Dear Commons Community,

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

Cheerio

Tony

——————————————————-

The New York Times

Harry’s Fractured Fairy Tale

Jan. 14, 2023

By Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soohee Cho

Dear Commons Community,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tony

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

Dear Commons Community,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May he rest in peace!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It sounds like dereliction of duty!

Tony

Paul Ryan dishes on Donald Trump

Dear Commons Community,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ryan has a good deal of insider information.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Attorney General Merrick Garland announced yesterday the appointment of a special counsel, Robert Hur, to oversee the Justice Department’s investigation into the discoveries of classified documents kept by President Biden after he left office as Vice President under Barack Obama.

President Biden acknowledged yesterday that a document with classified markings from his time as vice president was found in his “personal library” at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, along with other documents found in his garage, days after it was disclosed that sensitive documents were also found at the office of his former institute in Washington.  As reported by the Associated Press.

Biden told reporters at the White House that he was “cooperating fully and completely” with a Justice Department investigation into how classified information and government records were stored. He did not say when the latest series of documents were found, only that his lawyers’ review of potential storage locations was completed Wednesday night. Lawyers found the first set on Nov. 2, days before the midterm elections, but publicly revealed that development only on Monday.

Richard Sauber, a special counsel to the president, said after the initial documents were found by Biden’s personal lawyers, they examined other locations where records might have been shipped after Biden left the vice presidency in 2017.

Sauber said a “small number” of documents with classified markings were found in a storage space in Biden’s garage in Wilmington, with one document being located in an adjacent room. Biden later revealed that the other location was his personal library.

Biden said the Department of Justice was “immediately notified” after the documents were located and that department lawyers took custody of the records. The first batch of documents had been turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration.

Regardless of the Justice Department review, the revelation that Biden potentially mishandled classified or presidential records is proving to be a political headache for Biden, who said former President Donald Trump was “irresponsible” for keeping hundreds of such records at his private club in Florida.

New House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, said of the latest news: “I think Congress has to investigate this.”

“Here’s an individual that sat on ‘60 Minutes’ that was so concerned about President Trump’s documents locked in behind, and now we find that this is a vice president keeping it for years out in the open for different locations.”

The top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee has requested that intelligence agencies conduct a “damage assessment” of potentially classified documents. Ohio Rep. Mike Turner on Thursday also requested briefings from Attorney General Merrick Garland and the director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, on their reviews by Jan. 26.

“The presence of classified information at these separate locations could implicate the President in the mishandling, potential misuse, and exposure of classified information,” Turner wrote the officials.

Garland was to deliver a statement later Thursday but the Justice Department didn’t provide details.

Earlier this week, the White House confirmed that the department was reviewing “a small number of documents with classified markings” found at the Washington office. Biden’s lawyers had discovered the material at the offices of the Penn Biden Center and then immediately called the National Archives about the discovery, the White House said. Biden kept an office there after he left the vice presidency in 2017 until shortly before he launched his Democratic presidential campaign in 2019.

The revelation that additional classified documents were uncovered by Biden’s team came hours after White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre dodged questions about Biden’s handling of classified information and the West Wing’s management of the discovery.

She had said Wednesday that the White House was committed to handling the matter in the “right way,” pointing to Biden’s personal attorneys’ immediate notification of the National Archives.

But she refused to say when Biden himself had been briefed, whether there were any more classified documents potentially located at other unauthorized locations, and why the White House waited more than two months to reveal the discovery of the initial batch of documents.

The Justice Department is reviewing the records that were found at the Penn Biden Center and Garland has asked John Lausch, the U.S. attorney in Chicago, to review the the matter, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press this week. That person also was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Lausch is one of the few U.S. attorneys to be held over from Trump’s administration.

Biden has said he was “surprised to learn that there are any government records that were taken there to that office” but his lawyers “did what they should have done” when they immediately called the National Archives.

The revelation also may complicate the Justice Department’s consideration of whether to bring charges against Trump. The Republican is trying to win back the White House in 2024 and has repeatedly claimed the department’s inquiry into his own conduct amounted to “corruption.”

A political mess for the Democrats!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

New York Governor Kathy Hochul is pressing the state’s public colleges and universities to make abortion pills available to students — a measure that has been stalled in the legislature since 2019.

Hochul, who outlined her plans on Tuesday in her 2023 State of the State, said she would ensure all colleges and universities in the State University of New York and City University of New York systems either offer abortion pills at student health centers or form relationships with local reproductive health care providers to refer students.  As reported by the New York Daily News.

“Knowing the struggle that is accessing reproductive care on campuses,” said Nihakira Rao, co-founder of the student advocacy group the Reproductive Justice Collective, “there’s a difference between something being legal and something being truly accessible.”

Hazel Crampton-Hays, a spokeswoman for the governor, said the proposal “can either be done administratively by these respective institutions or legislatively.”

Spokesmen for both systems indicated they would work with the governor to ensure access to reproductive health care. The rep for CUNY added that all health centers have practitioners who can at minimum prescribe the pills or make referrals to nearby providers.

A bill in Albany to offer abortion medication on public college campuses, proposed in 2019, was still in committee at the end of last session. It originally just applied to SUNY, but was expanded to include CUNY last year, according to Assemblyman Harvey Epstein, its sponsor in the chamber alongside State Sen. Cordell Cleare.

Epstein estimated the directive could include $5 million in state funding to support the schools that do not yet have the infrastructure or resources in place, mostly community colleges.

The governor’s upcoming executive budget will include additional policies and funding details related to the proposal, the spokesperson confirmed.

Student advocates see improving abortion access on campus as vital after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in June — leading some states to enact near-blanket bans and their residents to seek reproductive health care elsewhere in places like New York.

Brigid Alliance, a service that provides logistical support for people traveling to abortions, has reported a 60% increase in clients coming from those states to New York.

“What medication on campus does is students don’t have to experience delays and wait times, which can go into weeks,” said Rao, a senior at Barnard College, adding that abortion pills are only prescribed for the early weeks of pregnancy. “That week-long delay can mean a difference in the procedure you can have access to.”

Rao added that students seeking getting their health care needs met on campus can reduce the load on clinics for the general public.

Plus, many of the clinics have become hotspots for clashes with abortion opponents, according to Hennessy Garcia, a student at CUNY Medgar Evers College in Crown Heights — who as a member of NYC for Abortion Rights counters protesters at Planned Parenthood in SoHo. Having access on campus could help students avoid those confrontations.

“It would definitely reduce fear among students,” said Garcia, who also organizes with the Reproductive Justice Collective.

Students can also face barriers to abortion related transportation, prohibitive costs or trouble navigating student health insurance coverage. Some colleges limit the number of students allowed cars on campus, and the New York school furthest from a clinic is more than 68 miles away, the advocacy group found.

Last October, Barnard, a women’s college, announced it would prepare and train campus providers to offer abortion medication by fall 2023. California and Massachusetts have already passed similar legislation to provide the pills at public university health centers.

“It’s really embarrassing for New York to be third!” Rao said.

Absolutely!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

President Biden’s aides found a new batch of classified documents at a second location associated with Mr. Biden, a person familiar with the situation said yesterday. It was the second such disclosure in three days.  As reported by The New York Times.

Republicans reveled in the new disclosures, accusing Mr. Biden of hypocrisy in calling former President Donald J. Trump irresponsible for hoarding sensitive documents at his private club and residence in Florida. This week, the new Republican chairman of the House oversight committee issued a far-ranging request to the National Archives and Records Administration, which is supposed to receive all highly sensitive materials after an administration leaves office, for documents and correspondence.

It is not clear where or when the records were recovered. But Mr. Biden’s aides have scoured various places since November, when his lawyers discovered a handful of classified files, including briefing materials on foreign countries, as they closed a think tank office in Washington. The Justice Department is reviewing the discovery to determine how to proceed.

A White House spokesman and a member of Mr. Biden’s legal team did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment.

On Tuesday, Mr. Biden told reporters in Mexico City that he was “surprised” to learn in the fall that his lawyers found classified government documents in his former office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement.

He said his staff had fully cooperated with the National Archives and the Justice Department.

A day later, NBC News reported that another cache had been found at a different, undisclosed location.

Under government regulations, access to classified documents is limited to people who are currently authorized to see them and the materials must be stored in special security containers to limit the risk of exposing sensitive information. The Presidential Records Act says official documents in the White House — classified and unclassified alike — should be turned over to the National Archives when an administration departs.

After Mr. Trump left office, officials with the archives identified sensitive documents that had not been recovered, prompting numerous appeals for their return. The matter was eventually referred to the Justice Department, which conducted a court-approved search of Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and turned up classified materials, including some bearing the most restrictive top secret markings.

By contrast, the first set of documents found by Mr. Biden’s lawyers was voluntarily returned to the archives in November, and had not been logged as missing. It is not clear if the archives had flagged the new materials.

A spokesman for the archives declined to comment.

The discovery of the second batch raises new questions about the handling of sensitive documents by a Biden team that has prided itself for adhering to norms and rules flouted by his predecessor.

But the circumstances of the two cases appear strikingly different. Unlike Mr. Trump, who resisted returning the records stored at Mar-a-Lago and failed to fully comply with a subpoena, Mr. Biden’s team appears to have acted swiftly and in accordance with the law, immediately summoning officials with the National Archives to retrieve the files. The archives then alerted the Justice Department, according to the White House.

Biden and his staff have given Republicans lots of fodder for criticism and sloppiness!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Nick Perez of The Chronicle of Higher Education compiled online college enrollments based on data collected by United States Department of Education for the years 2017 to 2021. As backdrop, when Covid-19 was officially declared a pandemic in March 2020, campuses were swiftly evacuated and instruction moved online en masse. New preliminary federal data, released in late 2022, charts what has happened in distance-education patterns, both throughout the sector and at individual institutions, through fall 2021.

The share of students who were enrolled only in distance-education classes dropped to 30.4 percent in 2021 from 45.6 percent in 2020 (see trend data above), according to a Chronicle analysis of USDOE data for close to 3,900 public and private four-year and two-year institutions. But it’s still higher than pre-pandemic numbers: In 2017, the share of students who were enrolled only in distance-learning classes was 15.7 percent.

The share of students who were enrolled only in distance education grew 12.8 percentage points between 2019 and 2021.  the increases differed among higher education institutions (see data below).

The Chronicle has also established an online database where the user can access data for any college in the USDOE data system.  Login and/or account required.  Below is the data for my own Hunter College.

Tony

Allen Weisselberg

Dear Commons Community,

Allen Weisselberg, a longtime executive for Donald Trump ’s business empire whose testimony helped convict the former president’s company of tax fraud, was sentenced yesterday to five months in jail for dodging taxes on $1.7 million in job perks.

Weisselberg, 75, was promised that sentence in August when he agreed to plead guilty to 15 tax crimes and to testify against the Trump Organization, where he’s worked since the mid-1980s and until his arrest, had served as chief financial officer.

He was handcuffed and taken into custody moments after the sentence was announced and was expected to be taken to New York City’s notorious Rikers Island jail complex. Weisselberg will be eligible for release after a little more than three months if he behaves behind bars.  As reported by the Associated Press.

As part of the plea agreement, Judge Juan Manuel Merchan also ordered Weisselberg to pay nearly $2 million in taxes, penalties and interest — which he has paid as of Jan. 3. Additionally, the judge ordered Weisselberg to complete five years of probation after his jail term is finished.

Weisselberg faced the prospect of up to 15 years in prison — the maximum punishment for the top grand larceny charge — if he were to have reneged on the deal or if he didn’t testify truthfully at the Trump Organization’s trial. He is the only person charged in the Manhattan district attorney’s three-year investigation of Trump and his business practices.

Weisselberg testified for three days, offering a glimpse into the inner workings of Trump’s real estate empire. Weisselberg has worked for Trump’s family for nearly 50 years, starting as an accountant for his developer father, Fred Trump, in 1973 before joining Donald Trump in 1986 and helping expand the family company’s focus beyond New York City into a global golf and hotel brand.

Weisselberg told jurors he betrayed the Trump family’s trust by conspiring with a subordinate to hide more than a decade’s worth of extras from his income, including a free Manhattan apartment, luxury cars and his grandchildren’s private school tuition. He said they fudged payroll records and issued falsified W-2 forms.

A Manhattan jury convicted the Trump Organization in December, finding that Weisselberg had been a “high managerial” agent entrusted to act on behalf of the company and its various entities. Weisselberg’s arrangement reduced his own personal income taxes but also saved the company money because it didn’t have to pay him more to cover the cost of the perks.

Prosecutors said other Trump Organization executives also accepted off-the-books compensation. Weisselberg alone was accused of defrauding the federal government, state and city out of more than $900,000 in unpaid taxes and undeserved tax refunds.

The Trump Organization is scheduled to be sentenced on Friday and faces a fine of up to $1.6 million.

Weisselberg testified that neither Trump nor his family knew about the scheme as it was happening, choking up as he told jurors: “It was my own personal greed that led to this.” But prosecutors, in their closing argument, said Trump “knew exactly what was going on” and that evidence, such as a lease he signed for Weisselberg’s apartment, made clear “Mr. Trump is explicitly sanctioning tax fraud.”

A Trump Organization lawyer, Michael van der Veen, has said Weisselberg concocted the scheme without Trump or the Trump family’s knowledge.

Weisselberg said the Trumps remained loyal to him even as the company scrambled to end some of its dubious pay practices following Trump’s 2016 election. He said Trump’s eldest sons, entrusted to run the company while Trump was president, gave him a $200,000 raise after an internal audit found he had been reducing his salary and bonuses by the cost of the perks.

Though he is now on a leave of absence, the company continues to pay Weisselberg $640,000 in salary and $500,000 in holiday bonuses. It punished him only nominally after his arrest in July 2021, reassigning him to senior adviser and moving his office.

He even celebrated his 75th birthday at Trump Tower with cake and colleagues in August, just hours after finalizing the plea agreement that ushered his transformation from loyal executive to prosecution witness.

Rikers Island, a compound of 10 jails on a spit of land in the East River, just off the main runway at LaGuardia Airport in Queens, has been plagued in recent years by violence, inmate deaths and staggering staffing shortages.

Though just 5 miles (8 kilometers) from Trump Tower, it’s a veritable world away from the life of luxury Weisselberg schemed to build — a far cry from the gilded Fifth Avenue offices where he hatched his plot and the Hudson River-view apartment he reaped as a reward.

This sentence seems light to me!  Why about a year or so for Trump?

Tony