Dear Commons Community,

In her New York Times column yesterday, Maureen Dowd questioned whether the foundational American aspiration to fairness is eroding, replaced by partisan vitriol, self-serving leadership, and reckless technological advancements. Reflecting on her own family and a sense of inclusivity in the American dream, she sees a present-day America where equity is overshadowed by malice and anxiety. Below is an excerpt.

Tony

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“Because of my parents, I always thought of fairness as an American trait, as well. My dad was an Irish immigrant and my mom’s parents were Irish immigrants, and they built their working-class dream life here. America was fair to them, and they wanted to be fair to everyone else.

My family believed in government, for all its flaws, as a protector of the people. My first cousin Peggy Dowd was the secretary for F.D.R.’s aide Tommy Corcoran, a primary strategist of the New Deal. After 10 years of working together, they married and started a family. The social safety net created jobs for millions of people and helped pull the country out of the Great Depression. People treated public goods as public goods instead of moneymaking opportunities for the well-connected few.

For decades, until President Trump, the government was trusted to protect food, water, the climate and the disadvantaged. It wasn’t about which party you were in. President Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act into law. George H.W. Bush shepherded the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Of course, we have, at times, fallen spectacularly short of that ideal in our nation’s history, including the original sin of slavery, the Alien and Sedition Acts, segregation and the internment of Japanese American citizens during World War II. But I always thought that most Americans sought to be fair. The country was founded on that aspirational goal: All men are created equal.

Yet lately, so much seems unfair.

The fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

The Trump family’s kleptocracy and blatant grifting, reported so brilliantly by The Times’s Eric Lipton and a team of reporters in a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation.

The racism and antisemitism that has reared up in raw and ugly ways.

Jeff Bezos’ decimation of a legendary newspaper, The Washington Post, aiming to please a thin-skinned president, and David Ellison’s decimation of a legendary news division at CBS, aiming to please a corrupt F.C.C. chair who’s kissing the ring of a thin-skinned president who yearns to be king.

Trump and his congressional cronies cutting critical safety net programs and handing out big tax breaks to billionaire buddies. The gutting of the landmark Voting Rights Act and the wrongheaded view of the conservative Supreme Court majority that racism is over in America.

The obscene pay of C.E.O.s, growing 20 times as fast as workers’ pay last year, and the obscene wealth in the tech world, with money cascading into the hands of greedy billionaires who lack empathy or even noblesse oblige. “The über-rich,” Rahm Emanuel told me, disgustedly. “I call it the ‘3-2-1.’ They’re going for the third house, the second wife and the first plane. They’re in a hermetically sealed world.”

Trump taking the country to war with Iran, in part at the urging of his pal Bibi — without any sensible plan, debate, sanction from Congress or consideration as to how this might hurt Americans already struggling to make ends meet.

Trump gleefully tearing up large chunks of the White House and my hometown, trying to install a solipsistic arch, an exclusive golf course, a gargantuan ballroom and a garden of heroes — all to his Versailles-on-acid specifications. He desecrated the Kennedy Center, slapping his name on it and meddling with its artistic content, until a judge ordered his name stripped off. The president is ripping apart the scenes of my happiest childhood memories — the modest but beautiful White House, Jackie Kennedy’s gardens, the golf course at Hains Point where I used to go with my older brother.

The stunning failure of the hacks in government and the lords of the cloud to figure out how to safely regulate A.I. and create a kill switch to save humanity, even as A.I. leaps forward into superintelligence, and sooner than we may think, consciousness.

I try to infuse my life with my parents’ sense of fairness. And I continue to believe — or hope — that most Americans are fair, despite the unholy din of social media malice and Trump nastiness, and despite all that’s stacked against us. It’s unfair to even have to wonder: Are Americans still fair?”

Dear Commons Community,

It has been 70 years since the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence—a workshop widely recognized as a foundational event in the field of artificial intelligence (AI)—and AI is now in the headlines everyday for many reasons.  Here is an excerpt from an article that appeared in Science on Friday commemorating the Dartmouth Project, written by Kate Crawford, a professor of science and technology studies and communication at the Annenberg School, University of Southern California.

THE ORIGINS OF “ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE”

Anniversaries in the history of science are strange devices. They flatten contingent events into origin myths and give a foundational weight to a single moment that the participants themselves rarely felt at the time. The birthplace of AI can plausibly be located in many moments before the 1956 Dartmouth meeting and many later ones: in Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts’s neural calculus of 1943, in Norbert Wiener’s wartime fire-control work, in Alan Turing’s 1950 imitation game, in the Macy meetings, or in the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), the continental air-defense network that in 1958 was the largest real-time computer system ever built.

Still, the Dartmouth Project remains the canonical example. In their grant application for the meeting, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon proposed that in 2 months, 10 men could study artificial intelligence and show that “every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it”. That is not what happened.

By the end of summer, the group had neither a shared agenda nor any notable newly completed projects. But it did produce a name. The phrase “artificial intelligence” was coined by McCarthy in part to define their project against Wiener’s “cybernetics.” It described a narrower, engineering-focused field that need not engage with cybernetics’ wider questions about how minds, bodies, and societies actually work, or Wiener’s moral concerns that automation would displace human labor and drive catastrophic wars.

NEITHER ARTIFICIAL NOR INTELLIGENT

The phrase “artificial intelligence” has arguably done as much work as any individual technical result. But it obscures what the systems are made of and overstates what they do. As I argued in my 2021 book, Atlas of AI, AI is neither “artificial” nor “intelligent.” Rather than algorithms in the “cloud,” it is highly material and increasingly resource-hungry, made from rare earth minerals and copper, water and fossil fuels, human labor and data, as well as industrial and political power.

Even greater confusion is caused by the word “intelligence.” The men of Dartmouth worked within a cognitivist tradition in which thinking meant theorem proving, chess, and optimization functions. In this worldview, intelligence is the work of mathematical calculations done at a desk. Outside that frame lies everything else that is embodied, relational, and contextual: the care work of a parent, the skill of a chef balancing flavors in a meal, the way a teacher reads a classroom. The messy work of ethical decision-making, politics, and culture is entirely absent.

FROM OPEN TO CLOSED WORLDS

Intelligence, and how we define it, has always been political. It matters as much what is included as what is left out. Hubert Dreyfus saw this in 1965 and argued that the embodied, situated, ambiguity-tolerant character of human cognition could not be captured by symbol-manipulation rules. Joseph Weizenbaum described it a decade later in his book Computer Power and Human Reason, where he saw the great trap of building chatbots that people all too easily assume are intelligent. His indictment of the field he helped build has been largely ignored by AI labs.

It did not have to be this way. There was a diverse intellectual scene addressing these issues in the 1940s and 1950s, reflected in the 10 meetings of the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation. Ultimately named the Conferences on Cybernetics, they included the founding AI figures of Wiener, McCulloch, Pitts, von Neumann, and Shannon but also anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, psychiatrist Lawrence Kubie, and linguist Roman Jakobson. They asked wider questions about the relationship between humans and machines: how communication shapes societies, what automation would do to workers and to human dignity, and how scientific knowledge might be safeguarded against capture by the military.

By the mid-1960s, most of this wider interdisciplinary work had been pruned in the Cold War institutional sorting that historian of science Paul Edwards documented in his 1996 book, The Closed World. The narrow technical vision was easier to fund in a Cold War environment because it promised bounded military deliverables: machine translation for signals intelligence, object detection for missile guidance and satellite imagery, facial recognition for surveillance. Seventy years on, those three remain among the top applications where AI has been successfully engineered.

AI INFRASTRUCTURE AND THE STATE

The historical intertwining of AI and the state continues today, despite the libertarian rhetoric of the tech sector. The four largest US technology firms are deeply embedded in the infrastructural systems of government. The Stargate Project, for example, was announced in President Trump’s first week in office in 2025, as a $500 billion joint venture of OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, and the Emirati sovereign wealth fund MGX. By July, data center construction was authorized on Interior, Energy, and Defense Department lands, and four Department of Energy sites were designated for public-private development. Projects whose federal subsidy fell below half of total cost were exempted from review under the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Department of Commerce was authorized to offer loans, grants, tax breaks, and long-term purchase contracts. This model has a closer kinship to Los Alamos than to the garage-startup folklore of Silicon Valley.

Frontier AI is among the most concentrated industries in the world. Two private companies—OpenAI and Anthropic—dominate, representing a staggering combined private valuation of >$1.6 trillion. Meanwhile, Nvidia supplies roughly 90% of AI data center chips and stands as the most valuable company in human history, hovering near a $5 trillion market capitalization after adding >$4 trillion dollars in value in just 3 years. Analysts describe a self-reinforcing loop in which Nvidia allocates scarce chips preferentially to the firms making the largest forward commitments, and the sector operates within a circular web of investments.

Historically, other concentrated industries, such as railroads, oil, and telephony, raised deep concerns among regulators and the public, be it for price-fixing power over consumers, the capture of legislatures, or private fortunes warping democratic politics. This resulted in antitrust suits and regulation in the past, but we are in a different time. The scale of AI’s physical footprint is harder still to grasp. What is underway is plausibly the largest collective infrastructure project in human history. The daily thermal output of the Stratos Project, according to physicist Rob Davies, could be equivalent to 23 atomic bombs. Meta is funding seven natural-gas plants for 7-gigawatt facilities in Louisiana. SoftBank is targeting $500 billion for a 10-gigawatt data center in Ohio, which Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has called “the largest construction project in the country”. A single gigawatt of capacity can power roughly 750,000 homes at any given moment.

DARTMOUTH’S BROADER LEGACIES

The artificial intelligence systems we have today are drastically different from what was imagined at Dartmouth in 1956, but symmetries remain. A small handful of men, mostly trained in the same disciplines at the same institutions, are again declaring that “intelligence” is what their machines do and that the world will be transformed for the better by what they build.

The Dartmouth group conceded after the meeting that there was hubris in trying to solve “intelligence” in 2 months. Today, some AI leaders claim not only that AI will become superintelligent but also that it will somehow solve the social and environmental harms it causes at an uncertain point in the future. In the meantime, our communities, institutions, and governments struggle to adapt in the face of dramatic power concentration, growing carbon emissions from data centers, and an integration with state violence that Weizenbaum and Wiener most feared.

After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Wiener refused further work for the military. He could find, as he wrote, “no way to publish without letting my inventions go to the wrong hands. If the Dartmouth anniversary is to be useful, it should compel a moment of ethical reckoning in the field.

AI is now capable of great harm on the battlefield, in the environment, to the value of human labor, and in democratic life. Alongside real engineering progress, the field has fallen far behind in confronting the wider consequences of its own experiments. Unless that disparity is addressed, the next major AI anniversary may be far from celebratory.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Last week, Unity Environmental University, a college known historically for its residential liberal-arts education shed its longtime campus for good.

The institution hasn’t closed. In fact, it’s enrolling more students than ever before. But Unity Environmental University, formerly Unity College, no longer enrolls any undergraduates at its home base in rural Maine. Unity has offloaded the real estate, at a price of $6 million. The sale, to a buyer who plans to use the 225 acres for summer-camp programming and outdoor experiences, caps off a yearslong pivot in which the institution has completely remade itself.  As reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

In 2016, the institution enrolled some 700 students in hands-on programs in wildlife conservation, zookeeping, and land management. Over the following few years, a reform-minded president with a business background pushed Unity to embrace online education, promising similar career opportunities with flexible learning at a far lower price.

After experiencing a steep decline in in-person enrollment during the pandemic, Unity now counts more than 7,000 students in its ranks, the vast majority of whom are remote. It echoes the famous transformation of Southern New Hampshire University, a private institution that became a distance-education giant within a decade. (A small amount of in-person instruction will continue at Unity’s rented Pineland Farms campus, a little over an hour from the town of Unity, where the original campus was located.)

Unity may be the rare success story in a long line of cautionary tales for rural small colleges that have struggled to adapt to the modern era.

But its transition hasn’t been without pain or controversy. Many alumni and former employees lament that, in their eyes, the university has strayed far from its mission of educating future stewards of the environment.

In a message to the Unity community, Melik Peter Khoury, the university’s president since 2016, seemed to anticipate pushback.

“The decision to move away from the traditional semester model and ultimately sell the Unity property was among the most difficult in our institution’s history,” Khoury wrote. “It was not made lightly, and it was not made without a deep appreciation for what this place meant to so many people.”

Shortly before news of the sale was announced, Khoury published a lengthy screed on Substack, titled “The Lie at the Center of Higher Education: What Thirty Years Inside the Academy Forced Me to Admit.”

In that piece, and in a conversation with The Chronicle shortly after, Khoury reflected on what he sees as the flawed social contracts between colleges, their employees, and their students. He argued that higher education serves its work force’s interests — particularly the faculty — above students’ needs and is too resistant to change.

“I am not disappointed in the students,” Khoury wrote. “I am not disappointed in the people doing the work. I am disappointed in an industry that had every chance to learn from the institutions proving a better way was possible and chose instead to look past them. So I am going to say it plainly, on the record, with my name on it and my job still attached.”

The changes that Khoury and his board have installed at Unity could give someone whiplash. The college laid off about 30 percent of its staff while facing a revenue shortfall during the Covid pandemic. But as the online component has thrived, the university has frozen its tuition costs for distance students, reorganized its academic schedule, and installed a $50,000 salary floor for full-time employees in Maine.

Khoury told The Chronicle that Unity’s approach is a departure from what he sees as pointless attempts to emulate selective four-year residential colleges.

“It’s like me saying, ‘I want to dunk like Michael Jordan,’” Khoury said. “If I’m lucky, I’ll dribble. If I’m lucky, I’ll do a layup. But I don’t have that athletic power. We have to change, and schools that do that don’t get much coverage. Open-access institutions constantly get vilified.”

‘No One’s Coming to Save Us’

If Unity’s model became the blueprint for other similar institutions, Khoury said, then more students would get access to education. Not every student needs the “American rumspringa,” he remarked. (Unity partners with the University of Southern Maine at Gorham to offer housing for Pineland students who want it).

“You have to look at some of the amenities of education that have nothing to do with teaching as luxuries,” Khoury said. “That’s why at Unity we try very hard to separate our audiences, so that the students who want that experience pay a little bit differently than the students who don’t, instead of this idea that there’s only one approach.”

But some alums are ill at ease with this dramatic transition, which they believe wasn’t the right response to a declining number of traditional-age undergraduates in the region. It’s not hard to see the parallels with another quirky New England institution, Hampshire College, which will close after the fall semester. Attempts to save the Massachusetts college haven’t panned out.

Steph Barrett, a Maine resident who graduated from Unity College in 1995 with a degree in outdoor-recreation leadership, said she didn’t think she would have succeeded at the contemporary Unity Environmental University, with its remote curriculum. As a nontraditional student, starting college at 21, Barrett said Unity had a personal touch and “counterculture influence” that helped her stay engaged.

“You could do things at Unity that you really couldn’t do at any other school,” Barrett said, like electrofishing or pulling cubs out of dens in the spring and weighing them.

Justin Preisendorfer, a Unity alum who works for the U.S. Forest Service, sees value in the new use for the campus property. But he says the local community has suffered from the loss of the main campus, which closed in 2020.

“I ran the college’s climbing wall for a number of years, and it was always open to the public, not just students,” Preisendorfer said. “We had families that would come, we’d have teenage kids who were looking for something to do on a Friday night. … That involvement with the community was central.”

Unity still touts experiential learning as a distinguishing factor of its education; many alumni go on to careers in natural resources and conservation. An alum and former employee who asked to speak on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution emphasized that while there is a place for online education, it would be hard to apply that knowledge without being outside.

There are also implications for fund raising. The current administration has alienated its older graduates, the former employee said, and recent or future students won’t have ties to a physical campus.

“No one’s coming to save us,” she said. “No one’s going to care about the governance or the takeover of a small environmental college that nobody really cared about.”

Asked to comment on the campus sale and the controversy surrounding it, Khoury said he understood why some people would be emotional, but that the transaction reflected the reality for higher education today. Eventually, he wrote, tuition-driven institutions without large endowments would have to choose between preserving a mission and preserving a space.

Khoury defended the decision as aligning with Unity’s mission, not selling it out.

“An institution that cannot pay its bills cannot educate anyone,” he wrote. “Protecting the mission sometimes means letting go of the very things people associate with it.”

Ain’t that the truth!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Texas approved a sweeping, new state book list yesterday, establishing for the first time a common set of books that millions of students across the state must read, including excerpts from the Bible.

It is highly unusual — perhaps unprecedented — for a state, rather than a school or a teacher, to mandate a reading list for every grade level for all public-school students.

The list will shape what a generation of Texas students grows up reading. The state is home to more than five million public school students, 11 percent of the total U.S. public school population.  As reported by The New York Times.

The list reflects the priorities of the state board, which has a 10-to-5 Republican majority. It puts a focus on classic literature and includes excerpts from the Bible.

The list was being edited up until it passed yesterday afternoon, but the draft included books like “Charlotte’s Web” by E.B. White (third grade), “Night” by Elie Wiesel (eighth grade) and “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare (12th grade).

A Bible excerpt was included in most grade levels, spurring fierce debate.

Texas education officials say the Bible is an essential piece of literature and important for understanding America’s founding and culture. Critics argue that including it in English class violates separation of church and state, and is part of a broader effort to infuse Christianity in Texas public schools.

“The government of Texas, let alone any American government body, should never be in the business of imposing one religion on everyone,” said Rachel Laser, president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which has challenged a law requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in Texas classrooms.

The new Texas list is also an effort to raise the level of rigor and get more students reading. Fewer students are reading full books in English class or at home, and U.S. reading scores are in a decade-long slump. Some education leaders and policymakers believe emphasizing whole books is increasingly essential for combating the rise of tech and A.I.

The Texas list comes in response to a 2023 state law that required state education officials to select at least one literary work in each grade level.

The state board went further, outlining a number of texts in each grade. Texas teachers were still expected to be able to teach books off the list, but they will need to find the time, on top of the ones required.

The selections have drawn criticism for putting an emphasis on older texts, often written by white and male authors, in a state where more than half of students are Hispanic or Black.

“With a list that’s so extensive, would teachers have the time or space to choose texts that are a great fit for their students, their classrooms, their region?” said Markesha Tisby, president of the Texas Council of Teachers of English Language Arts, which argued for narrowing the list to allow teachers more choice.

“Texas is extremely large,” she said, “and very diverse.”

The list focuses on classic literature

The draft list before the board included about 200 texts for K-12 students.

For elementary school students, the list included classics like “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” by Eric Carle. It also had a number of books about U.S. founding fathers and historical figures, as well as excerpts from “The Children’s Book of Virtues,” an anthology of stories edited by William J. Bennett, the secretary of education under President Ronald Reagan.

In middle and high school, two main books were to be required each year, along with other related poems, speeches, historical texts and biblical excerpts.

For example, 10th graders would read “The Tragedy of Julius Caesar” by William Shakespeare, and “The Inferno” by Dante Alighieri. Among other texts, they would also read the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I’ve Been to the Mountain Top” speech; Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem “The Raven”; Margaret Thatcher’s eulogy for Mr. Reagan; and an excerpt from the Book of Job.

The list aligns with a classical approach to education, popular with conservatives, that posits students should read texts that have stood the test of time.

“You don’t get to know what a classic is until 50, 60 years after the author is dead,” said Jeremy Tate, the founder of the Classic Learning Test, an alternative to the SAT and ACT.

While deciding upon a shared set of texts is bound to stir debate, he said, “it’s better to have a common canon that can provide some cultural common ground — a basis to argue around — rather than no canon at all.”

Democratic members of the state board and some Texas educators criticized the list’s lack of diversity across race, geography and time period, arguing that it will make it more difficult to engage students.

“There is a real attempt for students to not see themselves in these lists,” said Jonna Perrillo, an English professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, who noted that there are few Texas authors and few contemporary books on the list, particularly at the high school level.

Biblical passages would be required in most grades

Students would be required to read a Bible excerpt at most grade levels, starting in elementary school.

Excerpts included “The Necessity of Humility” by the Gospel of Luke and “To Everything There is a Season” from the Book of Ecclesiastes. In middle and high school, Bible selections were included in thematic units along with a book. For example, the “Definition of Love,” from First Corinthians, would be taught alongside “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen in 12th grade.

“There is a difference between proselytizing and utilizing great pieces of literature,” said Mandy Drogin, a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank that has supported the changes.

But the list drew objections from teachers, parents, students and religious leaders who testified before the board this week.

David Segal, a rabbi who works for the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, testified that the list shows a preference for evangelical Christian versions of the Bible, often the King James Version, that risks “an unconstitutional endorsement” of religion.

What’s not on the list

The Texas list did not include some of the most commonly taught books around the country, including “Romeo and Juliet” and “The Great Gatsby,” the No. 1 and No. 2. most assigned books in U.S. high schools, according to the National Council of Teachers of English.

It also avoided some popular classics that have been contested in recent years, like “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Those books are among the top books currently taught in Texas high schools, according to research by Dr. Perrillo, the UTEP professor, and Andrew Newman of Stony Brook University, who surveyed 1,250 high school English teachers, including almost 200 from Texas, in 2024.

On the survey, Texas teachers reported teaching a variety of other books, including some contemporary novels like “All the Light We Cannot See,” a 2014 novel by Anthony Doerr that won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

The question of what to include as essential literature is not new. The College Board, for example, has long encouraged certain texts, like “Frankenstein,” in Advanced Placement literature classes, if only because they are likely to show up on the end-of-year A.P. exam.

And some charter school networks like Great Hearts, which runs schools in Texas and Arizona, and Success Academy, in New York City, have rigorous lists of books that students are expected to read.

But the Texas list is a rare attempt at creating a shared canon for an entire state. The list was in flux up until the final vote. Texas officials voted to remove a picture book on Noah’s Ark for first graders, for example, but add a biblical reading from the Book of Jonah, on Jonah and the Whale.

The list would not go into effect immediately, but be rolled out as a requirement in the coming years.

Tony

Graduates in the School of Education hold up books during Harvard’s 371st Commencement on May 26, 2022, in Cambridge, Mass.

Mary Schwalm/AP

Dear Commons Community,

The U.S. Department of Education violated the law when it set a definition of “professional” graduate degree that excluded education and several other fields, a federal judge has ruled.

The Wednesday ruling from Judge Beryl Howell came in response to lawsuits from professional health care organizations and the National Education Association that challenged the agency’s May regulation limiting the definition of “professional” degrees to just 11 mostly doctoral-level degrees.  As reported by Education Week.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act that President Donald Trump signed last summer imposed new caps on how much graduate students can borrow in federal student loans, in a move proponents have said will drive down graduate program costs and reduce student debt.

But those borrowing limits are higher for degrees deemed “professional” ($50,000 annually or $200,000 total) than for other graduate degrees ($20,500 annually or $100,000 total).

Congress didn’t define a “professional” degree on its own when it wrote the law; instead it referred to a regulatory definition dating back to 2007 that mentioned 10 degrees—including for pharmacy, dentistry, podiatry, theology, and law—as examples of those that could qualify but didn’t include an exhaustive list.

When the Education Department developed regulations this year to implement the new borrowing caps, though, it limited the definition of professional degree to include 11 degrees, excluding fields such as education and nursing.

The department said education didn’t qualify because entry-level teaching positions only require a bachelor’s degree. But educators and others pointed out in comments on the department’s regulations that several K-12 positions, such as administrative and counselor roles, require graduate degrees. Without the ability to borrow to cover the full cost of advanced degrees, many argued, educators will either have to resort to private lenders or not pursue graduate degrees in needed fields at all.

According to Howell, an appointee of President Barack Obama, the Education Department didn’t have the authority to narrow the definition to those 11 degrees.

“Congress did not direct the Department to evaluate and update the regulatory definition … with any new eligibility criteria, let alone five material changes to the statutorily adopted regulatory definition,” she wrote in a 52-page opinion. “In fact, Congress did the opposite.”

In addition to the two lawsuits in which Howell ruled, the professional degree definition has drawn at least two other legal challenges—one from a coalition of Democratic-led states and another from a group of health care organizations led by the American Nurses Association.

Whether education fields join the ‘professional’ degree ranks is uncertain

The organizations leading the legal challenge in which Howell ruled hailed her order as a victory for those seeking advanced degrees in education, nursing, public health, and other fields.

“Cutting access to federal student loans for aspiring professionals in the education field is reckless and deeply harmful, especially when students are already feeling the impact of educator shortages in communities across the country,” NEA President Becky Pringle said in a statement.

But what happens next is uncertain.

Howell set aside the Education Department’s new definition of professional degree and told the agency to use the old definition to effectively develop a new list of degrees that qualify for the higher borrowing cap. Whether that new list includes education degrees remains to be seen.

An Education Department spokesperson said the agency “is reviewing the order and will take appropriate action.

“Additionally, we look forward to implementing the RISE student loan provisions and offering new, affordable repayment plans on July 1,” the spokesperson said, referring to the new borrowing limits.

Cheryl Holcomb-McCoy, the president and CEO of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, said in a statement that she’s hopeful education professions—including principals, school counselors, and supervisory special education positions—will eventually become part of the professional degree definition.

“Given the significant shortages across multiple professional roles in education, and the lower salaries that educators can expect compared to other professionals, it is essential that those pursuing these careers have access to the most affordable forms of credit available,” she said in a statement.

What AACTE is most concerned about is a provision in the law that limits borrowing even more for part-time students—to a prorated amount of the limits set in law—as many pursuing advanced education degrees are working educators. But the professional degree designation would give part-time graduate education students more breathing room, said Jacqueline King, a consultant with the association.

Another complication is that these regulatory changes are playing out weeks before the fall semester, after most universities have set their financial aid packages, King said. Normally, federal regulations affecting student aid have to be set by Nov. 1 before taking effect July 1 of the following year.

The Education Department, however, finalized its rule defining professional degrees on May 1. Now, July 1 is less than a week away.

Tony

“The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections,” a federal judge ruled on Thursday, tossing crucial parts of President Trump’s executive order that sought to restrict mail voting. Credit…Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Dear Commons Community,

The federal judiciary especially the US Supreme Court has been busy this week handing down rulings on a variety of cases especially those initiated by Trump.  In my opinion, one of the most consequential decisions was in a federal court in Massachusetts which struck down crucial components of an executive order from President Trump that sought to place significant restrictions on mail voting as “unlawful, null, and void.” The order had, in part, tried to use federal oversight of the U.S. Postal Service to regulate mail voting.  As reported by The New York Times.

The ruling from Judge Indira Talwani amounted to a broad rejection of the Trump administration’s attempts to change federal election procedures through an executive order, repeatedly emphasizing that the Constitution grants authority over elections not to the executive branch but to individual states and Congress.

“The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections,” Judge Talwani wrote, adding emphasis by underlining the words “does not.”

More than 20 Democratic attorneys general representing states across the country brought the legal challenge in federal court in Massachusetts.

Mr. Trump’s executive order, signed in March, called on the Department of Homeland Security to compile state-by-state citizen lists to help determine voter eligibility. It called on the Postal Service to verify voters based on lists provided by states. Earlier this month, the Postal Service complied with the order, releasing a proposed rule consistent with many of Mr. Trump’s demands.

The decision comes as Mr. Trump has renewed his push to pass federal legislation that would impose fresh voting restrictions, canceling the signing of a celebrated bipartisan housing measure on Wednesday and instead demanding that Republicans first pass the president’s priority voting legislation, known as the SAVE America Act.

A spokesperson for the Postal Service did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Abigail Jackson, a spokeswoman for the White House, defended the executive order’s legality and said that the administration was “confident that we will ultimately prevail” in putting in effect the executive order. She reiterated the administration’s intent to pass the SAVE America Act in Congress.

“President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of our elections,” Ms. Jackson said.

Multiple lawsuits have challenged the executive order, including a separate case in Washington, D.C., where a judge initially decided not to block the order after concluding that, because it had not yet been carried out, no state or party had suffered legal harm.

Judge Talwani, however, found that the executive order had already forced many states that were part of the Massachusetts lawsuit to change election policies and procedures. Connecticut had already shifted election workers away from other duties to begin planning for the executive order, and nearly half the states were grappling with the fact that they had already purchased mail ballot envelopes that were not in compliance with the directive.

“Not only are Plaintiff States experiencing injury now with respect to planning, but it is undisputed that, should the E.O.’s directives go into effect, Plaintiff States will incur compliance costs,” Judge Talwani, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama, wrote.

The ruling focused on two sections of the executive order that sought to create state-by-state citizenship lists within the Department of Homeland Security and direct the Postal Service to use an approved list of voters to guide election mail.

Judge Talwani found that the authority to create voter lists and to determine voter eligibility rests with the states, writing that “the Constitution reserves the power to determine voter eligibility to the States alone.”

But she also questioned whether records that the government would be relying on would be able to “track name changes (such as when a woman changes her name at marriage) or residence changes when citizens move from State to State.”

“It is clear that the federal agencies charged with compiling Confirmed Citizen Lists lack the ability to create complete and accurate lists of the U.S. citizens residing in every State,” Judge Talwani wrote.

And the judge returned to the question of executive authority, finding that “the President lacks any authority to compile voter lists for each State.”

Similarly, regarding the provision directing the Postal Service to take a more direct role in overseeing mail voting, Judge Talwani found the agency lacked authority over elections.

“No law enacted by Congress delegates authority to control mail-in voting to U.S.P.S.,” Judge Talwani wrote, adding that the service “lacks statutory authorization to promulgate any binding regulations on mail-in voting.”

The judge’s ruling comes a day after Postmaster General David Steiner confirmed in a hearing before the Senate that a proposed rule would block mail ballots in states that do not hand over sensitive voter data to the federal government.

Mr. Steiner has repeatedly said that the Postal Service would follow court orders.

In an interview with The New York Times earlier this year, he said that he would defer to the courts on the legality of Mr. Trump’s executive order and reaffirmed that the service would “absolutely” continue to deliver mail-in ballots.

We will see!

Tony

Photo by DAVID DEE DELGADO / AFP via Getty Images© HITC

Dear Commons Community,

Jalen Brunson played a pivotal role in finally making the New York Knicks an NBA champion for the first time since 1973.

Brunson’s impact was clear in the 2026 NBA Finals as he took home the NBA Finals MVP award after averaging 32.6 points, 4.2 rebounds, and 4.6 assists per game vs. the San Antonio Spurs.

Since then, the 3x NBA All-Star has been praised by a plethora of people, and former US President Barack Obama has joined that list.

Barack Obama applauded Jalen Brunson’s ‘mental fortitude’ as a second-round draft pick

As a 6’2″ guard being drafted in the second round, no one expected Brunson to become the star that he is today. It’s evident from the Dallas Mavericks allowing Brunson to leave as a free agent in 2022.

Obama praised the 29-year-old’s career during a recent appearance on All the Smoke podcast.

“It’s the toughness and endurance and mental fortitude of that guy,” Obama said. “Like, like you just felt like I’m just gonna keep coming, and I’m not doubting myself, and I’m not gonna let my team doubt myself.

He added, “And for a second-round draft pick, who was a champion, who was a winner, but I think nobody projected that, you know, you didn’t see it coming.”

Obama then couldn’t help but compare Brunson to Golden State Warriors superstar Stephen Curry due to their similarities in physiques.

Obama didn’t stop there and the former US President dropped the ultimate praise on Brunson by hailing him as the ‘king of New York.’

“So it’s a cliche, but that dude has the heart of a champion. You can see just watching him with his dad at the end of the game and kind of what that meant, all the work they must have put in,” he continued.

“Real proud of him. And let me tell you, I know, he never has to pay for a meal again in, in New York. … He’s the king of New York, right?” Obama concluded.

Being the captain of the Knicks team that ended their championship drought, it’s indeed safe to crown Brunson as the king of New York.

So true!

Tony

Qatar’s Airforce One

Dear Commons Community,

Trump unveiled the new presidential aircraft last week, a plane gifted by the Qatari government that has since undergone modifications. Trump has said he will not use the aircraft after leaving office and that it will eventually be donated to his future presidential library.

The Meidas Touch Network asked Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, if Trump gets to keep the jet after his presidency ends.

“No, he does not,” Raskin bluntly replied.

Raskin then explained:

“You know why? Because the Constitution says he can’t do it. Because the Constitution says that the president may not receive a present, an emolument, which means a payment, an office or title of any kind, whatever, from a king, a prince, or a foreign state without the consent of Congress. And Congress has not consented to him keeping a $400 million jet. So it’s got to be turned over immediately to Congress for our disposition. And we can either send it back to the people in Qatar, or we can keep it and do something different with it. But it doesn’t belong to the president.”

The Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause states: “No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

Raskin pointed to President Abraham Lincoln’s decision to turn over “some elephant tusks he’d gotten from the King of Siam” to the State Department as a perfect example of how foreign gifts should be handled.

“Like, that’s the right way to do it,” he said. “Every other president has come to Congress to ask whether they can keep one of these foreign gifts from a government or a king or a prince. President Trump should be no different. He’s got to come to us too. And if not, we’ll just have to requisition it and confiscate it.”

Ethics concerns were raised when the gift — which Trump has argued is being given to the Department of Defense, not to him personally — was first reported last year.

At the time, Columbia Law School professor Richard Briffault told NPR that if the aircraft ultimately ends up in Trump’s presidential library, “then it’s not really a gift to the United States at all” and that accepting the plane would be a “pretty textbook case of a violation of the Emoluments Clause.”

This gift oozes of slime!

Tony

Mayor Zohran Mamdani made appearances at three victory parties on Tuesday, the last with Darializa Avila Chevalier.

Credit…Lexi Parra/The New York Times

Dear Commons Community,

Mayor Zohran Mamdani showed the strength of his progressive coalition in New York on Tuesday night, using his political muscle to elevate three like-minded candidates to victories in Democratic House primary races — including two that ousted incumbents.

The wins will help shape the party’s direction heading into the midterms in November, when Democrats hope to flip control of the House amid voter unease over issues including inflation and the war in Iran.  As reported by The New YorkTimes.

Mr. Mamdani had made a major gamble to parlay his popularity in the city to expand his progressive left-wing movement, and three of his allies won closely watched races: Brad Lander, the former city comptroller, and two democratic socialists, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez.

At Ms. Valdez’s watch party, Mr. Mamdani told the gathered crowd that the night’s results showed that his victory in the mayor’s race “was not the end of a political movement, it was the beginning.”

As Mr. Mamdani spoke, the crowd broke into chants of “D.S.A.! D.S.A.!” — a reference to the Democratic Socialists of America organization. “The old politics that got us into this crisis is not the politics that’s going to get us out of this crisis,” he said.

Ms. Avila Chevalier beat Adriano Espaillat, a powerful incumbent, in a stunning upset. Mr. Lander ousted Representative Dan Goldman. And Ms. Valdez, a state lawmaker, is now poised to succeed Representative Nydia Velázquez, who is retiring.

In another closely watched Democratic contest in Manhattan, Micah Lasher, a state assemblyman, emerged from a field including Jack Schlossberg, the grandson of John F. Kennedy, and is poised to succeed Representative Jerrold Nadler in a safely Democratic district. Mr. Mamdani did not make an endorsement in the race.

In the suburbs north of the city, Democrats picked Cait Conley, a national security expert and combat veteran, to challenge Representative Mike Lawler, one of Republicans’ most vulnerable incumbents, in November.

New York wasn’t the only state with action on Tuesday: In South Carolina, a candidate endorsed by President Trump beat another candidate endorsed by Mr. Trump in a runoff in the Republican primary for governor. In Maryland, Democrats picked a candidate to seek the seat of the retiring Representative Steny Hoyer.

Other primary outcomes:

• Elsewhere in New York: In the North Country, Anthony Constantino, the sticker magnate who erected a 12-foot-high “VOTE FOR TRUMP” sign atop his company’s headquarters, won the Republican nomination to replace Representative Elise Stefanik. New York Democrats decided to again nominate their state comptroller of two decades, Thomas P. DiNapoli.
• Maryland House primaries: Pro-Israel and pro-crypto super PACs spent millions to back Adrian Boafo, a moderate state delegate, who emerged from a crowded primary field for the Democratic nomination to succeed Mr. Hoyer. In another district, Representative April McClain Delaney fended off a challenge from former Representative David Trone, the former occupant of the seat, in one of the country’s most expensive House primaries.
• Utah House primary: Court-ordered redistricting in Utah led to the creation of a deep-blue congressional district in Salt Lake City, meaning that Utah is likely to elect a Democrat to Congress this fall for the first time since 2018. Ben McAdams, a moderate former congressman who won that 2018 race, won the Democratic primary on Tuesday, defeating three progressive challengers, including Nate Blouin, a state senator backed by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
• South Carolina runoff: Alan Wilson, South Carolina’s longtime attorney general, won a runoff in the Republican primary for governor, defeating Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette. Mr. Trump had given his coveted endorsement to both candidates. Mr. Wilson will face State Representative Jermaine Johnson in November. South Carolina has not elected a Democratic governor since 1998.

Tony