Dear Commons Community,

The US Supreme Court has stopped a major initiative of the Biden administration to boost the nation’s COVID-19 vaccination rate, a requirement that employees at large businesses get a vaccine or test regularly and wear a mask on the job.

At the same time, the court is allowing the administration to proceed with a vaccine mandate for most health care workers in the U.S.

The court’s conservative majority concluded the administration overstepped its authority by seeking to impose the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s vaccine-or-test rule on U.S. businesses with at least 100 employees. More than 80 million people would have been affected and OSHA had estimated that the rule would save 6,500 lives and prevent 250,000 hospitalizations over six months.  As reported by several news media.

“OSHA has never before imposed such a mandate. Nor has Congress. Indeed, although Congress has enacted significant legislation addressing the COVID–19 pandemic, it has declined to enact any measure similar to what OSHA has promulgated here,” the conservatives wrote in an unsigned opinion.

In dissent, the court’s three liberals argued that it was the court that was overreaching by substituting its judgment for that of health experts. “Acting outside of its competence and without legal basis, the Court displaces the judgments of the Government officials given the responsibility to respond to workplace health emergencies,” Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a joint dissent.

President Joe Biden said he was “disappointed that the Supreme Court has chosen to block common-sense life-saving requirements for employees at large businesses that were grounded squarely in both science and the law.”

Biden called on businesses to institute their own vaccination requirements, noting that a third of Fortune 100 companies already have done so.

When crafting the OSHA rule, White House officials always anticipated legal challenges — and privately some harbored doubts that it could withstand them. The administration nonetheless still views the rule as a success at already driving millions of people to get vaccinated and encouraging private businesses to implement their own requirements that are unaffected by the legal challenge.

The OSHA regulation had initially been blocked by a federal appeals court in New Orleans, then allowed to take effect by a federal appellate panel in Cincinnati.

Both rules had been challenged by Republican-led states. In addition, business groups attacked the OSHA emergency regulation as too expensive and likely to cause workers to leave their jobs at a time when finding new employees already is difficult.

The National Retail Federation, the nation’s largest retail trade group, called the Supreme Court’s decision “a significant victory for employers.”

The vaccine mandate that the court will allow to be enforced nationwide scraped by on a 5-4 vote, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joining the liberals to form a majority. The mandate covers virtually all health care workers in the country, applying to providers that receive federal Medicare or Medicaid funding. It affects 10.4 million workers at 76,000 health care facilities as well as home health care providers. The rule has medical and religious exemptions.

Biden said that decision by the court “will save lives.”

In an unsigned opinion, the court wrote: “The challenges posed by a global pandemic do not allow a federal agency to exercise power that Congress has not conferred upon it. At the same time, such unprecedented circumstances provide no grounds for limiting the exercise of authorities the agency has long been recognized to have.” It said the “latter principle governs” in the healthcare arena.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in dissent that the case was about whether the administration has the authority “to force healthcare workers, by coercing their employers, to undergo a medical procedure they do not want and cannot undo.” He said the administration hadn’t shown convincingly that Congress gave it that authority.

Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett signed onto Thomas’ opinion. Alito wrote a separate dissent that the other three conservatives also joined.

Decisions by federal appeals courts in New Orleans and St. Louis had blocked the mandate in about half the states. The administration already was taking steps to enforce it elsewhere.

More than 208 million Americans, 62.7% of the population, are fully vaccinated, and more than a third of those have received booster shots, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. All nine justices have gotten booster shots.

The courthouse remains closed to the public, and lawyers and reporters are asked for negative test results before being allowed inside the courtroom for arguments, though vaccinations are not required.

The justices heard arguments on the challenges last week. Their questions then hinted at the split verdict that they issued yesterday.

A separate vaccine mandate for federal contractors, on hold after lower courts blocked it, has not been considered by the Supreme Court.

The court’s decisions in these cases were what was expected!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

U.S. Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota has been telling people for the last year that the 2020 election was fair, but this week he did something few other Republicans have dared — tell a national audience that.

Now he wishes more Republicans would join him.  As reported by the Associated Press.

Rounds, who is in his second Senate term, has been telling local newspapers, radio shows and Rotary clubs in South Dakota that he checked out the allegations of election fraud made by former President Donald Trump and, while there were some “irregularities,” they all came up empty of anything that could counter the truth that Trump lost. So, when ABC News’ “This Week” asked the senator to appear on its January 9^th Sunday show to discuss the Jan. 6, 2020, attack on the Capitol, Rounds said his decision was simple: “Well, of course I will.”

But the backlash from speaking was swift. Rounds said he wasn’t looking to pick a fight with Trump, but that’s exactly what happened. The former president called Rounds a “jerk” in a statement. Rounds stood by what he said, and argued there are many more Republicans like him — and they need to speak up.

“If we want to keep the trust and gain the trust of more individuals that are wondering, we have to probably say it a little bit louder and in more places that many of us normally either aren’t invited to talk or have chosen not to get into the fray,” Rounds told The Associated Press in an interview this week.

Rounds got backup after Trump’s attack from several high-profile Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and fellow South Dakotan Sen. John Thune, who has had his own run-ins with Trump. But with the GOP still largely in the former president’s grip, it’s not clear whether Rounds’ defiance represents a slip in that grasp or whether he’s a lonely voice in the party.

Republicans have mostly avoided public talk of the deadliest domestic attack on Congress in the nation’s history, calling memorials and inquiries into the insurrection “politicized.” And Trump has clung to the notion that the election was stolen from him. In an interview Tuesday with National Public Radio, the former president said it was an “advantage” for Republicans to keep alleging fraud and that Rounds was “totally wrong.”

Sen. Rounds stands by his statement that Trump lost the 2020 election after the former president called him a “jerk” for saying so.

Some Republicans have worried that Trump’s attacks will wind up hurting the party, depressing turnout by conservatives and damaging them in future elections.

That’s a point Rounds made. He wants to move on from Trump’s baseless election fraud claims, but not before making it clear that Trump lost — fair and square. He said the party risks losing credibility and voters if Trump is allowed to undermine trust in the democratic process.

“We have to be more aggressive in reassuring conservatives that their vote counts,” Rounds said, adding “to give them reassurance that they can trust us and that we will speak the truth. And even if it’s the hard truth that’s hard to swallow, we’re not going to lie to them.”

In South Dakota, the reaction to Trump’s attack on Rounds has so far been muted compared to the backlash Thune faced last year when Trump lashed out at him for saying that the attempt to overturn the election would “go down like a shot dog” in the Senate.

Gov. Kristi Noem, who has aligned herself more closely with Trump than any other South Dakota politician, said Tuesday she was not aware of the exchange between Rounds and Trump. And Jeff Holbrook, the chair of the Pennington County GOP, one of the state’s largest county parties that held “Stop the Steal” rallies in support of Trump after the 2020 election, said he had seen little reaction to Trump’s attack on Rounds.

Rounds said he has heard plenty about the exchange, acknowledging that some reaction was negative, but he said the “vast majority” was from people thanking him for speaking up.

Trump jabbed at Rounds by saying he only had courage to make those remarks because he doesn’t face reelection until 2026, and he pledged that he would never again endorse Rounds.

Rounds acknowledged that some Republicans facing earlier primaries would not “disappoint a part of the base that really does have a loyalty to the former president.”

But he argued it could be done, pointing to Thune, who recently mulled retirement before announcing last week he would seek another term. Though Thune has a large campaign fund and a seemingly clear path to reelection, he has drawn a handful of primary challenges from an insurgent group of conservatives seeking to unseat anyone who hasn’t bought into the Trump brand of politics.

“He’s not looking for a fight,” Rounds said of Thune. “He just wants to be honest with the people.”

One of Thune’s challengers, Bruce Whalen, had cautionary words for Rounds.

“He needs to remember that South Dakota is predominantly MAGA and there are just so many angry people out there right now,” Whalen said.

More Republicans need to speak out and face down the cowardly loser, Donald Trump!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education reported this morning that the final enrollment  in American higher education was down 2.7 percent or 476,100 students for fall 2021.  Undergraduate enrollments dropped by 3.1 percent.  Below is an excerpt from the article.

Tony

The Chronicle of Higher Education

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading Mary Higgins Clark’s memoir published in 2002.  If you are a fan of Clark, you will appreciate her story about growing up in the Bronx, dealing with family tragedies, striving to make it as a writer, and most important, her values.  Entitled, Kitchen Privileges, she recalls her youth living in the Pelham Parkway section of the Bronx, the tragic deaths of the men in her life at young ages (father, husband, brothers), her hard work, persistence, and importance of family.   The title comes from the fact that after her father dies, her mother had to take in tenants in her one family, semi-attached home and as an enticement gave them privileges to use her kitchen.  In reading the memoir, she is proud of her Bronx background and would defend it throughout her life.  She would say “that there were only three major locations in the world that are preceded by ‘The’:  The Vatican, The Hague, and The Bronx.  She shares her values throughout the memoir and it is obvious she was a person of great substance.  She ends as follows: 

“There’s a wonderful old saying:  ‘If you want to be happy for a year, win the lottery.  If you want to be happy for life, love what you do.  I love being a story teller.”

Clarks’ memoir is must reading for all of her fans.

A brief review that appeared in Goodreads is below.

Tony

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Goodreads

Kitchen Privileges

by

Mary Higgins Clark

In her long-awaited memoir, Mary Higgins Clark, America’s beloved and bestselling Queen of Suspense, recounts the early experiences that shaped her as a person and influenced her as a writer. Even as a young girl, growing up in the Bronx, Mary Higgins Clark knew she wanted to be a writer. The gift of storytelling was a part of her Irish ancestry, so it followed naturally that she would later use her sharp eye, keen intelligence, and inquisitive nature to create stories about the people and things she observed.

Along with all Americans, those who lived in New York City’s borough of the Bronx suffered during the Depression. So it followed that when Mary’s father died, her mother, deciding to open the family home to boarders, placed a discreet sign next to the front door that read, FURNISHED ROOMS. KITCHEN PRIVILEGES. Very shortly the first in a succession of tenants arrived: a couple dodging bankruptcy who moved in with their wild-eyed boxer; a teacher who wept endlessly over her lost love; a deadbeat who tripped over a lamp while trying to sneak out in the middle of the night…

The family’s struggle to make ends meet; her days as a scholarship student in an exclusive girls’ academy; her after-school employment as a hotel switchboard operator (happily listening in on the guests’ conversations); the death of her beloved older brother in World War II; her brief career as a flight attendant for Pan Am (a job taken after a friend who flew with the airline said ever so casually, “God, it was beastly hot in Calcutta”); her marriage to Warren Clark, on whom she’d had a crush for many years; sitting at the kitchen table, writing stories, and finally selling the first one for one hundred dollars (after six years and some forty rejections!) — all these experiences figure into “Kitchen Privileges,” as does her husband’s untimely death, which left her a widowed mother of five young children.

Determined to care for her family and to make a career for herself, she went to work writing scripts for a radio show, but in her spare time she began writing novels. Her first, a biographical novel about the life of George Washington titled “Aspire to the Heavens,” found a publisher but disappeared without a trace when the publisher folded. (Recently it was rediscovered by a descendant of the Washington family and was reissued under the title “Mount Vernon Love Story.)” The experience, however, gave her the background and the preparation for writing “Where Are the Children?” which went on to become an international bestseller. That novel launched her career and was the first of twenty-seven (and still counting!) bestselling books of suspense.

In “Kitchen Privileges,” she reflects on the joy that her life as a writer has brought her, and shares with readers the love that she has found.

Emmett Till and His Mother Mamie Till-Mobley – Library of Congress

Dear Commons Committee,

The US Senate has passed a bill to award the Congressional Gold Medal posthumously to Emmett Till, the Chicago teenager murdered by white supremacists in the 1950s, and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, who insisted on an open casket funeral to demonstrate the brutality of his killing.

In August, 1955, Till was abducted, tortured and killed after witnesses said he whistled at Carolyn Bryant, a white woman at a grocery store in rural Mississippi, a violation of the South’s racist societal codes at the time.  This incident has been a matter of dispute to this day. In return, Bryant’s husband Roy and his half-brother J.W. Milam  went to Till’s great-uncle’s house, abducted and killed Emmett in the predawn hours four days later.   In September 1955, an all-white jury found Bryant and Milam not guilty of Till’s murder. Protected against double jeopardy, the two men publicly admitted in a 1956 interview with Look magazine that they had killed Till.

The killing galvanized the civil rights movement after Till’s mother insisted on an open casket and Jet magazine published photos of his brutalized body.

Sens. Cory Booker, D-N.J. and Richard Burr, R-N.C., introduced the bill to honor Till and his mother with the highest civilian honor that Congress awards. They described the legislation as a long overdue recognition of what the Till family endured and what they accomplished in their fight against injustice.

The House version of the legislation is sponsored by Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill. He also has sponsored a bill to issue a commemorative postage stamp in honor of Mamie Till-Mobley. 

Well-deserved honors!

Tony

Dear Common Community,

Dr. Anthony Fauci showed that he is tired of Senator Rand Paul’s personal attacks on him during a Senate hearing yesterday on the federal government’s COVID response.   The exchange between the two  turned into a fierce back-and-forth with Fauci not backing down and giving Paul a bit of a butt-kicking. (see video above)  As reported by The New York Times.

Mr. Paul accused Dr. Fauci of plotting with colleagues to undermine scientists with opposing views on the virus, something Dr. Fauci denied doing.

The senator cited an email exchange between Dr. Fauci and Francis Collins, a former director of the National Institutes of Health.

“In usual fashion, you are distorting everything about me,’’ Dr. Fauci responded. The two then spoke over each other, disputing the contents of the email chain.

Later in the hearing, Dr. Fauci said Mr. Paul was partly responsible for a surge in threats against Dr. Fauci and his family.

He said personal attacks from Republicans had put his safety and that of his family at risk. He cited reports that an armed man in Iowa had been arrested in connection with plans to kill him and other officials in Washington. Dr. Fauci also displayed a fund-raising webpage for Mr. Paul that included a “Fire Dr. Fauci” graphic.

“You are making a catastrophic epidemic for your political gain,” Dr. Fauci said to Mr. Paul.

Since the early days of the pandemic in 2020, Dr. Fauci has often clashed with Mr. Paul, an ophthalmologist who is not currently practicing. Their exchanges have become a common scene at Senate testimony. Mr. Paul has accused Dr. Fauci of manipulating research and of lying to the public about the origins of the virus to protect China. Dr. Fauci has denied these claims, dismissed many of Mr. Paul’s assertions as falsehoods, and has stated in a hearing that Mr. Paul did not know what he was talking about.

Mr. Paul was one of the first senators to be infected with the coronavirus in 2020, and has often criticized pandemic precautions like wearing masks. YouTube has twice suspended him from posting on their service for spreading misinformation.

Don’t back down, Dr. Fauci!  Paul is an embarrassment in the US Senate!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Associated Press is reporting this morning that scientists are seeing signals that COVID-19’s alarming Omicron wave may have peaked in Britain and is about to do the same in the U.S., at which point cases may start dropping off.

The reason: The variant has proved so wildly contagious that it may already be running out of people to infect, just a month and a half after it was first detected in South Africa.

“It’s going to come down as fast as it went up,” said Ali Mokdad, a professor of health metrics sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle.

At the same time, experts warn that much is still uncertain about how the next phase of the pandemic might unfold. The plateauing or ebbing in the two countries is not happening everywhere at the same time or at the same pace. And weeks or months of misery still lie ahead for patients and overwhelmed hospitals even if the drop-off comes to pass.

“There are still a lot of people who will get infected as we descend the slope on the backside,” said Lauren Ancel Meyers, director of the University of Texas COVID-19 Modeling Consortium, which predicts that reported cases will peak within the week.

The University of Washington’s own highly influential model projects that the number of daily reported cases in the U.S. will crest at 1.2 million by Jan. 19 and will then fall sharply “simply because everybody who could be infected will be infected,” according to Mokdad.

In fact, he said, by the university’s complex calculations, the true number of new daily infections in the U.S. — an estimate that includes people who were never tested — has already peaked, hitting 6 million on Jan. 6.

In Britain, meanwhile, new COVID-19 cases dropped to about 140,000 a day in the last week, after skyrocketing to more than 200,000 a day earlier this month, according to government data.

Kevin McConway, a retired professor of applied statistics at Britain’s Open University, said that while cases are still rising in places such as southwest England and the West Midlands, the outbreak may have peaked in London.

The figures have raised hopes that the two countries are about to undergo something similar to what happened in South Africa, where in the span of about a month the wave crested at record highs and then fell significantly.

“We are seeing a definite falling-off of cases in the U.K., but I’d like to see them fall much further before we know if what happened in South Africa will happen here,” said Dr. Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at Britain’s University of East Anglia.

Differences between Britain and South Africa, including Britain’s older population and the tendency of its people to spend more time indoors in the winter, could mean a bumpier outbreak for the country and other nations like it.

On the other hand, British authorities’ decision to adopt minimal restrictions against omicron could enable the virus to rip through the population and run its course much faster than it might in Western European countries that have imposed tougher COVID-19 controls, such as France, Spain and Italy.

Shabir Mahdi, dean of health sciences at South Africa’s University of Witwatersrand, said European countries that impose lockdowns won’t necessarily come through the Omicron wave with fewer infections; the cases may just be spread out over a longer period of time.

On Tuesday, the World Health Organization said there have been 7 million new COVID-19 cases across Europe in the past week, calling it a “tidal wave sweeping across the region.” WHO cited modeling from Mokdad’s group that predicts half of Europe’s population will be infected with omicron within about eight weeks. 

By that time, however, Hunter and others expect the world to be past the omicron surge. 

“There will probably be some ups and downs along the way, but I would hope that by Easter, we will be out of this,” Hunter said. 

Still, the sheer numbers of people infected could prove overwhelming to fragile health systems, said Dr. Prabhat Jha of the Centre for Global Health Research at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. 

“The next few weeks are going to be brutal because in absolute numbers, there are so many people being infected that it will spill over into ICUs,” Jha said.

Mokdad likewise warned in the U.S.: “It’s going to be a tough two or three weeks. We have to make hard decisions to let certain essential workers continue working, knowing they could be infectious.”

Omicron could one day be seen as a turning point in the pandemic, said Meyers, at the University of Texas. Immunity gained from all the new infections, along with new drugs and continued vaccination, could render the coronavirus something with which we can more easily coexist.

“At the end of this wave, far more people will have been infected by some variant of COVID,” Meyers said. “At some point, we’ll be able to draw a line — and omicron may be that point — where we transition from what is a catastrophic global threat to something that’s a much more manageable disease.”

That’s one plausible future, she said, but there is also the possibility of a new variant — one that is far worse than Omicron — arising.

Some good news on the pandemic front. 

Get vaccinated!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In a medical first, doctors transplanted a pig heart into a patient in a last-ditch effort to save his life and a Maryland hospital said yesterday that he’s doing well three days after the highly experimental surgery.

While it’s too soon to know if the operation really will work, it marks a step in the decades-long quest to one day use animal organs for life-saving transplants. Doctors at the University of Maryland Medical Center say the transplant showed that a heart from a genetically modified animal can function in the human body without immediate rejection.

The patient, David Bennett, 57, knew there was no guarantee the experiment would work but he was dying, ineligible for a human heart transplant and had no other option, his son told The Associated Press.

“It was either die or do this transplant. I want to live. I know it’s a shot in the dark, but it’s my last choice,” Bennett said a day before the surgery, according to a statement provided by the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

There’s a huge shortage of human organs donated for transplant, driving scientists to try to figure out how to use animal organs instead. Last year, there were just over 3,800 heart transplants in the U.S., a record number, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, which oversees the nation’s transplant system.

“If this works, there will be an endless supply of these organs for patients who are suffering,” said Dr. Muhammad Mohiuddin, scientific director of the university’s animal-to-human transplant program.

But prior attempts at such transplants ― or xenotransplantation ― have failed, largely because patients’ bodies rapidly rejected the animal organ. Notably, in 1984, Baby Fae, a dying infant, lived 21 days with a baboon heart.

The difference this time: The Maryland surgeons used a heart from a pig that had undergone gene-editing to remove a sugar in its cells that’s responsible for that hyper-fast organ rejection.

“I think you can characterize it as a watershed event,” Dr. David Klassen, UNOS’ chief medical officer, said of the Maryland transplant.

Still, Klassen cautioned that it’s only a first tentative step into exploring whether this time around, xenotransplantation might finally work.

The Food and Drug Administration, which oversees xenotransplantation experiments, allowed the surgery under what’s called a “compassionate use” emergency authorization, available when a patient with a life-threatening condition has no other options.

Just last September, researchers in New York performed an experiment suggesting these kinds of pigs might offer promise for animal-to-human transplants. Doctors temporarily attached a pig’s kidney to a deceased human body and watched it begin to work.

The Maryland transplant takes their experiment to the next level, said Dr. Robert Montgomery, who led that experiment at NYU Langone Health.

“This is a truly remarkable breakthrough,” he said in a statement. “As a heart transplant recipient, myself with a genetic heart disorder, I am thrilled by this news and the hope it gives to my family and other patients who will eventually be saved by this breakthrough.”

It will be crucial to share the data gathered from this transplant before opening the option to more patients, said Karen Maschke, a research scholar at the Hastings Center, who is helping develop ethics and policy recommendations for the first clinical trials under a grant from the National Institutes of Health.

“Rushing into animal-to-human transplants without this information would not be advisable,” Maschke said.

The surgery last Friday took seven hours at the Baltimore hospital.

“He realizes the magnitude of what was done and he really realizes the importance of it,” David Bennett Jr. said of his father. “He could not live, or he could last a day, or he could last a couple of days. I mean, we’re in the unknown at this point.”

We wish Mr. Bennett well!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

A class-action lawsuit was filed yesterday in federal court in Chicago accusing 16 of the nation’s leading private universities of conspiring to reduce financial aid through an organization known as the 568 Presidents Group.  The lawsuit, filed on behalf of five former undergraduates who attended some of the universities named in the suit, takes aim at a decades-old antitrust exemption granted to these universities for financial aid decisions and claims that the colleges have overcharged an estimated 170,000 students who were eligible for financial aid over nearly two decades.

The universities accused of wrongdoing are Brown, the California Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Emory, Georgetown, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern, Notre Dame, the University of Pennsylvania, Rice, Vanderbilt and Yale.

Below is an article published this morning in The New York Times providing further description of the lawsuit.

Tony

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The New York Times

Lawsuit Says 16 Elite Colleges Are Part of Price-Fixing Cartel

The federal lawsuit against Yale, M.I.T. and other colleges is the latest legal action to question admissions practices.

By Stephanie Saul and Anemona Hartocollis

Jan. 10, 2022

A lawsuit filed in federal court on Monday accused 16 of the nation’s leading private universities and colleges of conspiring to reduce the financial aid they award to admitted students through a price-fixing cartel.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Chicago on behalf of five former undergraduates who attended some of the universities named in the suit, takes aim at a decades-old antitrust exemption granted to these universities for financial aid decisions and claims that the colleges have overcharged an estimated 170,000 students who were eligible for financial aid over nearly two decades.

The universities accused of wrongdoing are Brown, the California Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Emory, Georgetown, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern, Notre Dame, the University of Pennsylvania, Rice, Vanderbilt and Yale.

The allegations hinge on a methodology for calculating financial need. The 16 schools collaborate in an organization called the 568 Presidents Group that uses a consensus approach to evaluating a student’s ability to pay, according to the lawsuit.

Under federal antitrust law, these universities are permitted to collaborate on financial aid formulas if they do not consider a student’s ability to pay in the admissions process, a status called “need blind.” The group’s name is derived from a section of federal law permitting such collaborations: Section 568 of the Higher Education Act.

The suit claims that nine of the schools are not actually need blind because for many years, they have found ways to consider some applicants’ ability to pay.

The University of Pennsylvania and Vanderbilt, for example, have considered the financial needs of wait-listed applicants, the lawsuit says. Other schools, the lawsuit says, award “special treatment to the children of wealthy” donors, which, given the limited number of spots, hurts students needing financial aid.

The lawsuit claims that the actions of these nine schools — Columbia, Dartmouth, Duke, Georgetown, M.I.T., Northwestern, Notre Dame, the University of Pennsylvania and Vanderbilt — render the actions of all 16 universities unlawful, turning it into what the suit calls “the 568 Cartel.”

“Privileging the wealthy and disadvantaging the financially needy are inextricably linked,” the suit said. “They are two sides of the same coin.”

Peter McDonough, vice president and general counsel of the American Council on Education, an industry organization whose 2,000 college and university president members include leaders of the 16 schools, said the case was similar to antitrust litigation the Justice Department filed against Ivy League schools and M.I.T. in the 1990s.

Ultimately, he said, M.I.T. obtained a favorable federal appeals court ruling and the Justice Department settled its claims.

“I’d be surprised to ultimately find that there’s fire where this smoke is being sent up today,” Mr. McDonough said, noting that the schools named in the complaint were “very antitrust aware and particularly sophisticated. They have good advice provided to them.”

Several institutions, including Columbia, Duke and Rice, declined to comment on the pending litigation. Karen Peart, a spokeswoman for Yale, said the university’s “financial aid policy is 100 percent compliant with all applicable laws.”

The lawsuit is merely the latest legal action that raises questions about the admissions practices at elite universities and colleges — including the Operation Varsity Blues scandal, in which wealthy and well-connected donors were shown to have bought their children’s admission to college, and claims that admissions at top-ranked universities are based on racial quotas.

A Supreme Court decision is believed to be imminent on whether the court will consider two cases on affirmative action in admissions, one against Harvard and another against the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Neither university is named in the financial aid lawsuit.

But the lawsuit stated that Harvard, among other universities, declined to join the 568 group because it “would have yielded financial-aid packages that were smaller than what Harvard wanted to award.”

Dear Commons Community,

Brian Rosenberg, president emeritus of Macalester College and president in residence of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, had a provocative essay in yesterday’s Chronicle of Higher Education.  Entitled, “This Is the Way the Humanities End,”  Rosenberg analyzes a new book, Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation, by Roosevelt Montás.  Rosenberg references  a book review by Louis Menand, who dismisses the notion that “great books” courses are either distinctively important or frequently transformative for the students who experience them. There is passion is what Rosenberg writes.  His entire essay is below.

Important reading for anyone concerned about where the humanities are heading!

Tony

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The Chronicle of Higher Education

This Is the Way the Humanities End

A recent book review by Louis Menand carries the field further along the path to oblivion.

By Brian Rosenberg

January 7, 2022

The title of a new book by Roosevelt Montás — Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation — pretty much speaks for itself. Montás, for a decade the director of the Center for the Core Curriculum at Columbia, weaves a compelling personal narrative together with a forceful argument that reading classic texts, even those originating in predominantly white, Eurocentric cultures, is an important opportunity for underserved students of color to transform themselves and transform the inequitable social structures within which they are embedded. To deny those students encounters with the texts that are the pillars of Western thought is to deny them the ability to reshape the way all of us think. “Far from being a pointless indulgence for the elite,” he writes, “liberal education is, in fact, the most powerful tool we have to subvert the hierarchies of social privilege that keep those who are down, down.”

Louis Menand, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard, is having none of it. In a New Yorker review of Rescuing Socrates, and of Arnold Weinstein’s only vaguely similar The Lives of Literature: Reading, Teaching, Knowing, Menand dismisses the notion that “great books” courses are either distinctively important or frequently transformative for the students who experience them. He contrasts the generalist model represented by such courses with the specialist model that forms the structure of the modern research university and, while not dismissing generalists altogether, clearly favors the specialists. While some students “are happy to read Dante in translation and without a scholarly apparatus,” this is no adequate substitute for engaging with the Inferno “when you have a whole department of Italian-literature scholars on your faculty.” (Harvard and Columbia happen to have such departments. Most colleges and universities, of course, do not.)

The differences between the perspectives of Montás and Menand, however, run far deeper than their contrasting views of the Columbia core curriculum, and these deeper differences are what make this exchange between two inhabitants of the most rarefied stratum of higher education both interesting and important. Their argument, really, is about the purpose of reading and studying literature, and by extension about the purpose of the humanities in the academy. Montás’s view points to a future in which the academic study of subjects like literature, philosophy, and classics has a place in the modern university; Menand’s carries us further along the path to oblivion upon which those disciplines seem already to have started.

Menand’s fundamental critique of Montás and Weinstein, and of the beliefs they represent, is captured in several passages that have been rattling around in my head like a song that has become an earworm. Here is the first:

“The idea that students develop a greater capacity for empathy by reading books in literature classes about people who never existed than they can by taking classes in fields that study actual human behavior does not make a lot of sense.”

Had this statement been uttered or written by a member of the state Legislature in Florida or by a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, it would barely have caught my attention. It was, however, written by a professor of English at Harvard whose job it is to teach and write about “people who never existed.” In that context it is an eye-catcher. Menand seems to be saying that it “does not make a lot of sense” to presume that students can develop a greater capacity for empathy — or, one assumes, a greater capacity for traits like, say, tolerance, resilience, and courage — by studying make-believe people than by studying actual people. If a “greater capacity for empathy” is your goal, why bother with King Lear when you can spend some time with your grandfather? Why read Crime and Punishment when you can sit in a courtroom? Why read Beloved when you can take a course on the history of slavery in the United States?

This is the kind of stuff that gets English departments defunded.

Why read “Beloved” when you can take a course on the history of slavery in the United States?

Whether reading literature cultivates empathy has been a subject of much study and debate over many centuries, but this much seems incontrovertible: Such reading enables us to see things of meaning and importance that we miss in the world around us and for a time to experience that world from a perspective other than our own. One of the purposes of studying literature is to tease out and explore how this happens. Here is Robert Browning, in the dramatic monologue “Fra Lippo Lippi”:

we’re made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;
And so they are better, painted — better to us,
Which is the same thing. Art was given for that;

Or Pablo Picasso: “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.”

Or Anaïs Nin: “It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.”

Artists and literary theorists from the Romantic poets to the Russian formalists have expressed similar ideas, captured sometimes by the term defamiliarization: the belief that art can make the familiar strange and thereby allow us to see and understand the quotidian world in new and deeper ways. What happens in a psychology or sociology course is something quite different: not a making of the familiar strange, but a rendering of the familiar more comprehensible through scientific methodology. Both forms of understanding are important, but the existence of the latter does not, as Menand suggests, render the former irrelevant or senseless. Studying Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs does not lessen the value of or substitute for reading Dostoevsky.

Earworm No. 2: In the view of Montás and Weinstein, Menand writes,

the instructor’s job is not to give the students a more informed understanding of the texts, or to train them in methods of interpretation, which is what would happen in a typical literature- or philosophy-department course. The instructor’s job is to help the students relate the texts to their own lives. For people like Montás and Weinstein, it is also to personify what a life shaped by reading books like these can be.

To say that Menand is dismissive of this view is something of an understatement. “What qualifies a man like Arnold Weinstein,” he writes, “who has spent his entire adult life in the literature departments of Ivy League universities, to guide 18-year-olds in ruminations on the state of their souls and the nature of the good life?”
Menand is setting up a transparently false alternative. Teachers of literature need not choose between training students in methods of interpretation or helping them relate texts to their own lives. The good ones do both, and in fact it is hard to see how one could help students relate literary texts to their lives without also guiding them toward “a more informed understanding” of those texts. The study of literature is, or should be, rooted in careful attention to the text; that attention can lead many places, including to a fuller understanding of the self.

Studying Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs does not lessen the value of or substitute for reading Dostoevsky.

Montás understands that the overwhelming majority of college students in the world are not situated within the Ivy League and are not sitting in a literature classroom chiefly to learn methods of interpretation or critical theory. They are there — in steadily decreasing numbers — either because they are compelled by some distribution requirement or, yes, because they want to encounter what Nin calls “new meaning” and wrestle with the big, existential questions that Menand simply dismisses as “ineffable.” Students from underserved populations, Montás finds, “do not take [serious contemplation of existential issues] … to be the exclusive privilege of the social elite. In fact, they find in it a vision of dignity and excellence that is not constrained by material limitations.”

Earworm No. 3:

The university is a secular institution, and scientific research — more broadly, the production of new knowledge — is what it was designed for …. Humanists cannot win a war against science. They should not be fighting a war against science. They should be defending their role in the knowledge business, not standing aloof in the name of unspecified and unspecifiable higher things.

Humanists, that is, are not engaged in exploring concepts that lie beyond the parameters of science. They are, rather, in “the knowledge business,” though it is difficult to see what the scientifically valuable products of that business happen to be. Judged by this standard, it becomes much more important for a professor of English to publish an article on some previously unnoted linguistic pattern in Dickens than to help an undergraduate relate to and learn from the personal struggles of Pip or David Copperfield. The first is knowledge production, though of less than obvious value; the second is certainly not. (The first will also help you get tenure at a research university; the second most definitely will not.)

And, finally, Earworm No. 4:

Reading Weinstein and Montás, you might conclude that English professors, having spent their entire lives reading and discussing works of literature, must be the wisest and most humane people on earth. Take my word for it, we are not.

I do take his word for it. (Having been chair of an English department for five years, I really take his word for it.) But Menand is missing the point. Montás does not claim that reading Plato or Augustine makes you better or wiser than other people; he claims that it might make you more aware of your own nature than you were before and better equipped to understand your struggles and aspirations within the broad context of what others have thought and felt — that it provides you with a sense of “self-worth and self-respect.” Perhaps it will make you better and wiser. There are no guarantees, but there is hope, which is why we keep teaching these books to young people who will never publish an article in Studies in Philology.

In sum: Montás believes that engaging with important and complex texts can expose us to ideas to which we do not typically pay attention in daily life; that those texts can inspire personal growth and transformation; and that the humanities constitute an approach to the world that is in many ways obstinately unscientific. This leads not to a belief in one’s wisdom or virtue but to questions like the following: “To what extent do my material advantages, my professional accomplishments, my social privileges depend on the exploitation, marginalization, and exclusion of others? … To what degree do I live a compromised life?” This seems much closer to a sense of humility than to a sense of superiority.

Menand argues that people who “never existed” are less likely to instruct us than those who did, that engaging with literature is not about personal transformation or growth but about learning methods of interpretation, and that humanists are, or should be, in the business of “knowledge production”: all of which inspires the following question. Why “study” literature at all if it has less value than studying people who actually existed, if it doesn’t carry the potential for personal transformation, and if it doesn’t offer an essential alternative to a world shaped by scientifically verifiable expertise? The answer, probably, is that one should not bother. By all means, read a novel or attend a play, but don’t spend time in an English course unless you have the rather quixotic dream of becoming an English professor.

The reality, of course, is that most people teaching the humanities in American higher education are out of necessity closer to Montás’s model than to Menand’s. Most are forced by staffing levels and the nature of their institutions to be generalists; most are teaching students less interested in methods of interpretation than in drawing personal meaning from their education; most have little time to be in the business of knowledge production. But the diminution of the importance of that work and of its transformative potential is dangerous coming from an influential voice in an influential publication: not dangerous to places like Harvard or Columbia, where there will always be departments filled with specialists, but to the many colleges and universities whose humanities faculty members face regular challenges to their relevance.

In the end Menand’s essay, witty and well written, is deeply dispiriting.

In the end Menand’s essay, witty and well written, is deeply dispiriting: It acknowledges the shrinking role of the humanities within the university, the broken system of graduate training, the absence of traditional academic jobs, and — well, the best I can say is that it shrugs. “An academic discipline is a big ship to turn around, especially when it is taking on water.” Fair enough. Montás’s approach — to move the humanities away from hyperspecialization and critical theory, and toward a meaningful encounter with a new, very different generation of students — might be idealistic, but it reflects, I believe, the sort of idealism that drew most teachers of the humanities to their disciplines in the first place. It is an attempt to begin turning the ship around before it sinks.

The good news: Those legislators across the country who are ready to do away with the humanities are not the target market of The New Yorker.