP,” Trump’s eldest son wrote to Meadows, who replied: “I’m pushing it hard. I agree.”

Cheney, a prominent GOP critic of Trump’s actions that day, concluded: “These text messages leave no doubt the White House knew exactly what was happening at the Capitol.”

Some of those messages stand in contrast with how some Republican lawmakers, as well as Fox News stars like Tucker Carlson, have portrayed the violent attack on the Capitol. Two Fox News contributors recently quit over a special that downplayed the assault.

The revelations came as the House panel voted Monday to make Meadows the third Trump ally it referred for possible criminal penalties for refusing to cooperate with its investigation.

The specific text messages revealed by Cheney ahead of Monday’s vote are the latest details to emerge about Meadows’s communications leading up to and during the deadly riot by Trump supporters who sought to overturn the results of last year’s presidential election.

In a report issued on Sunday night ahead of the contempt vote, the committee described several specific messages about which it had planned to question Meadows about last week, when he failed to show up for a scheduled deposition.

Among the documents described in the contempt report is a Jan. 5 email in which Meadows indicated that the National Guard would be present at the Capitol the following day to ‘‘protect pro-Trump people.”

It’s not clear who was the recipient of this message from Meadows, or what it was based on, but it comes amid renewed scrutiny of who is to blame for the National Guard’s delayed response to requests for help from the Capitol Police during the riots. One of the main questions for congressional investigators is whether Trump played any role in that delay.

Incompetence all around in the White House!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The  University of Florida is investigating possible violations of its research integrity policy following a 274-page faculty committee report that included claims of pressure to destroy and barriers to publish COVID-19 data.

It is the latest development of the university’s academic freedom saga, which began in late October when it became public that multiple professors were restricted from participating in lawsuits against the state. The issue has developed into a nationwide debate over academics, freedom of speech, politics, prestige and money that has reached as far as UF’s accreditor and U.S. Congress.  As reported by The Gainseville Sun and USA Today.

In an emailed statement sent to faculty and staff on Friday, David P. Norton, the university’s vice president for research, said University of Florida Research and the university’s Office of Compliance and Ethics have initiated a formal investigation. He added that its results would be “made public once completed” but did not specify a timeline.

“The University of Florida takes breaches in research integrity very seriously and has a long-standing, rigorous process in place to investigate them,” Norton’s statement read.

The lengthy Faculty Senate Ad Hoc Committee on Academic Freedom document released in early December reported the following claims:

• There was external pressure to destroy COVID-19 data and inconsistencies in procedures for things like data destruction
• A State of Florida government entity created barriers to and delayed publication of COVID-19 data
• University of Florida employees were told verbally not to criticize Gov. Ron DeSantis or UF policies related to Covid-19 in media interactions

The committee report also discussed faculty members’ “grave concern about retaliation” and “a sense that anyone who objected to the state of affairs might lose his or her job or be punished in some way.”

Christina Pushaw, press secretary for DeSantis, emailed a statement to The Sun on Sunday about the faculty senate document. It read, “The report contains plenty of unsourced allegations and innuendo but zero evidence that Governor DeSantis or anyone connected to the governor’s office has exerted or attempted to exert improper influence on University of Florida. This is because it did not happen … Governor DeSantis does not interfere with the internal matters of UF, which this is.”

The University of Florida is fine institution.  It is a shame that it is being drawn into the muck of state politics.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

As the coronavirus pandemic approaches the end of a second year, the United States stands on the cusp of surpassing 800,000 deaths from the virus, and no group has suffered more than older Americans.  All along, older people have been known to be more vulnerable, but the scale of loss is only now coming into full view.

Seventy-five percent of people (see graph above) who have died of the virus in the United States — or about 600,000 of the nearly 800,000 who have perished so far — have been 65 or older. One in 100 older Americans has died from the virus. For people younger than 65, that ratio is closer to 1 in 1,400.  As reported by The New York Times.

The heightened risk for older people has dominated life for many, partly as friends and family try to protect them. “You get kind of forgotten,’’ said Pat Hayashi, 65, of San Francisco. “In the pandemic, the isolation and the loneliness got worse. We lost our freedom and we lost our services.”

Since vaccines first became available a year ago, older Americans have been vaccinated at a much higher rate than younger age groups and yet the brutal toll on them has persisted. The share of younger people among all virus deaths in the United States increased this year, but, in the last two months, the portion of older people has risen once again, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 1,200 people in the United States are dying from Covid-19 each day, most of them 65 or older.

In both sharp and subtle ways, the pandemic has amplified an existing divide between older and younger Americans.

In interviews across the country, older Americans say that they have continued to endure the isolation and fear associated with the pandemic long after tens of millions of younger and middle-aged people have gone back to work and school and largely resumed normal lives. Older people are still falling seriously ill in great numbers, particularly if they are unvaccinated, and hospitals in the Midwest, New England and the Southwest have been strained with an influx of patients this month. Worried about their risks, and the ongoing warnings from health officials about the added dangers for older people, many of them are still curtailing travel and visits with grandchildren, and are dining out less.

“After seeing a couple of people we knew die, we weren’t going to take any chances at all,” Rob Eiring, 70, a semiretired sales executive in Mill Creek, Wash., said of the way he and his wife had responded to the pandemic. “We really retreated. Everything turned inward for us.”

The relentless waves of new threats — a surge of the Delta variant and now the new Omicron variant — have been especially stressful for older Americans, prompting some people to consider tightening restrictions on their lives even more, during a period of life when socializing and staying physically and mentally active is considered essential.

“People are worried right now,” said Ann Cunningham, 84, who lives in a high-rise designated for seniors in Chicago, where a television room and a community room have remained shut down since March 2020. “If you’ve been inside for a long time, and the only time you talk to somebody is to get your mail or go down to the deli, that is a lot of isolation and loneliness for some people. They feel like nobody in the world cares for them.”

At the same time, the push by many companies to have employees return to workplaces is also creating new tension for adults who are older — but still working — and considered at higher risk if they were to get the virus, some experts said. “There’s all these ways — subtle, overt, direct, indirect — that we are not taking the needs of older people in this pandemic into account,” said Louise Aronson, a geriatrician at the University of California, San Francisco, and author of “Elderhood.”

The pandemic is no longer in the early, dark days of spring 2020, when the mysterious virus was sweeping through nursing homes and assisted living facilities and killing people in staggeringly high numbers, particularly those with pre-existing health issues.

After the first known coronavirus death in the United States in February 2020, the virus’s death toll in this country reached 100,000 people in only three months. The pace of deaths slowed throughout summer 2020, then quickened throughout the fall and winter, and then slowed again this spring and summer.

Throughout the summer, most people dying from the virus were concentrated in the South. But the most recent 100,000 deaths — beginning in early October — have spread out across the nation, in a broad belt across the middle of the country from Pennsylvania to Texas, the Mountain West and Michigan. 

The virus deaths of older people have sometimes been dismissed as losses that might have occurred anyway, from other causes, but analyses of “excess deaths” challenge that suggestion. Eighteen percent more older people died of all causes in 2020 than would have died in an ordinary year, according to data from the C.D.C.

“You can say, ‘They would have died anyway’ about any death, because we’re not immortal,” said Andrew Noymer, an associate professor of public health at the University of California, Irvine. “The point is you’re multiplying years of life lost by hundreds of thousands of deaths.’’

A year ago, when public health officials in this country began rolling out vaccines against the virus, they made older Americans a priority for shots before most younger people. Older Americans are now the most vaccinated age group in the country: 87 percent of people 65 and older have been fully vaccinated, according to the C.D.C.

Still, many older people who are unvaccinated have died of the virus. And the natural weakening of immune systems and organ function, geriatricians say, leave even vaccinated older people more vulnerable. The most recent available C.D.C. data on deaths among vaccinated people, which does not include those in the past 10 weeks, shows breakthrough deaths to be a small fraction of the nation’s toll. But there is no doubt that breakthrough infections in older people have resulted in some deaths.

For all of us and especially senior citizens, get vaccinated and then get the booster shot!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Veteran anchor Chris Wallace has left Fox News after 18 years for CNN, dealing a significant blow to Fox’s news operation at a time that it has been overshadowed by the network’s opinion side.

Wallace delivered the surprising news that he was leaving at the end of the “Fox News Sunday” show he moderates, and within two hours CNN announced he was joining its new streaming service as an anchor. CNN+ is expected to debut in early 2022.  As reported by the Associated Press.

“It is the last time, and I say this with real sadness, we will meet like this,” Wallace, who is 74, said on his show, which airs on the Fox network and is later rerun on Fox News Channel. “Eighteen years ago, the bosses here at Fox promised me they would never interfere with a guest I booked or a question I asked. And they kept that promise.”

Wallace was a veteran broadcast network newsman, working at both ABC and NBC News, before the late Roger Ailes lured him to Fox with the promise of his own Sunday show. Methodical and never showy — in contrast to his father Mike, the legendary “60 Minutes” reporter — Chris Wallace was known for his willingness to ask hard questions of all guests no matter their politics.

He was the first Fox News personality to moderate a presidential debate, doing it in 2016 and 2020. The debate he moderated last year went off the rails when then-President Donald Trump repeatedly interrupted Democratic challenger Joe Biden.

“He is the most tenacious interviewer in the television business, based on intense preparation and plain old persistence,” said Howard Kurtz, host of Fox’s “Media Buzz.” “He has the kind of seasoned judgment that only comes from so many years of covering political issues and he may be the best debate moderator ever.”

Kurtz said it was “a major loss for Fox News, no question about it.”

Wallace generally co-existed with Fox’s opinion side and infrequently took them on publicly, although in 2017 he said it was “bad form” when opinion hosts bashed the media.

But he had grown privately frustrated with the overall tenor at Fox, where conservative opinion hosts have been elevated and amplified, particularly after the network’s ratings took a brief hit following the 2020 election. The network ousted two news executives involved in the controversial — but correct — Election Night declaration that Biden had won in Arizona, a call that infuriated Republican Trump.

Wallace had expressed his concern about the strident opinion programming to Fox executives multiple times, including recently after Tucker Carlson’s documentary on the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, “Patriot Purge,” aired on Fox’s streaming service. Two Fox News contributors, Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes, cited that program in choosing to quit the network.

Wallace was one of a very few straight-news anchors at Fox who offered a contrast to popular opinion hosts such as Carlson and Sean Hannity.  Shepard Smith left in 2019 and is now doing a news show at CNBC.

His track record had given Wallace a large measure of independence at Fox, despite the network’s overall tilt. “I have been free to report to the best of my ability, to cover the stories I think are important, to hold our country’s leaders to account,” he said on Sunday. “It’s been a great ride.”

His announcement came as a surprise; even guests on his show Sunday hadn’t been tipped off they were seeing his finale.

In contrast to when Smith left, Wallace was coming to the end of his contract with Fox. But he turned down an offer for a multiyear extension and pay raise to leave for CNN.

“We are extremely proud of our journalism and the stellar team that Chris Wallace was a part of for 18 years,” Fox said on Sunday. “The legacy of ‘Fox News Sunday’ will continue.”

Until a successor is named, Fox said Wallace will be replaced by a rotating series of guest anchors, including Baier, John Roberts, Shannon Bream, Martha MacCallum, Jennifer Griffin, Neil Cavuto, Dana Perino and Bill Hemmer.

Wallace said that he wanted to “try something new, to go beyond politics to all the things I’m interested in.”

In CNN’s announcement, he said, “I look forward to the new freedom and flexibility streaming affords in interviewing major figures across the news landscape — and finding new ways to tell stories.”

CNN said more details about Wallace’s new role will be forthcoming. He’s the biggest name among the hires at CNN+, which has also brought on former NBC News anchor Kasie Hunt and business journalist Scott Galloway.

This is a major loss for Fox News.  There are hardly any objective hosts left at Fox News with the exception of Neil Cavuto.  Even Bret Baier, whose program was once considered a true news broadcast, has lost much of its objectivity.

Good luck to Mr. Wallace!

Tony