Josh Shapiro

Dear Commons Community,

Democrat Josh Shapiro took the oath of office yesterday to become the 48th governor of Pennsylvania, placing his hand on a stack of three Jewish Bibles at the inaugural ceremony outside the state Capitol to cap his blowout win in November’s election.

Shapiro, 49, takes over in the nation’s fifth-most populous state with extensive experience in state government, including six years as Pennsylvania’s elected attorney general. 

He took the oath from Chief Justice Debra Todd on a stage erected behind the state’s Capitol in Harrisburg, with lawmakers, ex-governors, members of Congress and several thousand others looking on.  As reported by the Associated Press.

“I am humbled to stand before you today as Pennsylvania’s 48th governor,” Shapiro said at the start of his remarks from the podium. “Along the winding road that has led to this moment, I have been grounded in my faith and family.”

Shapiro succeeds term-limited Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf, and is the first governor of Pennsylvania since 1966 to be elected to succeed a member of his own party.

On stage with Shapiro were just over a dozen people he invited — including survivors of child sexual abuse, parents of children killed by gun violence and the widows of two state troopers killed in the line of duty — who aides say symbolize his accomplishments as attorney general and his bipartisan policy aims as governor.

In his speech, Shapiro did not spell out specific policy aims, but he emphasized themes that he has developed before and after the election: that voters are embracing democracy, rejecting extremism and asking their leaders to protect their rights and make progress on important quality-of-life issues.

“Now is the time to join together behind the unifying strength of three simple truths that have sustained our nation over the past two-and-a-half centuries: that above all else, beyond any momentary political differences, we value our freedom, we cherish our democracy, and we love this country,” Shapiro wrote in prepared remarks.

The Capitol filled up in the hours before the inaugural ceremony, with Shapiro’s friends and supporters, political elite and many who will work in the new administration there to mingle, get credentials and pack into the Senate chamber to witness the swearing-in of Democrat Austin Davis to become Pennsylvania’s first Black lieutenant governor.

He’ll take the reins of a sprawling state government — it employs roughly 80,000 employees and handles more than $100 billion a year in state and federal money — that has billions in reserve and a stronger-than-usual economy for the slow-growing state.

But he also is moving across the street from the attorney general’s office to the executive suite in the Capitol at a time when the House of Representatives is paralyzed by a partisan fight for control and Republican lawmakers are aiming to take away some executive branch leeway to enact regulations.

Shapiro himself has preached bipartisanship, emphasizing his support from independents and Republicans in the election when he rolled up a powerhouse 15 percentage-point victory over the far-right Republican nominee, state Sen. Doug Mastriano.

Shapiro benefited from a Democratic electorate inflamed by the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and the Supreme Court’s overturning of the landmark abortion rights case Roe v. Wade.

In Shapiro, they saw someone who would protect abortion rights with his veto pen and ensure the 2024 presidential election — when Pennsylvania again is expected to be a premier battleground — will be free and fair, and not overturned if the Republican loses.

Still, every new law under Shapiro must have a GOP stamp of approval, considering the six-seat Republican majority in the state Senate.

To that end, Shapiro has tried to avoid radioactive political issues, staked out the middle on various issues and hired several Republicans for his Cabinet.

Shapiro will sign ethics orders for his administration later this week, aides say, and will deliver his first speech to a joint session of the Legislature when he presents his first budget plan March 7.

Shapiro also resigned Tuesday as attorney general, leaving in control his top deputy of six years, Michelle Henry, a career prosecutor who Shapiro plans to nominate to fill the last two years of his term.

Shapiro, a devout Jew, chose a stack of three copies of the Hebrew Bible on which to take his oath.

One is a family Bible; the second is from the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh where a gunman in 2018 killed 11 worshippers in the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history; and the third was an Army-issued tome carried by Herman Hershman of Philadelphia on D-Day in 1944.

Members of several faiths delivered an invocation at the event, where the capacity was about 4,400.

Good luck to Governor Shapiro!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

China announced yesterday that its population declined last year for the first time in six decades, a historic shift with profound implications for the world’s second-largest economy.

Officials from the National Bureau of Statistics said mainland China had 1.41175 billion people at the end of 2022, compared with 1.41260 billion a year earlier, a decrease of 850,000. There were 9.56 million births — a record low birth rate of 6.77 per thousand — and 10.41 million deaths.

The announcement was part of a larger release of economic data for 2022, a year when President Xi Jinping’s strict “zero-Covid” policies weighed heavily on growth. Officials reported a 3% increase in gross domestic product, beating expectations but still one of the weakest figures in decades.  As reported by NBC News,

“The economy is expected to improve in 2023 as China emerges from pandemic isolation, Kang Yi, director of the National Bureau of Statistics, said at a news briefing in Beijing. He also said that China’s population decline was not cause for worry and that the overall labor supply still exceeded demand.

The number of births in China has been declining for about a decade, undermining the ruling Communist Party’s consumption-driven growth model and raising questions about whether China can overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest economy. The United Nations has said India will surpass China as the world’s most populous nation later this year.

China’s 9.56 million births are a decrease of almost 10% from 2021, when about 10.6 million babies were born. The death rate of 7.37 per 1,000 people was up from 7.18 in 2021, when China recorded 10.14 million deaths.

As in other countries, a decline in births means an aging work force for China, which built its economic might largely on a manufacturing sector dependent on cheap labor. Officials said Tuesday that working-age people ages 16 to 59 made up 62% of the national population — down from about 70% a decade ago — while people 60 and older accounted for almost 20%.

A major reason for China’s declining population is the rise of the middle class, said Kent Deng, a professor of economic history at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

“Once you have well-qualified, well-educated urban people, they will decide not to produce a lot of kids,” he said, especially given China’s rising cost of living.

Covid is also believed to have played a role, although China appears to have experienced the vast majority of its cases and deaths in the last few months. After international criticism that it has not been transparent about the severity of its current outbreak, China said over the weekend it had recorded almost 60,000 Covid-related deaths since early December, when it abruptly ended three years of anti-Covid measures after rare mass protests. Experts say the true death toll could reach 1 million or more in the coming months.

China’s total number of deaths from all causes in December is not yet known, Kang said, and is not reflected in the 2022 population statistics.

The figures announced Tuesday are the start of what is expected to be a long decline in China’s population, which the U.N. says could reach 800 million by the end of the century. The U.S. population, by contrast, is predicted to grow from its current 337 million, mostly through immigration.

The world’s overall population reached 8 billion in November, according to the U.N.

Although populations are declining in many countries, this is the first time China’s population has contracted since 1961, after a three-year famine spurred by then-leader Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” industrialization drive, which is estimated to have killed tens of millions of people.

The country then experienced explosive growth through the second half of the 20th century, its population more than doubling. Concerned that overpopulation could hurt development, Chinese officials introduced a number of reproductive restrictions centered on the “one-child policy,” which was in force from 1980 to 2015.

While the one-child policy was effective in curbing population growth, critics say it resulted in rights abuses and a disproportionate number of men compared with women, especially in the countryside. It also fundamentally changed Chinese ideas about family size, Deng said, as parents realized they could achieve upward social mobility by investing more in educating a single child.

“They can see the result, because they can send their kids to the best schools and then to the best universities,” he said.

Chinese officials have anticipated the demographic crisis, allowing couples to have two children since 2016 and up to three children since 2021. A national policy document issued last year encouraged employers to provide child care and flexible working arrangements and local governments to offer preferential housing and other incentives. Xi promised additional measures to increase the birth rate at a party congress in October.

But the public has largely responded with indifference. A study published last year by the YuWa Population Research Institute, a think tank based in Beijing, found that Chinese people’s desire to have children was among the lowest in the world.”

I visited China in 2001 and again in 2006 with colleagues from CUNY and SUNY.  I was there for three weeks each time and was invited to give talks about American higher education and technology. No matter where we went the issue of having children always came up with our Chinese counterparts.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times this morning has a featured article entitled, “Alarmed by A.I. Chatbots, Universities Start Revamping How They Teach.” It is a timely piece considering the way chatbots have burst onto the college scene in the past six months.  ChatGPT especially has forced many in education to examine its potential impact on instruction.  Here is an excerpt from the Times article.

“With the rise of the popular new chatbot ChatGPT, colleges are restructuring some courses and taking preventive measures.

While grading essays for his world religions course last month, Antony Aumann, a professor of philosophy at Northern Michigan University, read what he said was easily “the best paper in the class.” It explored the morality of burqa bans with clean paragraphs, fitting examples and rigorous arguments.

A red flag instantly went up.

Mr. Aumann confronted his student over whether he had written the essay himself. The student confessed to using ChatGPT, a chatbot that delivers information, explains concepts and generates ideas in simple sentences — and, in this case, had written the paper.

Alarmed by his discovery, Mr. Aumann decided to transform essay writing for his courses this semester. He plans to require students to write first drafts in the classroom, using browsers that monitor and restrict computer activity. In later drafts, students have to explain each revision. Mr. Aumann, who may forgo essays in subsequent semesters, also plans to weave ChatGPT into lessons by asking students to evaluate the chatbot’s responses.

“What’s happening in class is no longer going to be, ‘Here are some questions — let’s talk about it between us human beings,’” he said, but instead “it’s like, ‘What also does this alien robot think?’”

Across the country, university professors like Mr. Aumann, department chairs and administrators are starting to overhaul classrooms in response to ChatGPT, prompting a potentially huge shift in teaching and learning. Some professors are redesigning their courses entirely, making changes that include more oral exams, group work and handwritten assessments in lieu of typed ones.

The moves are part of a real-time grappling with a new technological wave known as generative artificial intelligence. ChatGPT, which was released in November by the artificial intelligence lab OpenAI, is at the forefront of the shift. The chatbot generates eerily articulate and nuanced text in response to short prompts, with people using it to write love letters, poetry, fan fiction — and their schoolwork.

That has upended some middle and high schools, with teachers and administrators trying to discern whether students are using the chatbot to do their schoolwork. Some public school systems, including in New York City and Seattle, have since banned the tool on school Wi-Fi networks and devices to prevent cheating, though students can easily find workarounds to access ChatGPT.

In higher education, colleges and universities have been reluctant to ban the A.I. tool because administrators doubt the move would be effective and they don’t want to infringe on academic

“We try to institute general policies that certainly back up the faculty member’s authority to run a class,” instead of targeting specific methods of cheating, said Joe Glover, provost of the University of Florida. “This isn’t going to be the last innovation we have to deal with.”

That’s especially true as generative A.I. is in its early days. OpenAI is expected to soon release another tool, GPT-4, which is better at generating text than previous versions. Google has built LaMDA, a rival chatbot, and Microsoft is discussing a $10 billion investment in OpenAI. Silicon Valley start-ups, including Stability AI and Character.AI, are also working on generative A.I. tools.

An OpenAI spokeswoman said the lab recognized its programs could be used to mislead people and was developing technology to help people identify text generated by ChatGPT.

At many universities, ChatGPT has now vaulted to the top of the agenda. Administrators are establishing task forces and hosting universitywide discussions to respond to the tool, with much of the guidance being to adapt to the technology.”

ChatGPT has surely created a buzz in education and will force administrators and faculty to take a close look on how it impacts teaching and learning. I was  invited yesterday by the Hunter College Faculty Delegate Assembly to be on a panel  in February to discuss ChatGPT and its implications for education.  As I have posted already on this blog, ChatGPT is only the forerunner of what is to come. 

Tony

“The Embrace”  is a bronze sculpture, by the artist Hank Willis Thomas, that symbolizes the hug Dr. King and Coretta Scott King shared after Dr. King won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize.  Credit…Skanska

Dear Commons Community,

In 1965, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led a rally from Roxbury, a predominantly Black neighborhood in Boston, to the Boston Common. With the crowd of 20,000 singing and chanting freedom songs, that rally marked one of the first civil rights marches in the Northeast. On Friday, more than 50 years later, a 20-foot-tall monument was unveiled at the country’s oldest public park honoring Dr. King and Coretta Scott King’s legacy. Titled “The Embrace,” the sculpture symbolizes the hug the couple shared after Dr. King won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.  As reported by The New York Times.

The artist Hank Willis Thomas, who was chosen in 2019 along with MASS Design Group out of 126 submissions, said that with so many monuments dedicated to war, he crafted a sculpture that spreads a message of love and reiterates the Kings’ message of nonviolence and solidarity.

“You never wake up and think you’d be able to contribute meaningfully to the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King,” Thomas said. “And that alone, the fact that I was able to be a part of that, is just humbling and dumbfounding.”

Although Thomas, 46, was not alive during Dr. King’s lifetime, he said he lived to see Mrs. King’s trailblazing efforts to establish Martin Luther King Day as a national holiday. With the release of Stevie Wonder’s “Happy Birthday,” celebrating Dr. King, and a petition with six million signees delivered by Mrs. King and Wonder to the U.S. Senate, the two were able to raise awareness in support of a national holiday. In the years to come, Mrs. King continued to push for national recognition.

Dr. King hugs his wife, Coretta, during a news conference following the announcement that he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.Credit…Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

“In that photograph of them in 1964, his arms are wrapped around her but also his weight is on her,” Thomas said. “To see her so gracefully and lovingly carrying that weight, it was a metaphor for what she was able to do throughout a huge portion of my life.”

The 19-ton bronze artwork was made up of about 609 pieces welded together in Washington by the Walla Walla Foundry and transported to Boston. “The Embrace,” now a permanent fixture in Boston Common, sits on the 1965 Freedom Plaza, which honors 69 local civil rights leaders from the 1950s to the 1970s.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading  Origin:  A Genetic History of the Americas by Jennifer Raff, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas.  The main focus of this book is the “origin” of the first people to arrive in the Americas.  While the most accepted story is that these people arrived via the Bering Sea (or possibly a land or ice bridge) about 18,000 or 20,000 years ago, there is not universal acceptance of this theory among anthropologists especially regarding the timeline.  Some have it later and others have it much earlier.  Raff does a good job of taking the reader through the possibilities focusing on the science and especially the genetics.  She sometimes gets into the weeds of the evidence but it is worth the effort of reading through her explanations.

I found Origin informative and came away with a much better understanding of the genetic science behind the  anthropological beginnings of the Americas. If you are at all interested in this subject, it is worth a read!

Below is a review that appeared in ScienceNews.

Tony

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ScienceNews

‘Origin’ explores the controversial science of the first Americans

A new book looks at competing theories of how the Western Hemisphere was settled

By Bruce Bower

February 4, 2022

Origin
Jennifer Raff

Scientific understanding of the peopling of the Americas is as unsettled as the Western Hemisphere once was. Skeletal remains, cultural artifacts such as stone tools and, increasingly, microscopic pieces of ancient DNA have sparked heated debates about which of several origin stories best explains available evidence. Additional conflict stems from a tragic scientific legacy of ignoring and exploiting Indigenous groups whose ancestries are on the line.

Anthropologist and geneticist Jennifer Raff offers her take on the state of this fascinating and turbulent research field in Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas.

Raff wants to tell the most accurate, if still incomplete, story of how humans settled the Americas by integrating research on ancient and modern DNA with archaeological finds. She refers to people who inhabited the Western Hemisphere before Europeans arrived as First Peoples, a term favored by some of her Indigenous colleagues.

Most researchers think that ancestors of the First Peoples lived in Siberia and East Asia 20,000 years ago or more during the Ice Age, Raff explains. A consensus view holds that those groups eventually crossed a now-submerged expanse of land — the Bering Land Bridge — that connected northeastern Asia and North America. Analyses of ancient human DNA indicate that these migrants gave rise to populations that lived south of an ice sheet that ran across northern North America from around 80,000 to 11,000 years ago. But much remains unexplained.

Raff delves into several competing models of how, when and where people first made inroads into the Americas. One approach holds that Ice Age Siberians, known from archaeological finds, reached North America between 16,000 and 14,000 years ago and, within a few millennia, journeyed south across the continent through a gap in the melting ice sheet. Those settlers probably founded the Clovis culture, known for its distinctive stone points (SN: 1/15/22, p. 22).

Another view contends that people came to the Americas much earlier, 30,000 years ago or more. A minority of researchers in this camp contends that settlers may have even reached what’s now southern California by 130,000 years ago (SN: 5/27/17, p. 7).

But archaeological and genetic evidence best fits a third model, Raff writes. In this scenario, First Peoples reached the Americas as early as 18,000 years ago and perhaps over 20,000 years ago. These folks — including groups that were not predecessors of Clovis people — probably traveled by boat or canoe along North America’s west coast, arriving in South America no later than about 14,000 years ago (SN: 12/26/15, p. 10).

Raff articulates scientific arguments for these settlement scenarios in clear, nontechnical language. But her narrative revs up when she describes how geneticists, with some admirable exceptions, have treated Indigenous groups as afterthoughts or as passive DNA donors.

One example concerns a roughly 9,000-year-old skeleton found in Washington state in 1996, dubbed Kennewick Man or the Ancient One. That find sparked a legal battle between scientists who wanted to study the man’s remains and local tribes intent on reburying their ancestor. The scientists won. Years later, geneticists who consulted with one tribe in the dispute worked out an agreement to sample the tribe’s DNA for comparison with the Ancient One — and demonstrated an ancestral connection — before his bones were interred by the tribe (SN: 7/25/15, p. 6).

Many Native American groups, especially in North America, nurse bad memories of genetic researchers who misled them about study goals or never met with them to discuss DNA results at odds with tribal oral histories, Raff writes. As a result, Indigenous communities today often refuse to participate in genetic studies. Only a commitment by researchers to collaborate with those groups will resolve this standoff, she argues, as belatedly happened with the Ancient One.

Raff also provides a glimpse of how she came to study ancient DNA. A lifelong love of exploring caves, starting as a child in a caving club, imbued Raff with a respect for extensive preparation and intense focus in the moment. Those traits proved essential for conducting the many exacting lab procedures she outlines for coaxing DNA out of bone samples.

After mentioning that a few large, well-funded labs dominate ancient DNA research, Raff leaves unexplored the implications of that concentration of resources for studying ancient human migrations. But her book gives a balanced view of what’s known about the First Peoples and how scientists can cooperate with their modern-day descendants.

Dear Commons Community,

Maureen Dowd in her column this morning entitled, “Harry’s Fractured Fairy Tale,” comments on why Harry and Meghan have chosen a life away from the British royal family.  I am not a follower of upper-echelon Brits but I must say I have been amazed at all the attention that Harry’s book, Spare, has been getting in the media. For those of us who are uninformed of the Windsors, Dowd’s column provides some illumination. Read it below in its entirety.

Cheerio

Tony

——————————————————-

The New York Times

Harry’s Fractured Fairy Tale

Jan. 14, 2023

By Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist

WASHINGTON — I am, faith and begorrah, no monarchist.

Yet I found myself, over the last few years, exhausted by the exodus of Harry and Meghan, quitting palace life for the Netflix lobby, spilling secrets to accrue the gazillion that would be needed for a Vinyasa-and-Oprah lifestyle in Montecito.

If Meghan Markle wanted to change the world, couldn’t she do it more effectively from within the monarchy, blowing the dust off old rituals, as she did with her wedding? How could Meghan be “shocked to discover institutional racism in the very institution that created the most enduring business model for it?,” Alicia Montgomery wrote in Slate.

Couldn’t Harry and Meghan rise above Rupert Murdoch and salacious tabloid coverage, as the Obamas rose above the vile coverage on Murdoch’s Fox News? (And shouldn’t the royals stop having the tabloids laid out with their breakfast?)

Harry thought he’d find closure in disclosure. He will never feel the crown’s heaviness, but was his burden so unbearable that it needed multimedia unburdening? The family spats seemed sitcom-worthy, the drama as puffed up as a flower girl’s dress. As someone who has maneuvered sibling friction over politics, I learned to bite my tongue so I could remain close to my siblings.

Couldn’t the couple have played the inside game, as Diana did, more effectively torturing Harry’s “villain,” Camilla?

Now that I have read “Spare,” however, these questions seem pointless. It’s like asking Orestes, “Couldn’t you just have made nice with your mother?”

The unfathomable 1997 accident in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris, the crash that extinguished Diana’s radiance, a luminosity recalled so lovingly by her son in his memoir, turned the House of Windsor into the House of Atreus.

Much to the shock and discomfort of the royal family, Diana’s death opened a flood of emotion for the stiff-upper-lip Brits, and Harry is determined to keep that torrent flowing and make sure his mother is avenged.

The book is about hunting and being hunted. Harry hunted for the Taliban in Afghanistan and game in Africa and Balmoral — and love. When he killed a rabbit as a child, his nanny “blooded” him — smeared the animal’s blood on his forehead. When a teenage Harry killed a stag, his guide stuck his head in the carcass, giving him a “blood facial.”

Harry often identifies with the quarry. Once, when he was high on weed at Eton, he saw a fox and felt more connected to it than to his classmates or his family. He loathes being hunted by what he terms the “sadists” from the tabloids, just as his mother was, to the point where he thinks both sanity and life are endangered, for him and Meghan.

This is a prince who needs a hug. He couldn’t get one from his “Pa,” who couldn’t get one from his mother. (Maybe that’s why Charles kept his tattered teddy bear into adulthood.) Harry’s brother, preoccupied with primogeniture, often kept his affectionate younger brother at arm’s length, oddly calling him “Harold” and earning a place as Harry’s “arch nemesis.”

So Harry married Meghan, a hugger, like his mother, and moved to hug-at-hello Southern California where a stranger like Tyler Perry offered up his L.A. compound to the homeless couple and A-listers welcomed the former “Suits” actress to their ranks.

I have to admit, if it were me, I would have put up with a lot to live through history, to see the end of the Elizabethan era. I would have loved to be bouncing over the Scottish highlands with the queen in her Land Rover, nursing a thermos of Scotch and hearing anything she had to say about anyone.

Harry, winningly self-deprecating in the book, recalls his moniker of “Prince Thicko” and concedes he was not literary. He feels intimidated that Meghan has read “Eat, Pray, Love.” He is also so uninterested in history — even though it was his own family he was studying — that a teacher presented him with a wooden ruler engraved with the names of every British monarch since 1066. When he got a chance to chat with his great-grandmother, he did not quiz Gan-Gan about her illustrious and notorious relatives. He taught her how to say “Booyakasha,” Ali G-style.

He couldn’t get into Shakespeare, despite his father’s love of the Bard. “I opened Hamlet,” Harry wrote. “Hmmm: Lonely prince, obsessed with dead parent, watches remaining parent fall in love with dead parent’s usurper …? I slammed it shut. No, thank you.” Harry is not an intellectual, like Hamlet, although he is aggrieved and obsessed with his mother and following what he thinks are the desires of his parent’s ghost, even if it leads to a collapse of the court.

Harry’s internal struggle was not “To be or not to be” but “To split or not to split.” He split, he spilled and now, as at the end of all Shakespearean tragedies, the stage is covered in blood and littered with bodies.

Harry told a Telegraph writer that it could have been worse and that he left out a lot of damaging material about his father and brother. He is just, he said, “trying to save them from themselves.”

Soohee Cho

Dear Commons Community,

Daniel Bessner, an associate professor at the University of Washington, has a guest essay in today’s New York Times entitled, “The Dangerous Decline of the Historical Profession.” He reviews current controversies in the profession including those related to The 1619 Project and segues into the serious decline of faculty positions in history and the humanities in our colleges and universities.  Here is an excerpt.

“… as Americans fight over their history, the historical profession itself is in rapid — maybe even terminal — decline. [In 2022], the A.H.A. released a “Jobs Report” that makes for grim reading: The average number of available new “tenure track” university jobs, which are secure jobs that provide living wages, benefits and stability, between 2020 and 2022 was 16 percent lower than it was for the four years before the pandemic.

The report further notes that only 27 percent of those who received a Ph.D. in history in 2017 were employed as tenure track professors four years later. The work of historians has been “de-professionalized,” and people like myself, who have tenure track jobs, will be increasingly rare in coming years. This is true for all academic fields, not just history. As Adrianna Kezar, Tom DePaola and Daniel T. Scott note in their book “The Gig Academy,” about 70 percent of all college professors work off the tenure track. The majority of these professors make less than $3,500 per course, according to a 2020 report by the American Federation of Teachers. Jobs that used to allow professors to live middle-class lives now barely enable them to keep their heads above water.

What is to blame? In the past generation the American university has undergone a drastic transformation. To reduce costs, university administrators have dramatically reduced tenure. And as the protections of tenure have withered away, the size of nonteaching university staffs have exploded. Between 1976 and 2018, “full-time administrators and other professionals employed by those institutions increased by 164 percent and 452 percent, respectively,” according to a 2021 paper on the topic. Professors have been sacrificed on the altar of vice deans.

At the same time, in an effort to fund research that might redound to their financial benefit and to demonstrate their pragmatic value to politicians and to the public, universities have emphasized science, technology, engineering and math at the expense of the humanities. As the American Academy of Arts and Sciences reported, citing data from 2019, “spending for humanities research equaled 0.7 percent of the amount dedicated to STEM R.&D.”

The humanities, including history, are often considered more an object of ridicule than a legitimate lane of study. Look no further than statements from politicians: Rick Scott, the former governor of Florida, assembled a task force in 2012 that recommended that people who major in history and other humanities fields be charged higher tuition at state universities. In 2016, Gov. Matt Bevin of Kentucky said that “French literature majors” should not receive state funding for their degrees. Even more recently, in 2021, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida mocked people who go into debt to “end up with degrees in things like zombie studies.” And it’s not just Republicans: President Barack Obama remarked in 2014 that “folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree,” implying that if a degree didn’t make money it wasn’t worth it. (Mr. Obama later apologized to a University of Texas art historian for his remarks, clarifying that he did believe art history was a valuable subject.)

These material and ideological assaults have engendered a steep decline in undergraduate humanities majors. In the 2018-19 academic year, only 23,923 graduating undergraduates received degrees in history and related fields, which, the A.H.A. notes, is “down more than a third from 2012 and the smallest number awarded since the late 1980s.”

Private groups, which traditionally provided significant financial support to budding humanities scholars, have taken the hint and increasingly stopped supporting the humanities and soft social sciences. The Social Science Research Council recently ended its International Dissertation Research Fellowship program, which in the last 25 years funded over 1,600 scholars exploring “non-U.S. cultures” and “U.S. Indigenous communities,” declaring that the program “accomplished many of the goals it had set for itself.” The Ford Foundation has similarly decided to conclude its long-running National Academies fellowship program for historically marginalized scholars in order, the foundation’s president declared, “to invest more deeply in movement-building work.”

It’s the end of history. And the consequences will be significant.”

Dr. Bessner accurately reports on the sad state of the humanities in our colleges and universities.  The entire article is important reading.

Tony

Norm Fruchter “Every important, major education initiative in New York City, Norm was part of it.” Lester Young, Chancellor of the NYS Board of Regents

Dear Commons Community,

Norm Fruchter, a civil rights activist, documentarian and novelist who devoted his career to guaranteeing that all students receive a sound basic education regardless of their race, ethnicity, class or income, died on Jan. 4 in Brooklyn. He was 85.

His death, at a hospital, was caused by complications of injuries sustained when he was struck by a car on Dec. 22 while crossing the street near his home in the Bay Ridge section of the borough, said his wife, Heather Lewis. As reported by The New York Times.

“Mr. Fruchter, a lifelong educator, helped secure approval to start Independence High School in Newark in 1970. The school, intended for struggling students, became a prototype for alternative secondary schools across the country.

He was a driving force behind the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, a civic group that mounted a protracted legal challenge to the formula by which Albany funded the New York City school system.

In 2003, an appeals court agreed that the state’s method of disbursing education aid was unconstitutional and that New York City was receiving insufficient funds to meet the government’s legal requirements for providing a basic education. The decision led to millions more dollars for the city’s school system annually.

“Every important, major education initiative in New York City,” Lester Young, the chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, said in a statement, “Norm was part of it, and in very deliberate but very quiet ways.”

He had been a committed member of the activist group Students for a Democratic Society. In 1964, he was arrested at the New York World’s Fair for protesting against separate and unequal education in New York City schools. He was rejected for a job lecturing on film at Rutgers University in New Jersey because he refused to sign a loyalty oath.

But unlike many of his more radical contemporaries, Mr. Fruchter was no ideologue.

“He was a significant force in turning ’60s ‘movement’ ideas about educational change — student-centered, less authoritarian and bureaucratic — into practical policies that were often adopted by the political mainstream in New York and Newark,” Paul Lauter, a literature professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., and the author of “Our Sixties: An Activist’s History” (2020), said in an email.

“In particular,” Professor Lauter added, “he provided fresh ideas about what community-based schools could accomplish, and he offered supportive connections to people in the trenches struggling to provide marginalized students, generally poor kids of color, with the innovative education they needed.”

In a statement, N.Y.U.’s Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools characterized Mr. Fruchter as “a visionary, an intellectual, a radical organizer and mentor” who “was steadfast and unapologetic in his conviction that public school parents and youth, especially those from marginalized communities, should be in the lead of education policy.”

Norman David Fruchter was born on Aug. 11, 1937, in Camden, N.J. His father, Louis, worked in an electronics factory. His mother, Betty (Levin) Fruchter, was a bookkeeper.

After graduating from Newark High School, he earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Rutgers in 1959.

After college, Mr. Fruchter taught high school students in England on a Fulbright scholarship before returning to Newark to join Tom Hayden and other political organizers from Students for a Democratic Society to teach high school. He then established the Newark Community Union Project and, with Robert Machover, filmed “Troublemakers,” a documentary film about civic action in Newark that some critics described as revolutionist.

Mr. Fruchter published two novels, “Coat Upon a Stick” (1963) and “Single File” (1970), a New York tale in which “a young welfare worker, a chilly fugitive from graduate school, frets against his dead marriage” and investigates the murder of one of his cases, as Nora Sayre described it favorably in The New York Times Book Review.

In Brooklyn Mr. Fruchter was an elected member of the Community School Board in District 15, which includes Park Slope, from 1983 to 1994.

His first wife, Rachel Gillett Fruchter, a biochemist, was killed in an accident in 1997 when a van struck her bicycle.

In addition to his wife, Ms. Lewis, a professor of art and design education at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, he is survived by a son, Lev, and a daughter, Chenda Fruchter, both from his first marriage; his stepchildren, Jesse, Alina, Shayna and Joshua Lewis; four grandchildren; and four step-grandchildren.”

I had the pleasure of hearing him speak and meeting him in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He was totally dedicated to social and education justice.

May he rest in peace!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Administrators at the Virginia school where a first-grader shot his teacher last week learned the child may have had a weapon in his possession before the shooting but did not seize the 9mm handgun he brought to his classroom, the school system’s superintendent said.

School system Superintendent George Parker told parents Thursday night in an online meeting that a school official was notified about the weapon before the 6-year-old shot the teacher at Richneck Elementary in Newport News.  As reported by the 6-News Richmond and the Associated Press.

“At least one administrator was notified of a possible weapon in the timeline that we’re reviewing and was aware that that student had, there was a potential that there was a weapon on campus,” the superintendent told parents, according to a clip of the meeting broadcast by WAVY-TV.

The online meeting was for parents only but WAVY-TV reported the station gained access to the meeting from a parent.

The superintendent and a school spokeswoman did not respond to multiple messages from The Associated Press. Details about how they learned about the weapon and why it wasn’t found before the shooting weren’t immediately available.

The police chief has previously said the boy brought the gun to school in his backpack.

The teacher, Abigail Zwerner, 25, was shot in the chest with injuries initially considered to be life threatening. Her condition has improved, though, and she has been reported in stable condition at a hospital.

Earlier Thursday, Newport News School Board Chair Lisa Surles-Law said the district will install metal detectors at all schools, starting with Richneck.

The Jan. 6 shooting occurred as Zwerner was teaching her class. Authorities said there was no warning and no struggle before the 6-year-old boy pointed the gun at Zwerner.

Police Chief Steve Drew has described the shooting as intentional. A judge will determine what’s next for the child, who is being held at a medical facility following an emergency custody order.

Drew said the child used his mother’s gun, which had been purchased legally. It’s unclear how he gained access to the weapon. A Virginia law prohibits leaving a loaded gun where it is accessible to a child under 14 as a misdemeanor.

It sounds like dereliction of duty!

Tony

Paul Ryan dishes on Donald Trump

Dear Commons Community,

Former Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan says his party is done with Donald Trump.

“He’s fading fast,” he said yesterday on CNN. ”He’s a proven loser who cost us the House in ’18, he cost us the White House in ’20, he cost us the Senate again and again, and I think we all know that.”

Ryan said he believes Republicans are “moving past” the former president, who has already announced his 2024 candidacy to return to the White House.

“I can’t imagine him getting the nomination, frankly,” Ryan said:

Trump’s political demise has been predicted repeatedly since he first threw his hat into the presidential ring in 2015. However, he remains popular with his party’s base ― and though recent polls show that’s slipping, he’s still considered the favorite for the 2024 nomination.

A CBS News poll released earlier this week found that two-thirds of GOP voters believe loyalty to Trump is either “very” or “somewhat” important.

Ryan was House speaker for the first half of Trump’s term, and the two often clashed. Since leaving office in 2019, he has spoken out against Trump and last year said “anybody not named Trump” is more likely to win the White House for the GOP in 2024.

He currently sits on the board of directors of the Fox Corp., the parent company of Fox News.

Ryan has a good deal of insider information.

Tony