Dear Commons Community,

Members of Harvard’s faculty and the university’s top governing body held a meeting last week to address the unprecedented problems at America’s oldest institution of higher learning.

Harvard faces many problems: rising antisemitism on campus and the university’s controversial response to it; President Claudine Gay’s ongoing plagiarism scandal; plunging applications and an Affirmative Action ruling from the Supreme Court have the markings of a wounded institution..  As reported by several news media.

The meeting, first reported by the New York Times, included Jeff Flier, a former dean of Harvard Medical School, and Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, among two other faculty. They had a “very cordial and frank” discussion with nonprofit founder Tracy Palandjian and private-equity executive Paul Finnegan – both members of the Harvard Corporation – Flier told CNN. Finnegan also confirmed to CNN that the discussion over dinner took place last week.

“We were asked to discuss our views of the problems, and what might be done over time to address them,” Flier said. “We did that – they asked many questions and we tried to answer them.”

Flier said he urged the members of the university’s top governance board to address the copious problems facing Harvard in a more direct manner. The Harvard Corporation has put out few statements – either in support of Gay, regarding antisemitism on campus, or about Gay’s plagiarism.

“If people are saying the university is making mistakes — they are talking about you!” Flier said he told the Corporation members. He first provided the quote to the New York Times.

Flier said the Corporation responded to the faculty’s candid comments with interest and followed up with questions. They said they’d share the feedback with colleagues and get back to the staff.

Gay’s plagiarism scandal has captured much of the public conversation about Harvard in recent days. The drip, drip, drip of plagiarism allegations has spilled out gradually, keeping the story in the headlines despite the Harvard Corporation’s continued backing of its president. The governing board has called her mistakes “regrettable” but said the incomplete citations do not constitute research misconduct.

But the plagiarism discussion in many ways has distracted from a much bigger and more pervasive problem Harvard has been unable to solve: rising antisemitism on campus.

The Department of Education opened an investigation into Harvard “for discrimination involving shared ancestry,” an umbrella term that encompasses both antisemitism and Islamophobia. Harvard is one of scores of schools the federal government has been investigating since Hamas’ October 7 attacks on Israel.

Gay came under intense fire on December 5 for her disastrous testimony on Capitol Hill, in which she and other university presidents struggled to say explicitly that calls on campus for genocide of Jews would constitute a violation of school rules.

Former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill resigned soon after her testimony, but Harvard backed Gay. The Harvard Corporation issued a joint statement on December 12 fully supporting Gay.

Two weeks ago, Harvard announced early applications at Harvard College declined by 17% to four-year lows. It’s unclear why; Penn and other universities facing similar issues as Harvard said enrollment applications rose from the previous year.

The Class of 2028 also marks the first admissions cycle after the US Supreme Court gutted affirmative action in college, ruling the Harvard and University of North Carolina admissions programs were unconstitutional.

Last week, megadonor Len Blavatnik became the latest donor to pause giving to Harvard, a person familiar with the matter confirmed to CNN. He told Harvard he wants the university to solve the antisemitism problems on campus.

At last week’s dinner, according to the Times, the board members “faced a grilling” regarding the university’s president. But no one pressed for Gay’s removal, the Harvard Crimson reported Monday night.

Palandjian told the dinner group, according to the Times, replacing Gay might not be going far enough to get Harvard back on course. Harvard required “generational change,” she said, according to the Times. CNN has reached out to Palandjian for comment.

Harvard spokesperson Jonathan Swain told the Times the dinner was a “constructive and positive conversation about the importance of academic freedom, civil discourse and intellectual diversity,” adding the “discussion of ‘generational change’ occurred in that context; that addressing such a vital and complex societal issue would not happen overnight, but would take time. It was not related to any individual at Harvard.” Swain did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.

Flier said he did not remember Palandjian’s comment exactly as reported in the Times.

“I recall her saying that to accomplish the actions we recommended (which did not include removing the president) would take a generation … not a generational change, which has a different meaning,” he told CNN.

Gay held a virtual town hall with hundreds of faculty members on that same Tuesday, CNN previously reported, according to a source familiar with the matter. Gay held that meeting just before announcing plans to issue corrections to her dissertation.

The plagiarism controversy that has swirled around Gay did not come up during that Zoom town hall with members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the source said. About a dozen Harvard faculty members spoke during the event and all of them were supportive, according to the source.

Yet, according to the Times, “private conversations with donors, professors and others indicate that there are signs of tensions among board members.”

“Some members have conceded they need to address the billowing storms…” the paper reported.

Yes they do!

Tony

Maureen Dowd.  Alex Wong – Getty IMages

Dear Commons Community,

Maureen Dowd had a column on Sunday, reflecting on Christmas and the Catholic Church. Entitled, “The Church, Living in Christmas Past,” she reminisced about her own family celebrating Christmas and segued to the present and Pope Francis’s recent moves to open the Church more to others especially the LGBTQ community.  She laments that she no longer feels as strongly about her faith.  She also sees Pope Francis’s positions as small steps and that she would like to see him do more for gays and for women. 

I agree!

Below is her entire column.

Tony

———————————————————————–

The New York Times

The Church, Living in Christmas Past

Dec. 23, 2023

By Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist

My mom loved Christmas so much, she would sometimes leave the tree up until April.

She dyed a sheet blue for the sky behind the crèche and made a star of tin foil. The cradle would stay empty until Christmas morning; when we tumbled downstairs, the baby would be in his place, and the house would smell of roasting turkey.

Mom always took it personally if you didn’t wear red or green on Christmas, and she signed all the presents “Love, Baby Jesus,” “Love, Virgin Mary” or “Love, St. Joseph.”

(My brother Kevin was always upset that Joseph got short shrift, disappearing from the Bible; why wasn’t he around to boast about Jesus turning water into wine?)

We went to midnight Mass back then, and it was magical, despite some boys wearing Washington Redskins bathrobes as they carried presents down the aisle for Baby Jesus.

In 2005, when my mom was dying, I played Christmas music for her, even though it was July and the muted TV showed Lance Armstrong cycling in the Tour de France.

Christmas was never my favorite holiday; I thought it was materialistic and stressful. But I try to honor my mom’s feeling that it is the happiest time of the year.

Now that my Christmas is more secular — my bond with the Catholic Church faded over the years of cascading pedophilia scandals — I miss the rituals, choirs and incense.

I didn’t mean to, but I succumbed to the irresistible pull of the TCM holiday doubleheader of “Going My Way” and “The Bells of St. Mary’s.” It’s hard to beat Ingrid Bergman’s luminous nun coaching a bullied kid in “the manly art of self-defense” — i.e., boxing — as Bing Crosby’s bemused Father O’Malley looks on.

As bonding agents, religion and patriotism have been superseded by Facebook and TikTok. But somehow social media, which was touted as an engine of connectivity, has left us disconnected and often lonely, not to mention combative. We’re all in our corners. We understand one another less than ever and have less desire to try.

When we ran up against mean priests as children, my mother would say the church was not the men who ran it. The church was God, and He was all kind and all just. But it was increasingly hard for me to stay loyal to a church plagued with scandals and cover-ups and to an institution that seemed to delight in excluding so many.

At a time when the church is shrinking in the West, Pope Francis has been on a mission to make it more tolerant and inclusive.

On Monday the 87-year-old pope decreed that priests could bless same-sex couples. But the Catholic Church and Francis say that men with a “deep-seated tendency” for homosexuality should not be ordained as priests.

The pope did not change church doctrine that marriage is only between a man and a woman. The blessing is not a sacrament and cannot be connected through “clothing, gestures or words” to a wedding.

“Blessings instead are better imparted, the Vatican says, during a meeting with a priest, a visit to a shrine, during a pilgrimage or a prayer recited in a group,” The Times’s Jason Horowitz explained.

It’s better than nothing, and it’s certainly better than the 2021 Vatican ruling that inveighed against blessing gay unions, arguing that God “cannot bless sin” and that sexual unions outside marriage, like gay unions, did not conform with “God’s designs.”

But the declaration — “Fiducia Supplicans” — seems like a narrow gesture, designed to be delivered in a furtive way.

If the pope wants to move beyond the suffocating stranglehold and hypocrisy of the conservative cardinals so the church survives and grows, he must be bolder.

When he started, in a puff of white smoke, he seemed open to change. He does believe in a more pastoral, less rule-driven church, but he’s not ready to change the archaic rules.

That’s true not only with gay people but also with women. Allowing women to just give readings during Mass, serve as altar girls and distribute communion is not going to cut it. Jesus surrounded himself with strong women, even a soi-disant fallen woman, but his church has long been run by misogynists. Nothing major has changed for women since that 1945 classic “The Bells of St. Mary’s,” except that nuns have been muzzled by the Vatican. Ordaining women as priests is not on the table, any more than allowing priests to marry is.

It’s passing strange that a church with Mary at the center of its founding story could suffocate women’s voices for centuries. The cloistered club of men running the church grew warped. They were more concerned with shielding the church from scandal than ensuring the safety of boys and girls being preyed upon by criminal priests.

The church can’t succeed in a time warp, moving at the pace of a snail on Ambien. Even Saudi Arabia is modernizing faster.

It is simply immoral to treat women and gay people as unworthy of an equal role in their church. After all, isn’t the whole point of the church to teach us what is right? And it’s not right to treat people as partial humans.

Dear Commons Community,

The Republican Accountability Project’s “Dictator Donald” video ad (below), which comes weeks after Trump said he’d act like a dictator on “day one” of a new administration, sounds the alarm on the former president’s 2024 campaign.  The new ad compares the former president to other well-known dictators.

“He caused an insurrection at the Capitol and sorry to ruin your Christmas but he’s running again,” said the ad’s narrator, who declares that Trump is “openly running as a wannabe dictator.”

The ad goes on to display a Truth Social post from the former president who, in December 2022, called for the “termination” of articles of the Constitution.

“Trump said he would terminate the Constitution so he could be president again,” the ad’s narrator said.

“Do you know who also did that? Mussolini, Chávez, Pinochet – all of them shelved their Constitutions to centralize power.”

The ad later states that Trump plans to “purge tens of thousands of civil servants” from the government to replace them with his loyalists if he’s elected to another term.

“Authoritarian Viktor Orbán used the same tactic to dismantle Hungary’s democracy,” added the narrator before noting Trump’s “very real” chances to win the 2024 election.

“The alarm is going off, everyone needs to wake up. We have a choice between protecting our democracy or letting Trump destroy it.”

The Republican Accountability Project said it plans to run the ad nationally via CNN and MSNBC.

The spot, part of a six-figure ad campaign, is set to run in a number of swing states – Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – on the Hallmark Channel and during TBS’s marathon of “A Christmas Story” over the holidays.

The group looks to run the ad starting Friday and through next week.

The Republican Accountability Project’s latest ad joins a number of its other spots aimed at Trump and GOP lawmakers who have enabled the former president’s 2020 election lies such as Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The new COVID-19 variant that scientists call JN.1 now makes up about 44.1% of COVID-19 cases across the country, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated Friday, marking another week of the fast-spreading variant’s steep rise in the U.S.

The increase is more than two times larger than the 21.3% that the CDC now estimates the strain made up of infections for the week ending Dec. 9, after Thanksgiving.

Among regions with enough data reported from testing labs to produce these latest projections, the CDC estimates that JN.1’s prevalence is largest in the Northeast region spanning New Jersey and New York, where the strain is 56.9% of cases in those states. As reported by CBS News.

“JN.1’s continued growth suggests that the variant is either more transmissible or better at evading our immune systems than other circulating variants. It is too early to know whether or to what extent JN.1 will cause an increase in infections or hospitalizations,” the CDC said Friday.

These new estimates come as other countries have also tracked a rapid ascent in JN.1’s prevalence across recent weeks, prompting the World Health Organization to step up the strain’s classification to “variant of interest” on Tuesday — its second highest tier.

Authorities have so far not reported different or more severe symptoms from JN.1 compared to previous strains.

Though officials so far believe the public health risk from JN.1 is no greater than that of other recent strains, its unprecedented accumulation of mutations — most inherited from JN.1’s highly mutated parent BA.2.86, which first raised concern over the summer — has kept health authorities on guard. 

For months, BA.2.86 failed to gain much of a foothold around the world, despite being detected infecting people across dozens of countries after its discovery. 

JN.1’s additional mutations appear to have changed the trajectory of this strain, prompting concern that the variant may be more transmissible. 

The earliest JN.1 cases in the U.S. were reported by labs from samples in September. Since then, JN.1’s share of COVID-19 cases has accelerated to become the fastest-growing to date in the CDC’s every-other-week “Nowcast” estimates.

Variants grouped under the BA.2.86 umbrella, which include JN.1, have also made up the largest share of variants detected from the CDC’s airport testing program on arriving international travelers in recent weeks.

The CDC’s own variant classifications have not been updated since September, when BA.2.86 was first deemed a “variant being monitored,” the lowest classification for potentially concerning variants. 

In a split with the WHO, a CDC spokesperson confirmed Friday afternoon that the Biden administration has so far decided against elevating JN.1 to being a standalone “variant of interest.” Instead, the strain remains grouped with its BA.2.86 parent as a “variant being monitored.” 

“We will continue to monitor variants, including JN.1 and provide updates when information changes,” CDC spokesperson Jasmine Reed said in an email.

Effectiveness of COVID vaccines against JN.1

Data from early studies of the strain cited by the WHO in a risk evaluation this week also pointed to research suggesting JN.1 “displays a higher immune evasion” compared to its BA.2.86 parent, though not enough to prevent this season’s COVID-19 vaccines from being effective.

This year’s updated COVID-19 shots were targeted at the XBB.1.5 strains which drove a wave of infections earlier this year. A WHO panel earlier this month declined to call for an update to the vaccine’s recipe, after mulling early data so far measuring the threat posed by JN.1.

In a statement, a Novavax spokesperson said data from studies in mice and nonhuman primates showed its shot “induced cross-neutralization against JN.1” that was “similar” to other XBB strains.

A Pfizer spokesperson said that the company expects to have data in the coming weeks from tests of its vaccine against JN.1. A Moderna spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“Not raising the alarm there, we’re watching it very carefully, but it’s possible we could see a quantum leap as opposed to a gradual erosion of the protection of the vaccine. And if that happens, we’re going to have to move pretty quickly” Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview published Thursday by the New England Journal of Medicine.

Tony

Fossilized footprints in White Sands National Park in New Mexico are believed to be 23,000 years old.  Courtesy of US National Park Service.

Dear Commons Community,

A growing number of archaeological and genetic finds are fueling debates on when humans first arrived in North America.

New research presented last week at the American Geophysical Union Annual Meeting (AGU23) in San Francisco highlighted “one of the hottest debates in archaeology,” an article by Liza Lester of American Geophysical Union said.

According to Lester, archaeologists have traditionally argued that people migrated by walking through an ice-free corridor that briefly opened between ice sheets an estimated 13,000 years ago.

But some of the recent finds suggest that people made their way onto the continent much earlier. The discovery of human footprints in New Mexico, which were dated to around 23,000- years-old, is just one example, and Archaeologists have found evidence of coastal settlements in western Canada dating from as early as 14,000-years-ago.

The ‘kelp highway’ theory

The research presented at the AGU23 meeting provides another clue on the origins of North American human migration.

“Given that the ice-free corridor wouldn’t be open for thousands of years before these early arrivals, scientists instead proposed that people may have moved along a ‘kelp highway,’” Lester writes. “This theory holds that early Americans slowly traveled down into North America in boats, following the bountiful goods found in coastal waters.”

According to Lester, climate reconstructions of the Pacific Northwest hint that sea ice may have been one way for people to move farther south along the Pacific coastline from Beringia, “the land bridge between Asia and North America that emerged during the last glacial maximum when ice sheets bound up large amounts of water causing sea levels to fall,” Lester writes.

What if they didn’t use boats?

Additionally, researchers found that ocean currents were more than twice the strength they are today during the height of the last glacial maximum around 20,000 years ago due to glacial winds and lower sea levels, meaning it would be incredibly difficult to travel along the coast by boat in these conditions, said Summer Praetorius of the U.S. Geological Survey, who presented her team’s work at the summit.

But what if early migrants didn’t use boats?

Praetorius’ team is asking this very question because evidence shows that people were well adapted to cold environments. If they couldn’t paddle against the current, “maybe they were using the sea ice as a platform,” Praetorius said.

Praetorius and her colleagues used data that came from tiny, fossilized plankton to map out climate models and “get a fuller picture of ocean conditions during these crucial windows of human migration.”

Most interesting!  If you are inclined to take a deeper dive into this topic, I suggest trying, Origin (2022), by Jennifer Raff.  You can find a review here on my blog at:  https://apicciano.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2023/01/16/new-book-origin-a-genetic-history-of-the-americas-by-jennifer-raff/

Tony

Photograph:  Olivier Douliery

Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump doesn’t hate immigrants. He is the son of an immigrant.  He married two women who immigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe. Nor is he particularly insistent about immigrants having children in the United States. His three oldest children were born to Ivana Trump, who at the time had not yet become a citizen. His youngest child was born in March of the year that Melania Trump got her citizenship.

Despite being a descendant of an immigrant, Trump likes to talk about how immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country, as he did last weekend.  We don’t need to pretend that he is offering a sober observation about shifts in the country’s population. He is, instead, making a demagogic appeal to Americans who view newcomers with fear or anger.

The most obvious and immediate response to the idea that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country is to point out that the United States is inextricably constituted of immigrants and their children. We don’t live in Finland; we live in a country where the only native resident population is Native Americans and no other family can claim to have been here longer than about 400 years. Trump’s rhetoric is a bit like complaining about someone pouring tap water into the pond behind a dam.

It’s particularly hollow given how immigrants are underrepresented in positions of power. In Congress, for example, only about 3 percent of members were born outside the United States, according to Pew, compared with 16 percent of the population. Only about 15 percent of the members of Congress are immigrants or children of immigrants, about half the rate of the population overall.

Trump is a hypocrite!  Let’s deport Melania!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Rudy Giuliani filed for bankruptcy on Thursday, acknowledging severe financial strain exacerbated by his pursuit of former President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election and a jury’s verdict last week requiring him to pay $148 million to two former Georgia election workers he defamed.

The former New York City mayor listed nearly $153 million in existing or potential debts, including almost $1 million in state and federal tax liabilities, money he owes lawyers, and many millions of dollars in potential judgments in lawsuits against him. He estimated he had assets worth $1 million to $10 million.  As reported by The Associated Press.

Giuliani had been teetering on the brink of financial ruin for several years, but the eye-popping damages award to former election workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss pushed him over the edge. The women said Giuliani’s targeting of them after Republican Trump narrowly lost Georgia to Democrat Joe Biden led to death threats that made them fear for their lives.

Ted Goodman, a political adviser and spokesperson for Giuliani, said in a statement that Giuliani’s decision to seek bankruptcy protection “should be a surprise to no one” because “no person could have reasonably believed that Mayor Giuliani would be able to pay such a high punitive amount.”

The Chapter 11 filing will give Giuliani “the opportunity and time to pursue an appeal, while providing transparency for his finances under the supervision of the bankruptcy court, to ensure all creditors are treated equally and fairly throughout the process,” Goodman said.

But declaring bankruptcy likely won’t erase the $148 million verdict. Bankruptcy law doesn’t allow for the dissolution of debts that come from a “willful and malicious injury” inflicted on someone else. A judge said Wednesday that Freeman and Moss could start pursuing payment immediately, saying any delay could give Giuliani time to hide assets.

“This maneuver is unsurprising, and it will not succeed in discharging Mr. Giuliani’s debt to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss,” their lawyer, Michael Gottlieb, said.

After the verdict, Giuliani repeated his stolen election claims, insisted he did nothing wrong and suggested he’d keep pressing his claims even if it meant losing all his money or going to jail. His rhetoric prompted Freeman and Moss to sue him again this week.

The Dec. 15 verdict was the latest and costliest sign of the mounting financial toll incurred by the 79-year-old Giuliani, a one-time Republican presidential candidate and high-ranking Justice Department official once heralded as “America’s Mayor” for his calm and steady leadership after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

Once swimming in cash as a globetrotting security consultant, Giuliani’s money woes intensified amid investigations, lawsuits, fines, sanctions and damages related to his work helping Trump try to overturn the 2020 election.

Among his potential debts, he listed lawsuits brought by two voting machine manufacturers who say he and others defamed them with claims of a stolen election.

A lawyer for Giuliani, Adam Katz, suggested at an August court hearing in one of those cases that Giuliani was “close to broke,” and unable to pay a number of bills, including a $12,000 to $18,000 tab for a company to search through his electronic records for evidence.

In court papers rebuffing voting machine-maker Smartmatic’s demand for an accounting of his finances, Giuliani’s lawyers disclosed that he was so hard up for money that he solicited third-party donations to pay a prior $300,000 bill to the electronic discovery firm.

In September, Giuliani’s former lawyer Robert Costello sued him for nearly $1.4 million in unpaid legal bills. Giuliani claimed he never received them. The case is pending.

Costello represented Giuliani from November 2019 to this past July in matters ranging from an investigation into his business dealings in Ukraine, which resulted in an FBI raid on his home and office in April 2021, to investigations of his work in the wake of Trump’s 2020 election loss.

Investigators noted Giuliani’s dwindling finances in court papers unsealed this week from the 2021 raid, raising his need for money as possible motivation for his interest in aiding a Ukrainian official. Citing bank records and other information, they said Giuliani had gone from having about $1.2 million in the bank and $40,000 in credit card debt in January 2018 to about $288,000 in cash and $110,000 credit debt in February 2019. Giuliani was never charged with a crime as a result of that investigation.

Giuliani’s other lawsuits, which he listed as potential liabilities, include one brought against him by Biden’s son Hunter, who alleges Giuliani was responsible for the “total annihilation” of his digital privacy by accessing and sharing his personal data from his laptop computer.

Giuliani is also being sued by a woman who said she worked for him. She alleges he owed her nearly $2 million in unpaid wages and coerced her into sex. Another lawsuit involves a man who claims Giuliani defamed him after he slapped the ex-mayor on the back at a supermarket. Giuliani has denied the woman’s claims and has asked for the man’s lawsuit to be thrown out.

In August, Giuliani was indicted with Trump and others in Georgia on charges he acted as Trump’s chief co-conspirator in a plot to subvert Biden’s victory. He was also described as a co-conspirator but not charged in special counsel Jack Smith’s federal election interference case against Trump.

Giuliani’s bankruptcy filing did not detail his assets or add to what is already known about how he’s been making money in recent years.

What a sad loser Giuliani has become. And all thanks to his association with Trump!

Tony