Dear Commons Community,

More and more people are becoming infected in the ongoing measles outbreak in West Texas, New Mexico and other states, as more than 300 people have tested positive for the illness. The disease has killed one unvaccinated child in Texas and is suspected in the death of an unvaccinated adult in New Mexico.  As reported by The Huffington Post.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently said in a Fox News interview that the government is “delivering vitamin A” to West Texas to battle the outbreak, and “they’re getting very, very good results from budesonide, which is a steroid … and clarithromycin [an antibiotic], and also cod liver oil, which has high concentrations of vitamin A and vitamin D.”

He also promoted the use of vitamin A for measles treatment in a recent Fox News opinion piece.

While his statements refer to the treatment of measles in a medical setting, medical experts told HuffPost that they worry Kennedy’s focus on vitamin A and cod liver oil could encourage parents of unvaccinated children, or unvaccinated people themselves, to try supplementation as prevention or treatment at home — which is exactly what’s now happening in West Texas.

At a Texas children’s hospital, unvaccinated kids with severe cases of measles are also being treated for vitamin A toxicity, which suggests that the children were given the vitamin before hospitalization. There’s also increased demand for cod liver oil at local stores, according to Texas Public Radio. 

Medical professionals are concerned that this vitamin A misinformation could continue to spread and result in people not understanding what’s actually best for measles treatment and prevention.

Here’s what medical experts want everyone to know:

Vitamin A is not an at-home treatment or prevention tool for measles, but RFK Jr.’s vitamin A thoughts do come from somewhere.

“Like much of what RFK says, there’s always a kernel of truth, which he sort of manipulates to legitimize the things he’s saying, which I know is a strong statement, but at this point I think it’s very important to say strong statements about it because if we are not clear in our responses, they easily get manipulated,” said Dr. Anita Patel, a pediatric critical care doctor in Washington, D.C.

This is evident in Kennedy’s claims about vitamin A, according to Patel.

“The kernel of truth is that he’s right. Vitamin A at very high doses — high doses that you would never administer by yourself at home — but high-dose vitamin A administered in the hospital has shown to reduce both mortality and duration and severity of [measles] illness,” Patel said.

“The lack of truth in the statement he made is that giving vitamin A in the form of cod liver oil as like a panacea for all the people in Texas … is unequivocally wrong,” Patel added.

Cod liver oil as a measles treatment has not been studied, said Joel Bervell, a recent medical graduate and medical myth-buster on social media.

“It’s not the same as vitamin A supplementation,” Bervell explained. “I think the reason why he was talking about cod oil in the first place was it has high levels of vitamin A, but the amount of vitamin A that’s in cod oil can vary widely, and relying on that instead of vaccines can be risky.”

Supplementation for children just generally can also be an issue.

“As a blanket statement, I would never give my kids cod liver oil because we know the supplement industry is not very well regulated,” Patel explained. “I don’t like giving my kids any supplements, because the truth is, you have no idea what’s in them.”

More, taking too much of any vitamin, including vitamin A, can lead to complications and toxicity, Bervell said. “It can cause … liver damage to fatigue to hair loss and headaches.” According to Texas Public Radio, the hospitalized children who are now being treated for vitamin A toxicity have abnormal liver function.

Vitamin A also can interact with other medications, which can lead to more problems, Patel said.

Bottom line: Vitamin A isn’t going to prevent someone from getting the measles, and it’s also not proven to help with symptoms for patients who aren’t hospitalized, according to Patel. Ingesting high amounts of vitamin A or cod liver oil can lead to real health issues.

“I hope RFK knows that what he says is what parents are going to do,” Bervell said. “If they’re believing that either vitamin A or cod oil is a replacement for vaccines, that’s going to do their children, and the rest of communities in these areas, more harm than good.”

We have a maniac running the Department of Health and Human Services!

Tony

Katrina A. Armstrong

Dear Commons Community,

Columbia University announced yesterday that its interim president, Katrina A. Armstrong, was stepping down. The news arrives a week after the university caved to a list of demands from the Trump administration, which refused to restore $400 million in federal funding unless drastic concessions were made.

Armstrong had replaced former university President Minouche Shafik, who resigned last August after a firestorm of criticism of Shafik’s handling of student protests against the ongoing war in Gaza.

According to a statement from Columbia, Board of Trustees Co-Chair Claire Shipman has been appointed Acting President, effective immediately.  As reported by Rolling Stone and MSNBC.

“Dr. Armstrong accepted the role of interim president at a time of great uncertainty for the University and worked tirelessly to promote the interests of our community,” said David J. Greenwald, Chair of the Board of Trustees. “Katrina has always given her heart and soul to Columbia. We appreciate her service and look forward to her continued contributions to the University.”

Armstrong will return to lead the school’s Irving Medical Center, per the statement.

Earlier this month, the Trump administration sent a letter to the university with nine demands to meet as a precondition to negotiations surrounding its federal funding. With $400 million in key funding on the line, one of the nation’s most prestigious and oldest universities conceded and agreed to ban students from wearing masks on campus for the purpose of concealing identity during protests, with exceptions for religious and health reasons. Columbia also agreed to increase its campus security by hiring 36 new security officers, who unlike in the past, will have the authority to arrest students, and to install a new senior vice provost to monitor the department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies.

Columbia also stated its commitment to “greater institutional neutrality” and said it is “working with a faculty committee to establish an institution-wide policy implementing this stance.”

It sounds like venerable Columbia is in disarray!

Tony

Microsoft’s Majorana 1 processor, a quantum computing device it claims contains eight  “topological” qubits. PHOTO: JOHN BRECHER/MICROSOFT

Dear Commons Community,

Physicists are casting doubt on claims by Microsoft of its “topological” qubit (photo above), a robust quantum analog of the 0-or-1 bit used in conventional computers.  As reported by Science.

On 18 March in an Anaheim, California, conference hall, Microsoft physicist Chetan Nayak faced a formidable challenge: convincing a standing-room audience of other scientists that his company had shaken the landscape of quantum computing. Nayak tried to make the case that his team had created the world’s first “topological” qubit, a robust quantum analog of the 0-or-1 bit used in conventional computers. Doing so would require not only conjuring the Majorana quasiparticle—a long-sought mode of electron behavior— but also controlling multiple Majoranas to encode quantum information.

Many audience members, however, weren’t sold. “I don’t think the data are convincing,” says Jelena Klinovaja, a physicist at the University of Basel who attended Nayak’s talk at the American Physical Society’s (APS’s) Global Physics Summit.

The claims received a similarly frosty reception at a talk the day before at the same meeting, when University of St. Andrews physicist Henry Legg—the author of two preprints challenging Microsoft’s work— declared that “any company claiming to have a topological qubit in 2025 is essentially selling a fairy tale.”

For his part, Nayak remains confident that his team has tamed the Majoranas. “We’ve only revealed a tiny fraction of what we’ve done,” he tells Science. “It’s going to look more and more convincing that this is going to be the basis of a technology.”

The furor began last month, when Microsoft proclaimed via a press release and a paper in Nature that it had achieved a breakthrough: a chip hosting eight Majorana-based topological qubits, which it says could yield utility-scale quantum computers in a matter of years. Quantum computing stocks soon rose, and Senator Ted Cruz (R–TX) touted the news on the Senate floor. In a social media post, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella suggested the chip “could be quantum’s transistor moment.”

Microsoft’s paper, however, didn’t detail the chip or provide proof of Majoranas, focusing instead on a method for measuring certain quantum properties of a future device. Outraged by what they deemed to be hype, many physicists responded by posting fiery comments, barbed memes, and livestreamed takedowns online.

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my time in physics,” says Jason Alicea, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology. “The burden is on [Microsoft] to really show that what they have is the real deal.”

For decades, scientists have dreamed of better simulating nature and solving certain problems much faster by building computers that operate not on conventional bits— which can be set to either 0 or 1—but rather on qubits, which can be set to combinations of 0 and 1 simultaneously. But today’s quantum computers remain stifled by their qubits’ fragility to environmental noise.

Microsoft is trying to build qubit protection directly into its hardware by making qubits out of Majoranas, which are essentially delocalized electrons. Because the electrons don’t exist in any one location, their information can be protected “topologically” from any local disturbances under the right conditions.

Microsoft’s chip features ultrathin, superconducting indium-arsenide wires that force the electrons inside to form loose pairs. Each wire can also accommodate an extra unpaired electron, which effectively splits in half to occupy a Majorana at each end of the wire. A given wire’s two “parity” states—which would represent a 0 or 1 in a future computer—correspond to whether the wire contains an even or odd number of electrons. By measuring the chip in specific ways, Nayak’s team plans to shift and probe the wires’ parity states, thereby encoding and reading out quantum information.

To better define their search for the elusive Majoranas—whose discovery has been claimed and then debunked multiple times—Microsoft researchers devised a protocol in 2021 that tests whether a device can host the quasiparticles. The protocol consists of a computer simulation of their device they trained to identify Majorana-forming states. They then fed real measurements of the device into the same protocol to assess its state.

In 2023, Nayak’s team claimed to have built a device that passed the protocol; the new paper, published in Nature on 19 February, establishes a procedure for reading out the parity of the device’s nanowires. Microsoft claimed these results, along with new data hinted at in a press release, constituted “the world’s first quantum processor powered by topological qubits.”

Of the researchers who consider Microsoft’s claims overblown, Legg has been among the most forceful critics. A week after the company’s February announcement, he posted his first public challenge: a preprint that sharply criticized the reliability of Microsoft’s protocol for identifying Majoranas. “They have some explaining to do,” he says.

By digging into the protocol’s available code, Legg noticed that simply changing the measured ranges of a device’s different parameters, such as its magnetic field, appears to affect whether the device passes the protocol. Within each Microsoft experiment, Legg tells Science, the code used to evaluate real data also seems to be less restrictive than the code used for simulated data. And in another preprint posted on 11 March, Legg argues that raw data in Microsoft’s latest paper appear too disordered for the company’s device to have been harboring Majoranas.

In a 15 March LinkedIn post, Microsoft researcher Roman Lutchyn defended his team’s work, claiming the protocol’s sensitivity was expected and that the two versions of code yielded statistically similar outputs. During the Q&A session of Legg’s APS talk, Lutchyn issued his own challenge to Legg: “If you have a better idea, put forward a protocol, and then let’s all follow it.”

In his packed APS talk, Nayak unveiled a device that combines two nanowires into an H-shaped array that’s meant to demonstrate a functioning qubit. He then showed data describing the nanowires’ ability to exist in two distinct states that are complex combinations of 0 and 1, essential for the device to operate as a qubit.

Some in the audience were impressed by the engineering advances behind the doublenanowire device—but the new measurements were also met with skepticism. The data suggested a single nanowire would hold the 0 or 1 state for up to 10 milliseconds. However, the measurements Nayak presented for more complex states were far less clear. Statistical analysis suggested the complex states persisted for a few microseconds at a time. To some physicists in attendance, though, the data looked more like noise.

” would have loved for this to come out screaming at me that there’s only two [distinct] states,” says Cornell University physicist Eun-Ah Kim, who moderated the session. “But that’s not what I think I see.”

Despite many physicists’ qualms over Microsoft’s current evidence for a topological qubit, some, including University of Oxford physicist Steve Simon, remain hopeful: Recently, Simon bet Legg a Belgian beer that Nature won’t retract Microsoft’s paper in the next 2 years.

But for others such as Anton Akhmerov, a physicist at the Delft University of Technology, the overriding feeling is one of frustration—with both Microsoft’s sensational announcement and the backlash to it. “The problem is that both sides are making confident claims … and I don’t think either viewpoint is justified,” Akhmerov says. “It’d be nice if people would chill out a bit.”

This furor will not die down any time soon.  The ball is in Microsoft’s court.

Tony

Tong Tong (pictured, center) is an artificial general intelligence (AGI) agent at the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence (BIGAI) embodied in a virtual world that emulates the complexity of the real physical social world. Here, she interacts with her mother and generates tasks based on her value function. PHOTO: ZHEN CHEN AND XIAOMENG GAO.

 Dear Commons Community,

Science has a featured article this morning entitled, “AI gets a mind of its own” that reports on the latest developments at DeepSeek and the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence.  It reports on the work of Song-Chun Zhu, recognized as one of the major figures in creating new AI models.  The photo above pictures Tong Tong,  an artificial general intelligence (AGI) agent, created by Zhu and his colleagues.

The entire Science article is below.  An important step forward in general AI development.

Tony

———————————————————-

Science

AI gets a mind of its own

Artificial general intelligence research is moving into a new era

Sometimes, less is more. In January, DeepSeek released the latest version of its chatbot, upending the artificial intelligence (AI) world. A training AI built for under $6 million, DeepSeek seems to rival the technical capabilities of other large language model (LLM) AIs, including ChatGPT, with only a fraction of the processing power. The breakthrough was a welcome development for Song-Chun Zhu, dean of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence at Peking University in Beijing, who has been challenging the current LLM-dominated AI paradigm in his efforts to create artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Zhu, a trailblazer in the AI field, graduated from Harvard University in 1996 and has published more than 400 papers covering computer vision, cognitive science, robot autonomy, and commonsense reasoning, among other topics. Now, he is the founder and director of the non-profit Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence (BIGAI).

“We as a society may have misunderstood the term ‘AI’,” says Zhu. “Just like how we call a multifunctional cellphone ‘smart’, the popular AI models we use today are not truly intelligent.” That’s because today’s AI, he explains, is driven by big data built upon massive computing power. Zhu pioneered data-driven statistical approaches and created the world’s first large-scale annotated image dataset at the Lotus Hill Institute in 2005. However, he realized that big data sets and specific machine learning models alone are not enough to make true intelligence. “One of the major Chinese philosophical schools, the Yangmingism or the ‘Teachings of the Heart’, argues ‘the reality we see comes from how our minds perceive’,” Zhu says. To make AI more like humans, Zhu says, it needs to have a framework that emulates the top-down mechanisms in the brain.

According to Zhu, the future of AGI should be a kind of autonomous AI that doesn’t require vast datasets. In 2020, Zhu returned to China to establish and lead BIGAI. Its mission: To pursue a unified theory of artificial intelligence in order to create general intelligent agents for lifting humanity.

Defining AGI agents in CUV-space:

Zhu and his team’s focus at BIGAI is on creating value-driven human-like cognition that goes beyond data-driven imitation. “The difference between AGI and current LLM-based AI is just like the difference between a crow and a parrot,” he said. While parrots can mimic many words, he says, crows can achieve their goals autonomously in the real world. In an article published in 2017, Zhu discusses how statistical models, which modern LLMs are based upon, function like “stochastic parrots.” While leading two Multidisciplinary University Research Initiatives at UCLA, Zhu pursued research to make machines more crow-like, exploring the brain mechanisms that make it possible for crows—and humans—to understand the physical and social world and act accordingly.

Human intelligence evolves over time, as the body changes and experiences accrue. AGI also matures over time. To help define, evaluate, and improve AGI development, Zhu proposed to define AGI in the mathematical space of the “CUV framework” In this framework, C is the AGI’s “cognitive architecture” to think, or its simulation of the decision-making processes in the brain. U is a set of “potential functions” that represent an AGI’s ability to understand and interact with its environment. V is a set of hierarchical internal “value functions” that supply the AGI’s motivation. With this formulation, Zhu and colleagues can define AGI agents as points in this CUV space and characterize their learning and self-reflection processes.

The Tong test

In Chinese, the word “general” is translated as Tong (), a character that is also the logo of BIGAI. Artistically arranged, the character also holds the English letters “AGI.” Tong Tong is the name Zhu gave to world’s first AGI agent born at BIGAI, a digital Chinese girl that looks to be about 3 to 4 years old. Tong Tong is a step forward in AGI research, and researchers really want to know, “What is she thinking?” and “How is she learning and making decisions?” Researchers have long relied on tests to assess AI models. The Turing test was developed to determine whether a machine could mimic human intelligence through dialogue. ChatGPT and other AI built on big data can pass the Turing test, but Zhu wanted a test that could assess broad human intelligence. Thus, the Tong Test was born, which relies on the CUV framework.

What sets Tong Tong apart from ChatGPT is that she doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but is rather embodied in a virtual world that emulates the complexity of the real physical social world. The Tong test examines an AGI’s understanding of this world— its abilities—as well as the AGI’s internal motivations for behaviors—its values. For example, how an AGI responds to a crying baby sitting on a floor can say a lot about its commonsense reasoning, inference of social interactions, and self-awareness. “Those natural abilities such as emotions and languages are true embodiment of human intelligence,” Zhu says. “Tong Tong may be an AGI agent, but she is just like a real human child, able to understand and behave according to her own environment even if it changes. The goal of the Tong test is to build a systematic evaluation system to promote standardized, quantitative, and objective benchmarks and evaluation for AGI.” And Tong Tong is just the beginning; researchers at BIGAI are developing diverse AGI agents that may someday enter the physical world through robotics and other mediums to serve society in meaningful ways.

AGI safety

As Tong Tong and the Tong test continue to grow and mature, AGI safety is front of mind for Zhu. Because AGI behavior is human-like, and not all humans are benevolent, there are risks that AGI will take actions that are not in humanity’s best interests. On the other hand, AGI’s cognitive architecture may be able to incorporate a mutual theory of mind—in other words, the golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

During a panel discussion at SafeAI 2023, Zhu and Stuart Russell from the University of California Berkeley, two leading figures in AGI, had an in-depth discussion on the risks and ethics of AGI.

When Russell raised a question about how humans could keep AGI agents in check, Zhu replied, “To prevent potential threats from future AGI agents to humanity, we can gradually loosen the capability and value space of agents. It’s similar to how we approach robots: initially, we confine them in a ‘cage’ and slowly increase their permission. Now, we already have autonomous vehicles operating on specific roads.” Zhu added that once AGI agents are proven safe and controllable, they can have more freedom, with the safeguard of understanding and transparency. “If we can explicitly represent the cognitive architecture of AGI agents, understanding how they work, we will be better equipped to control them.”

For Zhu, now is the beginning of a new era for AI to evolve into AGI. Zhu’s doctoral advisor at Harvard, mathematician and Fields medalist David Mumford, is also an advocate of creating AIs with the top-down neural architecture of the human brain. He gave Zhu a trophy to recognize his perseverance at AGI innovation. “The future of AGI will be a combination of science and philosophy,” Zhu says. “Chinese teachings of the heart are crucial to guiding AGI to obtain true beneficial human behavior.”

Dear Commons Community,

Over the next decade, advances in artificial intelligence will mean that humans will no longer be needed “for most things” in the world, says Bill Gates.

That’s what the Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist told Jimmy Fallon during an interview on NBC’s “The Tonight Show.”  At the moment, expertise remains “rare,” Gates explained, pointing to human specialists we still rely on in many fields, including “a great doctor” or “a great teacher.”  As reported by CNBC.

But “with AI, over the next decade, that will become free, commonplace — great medical advice, great tutoring,” Gates said.

In other words, the world is entering a new era of what Gates called “free intelligence” in an interview last month with Harvard University professor and happiness expert Arthur Brooks. The result will be rapid advances in AI-powered technologies that are accessible and touch nearly every aspect of our lives, Gates has said, from improved medicines and diagnoses to widely available AI tutors and virtual assistants.

“It’s very profound and even a little bit scary — because it’s happening very quickly, and there is no upper bound,” Gates told Brooks.

The debate over how, exactly, most humans will fit into this AI-powered future is ongoing. Some experts say AI will help humans work more efficiently — rather than replacing them altogether — and spur economic growth that leads to more jobs being created.

Others, like Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, counter that continued technological advancements over the next several years will change what most jobs look like across nearly every industry, and have a “hugely destabilizing” impact on the workforce.

“These tools will only temporarily augment human intelligence,” Suleyman wrote in his book “The Coming Wave,” which was published in 2023. “They will make us smarter and more efficient for a time, and will unlock enormous amounts of economic growth, but they are fundamentally labor replacing.”

AI is both concerning and a ‘fantastic opportunity’

Gates is optimistic about the overall benefits AI can provide to humanity, like “breakthrough treatments for deadly diseases, innovative solutions for climate change, and high-quality education for everyone,” he wrote last year.

Talking to Fallon, Gates reaffirmed his belief that certain types of jobs will likely never be replaced by AI, noting that people probably don’t want to see machines playing baseball, for example.

“There will be some things we reserve for ourselves. But in terms of making things and moving things and growing food, over time those will be basically solved problems,” Gates said.

AI’s development does come with “understandable and valid” concerns, Gates wrote in a 2023 blog post. Today’s top-of-the-line AI programs are rife with errors and prone to enabling the spread of falsehoods online, for example.

But if he had to start a new business from scratch, he’d launch an “AI-centric” startup, Gates told CNBC Make It in September 2024.

“Today, somebody could raise billions of dollars for a new AI company [that’s just] a few sketch ideas,” he said, adding: “I’m encouraging young people at Microsoft, OpenAI, wherever I find them: ‘Hey, here’s the frontier.’ Because you’re taking a fresher look at this than I am, and that’s your fantastic opportunity.”

Gates saw the AI revolution coming nearly a decade ago: When asked which industry he’d focus on if he had to start over from scratch, he quickly chose AI.

“The work in artificial intelligence today is at a really profound level,” Gates said at a 2017 event at Columbia University alongside Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett. He pointed to the “profound milestone” of Google’s DeepMind AI lab creating a computer program that could defeat humans at the board game Go.

At the time, the technology was years away from ChatGPT-style generative text, powered by large language models. Yet by 2023, even Gates was surprised by the speed of AI’s development. He’d challenged OpenAI to create a model that could get a top score on a high school AP Biology exam, expecting the task to take two or three years, he wrote in his blog post.

“They finished it in just a few months,” wrote Gates. He called the achievement “the most important advance in technology since the graphical user interface [in 1980].”

I share  the same concerns as Gates. I started speaking and writing about the potential of AI on education about ten years ago.  (See: Artificial Intelligence and the Academy’s Loss of Purpose | Online Learning.) While I agree with some of what Gates says, I think his timing is off.  AI will come to dominate much of what we do but it will take much longer than ten years for this to happen.  There will be a long conversion period from where we are now to the possible world that Gates is describing.

Tony

Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger during an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN.

Dear Commons Community,

Former Congressman Adam Kinzinger challenged Donald Trump to bring charges against him for his role on the January 6th committee. The committee investigated Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.  

On Sunday night, Trump made a strange claim. He suggested that some of the pardons issued by President Joe Biden, including those given to members of the January 6th committee, were invalid because they were signed with an autopen, which is a machine that signs documents automatically.  As reported on CNN and the Daily Boulder.

Trump said, “But I would say that they’re null and void because I’m sure Biden didn’t have any idea that it was taking place.” He then posted on Truth Social, calling the pardons “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT.”

The White House quickly pushed back on Trump’s claim. The next day, Kinzinger, one of the two Republicans on the January 6th committee, responded during an interview on CNN’s The Lead. Host Jake Tapper asked Kinzinger about Trump’s post, which declared his preemptive pardon invalid.

Kinzinger responded, saying, “First off, I’m trying to figure out what he’s trying to distract from because that’s what all this is – always a distraction to try to get people’s attention. Or maybe he hasn’t felt like he’s gotten enough attention.”

He continued, “But look, Jake. It’s like, bring it on. Like, honestly. So, we had an election. I fought against Donald Trump. I wanted Kamala Harris to win. January 6th was a big thing, but America made a different choice. Fine. I’m ready to move on.”

Kinzinger added, “I’m like, look, we made it very clear what happened on January 6th. America made a decision. And there is one person that’s obsessed about the sixth because he still has been basically deemed guilty in the court of public opinion, and that’s Donald Trump. And he can’t handle it. He obsesses about it.”

He ended with a bold statement: “So, my reaction to him is like, you know what? Then bring it on ! Like, stop talking about it! Stop being all verbose. Stop pretending like you’re tough. Bring the charges then if you really want to do it because we will crush you in court.”

Kinzinger understands well that Trump is a cowardly bully who talks the talk but doesn’t walk the walk!

Tony

Mike Waltz, JD Vance, Pete Hegseth

Dear Commons Community,

The most important part of the Signal snafu remains the fact that the secretary of defense posted sensitive information about a forthcoming strike in a Signal chat organized by the national security adviser that inadvertently included The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg.

The hunt for accountability, to the extent it occurs, will rightly focus on the security breach and whether laws were violated.

But there’s a lot more to this story and some interesting lessons to be learned from the dynamics of the national security team President Donald Trump has built for his second term.

Here some key points to consider from the 18-person group chat courtesy of CNN.

JD Vance loathes Europe

We already knew that Vice President JD Vance does not hold Europe in high regard after he lectured European officials about democracy and free speech during this year’s Munich Security Conference.

That disdain entered the “Houthi PC small group” when Vance opposed striking the Houthis in Yemen because, in his view, it would benefit Europe more than the US.

More European than American trade travels through the Suez Canal, Vance argued, and he said he worried Americans wouldn’t understand why the US was striking in Yemen. It’s a valid concern for a White House that promised “America first” foreign policy.

Vance opposed the strike. He wasn’t sure Trump understood the situation

“I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now,” Vance said, according to the posts.

Take your pick of European policies Vance might be referring to.

Trump is in the midst of threatening steep tariffs on European goods, misidentifying the European value-added tax structure as a tax on Americans. The strikes, on the other hand, were meant to open up shipping routes relied on by Europeans (and multinational corporations such as Tesla).

Trump has criticized European countries for not spending enough on their own defense and promised to stop subsidizing their security.

“I just hate bailing Europe out again,” Vance said in the chat.

Vance also mentioned a possible spike in oil prices at a time when Trump has promised to bring oil prices down.

Instead of immediate strikes, Vance suggested waiting a month to give time to explain to Americans why they were necessary.

Who tells Trump about concerns?

We know that Trump was involved in discussions about the strikes because he is quoted as saying they would be most valuable to “send a message.”

We don’t know if he heard about Vance’s opposition.

In one extremely telling post, Hegseth said he understood the concerns and would support Vance raising them with Trump.

“I fully share your loathing of European free-loading,” Hegseth said later. “It’s PATHETIC.” But then he argued the US should carry out the strikes because it was the only country “on our side of the ledger” that could make them happen.

There’s some interesting phrasing in a statement Vance’s spokesman gave to Goldberg.

“The Vice President’s first priority is always making sure that the President’s advisers are adequately briefing him on the substance of their internal deliberations,” he said.

Does that mean Vance expected someone else to raise the concerns?

Vance’s team wants you to know he does not disagree with Trump

“Vice President Vance unequivocally supports this administration’s foreign policy,” his spokesman told Goldberg. “The President and the Vice President have had subsequent conversations about this matter and are in complete agreement.”

This story should put to rest any doubts about how important a voice Stephen Miller is in the White House. Presuming he is the “SM” in the group chat, he essentially ended the conversation the day before the strike by channeling Trump.

“As I heard it, the president was clear: green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return.”

Trump’s administration expects the US to be compensated

Perhaps the most intriguing mystery is what the US expected in return for these strikes and how or whether that demand was transmitted to Europe and Egypt.

Here’s what Miller said:

“We also need to figure out how to enforce such a requirement. EG, if Europe doesn’t remunerate, then what? If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.”

Did the Europeans and Egyptians know these strikes were coming or were they expected to “remunerate” after the fact? What is the going rate for drone strikes against Houthi rebels shutting down shipping lanes?

It was Hegseth who may have posted the most sensitive information

The error in organizing the chat was national security adviser Mike Waltz’s, but the larger violation may have been by Hegseth and CIA Director John Ratcliffe.

Waltz referred to emailing details to the group’s “High side” accounts, which means their email system for sensitive data, suggesting he realized some information should not be placed on Signal.

Goldberg did not reprint all of the messages sent by Ratcliffe and Hegseth, but he wrote that one in particular from Hegseth was “shockingly reckless” because it included “operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.”

Both Hegseth and Ratcliffe have since said they did not post classified material.

Hegseth is quoted as pushing for the strikes against the Houthis, which killed 53 people, according to the Yemeni health ministry. But the deadly strike was not about the Houthis, Hegseth said.

“I see it as two things: 1) Restoring Freedom of Navigation, a core national interest; and 2) Reestablish deterrence, which Biden cratered,” he said. At another point, Hegseth argued the messaging around the strike needed to focus on Joe Biden and blaming the former president for failure to more forcefully address the issue.

Top government officials love emoji too

Before the strike, at least two officials used a prayer emoji, according to Goldberg.

After the strike, as the Cabinet officials congratulated each other, they used the same emojis anyone else might use in a text message.

Steve Witkoff, Trump’s emissary to Ukraine and Middle East peace talks, posted five emoji: two hands praying, a flexed bicep and two American flags.

Moments of DC hypocrisy

Hegseth, who appears to have posted the strike plan to Signal, twice refers to the importance of operations security, or OPSEC.

“We are currently clean on OPSEC,” he sends to the chat that included a journalist.

And, of course, for those who remember the email server scandal that hurt Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, there is now a role reversal as Democrats call for accountability while many Republicans are doing the opposite.

It should also be pointed out that the Trump administration is currently arguing in federal court that it does not have to share information about deported suspected gang members with a federal judge because to do so would jeopardize state secrets.

In sum, a bunch of incompetents are heading American foreign policy!

Tony

Dear Commons Community

Donald Trump announced last weekend that federal special education operations, currently spearheaded by the U.S. Department of Education, will move to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. As reported by K-12 Dive, Education Week and other news media.

“It’s going to be a great situation. I guarantee that in a few years from now… I think that you’re going to have tremendous results,” said Trump, while seated in the Oval Office of the White House. Trump also said he would move federal student loan and school nutrition program oversight from the Education Department to the Small Business Administration.

Trump did not say when or how the transitions would occur. Additional information from the Education Department about logistics concerning the transfer of responsibilities was not available Friday afternoon.

U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon, in a Fox News interview, said funding for the federal special education law — the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act — was in place before the creation of the Education Department in 1979. McMahon added that before the Education Department was created, special education programming was housed in what was then the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, “and it managed to work incredibly well.”

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. wrote on the social media platform X that HHS, “is fully prepared to take on the responsibility” of supporting students with disabilities. He added, “We are committed to ensuring every American has access to the resources they need to thrive. We will make the care of our most vulnerable citizens our highest national priority.”

The Education Department oversees the distribution of about $15.4 billion for supports to about 8.4 million infants, toddlers, school children and young adults with disabilities. The department’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilatives Services and Office of Special Education Programs also conducts monitoring, provides technical assistance to states and districts, and holds states and districts accountable for compliance to IDEA.

The president’s comments come after he signed an executive order during a White House event directing McMahon to shutter the department to the “maximum extent appropriate.”

At the Thursday signing of the executive order, Trump said the low academic performance of U.S. students required a shakeup at the federal level.

He and his administration have also cited the desire to reduce federal bureaucracy in order to give more decision-making power to the state and local levels.

But public school supporters have vigorously denounced the Trump administration’s moves to dismantle the Education Department, which have already included reducing the workforce by half and canceling research and teacher preparation grants. At least one group — Democracy Forward — says it is planning legal action to stop the department shutdown.

Chad Rummel, executive director of the Council for Exceptional Children, said in a statement Friday, “IDEA is an education law, not a healthcare law, and belongs at the Department of Education.”

CEC is a nonprofit for professionals who work in special and gifted education.

Rummel added, “Moving IDEA programs to HHS would de-emphasize the purpose of IDEA to provide a free and appropriate public education and other critical activities to infants, toddlers, children, and youth with disabilities, and challenge the federal role to provide evidence-based research, personnel preparation, and technical assistance to advance the field of special education.”

National Parents Union President Keri Rodrigues said in a Friday statement, “This is not a minor bureaucratic reorganization — it is a fundamental redefinition of how our country treats children with disabilities.” The National Parents Union is a 1.7 million membership organization with more than 1,800 affiliated parent organizations in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.

“We must call this what it is: an effort to dismantle protections, disempower families, and turn education into a battleground for profit-driven insurance corporations,” Rodrigues said. “We will not allow it.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Under severe fiscal stress, Wisconsin’s private colleges are cutting majors and retrenching staff in an effort to survive the financial headwinds plaguing many in institutions of higher education,

Some are upending the liberal arts at the core of their identity as they add and expand programs like computer science, artificial intelligence and health care.

The changes come after a particularly rough set of years for the state’s network of private, nonprofit colleges: In the last two years, two institutions, Cardinal Stritch University in Fox Point and Northland College in Ashland, have either closed their doors or announced they’ll do so this spring. A third, Holy Family in Manitowoc, closed in 2020.

Those challenges are driven by many of the factors that challenge higher ed in general: In Wisconsin, there’s just a smaller pool of high school students to pull from, as birth rates have consistently dropped over the last 30 years. And the high schoolers that exist are less likely to go to college than their peers a decade ago. In 2015, about 63 percent of high school graduates in Wisconsin went to college; now, it’s 51.7 percent.

A bustling job market that is willing to pay a living wage right out of high school isn’t particularly helpful to college enrollments in general. (High school graduates in Wisconsin make an average of $33,700 a year.) The sticker shock of tuition at a private college, which can range from $30,000 to $40,000 per year before scholarships, also gives some prospective students pause.

“It’s a tough time in higher education. I don’t think anybody could dispute that,” said Eric Fulcomer, president of the Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. “What you’re seeing in the Wisconsin private colleges is comparable to what we’re seeing in the Midwest, and it’s what’s happening at (Universities of Wisconsin). The challenge is, we don’t have that backstop of state funding. And so, when our schools get into a situation where things aren’t tenable, they end up closing.”

Edgewood College President Andrew Manion is looking to grow beyond the traditional, 18- to 22-year-old student, as the number of high school graduates decline: He has diversified the college’s programs to include occupational therapy and nursing anesthetics, and Edgewood has made many of its graduate programs accessible online to reach working adults who can’t relocate.

Edgewood, Madison’s only private nonprofit college, also will change its name this summer to Edgewood University, to better reflect the array of programs it provides.

“Any school that is entirely reliant upon traditional-age, undergraduate students right now is struggling to try to figure out where their future revenue is going to come from,” Manion said. “As the number of students declines, the only alternative that those schools would have would be to continue to increase tuition in order to make up for those losses, and that becomes unrealistic for too many students.”

NORTHLAND COLLEGE TO CLOSE DESPITE AGGRESSIVE CUTS AND FUNDRAISING

“Northland College has no sustainable path forward,” Northland College Board of Trustees chair Ted Bristol said.

To avoid closing, various private colleges have resorted to staff and programming cuts, as enrollment numbers drop off and budget shortfalls balloon.

Alverno College in Milwaukee cut 14 programs and three dozen staff last year after declaring a financial crisis. In Mequon, another two dozen Concordia University employees were cut last year to reduce costs.

In La Crosse, Viterbo University will eliminate 13 jobs at the end of the school year, less than 12 months after a prior round of cuts that impacted 25 roles. And at St. Norbert, in De Pere, the proposed cuts of about three dozen tenured faculty and 15 programs would eliminate many liberal arts majors, after its board approved a plan to eliminate a projected $7 million budget shortfall.

Cuts have even come at private institutions that look healthy based on IRS filings and audit reports. Marquette University, which ended 2023 with an overall surplus of $57 million, thanks to sizeable donations, is planning a $31 million reduction in spending by 2031, about 7 percent of its operating budget.

FINANCIAL WOES

Private college IRS filings take more than just tuition and expenses into consideration, Fulcomer said. Those filings also include gains or losses in the stock market, whether they’re tangible gains or not; donations often given for capital campaigns, instead of operating expenses; and spending that might reflect an institution’s investment into starting a program and hiring faculty for it, before it brings in a dime.

Still, far more colleges were in the red for fiscal year 2023, the last year all of the filings were available, than in the previous year. Seventeen colleges reported losses for that year ranging from nearly $88,000 to $13 million. Most ran shortfalls in the $1 million to $7 million range.

The year before, three of the private colleges and universities had shortfalls, with the largest being $3.7 million.

Edgewood fared on the better side when considering losses in 2023, with a shortfall of $565,720. Of colleges in the red, Green Bay-based Bellin College had the smallest loss, at $87,881.

Only four private nonprofit colleges weathered 2023 with a positive balance in their bank accounts, including three Milwaukee -based institutions — the Medical College of Wisconsin, Marquette University and Milwaukee School of Engineering — and Ripon College.

A handful of publicly available audits for fiscal year 2024 show mixed results. While nearly all of them saw increases in their assets, five didn’t earn enough revenue to cover their operating expenses while five others brought in more money than they spent.

ST. NORBERT, A CATHOLIC COLLEGE, MAY NIX THEOLOGY IN LATEST ROUND OF BUDGET CUTS

On college leaders’ chopping block are a wide array of humanities majors — notably, the Green Bay area Catholic college’s theology and religious studies majors.

Nevertheless, in the last two years, auditors only raised the closure alarm at one private college: Northland College, which launched a last-ditch fundraising rally last spring.

The college wanted to raise $12 million to stave off closure but only brought in $1 million. It was enough to stay open another year, but enrollment dropped by nearly half, to 270 students, after the college’s offerings were cut down to nine programs. In February, Northland announced that this year will be its last.

It’s “devastating” to these communities when the local private college closes, Fulcomer said.

“It’s a natural part of the situation we find ourselves in, so schools are working really hard to avoid that,” he said.

UP AGAINST HEADWINDS

While public and private schools face many of the same challenges, there’s a handful of aspects that disproportionately affect smaller private colleges.

Wisconsin’s private colleges have smaller enrollments to begin with, with 52,000 students spread across 22 institutions, compared to the UW system’s 164,000 enrolled at 13. That means fewer students sharing the costs. And when smaller institutions lose students, those losses are more pronounced because tuition makes up a larger portion of budgets than at larger schools.

There are also fewer streams of income available to private colleges than public universities and two-year technical colleges: They don’t get state funding, outside of scholarships given directly to students.

For every dollar in scholarships the state gives students, Fulcomer said, the institution often is giving $24 in discounted tuition and institutional scholarships.

But the sticker shock prospective students get from seeing price tags in the tens of thousands per year could be a deterrent, even if a financial aid package dials that cost back for them, said UW-Madison professor Nicholas Hillman, who studies college-going and access.

“So a student looking at where to go to college, they see a nonprofit charging $20,000, $30,000 in tuition a year, and they think, ‘Oh, my, might as well, you know, go to the public, because their tuitions are staying low,'” Hillman said.

PIVOTING TO IN-DEMAND FIELDS

Edgewood is giving Beloit College, traditionally a liberal arts college, a step up into nursing through a new partnership. Marian University in Fond du Lac has started a construction management bachelor’s degree after requests from a local company, Fulcomer said.

Viterbo University is adding a data analytics minor and a master’s degree in nursing. Carthage in Kenosha has a new healthcare administration program. Milwaukee School of Engineering is offering minors in machine learning and artificial intelligence. Concordia University is launching a pharmacy program.

“Our institutions are looking at the market — they’re deciding to add academic programs that will bring students to the institution and to meet the workforce needs,” Fulcomer said.

The shift to more industry-based needs is happening elsewhere in Wisconsin’s higher education landscape, too. UW system created many new nursing, engineering and artificial intelligence programs as part of a workforce development plan; many of the technical colleges have set their sights on expanding technology and healthcare programs.

Cuts to some of the liberal arts programs, though, worry students and alumni of private colleges. At St. Norbert College, a Catholic institution, its theology, French, history and art education departments are among those on the chopping block. At Alverno College, it was English, environmental science and media design, along with other science-based majors.

At Edgewood, Manion had to contend with eliminating seven tenured faculty after arriving in 2020, but then turned to figuring out where the college could grow, he said.

“When I arrived, the main issue was not about what else can we cut, but what areas can we grow into so that we can get more revenue?” he said. “It’s always about balancing revenue and expenditures, and you can only cut so much.

Tough times for high education and as the article indicates no saviors are on the horizon.

Tony