Chris Wallace

Dear Commons Community,

Chris Wallace told New York Times correspondent Michael M. Grynbaum “I just no longer felt comfortable with the programming at Fox” after nearly two decades at Fox News.

For those on the left who admired him, and those on the right who doubted him, it’s a statement that was a long time coming.  Here is an except from the exchange between Wallace and Grynbaum.

A down-the-middle outlier at Fox News who often confounded conservatives by contradicting the network’s right-wing stars, Mr. Wallace was also one of the channel’s fiercest defenders, disappointing liberals who hoped he might denounce colleagues like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson.  ere is

But in December, Mr. Wallace, 74, issued a final verdict: He was done. In a surprise move, he declined to renew his contract as host of “Fox News Sunday” and jumped to archrival CNN. His daily interview show — “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?” — starts Tuesday on the new CNN+ streaming service.

So why did Mr. Wallace change the channel?

“I’m fine with opinion: conservative opinion, liberal opinion,” Mr. Wallace said in his first extensive interview about his decision to leave. “But when people start to question the truth — Who won the 2020 election? Was Jan. 6 an insurrection? — I found that unsustainable.”

“I spent a lot of 2021 looking to see if there was a different place for me to do my job,” he added.

The anchor was eager to describe what attracted him to his new gig: excitement about CNN+, the more freewheeling format of streaming TV — “I don’t have to say, you know, ‘Wolf Blitzer starts right now at 6:59:59’” — and the opportunity to expand beyond politics. In early episodes, he discusses space travel with the “Star Trek” actor William Shatner, asks the former Disney boss Bob Iger about meeting the pope, and at one point sings a warbling duet with the songstress Judy Collins.

But Mr. Wallace also acknowledged that he felt a shift at Fox News in the months after Donald J. Trump’s defeat in 2020 — a period when the channel ended its 7 p.m. newscast, fired the political editor who helped project a Trump loss in Arizona on election night, and promoted hosts like Mr. Carlson who downplayed the Jan. 6 riot.

He confirmed reports that he was so alarmed by Mr. Carlson’s documentary “Patriot Purge” — which falsely suggested the Jan. 6 Capitol riot was a “false flag” operation intended to demonize conservatives — that he complained directly to Fox News management.

“Before, I found it was an environment in which I could do my job and feel good about my involvement at Fox,” Mr. Wallace said of his time at the network. “And since November of 2020, that just became unsustainable, increasingly unsustainable as time went on.”

Your revelations are welcome Mr. Wallace but they were a long time coming!

Tony

Russian Soyuz Rocket Lifting off at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan

Dear Commons Community,

In scientific fields with profound implications for mankind’s future and knowledge, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine is causing a swift and broad decaying of relationships and projects that bound together Moscow and the West. Post-Cold War bridge-building through science is unraveling as Western nations seek to punish and isolate the Kremlin by drying up support for scientific programs involving Russia.

The costs of this decoupling, scientists say, could be high on both sides. Tackling climate change and other problems will be tougher without collaboration and time will be lost. Russian and Western scientists have become dependent on each other’s expertise as they have worked together on conundrums from unlocking the power of atoms to firing probes into space. Picking apart the dense web of relationships will be complicated.  As reported by the Associated Press.

The European Space Agency’s planned Mars rover with Russia is an example. Arrays of Russian sensors to sniff, scour and study the planet’s environment may have to be unbolted and replaced and a non-Russian launcher rocket found if the suspension of their collaboration becomes a lasting rupture. In that case, the launch, already scrubbed for this year, couldn’t happen before 2026.

“We need to untangle all this cooperation which we had, and this is a very complex process, a painful one I can also tell you,” the ESA director, Josef Aschbacher, said in an Associated Press interview. “Dependency on each other, of course, creates also stability and, to a certain extent, trust. And this is something that we will lose, and we have lost now, through the invasion of Russia in Ukraine.”

International indignation and sanctions on Russia are making formal collaborations difficult or impossible. Scientists who became friends are staying in touch informally but plugs are being pulled on their projects big and small. The European Union is freezing Russian entities out of its main 95 billion euro ($105 billion) fund for research, suspending payments and saying they’ll get no new contracts. In Germany, Britain and elsewhere, funding and support is also being withdrawn for projects involving Russia.

In the United States, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology severed ties with a research university it helped establish in Moscow. The oldest and largest university in Estonia won’t accept new students from Russia and ally Belarus. The president of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, Tarmo Soomere, says the breaking of scientific connections is necessary but also will hurt.

“We are in danger of losing much of the momentum that drives our world towards better solutions, (a) better future,” he told the AP. “Globally, we are in danger of losing the core point of science — which is obtaining new and essential information and communicating it to others.”

Russian scientists are bracing for painful isolation. An online petition by Russian scientists and scientific workers opposed to the war says it now has more than 8,000 signatories. They warn that by invading Ukraine, Russia has turned itself into a pariah state, which “means that we can’t normally do our work as scientists, because conducting research is impossible without full-fledged cooperation with foreign colleagues.”

The growing estrangement is being pushed by Russian authorities, too. An order from the Science Ministry suggested that scientists no longer need bother getting research published in scientific journals, saying they’ll no longer be used as benchmarks for the quality for their work.

Lev Zelenyi, a leading physicist at the Space Research Institute in Moscow who was involved in the now-suspended collaboration on the ExoMars rover, described the situation as “tragic” and said by email to the AP that he and other Russian scientists must now “learn how to live and work in this new non-enabling environment.”

On some major collaborations, the future isn’t clear. Work continues on the 35-nation ITER fusion-energy project in southern France, with Russia still among seven founders sharing costs and results from the experiment.

ITER spokesman Laban Coblentz said the project remains “a deliberate attempt by countries with different ideologies to physically build something together.” Among the essential components being supplied by Russia is a massive superconducting magnet awaiting testing in St. Petersburg before shipment — due in several years.

Researchers hunting for elusive dark matter hope they’ll not lose the more than 1,000 Russian scientists contributing to experiments at the European nuclear research organization CERN. Joachim Mnich, the director for research and computing, said punishment should be reserved for the Russian government, not Russian colleagues. CERN has already suspended Russia’s observer status at the organization, but “we are not sending anyone home,” Mnich told the AP.

In other fields as well, scientists say Russian expertise will be missed. Adrian Muxworthy, a professor at London’s Imperial College, says that in his research of the Earth’s magnetic field, Russian-made instruments “can do types of measurements that other commercial instruments made in the West can’t do.” Muxworthy is no longer expecting delivery from Russia of 250 million-year-old Siberian rocks that he had planned to study.

In Germany, atmospheric scientist Markus Rex said the year-long international mission he led into the Arctic in 2019-2020 would have been impossible without powerful Russian ships that bust through the ice to keep their research vessel supplied with food, fuel and other essentials. The Ukraine invasion is stopping this “very close collaboration,” as well as future joint efforts to study the impact of climate change, he told the AP.

This is a sad situation for global science research.  Thank you Mr. Putin!

Tony

Donald Trump and John Bolton

Dear Commons Community,

Former president Donald Trump would not be “capable” of holding Ukraine peace talks in Moscow to stop the Ukraine invasion, according to John Bolton, the ex-president’s own former national security adviser.

“He’s not capable of it,” John Bolton told The Palm Beach Post in a story Saturday when asked about Trump’s ability to successfully conduct a “peace-negotiating trip” to Moscow.

“This would require thinking through a policy and considering the pluses and minuses, the risks and costs involved. That’s just not what he does,” Bolton added.

Bolton, who infamously derided Rudy Giuliani’s dirt-digging efforts in Ukraine as “a drug deal,” instead said Trump would have gifted Russia Ukraine had he been re-elected.

He said Trump’s withholding of the $250 million in military aid put the assistance in far more jeopardy than was understood.

“The urgency of the particular $250 million was that it was appropriated money that under the federal government’s bizarre budget procedures would have expired on Sept. 30, 2019,” Bolton recalled.

Bolton spoke to the newspaper as it examined Trump’s boasts that the Russian invasion of Ukraine would not have happened on his watch — in part because of his claimed excellent relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Early on, Trump called Putin’s Ukraine invasion “genius.”

If the invasion had occurred while he was president, he could have ended it, Trump has also claimed. The former president said last week he would use U.S. nuclear submarines to threaten Russia, which many observers viewed as dangerously provocative, especially since Putin has already indicated he’s ready to use nuclear weapons.

Bolton had said earlier that Trump in fact helped set the stage for the invasion. His repeated flattery of Putin and his weakening of America’s relationship with Europe emboldened the Russian leader, while Trump’s “contempt” for Ukraine and his baseless claims that its government was corrupt weakened that nation’s standing.

“I think all contributed to a precarious status for Ukraine, which would have continued in a second term,” for Trump, Bolton told The Palm Beach Post.

In 2019, Trump froze military aid to Ukraine authorized by Congress that he then tried to use as an enticement to convince Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to launch an investigation into Trump’s rival Joe Biden and his son Hunter. The action led to Trump’s first impeachment.

The aid stall was far more serious for Ukraine than many realized at the time, according to Bolton.

“The urgency of the particular $250 million was that it was appropriated money that under the federal government’s bizarre budget procedures would have expired on Sept. 30, 2019,” Bolton recounted to the newspaper.

He also said that Ukraine wasn’t the only nation that faced increased security risks in the Trump administration. Bolton believed Trump’s objective was to “withdraw the U.S. from NATO or substantially limit” Washington’s support for the defense alliance. That’s what Putin was “waiting for” in a second Trump term, Bolton told The Washington Post early this month.

We appreciate Bolton’s present views on Trump.  He would have served our country a bit better if he said of some of these things when he was in Trump’s circle.

Tony

Jennifer Sey. Credit…Stephen Speranza for The New York Times

Dear Commons Community,

Before 2020, Jennifer Sey, a top executive at Levi Strauss & Company and a leading candidate to be the company’s next leader, barely used social media. Two years later, Ms. Sey was out of a job, in part, in her telling, because of her activity on Twitter.

Ms. Sey’s unusual exit last month from Levi’s after more than 20 years generated a flurry of headlines, with her claiming in a widely circulated essay that her advocacy for school reopenings during the pandemic made her a pariah at work and ultimately led to her ouster. As reported by The New York Times.

But the road to her departure was complicated. It touched on issues like whether corporations can control the personal speech of their employees, particularly in a period of isolation, and the politics tied to speaking on certain platforms, like Fox News opinion shows.

The vast majority of Ms. Sey’s tweets were about schools, but some of them criticized guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, whom she accused of fear mongering. (“So when is Fauci going to stop doing the morning shows on Sunday, terrorizing the already fearful?” she tweeted in April 2021.)

She also expressed skepticism about the effectiveness of masking, mostly for young children. (“Currently there is not enough evidence for or against the use of masks (medical or other) for healthy individuals in the wider community,” she posted in May 2020.)

Ms. Sey’s outspokenness drew criticism both inside and outside the company, including threats of boycotts. The tweets came when Levi’s was using public health guidance to manage protocols across hundreds of stores and in distribution centers. But Ms. Sey said she was speaking as a concerned mother, not a corporate executive. She also noted that Levi’s — which has been vocal about hot-button issues like gun control — had not previously complained when she posted on social media in support of Democratic politicians like Senator Elizabeth Warren or more liberal causes.

Levi’s disputes Ms. Sey’s account of events, including her claims that she was punished because her views veered from “left-leaning orthodoxy” and that she walked away from a $1 million severance package in order to be able speak freely about the company. Levi’s said Ms. Sey had quit rather than negotiate an exit package, which would have contained a nondisclosure agreement. It “would not contain a prohibition on the executive speaking out about matters of public interest such as school closures or on engaging in any legally protected speech,” Kelly McGinnis, the senior vice president of corporate affairs at Levi’s, said in a statement.

Ms. McGinnis said that Levi’s supported Ms. Sey’s advocacy on schools, but that she “went far beyond calling for schools to reopen, and frequently used her platform to criticize public health guidelines and denounce elected officials and government scientists.”

She added that Ms. Sey “did this at a time in 2020 and 2021 when hospitalizations and deaths from Covid were spiking, when the company had its own employees hospitalized, and in some cases dying, and companies like Levi’s were using guidance from public health officials to implement policies to keep our employees and consumers safe.”

The company’s social media policy says that employees are free to discuss their views but that it expects employees to protect the company’s “reputation and image.” 

This is an interesting case and one that I think is not over!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

If you watched the Senate confirmation hearings of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson this past week, you saw a lot of political theater, some of which was not always very attractive.  Above is a photograph that captured a spark of beauty during the hearings and features a deliberately out-of-focus Jackson smiling joyously during her confirmation as her daughter, 17-year-old Leila Jackson, looked on from behind, brimming with what can only be described as pride and adoration. The photo was taken by Sarahbeth Maney, a Black photojournalist from Oakland, Calif.

Maney says her perspective as a Black woman and proud daughter led her to capture the sentimental moment.

“I try to photograph what I feel, and not what I see,” Maney, 26, told Yahoo Life.

Maney, who is a fellow for the New York Times, shared the photo to Twitter with the caption, “Being the first often means you have to be the best–and the bravest.”

Maney, who is also the first Black photography fellow for New York Times, knew she would be covering a historic moment but could not imagine the reach her photo would have, stating that she initially wasn’t going to post the picture on Twitter.

“I wasn’t going to tweet because I posted it on Instagram, and someone took it from Instagram and put it on Twitter and so I was like, ‘okay’, and I tweeted it out, put my credit on it and like, immediately, it was like, just a thunderstorm of likes and retweets and comments,” she says. “I was really not expecting it at all.”

A re-share of the photo by Maya Harris, sister of Vice President Kamala Harris — photographed by Maney in the past — launched the moment into viral territory.

“I think it really started when Maya Harris shared the photo… it’s been such a whirlwind experience these past, like 24 hours,” she says of the flood of likes and shares she has received. As of Friday afternoon, the photo (in which Brown Jackson’s husband, Patrick Jackson, is seen behind her, at left) had racked up nearly 10,000 retweets and almost 90,000 likes on Maney’s Twitter and over 70,000 likes on Instagram.

Maya Harris’s post has so far received over 20,000 retweets and nearly 300,000 likes.

“This is everything,” reads the caption.

Many users shared the uplifting and emotional response the photo sparked with Maney directly.

“I saw a lot of people commenting that they burst into tears when they saw the photo,” Maney says.

A happy proud child is indeed “everything”!

Tony

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frmL4X7-7ug

..

Dennis Sullivan

Dear Commons Community,

CUNY Distinguished Professor Dennis Sullivan is the recipient of the 2022 Abel Prize for Mathematics.  The prize – equivalent to a Nobel Prize in Math – is awarded to Sullivan by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters for his “groundbreaking contributions to topology in its broadest sense, and in particular its algebraic, geometric, and dynamical aspects.” As a part of the award, he will receive 7.5 million Norwegian kroner (nearly $860,000 US).

Sullivan was one of the leading figures in great advances in understanding the topology of manifolds in higher dimensions during the late 60s and 70s. Some of the best of his early work for many years was only available if you could find a copy of unpublished mimeographed notes from a 1970 MIT course. In 2005 a Tex’ed version of the notes was finally published (available here). This includes as a postscript Sullivan’s own description of this work, how it came about, and how it influenced his later work.

This was followed by wonderful work on rational homotopy theory, making use of differential forms. For this, see Sullivan’s 1977 Infinitesimal computations in topology, and lecture notes on this by Phil Griffiths and John Morgan. In later years Sullivan’s attention turned to subjects with which I’m not very familiar: topics in dynamical systems and the development of what he called “string topology”.

Since 1981 Sullivan has held the Einstein chair at the CUNY Graduate Center, running a seminar each week that concentrates on the relation between topology and QFT. For many years these were held in a Russian style, going on for multiple hours, possibly with a break, until all participants were exhausted. There’s a remarkable collection of videos of these lectures at the seminar site, including many going way back into the 80s and 90s, with video recorded at a time when this was quite unusual (more recent ones are on Youtube).

Congratulations to Professor Sullivan!

Tony

Ginni and Clarence Thomas

Dear Commons Community,

In the weeks between the 2020 presidential election and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, sent a barrage of text messages imploring President Donald J. Trump’s chief of staff to take steps to overturn the vote.

In one message sent in the days after the election, she urged the chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to “release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down,” invoking a slogan popular on the right that refers to a web of conspiracy theories that Trump supporters believed would overturn the election.

In another, she wrote: “I can’t see Americans swallowing the obvious fraud. Just going with one more thing with no frickin consequences.” She added: “We just cave to people wanting Biden to be anointed? Many of us can’t continue the GOP charade.”  As reported by The Washington Post, CBS, News and The New York Times.

The contents of the texts were among about 9,000 pages of documents that Mr. Meadows turned over to the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack. The texts detailed Mr. Meadows’s interactions with Republican politicians as they planned strategies to try to keep Mr. Trump in office in the weeks before the riot.

The committee obtained 29 texts between Ms. Thomas and Mr. Meadows — 28 exchanged between Nov. 4 and Nov. 24, and one written on Jan. 10. The text messages, most of which were written by Ms. Thomas, represent the first evidence that she was directly advising the White House as it sought to overturn the election. In fact, in her efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power, Ms. Thomas effectively toggled between like-minded members of the executive and legislative branches, even as her husband, who sits atop the judiciary branch that is supposed to serve as a check on the other branches of government, heard election-related cases.

Justice Thomas has been Mr. Trump’s most stalwart defender on the court. In February 2021, he wrote a dissent after the majority declined to hear a case filed by Pennsylvania Republicans that sought to disqualify certain mail-in ballots. And this past January, he was the only justice who voted against allowing the release of records from the Trump White House related to the Jan. 6 attack.

Ms. Thomas has actively opposed the Jan. 6 committee and its work, co-signing a letter in December calling for House Republicans to expel Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger from their conference for joining the committee. Ms. Thomas and her co-authors said the investigation “brings disrespect to our country’s rule of law” and “legal harassment to private citizens who have done nothing wrong,” adding that they would begin “a nationwide movement to add citizens’ voices to this effort.”

Many of Ms. Thomas’s postelection texts are rambling, with little attention to punctuation, and they run the gamut. She calls Nov. 3, Election Day, a “heist,” and repeats debunked conspiracy theories, including one pushed by QAnon that falsely alleged that voter fraud had been discovered in Arizona on secretly watermarked ballots.

The texts show she was communicating not only with Mr. Meadows, but also with Connie Hair, the chief of staff to Louie Gohmert, the Texas Republican congressman who sued Vice President Mike Pence to force him to certify Mr. Trump as the victor of the 2020 election.

The text traffic also suggests that Ms. Thomas was in contact with Jared Kushner, the former president’s son-in-law and adviser. Sidney Powell, the lawyer advising Trump’s campaign team known for unleashing wild theories about voting fraud, comes up repeatedly. On Nov. 13, for instance, Mr. Trump included Ms. Powell in a tweeted list of his team’s lawyers. That same day, Ms. Thomas urged Mr. Meadows to support Ms. Powell, and said she had also reached out to “Jared” to do the same: “Just forwarded to yr gmail an email I sent Jared this am,” she wrote. “Sidney Powell & improved coordination now will help the cavalry come and Fraud exposed and America saved.”

When some of the president’s other lawyers began distancing themselves from Ms. Powell, Ms. Thomas warned Mr. Meadows not to “cave” to the “elites.”

In one text exchange right after the election, she tells Mr. Meadow that he needs to listen to Steve Pieczenik, a onetime State Department consultant who has appeared on Alex Jones’s Infowars to claim, among other things, that the Sandy Hook school massacre was a false-flag operation.

Justice Thomas should resign and get help for his wife!

Tony

Aynklo for The Chronicle

Dear Commons Community,

Jon Boeckenstedt, vice provost for enrollment management at Oregon State University, has an article in The  Chronicle of Higher Education entitled, “Will Your College Survive the Demographic Cliff.”  He provides a data-packed analysis of future enrollment trends in higher education based on demographics especially predicted high school graduation rates. It is not a pretty picture.  However, his conclusion is that while national trends are dismal, college enrollments will be largely affected by local demographics as well as whether states tend to attract or lose students. He also provides an interesting analysis of student race and family income levels as important determinants of college enrollment.

One of his conclusions is:

“As many people have noted, it’s not just the numbers that are changing; it’s the mix of students. That means we’re not looking so much at a demographic cliff as we are at a demographic perfect storm.”

Below is an excerpt from the article.  It should be read by college administrators around the country.  Also be sure to follow the links in the article.  They provide critical data from reliable sources.

Tony

————————————————————

The Chronicle of Higher Education

“On campuses across the country, and also in the media, the enrollment consequences of the sharp drop in birth rates starting in 2007 are being debated. Many have relied on the excellent work of Nathan Grawe, an economics professor at Carleton College who is very bearish on the future of the market. His book Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education is widely cited as the gold standard when looking 10 years into the future. Some, using Grawe’s analysis, see severe enrollment declines that will disrupt how colleges operate. Others think that the threat has been exaggerated and that the industry will escape mostly unharmed. It seems clear, looking at the data, that a demographic cliff is coming. But it won’t affect all colleges in the same way.

If it’s true that all politics is local, then in some sense so is (almost) all college enrollment.

The truth is that higher education is well placed to predict the future. We have a long view on our markets second only to the funeral industry. And sometimes demographic patterns turn out as planned. In my generation the drop in high-school graduates happened right on schedule; that spike in births in 1957, caused by World War II veterans reaching their late 30s and early 40s during the mid-1950s, signaled the beginning of the end of the baby-boom generation. The tally of 4.3 million births in 1957 wasn’t matched again until 50 years later, in 2007.

But the drop in high-school graduates (down 21 percent from 1975 to 1992) did not coincide with a drop in college enrollment. In fact, just the opposite happened. At first, undergraduate enrollment continued to increase, until about 1985, when it fell slightly. But starting in 1986, things quickly picked up, and enrollment increased from 10.3 million in 1986 to 17.3 million 2011, a remarkable 68 percent, even though the population of high-school graduates over that time increased only 31 percent.

What happened? High-school graduation rates increased. America, still interested in investing in education, increased financial aid, knocking down the largest barrier to a college degree. Programs focused on the special needs of those age 25 and older popped up all over the country. Colleges opened branch campuses to make education more convenient. Universities began to recruit internationally, and those efforts paid off: The number of international students doubled from 1985 to 2010, and grew by 730,000 more students by 2019. For-profit higher education expanded, and began enrolling many students who were not well served by traditional colleges. Concerns about the budget ramifications of drops in enrollment at the undergraduate level were softened by an astonishing increase of 95 percent in graduate-education enrollment from 1986 to 2020.

Fast forward. History repeats itself, and now we’re looking at another demographic cliff.

The raw numbers aren’t perfect, but they are a good place to start. The basis of most of our foresight comes from federal data and from data produced by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. Both data sets generally show the same thing: The number of public high-school graduates is expected to peak in about 2025 or 2026, and then fall off. The commission says 3.5 million in 2025; federal data say 3.4 million in 2026. Then, both data sets agree, we’ll see a steady decline as far out as the projections go. The federal data say 3.2 million in 2030, and the commission says 3.3 million in that year but, for good measure, projects all the way to 2036, when the numbers drop to 3.2 million. The last time we saw numbers like that was — get ready — 2015.

The numbers are less troubling than some suggest. But the national numbers don’t tell us very much. If it’s true that all politics is local, then in some sense so is (almost) all college enrollment.

Before you think about anything else, consider this: A majority — 56.2 percent — of students at public four-year colleges attend an institution less than an hour’s drive away from home, and nearly 70 percent attend within two hours. So if your college is in Connecticut, a booming population in Florida or Arizona might be interesting, but it probably won’t solve your future enrollment challenges. If you want to see how reliant your college is on regional migration and how it’s changed over time, take a look at the Ipeds freshman–migration data I visualized here using the last tab on the display.

National numbers of high-school graduates are really not that important to most colleges. It’s better to look at the number of graduates in your state or region. When you do, you’ll see that New England and the Great Lakes states have been dealing with falling numbers for a while; in other regions, the decrease will come later and be more temperate. Where you sit is where you stand, both literally and figuratively.

But that’s not all. As many people have noted, it’s not just the numbers that are changing; it’s the mix of students. That means we’re not looking so much at a demographic cliff as we are at a demographic perfect storm. This new phenomenon will be a lot different for several reasons, and not just because we’ve already exercised many of our mitigating strategies. We made lemonade from lemons a long time ago, and there is not much juice left to squeeze.

This year white public-high-school graduates will no longer be a majority in the United States, and will drop to about 42 percent of all graduates in 2036, the farthest year out we can predict. Among the many dubious reasons people may have for being concerned about the drop in white students, there is at least one legitimate one: Who goes to college in America is driven by several factors that tend to overlap strongly, and those factors affect market viability: parental attainment of a college degree, parental income, and student ethnicity.

College attendance by ethnicity lines up in the exact same order as parental attainment and parental income: Asian, white, Hispanic, and African American. And the data tell us that the 10-percent decrease in white graduates won’t be offset by small increases in Asian populations or even larger increases in Hispanic populations.

Again, this is not new information. Almost a decade ago, the Human Capital Research Corporation provided sortable data from the Census Bureau’s 2011 American Community Survey. Breaking down the numbers of children by age, ethnicity, parental attainment, and — especially — income shows what demographers have known for a long time: Wealthier families have fewer children. That data predicted many colleges’ difficulty in enrolling students who can afford to pay the full cost of attendance. Discount rates, but especially concerns about net revenue, are obvious at many private colleges; the recent decline in median family income won’t help ease that concern, and whether the trend might be driven by Covid-19 is irrelevant.

If your campus is 85-percent white, you need to ask yourself how students in the future will consider you relevant.

Finally, we can’t focus exclusively on the future and ignore the present. The public is losing confidence in higher education, a trend long in coming and slow in developing. The last time college enrollment increased in the United States was 2014-15, and it too has been on a slow, steady decline since then, even before the pandemic. Of course, 2020 threw us a sucker punch, when enrollment dropped by almost 700,000 students (4 percent) in one year, and estimates suggest 2021 saw an additional 3-percent decline. It’s true, of course, that almost all of that drop is explained by decreases in community-college enrollment. But that may be the bellwether that signals bigger problems ahead.

It’s possible that the change we fear is already here. It’s also possible — but considerably less probable — that this fall will mark the beginning of the rebound, and in 10 years we’ll be wondering what we were worrying about. There are far too many critical points between now and then to know for sure, but it’s clear that the most prudent approach is to plan for the worst and hope for the best. Check that. Plan for the worst, and do everything you can to foster the best for your campus.

If you’re in Vermont, you will naturally think about this differently than if you’re in Florida or Arizona. If your campus is 85-percent white, you need to ask yourself how students in the future will consider you relevant. If your curriculum hasn’t changed in 40 years, it may be time to modernize it. If you’ve relied on international students — especially from China — to contribute substantially to the bottom line, it might be wise to consider other options.

And if you haven’t thought about this at all, well, there is no time like the present.

We are at a critical moment: Declining enrollment even in one sector (say, community colleges) is troublesome because of downstream effects. Declining revenue and wavering state support, coupled with fewer high-school graduates, fewer families that don’t need financial help, and an increasingly negative attitude from the public toward higher education, may take us to a long-rumored tipping point. While there are no guarantees, the colleges that are aware of how those trends will affect their specific states and regions, are dealing with those issues, and are looking realistically toward the future are likely to be the ones best able to survive.

Dear Commons Community,

CERN, the Geneva-based research center that houses the world’s largest atom smasher is grappling with ways to punish Russia’s government while protecting Russian researchers who work to help solve the deepest mysteries of the universe.  As reported by the Associated Press.

CERN, also known as the European Center for Nuclear Research, has a mission to facilitate collaboration among its 23 member countries and beyond. The war in Ukraine, an associate member state, has the organization trying to calibrate its response to join international actions against Russia, which was an official CERN observer before the invasion, without sacrificing science.

Some 1,000 scientists, or nearly 7% of the 18,000 researchers involved with CERN, are affiliated with Russian institutions — most, though not all, are Russian. If they are cut off from participating in experiments and other research, it could slow or complicate upcoming projects involving the center’s Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator.

A crucial decision for CERN’s governing council looms this week because the collider is set to start operating again in April after a hiatus of more than three years that partly resulted from the coronavirus pandemic. The collider requires regular pauses, and its next run is expected to generate huge amounts of new data.

“What kind of projects are the Russians involved here at CERN? It’s essentially in everything that we are doing,” Joachim Mnich, the director for research and computing. “We’re in discussions with the council to find a solution for that: Punish — as much as possible, as we can do — the Russian government. But not punishing our colleagues.”

The next operation of the accelerator, which is set to churn out new data starting this summer, will be only the third round of experiments in the collider: A first run took place from 2010 to 2012, and a second from 2015 to 2018. The one starting in April is expected to last until 2026.

On March 8, the CERN Council joined international condemnation of the invasion of Ukraine and suspended new collaborations with Russia and its institutions indefinitely. It also expressed support for Russian scientists who “reject this invasion” and stripped Russia of its observer status.

CERN is run by 22 European countries and Israel as member states. The United States, Japan and the European Union have observer status. Ukraine is among seven countries with associate member status.

Russian researchers are involved in a project for the “high-luminosity” phase of the collider, which should “crank up” its performance by 2027 and generate vast new amounts of data, Mnich said.

The Russians are working on physics analysis, computing, and the operation, construction and design of new detectors that catch protons after they are smashed together.

Mnich said fully two-thirds of the staffers are Russian on an experiment known as NA64, which involves blasting a high-powered electron beam onto a fixed target and searching for unknown particles from a hypothetical dark-sector.

Another experiment related to CERN’s accelerator, which propels particles through an underground, 27-kilometer (17-mile) ring of superconducting magnets in and around Geneva, uses synthetic crystals to split and deflect beams. Nearly half of the staff working on the research are from Russia, Mnich said.

Yet another project, to study the internal structure of protons and neutrons, has components “delivered by Russian colleagues,” he said.

“They are here. They arrived already last year. They’re installed. But we might have problems to operate the detectors if our Russian colleagues will not be able to come to CERN as planned in the future,.” Mnich said.

“We are not sending anyone home,” he added. “We try to continue to keep them here, but it’s a very difficult situation for us.”

Prudent decision!

Tony