Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education is providing a table of the first wave of reconceived Carnegie classifications.  The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the American Council on Education, which manage the classifications, posted the new college research designations yesterday.

There are now three possible research categories that colleges can fall under:

• Research 1: Very High Spending and Doctorate Production (187 institutions): Institutions that, on average in a single year, spend at least $50 million on research and development and award at least 70 research doctorates.
• Research 2: High Spending and Doctorate Production (139 institutions): Institutions that, on average in a single year, spend at least $5 million on research and development and award at least 20 research doctorates.
• Research Colleges and Universities (218 institutions): Institutions not on one of the above lists that, on average in a single year, award at least $2.5 million on research and development.

The third category, “Research Colleges and Universities,” is new, and allows for institutions that conduct some research to get a research designation even if they don’t offer doctorates, which wasn’t possible in past Carnegie classifications. It also allows for tribal colleges to get a research designation. In the past, “tribal college” and the “R1” and “R2″ categories were mutually exclusive. The change is intended to “shed light on institutions that have engaged in research but historically haven’t been recognized for it,” Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, said in a statement.

Over all, the Carnegie Classification’s managers hoped both to acknowledge the research that happens at non-doctoral universities, and to make research intensity less central to a college’s identity, as they told The Chronicle previously.

The American Council on Education and the Carnegie Foundation plan to release new classifications for every college — not just those that conduct research — in April 2025. In the new core classifications, colleges will be sorted by “characteristics including the types of degrees they award, the fields of study in which students receive their degree, and the size of the institution,” according to a release accompanying the new research listings.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading a third novel by Ronald H. Balson entitled, The Girl from Berlin, written in 2018.  This is the third book by Balson that I have read during the winter intersession.  He has a formula that captivates the reader and uses a modern day trial investigation to unravel a mystery that took place during the 1930s and 1940s in Europe.  This story is based in Germany and Italy and focuses on the life of an aged Italian woman (Gabrielle) who is about to lose her home and villa in Tuscany in 2017 to a German-owned corporation.  Gabrielle’s attorney, Catherine Lockhart,  and private investigator husband, Liam Taggart, are employed to reveal events that took place eighty years ago to determine who are the rightful owners of the property. There is lots of intrigue and Nazi cruelty in the story.

If you are a mystery fan and at all interested in World War II, the Holocaust, and the Nazi era, I highly recommend The Girl from Berlin.

Below is a brief review and summary that appeared in Class and the City.

Tony

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Class and the City

January 2, 2019

Book Review – The Girl From Berlin by Ronald H. Balson

It’s a little bit tricky – maneuvering crying on your commute into the city because you’ve reached the point where the book you’re reading has had one too many parallels to contemporary times and none of the characters deserve the violent endings they inevitably receive. Of course, when you embark on reading historical fiction about WWII and the Holocaust, happy endings are not to be expected. Yet in this story, Ronald Balson is able to weave in a few necessary plot development surprises.

The book begins with an Alfa Romeo driving through the gorgeous hills of Tuscany – my mother’s dream – in modern times. This is before we get into the book within the book that takes us back into the confusion and total hell of the Holocaust. I haven’t read any of Balson’s first four books (yet!) but I understand that he writes a series that features lawyer Catherine Lockhart and her husband, Liam. Similar to the way Fredrick Backman writes his stories, they are not sequels and prequels to one another, but instead just hold the same two crime solving characters like Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, who are apt to pop up in any story to take charge of an unfortunate situation.

In this book, I was thrilled to see that three of the main characters were female. That Balson, a practicing lawyer himself, wrote from the perspective of two female lawyers, who had men as their sidekicks. It was a nice surprise to have a book written by a man where powerful women were at the forefront and their husbands were able to pleasantly support them in their professional endeavors. It is these characters and the characters of the story from the past that make the book truly spectacular. The character development is phenomenal and the way Balson is able to portray the lasting affects of trauma was so creative. The premise of the story is that an eighty-something year old woman in Pienza is about to be evicted from her villa and vineyard due to confusing property title records, after charges were pressed by a major wine manufacturer. The woman, Gabrielle, is unable to speak about her past due to traumatic events and instead shares copies of an unpublished manuscript with her new lawyer, Catherine Lockhart. By reading through the manuscript and following the clues it leads her to, Lockhart and her husband are able to realize discrepancies in the property records surrounding the villa and nearby properties. It’s perhaps the most frightening aspect of all, when you realize that the Holocaust was a reality not too long ago.

This book is a must-read, for the clever story crafting and interesting characters and the mysteries they carry with them. But not only for these purposes. In today’s political climate there are many seriously stomach-flipping parallels occurring with what took place in Germany in the early 1900’s. I was on the NJ transit entering the tunnel heading into New York Penn Station when I read on page 66 that Hitler had promised to “Make Germany Great Again.” My stomach entirely turned on itself and I started to feel bile coming up through my throat. These are not coincidences. Just like it’s not a coincidence that earlier last month Trump announced that he was trying to modify citizenship rights so that not everyone born in the United States should be considered a citizen anymore. Perhaps the one difference between the present United States and Germany in the 1930’s and 40’s is that the US has a democracy and constitution. And though the democracy part seems to be easily manipulated by foreign powers and complying social media networks, it does still give me the smallest piece of mind that the Democrats just took back the majority in the House.

Politics aside, do yourself a favor and read this captivating book. Who knows, you might learn a little something too.

Stay Classy, xx.

Dear Commons Community,

John Bolton, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, believes that Trump’s statements about Ukraine’s potential losses before the start of negotiations with Russia mean that Trump “has effectively surrendered to Putin”.

In an interview on CNN (see video above), Bolton stressed that “it is unconscionable to allow Russia to assault Ukraine’s sovereignty, recruit enemies like North Korea to aid in their fight, and then sell out the Ukrainians by conceding the loss of their territory and NATO security guarantees or membership”.  

“By making these and others concessions before negotiations even started, Trump has effectively surrendered to Putin on Ukraine,” he said.  

Bolton noted that he had warned many times that Trump would favor Russia in negotiations between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin.

“Russia’s military performance has been miserable, but Trump is vindicating Putin’s decision to invade,” Bolton pointed out. 

Bolton thinks that the harm and damage to US security interests “will extend well beyond Central Europe, as our adversaries in the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific can plainly see”.

Bolton said:  “It is incumbent on US leaders to stand unequivocally with Ukraine and whatever NATO allies stick with Kyiv. It is not in our national interest to let the Kremlin’s unprovoked aggression against Ukraine prevail. Shame on the Trump administration.”

Yesterday, US Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, said  that a return to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is not a realistic goal, and that the US does not consider NATO membership for Ukraine a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement of the war.

Sounds like Trump and company are raising the white flag!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

A large group of Danes are mocking Trump by circulating a petition to buy California. 

The petition to buy the state of California for Denmark prompted more than 200,000 signatures by yesterday in response to President Trump’s talk about taking control of Greenland, a vast and mineral-rich Arctic island.  As reported by Time.

“Have you ever looked at a map and thought, ‘You know what Denmark needs? More sunshine, palm trees, and roller skates,’” the petition asks. “Well, we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make that dream a reality. 

“It is in the national interest to promote the extraordinary heritage of our Nation, so California will become New Denmark. Los Angeles? More like Løs Ångeles,” it says.

Xavier Dutoit, the petition’s organizer, got the idea last month while vacationing in the Philippines. He overheard an American tourist loudly discussing Trump’s Greenland pitch.

“That American didn’t seem to grasp how unhinged and absurd it was for any country’s President — especially in a stable democracy that the USA claims to be — to offer or threaten to take over another sovereign country’s territory,” Dutoit wrote in an email to The Associated Press.

While Dutoit is not Danish — he is Swiss-French — he consulted a multi-national group of friends who are helping him, including Kenneth Haar, who is Danish and lives in Copenhagen.

“The Trump-Greenland issue is, by far, the biggest political issue in this country at the moment,” Haar told AP in a Zoom interview. “It is considered a very depressing and a very dangerous situation.”

While Løs Ångeles is a joke, there is another city in Southern California with a very real connection to the land of Vikings, Lego and Hans Christian Andersen. Known as “the Danish capital of America,” Solvang was founded by three immigrants from Denmark in 1911.

The city is popular with tourists, who come in droves for its aebleskiver pastries (similar to fritters), Scandinavian windmills, a main street called “ Copenhagen Drive ” and, of course, a Hans Christian Andersen Museum to honor the famous Danish fairy tale author. Danish royals have visited several times over the decades.

In 2019, Trump scrapped a trip to Denmark, blaming Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen for making a “nasty” statement when she rejected his first-term idea of buying Greenland as an absurdity. Greenland is a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark, a U.S. ally and fellow member of NATO.

Before taking office again last month, Trump said he would not rule out the use of military force to seize control of Greenland, calling it vital to U.S. national security, and last month his son visited the island.

Múte B. Egede, Greenland’s prime minister, shot back: “Greenland is for the Greenlandic people. We do not want to be Danish, we do not want to be American. We want to be Greenlandic.”

Haar said California’s appeal to Danes is obvious, from its towering mountains to its sunny beaches.

“We have none of that here,” he said. “Denmark is a pretty flat country with a pretty boring climate.”

The petition organizers even have their own plans for Disneyland in Southern California: “We’ll rename it Hans Christian Andersenland. Mickey Mouse in a Viking helmet? Yes, please.”

The petition notes that Trump isn’t a fan of the Golden State. Last year, he called it “Paradise Lost” and he regularly derides Gov. Gavin Newsom with the nickname “Newscum.”

But of course, every petition needs some fine print, way down at the bottom:

“Disclaimer: This campaign is 100% real … in our dreams.”

Tony

Jerome Powell.  Courtesy of Bloomberg News.

Dear Commons Community,

The growing crisis in the insurance industry may make it hard to get a mortgage in parts of the country in the coming decades, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said on Tuesday.  As reported by Yahoo Fianance and other media.

“If you fast-forward 10 or 15 years, there are going to be regions of the country where you can’t get a mortgage,” he said during his semiannual testimony to Congress, noting that banks and insurance companies have been pulling out of coastal and fire-prone areas they deem too high risk.

Insurers have been canceling policies across the country as climate change intensifies natural disasters, saddling them with multibillion-dollar losses. State Farm, for example, canceled thousands of policies in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles months before it was devastated by wildfires.

Because mortgage lenders typically require homeowners insurance as a condition of making a loan, prospective buyers with few alternatives are increasingly purchasing coverage from state-designed insurers of last resort, which can have higher premiums and skimpier coverage than traditional alternatives.

Banks and insurers won’t keep making loans or providing coverage when faced with evidence of disasters, Powell said in response to a question from Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith.

Questions about high housing costs came up repeatedly throughout Powell’s testimony. The Fed chair reiterated that interest rate normalization may help buyers in the years ahead, but much of the problems with affordability boil down to a lack of supply, an issue outside of the Fed’s purview.

“There’s a short-term problem that will go away in the coming years, but there’s a longer-term problem with housing affordability, and that’s going to be something that’s not within our authorities or powers to affect,” Powell said in response to a question from Sen. Ruben Gallego.

Even if rates do fall, Powell said it’s “not obvious” that lower rates would slow housing inflation because demand would likely rise.

“It would unlock people’s low mortgages, but that creates both a buyer and a seller,” Powell said. “It’s not clear that that would be something that would drive down housing inflation.”

When asked about the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Powell said that the government’s backing of the mortgage giants “does hold down mortgage rates.” He said releasing them from conservatorship was ultimately a question for Congress, adding that “putting housing finance back in the private sector has some appeal over the longer run.”

Sad situation!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Elon Musk is attempting to put himself at the forefront of artificial intelligence with a high-stakes bid that could reshape the future of the technology. The Tesla and SpaceX founder is leading a group of investors who’ve offered to buy OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT, for $97.4 billion. The investment could give Musk majority control of the company, which rivals his X.AI program. In response to the unsolicited offer, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a post on X, “no thank you but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.” Their back-and-forth comes as political and business leaders are meeting at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris to discuss how to create effective guardrails for AI without stifling innovation.  Below is further analysis and reporting by Matt O’Brien of  The Associated Press.

Tony

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The Associated Press

Elon Musk-led group proposes buying OpenAI for $97.4 billion. OpenAI CEO says ‘no thank you’

By  Matt OBrien

Updated 9:16 PM EST, February 10, 2025

A group of investors led by Elon Musk is offering about $97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit behind OpenAI, escalating a dispute with the artificial intelligence company that Musk helped found a decade ago.

Musk and his own AI startup, xAI, and a consortium of investment firms want to take control of the ChatGPT maker and revert it to its original charitable mission as a nonprofit research lab, according to Musk’s attorney Marc Toberoff.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman quickly rejected the unsolicited bid on Musk’s social platform X, saying, “no thank you but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.”

Musk bought Twitter, now called X, for $44 billion in 2022.

Musk and Altman, who together helped start OpenAI in 2015 and later competed over who should lead it, have been in a long-running feud over the startup’s direction since Musk resigned from its board in 2018.

Musk, an early OpenAI investor and board member, sued the company last year, first in a California state court and later in federal court, alleging it had betrayed its founding aims as a nonprofit research lab that would benefit the public good by safely building better-than-human AI. Musk had invested about $45 million in the startup from its founding until 2018, Toberoff has said.

The sudden success of ChatGPT two years ago brought worldwide fame and a new revenue stream to OpenAI and also heightened the internal battles over the future of the organization and the advanced AI it was trying to develop. Its nonprofit board fired Altman in late 2023. He came back days later with a new board.

Now a fast-growing business still controlled by a nonprofit board bound to its original mission, OpenAI last year announced plans to formally change its corporate structure. But such changes are complicated. Tax law requires money or assets donated to a tax-exempt organization to remain within the charitable sector.

If the initial organization becomes a for-profit, generally, a conversion is needed where the for-profit pays the fair market value of the assets to another charitable organization. Even if the nonprofit OpenAI continues to exist in some way, some experts argue it would have to be paid fair market value for any assets that get transferred to its for-profit subsidiaries.

Lawyers for OpenAI and Musk faced off in a California federal court last week as a judge weighed Musk’s request for a court order that would block the ChatGPT maker from converting itself to a for-profit company.

U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers hasn’t yet ruled on Musk’s request but in the courtroom said it was a “stretch” for Musk to claim he will be irreparably harmed if she doesn’t intervene to stop OpenAI from moving forward with its planned transition.

But the judge also raised concerns about OpenAI and its relationship with business partner Microsoft and said she wouldn’t stop the case from moving to trial as soon as next year so a jury can decide.

“It is plausible that what Mr. Musk is saying is true. We’ll find out. He’ll sit on the stand,” she said.

Along with Musk and xAI, others backing the bid announced Monday include Baron Capital Group, Valor Management, Atreides Management, Vy Fund, Emanuel Capital Management and Eight Partners VC.

Toberoff said in a statement that if Altman and OpenAI’s current board “are intent on becoming a fully for-profit corporation, it is vital that the charity be fairly compensated for what its leadership is taking away from it: control over the most transformative technology of our time.”

Musk’s attorney also shared a letter he sent in early January to the attorneys general of California, where OpenAI operates, and Delaware, where it is incorporated.

Since both state offices must “ensure any such transactional process relating to OpenAI’s charitable assets provides at least fair market value to protect the public’s beneficial interest, we assume you will provide a process for competitive bidding to actually determine that fair market value,” Toberoff wrote, asking for more information on the terms and timing of that bidding process.

Credit…Stephen Hilger/Bloomberg News

Dear Commons Community,

For years, experts and government officials have called for eliminating the penny.

Since taking office, President Trump has set his sights on big targets, like buying  Greenland. But he has also taken aim at small ones, like paper straws. And pennies.

On Sunday night, Mr. Trump said he had ordered the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, to stop producing new pennies, a move that he said would help reduce unnecessary government spending.  As reported by The New York Times and other media.

“Let’s rip the waste out of our great nations budget, even if it’s a penny at a time,” he said in a post on Truth Social, adding that pennies “literally cost us more than 2 cents.”

It is unclear whether Mr. Trump has the power to do this. It is Congress, not the Treasury or the Federal Reserve, that authorizes the manufacture of the nation’s coins, according to the U.S. Mint.

But he is right that pennies cost more than they are worth. For years, experts and government officials have called for eliminating the penny, whose purchasing power has fallen because of inflation even as its production costs have risen.

It cost 3.69 cents to produce and distribute a penny last year, according to the U.S. Mint’s annual report. This means that, accounting for their face value, each penny made a loss of 2.69 cents.

Last year, the Mint issued over three billion pennies, according to its annual report, at a loss of about $85.3 million. Pennies, which are often given as change but rarely spent, accounted for more than half of all the coins the Mint produced that year. There were about 250 billion pennies in circulation, or about 700 per person, in the United States, last year.

Countries around the world have eliminated their smallest-denomination coins in recent decades.

In 2012, Canada stopped producing pennies, describing them as essentially a waste of time and space and arguing that the move would save millions of dollars a year. Since then, cash transactions have been rounded to the nearest nickel, after federal and provincial sales taxes are added.

Australia withdrew its one- and two-cent coins from circulation in 1992, citing inflation and production costs. Even earlier, countries like Sweden and New Zealand stopped minting their one-cent coins.

In Australia, the elimination of those coins “hasn’t mattered at all,” said Andrew Stoeckel, an honorary professor at the Australian National University’s Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis. In the U.S., given how little pennies are used, the move would also likely have a negligible impact on the economy, though the government would probably save some money, he said.

The movement to eliminate pennies has faced significant opposition. Americans for Common Cents, an advocacy group, has argued that eliminating pennies would not save money, because “many overhead expenses at the Mint would remain and would need to be absorbed by other coins, increasing their per-unit costs.”

In addition, the elimination of the penny will increase the demand for nickels, which are even more expensive to produce and distribute at 13.78 cents per coin, the organization said. (The dime is the smallest coin whose face value is greater than what it costs to produce.)

Penny proponents have also argued that eliminating the coin would effectively impose a one-cent sales tax on consumers, because prices ending in 99 cents are so common.

But much of the resistance may have to do with sentimentality, said Professor Stoeckel.

“People will put it in a paperweight or something; there’ll probably be some hoarding,” he said of the penny. “It’s just a memento kind of thing. There’s no significance.”

As a young child growing up in the 1950s, my mother would give me a few pennies (on good days as much as a nickel or dime) and I would go to the “candy store” and buy penny candy.  I loved the smell of the dozen or more candies (lollipops, bubble gum, sour balls, tootsie rolls) in the candy cabinet, each of which cost a penny.

Tony

Dear Colleagues,

The snow yesterday made for a winter wonderland at our lake.  These photos were from my driveway.  The house on the left is where we live.

Tony

Orlando Sentinel.

Dear Commons Community,

My colleague, Patsy Moskal, alerted me to an opinion piece written by Scott Maxwell, a columnist for the Orlando Sentinel, in which he laments the abysmal student test scores in Florida.  Here is an excerpt:

“For the past several years, Florida politicians have been on a crusade to censor books, whitewash history, bash teachers and even pass laws about preferred pronouns — basically do anything except actually educate students.

So it should come as little surprise that Florida schools just posted some of the worst scores in decades on what’s known as the “nation’s report card” for public schools.

We’re talking scores so low, Florida even trailed Mississippi in one category. Unless it’s a competition for mud pies or confederate war monuments, you should never trail Mississippi.

As the Orlando Sentinel recently reported, Florida’s eighth graders posted the lowest math scores in 20 years and the lowest reading scores in more than 25 years on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests.”

Thank you Governor DeSantis and the Republicans controlling the Florida education system.

Tony