Dear Commons Community,

Trump’s stake in his social media company is worth about half of what it was before his conviction on charges of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal during the 2016 presidential campaign

Mr. Trump’s roughly 65 percent stake in Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent of Truth Social, was worth roughly $6 billion on May 30, the day a New York jury found him guilty on all 34 charges. Yesterday, the value of his 115 million shares of Trump Media had dropped to about $3.2 billion.

By any measure, Mr. Trump’s stake is still worth a tremendous amount of money. But the social media company’s shares have been extremely volatile, as highlighted by the steep decline this month. As reported in The New York Times. 

Trump Media’s stock price traded as high as $66 after its merger with a public shell company in late March, and as low as $23 a few weeks later. The stock, after trading down most of the day Friday, closed at $27.66, up about 3 percent.

The big swing in price is a potential sign of more volatility to come when a provision that bars Mr. Trump from selling his shares expires in September, a few weeks before the presumptive Republican nominee faces President Biden in a presidential election rematch.

Trump Media’s stock has also been weighed down because securities regulators this week allowed early investors in the company to potentially sell tens of millions of shares. Trump Media warned in a filing that the move by the Securities and Exchange Commission “could result in a significant decline in the public trading price of our common stock.”

This week, shares of Trump Media have fallen more than 20 percent on heavier-than-usual trading volumes.

Trump Media went public after completing a long-delayed merger with a cash-rich shell company called Digital World Acquisition Corporation, which had raised money by going public in September 2021, a month before announcing its deal with Trump Media. Early investors in Digital World had stock that became Trump Media as well as warrants that gave them the right to buy more shares at a fixed price after certain regulatory hurdles were cleared.

Another Trump venture on the verge of collapse!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Michelle Goldberg has a column this morning warning America about a little known law that if enforced could be used to ban the mailing of “devices and substances” for producing abortion. Goldberg gives excellent background on the Comstock Law for those of us not familiar with it.  She quotes Jonathan F. Mitchell, a crusading anti-abortion lawyer who represented Trump before the Supreme Court this year, who said:

 “We don’t need a federal ban [on abortion] when we have Comstock on the books.”

Goldberg goes on to describe the 1873 act as:

“It is similarly difficult to get Americans to appreciate the threat that the 19th-century Comstock Act could be resurrected. Named colloquially for the fanatical postal inspector Anthony Comstock, the 1873 act — which is actually a set of anti-vice laws — bans the mailing of “obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile” material, including devices and substances used “for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral purpose.” Though never repealed, it was, until recently, considered a dead letter, made moot by Supreme Court decisions on free speech, birth control and abortion.

But with Roe overturned, some in Donald Trump’s orbit see a chance to reanimate Comstock, using it to ban medication abortion — and maybe surgical abortion as well — without passing new federal legislation.

The 920-page blueprint for a second Trump administration created by Project 2025, a coalition of conservative organizations, calls for enforcing Comstock’s criminal prohibitions against using the mail — widely understood to include common carriers like UPS and FedEx — to provide or distribute abortion pills.

She concludes with a warning that we would likely see Republicans attempting to enforce Comstock if Trump is elected in November.

The entire column is worth a read.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading The Wide Wide Sea:  Imperial  Ambition, First Contact, and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook by Hampton Sides. Sides is an American historian, author and journalist. His earlier book, The Ghost Soldiers won the Pen USA Award for Nonfiction. The Wide Wide Sea… is a gripping story of Captain James Cook’s final voyage to the South Pacific.  Right from the beginning, Sides lets the reader know that Cook will be killed in Hawaii at the end.  Still, the reader wants to know the how and why Cook meets his fate.  On the way, one learns of his remarkable talents as the captain of a sailing ship who charted much of the Pacific Ocean from north to south in the 1700s. On this third voyage, Cook, who has a complex and controversial legacy in dealing with Indigenous people, sets out to discover a Northwest Passage in North America. If you are at all interested in Cook and European exploration of the South Seas in the 1700s, you will not put this book down.

Below is review that appeared in The New York Times.

Tony

The New York Times

THE WIDE WIDE SEA: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides

Reviewed by Doug Bock Clark

In January 1779, when the British explorer James Cook sailed into a volcanic bay known by Hawaiians as “the Pathway of the Gods,” he beheld thousands of people seemingly waiting for him on shore. Once he came on land, people prostrated themselves and chanted “Lono,” the name of a Hawaiian deity. Cook was bewildered.

It was as though the European mariner “had stepped into an ancient script for a cosmic pageant he knew nothing about,” Hampton Sides writes in “The Wide Wide Sea,” his propulsive and vivid history of Cook’s third and final voyage across the globe.

As Sides describes the encounter, Cook happened to arrive during a festival honoring Lono, sailing around the island in the same clockwise fashion favored by the god, possibly causing him to be mistaken as the divinity.

Sides, the author of several books on war and exploration, makes a symbolic pageant of his own of Cook’s last voyage, finding in it “a morally complicated tale that has left a lot for modern sensibilities to unravel and critique,” including the “historical seeds” of debates about “Eurocentrism,” “toxic masculinity” and “cultural appropriation.”

Cook’s two earlier global expeditions focused on scientific goals — first to observe the transit of Venus from the Pacific Ocean and then to make sure there was no extra continent in the middle of it. His final voyage, however, was inextricably bound up in colonialism: During the explorer’s second expedition, a young Polynesian man named Mai had persuaded the captain of one of Cook’s ships to bring him to London in the hope of acquiring guns to kill his Pacific islander enemies.

A few years later, George III commissioned Cook to return Mai to Polynesia on the way to searching for an Arctic passage to connect the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Mai brought along a menagerie of plants and livestock given to him by the king, who hoped that Mai would convert his native islands into simulacra of the English countryside.

“The Wide Wide Sea” is not so much a story of “first contact” as one of Cook reckoning with the fallout of what he and others had wrought in expanding the map of Europe’s power. Retracing parts of his previous voyages while chauffeuring Mai, Cook is forced to confront the fact that his influence on groups he helped “discover” has not been universally positive. Sexually transmitted diseases introduced by his sailors on earlier expeditions have spread. Some Indigenous groups that once welcomed him have become hard bargainers, seeming primarily interested in the Europeans for their iron and trinkets.

Sides writes that Cook “saw himself as an explorer-scientist,” who “tried to follow an ethic of impartial observation born of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution” and whose “descriptions of Indigenous peoples were tolerant and often quite sympathetic” by “the standards of his time.”

In Hawaii, he had been circling the island in a vain attempt to keep his crew from disembarking, finding lovers and spreading more gonorrhea. And despite the fact that he was ferrying Mai and his guns back to the Pacific, Cook also thought it generally better to avoid “political squabbles” among the civilizations he encountered.

But Cook’s actions on this final journey raised questions about his adherence to impartial observation. He responded to the theft of a single goat by sending his mariners on a multiday rampage to burn whole villages to force its return. His men worried that their captain’s “judgment — and his legendary equanimity — had begun to falter,” Sides writes. As the voyage progressed, Cook became startlingly free with the disciplinary whip on his crew.

“The Wide Wide Sea” presents Cook’s moral collapse as an enigma. Sides cites other historians’ arguments that lingering physical ailments — one suggests he picked up a parasite from some bad fish — might have darkened Cook’s mood. But his journals and ship logs, which dedicate hundreds of thousands of words to oceanic data, offer little to resolve the mystery. “In all those pages we rarely get a glimpse of Cook’s emotional world,” Sides notes, describing the explorer as “a technician, a cyborg, a navigational machine.”

The gaps in Cook’s interior journey stand out because of the incredible job Sides does in bringing to life Cook’s physical journey. New Zealand, Tahiti, Kamchatka, Hawaii and London come alive with you-are-there descriptions of gales, crushing ice packs and gun smoke, the set pieces of exploration and endurance that made these tales so hypnotizing when they first appeared. The earliest major account of Cook’s first Pacific expedition was one of the most popular publications of the 18th century.

But Sides isn’t just interested in retelling an adventure tale. He also wants to present it from a 21st-century point of view. “The Wide Wide Sea” fits neatly into a growing genre that includes David Grann’s “The Wager” and Candice Millard’s “River of the Gods,” in which famous expeditions, once told as swashbuckling stories of adventure, are recast within the tragic history of colonialism. Sides weaves in oral histories to show how Hawaiians and other Indigenous groups perceived Cook, and strives to bring to life ancient Polynesian cultures just as much as imperial England.

And yet, such modern retellings also force us to ask how different they really are from their predecessors, especially if much of their appeal lies in exactly the same derring-do that enthralled prior audiences. Parts of “The Wide Wide Sea” inevitably echo the storytelling of previous yarns, even if Sides self-consciously critiques them. Just as Cook, in retracing his earlier voyages, became enmeshed in the dubious consequences of his previous expeditions, so, too, does this newest retracing of his story becomes tangled in the historical ironies it seeks to transcend.

In the end, Mai got his guns home and shot his enemies, and the Hawaiians eventually realized that Cook was not a god. After straining their resources to outfit his ships, Cook tried to kidnap the king of Hawaii to force the return of a stolen boat. A confrontation ensued and the explorer was clubbed and stabbed to death, perhaps with a dagger made of a swordfish bill.

The British massacred many Hawaiians with firearms, put heads on poles and burned homes. Once accounts of these exploits reached England, they were multiplied by printing presses and spread across their world-spanning empire. The Hawaiians committed their losses to memory. And though the newest version of Cook’s story includes theirs, it’s still Cook’s story that we are retelling with each new age.

Dear Commons Community,

Declining enrollments. Changing demographics. Tightening budgets. And, above all, an “evolving student marketplace.”

All these elements led Jay O. Rothman, president of the University of Wisconsin system, to announce in Fall 2023 that the system was closing one two-year campus and ending in-person instruction at two others. More closures may be on the horizon, as Rothman ordered university leaders to examine the financial viability of the remaining 10 two-year campuses. As reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“It’s time for us to realign our branch campuses to current market realities and prepare for the future,” Rothman said in a statement. “The status quo is not sustainable.”

Nearly half of Wisconsin’s community colleges have been shuttered in the past year.

Most recently, the grim trend came for the Fox Cities campus of the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, which will close in the spring of 2025, officials announced last week.

This wasn’t the plan. In 2017, the University of Wisconsin system announced a bold measure that officials said was meant to preserve the 13 two-year institutions — by merging each of them with one of the system’s universities.

Since the mergers went through, most of the two-year colleges have continued to lose students and tuition dollars. Now, as more campus closures loom in the near future, outraged professors and residents are pointing fingers at university leaders and state lawmakers for the harm they’re causing in local communities.

We will see more closures and mergers in other parts of the country as declining student enrollments plague higher education.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Willie Mays was remembered in his native Birmingham, Alabama, yesterday during a Juneteenth celebration at the Negro Southern League Museum.

The heartbreaking part of the day was Mays – who died Tuesday at 93 – was not around to hear the memories shared by former players or stories told by relatives of Negro Leagues greats who idolized one of baseball’s icons.

Mays, who had said Monday he would not be able to make the trip as planned, gave a statement to friend Dusty Baker to share at the event.

A mural (above) of Willie Mays was unveiled in Birmingham, Alabama, where he played in the Negro Leagues in the 1940s.

Mays, a Hall of Famer who slugged more than 600 home runs and is probably best known for his over-the-shoulder catch in the 1954 World Series, gifted a clock to Birmingham, where a mural was unveiled in the city where he played in the Negro Leagues in the 1940s.

The statement, given to Baker on Monday, reads:

“I wish I could be with you all today. This is where I’m from. I had my first pro hit here at Rickwood as a Baron in 1948. And now this year 76 years later, it finally got counted in the record books. Some things take time, but I always think better late than never. Time changes things. Time heals wounds, and that is a good thing. I had some of the best times of my life and Birmingham so I want you to have this clock to remember those times with me and remember all the other players who were lucky enough to play here at Rickwood Field in Birmingham. Remember, time is on your side.”

Mays was a class act then, now and forever!

Tony

Credit. Upward News.

Dear Commons Community,

Louisiana has become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom, the latest move from a GOP-dominated Legislature pushing a conservative agenda under a new governor.

The legislation that Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed into law yesterday requires a poster-sized display of the Ten Commandments in “large, easily readable font” in all public classrooms, from kindergarten to state-funded universities.  As reported by The Associated Press.

“If you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses” who got the commandments from God, Landry said.

Opponents questioned the law’s constitutionality and vowed to challenge it in court. Proponents said the measure is not solely religious, but that it has historical significance. In the language of the law, the Ten Commandments are “foundational documents of our state and national government.”

The posters, which will be paired with a four-paragraph “context statement” describing how the Ten Commandments “were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries,” must be in place in classrooms by the start of 2025.

Under the law, state funds will not be used to implement the mandate. The posters would be paid for through donations.

The law also “authorizes” but does not require the display of other items in K-12 public schools, including: The Mayflower Compact, which was signed by religious pilgrims aboard the Mayflower in 1620 and is often referred to as America’s “First Constitution”; the Declaration of Independence; and the Northwest Ordinance, which established a government in the Northwest Territory — in the present day Midwest — and created a pathway for admitting new states to the Union.

Not long after the governor signed the bill into law at Our Lady of Fatima Catholic School in Lafayette on Wednesday, civil rights groups and organizations that want to keep religion out of government promised to file a lawsuit challenging it.

The law prevents students from getting an equal education and will keep children who have different beliefs from feeling safe at school, the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Freedom from Religion Foundation said in a joint statement Wednesday afternoon.

“Even among those who may believe in some version of the Ten Commandments, the particular text that they adhere to can differ by religious denomination or tradition. The government should not be taking sides in this theological debate,” the groups said.

The controversial law, in a state ensconced in the Bible Belt, comes during a new era of conservative leadership in Louisiana under Landry, who replaced two-term Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards in January. The GOP holds a supermajority in the Legislature, and Republicans hold every statewide elected position, paving the way for lawmakers to push through a conservative agenda.

Similar bills requiring the Ten Commandments be displayed in classrooms have been proposed in other states including Texas, Oklahoma and Utah. However, with threats of legal battles over the constitutionality of such measures, no state besides Louisiana has succeeded in making the bills law.

Legal battles over the display of the Ten Commandments in classrooms are not new.

In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a similar Kentucky law was unconstitutional and violated the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution, which says Congress can “make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” The high court found that the law had no secular purpose but rather served a plainly religious purpose.

God save our country from the religious zealots on the extreme right!

Tony

Credit. Kornmesser/ESO

Dear Commons Community,

Astronomers are witnessing a never-before-seen spectacle in the cosmos: the awakening of a supermassive black hole at the center of a distant galaxy.  As reported by NASA, CNN and other media sources.

In late 2019, a team of astronomers took notice of an otherwise unremarkable galaxy named SDSS1335+0728, 300 million light-years away in the Virgo constellation. A sudden spike in the galaxy’s brightness had been automatically detected by the Zwicky Transient Facility’s telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California.

With its extreme wide-field view, the camera scans the entire northern sky every two days, capturing data on celestial objects such as near-Earth asteroids as well as distant, bright supernovas.

An interdisciplinary team of astronomers and engineers followed up on Zwicky’s observation by using information from space- and ground-based telescopes to see how the galaxy’s luminosity changed over time.

To their surprise, the researchers realized they were witnessing a unique moment as a cosmic monster awakened. Their study findings have been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

“Imagine you’ve been observing a distant galaxy for years, and it always seemed calm and inactive,” said lead study author Paula Sánchez Sáez, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory in Germany, in a statement. “Suddenly, its (core) starts showing dramatic changes in brightness, unlike any typical events we’ve seen before.”

The team classified the galaxy as having an active galactic nucleus, or a bright, compact region that is powered by a supermassive black hole.

A number of celestial scenarios can cause a galaxy to suddenly brighten, such as supernova explosions or when stars draw too near to black holes and become torn apart during a phenomenon called tidal disruption events.

But such events only last dozens or hundreds of days — and SDSS1335+0728 continues to grow in brightness more than four years after researchers first observed it spiking in luminosity like the flick of a cosmic light switch.

And the brightness variations in the galaxy don’t resemble anything astronomers have seen before, which only puzzled them further.

An unprecedented cosmic event

To find answers, the team consulted archival data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer and Galaxy Evolution Explorer, the Two Micron All Sky Survey, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and other observatories.

The researchers compared the data with follow-up observations taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, or VLT, in Chile, the Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope in Chile, the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii and NASA’s space-based Neil Gehrels Swift and Chandra X-ray observatories.

Together, the datasets presented a broad portrait of the galaxy both before and after the December 2019 observation, revealing that the galaxy shifted to emit much more ultraviolet, visible and infrared light in recent years, and X-rays beginning in February — which is unprecedented behavior, Sánchez Sáez said.

Given that the galaxy is 300 million light-years away, the events that astronomers are seeing happened in the past — but the light from these events is just now reaching Earth after traveling across space for millions of years. One light-year is the distance light travels in one year, which is 5.88 trillion miles (9.46 trillion kilometers).

“The most tangible option to explain this phenomenon is that we are seeing how the (core) of the galaxy is beginning to show (…) activity,” said study coauthor Lorena Hernández García, astronomer at the Millennium Institute of Astrophysics and the University of Valparaíso, both in Chile, in a statement. “If so, this would be the first time that we see the activation of a massive black hole in real time.”

Sleeping celestial giants

Supermassive black holes are classified as having masses more than 100,000 times that of our sun. They can be found at the center of most galaxies, including the Milky Way.

“These giant monsters usually are sleeping and not directly visible,” said study coauthor Claudio Ricci, associate professor at Diego Portales University in Chile, in a statement. “In the case of SDSS1335+0728, we were able to observe the awakening of the massive black hole, (which) suddenly started to feast on gas available in its surroundings, becoming very bright.”

Previous research has pointed to inactive galaxies that appeared to become active after several years, which is usually triggered by black hole activity, but the process of a black hole awakening has never been directly observed before, until now, Hernández García said.

The same scenario may play out with Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, but astronomers aren’t sure how likely it is to occur, Ricci said.

Astronomers can’t rule out that their observation could be an unusually slow tidal disruption event, or an unknown new celestial phenomenon.

“Regardless of the nature of the variations, (this galaxy) provides valuable information on how black holes grow and evolve,” Sánchez Sáez said. “We expect that instruments like (MUSE on the VLT or those on the upcoming Extremely Large Telescope) will be key in understanding (why the galaxy is brightening).”

Impressive stuff!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The U.S. surgeon general is calling for a warning label on social media alerting users that “social media is associated with significant mental health harms in adolescents.”

In a New York Times opinion piece, Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy said there is enough evidence mounting that shows a connection between social media and adolescents’ deteriorating mental health that a surgeon general’s warning label—similar to what appears on cigarette packages—is warranted.

“One of the most important lessons I learned in medical school was that in an emergency, you don’t have the luxury to wait for perfect information,” Murthy wrote in the New York Times. “You assess the available facts, you use your best judgment, and you act quickly.”

Murthy had already signaled his concerns with the potentially harmful effects of social media on kids and teens when he issued an advisory last year warning about the risks social media poses to youth mental health.

A surgeon general’s warning label, though, would have to be approved by Congress before it could be applied to social media platforms.

Many educators say that social media—and students’ near-constant access to it via cellphones—has become a major challenge for schools. More than 200 school districts have sued the major social media companies, claiming that they have created highly addictive products that are damaging students’ mental health, leaving schools to deal with the fallout.

Four years ago, nearly 100 school districts used a similar argument in lawsuits against e-cigarette manufacturers, claiming the problems the hard-to-detect tobacco products caused amounted to a public nuisance. A class action lawsuit against JUUL was settled in 2022.

Some state and federal lawmakers are also trying to restrict young kids’ access to social media, with the aim of improving their mental health, adding to the mounting pressure on social media companies.

For their part, social media companies say they are taking steps to protect their youngest users’ safety and well-being on their platforms through parental controls, age-verification features, and time-management tools.

There is evidence that warning labels like those on tobacco products can change people’s behavior, Murthy wrote in the New York Times. And he pointed to a recent survey of Latino parents showing that three-quarters said they would limit or monitor their children’s social media use if they saw a surgeon general’s warning on the platforms used by their families.

Murthy did concede in the opinion essay that a warning label would not completely negate the harms and challenges presented by social media, a sentiment echoed by educators.

Michael Lubelfeld is the superintendent of North Shore School District 112 in a suburb of Chicago, and his district is among those suing the social media companies over the youth mental health crisis. He’s unsure the warning label will make a difference, although he said he applauds the surgeon general’s effort.

“Because to some degree the cat’s already out of the bag, there’s tremendous usage among children who are having a very difficult time dealing with it,” he said. “I don’t know that parents are always aware of what their kids are doing on their smartphones.”

A warning label would help raise awareness, said Beth Houf, the principal of Capital City High School in Jefferson, Mo.

“It’s a step in helping the situation, but there is more that needs to be done,” she said.

Houf, who has also led elementary and middle schools in her career, said she’s seen the negative effects social media has on students’ mental health worsen over the 17 years she’s been a principal. Despite the cyberbullying and the unhealthy comparisons kids make of each other on social media, they can’t seem to turn away from these platforms, she said.

“When you hear something or have a vibration in your pocket, the fear that you’re missing out on something you feel like you have to engage with—that makes it harder to pay attention in the classroom,” she said.

Murthy said social media platforms should also not be allowed to collect sensitive data from children nor use manipulative features like algorithms, push notifications, and the infinite scroll, which all “contribute to excessive use.” Murthy also renewed his calls for social media companies to share their data on the health effects of their products with independent scientists and the public.

But schools and parents also have roles to play, Murthy said.

“Schools should ensure that classroom learning and social time are phone-free experiences,” he said. “Parents, too, should create phone-free zones around bedtime, meals, and social gatherings to safeguard their kids’ sleep and real-life connections—both of which have direct effects on mental health.”

Murthy is to be congratulated for making his opinion public on this issue. I highly recommend Jonathon Haidt’s bestseller, The Anxious Generation, for further reading.

Tony

CUNY students and others at a pro-Palestinian protest outside the CUNY chancellor’s office  last November. The New York Daily News.

Dear Commons Community,

The U.S. Education Department, as part of a civil rights probe, earlier this week identified “concerns” about how the City University of New York investigated and responded to allegations and complaints of antisemitism and Islamophobia.

The nine complaints date to 2019-20, but also include the most recent school year, as campus tensions over the Israel-Hamas war erupted in the final weeks of the semester with a pro-Palestinian encampment and disruptions at graduations. Included in the probe were Hunter College, Brooklyn College, the CUNY School of Law, Queens College, Baruch College and CUNY’s central offices.  As reported by The Daily News.

The episodes included allegations that Jewish students at Hunter College were told they “should be listening, not speaking” during a discussion about the Middle East, a verbal assault on a Jewish person at Baruch College and pro-Palestinian students at Queens College saying they’d been called “terrorists.”

With education officials still investigating, CUNY approached the Education Department about a voluntary agreement to increase training and reporting requirements, and reopen internal investigations into some of the complaints. For each, CUNY is required to provide investigators with their findings and next steps.

“Everyone has a right to learn in an environment free from discriminatory harassment based on who they are,” U.S. Assistant Education Secretary for Civil Rights Catherine Lhamon said in a statement. “In fully executing the important commitments announced today, the City University of New York will ensure that its students may learn in the nondiscriminatory environment federal law promises to them.”

The complaints against CUNY and an additional two cases at the University of Michigan are the first since Oct. 7 to be resolved by the Education Department, with more than 100 still pending at colleges and public school districts across the nation.

At Hunter, investigators confirmed that students and faculty in 2021 disrupted two required online classes “by commandeering the scheduled course discussion to use the class time to call for the decolonization of Palestine,” according to a press release. At least one student left, and another testified that when Jewish students spoke or tried to contribute to the conversation, their classmates told them they “should be listening, not speaking.”

Hunter, in its investigation, said the incident did not deny Jewish students access to education. But civil rights investigators called out the fact that CUNY did not directly interview any students in the class, leading education officials to conclude Hunter “could not have adequately evaluated what occurred in the sessions.”

Over the past school year, more incidents that were still under investigation emerged. In November, a Baruch student attacked a Jewish person, shouting, “Jews are all s–t and need to die,” just over a week before a large toilet paper swastika was found in a campus bathroom, according to press reports cited in the complaint.

Other cases alleged discrimination against Arab and Muslim students and pro-Palestinian students. CUNY Law this spring jettisoned its tradition of a student commencement address, after previous speakers who wore hijabs sparked public controversy over their criticism of Israel. At Queens College, pro-Palestinian students said they were verbally harassed and called names, such as “ISIS” and “terrorists,” during a campus protest that the college failed to investigate.

“While [the federal Office for Civil Rights] investigation of these nine cases are in various stages of progress,” education officials said in a letter to CUNY, the office “has determined that sufficient concerns identified in the investigation to date warrant comprehensive resolution now.”

Kenneth Marcus, founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law — which brought the complaint against CUNY for Jewish students — and a former head of the Office for Civil Rights, said Monday’s announcement was a “welcome first step,” but shows that CUNY is “far from finished with addressing these pervasive issues.”

“Simply requiring CUNY to complete the internal investigations of antisemitic events on their campuses that should have been done thoroughly in the first place is not enough,” he said. “Because [the Office for Civil Rights] didn’t finish their investigation, they will need to work twice as hard on the monitoring and work very closely with CUNY.”

An independent review of CUNY’s antisemitism and discrimination policies and procedures, ordered last fall by Gov. Hochul, is ongoing, according to the university. More recently, seven CUNY colleges have been working with Hillel, a Jewish campus organization, to conduct surveys about how Jewish students feel on campus and will make recommendations by September.

“CUNY is committed to providing an environment that is free from discrimination and hate,” CUNY Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez said in a statement, “and these new steps will ensure that there is consistency and transparency in how complaints are investigated and resolved.”

This is a serious situation that requires CUNY’s complete attention!

Tony