Michael J. Hicks: Trump has no plan to fix the economy – and Americans know it!

 

Dear Commons Community,

Mchael J. Hicks, the director of the Center for Business and Economic Research and the George and Frances Ball distinguished professor of economics in the Miller College of Business at Ball State University, had an op-ed in the Indianapolis Star yesterday entitled, “Trump has no plan to fix the economy – and Americans know it.”   It is a sober piece that portends financial struggle or worse for our economy over the next year or more. Below is his entire commentary.

Tony

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Recessions are caused by economic shocks that affect either the demand or the supply of goods and services. President Donald Trump’s policy choices target both supply and demand.

This helps explain the rapid reversal of economic growth that has descended upon the United States. Because these effects hit both consumers and producers, changing course will become increasingly difficult.

This risks a very painful type of recession.

Before I explain how this recession might play out, it is useful to address the president’s main assertion that he is trading short-term pain for long-term gain. It is bunk.

Americans know Trump plan has no long-term gain

The range of economic responses, from declining stocks to reduced consumer sentiment and spending, suggests that families and businesses understand there is no long-term gain in Trump’s plan.

If the White House offered a cogent and thoughtful plan to improve the U.S. economy, then stocks would be rising, business investment accelerating and consumer sentiment rising. That would be true, even if there was economic sacrifice involved.

To illustrate this, imagine if the president offered Congress a realistic plan to balance the budget over five years. It would need to include broad tax increases, targeted spending cuts and a major reworking of our entitlement programs.

Such a plan would cause short-term pain to most American families and businesses. But it would also reduce long-term borrowing costs, ensure the survival of Social Security and Medicaid, and again make us a prime location for foreign investors.

That would boost stocks and provide confidence to American investors and consumers.

Nothing remotely like that is under consideration. In fact, the plan passed by the House would be the most inflationary budget in U.S. history. Every business knows this, every member of Congress knows this and even the president’s economic advisers know this.

Market participants ‒ from homebuyers in Houston to artificial intelligence tech investors to mutual fund advisers to people planning new car purchases ‒ are all aware there is no long-run plan for economic gain.

Prices up, interest rates up: Cycle continues until courageous Republicans act

Indeed, the long-term risk to the economy is now stagflation – the combination of deep reductions of supply and demand alongside an inflationary budget. This hamstrings policies that might reduce the pain of a recession in two ways.

First, our federal debt has become so large that fiscal policy – like the $5,000 stimulus floated by Elon Musk – is unlikely to affect demand.

Second, any inflationary spending policies will force the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates. This will further reduce spending and new business expansion – cutting both demand and supply.

We are in a cycle that will continue until political pressure ends it. Writing that sentence made me chuckle, because that political pressure would have to come from courageous Republicans.

Ironically, the greatest policy impacts on supply and demand tend to surround the purchase of goods, not services. Tariffs are placed primarily on goods, increasing their price and the price of substitute goods. So all automobiles, not just those made in Canada, will see price increases.

The effects will worsen with stagflation, because interest rates will remain high.

Cars and homes will cost more, and borrowing to buy them will be more expensive. We should see households shift their consumption from goods to services. I think this will be big enough to wholly reverse the manufacturing production boom that followed the COVID-19 pandemic.

Red states face highest risks

The really interesting aspect of this is that red states tend to dominate the production of goods, while blue states are far more service-oriented.

This is also true at the county and city level.

GOP voters are far more likely to work in the trades, construction and manufacturing, while Democratic voters toil in service sectors: health care, education and professional services.

As with most downturns, the economic pain will not be uniformly distributed.

I make this point only to illustrate that Trump’s rapid recession will cause plenty of tears, but they mostly won’t be those sweet, sweet liberal tears that appeal to his MAGA followers.

Unlike Trump, I don’t revel at the economic pain of people with differing political views. I dislike recessions.

Employment shocks, like the one that is just starting, fall most heavily on the least educated workers, such as those who have not been to college or finished high school. Lost jobs mean that hardworking people lose careers, homes and oftentimes must move from the places they love.

Economic shocks to agriculture and manufacturing are more geographically concentrated, so some cities or towns will be heavily affected, while others escape the deepest job losses.

Workers in manufacturing, construction, logistics and agriculture face far greater challenges finding similar employment anywhere. These workers endure much more painful transitions to new occupations. A large share never again finds meaningful work, and their children have poorer economic prospects than those who do not lose jobs.

Over the past few years, economists were widely criticized for insisting that the economy was strong, even with high single-digit inflation. The coming downturn is going to make it starkly clear why economists are far more worried about the long-term economic effects of, say, an 8% unemployment rate than an 8% inflation rate.

We really dislike both coming at the same time – which is where Trump’s policies are pushing us. By Christmas, many Americans are going to be nostalgic for former President Joe Biden’s economy.

Of course, there is some opportunity to prevent much of this. If the president admitted that his tariffs are a mistake, stopped threatening federal spending like the CHIPS Act and made amends with our allies, he could undo much of the damage. If he could corral a bipartisan Congress to pass meaningful spending cuts and tax increases to balance the budget, we would surely experience an improved economic outlook.

I chuckled while writing that paragraph, too. He’d much rather taunt a Canadian leader than save your job. The president inherited a solid economy poised for a soft landing. He chose a recession.  

U.S. Department of Education Closes its Office of Educational Technology!

Dear Commons Community

The U.S. Department of Education’s office of educational technology has been eliminated as part of the federal agency’s massive reduction in force, according to sources familiar with the layoffs and an email notice obtained by Education Week.

The office, also called OET, was tasked with setting a national education technology plan and assisting states and districts in implementing technology in schools. Practically speaking, the OET has helped states and districts navigate whatever new and emerging technology is affecting schools—from cellphones and social media to artificial intelligence and cybersecurity—by providing policy guidance and evidence-based strategies.

The OET staffers are among the hundreds of employees dismissed from the Education Department, after the federal agency announced that it will shrink its workforce to about 2,200 employees by March 21. That’s just over half of its size when President Donald Trump—who has repeatedly pledged to eliminate the 45-year-old agency—took office on Jan. 20.

While the OET was small, consisting of just three career officials and a handful of fellows, proponents of its work said the office had an outsize impact.

“There’s going to be a new technology—it’s inevitable,” said Joseph South, the chief innovation officer for ISTE/ASCD, who was a former OET director during the Obama administration. “States and districts are going to be trying to figure it out, … and there won’t be an entity that’s gathering research on effective pedagogy, best practices, and then responding back to states with guidance.”

Not all states have a dedicated team or person who coordinates ed-tech, he added.

The Education Department did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement announcing the overall reduction in force, Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the goal was to make the agency more efficient.

After this announcement, several news sources were reporting that Trump intends to sign an executive order eliminating the entire Education Department today!

Tony

Chief Justice John Roberts Smacks Down Trump’s Call to Impeach Judges


Chief Justice John Roberts. Reuters.

Dear Commons Community,

Chief Justice John Roberts decried calls from President Trump and his supporters to impeach judges who have ruled against administration policies, saying that the courts should be left to resolve legal disputes through the traditional system of litigation. As reported by The Wall Street Journal.

“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts said Tuesday in a statement. “The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”

To be sure, judicial impeachments have been floated for political purposes before.

In 1970, House Minority Leader Gerald Ford (R., Mich.), the future president, called for impeaching Justice William O. Douglas, a pugnacious liberal who recently had published a book, “Points of Rebellion,” sympathizing with the era’s radical movements. Last year, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) filed impeachment articles against Justice Clarence Thomas, the current court’s most conservative member whose undisclosed acceptance of lavish gifts from wealthy patrons prompted critics to question his ethics.

Impeachment threats against district judges over preliminary orders issued at the outset of litigation are all but unheard of—let alone from the president.

To remove a judge, the House would have to approve articles of impeachment and the Senate, following a trial, would need to convict by a two-thirds vote. While the odds of that are slim, Roberts and other judges have warned that incendiary rhetoric from political leaders can lead to intimidation of judges and even threats to their and their families’ safety.

Trump loves to intimidate because he is such a cowardly bully.

Tony

Previously classified documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy have been released: Sending historians hunting for new clues!

President John F. Kennedy waves from his car in a motorcade approximately one minute before he was shot, Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas.  (AP Photo/Jim Altgens, File)

Dear Commons Community, 

Unredacted documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy were released yesterday following an order by President Donald Trump shortly after he took office.

More than 1,100 files consisting of over 31,000 pages were posted on the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration’s website in the evening. The vast majority of the National Archives’ collection of over 6 million pages of records, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings and artifacts related to the assassination have previously been released.  As reported by The Associated Press.

Larry J. Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and author of “The Kennedy Half-Century,” said he had a team that started going through the documents but it may be some time before their full significance becomes clear.

“We have a lot of work to do for a long time to come, and people just have to accept that,” he said.

Trump announced the release Monday while visiting the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, saying his administration would be releasing about 80,000 pages.

“We have a tremendous amount of paper. You’ve got a lot of reading,” Trump said.

Researchers had estimated that the number of files still released either in whole or in part was around 3,000 to 3,500. And last month the FBI said it had discovered about 2,400 new records related to the assassination.

Jefferson Morley, vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a repository for files related to the assassination, said in a statement posted on the social platform X that the release is “an encouraging start.” Complete versions of about a third of the redacted documents held by the National Archives have now been made public, he said, an estimate of over 1,100 of about 3,500 documents.

“Rampant overclassification of trivial information has been eliminated and there appear to be no redactions, though we have not viewed every document,” Morely said.

The National Archives said on its website that in accordance with the president’s directive, the release would encompass “all records previously withheld for classification.” But Morley said what was released Tuesday did not include two-thirds of the promised files or any of the recently discovered FBI files.

Interest in details related to Kennedy’s assassination has been intense over the decades, with countless conspiracy theories spawned.

He was killed Nov. 22, 1963, on a visit to Dallas, when his motorcade was finishing its parade route downtown and shots rang out from the Texas School Book Depository building. Police arrested 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald, who had positioned himself from a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor. Two days later nightclub owner Jack Ruby fatally shot Oswald during a jail transfer.

A year after the assassination, the Warren Commission, which President Lyndon B. Johnson established to investigate, concluded that Oswald acted alone and that there was no evidence of a conspiracy. But that didn’t quell a web of alternative theories over the decades.

Oswald was a former Marine who defected to the Soviet Union before returning home to Texas.

Files in the new release included a memo from the CIA’s St. Petersburg station from November 1991 saying that earlier that month, a CIA official befriended a U.S. professor there who told the official about a friend who worked for the KGB. The memo said the KGB official had reviewed “five thick volumes” of files on Oswald and was “confident that Oswald was at no time an agent controlled by the KGB.”

The memo added that as Oswald was described in the files, the KGB official doubted “that anyone could control Oswald, but noted that the KGB watched him closely and constantly while he was in the USSR.” It also noted that the file reflected that Oswald was a poor shot when he tried target firing in the Soviet Union.

In the early 1990s, the federal government mandated that all assassination-related documents be housed in a single collection in the National Archives and Records Administration. The collection was required to be opened by 2017, barring any exemptions designated by the president.

Around 500 documents, including tax returns, were not subject to the 2017 disclosure requirement.

Trump, who took office for his first term in 2017, had said that he would allow the release of all of the remaining records but ended up holding some back because of what he called the potential harm to national security. And while files continued to be released during President Joe Biden’s administration, some remained unseen.

Sabato said that his team has a “long, long list” of sensitive documents it is looking for that previously had large redactions.

“There must be something really, really sensitive for them to redact a paragraph or a page or multiple pages in a document like that,” he said. “Some of it’s about Cuba, some of it’s about what the CIA did or didn’t do relevant to Lee Harvey Oswald.”

Some of the previously released documents have offered details on the way intelligence services operated at the time, including CIA cables and memos discussing visits by Oswald to the Soviet and Cuban embassies during a trip to Mexico City just weeks before the assassination.

For those of us who were alive in 1963, the subsequent investigation by the Warren Commission never satisfied our curiosity of what actually happened particularly since the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was murdered by Jack Ruby while in police custody.

Tony

 

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway is investing more of its money in Japan amid the recent selloff in the U.S. stock market.

Dear Commons Community,

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway increased its holdings in Japan’s five biggest trading houses, according to Japanese regulatory filings published yesterday.  As reported by Fortune.

Berkshire grew its stake in Mitsui to 9.82% from 8.09%, in Mitsubishi to 9.67% from 8.31%, in Marubeni to 9.3% from 8.3%, in Sumitomu to 9.29% from 8.23%, and in Itochu to 8.53% from 7.47%. 

While the additional Japanese investments were disclosed yesterday, the exact timing of the transactions is unclear, though the annual letter in late February telegraphed what was coming.

The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

In contrast, Berkshire sold a net $134 billion in equities in 2024, ending the year with a cash pile of $334.2 billion—nearly double from a year ago and more than its shrinking stock portfolio of $272 billion. 

Meanwhile, U.S. stocks began nose-diving in mid-February after President Donald Trump began imposing tariffs; he has since continued rolling out more. So far, he has hit China, Canada, Mexico, steel, and aluminum with higher duties, and reciprocal tariffs are due April 2.

The Nasdaq has tumbled into correction territory, and the S&P 500 also passed the correction threshold last week but soon pared its decline to less than 10% from its peak.

That’s left investors wondering if Buffett will finally make a major purchase of stock or clinch a mega-deal for a company after complaining for years that valuations have been too high.

But analysts told Fortune earlier that a big splash is still unlikely as valuations haven’t gone down far enough, noting that Buffett usually prefers to be patient.

“He has no interest in timing the market’s bottom, nor does he chase short-term rebounds,” Armando Gonzalez, founder of AI-powered research platform Bigdata.com, said. “Instead, he waits for moments when fear drives prices to levels where the risk-reward equation tilts decisively in his favor.”

Warren Buffett knows the economy and foresaw the instability that Trump brought to it!

Tony

French Member of Parliament: Give the Statue of Liberty back to France!

Dear Commons Community,

Raphaël Glucksmann, a French politician is making headlines in his country for suggesting that the U.S. is no longer worthy of the Statue of Liberty, that was a gift from France nearly 140 years ago.

As a member of the European Parliament and co-president of a small left-wing party in France, Glucksmann does not claim to speak for all of his compatriots.

But his assertion in a speech this weekend that some Americans “have chosen to switch to the side of the tyrants” reflects the broad shockwaves that U.S. President Donald Trump’s seismic shifts in foreign and domestic policy are triggering in France and elsewhere in Europe.

“Give us back the Statue of Liberty,” Glucksmann said, speaking Sunday to supporters of his Public Place party, who applauded and whistled.

“It was our gift to you. But apparently you despise her. So she will be happy here with us,” Glucksmann said.

For background, Lady Liberty was initially envisaged as a monumental gesture of French-American friendship to mark the 100th anniversary of the July 4, 1776, Declaration of Independence.

But a war that erupted in 1870 between France and German states led by Prussia diverted the energies of the monument’s designer, French sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi.

The gift also took time to be funded, with a decision taken that the French would pay for the statue and Americans would cover the costs of its pedestal.

Transported in 350 pieces from France, the statue was officially unveiled Oct. 28, 1886.

Is France’s government offering asylum to Lady Liberty?

No. French-U.S. relations would have to drop off a cliff before Glucksmann found support from French President Emmanuel Macron’s government.

For the moment, the French president is treading a fine line — trying to work with Trump and temper some of his policy shifts on the one hand but also pushing back hard against some White House decisions, notably Trump’s tariff hikes.

Macron has let his prime minister, François Bayrou, play the role of being a more critical voice. Bayrou tore into the “brutality” that was shown to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during his White House visit and suggested that Trump’s administration risked handing victory to Russia when it paused military aid to Ukraine.

Glucksmann’s party has been even more critical, posting accusations on its website that Trump is wielding power in an “authoritarian” manner and is “preparing to deliver Ukraine on a silver platter” to Russia.

In his speech, Glucksmann referenced New York poet Emma Lazarus’ words about the statue, the “mighty woman with a torch” who promised a home for the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

“Today, this land is ceasing to be what it was,” Glucksmann said.

Amen!

Tony

New York Times Editorial: Colleges Are Under Attack, They Can Fight Back!

Dear Commons Community,
The New York Times yesterday had an editorial entitled, “Colleges Are Under Attack, They Can Fight Back.”  Here is the main message:

“When a political leader wants to move a democracy toward a more authoritarian form of government, he often sets out to undermine independent sources of information and accountability. The leader tries to delegitimize judges, sideline autonomous government agencies and muzzle the media. President Vladimir Putin of Russia has done so over the past quarter-century. To lesser degrees, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey recently have as well.

The weakening of higher education tends to be an important part of this strategy. Academic researchers are supposed to pursue the truth, and budding autocrats recognize that empirical truth can present a threat to their authority. “Wars are won by teachers,” Mr. Putin has said. He and Mr. Erdogan have closed universities. Mr. Modi’s government has arrested dissident scholars, and Mr. Orban has appointed loyal foundations to run universities.

President Trump has not yet gone as far to impede democracy as these other leaders, but it would be naïve to ignore his early moves to mimic their approach. He has fired government watchdogs, military leaders, prosecutors and national security experts. He has sued media organizations, and his administration has threatened to regulate others. He has suggested that judges are powerless to check his authority, writing on social media, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

The editorial conclusion:

“In Mr. Trump’s first term, administrators and professors sometimes  commented on political issues about which they had little expertise. College presidents do not need to become pundits. But they do need to defend the core mission of their institutions when it is under attack. University leaders would help themselves, and the country, by emerging from their defensive crouches and making a forthright case for inquiry, research, science and knowledge.”

Recall the rallying cry of Mexican revolutionaries in the early 20th century:  “Better to live on your feet than die on your knees”.

The entire editorial is below.

Tony

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The New York Times
Opinion

The Editorial Board

March 15, 2025

When a political leader wants to move a democracy toward a more authoritarian form of government, he often sets out to undermine independent sources of information and accountability. The leader tries to delegitimize judges, sideline autonomous government agencies and muzzle the media. President Vladimir Putin of Russia has done so over the past quarter-century. To lesser degrees, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey recently have as well.

The weakening of higher education tends to be an important part of this strategy. Academic researchers are supposed to pursue the truth, and budding autocrats recognize that empirical truth can present a threat to their authority. “Wars are won by teachers,” Mr. Putin has said. He and Mr. Erdogan have closed universities. Mr. Modi’s government has arrested dissident scholars, and Mr. Orban has appointed loyal foundations to run universities.

President Trump has not yet gone as far to impede democracy as these other leaders, but it would be naïve to ignore his early moves to mimic their approach. He has fired government watchdogs, military leaders, prosecutors and national security experts. He has sued media organizations, and his administration has threatened to regulate others. He has suggested that judges are powerless to check his authority, writing on social media, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

Mr. Trump’s multifaceted campaign against higher education is core to this effort to weaken institutions that do not parrot his version of reality. Above all, he is enacting or considering major cuts to universities’ resources. The Trump administration has announced sharp reductions in the federal payments that cover the overhead costs of scientific research, such as laboratory rent, electricity and hazardous waste disposal. (A federal judge has issued a temporary restraining order against those cuts.) Vice President JD Vance and other Republicans have urged a steep increase of a university endowment tax that Mr. Trump signed during his first term. Together, these two policies could reduce the annual budgets at some research universities by more than 10 percent.

Mr. Trump is squeezing higher education in other ways too. The Education Department let go of about half its work force, potentially making it harder for students to receive financial aid. The virtual elimination of the U.S. Agency for International Development led to the cancellation of $800 million in grants to Johns Hopkins alone. On March 7, the administration targeted a single university, announcing that it would end $400 million in grants to Columbia as punishment for its insufficient response to campus antisemitism.

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We understand why many Americans don’t trust higher education and feel they have little stake in it. Elite universities can come off as privileged playgrounds for young people seeking advantages only for themselves. Less elite schools, including community colleges, often have high dropout rates, leaving their students with the onerous combination of debt and no degree. Throughout higher education, faculty members can seem out of touch, with political views that skew far to the left.

Mr. Trump and his advisers are tapping into public dissatisfaction with real problems at universities. But as is the case with their approach to trade, government waste, immigration policy and European military spending, many of their would-be solutions will not solve the underlying problems or will create new ones. The American higher education system, for all its flaws, is the envy of the world, and it now faces a financial squeeze that threatens its many strengths — strengths that benefit all Americans.

Chief among them is its global leadership in medical care and scientific research. American professors still dominate the Nobel Prizes. When wealthy and powerful people in other countries face a medical crisis, they often use their connections to get an appointment at an American academic hospital. For that matter, some of the same Republicans targeting universities with budget cuts seek out its top medical specialists when they or their relatives are ill.

American leadership in medical and scientific research depends on federal money. Private companies, even large ones, typically do not conduct much of the basic research that leads to breakthroughs because it is too uncertain; even successful experiments may not lead to profitable products for decades. Mr. Trump’s planned funding cuts are large enough to force universities to do less of this research. The list of potential forgone progress is long, including against cancer, heart disease, viruses, obesity, dementia and drug overdoses. And there will be costs beyond the medical sector. There is a reason that Silicon Valley sprang up next to a research university.

The nonfinancial parts of the administration’s campaign against higher education are also alarming. Last weekend, immigration officers arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia who holds a green card and is married to an American citizen. The government has offered no evidence that he broke the law. Even many legal scholars who reject his views on Israel and Hamas consider his arrest to be a dangerous violation of free speech principles, and we share this concern. Mr. Trump described Mr. Khalil’s detention as “the first arrest of many to come,” a sign that the president wants to chill speech among the many immigrants on university campuses.

What is the most effective response to Mr. Trump’s campaign against universities? For people outside higher education, this is a moment to speak publicly about why universities matter. They promote public health, economic growth and national security. They are the largest employers in some regions. They are an unmatched, if imperfect, engine of upward mobility that can alter the trajectory of entire families.

For people in higher education, this is a moment both to be bolder about trumpeting its strengths and to be more reflective about addressing its weaknesses. About those shortcomings: Too many professors and university administrators acted in recent years as liberal ideologues rather than seekers of empirical truth. Academics have tried to silence debate on legitimate questions, including about Covid lockdownsgender transition treatments and diversity, equity and inclusion. A Harvard University survey last year found that only 33 percent of graduating seniors felt comfortable expressing their opinions about controversial topics, with moderate and conservative students being the most worried about ostracization.

“The insularity of American academia is appalling,” said Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University. “It has led to massive resentment against intellectual elites.” This insularity does not justify Mr. Trump’s policies, but it does help explain the dearth of conservatives defending universities today. Universities will be in a stronger long-term position if they recommit themselves to open debate.

As for trumpeting the sector’s strengths, the leaders of American higher education have been largely timid and quiet in the face of the Trump onslaught. “The people who are attacking higher education are talking nonstop,” said Holden Thorp, a chemist and former university administrator who runs the Science family of journals. “And the people leading higher education are not saying very much.” (Mr. Roth, a frequent critic of the administration, is an exception.) University presidents seem to be hoping that if they keep their heads down, the threat will pass — or at least pass by their campuses. They are unlikely to be so fortunate.

In Mr. Trump’s first term, administrators and professors sometimes made the opposite mistake and commented on political issues about which they had little expertise. College presidents do not need to become pundits. But they do need to defend the core mission of their institutions when it is under attack. University leaders would help themselves, and the country, by emerging from their defensive crouches and making a forthright case for inquiry, research, science and knowledge.

Meghan O’Rourke: The End of the University as We Know It

Credit:  Joan Wong.

Dear Commons Community,

Ms. O’Rourke, editor of The Yale Review and a professor in the English department at Yale University, had a guest essay in The New York Times yesterday entitled, “The End of the University as We Know It.”  Her main thesis is that:

“Conservatives have been trying to reshape the American university since the federal government began funding it in earnest in the mid-20th century. But now the Trump administration appears prepared to destroy it. The [Trump] administration has issued sweeping executive orders and deployed the so-called Department of Government Efficiency to slash funding; dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives; and intervene in university policy. On March 7 the administration announced it was pulling $400 million in federal grants and contracts from Columbia University, alleging “continued inaction” to protect the civil rights of Jewish students on campus during the protests against the war in Gaza. The result, if all goes through, will be nothing less than the permanent diminishment of research universities and an upheaval of the free speech principles at the core of the country.”

She goes on further by observing that the attack on universities is really an attack on freedom of ideas:

“the real wound ran deeper: the quiet, creeping sense that something larger — the very idea of the university as a place of free inquiry — was slipping away. In an era when both the right and the left have had their moments of speech policing and ideological rigidity, some hope this moment will force universities to rethink their own commitments to open inquiry, that it will serve as an invitation to resist the intellectual and moral narrowing that happens not only through government decree but also through the hardening of internal orthodoxy.

But the more likely outcome is that this moment will close, rather than expand, the range of what is possible. Because what we are witnessing is not just an attack on academia or a set of fiscal reforms or a painful political rebalancing. It is an attack on the conditions that allow free thought to exist. We may not yet know its full cost, but we will feel its consequences for decades.”

I agree with much of what O’Rourke says but I am going to be a bit more optimistic that the core purpose of the academia is to promote freedom of ideas and it will survive.

Her entire guest essay is below.  Excellent commentary!

Tony

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The New York Times

The End of the University as We Know It

March 16, 2025

By Meghan O’Rourke

The rumors had been building for months: The Trump administration was coming for the universities. In the weeks after the president issued the first executive orders of this term, the effects rippled through my academic world: A Rutgers conference on H.B.C.U.s was canceled; graduate students on visas asked a professor I know if it was safe for them to travel; a colleague at a public university texted about an undergraduate crying in his office, worried about the job landscape. There was news of endangered climate projects, grant pages disappearing (and sometimes later reappearing) as people were applying to them and forestalled scientific programs of all kinds, including one at Columbia’s maternal health center studying how to reduce America’s maternal mortality rate.

A meeting at Yale, where I teach, to discuss the impact of the Trump administration’s policies had to be moved to a larger auditorium because so many concerned faculty members showed interest in attending. After listening to a bracing description of the financial implications of the government edicts, we milled about, stunned. The reality was much worse than we had imagined. I run a small program for students who want to be editors and writers. In the grips of uncertainty, I stayed up late that night to figure out which parts I would have to kill if my budget was cut. I finally realized there was no good solution; in that scenario, I would have to cancel the whole thing.

Conservatives have been trying to reshape the American university since the federal government began funding it in earnest in the mid-20th century. But now the Trump administration appears prepared to destroy it. The administration has issued sweeping executive orders and deployed the so-called Department of Government Efficiency to slash funding; dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives; and intervene in university policy. On March 7 the administration announced it was pulling $400 million in federal grants and contracts from Columbia University, alleging “continued inaction” to protect the civil rights of Jewish students on campus during the protests against the war in Gaza. The result, if all goes through, will be nothing less than the permanent diminishment of research universities and an upheaval of the free speech principles at the core of the country.

This attack on higher education has been a long-brewing project for Trump-aligned conservatives. Christopher Rufo, a key architect of the assault, has been explicit about the strategy: use financial pressure to put universities into what he called “existential terror,” making compliance seem like the only viable option, forcing them to dismantle programs and reshape hiring and curriculums. Mr. Rufo, who was invited to Mar-a-Lago to discuss higher education overhauls shortly after Donald Trump was elected again, views universities as having been “captured” by leftist ideology and rejects the idea that diversity is a worthwhile goal. He envisions a radical restructuring of the humanities, replacing current frameworks with what he confusingly calls a “classical” model while bringing in more conservative faculty members.

This assault isn’t happening in a vacuum, of course. Decades of conservative attacks have primed the public to see universities as elitist indoctrination centers. These attacks date at least to the Red Scare in the 1950s, when suspected Marxist professors were forced to testify before the Senate (and the F.B.I. leaked disparaging information about 400 teachers and professors to their employers). But more recently these attacks have evolved into a strategic, well-funded campaign. As Ellen Schrecker, a historian who studies higher education and political repression, noted in a 2023 essay: “During the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s … right-wing philanthropists poured millions of dollars into demonizing higher education as infested by ‘political correctness’ whose advocates supposedly purveyed a dogmatic brand of left-wing identity politics while suppressing free speech and conservative discourse on their campuses.”

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Mr. Trump and his allies have hammered home that message, fueling Republican distrust in academia, even as soaring tuition costs put private institutions ever more out of reach and the pandemic deepened skepticism in expertise. Gallup polls found that in 2015, 57 percent of Americans had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in higher education, a figure that had dropped to 36 percent by 2023. Among Republicans, it cratered from 56 percent to 20 percent. Some of this distrust stems from the fact that since the late 1990s, the number of university faculty members who identify as liberal has risen, while the numbers of moderates and conservatives have declined. But it’s also the product of the right’s campaign against universities, which has caricatured them as breeding grounds for a narrow-minded woke ideology that brooks no dissent, rather than the large, complicated places they are. While there have been instances of a campus left that was hubristically convinced of its own point of view, the reality for most of us who teach on campus looks nothing like the distorted portrait that the right has painted.

Indeed, it’s crucial to acknowledge the qualitative difference between any excesses the left has committed in the enforcement of campus norms and speech and the federal government’s decision to use the full force of state power to prevent people from saying things it doesn’t like. As Hari Kunzru, a novelist who teaches creative writing at N.Y.U., put it to me recently, “The notion that this is a justified response to the excesses of the left is not a legitimate framing.” The destruction underway is not a considered reaction to allegations of civil rights violations or a fine-tuned reform of university policy. Instead, it is a hammer smashing a very complicated mechanism. It will have real, damaging consequences across party lines. It will dismantle expertise that benefits America and its status in the world. Cancer research. Maternal health. Climate-related technology. All this will be materially worse off. The economic impacts will be enormous. But so, too, will be the cultural ones. What is really happening here is an attack on the American faith in knowledge as a value and a public good that has served us well.

For much of its history, the American university has stood at the intersection of knowledge production and national interest. The Morrill Act of 1862, which established land-grant universities, was one of the first federal efforts to expand access to higher education, aligning colleges with the needs of a growing industrial economy. In 1890, the Second Morrill Act brought funding to historically Black colleges and universities and reinforced the idea that higher education was a public good, one that served not only individuals but also the broader needs of the nation. But it was World War II and the Cold War that fundamentally transformed universities into engines of state power, binding research to military and technological supremacy.

The war effort had demonstrated the strategic value of academic research. Universities played a crucial role in projects like the Manhattan Project and the development of radar, showing that scientific breakthroughs created by university research could determine military superiority. In 1945, Vannevar Bush, a key wartime science administrator, argued that the federal government should sustain this partnership in peacetime, leading to the creation of the National Science Foundation in 1950. From then on, higher education was integral to American dominance on the global stage.

By the 1960s, in the wake of Russia’s launch of the Sputnik satellite, America was seized by a national fervor for scientific and technological education. Federal R & D funding skyrocketed, supporting not just engineering and military projects but also the social sciences, humanities and the arts. Universities became hubs of government-backed knowledge production. In 1957, funding from the National Science Foundation stood at $40 million; by 1968, it had climbed to nearly $500 million. These investments fueled space exploration, medical research, literary magazines and global diplomacy. Knowledge in this era was not partisan; it was a national asset.

Yet this arrangement also carried contradictions with it. While the university thrived on public funding, the presence of left-wing voices among its students and faculty members made it a target for conservatives, who, as evidenced by the Red Scare, were already profoundly distrustful of left-leaning academics. Ronald Reagan targeted Berkeley’s free speech movement in his campaign to become governor of California. In the late 1960s, President Richard Nixon’s administration debated cutting university funding over Vietnam War protests on campuses. Though it never followed through, more than 100 people without tenure were fired for their political activities, and states considered bills to criminalize participation in campus protests. In 1991, President George H.W. Bush attacked “political correctness” for restricting “enterprise, speech and spirit” and leading to “bullying.” But on a broader level there seemed to be a tacit sense on the right that for all of its problems, the modern research university was of real value — even a great strength of America, a reason people come here, an instrument of soft power and, indeed, a branding tool. As Nixon himself originally put it, when he rejected House-proposed legislation to end federal funding to universities that allowed campus protests of the war, doing so would be “cutting off our nose to spite our face.” The responsibility, he insisted, “should be on the college administrators.”

Not now. What is distinctive about what is happening is that the very concept of the research university as an autonomous institution is under direct attack. The shift is stark. If, during the Cold War, the government funded universities as a way of strengthening America, Mr. Trump’s second administration treats them as a threat to be dismantled. The real question driving their “reforms” is not whether federal support for universities should continue but whether universities deserve to exist in their current form at all.

If the university has always been politicized one way or another, why should conservatives care about protecting the intellectual freedom currently housed in what are predominantly liberal institutions? The answer is earnest and aspirational: because the serious, reflective work of scholarship benefits us all. Because academic freedom makes it possible to critique institutionality from within at a time when institutions rule our lives. Because it permits intellectuals and scientists to question realities we have become complacent about. Because it creates space for values that live outside the capitalist marketplace. Because it houses art and artists. Yes, the university can be, like any community anywhere, divisive, censorious, sometimes too ideologically homogeneous. But when it works, it trains people to think critically, powerfully and unflinchingly. The strongest critiques of the National Institutes of Health I’ve heard, for instance, have been voiced not by Mr. Trump or Elon Musk but by academics who understand its workings and have the theoretical framework to imagine how to reform it.

The Trump administration’s orders arrive at a precarious moment in America — a moment of transformative technologies, escalating climate crises and global instability. It’s a moment that demands more from universities, not less. “The core mission of the humanities is more important than ever,” Robin Kelsey, a former dean of arts and humanities at Harvard, told me. As he explained, the humanities as we know them emerged in response to the violence of the two world wars, precisely because those conflicts revealed that scientific progress does not guarantee moral progress. A humanist education teaches us to question dominant narratives, to recognize how certain ways of thinking rise to prominence while others fade from view.

Dr. Kelsey warned against abandoning the humanities precisely when their lessons are most needed. “One of the contradictions at the heart of the humanities,” he said, “is that they are supposed to practice the same skepticism, open inquiry and refusal of dogma that science is known for — while also addressing questions about meaning, virtue and ethics, which had long been the domain of religion.” That contradiction has made the humanities both essential and vulnerable, open to attack from those who see them as frivolous or politically suspect. But what is now more clear than ever is that Mr. Rufo and other Trump-aligned ideologues actually know how important the humanities, and the civic and aesthetic values they explore, are. That is precisely why so much effort is being spent on trying to impose a set of nostalgic, premodern views at the heart of the university.

The defunding of Columbia and the threat of cuts have sent a chill through the halls of academia. If the battle over universities were only about budgets, the fight might be different. But what is being targeted is something more profound: the ability of institutions to sustain the freedoms that form the foundation of our democracy. Mr. Trump campaigned on free speech: “I’ve stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America,” he told Congress on March 4. But make no mistake: His administration is trying to force universities to conform — and to make its faculty members quite literally stop saying or studying things that they don’t want said out loud or studied. Most egregiously, the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Ed Martin, recently wrote the dean of the Georgetown University Law Center, a Catholic institution, saying that it was “unacceptable” for the school to “teach D.E.I.” (whatever that means) and declaring that until Georgetown revised its curriculum, his office would refuse to hire — that is, would blacklist — its students.

The obvious threat here is that institutions will fall in line with the administration’s broadest goals in order to preserve their funding. But beyond that, there is the deeper threat that the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz identified in “The Captive Mind,” his exploration of how intellectuals adapt to authoritarian regimes. Living under Soviet rule, Mr. Miłosz observed that artists and scholars, without direct coercion, anticipated the regime’s desires, adjusting their behavior before the government even had to intervene. Fear reshaped their internal weather, dictating what they would — and wouldn’t — say.

That fear, or one like it, is settling now into American institutions. Last week, it became more difficult to get affected professors and university administrators to talk to me, whereas before, many had been eager to weigh in. The silence was instructive. In a faculty meeting I attended recently, in a high-ceilinged room with carved wood and delicately painted windows, anxiety reverberated. We were warned of funding cuts. But the real wound ran deeper: the quiet, creeping sense that something larger — the very idea of the university as a place of free inquiry — was slipping away. In an era when both the right and the left have had their moments of speech policing and ideological rigidity, some hope this moment will force universities to rethink their own commitments to open inquiry, that it will serve as an invitation to resist the intellectual and moral narrowing that happens not only through government decree but also through the hardening of internal orthodoxy.

But the more likely outcome is that this moment will close, rather than expand, the range of what is possible. Because what we are witnessing is not just an attack on academia or a set of fiscal reforms or a painful political rebalancing. It is an attack on the conditions that allow free thought to exist. We may not yet know its full cost, but we will feel its consequences for decades.

 

Teacher in Meridian, Idaho ordered to remove signs from classroom, including one saying ‘Everyone is welcome here’

Idaho school district orders teacher to remove ‘Everyone is welcome here’ sign.

Dear Commons Community,

An Idaho teacher is in a standoff with her own school district after officials ordered her to remove classroom signs, including one that reads, “Everyone is welcome here.”

Sarah Inama, a sixth-grade history teacher at Lewis and Clark Middle School in Meridian, Idaho, says she won’t comply with the order, arguing that the message is a fundamental part to ensuring a positive learning environment for her students.

Inama, who has taught at the school for five years, says her commitment to inclusivity isn’t about politics. It’s about her passion for education and students.  As reported by TODAY.com and NBC News.

“I love the area that I teach,” she says in an interview with TODAY.com. “It’s really a valuable thing for people to know our human history, things that humans have accomplished, our time on this earth, things that they’ve overcome, patterns that exist.”

Five years ago, when she first put up the two signs, it was to make sure students knew they were in an open and welcoming space. Now, she says she is risking her job in the name of those values.

A notice from her school district

Inama says the controversy began in January when her principal and vice principal came to her classroom to inform her that two posters on her walls were controversial and needed to be removed, a detail the district verified in an email to TODAY.com. Inama says other teachers were given similar instruction, but she was caught off guard by the directive.

Photos of the two posters show that one features the phrase “Everyone is welcome here,” with an illustration of hands in different skin tones. The other says that everyone in the classroom is “welcome, important, accepted, respected, encouraged, valued” and “equal.”

“I was just so confused,” she recalls. “I still can’t even wrap my head around what they’re referring to as far as why it’s controversial.”

Inama says the principal cited district policy that classrooms must respect the rights of people to express differing opinions and that decorations are to be “content-neutral.”

“There are only two opinions on this sign: Everyone is welcome here or not everyone is welcome here,” she says. “Since the sign is emphasizing that everyone, in regards to race or skin tone, is welcome here no matter what, immediately, I was like, the only other view of this is racist. And I said, ‘That sounds like racism to me.’”

A change of heart

Feeling pressured, Inama removed the signs, but reconsidered as the decision weighed on her into the following weekend.

“I told my husband, ‘I have to put that sign back up,’” she recalls.

That Saturday, she says her husband accompanied her back to the school where she re-hung the signs and emailed her principal to let him know.

“I just was not interested in taking it down,” she says. “I didn’t agree with why they were asking me to take it down. And for that reason, it was back up.”

According to Inama, the principal warned her that her refusal constituted insubordination and could result in further action.

TODAY.com has reached out to the principal for comment on Inama’s allegations but did not receive a response.

A compromise

A meeting was soon arranged with district personnel, including West Ada School District’s chief academic officer Marcus Myers and a West Ada Education Association representative.

In its email to TODAY.com, West Ada School District states that the meeting was arranged to “provide further clarification and support” to Inama and to “discuss concerns about the poster and how it violates Policy 401.20.” The policy says that banners in the classroom must be “content-neutral and conducive to a positive learning enviornment.”

TODAY.com reached out to Myers for comment regarding the district’s decision and his role in the discussion with Inama but has not yet received a response.

Inama says the officials offered to purchase any alternative signs for her classroom during the meeting, just as long as they didn’t have the same messages as her current posters. Challenging the request, Inama pointed out that district policy classifies motivational posters as learning aids, which she argued should be allowed under the current rules.

Inama says the conversation escalated when Myers attempted to justify the request to remove her posters saying that “the political environment ebbs and flows, and what might be controversial now might not have been controversial three, six, nine months ago, and we have to follow that.”

The more the discussion continued, Inama says she became increasingly convinced that what the district was asking her to do was wrong.

“The more that we talked about it, the more it just solidified,” she says. “It seems so gross what they’re asking me to compromise about. I mean, there’s no way you’ll convince me that the differing view they’re trying to protect of that sign is not racist.”

She says the meeting ended without resolution and another warning, this time that further action might be necessary if she did not comply.

Legal counsel intervenes

After their meeting, Inama says the district offered to have legal counsel review her position, but that she would have to submit an email explaining why she believed the poster did not violate policy.

“I typed a big, long email and sent it off to them about why it was important for me to keep this poster up and why I don’t find it to be in violation,” Inama explains.

A week later, the district responded, maintaining that the signs violated policy. Inama says she was told she has until the end of the school year to remove them.

In a statement issued to TODAY.com via email, Niki Scheppers, chief of staff for communications at West Ada School District, explains the district’s decision to enforce its policy.

“West Ada School District has been and always will be committed to fostering a welcoming and supportive learning environment for all students while upholding district policies,” the statement reads.

“Classrooms are places where students learn to read, write, think critically and build the skills needed for future success. While classroom decorations can contribute to the atmosphere, a truly welcoming and supportive environment is built through meaningful relationships and positive interactions between staff and students, not posters on the walls. Our focus is on fostering kindness, respect and academic achievement so that every student can thrive in a distraction-free learning environment.”

According to the statement, approved classroom displays include the Idaho state flag, instructional materials like the periodic table or U.S. Constitution, student artwork, approved club information and school-sponsored achievements. Other permitted items include temporary displays of world flags for educational purposes, personal family photos of employees and promotional materials from colleges or professional sports teams.

“This policy is designed to maintain consistency across all classrooms while ensuring that no one group is targeted or offended by the display of certain items.”

The district underlined that its policies are not intended to limit free speech but to ensure fairness in classroom materials.

“While we respect individuals’ rights to express their perspectives, it is important to reaffirm that this situation is not about limiting speech or expression but about ensuring consistency in our classrooms and maintaining a learning environment free from distraction,” the statement said.

The district confirmed that legal counsel determined Inama’s poster must be removed and that she has until the end of the school year to find an alternative that complies with policy.

Fighting for her students, no matter the cost

Despite the district’s ruling, Inama refuses to remove the signs, even if it means risking her job.

“I would feel so sad to like leave my students before the end of the year, and financially, it would be difficult, but I just feel like your job, like your specific workplace, is not like your whole identity,” she explains. “There’s no way I would be able to allow myself to just take it down and roll over to what I feel like they’re asking me to do.”

Inama says what helps her now is knowing that she is not alone in her resistance. She says hundreds of people — including teachers across the district — have reached out to extend their support since her story became public.

“I’d say at least half of them are from other teachers in this district and in some of the other districts in Idaho and in other states,” she says.

Above all, Inama says she will prioritize the students seated in her classroom and stand by what she believes to be right.

Good for her!

Tony

Lincoln Heights, Ohio: A majority-Black town starts armed protection group after neo-Nazi rally

An armed volunteer for the Lincoln Heights Safety and Watch Program stands guard near a community center.  Courtesy of NBC News.

Dear Commons Community,

This story appeared on NBC News.

Nearly every morning for the last month, Jay has been waking up before sunrise to drive around the streets of Lincoln Heights, patrolling neighborhood bus stops to make sure children are getting to school safely.

“We have a very tight community, so all of our kids, they know us,” he said.

But for anyone outside the community, Jay’s presence might be a mystery. He wears a face covering along with tactical vests, and Jay is not his real name, which he asked not to use to prevent harassment from hate groups.

He’s a member of the Lincoln Heights Safety and Watch program, an initiative that started shortly after Feb. 7, when a neo-Nazi group waving swastika flags and shouting racial slurs demonstrated on a highway overpass just on the edge of this majority-Black community about 30 minutes north of Cincinnati.

Officers from Evendale, which borders Lincoln Heights, and the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office both responded that day. No arrests were made, and Evendale police officers did not take down any names or identifying information from members of the neo-Nazi group, according to the mayor’s office. The Hamilton County Prosecutor’s office is currently investigating the incident to see if criminal charges could be filed.

In a statement, Evendale Mayor Richard Finan said officers’ emphasis on de-escalation “resulted in the incident’s resolution without injuries to any of the persons involved, passersby or law enforcement officers. During this evolving scene, protecting life took priority over immediate identification.” The Evendale Police Department was the first to respond to the incident, which took place on a bridge linking Evendale with Lincoln Heights.

But for Daronce Daniels, the safety and watch group’s spokesperson, the police response was just as alarming as the neo-Nazi appearance, making residents feel they wouldn’t be protected if another hate group were to visit their town.

“They’ve been very clear that if it happens again, they’ll allow it to happen again, that their hands are tied,” Daniels said.

Lincoln Heights residents said the police response to the incident was insufficient, prompting Daniels and other members of the Heights Movement, an existing community empowerment organization, to devise the safety and watch program, which includes armed volunteers wearing tactical gear and face coverings. Some of the same volunteers who helped mentor youth through the Heights Movement are now going on armed patrols. Ohio state law allows anyone legally allowed to own a gun to open carry without a permit.

“I’ve never felt safer as a Black man in my community than I have right now,” Daniels said. “These are my friends. These are my cousins, my brothers, my sisters, my aunties.”

Local business owner Eric Ruffin was accosted in his car by the neo-Nazi group as he was coming home from a work meeting.

He said he supports law enforcement, but that its handling of the Feb. 7 demonstration doesn’t give him faith that it will protect him in the future. For that reason, he says he’s proud of the neighborhood safety and watch program, even though he wishes it weren’t needed.

“What I don’t understand is how I can be standing here in America in 2025 and somebody can walk up to my window with a swastika and have guns and call me the N-word and law enforcement watch,” Ruffin said.

“We don’t want to become what we hate. You know, we don’t want to become a group of people that walk around feeling like we have a reason in America to have to protect ourselves. That’s what the Nazis want.”

The village of Lincoln Heights was formed in 1923 for Black families escaping the South, and it incorporated in 1946 as the “first African American self-governing community north of the Mason-Dixon Line,” according to the town’s website. However, residents say the community has been underserved by local municipalities, and its police department was disbanded in 2014, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer, leaving it under the jurisdiction of the Hamilton County Sheriff.

For many safety and watch volunteers, that history plays a role in their decision to add to their everyday duties as parents and workers.

“It’s just something that our grandfathers and our great-grandmothers — they started this. So we’re going to make sure that that history stays intact,” said one volunteer, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from hate groups.

Yard signs that read “We Support Lincoln Heights Safety & Watch” are peppered throughout the town, and community members could be seen waving to safety and watch volunteers as they stood guard near the local elementary school one Tuesday morning.

Chantelle Phillips said she saw the neo-Nazi rally playing out on social media as it happened. She said she trusts the neighborhood protection group to be more proactive than officers with the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office, whose jurisdiction includes Lincoln Heights.

“I feel like it’s more secure now,” Phillips said. “I know my son can walk home and be OK.”

Hamilton County Sheriff Charmaine McGuffey is now calling on the Ohio state Legislature to pass laws that make it illegal to wear a mask “for the purpose of intimidation” while open carrying. She said this measure would have given her officers more leeway to make arrests during the neo-Nazi rally.

In an interview with NBC News, she defended her officers’ response on Feb. 7 but said she understands why Lincoln Heights residents are concerned for their safety. Still, she worries that an armed confrontation between neighborhood residents and another hate group could lead to a dangerous situation.

“They feel they need to arm their residents, and they’re allowed to,” McGuffey said. “At some point, we are going to likely face a very dangerous situation that we are trained to handle. But the unknown is, who else is armed? How many juveniles are standing around with a gun in their hand? I cannot be more emphatic that this issue that we’re embedded in, and the way that people are reacting and acting with guns with open carry is directly related to the inaction of legislators who say they support law enforcement, who say they support families and order, and they do not.”

Tony