Ales Bialiatski

Dear Commons Community,

A court on Friday sentenced Belarus’ top human rights advocate and one of the winners of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, to 10 years in prison.

The harsh punishment of Ales Bialiatski and three of his colleagues came in response to massive protests over a 2020 election that gave authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko a new term in office.  As reported by the Associated Press and other media.

Lukashenko, a longtime ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin who backed Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, has ruled the ex-Soviet country with an iron fist since 1994. More than 35,000 people were arrested, and thousands were beaten by police, in a brutal crackdown he unleashed on the protesters, the largest in the country’s history.

Belarus stands as an outlier in its support of the year-old Russian invasion, with other countries in the region not backing Moscow publicly.

Bialiatski and his cohorts at the Viasna human rights center he founded were convicted of financing actions violating public order and smuggling, Viasna reported Friday.

Valiantsin Stefanovich was given a nine-year sentence; Uladzimir Labkovicz seven years; and Dzmitry Salauyou was sentenced to eight years in prison in absentia.

During the trial, which took place behind closed doors, the 60-year-old Bialiatski and his colleagues were held in a caged enclosure in the courtroom. They have spent 21 months behind bars since the arrest.

In the photos from the courtroom released yesterday by Belarus’ state news agency Belta, Bialiatksi, clad in black clothes, looked wan, but calm.

Viasna said after the verdict that all four activists have maintained their innocence.

In his final address to the court, he urged the authorities to “stop the civil war in Belarus.” Bialiatski said it became obvious to him from the case files that “the investigators were fulfilling the task they were given: to deprive Viasna human rights advocates of freedom at any cost, destroy Viasna and stop our work.”

Exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya denounced the court verdict on Friday as “appalling.” “We must do everything to fight against this shameful injustice (and) free them,” Tsikhaouskaya wrote in a tweet.

The sentence handed to Bialiatski and his colleagues elicited outrage in the West.

The Norwegian Helsinki Committee, a nongovernmental organization working to ensure that human rights are respected in practice, said that it was “shocked by the cynicism behind the sentences that were just issued to our Belarusian friends in Minsk.”

”The trial shows how Lukashenka’s regime punishes our colleagues, human rights defenders, for standing up against the oppression and injustice,” Secretary General Berit Lindeman said in a statement.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said in a tweet that the proceedings against the activists “were a farce.”

“The Minsk regime is fighting civil society with force and prison,” she added. “This is just as much a daily disgrace as Lukashenko’s support for Putin’s war. We call for the end of political persecution and freedom for the more than 1,400 political prisoners.”

Disgrace indeed!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Conservative columnist and  CNN commentator S.E. Cupp on Wednesday hit the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) with a mocking new nickname: the “Donald Trump Family Variety Hour.”

Cupp broke down how the “once obligatory event” for national Republicans has been “corrupted and corroding” since Trump’s takeover of the GOP.

It would go off in Maryland this week with “hardly a bang, more of a whimper,” she predicted, noting the absence of high-profile Republicans and the scheduled attendance of Trump and his family members.

CPAC faces further turmoil as Matt Schlapp, chair of the American Conservative Union, which organizes the conference, faces allegations he groped a Republican staffer, which he denies, noted Cupp.

But it’s the Trump element that has turned it into a “joke,” she said.

It’s now just “a vehicle for Trump and Trumpism and is no longer … a stop on way to becoming president,” she added.

“I don’t think people go there to meet the next generation of leaders. They go to celebrate the last one,” said Alex Conant, a longtime GOP strategist who remembers attending his first CPAC as a high school student in the 1990s and being star-struck meeting Newt Gingrich, the Georgia congressman who had just stepped down as House speaker.

CPAC has indeed become a “joke.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

With more lunar missions than ever on the horizon, the European Space Agency (ESA) wants to give the moon its own time zone. As reported by the Associated Press and Science.

This week, the agency said space organizations around the world are considering how best to keep time on the moon. The idea came up during a meeting in the Netherlands late last year, with participants agreeing on the urgent need to establish “a common lunar reference time,” said the ESA’s Pietro Giordano, a navigation system engineer.

“A joint international effort is now being launched towards achieving this,” Giordano said in a statement.

For now, a moon mission runs on the time of the country that is operating the spacecraft. European space officials said an internationally accepted lunar time zone would make it easier for everyone, especially as more countries and even private companies aim for the moon and NASA gets set to send astronauts there.

NASA had to grapple with the time question while designing and building the International Space Station, fast approaching the 25th anniversary of the launch of its first piece.

While the space station doesn’t have its own time zone, it runs on Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC, which is meticulously based on atomic clocks. That helps to split the time difference between NASA and the Canadian Space Agency, and the other partnering space programs in Russia, Japan and Europe.

The international team looking into lunar time is debating whether a single organization should set and maintain time on the moon, according to the European Space Agency.

There are also technical issues to consider. Clocks run faster on the moon than on Earth, gaining about 56 microseconds each day, the space agency said. Further complicating matters, ticking occurs differently on the lunar surface than in lunar orbit.

Perhaps most importantly, lunar time will have to be practical for astronauts there, noted the space agency’s Bernhard Hufenbach. NASA is shooting for its first flight to the moon with astronauts in more than a half-century in 2024, with a lunar landing as early as 2025.

“This will be quite a challenge” with each day lasting as long as 29.5 Earth days, Hufenbach said in a statement. “But having established a working time system for the moon, we can go on to do the same for other planetary destinations.”

Mars Standard Time, anyone?

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

My colleague, Bob Ubell, has a column this morning published in EdSurge, entitled,  “How Mega-Universities Manage to Teach Hundreds of Thousands of Students.”   He specifically examines Western Governors University and Southern New Hampshire University.  These two institutions provide important online models for American higher education as we progress through the 21^st century.

Bob’s assessment is important reading. 

Below is an excerpt.   

Tony

———————————————————————————————————————

EdSurge

How Mega-Universities Manage to Teach Hundreds of Thousands of Students!

Robert Ubell

March 2, 2023

In the early days of online education, I imagined that virtual classrooms would follow the same basic model as in-person ones, with an instructor leading the same number of students typical in a campus class.

One of my colleagues at New York University disagreed, cautioning even decades ago, that the belief was “pretty naive.” To make online financially viable, he predicted, “remote classes will need to enroll many more.”

It turns out he was right. Colleges found new ways of scaling, rethinking how teaching is done online.

It’s worth taking a step back to look at how the largest providers of online education in the U.S. teach remote students.

As a reminder of the scale we’re talking about, I asked industry-watcher Phil Hill to dig into federal enrollment data. He discovered that while enrollments from institutions that are almost exclusively online represent only a small percentage at nonprofit and state colleges, they make up about half of the student population at for-profits, a trend that started many years ago as investors poured money into digital education.

But when Hill honed in at the nation’s nonprofit online enrollments only, he found that about 35 percent of them are at these virtual mega institutions.

It turns out that colleges with giant online enrollments, some topping 100,000 students, run remote classrooms very differently from the way my virtual classes operated at Stevens Institute of Technology and NYU.

Example 1: Western Governors University

The biggest higher ed institution in the U.S. is Western Governors University, a private, competency-based institution, located in Utah, with 150,000 students — all online.

The institution was built with online in mind, and focuses on a so-called competency-based teaching method, where students work at their own pace and get credit when they show they know the material. Instruction at WGU discards key elements found in traditional colleges, with no physical classrooms and no fixed course schedule. Classes don’t start and end according to an academic calendar, but begin when a student clicks “start course” and gets assigned a faculty member. Class ends when the learner demonstrates competency in a given subject, a process that does not occupy a fixed number of weeks, but can conclude on the very first day if the student masters its content quickly, or it can take as long as competency is achieved — but no longer than the end of the term.

Students attend WGU entirely on screen, with instructors engaging with them virtually by email, phone, text and video. Classes aren’t led by a lone professor lecturing at the front of the classroom, but by teams of educators, with at least three virtual instructors and as many as ten to fifteen assigned to larger classes. On average, instructors are assigned 230 students at a time–a big change from the 20 or 30 I was used to at NYU and Stevens.

To stimulate peer-to-peer interaction, each course at Western Governors offers students a chat function where they post questions and where faculty and other students respond. Live streamed events are held once or twice a week, with break-out rooms open for students to interact virtually in small groups.

Performance assessment varies, with students submitting essays, videos or presentations to demonstrate they’ve learned the material. In a dramatic departure from convention, grading is not performed by instructors or TA’s, but by “evaluators,” experts who don’t interact with students directly. Course completion at WGU is 86 percent.

The university argues that its unusual teaching model makes its scale work for students, and that its focus on proving competency helps returning adult students who come to the virtual classroom with skills that should be recognized. Its leaders argue that it provides a faster and less-expensive way to earn a college degree, which remains key to marketable careers in today’s economy.

Some traditional professors have opposed the model as too great a departure from the classic liberal arts college.

“WGU offers us a vision of the university without intellectuals,” wrote Johann N. Neem, associate professor of history at Western Washington University, in a critique of the model. “If the academy produced commodities, perhaps WGU’s approach would make sense. But the academy does not, and it is not served when faculty are replaced by managers, curriculum specialists, vendors, assessment specialists, and ‘course mentors’.”

Example 2: Southern New Hampshire University

The next biggest online mega-university is Southern New Hampshire, a private college, with 145,000 online students. SNHU continues to run its traditional campus as well, with an on-campus population of about 6,000.

SNHU veers far from the pedagogical path taken by WGU, with undergrad classes as small as 24 to 35 and grad classes averaging 21. Courses are designed for busy working professionals who make up much of its online student body.

Sessions are divided into week-long modules, opening Monday mornings and ending Sunday evenings. Assignments, in largely project-based instruction, are due at the end of each week. Students gain access to their courses — syllabus, main project, required engagements, discussion forum and other materials — a week prior to the start of class. After students meet one-on-one with an advisor, they perform their studies in self-paced mode. Undergrad courses run for eight weeks; graduate courses are 10 weeks long. To determine whether students learned the material, faculty review student performance data — including participation, meeting deadlines and passing tests or other activities assigned by instructors. Southern New Hampshire’s course completion rate is 90 percent.

One key difference at SNHU is how it hires faculty, relying on an academic army of about 8,000 adjuncts who earn $2,000 per semester for teaching an undergrad course and $2,500 for a grad course. Reliance on adjuncts, especially in online instruction, is a national trend. Today, gig faculty occupy about three-quarters of all U.S. college instructors. But Southern New Hampshire and other online operations depend even more on contingent labor than most of their traditional peers.

For colleges to depend entirely on an Uber-style instructional workforce may be financially prudent, but I argue it’s academically risky, with little continuity and no permanent faculty. It’s also exploitative, with instructors ending up in precarious work arrangements without living wages and benefits.

These models are worth highlighting at a time when higher education is no longer just for the privileged, but is an essential part of the nation’s economic life. Over their working lives, on average, college graduates earn twice what high school grads make.

A century ago, just two percent of Americans were enrolled in college. While many colleges have long welcomed working-class kids like me — as Brooklyn College did when I enrolled there in the 1950’s — others still continue to exclude those who need degrees most. Abandoning convention, these new online large-scale universities swing open their virtual gates to students whose economic lives depend on a college degree to make it.

One of the greatest accomplishments of American higher education is its institutional diversity, with state and private colleges, small liberal arts schools, urban academic complexes and for-profit career academies, among others. To give students wide choice, U.S. higher ed has ample room to house both our old, conventional, slow-and-steady colleges, together with these new, fast-track, online academic gate-crashers.

Faculty and Students Protest Against New College Board of Trustees!

Dear Commons Community,

New College of Florida’s Board of Trustees abolished the office handling diversity, equity and inclusion programs during a contentious and emotional meeting Tuesday that included testimony from students worried that a board reshaped by Gov. Ron DeSantis is making the school unwelcoming to minorities.

DeSantis appointed six members to New College’s board on Jan. 6 in an effort to transform the school, putting the small Sarasota institution at the center of the GOP’s nationwide pushback on education policies aimed at supporting historically marginalized groups, including racial minorities and LGBTQ individuals.

DeSantis has emerged as a key national figure in this debate after he pushed through legislation governing how K-12 schools discuss race and gender identity and recently prohibited an Advanced Placement course in African American studies, which caused an uproar. The governor is now taking aim at university programs. 

Eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives − which have become a major flashpoint for conservatives and a target of DeSantis throughout Florida’s public university system − is among the first substantive actions by New College’s revamped board, which also fired the former president last month and hired DeSantis ally Richard Corcoran as interim president. Corcoran’s first board meeting was Tuesday.  As reported by USA Today.

Among DeSantis’ New College board appointees is prominent conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who pushed at his first meeting on Jan. 31 to abolish diversity programs.

The board opted to wait until more research could be done. College administrator Brad Thiessen presented the results of his DEI review Tuesday, delving into everything from faculty training to hiring practices and student admissions.

Thiessen said there was little mandatory diversity training and that only recently had prospective faculty been asked to submit a statement in their job application outlining how they would promote diversity.

Additionally, only one of the employees in the Office of Outreach and Inclusive Excellence was primarily focused on DEI programs. The others managed grants, worked on community outreach and performed other activities that aren’t controversial.

That led Trustees Grace Keenan and Matthew Lepinski to question whether the impacts of the DEI programs had been overstated.

“I’m concerned that we’re solving a problem that isn’t serious, or doesn’t really exist,” Lepinski said.

Keenan wondered if the board was spending a lot of time and energy on something that was relatively limited in scope. She suggested that the effort spent weeding out DEI programs was out of proportion to the amount of DEI that actually exists on campus.

“This is not a very impressive DEI bureaucracy,” Keenan said.

Keenan, Lipinski and Trustee Mary Ruiz voted against eliminating the diversity office.

Rufo conceded that DEI isn’t as deeply embedded in the college’s practices as he expected, but said it was still important to remove it on “principle.” Rufo and Trustee Matthew Spalding both suggested it is discriminatory to take race into account when setting the college’s priorities.

“It treats people differently on the basis of their skin color,” Rufo said.

“This is discrimination, it should be gone,” Spalding added.

The majority of trustees voted to have Corcoran move forward with eliminating the Office of Outreach and Inclusive Excellence, which handles DEI programs. The Office’s four employees will be offered other jobs.

Trustees also voted to eliminate the diversity statement when hiring faculty and to direct Corcoran to consider adopting a prohibition on diversity training for employees.

Additionally, the board voted to have Corcoran create a school policy that prohibits spending money on any DEI efforts.

Under the new regulation, DEI will be defined to include “any effort to manipulate or otherwise influence the composition of the faculty or student body with reference to race, sex, color, or ethnicity.”

The definition of DEI also would include: “Any effort to promote as the official position of the administration, the college, or any administrative unit thereof, a particular, widely contested opinion referencing unconscious or implicit bias, cultural appropriation, allyship, transgender ideology, microaggressions, group marginalization, anti-racism, systemic oppression, social justice, intersectionality, neo-pronouns, heteronormativity, disparate impact, gender theory, racial or sexual privilege, or any related formulation of these concepts.”

The rollback of New College’s diversity programs came at the end of a 3-1/2-hour meeting that featured emotional testimony for students, parents and others. About 200 people attended the meeting.

Disgraceful position on the part of the New College Board!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

If you’ve been thumbing through a gardening catalog or shopping at a nursery, you’ve likely noticed two names assigned to each plant, a common name and a botanical name, the latter of which might read like a sort of pretentious, unpronounceable gibberish.

That’s botanical Latin, and its purpose is to help you confirm that the plant you bring home is what you intend to buy.

The common name – often a simple marketing moniker – can get you into trouble. That’s because common names are just nicknames for plants. A single common name can be shared by many plants. And one plant can have many common names and confusion ensues. Here are some examples, courtesy of the Associated Press.

The perennial cranesbill, for instance, is the true Geranium, while the annual container plant that carries the common name geranium is actually a Pelargonium. And depending on where you live, you might know my favorite perennial as blazing star or gayfeather. But call it Liatris spicata, and everyone in every region and country will know which plant you’re talking about.

This name game was first addressed in the 1700s by Swedish botanist, zoologist and physician Carolus Linnaeus. His works “Systema Naturae” and “Fundamenta Botanica” created rules for classifying and naming plants in botanical Latin and with which all gardeners should have at least some familiarity.

Linnaeus devoted his life to assigning every plant and animal of his time a two-part, or binomial, name consisting of a genus and species, often based on the appearance of their reproductive parts. As you might imagine, some of those names raised 18th-century eyebrows.

Consider that avocado is the Aztec word for testicle. Vainilla, the orchid pod from which vanilla comes, is derived from the Latin word “vaina,” which means vagina (have you ever really looked at an orchid flower?).

Linnaeus’ International Code of Botanical Nomenclature dictates that a plant name start with a capitalized genus, followed by a lower-case species, then either a variety (if naturally occurring), cultivar (if created by a breeder) or hybrid name (if it’s a cross between two plants, indicted by an “x”).

The code is regulated by the International Botanical Congress, which has been convening every six years since 1900 to evaluate and decide on naming issues raised by new genetic research and scientific findings. After all, Linnaeus didn’t have a microscope or DNA testing lab, which would have helped definitively determine which plants were related.

The Congress, which meets next in Madrid in July 2024, uses these modern tools to decide which plants to reclassify or rename.

Bleeding hearts, once officially called Dicentra spectabilis, were moved into the newly created Lamprocapnos genus several years ago, and snapdragons, originally in the Antirrhinum genus, were transferred into the plantain family, Plantaginaceae, along with Digitalis, Hebe and Penstemon.

But nobody regulates common names, and that can turn plant identification into a Tower of Babel, where Rudbeckia hirta is known to some as black-eyed Susan, to others as yellow-oxeye daisy and to others still as gloriosa daisy.

And the potential for error doesn’t end there, as when the same common name is shared by several plants. Ask a garden center employee for a snowball bush, and you might walk out with Hydrangea arborescens or Viburnum plicatum. It’s a crapshoot.

So it pays to study up — or at least do a little research before buying plants or swapping seeds.

Plug a common name into the Royal Horticultural Society’s free online Garden Plant Finder  and get a listing of relevant botanical names -– or vice versa. The listed suppliers are British, but the proper terminology adheres to no borders.

And if you really want to nerd out, lose yourself in the International Plant Names Index (www.ipni.org), a collaboration between The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; The Harvard University Herbaria, and The Australian National Herbarium.

Go for it!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The US Supreme Court’s conservatives signaled  reservations yesterday about President Joe Biden’s plan to erase $400 billion in student loan debt, an outcome with sweeping implications for the White House and 40 million borrowers.

For more than three hours, the justices questioned the lawyer representing the Biden administration with concerns about how the administration crafted its plan, whether it was fair to Americans who repaid their loans and why Congress didn’t get a say.

Not only will the decision have enormous consequences for tens of millions of Americans who had sought to benefit from the program, it may reshuffle the balance of power among the president, Congress and the federal courts – hamstringing future administrations from embracing major national policies unilaterally. A decision is expected in June.

Here are four takeaways from the Supreme Court’s arguments over the plan courtesy of USA Today.

1. Biden appears likely to lose student loan forgiveness cases

Biden’s plan was expected to be on the ropes and there was little during the course of the arguments to give the White House hope those predictions were wrong. Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh, both of whom sit at the ideological center of the conservative court, underscored skepticism early and often.

Roberts called attention to the 2003 law the administration relied on to create the program, the HEROES Act. That law allows the Department of Education to “waive or modify” loan provisions. It doesn’t specifically say “cancel or forgive.”

“We’re talking about half a trillion dollars and 43 million Americans,” Roberts said during the first few minutes of the arguments. “How does that fit under the normal understanding of ‘modifying’?”

Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, representing the administration, focused on the part of the law that authorizes “waiving” loans.

Kavanaugh asked difficult questions of both sides but asserted that “some of the finest moments in the court’s history were pushing back against presidential assertions of emergency power.” Some of its “biggest mistakes,” he said, were when it didn’t.

On the other hand, Kavanaugh pressed the attorney representing the states for why “waive” couldn’t authorize Biden’s plan.

“Congress was very aware of potential emergency actions,” he said, noting that the law was passed in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. “Why not just read that as written?”

Biden’s supporters had hoped the administration might eke out a procedural win on the question of whether the parties who sued – six conservative states and two individual borrowers – were harmed enough by the plan to bring their case to court. While that debate came up, it received far less attention than questions about presidential power.

2. Fairness looms large for conservative justices scrutinizing loan forgiveness

Conservative justices, including Roberts, raised what they called “the fairness argument,” echoing a common criticism from Biden’s opponents that forgiving debt punishes, in some sense, Americans who didn’t attend college or worked hard to pay off their loans.

That line of questioning was a troubling sign for Biden.

Roberts, whose support is crucial for Biden to garner the five votes needed for a majority, introduced a hypothetical situation of two high school graduates, neither of whom could afford higher education. One took out a loan to attend college. The other, instead, started a lawn care business with help from a private bank loan.

“At the end of four years, we know statistically, that the person with the college degree is going to do significantly financially better over the course of life than the person without,” Roberts said. “And then along comes the government and tells that person, you don’t have to pay your loan.”

In response, Prelogar argued that it was Congress, by enacting the HEROES Act, that decided the education secretary could provide student loan forgiveness tied to emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic. Two associate justices in the court’s liberal wing, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, signaled support for Biden on the point.

“Congress passed a statute that dealt with loan repayment for colleges, and it didn’t pass a statute that dealt with loan repayment for lawn businesses,” Kagan said.

3. Biden’s Plan B on student loans? Very uncertain

If Biden loses, it’s likely to put enormous pressure on the administration from the left to come up with another plan. The mass of protesters outside the court – and posting on social media – suggests student loan borrowers will be irate if the plan is torpedoed.

So far, the White House hasn’t wanted to discuss that.

“The bottom line is we’re confident in our legal authority, which is why we’ve taken the case all the way to the Supreme Court,” said White House spokeswoman Olivia Dalton.

And it’s not clear what other avenue the administration could turn down to offer nationwide debt forgiveness. Biden could try Congress, but a compromise between the Republican-held House and Democrat-controlled Senate is highly unlikely.

Instead, the administration may be forced to focus on smaller steps within its control.

Alongside the debt forgiveness plan, for example, Biden introduced a new program meant to tie borrowers’ monthly loan payments to how much they earn. The government already has several such plans in place, but the newest would be the most generous. It would reduce some borrowers’ payments to 5% of their discretionary income. That plan isn’t available yet, but is currently going through the Department of Education’s regulatory process.

4. Biden’s lawyer closes with an emotional appeal on loan forgiveness

After three and a half hours of complicated arguments about standing to sue, separation of powers and court precedent, Biden’s lawyer closed her remarks with an emotional appeal about the millions of Americans who have been dealing with student loan debt.

“I know that we have had hours today on the legal issues in this case, but I do want to step back for a moment and focus on the stakes of this case,” Prelogar said.

It was a classic Prelogar move: The solicitor general can go toe-to-toe in the weeds of the law with the best Supreme Court advocates in the nation. But she also has a knack for calling attention to the bigger picture.

Prelogar talked about the millions of student loan borrowers who have had “devastating financial impacts based on this unprecedented pandemic” and will be hurt even more when Biden’s moratorium on repaying student loan debt ends.

Ninety percent of the borrowers covered by Biden’s plan make $75,000 or less, she said. Twenty-six million Americans have applied for debt forgiveness and 16 million have been approved.

“For those Americans, this is a critical lifeline to ensure that they are not subject to the severe negative consequences of delinquency and default on student loan debt,” Prelogar said. “And the relief for these Americans has been held up by two student loan borrowers who don’t even have standing and whose claims fail on the merits.”

Some borrowers told USA TODAY the pause on loan repayments during the pandemic allowed them to pay down credit card bills, build a house, buy a new car, or just keep food on the table.

Prelogar seemed to be reminding the court of a reality: Student loan borrowers who cheered Biden’s long-awaited program in August are going to be let down if the court blocks it.

It doesn’t look good for student loan forgiveness!

Tony

Lori Lightfoot

Dear Commons Community,

Paul Vallas and Brandon Johnson will meet in a runoff to be the next mayor of Chicago after voters yesterday denied incumbent Lori Lightfoot a second term, issuing a rebuke to a leader who made history as head of the nation’s third-largest city.

Vallas, a former schools CEO backed by the police union, and Johnson, a Cook County commissioner endorsed by the Chicago Teachers Union, advanced to the April 4 runoff after none of the nine candidates was able to secure over 50% of the vote to win outright.

Lightfoot, the first Black woman and first openly gay person to lead the city, won her first term in 2019 after promising to end decades of corruption and backroom dealing at City Hall. But opponents blamed Lightfoot for an increase in crime that occurred in cities across the U.S. during the pandemic and criticized her as being a divisive, overly contentious leader.

She is the first elected Chicago mayor to lose a reelection bid since 1983, when Jane Byrne, the city’s first female mayor, lost her Democratic primary.  As reported by the Associated Press.

Speaking to supporters last night, Lightfoot called being Chicago’s mayor “the honor of a lifetime.”

“Regardless of tonight’s outcome, we fought the right fights and we put this city on a better path,” Lightfoot said. She told her fellow mayors around the country not to fear being bold.

At his victory party, Vallas noted that Lightfoot had called to congratulate him and asked the crowd to give her a round of applause. In a nod to his campaign promise to combat crime, he said that, if elected, he would work to address public safety issues.

“We will have a safe Chicago. We will make Chicago the safest city in America,” Vallas said.

Johnson noted the improbability that he would make the runoff, considering his low name recognition at the start of the race.

“A few months ago they said they didn’t know who I was. Well, if you didn’t know, now you know,” Johnson said. He thanked the unions that supported him and gave a special shout-out to his wife, telling the crowd, “Chicago, a Black woman will still be in charge.”

Lightfoot’s loss is unusual for mayors in large cities, who have tended to win reelection with relative ease. But it’s also a sign of the turmoil in U.S. cities following the COVID-19 pandemic, with its economic fallout and spikes in violent crime in many places.

Public safety has been an issue in other recent elections, including the recall of a San Francisco district attorney who was criticized for progressive policies. The pandemic also may shape elections for mayor in other cities this year, such as Philadelphia and Houston, where incumbents cannot run again due to term limits.

There are clear contrasts between Vallas and Johnson.

Vallas served as an adviser to the Fraternal Order of Police during its negotiations with Lightfoot’s administration. He has called for adding hundreds of police officers to patrol the city, saying crime is out of control and morale among officers sunk to a new low during Lightfoot’s tenure.

Vallas’ opponents have criticized him as too conservative to lead the Democratic stronghold. Lightfoot blasted him for welcoming support from the police union’s controversial leader, who defended the Jan. 6 insurrectionists at the Capitol and equated Lightfoot’s vaccine mandate for city workers to the Holocaust.

Johnson received about $1 million from the Chicago Teachers Union for his campaign and had support from several other progressive organizations, including United Working Families. The former teacher and union organizer has argued that the answer to addressing crime is not more money for police but more investment in mental health care, education, jobs and affordable housing, and he was accused by rivals such as Lightfoot of wanting to defund the police.

Johnson has avoided the word “defund” during the race, and his campaign says he does not want to cut the number of police officers. But in a 2020 radio interview, Johnson said defunding is not just a slogan but “an actual real political goal,” and he sponsored a nonbinding resolution on the county board to redirect money from policing and jails to social services.

Crime was an issue that resonated with voters.

Rita DiPietro, who lives downtown, said she supported Lightfoot in 2019. But she voted for Vallas on Tuesday, saying she was impressed by his detailed strategy to address public safety.

“The candidates all talk about what they’d like to do,” she said. “This guy actually has a plan. He knows how he’s going to do it.”

Lindsey Hegarty, a 30-year-old paralegal who lives on Chicago’s North Side, said she backed Johnson because “he seemed like the most progressive candidate on issues like policing, mental health” and public transit.

Race also was a factor as candidates courted votes in the highly segregated city, which is closely divided in population among Black, Hispanic and white residents. Vallas was the only white candidate in the field. Lightfoot, Johnson and five other candidates are Black, though Lightfoot argued she was the only Black candidate who could win. U.S. Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia was the only Latino in the race.

Lightfoot accused Vallas of using “the ultimate dog whistle” by saying his campaign is about “taking back our city,” and of cozying up to the president of the Fraternal Order of Police, whom she calls a racist. A recent Chicago Tribune story also found Vallas’ Twitter account had liked racist tweets and tweets that mocked Lightfoot’s appearance and referred to her as masculine.

Vallas denied his comments were related to race and says his police union endorsement is from rank-and-file officers. He also said he wasn’t responsible for the liked tweets, which he called “abhorrent,” and suggested someone had improperly accessed his account.

Lightfoot touted her record of investing in neighborhoods and supporting workers, such as by increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour. She also noted that the city had navigated unprecedented challenges such as the pandemic and its economic and public safety fallout to protests over policing.

Asked if she was treated unfairly because of her race and gender, Lightfoot said: “I’m a black woman in America. Of course.”

Vallas, who has led school systems in Chicago, New Orleans and Philadelphia, lost a 2019 bid for mayor. This time, he was laser-focused on public safety, saying police officers who left the force under Lightfoot’s administration will return if he’s elected.

The other candidates were businessman Willie Wilson, Chicago City Council members Sophia King and Roderick Sawyer, activist Ja’Mal Green and state Rep. Kambium “Kam” Buckner.

Surprising outcome!

Tony