Dear Commons Community,

Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) on Sunday challenged a call from Florida’s GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis to investigate COVID-19 vaccines, arguing Republicans should not “undermine science” and medical experts.

Hutchinson told NBC’s “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd that he was “for the education and the science” behind the COVID-19 vaccines and protecting Americans from the novel coronavirus.

“We shouldn’t undermine science. We shouldn’t undermine the medical community that’s very important to our public health,” he said. “We are not good as a society, it’s not the right direction, if we diminish the facts, we diminish all the best information that we have from science at the time.”

DeSantis last week called for a grand jury in Florida’s Supreme Court to probe if pharmaceutical companies criminally misled Floridians about the side effects of vaccines and the efficacy of the COVID-19 shots.

The announcement came on the same day a new study found the COVID-19 vaccines have saved more than 3 million lives since late 2020.

But the Florida governor, considered a potential 2024 presidential nominee, embraced concerns among Republicans and conservatives about the efficacy and safety of the vaccines.

DeSantis has moved even further to the right on the vaccine issue than former President Trump, who announced his 2024 White House bid last month and helped speed up the rollout of the vaccines in 2020 with a federal program called Operation Warpspeed.

Hutchinson, who is also mulling a 2024 run, on Sunday said it was “not helpful” for the Republican Party to focus on issues in the past.

“I don’t think it’s good to go back,” the Arkansas governor said. “Whether you’re going back to the 2020 election or whether you’re going back and trying to re-litigate everything that happened during the pandemic, that’s not helpful for where we are.”

Hutchinson is becoming a major voice of reason for the Republican Party.  I hope he runs for the Party’s presidential nomination.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

My colleague, Bob Ubell, had a column yesterday published in EdSurge, entitled,  “Why College Students Turned From Being Down on Remote Learning to Mostly in Favor of It.”   He provides important commentary on how after a rocky start, online learning has become the instructional modality of choice for many of them.

I agree fully with his assessment. 

Below is his column in its entirety.   

Tony

———————————————————————————————————————————–

EdSurge

Why College Students Turned From Being Down on Remote Learning to Mostly in Favor of It?

By Robert Ubell (Columnist)    

Dec 20, 2022

If you go back to the first days of the COVID crisis, when campuses across the country were shutting down, college students weren’t very happy with emergency online learning. Surveys conducted then showed deep dissatisfaction, with as many as 70 percent saying they didn’t like it.

Low grades for remote instruction persisted for months. As the nation struggled under one of the worst public health threats in centuries, emergency instruction proceeded as the only viable way to keep higher education going, even though so few students liked it.

Since then, things have taken a surprising turn. Today, 70 percent of college students give online and hybrid learning a thumbs-up.

How did that happen? What were the forces at play that turned disaffection into growing acceptance?

It’s totally understandable that students taking remote classes in those early pandemic months resisted. Remote education was not a choice, but a command. Higher education was like a country at war, with students conscripted online like soldiers fighting for their academic lives. By the second semester of the crisis, about 680,000 dropped out altogether.

Students in those early days of COVID were under severe stress, tossed about with anxiety and depression; many found it difficult to concentrate or even sleep, let alone stay in school.

Just before the COVID shutdown, about a third of college students were enrolled in at least one online course. Today, three years after the worst of the crisis, that percentage has unexpectedly jumped to half. As the pandemic waned, increasing numbers of students opted to enroll in online instruction, casting aside their early disappointment because remote learning fulfilled needs it had always provided students—convenience, speed to graduation, flexibility and lower tuition. For working adults, online is often the simplest and easiest path to earn a degree. It satisfies those eager to access courses anytime, day or night.

And some faculty teach with more effective active-learning methods in the online format.

The often mediocre delivery of digital instruction at the start of the pandemic shined a spotlight on college teaching, with students measuring their online experience against in-person instruction. Critics have long been unhappy with what goes on in those college classrooms, often with professors lecturing interminably, as if the call for active learning has not been a century-long cry by thoughtful educators.

Now, students were given the opportunity to compare. And they discovered that the often lackluster college classroom is not much better than what usually happens online. If everything is lecture, students are choosing between slumping on couches at home in front of their screens or passively nodding off in classrooms.

“The reason why so many were disappointed with emergency digital instruction was not because it was alien, but because it was so very familiar.”

Few faculty were guided on how to teach during emergency remote instruction. They were just sent off online, with presidents and provosts praying students would survive the ordeal. It turns out that the same pedagogical failure that occurred online also happens widely on campus. Few professors step into their on-campus classrooms knowing best practices in teaching face-to-face.

Perhaps students in the early days of emergency remote instruction expected something different, exciting and new. But what they found, once they logged on, was the same endless talking heads at home on video or Zoom or on campus face-to-face. Students have now grown accustomed to pretty much the same experience, and they’ve resigned themselves. Over the long haul, students came to terms with it, accepting online as they’ve always endured lectures in person. The reason why so many were disappointed with emergency digital instruction was not because it was alien, but because it was so very familiar.

Of course, not every on-campus or online course is conducted in lecture mode. Thoughtful faculty use their digital and analog classrooms to stimulate engaging academic experiences, with students and instructors participating in peer-to-peer learning and other innovative practices. Abandoning lectures, skilled professors teach remotely or in-person, treating students not as passive listeners in a theater audience, but as players up on the academic stage, collectively discovering knowledge.

Feeling Alienated

Attending remote classes in the crisis, most college students felt alienated, lonely on their screens. They lacked in-person conversation, and they wished they could return to ordinary, face-to-face conversation.

The campus, after all, is a far more socially accommodating environment, with students busy with others in clubs, sports and other interpersonal activities in the school cafeteria and dorm rooms.

The physical classroom was never designed to provide all of the student’s wishes for social interaction. Classrooms on campus commonly allow only limited one-on-one engagement, with students rarely connecting with their peers, except at moments when classes are open to discussion. In college, I remember often leaving class at the end of a term, never having said a word all semester long to classmates seated right next to me.

During the pandemic, with every other avenue of interchange shut down, remote classrooms were asked to fulfill urgent needs for student personal engagement—a capability they were never meant to deliver. Yearning for human connection during those first COVID days and weeks was painful, but online learning was never going to satisfy it.

Once normal life returned and students could rely on other ways of getting together with friends and classmates, the digital classroom could relinquish its overwhelming social burden. Students can now take classes online without expecting them to be a place not only for learning, but also for socializing.

Pivoting to Video

One fascinating recent teaching strategy may have played a decisive role in changing student perceptions—increased use of video instruction. Many remote instructors now step away partially from delivering only Zoom sessions and produce instructional videos as well—as I did when I taught at The New School.

“This is the new normal,” says educational research psychologist Nicole Barbaro at GWU Labs, an affiliate of Western Governors University. “Professors are increasingly using videos to disseminate lectures and other instructional content to their students, and students are now watching hours of recorded videos each week for their courses.”

To my surprise, video—especially as a supplement in remote instruction—turns out to be a boon to greater student learning. A new meta-analysis uncovers the striking finding that when instructional videos supplement in-class instruction, rather than when they replace in-person teaching, students gained the most—results that have clear implications for online instructors. If you are weighing whether to design your digital course with either static text or recorded videos, videos are surely the way to go, advises GMU’s Barbaro.

When I taught online at The New School, a crack team of instructional designers and photographers guided me on how to deliver professional, 7-minute videos, accompanied by graphics, text and other elements. Other videos were TV-style newscast interviews of scholars and practitioners I had invited to offer their expertise on topics covered in my course. In the 6 weeks my online course ran, my Zoom sessions consisted entirely of remote classroom discussions of the videos students watched at home and readings I had assigned. In all those weeks, I never once delivered a real-time lecture.

Over time, with months of practice as the pandemic proceeded, instructors and students learned how to use remote tools. Continuously online, enormous numbers gained proficiency with digital learning software. “The quality of a well-run synchronous, online class can now rival—and in some respects exceed—the quality of the in-person equivalent,” observes John Villasenor at the Brookings Institution.

The good news is that online learning is no longer reviled and resented, but after a rocky tryout in the pandemic, it’s now just another higher ed choice in which students and faculty, after years of digital stress, have largely adapted to it.

Hope Hicks as seen onscreen during the Jan. 6 committee’s final hearing on Dec. 19, 2022. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday the House Select Committee had its last public session during which it unanimously voted to recommend that the Justice Department seek criminal charges against Donald Trump and others for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and prevent the peaceful transition of power, culminating in the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Most of the information that the Committee presented has been heard before except for the testimony of Hope Hicks.

Hicks, who served as a top adviser to  Trump, testified to the House Select Committee that she told him she was worried he was tarnishing his legacy by promoting the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen.

“We were not seeing evidence of fraud on a scale that would have impacted the outcome of the election,” Hicks said in videotaped testimony shown  during the committee’s final public hearing. “And I was becoming increasingly concerned that we were damaging his legacy.”

Hicks was asked what the president said to her in response.

“He said something along the lines of, you know, ‘Nobody will care about my legacy if I lose so that won’t matter,'” Hicks replied. “‘The only thing that matters is winning.'” Hicks is a longtime confidante of the former president. She worked for the Trump Organization and his 2016 presidential campaign before serving in multiple senior roles in the Trump White House, first as White House communications director, as director of strategic communication and as counselor to the president. She left the White House on Jan. 12, 2021, six days after the Capitol insurrection.

Her interview with the committee was conducted in late October. In introducing video footage of her testimony, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., said that Hicks was one of the witnesses who came forward after the panel’s last public hearing to “tell us about their conversations with ex-President Trump.”

Over the course of its 18-month investigation, the committee uncovered evidence that Trump was told repeatedly by his campaign advisers, government officials and others that there was no evidence to support his claims of election fraud.

But he “continued to purposely and maliciously make false claims sometimes within a day of being told that a particular claim was false and unsupported by the evidence,” Lofgren said.

“By the time the Electoral College met to cast its votes on Dec.14, 2020, a number of President Trump’s senior staff, cabinet officials and members of his family were urging him to facilitate a peaceful transition to the incoming administration,” she added. “He disregarded their advice and he continued to claim publicly that the election had been stolen from him.”

Trump acted disgracefully and deserves to pay a price!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Millions of Twitter users asked Elon Musk to step down as the head of Twitter in a poll the billionaire created and promised to abide by. But by yesterday afternoon there was no word on whether Musk would step aside or who the new leader might be.  As reported by the Associated Press.

Twitter has grown more chaotic and confusing under Musk’s leadership with rapidly vacillating policies that are issued, then withdrawn or changed.

Among those voting with the “go” camp almost certainly were Tesla investors who have grown tired of the 24/7 Twitter chaos that they say has distracted the eccentric CEO from the electric car company, his main source of wealth.

Musk also used his Tesla stock to partially fund the acquisition of Twitter.

Shares of Tesla are down 35% since Musk took over Twitter on Oct. 27, costing investors billions. Tesla’s market value was over $1.1 trillion on April 1, the last trading day before Musk disclosed he was buying up Twitter shares. The company has since lost 58% of its value, at a time when rival auto makers are cutting in on Tesla’s dominant share of electric vehicle sales.

“This has been a black eye moment for Musk and been a major overhang on Tesla’s stock, which continues to suffer in a brutal way since the Twitter soap opera began,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives wrote Monday.

If Musk’s tenure ends, it would be a major positive for Tesla stock and a sign that Musk is “finally reading the room that has been growing frustration around this Twitter nightmare,” Ives wrote.

Musk attended the World Cup final Sunday in Qatar, where he opened the poll. Since the poll closed early Monday, Musk has been uncharacteristically silent on Twitter as he appeared to be flying back to the U.S.

Musk has taken a number of unscientific polls on substantial issues facing the social media platform, including whether to reinstate journalists that he had suspended from Twitter, which was broadly criticized in and out of media circles.

The polls have only added to a growing sense of tumult on Twitter since Musk bought the company for $44 billion, potentially leaving the future direction of the company in the hands of its users.

Among those users are people recently reinstated on the platform under Musk, people who had been banned for racist and toxic posts, or who had spread misinformation.

Since buying Twitter, Musk has presided over a dizzying series of changes that have unnerved advertisers and turned off users. He’s laid off half of the workforce, axed contract content moderators and disbanded a council of trust and safety advisors. He has dropped enforcement of COVID-19 misinformation rules and called for criminal charges against Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert.

Musk clashed with some users on multiple fronts and on Sunday, he asked Twitter users to decide if he should remain in charge, acknowledging he made a mistake in launching new restrictions that banned the mention of rival social media websites.

The results of the online survey, which lasted 12 hours, showed that 57.5% of the 17.5 million respondents wanted him to leave, while 42.5% wanted him to stay.

The poll followed just the latest significant policy change since Musk acquired Twitter in October. Twitter had announced that users will no longer be able to link to Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon and other platforms targeted for “prohibition.”

Early Monday, the tweets from Twitter’s ‘Support’ account and the Twitter blog announcing the “prohibitions” disappeared without explanation. Twitter no longer has a press office so it was not possible to ask why.

That decision had generated immediate blowback, including criticism from past defenders of Twitter’s new owner. Musk then promised that he would not make any more major policy changes to Twitter without an online survey of users.

The action to block competitors was Musk’s latest attempt to crack down on certain speech after he shut down a Twitter account last week that was tracking the flights of his private jet.

The banned platforms included mainstream websites such as Facebook and Instagram, and rivals Mastodon, Tribel, Nostr, Post and former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social.

A growing number of Twitter users have left under Musk, or created alternative accounts on rival platforms and included those addresses in their Twitter profiles.

Musk has advocated for free speech on Twitter, but shut down the jet-tracking account, calling it a security risk. He used that to justify the decision last week to suspend the accounts of numerous journalists who cover Twitter and Musk, among them reporters working for The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Voice of America and other publications. Many of those accounts were restored following an online poll by Musk.

The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz was suspended over the weekend after requesting an interview with Musk in a tweet tagged to the Twitter owner.

Sally Buzbee, The Washington Post’s executive editor, called it an “arbitrary suspension of another Post journalist” that further undermined Musk’s promise to run Twitter as a platform dedicated to free speech.

“Again, the suspension occurred with no warning, process or explanation — this time as our reporter merely sought comment from Musk for a story,” Buzbee said. By midday Sunday, Lorenz’s account was restored, as was the tweet she thought had triggered her suspension.

Musk was questioned in court on Nov. 16 about how he splits his time among Tesla and his other companies, including SpaceX and Twitter. He had to testify in Delaware’s Court of Chancery over a shareholder’s challenge to Musk’s potentially $55 billion compensation plan as CEO of the electric car company.

Musk said he never wanted to be a CEO of any company, preferring to see himself as an engineer.

In public banter with Twitter followers Sunday, Musk expressed pessimism about the prospects for a new CEO, saying that person “must like pain a lot” to run a company that “has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy.”

“No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor,” Musk tweeted.

Leave Elon leave!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

New York Times  columnist, Ross Douthat, had an opinion piece yesterday entitled,  The End of the Trump Era Will Be Unsatisfying.   Here is an excerpt:

“Since the 2022 midterm elections, the end of the Trump era in American politics has become, at least, a 50-50 proposition. While Ron DeSantis surges in multiple national polls, the former president has busied himself shilling $99 digital trading cards to his most devoted fans. The promised battle royale, in which Trump emerges from Mar-a-Lago to smite his challenger and reclaim his throne, may yet be in the offing. But it’s also possible that Trump 2024 will end up where many people expected Trump 2016 to go, diminishing into an act of self-indulgence that holds on to his true loyalists but can’t win primary-season majorities.

If that’s how Trump goes out, doing a slow fade while DeSantis claims his mantle, the people who have opposed Trump most fiercely, both the Resistance liberals and the Never Trump Republicans, will probably find the ending deeply unsatisfying.

There will be no perp walk where Trump exits the White House in handcuffs (though he could still face indictment; that hope lives), no revelations of Putinist treason forcing the Trumps into a Middle Eastern exile, no Aaron Sorkin-scripted denunciation driving him, in shame, from the public square.

Nor will there be a dramatic repudiation of the Trumpist style. If DeSantis defeats Trump, it will be as an imitator of his pugilism and populism, as a politician who promises to fight Trump’s battles with more effectiveness and guile.

Nor, finally, will there be any accountability for Trump’s soft enablers within the Republican Party. There was a certain political accountability when the “Stop the Steal” devotees lost so many winnable elections last month. But the men and women who held their noses and went along with Trump at every stage except the very worst will continue to lead the Republican Party if he fades away; there will be no Liz Cheney presidential campaign to deliver them all a coup de grâce.

These realities are already yielding some righteous anger, a spirit evident in the headline of a recent essay by Bill Lueders at The Bulwark: “You’re Only Leaving Trump Now?” Never forget, Lueders urges, that if Republicans abandon Trump it won’t be because of his long list of offenses against decency and constitutional government; it will be only because, at last, they’re sure he cannot win.”

Douthat has it right unfortunately!

Tony

Lionel Messie and his Argentine team mates celebrate their World Cup victory over France. (AP Photos – Martin Meissner)

Dear Commons Community,

Lionel Messi, wearing a black Qatari robe over his blue-and-white Argentina shirt, kissed the World Cup, shuffled toward his teammates and hoisted the golden trophy high in the air.

It was an iconic sight that finally — definitively — places the soccer superstar in the pantheon of the game’s greatest players.

Messi’s once-in-a-generation career is complete: He is a World Cup champion.

In probably the wildest final in the tournament’s 92-year history, Argentina won its third World Cup title by beating France 4-2 in a penalty shootout after a 3-3 draw featuring two goals from the 35-year-old Messi and a hat trick by his heir apparent, France forward Kylian Mbappé.  S reported by the Associated Press.

“It’s just crazy that it became a reality this way,” Messi said. “I craved for this so much. I knew God would bring this gift to me. I had the feeling that this (World Cup) was the one.”

Amid the chaos inside Lusail Stadium, Mbappé did all he could to emulate Brazil great Pelé as a champion at his first two World Cups. Even scoring the first hat trick in a final since Geoff Hurst for England in 1966.

It wasn’t enough.

Now there’s no debate. Messi joins Pelé — a record three-time World Cup champion — and Diego Maradona, the late Argentina great with whom Messi was so often compared, in an exclusive club of the best soccer players of all time.

Who is the greatest? It’s a discussion that will rage forever because there can never be a definitive answer. Messi has put up a good argument, though, and — with the World Cup title on his resume — he is surely above Cristiano Ronaldo as the best player of his generation.

Messi achieved what Maradona did in 1986 and dominated a World Cup for Argentina. He scored seven goals and embraced the responsibility of leading his team out of those dark moments after a shocking 2-1 loss to Saudi Arabia in the group stage.

Playing in the spirit of Maradona, Messi coupled his dazzling skills with rarely seen aggression and led Argentina to the title by becoming the first man in a single edition of the World Cup to score in the group stage and then in every round of the knockout stage.

The torch will one day pass to Mbappé, but not just yet.

“Let’s go, Argentina!” Messi roared into a microphone on the field in the post-match celebrations after playing in a record 26th World Cup match.

Later, he said: “I can’t wait to be in Argentina to witness the insanity of this.”

Hundreds of thousands if not millions of fans celebrated the World Cup victory in Argentina last night

Messi had a tantalizing glimpse of the 18-carat gold World Cup trophy when walking on the stage to collect the Golden Ball, awarded to the player of the tournament. He even kissed the World Cup and rubbed it repeatedly.

He got his hands on it for good about 10 minutes later, after a ceremonial robe — a bisht — was draped over his shoulders by Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. And, oh, did he enjoy the moment, celebrating with his family and the teammates who put Argentina atop the soccer world for the first time since the 1986 World Cup in Mexico. The country’s other title came in 1978 on home soil.

Messi was in scintillating form from the start of the final, putting Argentina ahead from the penalty spot after Angel Di Maria was tripped and later playing a part in a flowing team move that resulted in Di Maria making it 2-0 after 36 minutes.

Mbappé, on the other hand, was anonymous until bursting into life by scoring two goals in a 97-second span — one an 80th-minute penalty, the other a volley from just inside the area after a quick exchange of passes — to take the game to extra time at 2-2.

Messi still had plenty of energy and he was on hand to tap in his second goal in the 108th minute, with a France defender clearing the ball just after it had crossed the line. Argentina was on the brink of the title once again, but there was still time for another penalty from Mbappé, after a handball, to take the thrilling game to a shootout.

“We managed to come back from the dead,” said France coach Didier Deschamps, whose team was looking to become the first back-to-back champions since Brazil in 1962.

Mbappé and Messi took their teams’ first penalties and scored. Kingsley Coman had an attempt saved by Argentina goalkeeper Emi Martinez and Aurelien Tchouameni then missed for France, giving Gonzalo Montiel the opportunity to end it. He converted the penalty to the left and sparked wild celebrations.

“The match was completely insane,” said Argentina coach Lionel Scaloni, who was asked if he had a message for Maradona, who died two years ago.

“If he had been here, he would have enjoyed it so much,” Scaloni said. “He would have been the first person on the field (to celebrate). I wish he’d have been here to enjoy the moment.”

Europe’s run of four straight World Cup winners, dating to 2006, came to an end. The last South American champion was Brazil, and that was also in Asia — when Japan and South Korea hosted the tournament in 2002.

In Qatar, Argentina backed up its victory from last year’s Copa America, its first major trophy since 1993. It’s quite the climax to Messi’s international career, which is not over just yet. He said after the match that he would continue to play with the national team.

It was quite a final for a unique World Cup — the first to be played in the Arab world.

For FIFA and the Qatari organizers, a final between two major soccer nations and the world’s two best players represented a perfect way to cap a tournament laced in controversy ever since the scandal-shrouded vote in 2010 to give the event to a tiny Arab emirate.

The years-long scrutiny since has focused on the switch of dates from the traditional June-July period to November-December, strong criticism of how migrant workers have been treated, and then unease about taking soccer’s biggest event to a nation where homosexual acts are illegal.

On Sunday, there was one narrative at play for most people: Could Messi do it?

He could, despite the 23-year-old Mbappé doing all he could to deny his Paris Saint-Germain teammate. Finishing the tournament as the top scorer with eight goals is likely only a crumb of comfort.

Messi has been a man on a mission in the Middle East, determined to erase memories of his only other World Cup final — in 2014 when Argentina lost to Germany 1-0 and Messi squandered a great chance in the second half.

On that night at the Maracana Stadium, Messi stared down at that golden World Cup trophy that escaped him.

Eight years later, he raised it aloft in the biggest moment of a career like no other.

This World Cup final will go down in soccer history as one of the best games of all time!

Tony

Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party. Credit…Axel Dupeux/Redux

Dear Commons Community,

Michelle Goldberg has a  column this morning alerting us that many left-wing activist groups are becoming dysfunctional.  She specifically references Maurice Mitchell, the director of the Working Families Party, who laid out assertions and assumptions that have paralyzed progressive organizations.  Among them are maximalism, or “considering anything less than the most idealistic position” a betrayal; a refusal to distinguish between discomfort and oppression; and reflexive hostility to hierarchy. He criticizes the insistence “that change on an interpersonal or organizational level must occur before it is sought or practiced on a larger scale,” an approach that keeps activists turned inward, along with the idea that progressive organizations should be places of therapeutic healing.?

Goldberg concludes:

“After all, the ultimate aim of social justice work should not be the refinement of one’s own environment. “Building resilient and strong organizations is not the end goal,” said Mitchell. “It’s a means to building power so we can defeat an authoritarian movement that wants to take away democracy.” Here’s to remembering that in 2023.”

Amen!

Goldberg’s entire column is below!

Tony

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The New York Times

The Left’s Fever Is Breaking

Dec. 16, 2022

By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

It’s no secret that many left-wing activist groups and nonprofits, roiled by the reckonings over sexual harassment and racial justice of the past few years, have become internally dysfunctional.

In June the Intercept’s Ryan Grim wrote about the toll that staff revolts and ideologically inflected psychodramas were taking on the work: “It’s hard to find a Washington-based progressive organization that hasn’t been in tumult, or isn’t currently in tumult.” Privately, I’ve heard countless people on the professional left — especially those over, say, 35 — bemoan the irrational demands and manipulative dogmatism of some younger colleagues. But with a few exceptions, like the brave reproductive justice leader Loretta Ross, most don’t want to go on the record. Not surprisingly, many of Grim’s sources in the nonprofit world were anonymous.

That’s why the decision by Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the progressive Working Families Party, to speak out about the left’s self-sabotaging impulse is so significant. Mitchell, who has roots in the Black Lives Matter movement, has a great deal of credibility; he can’t be dismissed as a dinosaur threatened by identity politics. But as the head of an organization with a very practical devotion to building electoral power, he has a sharp critique of the way some on the left deploy identity as a trump card. “Identity and position are misused to create a doom loop that can lead to unnecessary ruptures of our political vehicles and the shuttering of vital movement spaces,” he wrote last month in a 6,000-word examination of the fallacies and rhetorical traps plaguing activist culture.

Addressed to the left, Mitchell’s keen, insightful essay seemed designed to be ignored by the broader public. It had a deeply unsexy headline, “Building Resilient Organizations,” and was published on platforms geared toward professional organizers, including The Forge and Nonprofit Quarterly. Among many progressive leaders, though, it’s been received eagerly and gratefully. It “helped to put language to tensions and trends facing our movement organizations,” Christopher Torres, an executive director of the Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice institute, said at a Tuesday webinar devoted to the article.

Mitchell’s piece systematically lays out some of the assertions and assumptions that have paralyzed progressive outfits. Among them are maximalism, or “considering anything less than the most idealistic position” a betrayal; a refusal to distinguish between discomfort and oppression; and reflexive hostility to hierarchy. He criticizes the insistence “that change on an interpersonal or organizational level must occur before it is sought or practiced on a larger scale,” an approach that keeps activists turned inward, along with the idea that progressive organizations should be places of therapeutic healing.

All the problems Mitchell elucidates have been endemic to the left for a long time. Destructive left-wing purity spirals are at least as old as the French Revolution. Jo Freeman’s classic essay “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” about how resistance to formal leadership in second-wave feminism led to passive-aggressive power struggles, has remained relevant since it was published in the early 1970s. It’s not surprising that such counterproductive tendencies became particularly acute during the pandemic, when people were terrified, isolated and, crucially, very online. There’s a reason Grim’s article was titled “Elephant in the Zoom.”

“On balance, I think social media has been bad for democracy,” Mitchell told me. It’s a striking statement, given the organizing work he did in the wake of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Mo., where social media played a major role in galvanizing protest. But as Mitchell wrote in his essay, social media platforms reward shallow polemics, “self-aggrandizement, competition and conflict.” These platforms can give power to the powerless, but they also bestow it on the most disruptive and self-interested people in any group, those likely to take their complaints to Twitter rather than to their supervisors or colleagues. The gamification of discourse through likes and retweets, he said, “flies in the face of building solidarity, of being serious about difference, of engaging in meaningful debate and struggle around complex ideas.”

The publication of “Building Resilient Organizations” and the conversation around it are signs that the fever Mitchell describes is beginning to break. It’s probably not coincidental that that’s happened in tandem with the end of pandemic restrictions and the return of more in-person gatherings.

But that doesn’t mean the dysfunctions Mitchell identified will go away on their own once people start spending more time together. He puts much of the onus on leaders to be clear with employees about the missions of their organizations and their decision-making processes and to take emotional maturity into account in hiring decisions. He urges leaders to support unionization efforts, seeing unions as the best way to mediate employee grievances. Rather than simply chiding young people for their unreasonableness, he’s trying to think through more productive ways to manage inevitable conflicts.

After all, the ultimate aim of social justice work should not be the refinement of one’s own environment. “Building resilient and strong organizations is not the end goal,” said Mitchell. “It’s a means to building power so we can defeat an authoritarian movement that wants to take away democracy.” Here’s to remembering that in 2023.

Dear Commons Community,

Many people in China have bristled under the weight of “zero Covid” restrictions, strict measures to keep a tight grip on infections while much of the world opened back up.

Now those curbs are suddenly being swept aside in the wake of rare nationwide protests, and the capital of the world’s most populous country appears to be facing a wave of infections as the rapid policy shift presents new challenges ahead of the busy winter travel season.

Downtown Beijing was largely deserted this week as people seemingly stayed home to avoid infections.  As reported by NBC News.

There are shortages of some medicines as residents stockpile them along with other supplies. Hospitals face a rise in patients and staff catching the virus. And there were social media reports of people panic-buying lemons and peaches after spurious social media trends suggested falsely that they were effective treatments.

It’s difficult to know exactly how bad things are.

China reported 2,157 new symptomatic infections Thursday, but officials have stopped counting asymptomatic cases and halted mandatory testing. Many people now use rapid test kits at home whose results aren’t often registered, and officials have switched from “prevention” to focusing on “treatment.”

Anecdotally, many people in Beijing describe a widespread outbreak.

“My family is OK, but more than half of my colleagues have Covid right now,” Yueying Wang, 22, a university student who interns at a tech company, told NBC News. 

James Zimmermann, a lawyer, posted on Twitter earlier this week that 90% of his office was sickened.

“This is not a spike, this is a tsunami,” said Jin Dong-Yan, a professor at the University of Hong Kong who studies viral diseases.Until now, China’s policy has stood in stark contrast to the West, which spent much of the last three years yo-yoing in and out of lockdowns while suffering millions of deaths. Meanwhile, Beijing has tried to maintain its policy of imposing harsh limits on people’s daily lives whenever an outbreak flared.

Although direct comparisons are difficult, officially China has suffered just more than 5,200 deaths — compared with nearly 1.1 million in the United States. But repeatedly locking down parts of the nation of 1.4 billion has also wrought huge internal economic damage, while worsening supply chain problems for the rest of the globe.

It also recently caused social unrest in the form of widespread demonstrations, which appeared to be the catalyst for the abrupt policy change. Some even called for Chinese President Xi Jinping to step down — a level of dissent not seen in decades in a country in which freedom of speech is tightly controlled.

However, the dizzying policy shift has not been met by scenes of liberation, with many residents seemingly deciding to lock themselves down in an apparent bid to shelter from the waves of uncertainty and infections that have coincided with the reopening.

On Wangfujing, a popular pedestrian shopping street in the capital, NBC News witnessed more security guards and police  than pedestrians wandering around earlier this week. Tai Taikoo Li, another upscale area, has been virtually empty all week even though restrictions were lifted. And the large, usually thronging Shunyi New World Shopping Mall was nearly empty of customers.

“It used to take me more than two hours to drive to our company’s project location, but now it only takes me about an hour for the 50 kilometer (30 mile) journey,” said Song, a 44-year-old commuter who asked to be only identified by his surname because he worried his state-owned employer would not allow him to speak with the news media. “There are very few people on the roads in Beijing now.”

Whether the lifting of the restrictions was the initial cause of the wave of infections is up for debate.

Dr. Mike Ryan, the emergencies director at the World Health Organization, told a news briefing Wednesday that he believes Chinese officials saw that lockdowns “were not stopping the disease” and “decided strategically that was not the best option anymore.” 

But now that wave is underway, many experts are worried that the reopening — and the risk of lots of people becoming infected all at once — has the potential to overwhelm China’s health care system.

The main worry is that millions of Chinese people — almost 1 in 3 over the age of 60, according to official figures — haven’t had a third booster shot, leaving them more exposed to serious illness.

The government has recently ramped up its bid to vaccinate reluctant older people.

And because China has avoided large waves so far, it lacks the immunity through infection that many other countries have obtained as a side product of their massive and deadly waves.

“I’m really worried about how the hospitals and intensive care units are going to hold up with such a large number of infections in a short space of time,” said Ben Cowling, the chair of epidemiology at Hong Kong University. “Most likely the majority of the population will be infected within a fairly short space of time because the only thing that’s going to stop this virus is when everybody’s had it.”

Anticipating a potential shortage of available staff in hospitals as the virus spreads, the Global Times newspaper, the Chinese Communist Party’s bullish mouthpiece, openly suggested that some may be asked to continue working despite being sick to avoid the risk of patients going untreated.

The abrupt lifting of restrictions could result in over a million deaths through 2023, according to new projections from the U.S.-based Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation, which has been relied on by governments and companies throughout the pandemic.

With the easing of the COVID restrictions, the situation in a densely populated Chinese center like Beijing was inevitable.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The University of California and academic workers announced a tentative labor agreement yesterday, signaling a potential end to a high-profile strike that has disrupted the prestigious, 10-campus public university system for more than a month. As reported by The New York Times.

The deal promises to substantially increase pay for some 36,000 unionized workers, including teaching assistants, researchers and tutors, many of whom are graduate students. The lowest paid academic student employees, who currently start at about $23,000 in an academic year, would see salary boosts of more than 55 percent over the next two and a half years, with additional increases at campuses in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, where housing is particularly expensive. They would also receive significant increases in health and child care benefits.

Union and university officials expressed optimism about the deal, although it still must be ratified by the rank-and-file of two fractious bargaining units of the United Auto Workers, the union that represents the academic employees.

The agreement is “a huge deal, and it will go a long way toward addressing the high cost of living near U.C. campuses,” said Rafael Jaime, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the president of a bargaining unit that represents roughly 19,000 teaching assistants, tutors and other classroom workers.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, in an interview, said he was “relieved” by the deal, but called the labor friction “a preview of things to come” as the economy softens. A state budget agreement this year that guaranteed at least five years of annual increases to U.C. funding will most likely pay for the added costs of the new contracts, he said.

“I’m pleased,” Mr. Newsom said. “I don’t expect, and hope not to see, a tuition increase.”

The announcement came as concerns had begun to mount that fall grades might be delayed by the university’s dispute with the employees who, in many ways, serve as the backbone of day-to-day undergraduate instruction. Many programs had already made adjustments to their grading schedules as the finals period and winter recess approached, but officials noted that for some students, a long postponement could jeopardize federal financial aid.

The University of California system has nearly 300,000 students and serves as the major research engine for a state that is crucial to the nation’s most innovative sectors. The labor action highlighted the schools’ reliance on the graduate students, researchers and postdoctoral fellows who lead discussion units, provide office hours, grade tests and staff research labs. The work stoppage was among the largest in the nation in an era of American workplace upheaval, and, according to the U.A.W., the largest at a university in U.S. history.

In a statement, Michael V. Drake, president of the University of California, called the tentative deal “a positive step forward” that would restore a work force that is integral to the university and its students. “These agreements will place our graduate student employees among the best supported in public higher education,” he said.

Late last month, the university reached separate five-year agreements with two other bargaining units representing about 12,000 academic researchers and postdoctoral employees, generally more senior workers whose pay was underwritten by research grants and federal funding. But that deal still left three-quarters of the striking employees without an agreement.

Darrell Steinberg, the mayor of Sacramento and a lawyer with degrees from two U.C. campuses, negotiated the deal this week at Sacramento City Hall, shuttling between rooms of union and university officials. He said that the union “fought hard to ensure that the university’s graduate students make a living wage at every campus community,” and that President Drake had created “a model for other universities throughout the country.”

Union activity has surged nationally this year as workers have leveraged bargaining power in a tight labor market, involving large retail companies such as Starbucks and Amazon, as well as private college campuses. This month, a stalemate between rail companies and unionized workers threatened freight deliveries during the holiday season until Congress and President Biden imposed a labor agreement by invoking constitutional powers that had not been used in decades.

Organized labor membership has been declining for generations, and only about 10 percent of American workers are represented by a union, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But polls this year have shown popular support for organized labor at its highest point since the mid-1960s, with approval from roughly 70 percent of Americans.

Labor leaders said the University of California strike reflected both a generational milestone and increased resistance in an economy that has become ever-reliant on intellectual labor.

“This is indicative of a kind of new excitement and empowerment, especially among younger workers who haven’t traditionally been thought of as union members,” said Lorena Gonzalez, the chief officer of the California Labor Federation, in an interview this month. She noted the involvement of “people who are going into professional fields, and who are taking this experience with them into science or technology or academia.”

“We saw a little of it around internships a few years ago,” added Ms. Gonzalez, a former Democratic state lawmaker who wrote bills that would have allowed state legislative staff to unionize. “That idea of, ‘You’re just lucky to be here’ is going by the wayside. Work is work. You can’t glorify unfair compensation just by suggesting that this is the way it has always been.”

The U.C. workers had said that their compensation fell far short of what they needed to make ends meet in California, especially given the pressures of inflation and a persistent housing shortage. Largely graduate students, they charged that the university’s business model had gone from being exploitative to untenable.

Good settlement!

Tony

Claudine Gay

Dear Commons Communit,

In a historic move, Claudine Gay has been selected as Harvard University’s 30th president, the Ivy League school announced on Thursday. Gay, the founding chair of Harvard’s Inequality in America Initiative and the dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences since 2018, is the school’s first Black leader and only the second woman to be appointed its president.

The daughter of Haitian immigrants, Gay graduated from Stanford and then earned her Ph.D. in government at Harvard in 1998, winning the Toppan Prize for best dissertation in political science, according to the university’s Harvard Gazette.

Gay was elected to the presidency by the Harvard Corporation, the university’s principal governing board.

She will be succeeding current Harvard President Lawrence S. Bacow, who announced he was retiring in June after five years at the helm. His predecessor, historian Drew Gilpin Faust, was the first woman to serve as Harvard president since its founding in 1636.

Gay’s tenure is set to begin on July 1, 2023.

In a video posted by the university, Gay said she was “humbled” to be elected, and thanked Bacow for his guidance.

As I start my tenure, there’s so much more for me to discover about this institution that I love. And I’m looking forward to doing just that, with our whole community.Claudine Gay

“It has been a privilege to work with Larry over the last five years,” Gay said. “He has shown me that leadership isn’t about one person. It’s about all of us, moving forward together. And that’s a lesson I take with me into this next journey.”

“As I start my tenure, there’s so much more for me to discover about this institution that I love. And I’m looking forward to doing just that, with our whole community,” Gay added.

Bascow said the university’s future is “very bright” with Gay at the helm.

“Claudine is a person of bedrock integrity,” Bacow said in a statement. “She will provide Harvard with the strong moral compass necessary to lead this great university. The search committee has made an inspired choice for our 30th president. Under Claudine Gay’s leadership, Harvard’s future is very bright.”

We wish her great success!

Tony