Dear Commons Community,

Acting swiftly on President Joe Biden’s promise to retaliate for the deadly suicide bombing at Kabul airport, the U.S. military said it used a drone strike to kill a member of the Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate this morning.

The strike came amid what the White House called indications that IS planned to strike again as the U.S.-led evacuation from Kabul airport moved into its final days.  As reported by NBC News and the Associated Press.

Biden authorized the drone strike and it was ordered by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a defense official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to provide details not yet publicly announced.

The airstrike was launched from beyond Afghanistan less than 48 hours after the devastating Kabul attack that killed 13 Americans and scores of Afghans with just days left in a final U.S. withdrawal after 20 years of war. U.S. Central Command provided few details; it said it believed its strike killed no civilians.

The speed with which the U.S. military retaliated reflected its close monitoring of IS and years of experience in targeting extremists in remote parts of the world. But it also shows the limits of U.S. power to eliminate extremist threats, which some believe will have more freedom of movement in Afghanistan now that the Taliban is in power.

Central Command said the drone strike was conducted in Nangahar province against an IS member believed to be involved in planning attacks against the United States in Kabul. The strike killed one individual, spokesman Navy Capt. William Urban said.

It wasn’t clear if the targeted individual was involved directly in the Thursday suicide blast outside the gates of the Kabul airport, where crowds of Afghans were desperately trying to get in as part of the ongoing evacuation.

The airstrike came after Biden declared Thursday that perpetrators of the attack would not be able to hide. “We will hunt you down and make you pay,” he said. Pentagon leaders told reporters Friday that they were prepared for whatever retaliatory action the president ordered.

“We have options there right now,” said Maj. Gen. Hank Taylor of the Pentagon’s Joint Staff.

The president was warned Friday to expect another lethal attack in the closing days of a frantic U.S.-led evacuation. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden’s national security team offered a grim outlook.

“They advised the president and vice president that another terror attack in Kabul is likely, but that they are taking maximum force protection measures at the Kabul airport,” Psaki said, echoing what the Pentagon has been saying since the bombing Thursday at Kabul airport.

Late Friday, the State Department again urged Americans to stay away from airport gates, including “the New Ministry of Interior gate.”

Few new details about the airport attack emerged a day later, but the Pentagon corrected its initial report that there had been suicide bombings at two locations. It said there was just one — at or near the Abbey Gate — followed by gunfire. The initial report of a second bombing at the nearby Baron Hotel proved to be false, said Maj. Gen. Hank Taylor of the Pentagon’s Joint Staff; he attributed the mistake to initial confusion.

Based on a preliminary assessment, U.S. officials believe the suicide vest used in the attack, which killed at least 169 Afghans in addition to the 13 Americans, carried about 25 pounds of explosives and was loaded with shrapnel, a U.S. official said Friday. A suicide bomb typically carries five to 10 pounds of explosives, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss preliminary assessments of the bombing.

Biden still faces the problem over the longer term of containing an array of potential extremist threats based in Afghanistan, which will be harder with fewer U.S. intelligence assets and no military presence in the nation.

Emily Harding, a former CIA analyst and deputy staff director for the Senate Intelligence Committee, said she doubted Biden’s assurances that the United States will be able to monitor and strike terror threats from beyond Afghanistan’s borders. The Pentagon also insists this so-called “over the horizon” capability, which includes surveillance and strike aircraft based in the Persian Gulf area, will be effective.

In an Oval Office appearance Friday, Biden again expressed his condolences to victims of the attack. The return home of U.S. military members’ remains in coming days will provide painful and poignant reminders not just of the devastation at the Kabul airport but also of the costly way the war is ending. More than 2,400 U.S. service members died in the war and tens of thousands were injured over the past two decades.

The Marine Corps said 11 of the 13 Americans killed were Marines. One was a Navy sailor and one an Army soldier. Their names have not been released pending notification of their families, a sometimes-lengthy process that Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said involves “difficult conversations.”

Still, sorrowful details of those killed were starting to emerge. One Marine from Wyoming was on his first tour in Afghanistan and his wife is expecting a baby in three weeks; another was a 20-year-old man from Missouri whose father was devastated by the loss. A third, a 20-year-old from Texas, had joined the armed services out of high school.

Biden ordered U.S. flags to half-staff across the country in honor of the 13.

They were the first U.S. service members killed in Afghanistan since February 2020, the month the Trump administration struck an agreement with the Taliban that called for the militant group to halt attacks on Americans in exchange for a U.S. agreement to remove all American troops and contractors by May 2021. Biden announced in April that he would have all forces out by September.

Psaki said the next few days of the mission to evacuate Americans and others, including vulnerable Afghans fleeing Taliban rule, “will be the most dangerous period to date.”

The White House said that as of Friday morning, about 12,500 people were airlifted from Kabul in the last 24 hours on U.S. and coalition aircraft; in the 12 hours that followed, another 4,200 people were evacuated. Psaki said about 300 Americans had departed and the State Department was working with about 500 more who want to leave. The administration has said it intends to push on and complete the airlift despite the terror threats.

Kirby told reporters the U.S. military is monitoring credible, specific Islamic State threats “in real time.”

“We certainly are prepared and would expect future attempts,” Kirby said. He declined to describe details of any additional security measures being taken, including those implemented by the Taliban, around the airport gates and perimeter. He said there were fewer people in and around the gates Friday.

Drones are a far more desirable way to fight in Afghanistan than ground troops.

Tony

Sirhan Sirhan (1968) – Robert Kennedy – Sirhan Sirhan (Today)

Dear Commons Community,

The California parole board voted yesterday to free Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin after two of RFK’s sons said they supported releasing him and prosecutors declined to argue he should be kept behind bars. As reported by the Associated Press.

“Douglas Kennedy was a toddler when his father was gunned down in 1968. He told a two-person board panel that he was moved to tears by Sirhan’s remorse and that the 77-year-old should be released if he’s not a threat to others.

“I’m overwhelmed just by being able to view Mr. Sirhan face to face,” he said. “I’ve lived my life both in fear of him and his name in one way or another. And I am grateful today to see him as a human being worthy of compassion and love.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has spoken in favor of Sirhan’s release in the past and met with him in prison, wrote in favor of paroling Sirhan.

“While nobody can speak definitively on behalf of my father, I firmly believe that based on his own consuming commitment to fairness and justice, that he would strongly encourage this board to release Mr. Sirhan because of Sirhan’s impressive record of rehabilitation,” he said in a letter submitted to the board.

Sirhan smiled, thanked the board and gave a thumbs-up after the decision to grant parole was announced. It was a major victory in his 16th attempt at parole. But it does not assure his release.

The ruling will be reviewed over the next 90 days by the board’s staff. Then it will be sent to the governor, who will have 30 days to decide whether to grant it, reverse it or modify it. If Sirhan is freed, he must live in a transitional home for six months, enroll in an alcohol abuse program and get therapy.

Robert F. Kennedy was the U.S. senator from New York and the brother of President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1963. RFK was seeking the Democratic presidential nomination when he was gunned down at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles moments after delivering a victory speech in the pivotal California primary. Five others were wounded.

Sirhan, who insists he doesn’t remember the shooting and had been drinking alcohol just beforehand, was convicted of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to death after his conviction, but that sentence was commuted to life when the California Supreme Court briefly outlawed capital punishment in 1972.

At his last parole hearing in 2016, commissioners concluded after more than three hours of intense testimony that Sirhan did not show adequate remorse or understand the enormity of his crime.

This time, prosecutors declined to participate or oppose Sirhan’s release under a policy by Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón, a former police officer who took office last year after running on a reform platform. Gascón, who said he idolized the Kennedys and mourned RFK’s assassination, believes the prosecutors’ role ends at sentencing and they should not influence decisions to release prisoners.

The Los Angeles Police Department, relatives of some of the victims and members of the public submitted letters opposing Sirhan’s release, Parole Board Commissioner Robert Barton said at the start of Friday’s proceeding, held virtually with Sirhan appearing on camera from a San Diego County prison.

“We don’t have a DA here, but I have to consider all sides,” Barton said, noting it would consider arguments made in the past by prosecutors opposing his release, depending on their relevance.

Sirhan’s lawyer, Angela Berry, said the board should base its decision on who Sirhan is today and not what he did more than 50 years ago. She said he is not a threat to the public.

Sirhan said he had learned to control his anger and was committed to living peacefully.

“I would never put myself in jeopardy again,” he told the panel. “You have my pledge. I will always look to safety and peace and non-violence.”

Sirhan, a Christian Palestinian from Jordan, has acknowledged he was angry at Kennedy for his support of Israel. When asked about how he feels about the Middle East conflict today, Sirhan broke down crying and temporarily couldn’t speak.

“Take a few deep breaths,” said Barton, who noted the conflict had not gone away and still touched a nerve.

Sirhan said he doesn’t follow what’s going on in the region but thinks about the suffering of refugees.

“The misery that those people are experiencing. It’s painful,” Sirhan said.

If released, Sirhan could be deported to Jordan, and Barton said he was concerned he might become a “symbol or lightning rod to foment more violence.”

Sirhan said he was too old to be involved in the Middle East conflict and would detach himself from it.

“The same argument can be said or made that I can be a peacemaker and a contributor to a friendly nonviolent way of resolving the issue,” said Sirhan, who told the panel the hoped to live with his blind brother in Pasadena, California.

Paul Schrade, a union leader and aide to RFK who was among five people wounded in the 1968 shooting, also spoke in favor of Sirhan’s release.”

If RFK’s children can forgive Sirhan and support his parole, the Board’s decision makes sense.

Tony

Credit…Bryan Denton for The New York Times

Dear Commons Community,

Ezra Klein had an opinion piece in yesterday’s New York Times entitled, “Let’s Not Pretend That the Way We Withdrew From Afghanistan Was the Problem.”  It analyzes well the United States withdrawal from the beleaguered country.  Here is an excerpt:

“To state the obvious: There was no good way to lose Afghanistan to the Taliban. A better withdrawal was possible — and our stingy, chaotic visa process was unforgivable — but so was a worse one. Either way, there was no hope of an end to the war that didn’t reveal our decades of folly, no matter how deeply America’s belief in its own enduring innocence demanded one. That is the reckoning that lies beneath events that are still unfolding, and much of the cable news conversation is a frenzied, bipartisan effort to avoid it.

Focusing on the execution of the withdrawal is giving virtually everyone who insisted we could remake Afghanistan the opportunity to obscure their failures by pretending to believe in the possibility of a graceful departure. It’s also obscuring the true alternative to withdrawal: endless occupation. But what our ignominious exit really reflects is the failure of America’s foreign policy establishment at both prediction and policymaking in Afghanistan.

“The pro-war crowd sees this as a mechanism by which they can absolve themselves of an accounting for the last 20 years,” Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, told me. “Just think about the epic size of this policy failure. Twenty years of training. More than $2 trillion worth of expenditure. For almost nothing. It is heartbreaking to watch these images, but it is equally heartbreaking to think about all of the effort, of lives and money we wasted in pursuit of a goal that was illusory.”

Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, phrased it well: “There’s no denying America is the most powerful country in the world, but what we’ve seen over and over in recent decades is we cannot turn that into the outcomes we want. Whether it’s Afghanistan or Libya or sanctions on Russia and Venezuela, we don’t get the policy outcomes we want, and I think that’s because we overreach — we assume that because we are very powerful, we can achieve things that are unachievable.”

Klein is on target.  His entire piece is below.

Tony

————————————————————————————————————

The New York Times

“Let’s Not Pretend That the Way We Withdrew From Afghanistan Was the Problem”

By Ezra Klein

Opinion Columnist

August 6, 2021

In 2005, two of my colleagues at The American Prospect, Sam Rosenfeld and Matt Yglesias, wrote an essay I think about often. It was called “The Incompetence Dodge,” and it argued that American policymakers and pundits routinely try to rescue the reputation of bad ideas by attributing their failure to poor execution. At the time, they were writing about the liberal hawks who were blaming the catastrophe of the Iraq war on the Bush administration’s maladministration rather than rethinking the enterprise in its totality. But the same dynamic suffuses the recriminations over the Afghanistan withdrawal.

To state the obvious: There was no good way to lose Afghanistan to the Taliban. A better withdrawal was possible — and our stingy, chaotic visa process was unforgivable — but so was a worse one. Either way, there was no hope of an end to the war that didn’t reveal our decades of folly, no matter how deeply America’s belief in its own enduring innocence demanded one. That is the reckoning that lies beneath events that are still unfolding, and much of the cable news conversation is a frenzied, bipartisan effort to avoid it.

Focusing on the execution of the withdrawal is giving virtually everyone who insisted we could remake Afghanistan the opportunity to obscure their failures by pretending to believe in the possibility of a graceful departure. It’s also obscuring the true alternative to withdrawal: endless occupation. But what our ignominious exit really reflects is the failure of America’s foreign policy establishment at both prediction and policymaking in Afghanistan.

“The pro-war crowd sees this as a mechanism by which they can absolve themselves of an accounting for the last 20 years,” Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, told me. “Just think about the epic size of this policy failure. Twenty years of training. More than $2 trillion worth of expenditure. For almost nothing. It is heartbreaking to watch these images, but it is equally heartbreaking to think about all of the effort, of lives and money we wasted in pursuit of a goal that was illusory.”

Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, phrased it well: “There’s no denying America is the most powerful country in the world, but what we’ve seen over and over in recent decades is we cannot turn that into the outcomes we want. Whether it’s Afghanistan or Libya or sanctions on Russia and Venezuela, we don’t get the policy outcomes we want, and I think that’s because we overreach — we assume that because we are very powerful, we can achieve things that are unachievable.”

It is worth considering some counterfactuals for how our occupation could have ended. Imagine that the Biden administration, believing the Afghan government hollow, ignored President Ashraf Ghani’s pleas and began rapidly withdrawing personnel and power months ago. The vote of no-confidence ripples through Afghan politics, demoralizing the existing government and emboldening the Taliban. Those who didn’t know which side to choose, who were waiting for a signal of who held power, quickly cut deals with the Taliban. As the last U.S. troops leave, the Taliban overwhelms the country, and the Biden administration is blamed, reasonably, for speeding their victory.

Another possible scenario was suggested to me by Grant Gordon, a political scientist who works on conflict and refugee crises (and is, I should say, an old friend): If the Biden administration had pulled our allies and personnel out more efficiently, that might have unleashed the Taliban to massacre their opposition, as America and the world would have been insulated and perhaps uninterested in the aftermath. There have been revenge killings, but it has not devolved, at least as of yet, into all-out slaughter, and that may be because the American withdrawal has been messy and partial and the Taliban fears re-engagement. “What is clearly a debacle from one angle may actually have generated restraint,” Gordon told me. “Having spent time in places like this, I think people lack a real imagination for how bad these conflicts can get.”

Let me offer one more: Even though few believed Ghani’s government would prevail in our absence, and the Trump administration cut them out of its deal with the Taliban, there’s widespread disappointment that the government we supported collapsed so quickly. Biden has been particularly unsparing in his descriptions of the Afghan Army’s abdication, and I agree with those who say he’s been unfair, underestimating the courage and sacrifice shown by Afghan troops throughout the war. But put that aside: Americans might have felt better seeing our allies in Afghanistan put up a longer fight, even if the Taliban emerged victorious. But would a multiyear civil war have been better for the Afghans caught in the crossfire?

Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, put it simply: “I think there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance, and smart people are struggling with how to rationalize defeat. Because that’s what we have here in Afghanistan — a defeat.”

I will not pretend that I know how we should have left Afghanistan. But neither do a lot of people dominating the airwaves right now. And the confident pronouncements to the contrary over the past two weeks leave me worried that America has learned little. We are still holding not just to the illusion of our control, but to the illusion of our knowledge.

This is an illusion that, for me, shattered long ago. I was a college freshman when America invaded Iraq. And, to my enduring shame, I supported it. My reasoning was straightforward: If George W. Bush and Bill Clinton and Tony Blair and Hillary Clinton and Colin Powell and, yes, Joe Biden all thought there was some profound and present danger posed by Saddam Hussein, they must have known something I didn’t.

There’s an old line: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” And so it was with the Iraq war. Bush and Clinton and Powell and Blair knew quite a bit that wasn’t true. As Robert Draper shows in his book “To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq,” they were certain Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Only he didn’t. They were also certain, based on decades of testimony from Iraqi expats, that Americans would be welcomed as liberators.

There were many lessons to be learned from the Iraq war, but this, for me, was the most central: We don’t know what we don’t know, and, even worse, we don’t always know what we think we know. Policymakers are easily fooled by people with seemingly relevant experience or credentials who will tell them what they want to hear or what they already believe. The flow of money, interests, enmities and factions is opaque to outsiders and even to insiders. We do not understand other countries well enough to remake them according to our ideals. We don’t even understand our own country well enough to achieve our ideals.

“Look at the countries in which the war on terror has been waged,” Ben Rhodes, who served as a top foreign policy adviser to President Barack Obama, told me. “Afghanistan. Iraq. Yemen. Somalia. Libya. Every one of those countries is worse off today in some fashion. The evidentiary basis for the idea that American military intervention leads inexorably to improved material circumstances is simply not there.”

I wrote a book on political polarization so I am often asked to do interviews where the point is to lament how awful polarization is. But the continuing power of the war-on-terror framework reflects the problems that come from too much bipartisanship. Too much agreement can be as toxic to a political system as too much disagreement. The alternative to polarization is often the suppression of dissenting viewpoints. If the parties agree with each other, then they have incentive to marginalize those who disagree with both of them.

At least for my adult life, on foreign policy, our political problem has been that the parties have agreed on too much, and dissenting voices have been shut out. That has allowed too much to go unquestioned, and too many failures to go uncorrected. It is telling that it is Biden who is taking the blame for America’s defeat in Afghanistan. The consequences come for those who admit America’s foreign policy failures and try to change course, not for those who instigate or perpetuate them.

Initially, the war in Afghanistan was as broadly supported and bipartisan as anything in American politics has ever been. That made it hard to question, and it has made it harder to end. The same is true of the assumptions lying beneath it, and much else in our foreign policy — that America is always a good actor; that we understand enough about the rest of the world, and about ourselves, to remake it in our image; that humanitarianism and militarism are easily grafted together.

The tragedy of humanitarian intervention as a foreign policy philosophy is that it binds our compassion to our delusions of military mastery. We awaken to the suffering of others when we fear those who rule them or hide among them, and in this way our desire for security finds union with our desire for decency. Or we awaken to the suffering of others when they face a massacre of such immediacy that we are forced to confront our passivity and to ask what inaction would mean for our souls and self-image. In both cases, we awaken with a gun in our hands, or perhaps we awaken because we have a gun in our hands.

To many, America’s pretensions of humanitarian motivation were always suspect. There are vicious regimes America does nothing to stop. There are vicious regimes America finances directly. It is callous to suggest that the only suffering we bear responsibility for is the suffering inflicted by our withdrawal. Our wars and drone strikes and tactical raids and the resulting geopolitical chaos directly led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis.

This is the deep lacuna in America’s foreign policy conversation: The American foreign policy establishment obsesses over the harms caused by our absence or withdrawal. But there’s no similar culpability for the harms we commit or that our presence creates. We are much quicker to blame ourselves for what we don’t do than what we do.

My heart breaks for the suffering we will leave behind in Afghanistan. But we do not know how to fix Afghanistan. We failed in that effort so completely that we ended up strengthening the Taliban. We should do all we can to bring American citizens and allies home. But if we truly care about educating girls worldwide, we know how to build schools and finance education. If we truly care about protecting those who fear tyranny, we know how to issue visas and admit refugees. If we truly care about the suffering of others, there is so much we could do. Only 1 percent of the residents of poor countries are vaccinated against the coronavirus. We could change that. More than 400,000 people die from malaria each year. We could change that, too.

“I want America more forward-deployed, but I want it through a massive international financing arm and a massive renewable energy arm,” Senator Murphy told me. “That’s the United States I want to see spread across the world — not the face of America today that’s by and large arms sales, military trainers and brigades.”

The choice we face is not between isolationism and militarism. We are not powerful enough to achieve the unachievable. But we are powerful enough to do far more good, and far less harm, than we do now.

Dear Commons Community,

As a prelude to their upcoming book, , The Great Upheaval: Higher Education’s Past, Present, and Uncertain Future, Arthur Levine and Scott Van Pelt have an article in this morning’s Chronicle of Higher Education  entitled, “5 Ways Higher Education will be upended. “ Their predictions are that colleges will lose power, prices will go down, and credentials will multiply — among other jarring shifts.  They are not the first to paint this dire prediction of higher education’s future.  However, they rightfully comment that the pandemic has accelerated a movement in this direction.  The entire article is below.  Anyone interested in the future of our colleges and universities should read it.

Tony

——————————————————————– 

The Chronicle of Higher Education

“5 Ways Higher Ed Will Be Upended”

By Arthur Levine and Scott Van Pelt

August 25, 2021

After campuses closed, in the spring of 2020, we spoke with college presidents, the heads of higher-education associations, policy makers, and accreditors about Covid-19 and their post-pandemic plans. There were few surprises. Anxiety was sky high, and everyone expected the financial toll and enrollment losses to be extraordinarily high (how high remained a guessing game).

Most viewed the pandemic as a natural disaster. They wanted to get back to business as soon as possible, clean up the damage, and restore what had been lost. In this sense, most misunderstood the nature of the pandemic, viewing it as an interruption of business as usual rather than an accelerator of changes already underway. They expected to turn back the clock to 2019 and recreate their pre-Covid colleges. They wanted to recapture the past.

That urge is understandable, and yet misguided. The pre-pandemic state of higher education was in flux, with five profound and jarring new realities — none of higher education’s making — already beginning to shape its future. The pandemic has accelerated those changes, and it’s imperative that academic leaders grasp the import of this shifting landscape.

1. Institutional control will decrease, and the power of consumers will increase.

When we speak of higher education today, we think of colleges. Everything else is ephemeral — knowledge evolves; faculty members, students, and programs change. Colleges are a constant. They create, sustain, and disseminate knowledge. They are the engines that drive the enterprise.

During the industrial era, major players emerged in the knowledge industries: In music, that meant labels like Motown were ascendant; in film, that meant studios like Disney; and in news, papers like The New York Times. Over time, the specific labels, studios, and newspapers changed — and so did the regulations that governed them, the competition they faced, and the technologies that emerged around them. But it was always a recording label, a studio, or a newspaper on top. As with colleges today, those institutions defined how we thought about the industry and its business models.

But for the music, film, and journalism sectors, the advent of the global, digital knowledge economy upset the balance. Consumers have more choice over what, where, when, and how they consume information and entertainment. The focus shifted from institutions to consumers. As the consumer became the dominant force in each industry, institutional control declined. That same transition is underway in higher education.

2. With near universal access to digital devices and the internet, students will seek from higher education the same things they are getting from the music, movie, and newspaper industries.

In all three of those industries, consumers chose on-demand over fixed-time access and universal, mobile access over fixed locations. They selected unbundled rather than bundled content — a track instead of an album, an article instead of a newspaper. Apart from luxury goods, they opted for low-cost instead of high-cost options. The same trends apply to our sector.

College students favor these changes. Generation on a Tightrope, a book one of us (Arthur Levine) wrote with the higher-education scholar Diane R. Dean, found that in contrast to traditional higher education, digital natives preferred anytime, anyplace access. That book also found that older adults, largely working women attending college part time, sought affordable, unbundled, or stripped-down versions of college. When those students were asked what they wanted from college, they invoked convenience, service, quality, affordability, and the importance of being charged for only the services and activities they used. They did not want to pay for facilities they didn’t use, events they didn’t attend, or electives they didn’t take. They wanted to buy a single track, not an entire album.

Those preferences make sense in the context of an ongoing retreat by undergraduates from campus life. The proportion of students living in college housing has dropped continuously since at least 1969. Indeed, only about 16 percent of undergraduates resided on campus before the pandemic. Less than a third of college students took part in on-campus social activities, used the campus fitness center, attended athletic contests, went to meetings of academic, student, or professional clubs, or watched campus lectures, debates, or other academic events at least once a month. More than a third of students never did any of those things.

The trend was particularly significant at community colleges, where 80 percent of students had never attended academic or professional meetings and 57 percent had never been to social events. In the nationwide 2020 Community College Survey of Student Engagement, only 28 percent of respondents identified student organizations as being “very” important.

Students’ lives are increasingly filled by demands beyond college. More of them are working, and they are working longer hours. Particularly among nontraditional students, there is a growing tendency to visit the campus only to attend classes, commuting in just before their start and commuting out immediately afterward. That places a premium on convenience: They’re looking for an education that fits their circumstances at an affordable price.

3. New postsecondary entities will enter the marketplace, driving up competition and driving down prices.

A host of new institutions, organizations, and programs have cropped up to serve those nontraditional students — and constitute a harbinger of things to come. Coursera offers an instructive example.

Coursera is an online-learning platform, a MOOC pioneer that was launched in 2012. By 2019 it was valued at well over a billion dollars, according to its chief executive. Today it offers 77 million users more than 4,000 courses and specialty studies in fields like data science, engineering, business, and health.

Coursera’s view of education is more pragmatic and career-oriented than traditional higher education is, and that’s what both traditional and nontraditional students increasingly want from college. While it does offer a panoply of degree programs and courses in the liberal arts, its website touts a 2020 survey showing that 87 percent of those who enrolled received a salary increase, a promotion, or the capacity to begin a new career.

Coursera also differs from traditional higher education in terms of who provides its content, which is an eye-popping list of more than 200 of the world’s leading universities and businesses. Its higher-education partners include the California Institute of Technology, Columbia, Duke, École Polytechnique, Hebrew University, Johns Hopkins, Moscow State University, and Peking University, just to name a few. Then there are its business and nonprofit partners. You can learn technology from Cisco, finance and management from Goldman Sachs, and merchandise and sales from Alibaba. The nonprofit and government-sector partners, which are of equal renown, include the American Museum of Natural History, the Museum of Modern Art, and the World Bank.

Consider the value these new providers offer. Google’s Information Technology Certificate Program, offered through Coursera, consists of a five-course sequence, on computer networking, operating systems, system administration, IT infrastructure, and IT security, each of which is rated 4.7 or better on a five-point scale by students. It’s a subbaccalaureate program, in a field commonly offered at two- and four-year colleges, worth 12 college credits and a Google badge, which is an accepted employment credential.

Hundreds of thousands of students have enrolled in the program, which Google says can be completed in six months or less with 10 hours of study a week at a cost of $49 per month. The first week is free, and students commit to only a month at a time. During the pandemic, Google added two new certificate programs, in data analytics and program management.

Or consider another Coursera offering, the Museum of Modern Art’s “In the Studio: Postwar Abstract Painting.” One of the museum’s 10 classes offered through Coursera, it is 27 hours long and priced at Coursera’s $49-per-month subscription fee. It has a 4.9 rating and has enrolled more than 100,000 students. It’s described as an in-depth, hands-on look at the materials, techniques, and thinking of seven New York School artists: Willem de Kooning, Yayoi Kusama, Agnes Martin, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, and Mark Rothko. There are studio demonstrations and gallery walk-throughs, rounded out by readings and other resources that provide a broader cultural, intellectual, and historical context. The course description reads like any university’s modern-art course — and yet 55 percent of the course’s alumni who completed surveys claimed to have derived a tangible benefit for their careers.

The two courses could not be more different — one is purely vocational, and the other is straight-up liberal arts. But they have several things in common: They are inexpensive, convenient, highly rated, heavily enrolled (though their completion rates are unreported), and they are being offered by entities other than colleges. They are also accessible 24/7, and do not adhere to an academic calendar.

The Coursera programs are just the tip of the iceberg. In addition to the two certificate programs Google offers through Coursera, it has dozens and dozens more of its own, as does Microsoft. The American Museum of Natural History has its own graduate school, which offers a Ph.D. in comparative biology and an M.A. in teaching. It also provides six-week online courses on subjects such as the solar system, evolution, climate change, and water for $549 each (there’s an extra fee for obtaining graduate credit). The courses also qualify for professional-development credit for teachers. PBS has a wealth of professional-development courses for teachers, lasting from 1.5 to 45 hours in subjects including reading, math, leadership, and instructional technology.

The looming issue for higher education is not just the explosion of alternative providers, but their world-class quality. Students have the option of obtaining certification from Google or getting classroom credit from a more-expensive regional university. They are choosing between the Museum of Modern Art and a local college.

4. The industrial-era model of higher education, focusing on time, process, and teaching, will be eclipsed by a knowledge-economy successor rooted in outcomes.

A shift from teaching to learning and from fixed-time to fixed-outcomes will occur for a few reasons. First, it’s common sense to focus on the outcomes we want students to achieve, not how long we want them to be taught. Imagine taking your clothes to a drop-off laundry service. The service doesn’t ask how long you want them washed. And for good reason: It’s an absurd question. Your only concern is that the clothes be clean when you pick them up. The outcome is what matters, not the process. The same is true of education.

The second reason for the shift is an evolution in our understanding of equity. In our current system, equity means enabling all students to have access to comparable facilities, professors, and programs. And yet inequities persist. Real equity would entail making it possible for all students to achieve the same outcomes by giving them the differential resources they need to attain them.

For more than a century, all education experiences have been translatable into units of time — courses, credit hours, semesters. This model worked well, but that period is over. The explosion of new education options has generated a grab bag of disparate curricular practices, which is growing increasingly heterogeneous and cannot be translated into uniform time or process measures.

That will gradually render the traditional academic currency of process and time irrelevant and leave higher education searching for a replacement. In the short run, this will require colleges to become bilingual, operating on two different standards (one, courses and credits; the other, outcomes and learning). In the longer run, higher education will have no alternative but to embrace outcomes and learning as its primary accounting system.

5. The dominance of degrees and “just in case” education will diminish; nondegree certifications and “just in time” education will increase in status and value.

American higher education has focused on degree-granting programs in part to prepare students for careers and life beyond college. This is “just in case” education, teaching students the skills and knowledge that colleges believe will be necessary for the future.

In contrast, “just in time” education teaches students the skills and knowledge they need right now. They may need to learn a foreign language for an coming trip or business deal. They may need to learn an emerging technology. “Just in time” education comes in all shapes and sizes, but diverges from traditional academic time standards, uniform course lengths, and common credit measures. Only a small portion of such programs award degrees; most grant certificates, microcredentials, or badges.

Will such credentials replace or erode the dominant status of a college degree? Nondegree certifications aren’t new to higher education — Yale established the first certificate program more than two centuries ago for students who took only scientific and English-language classes. Subbaccalaureate programs in technical fields are common. And yet degrees have always enjoyed a far higher status and been regarded as the far-more-valuable credential. That balance of power will be reset.

Why? Degrees are declining in value in the labor market. Google, Ernst and Young‘s U.K. office, Penguin Random House, Hilton, Apple, Nordstrom, and IBM have all announced they will no longer require college degrees for employment. A slew of high-profile technology titans, including Michael Dell (founder, Dell Computers), Daniel Ek (cofounder, Spotify), Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, David Karp (creator, Tumblr), Steve Wozniak, and Mark Zuckerberg, did not graduate from college. A 2019 Gallup Poll reported a decreasing proportion of Americans consider a college degree to be very important — 51 percent in 2019 versus 70 percent in 2013.

A second cause for a possible reset is that periods of profound change produce curricular flux. During the Industrial Revolution, new degrees were established such as the Ph.D., the associate degree, and the earned master’s degree, which was previously more honorary than academic. Scores and scores of new discipline-based baccalaureate degrees came into being, most notably the bachelor of science, which was developed as a means of distinguishing between students who had completed a rigorous arts program and those who had studied a lesser scientific curriculum. Programs awarding certificates multiplied, too, particularly after the development of continuing-education units in the late 19th century. We will see a similar shakeout in the wake of the pandemic.

Those five new realities will transform our sector. Competency-based education will become the norm. Carnegie units and credit hours will give way. Certification will broaden: It will be granted both for mastering a single competency (such as a foreign language) and for achieving a set of related outcomes (such as the Google IT grouping of skills).

There are two important caveats here. First, competency-based education is now an umbrella term for a panoply of differing practices with strong proponents and opponents. The blurred meaning and controversy surrounding it may doom the term, but the focus on learning and outcomes will persist, regardless of what it is called.

Second, the transition to competency-based education will be as disorderly and chaotic as the shift to the Carnegie unit in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We are in the early days of a new system. The process of formulating and gaining consensus for competences will not be quick. Initially, a multiplicity of differing conceptions for the same competency will emerge. Only movement toward common definitions and practices will abate the chaos.

Assessment will become largely formative and individualized. Transcripts will become records of the competencies people achieve throughout their lives and the certifying authority for each.

Faculty members, whose numbers can be expected to decline, will also undergo a shift. Currently composed of subject-matter experts engaged in teaching and research, the ranks will be diversified to include learning designers, instructors, assessors, and technologists, and will more accurately reflect the demographics of the nation. The competition for this talent both within and outside higher education will be fierce. As in the film industry, talent is likely to overshadow institution, and with an abundance of competing providers, the ability to sell one’s talents to a variety of outlets may be more valued than tenure.

Tuition, which is now largely credit-based, will become subscription-based and tied to outcomes, as it is at Coursera.

Other historical practices will join credit hours in what Henry Adams called the “ash heap” of history. Take A-F grading. It is a comparative measure of student performance relative to peers and the subject matter being taught. However, competency-based education, rooted in absolute measures, is pass-fail at its core. Either students have mastered a competency or they have not. As a result, A-F grading and corollary measures such as GPA, the dean’s list, class rankings, and graduation honors will atrophy.

As familiar practices fall by the wayside, new methods of quality control will emerge. Because of the multiplicity of new providers, new certifying or validating institutions will rise to assess, guide, certify, and record student learning. In the short run, we can expect different organizations using different definitions of competencies. But as consensus grows, standards and practices will become increasingly uniform.

The current model of accreditation also is at risk. Accreditation’s focus is and has always been on providers, which are still assessed largely on the basis of the industrial era’s best practices. Accreditors are increasingly viewed as slow, outdated, change-resistant parts of our sector. That is not surprising — the reason for creating a self-policing arm of the academy was to standardize. And yet unless accreditors are able to shift their focus from the process of education to its outcomes and from institutions and programs to students, they will lose their utility.

Anticipating such upheaval, some institutions are already evolving. Arizona State’s “Fifth Wave” university combines research excellence, cutting-edge technology, and a culture of diversity and access. Purdue focuses on affordability, data, and technology, and fusing postsecondary and higher education. Southern New Hampshire University and Western Governors University emphasize affordability, access, online instruction, and competency-based learning.

Other institutions have become known for a specific innovation. Standouts include Georgia State University (student success), Hostos Community College (bilingual education), Ivy Tech Community College (access and scale), Minerva (international video seminars), Olin College of Engineering (redesigning engineering education), Paul Quinn College (turnaround), PennFoster College (career education), University of Maryland-Baltimore County (math/science and underrepresented populations), and the University of Texas at El Paso (Latino and binational education). Coursera and the University of the People excel at affordability and mass access.

There is also one institution that stands poised to lead the diffusion of new models to mainstream higher education, just as Johns Hopkins did during the Industrial Revolution: MIT. It has led higher education into the global, digital, knowledge economy with a series of major innovations in technology, learning sciences, curriculum, instruction, and credentialing.

To look forward rather than backward is no easy feat. Colleges must confront their tendency toward magical thinking — their belief that institutional challenges will somehow vanish. Another trap is complacency and an assumption of institutional exceptionalism — the idea that each college is special, shielded, somehow, from the woes confronting other institutions. Colleges must also stress genuine long-term thinking: Despite the frequency of five-year plans, they tend to think about their future a year at time, which discourages investing in the future.

Two other barriers to progress are the tendency to view failed attempts at innovation to be an affirmation of current practices, and the trust gap — the divide between administrators, faculty members, and trustees, which exacerbates the difficulty of long-term planning.

The future of every institution depends on overcoming those barriers. It’s the responsibility of presidents and boards to lead their institutions into the future and to educate their communities about the challenges and opportunities ahead. The pandemic provides the teaching moment to do it.

This essay is adapted from the authors’ forthcoming book, The Great Upheaval: Higher Education’s Past, Present, and Uncertain Future (Johns Hopkins University Press).

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai at Wednesday’s Meeting with President Biden

Dear Commons Community,

President Joe Biden had a meeting with the CEOs of some of the world’s biggest tech, energy, and financial services companies on Wednesday to ask their help in dealing with the  nation’s cybersecurity issues.

CEO’s from the biggest technology companies, like newly minted Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Alphabet (Google) CEO Sundar Pichai, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella were all on the guest list.

Additionally, players from the financial sector like Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon joined the event, as well as CEOs and leaders in energy — such as energy firm Southern Company CEO Thomas Fanning — insurance, and education.

Speaking to those CEOs, Biden noted some of the administration’s efforts to combat cyberattacks, including bringing together 30 nations to work together to combat ransomware.  As reported by the Reuters and the Associated Press.

“But the reality is, most of our critical infrastructure owned and operated — is owned and operated by the private sector, and the federal government can’t meet this challenge alone,” Biden said. “So I’ve invited you all here today because you have the power, the capacity, and the responsibility, I believe, to raise the bar on cybersecurity.”

Cybersecurity has become a growing concern within the government following the massive hack of government systems, including the Department of Defense, by Russian hackers in December 2020. A ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline in April, and the revelation in July that China-based hackers attacked 23 U.S. pipeline companies from 2011 through 2013, only added to calls for improved cybersecurity at the national level.

Following the meeting the White House announced that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will work with industry partners to create a new framework to improve the security and integrity of the technology supply chain. The Biden administration also announced the expansion of the Industrial Control Systems Cybersecurity Initiative to natural gas pipelines.

The meeting also saw major announcements from the biggest tech firms on hand. Microsoft, for instance, announced it will spend $20 billion over the next 5 years to boost the company’s cybersecurity capabilities. It also will provide $150 million in services to federal, state, and local governments to improve their cyber defenses.

Amazon, meanwhile, announced that it will make the cybersecurity training materials it has developed to keep its employees and sensitive information safe from cyberattacks available to the public. The company will provide qualified AWS customers with a free multi-factor authentication device to help protect them from cyberattacks.

Google said it will invest $10 billion over the next five years to expand its zero-trust programs to help secure the software supply chain and enhance open-source security.

Apple, for its part, said it will create a new program to build out security improvements for the technology supply chain by working with its suppliers to ensure they use multi-factor authentication, have security training, and understand vulnerability remediation, event logging, and incident response.

U.S. Bancorp CEO Andy Cecere, who was also in attendance, thanked Biden for holding the meeting.

“We’re committed to working with the White House, Congress and private sector partners to put the results of today’s productive discussions into action,” he said in the statement.

The gathering also comes as the Biden administration reportedly pursues investigations of Apple, Google, and Amazon for potential antitrust violations and after repeated criticisms of Big Tech’s role in the spread of disinformation from the president and his team.

In May, the Colonial Pipeline hack cut off nearly 50% of the fuel capacity for the East Coast, causing shortages in some states as drivers bought up as much gasoline as possible. Following that incident, the president emphasized the need for “greater private-sector investment in cybersecurity.”

Biden was all set to ask the assembled CEOs for that type of investment on Wednesday. But the meeting came as he and his administration have developed a complicated relationship on many fronts with the tech giants.

On the one hand, the president and his aides have often taken their companies to task for how they operate in their respective industries. In July, Biden said “they’re killing people” when he was asked about his message for platforms like Facebook when it comes to vaccine misinformation. The president later walked back the remarks somewhat but has maintained an aggressive posture towards the industry.

Biden has also staffed his administration with a mix of prominent critics of Big Tech — like the selection of prominent Amazon critic Lina Khan to head the Federal Trade Commission — that seemed to signal his team would take a tough stance towards tech giants like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple.

On the other hand, Biden has also populated his administration with some veterans of the technology industry as the Wall Street Journal reported in May. And just Monday, The New York Times reported that Apple and Google were urging trade officials in Washington to fight a South Korean bill that could hurt their app store businesses.

Despite its mixed past with Big Tech, the Biden administration might need tech giants to help shore up the nation against cyberattacks.

High-profile attacks like those on Colonial Pipeline garner international headlines. But apart from those high-profile cases, states and local municipalities have also been inundated by cyberattacks that impact everything from their records to 9-1-1 systems.

What’s more, the attacks can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost time, labor, and new equipment to remediate, money that many localities don’t have. Such hacks often stem from outdated software, user error, or poorly configured security systems.

In May, Biden acknowledged that he can’t force private companies to take measures to prevent attacks. But, he added, “It’s becoming clear to everyone that we have to do more than is being done now.”

The Biden administration has proposed nearly $1 billion in grants within the $1 trillion infrastructure bill for cybersecurity improvements for state, local, and tribal governments.

The federal government has also moved forward with new cybersecurity rules for pipeline operators, requiring them to report any cyberattacks on their systems to the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and implementmeans to protect against future cyberattacks.

It is about time that the federal government recognized the resources of private companies especially big tech in addressing cybersecurity issues.  They control the infrastructure and more importantly they have the technological expertise to do so.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The U.S. Education Department (ED) is continuing to reverse course on Trump-era policies that led to blanket denials of borrower defense claims from students who were allegedly defrauded by various colleges.  As reported by Yahoo Finance.

On Tuesday, the USDOE released reasoning for why the agency previously provided full debt relief for borrowers who had under the previous administration received only partial forgiveness despite being found to have been defrauded by a predatory institution.

“The Department reviewed this methodology and rescinded it in the March 2021 announcement after finding several significant flaws, which are described below,” the Federal Student Aid (FSA) office stated. “The overall effect of these flaws is that the methodology unfairly determined relief for students based upon data that may not have included them, and then incorrectly used statistical concepts that were not suited for the task at hand.”

While about 72,000 borrowers who were given partial debt relief under the old DeVos-era formula were made whole, a borrower defense backlog remains: According to the latest government data as of April 30, 107,825 borrower defense claims are still awaiting adjudication while 137,413 have previously been deemed ineligible.

Furthermore, it’s unclear if those 137,413 ineligible claims involve borrower defense claims that were systematically denied during the Trump administration — including nearly 130,000 in 2020 alone. (The ED did not respond to requests for comment on this specific question.)

“If there is fraud, the entire loan needs to be cancelled,” Eileen Connor, legal director of Harvard’s Project on Predatory Student Lending, which represents many defrauded student loan borrowers, told Yahoo Finance. “This is true in the vast, vast majority of cases and needs to be the starting presumption.”

Going forward, when the department reviews borrower defense claims for loan forgiveness, ED will “assess all approved claims applying a rebuttable presumption of full relief as a starting point.”

House Education and Labor Committee Chairman Bobby Scott applauded the move.

“The Biden administration’s new policy for Borrower Defense claims aligns with that recommendation and provides student loan borrowers the relief that they need and deserve,” Scott said. “Once again, the Biden administration is using its full authority to deliver life-changing loan forgiveness to students and families.”

DeVos ED rushed reviews, spent 12 minutes per case

The borrower defense process, in which students who believe they were defrauded can apply for loan forgiveness, was created in 1995 and barely used until the Corinthian Colleges closed in 2015.

A flood of claims followed.

“For years, Corinthian profited off the backs of poor people — now they have to pay,” then-California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris said in a 2016 statement. “This judgment sends a clear message: there is a cost to this kind of predatory conduct … My office will continue to do everything in our power to help these vulnerable students obtain all available relief, as they work to achieve their academic and professional goals.”

The Obama administration created special rules to address the problem, making it easier for defrauded students to get their loans cleared — with some getting automatic loan forgiveness if they qualified.

The Trump administration rolled back Obama-era regulations, limiting how applicants could access the program, and eventually set up a rubber stamp system for denials.

A letter from an ED official named Colleen Nevin wrote in August 2019 — made public via a complaint filed in a related court case — detailed how the plan for 2020 would require reviewers of borrower defense claims to “on average” look through “a minimum of 5 cases per hour” while maintaining “an error rate under 5%.”

Additionally, Nevin then stated that the “bar for new approvals is high” and that the “majority of applications will be denied — based on either the insufficiency of the borrower’s allegations or the lack of sufficient evidence to support the borrower’s application.”

Harvard’s Connor described the DeVos policy as involving “thinly-veiled, mathematically illiterate pretenses to prop up predatory institutions and hurt our clients.” And despite the blanket denials, the Trump-era ED left a huge backlog of borrower defense claims for the Biden administration.

“The previous administration’s formula for determining debt relief was deeply flawed,” Rep. Scott stated. “Under the old formula, some defrauded borrowers would be granted relief only if they made ‘negative earnings’ — which is obviously impossible.”

When the Trump-era formula was unveiled in December 2019, experts swiftly called out the “bad math,” foreshadowing the ED explanation that the policy had “incorrectly used statistical concepts.”

Congratulations to the USDOE for correcting the Trump and DeVos’ policies on student loans!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Delta Airlines is adopting a tough policy that will charge employees on the company health plan $200 a month if they fail to get vaccinated against COVID-19, a policy the airline’s top executive says is necessary because the average hospital stay for the virus costs the airline $50,000.

CEO Ed Bastian said that all employees who have been hospitalized for the virus in recent weeks were not fully vaccinated.  As reported by the Associated Press.

The airline said yesterday that it also will stop extending pay protection to unvaccinated workers who contract COVID-19 on Sept. 30, and will require unvaccinated workers to be tested weekly beginning Sept. 12, although Delta will cover the cost. They will have to wear masks in all indoor company settings.

Delta stopped short of matching United Airlines, which will require employees to be vaccinated starting Sept. 27 or face termination. However, the $200 monthly surcharge, which starts in November, may have the same effect.

“This surcharge will be necessary to address the financial risk the decision to not vaccinate is creating for our company,” Bastian said in a memo to employees.

The surcharge will only apply to employees who don’t get vaccinated and won’t be levied for spouses or dependents, a Delta spokeswoman said.

Delta is self-insured and sets premiums for its plans, which are administered by UnitedHealthcare. The company spokeswoman had said the average hospital stay costs $40,000, contradicting the figure that Bastian used in his memo, and Delta later said both figures reflected a range of the average bill.

Bastian said that 75% of Delta employees are vaccinated, up from 72% in mid-July. He said the aggressiveness of the leading strain of the virus “means we need to get many more of our people vaccinated, and as close to 100% as possible.”

“I know some of you may be taking a wait-and-see approach or waiting for full (Food and Drug Administration) approval,” he told employees. “With this week’s announcement that the FDA has granted full approval for the Pfizer vaccine, the time for you to get vaccinated is now.”

A growing number of companies including Chevron Corp. and drugstore chain CVS announced they will require workers to get vaccinated after Monday’s FDA decision.

United and Delta already require new hires to be vaccinated. Two smaller carriers, Hawaiian and Frontier, have said they will require either vaccination or regular testing for current employees. Other major U.S. airlines, including American and Southwest, said Wednesday that they are encouraging employees to get vaccinated but have not required it.

Delta’s requirement for weekly testing of unvaccinated employees will start Sept. 12, and the requirement that the unvaccinated wear masks indoors takes effect immediately.

Fueled by the now-dominant delta variant of the virus, new reported cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. have topped 150,000 a day, the highest level since late January. Nationally the rate of increase has slowed, but the variant threatens to overwhelm emergency rooms in parts of the country.

On Tuesday, Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, where Delta is based, ordered members of the National Guard to 20 hospitals across the state to help deal with a surge that is larger than the national average.

Southwest, Spirit and Frontier have blamed the rise of the delta variant for a slowdown in customers booking flights, and U.S. air travel remains down more than 20% from pre-pandemic 2019.

In his message to employees Bastian referred to the fast-spreading strain of the virus as B.1.617.2, which is used by scientists to identify its lineage. The Delta CEO’s effort to avoid using the more commonly known “delta variant” did not go unnoticed and B.1.617.2 began trending on Twitter Wednesday.

Congratulations Delta Airlines for pushing the envelope to get its employees vaccinated.

Tony

Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones performs onstage during ‘The Rolling Stones American Tour 1981’

Dear Commons Community,

Charlie Watts, the Rolling Stones drummer who helped anchor one of rock’s greatest rhythm sections and used his “day job” to support his enduring love of jazz, has died, according to his publicist. He was 80.

Bernard Doherty said yesterday that Watts “passed away peacefully in a London hospital earlier today surrounded by his family.”

“Charlie was a cherished husband, father and grandfather and also as a member of The Rolling Stones one of the greatest drummers of his generation,” Doherty said.

Watts had announced he would not tour with the Stones in 2021 because of an undefined health issue.  As reported by the Associated Press.

The quiet, elegantly dressed Watts was often ranked with Keith Moon, Ginger Baker and a handful of others as a premier rock drummer, respected worldwide for his muscular, swinging style as the Stones rose from their scruffy beginnings to international superstardom. He joined the band early in 1963 and remained for nearly 60 years, ranked just behind Mick Jagger and Keith Richards as the group’s longest lasting and most essential member.

Watts stayed on, and largely held himself apart, through the drug abuse, creative clashes and ego wars that helped kill founding member Brian Jones, drove bassist Bill Wyman and Jones’ replacement Mick Taylor to quit and otherwise made being in the Stones a most exhausting jo

A classic Stones song like “Brown Sugar” and “Start Me Up” often began with a hard guitar riff from Richards, with Watts following closely behind, and Wyman, as the bassist liked to say, “fattening the sound.” Watts’ speed, power and time keeping were never better showcased than during the concert documentary, “Shine a Light,” when director Martin Scorsese filmed “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” from where he drummed toward the back of the stage.

The Stones began, Watts said, “as white blokes from England playing Black American music” but quickly evolved their own distinctive sound. Watts was a jazz drummer in his early years and never lost his affinity for the music he first loved, heading his own jazz band and taking on numerous other side projects.

He had his eccentricities — Watts liked to collect cars even though he didn’t drive and would simply sit in them in his garage. But he was a steadying influence on stage and off as the Stones defied all expectations by rocking well into their 70s, decades longer than their old rivals the Beatles.

Watts didn’t care for flashy solos or attention of any kind, but with Wyman and Richards forged some of rock’s deepest grooves on “Honky Tonk Women,” “Brown Sugar” and other songs. The drummer adapted well to everything from the disco of “Miss You” to the jazzy “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” and the dreamy ballad “Moonlight Mile.”

Jagger and Richards at times seemed to agree on little else besides their admiration of Watts, both as a man and a musician. Richards called Watts “the key” and often joked that their affinity was so strong that on stage he’d sometimes try to rattle Watts by suddenly changing the beat — only to have Watts change it right back.

He also had an impact on the Rolling Stones that extended beyond drumming. He worked with Jagger on the ever more spectacular stage designs for the group’s tours. He also provided illustrations for the back cover of the acclaimed 1967 album “Between the Buttons” and inadvertently gave the record its title. When he asked Stones manager Andrew Oldham what the album would be called, Oldham responded “Between the buttons,” meaning undecided. Watts thought that “Between the Buttons” was the actual name and included it in his artwork.

To the world, he was a rock star. But Watts often said that the actual experience was draining and unpleasant, and even frightening. “Girls chasing you down the street, screaming … horrible!… I hated it,” he told The Guardian newspaper in an interview. In another interview, he described the drumming life as a “cross between being an athlete and a total nervous wreck.”

Watts found refuge from the rock life, marrying Shirley Ann Shepherd in 1964 and having a daughter, Seraphina, soon after. While other famous rock marriages crumbled, theirs held. Jagger and Richards could only envy their bandmate’s indifference to stardom and relative contentment in his private life, which included happily tending horses on a rural estate in Devon, England.

Author Philip Norman, who has written extensively about the Rolling Stones, said Watts lived “in constant hope of being allowed to catch the next plane home.” On tour, he made a point of drawing each hotel room he stayed in, a way of marking time until he could return to his family. He said little about playing the same songs for more than 40 years as the Stones recycled their classics. But he did branch out far beyond “Satisfaction” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” by assembling and performing with jazz bands in the second half of his career.

Charles Robert Watts, son of a truck driver and a homemaker, was born in Neasden, London, on June 2, 1941. From childhood, he was passionate about music — jazz in particular. He fell in love with the drums after hearing Chico Hamilton, and taught himself to play by listening to records by Johnny Dodds, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington and other jazz giants.

He worked for a London advertising firm after he attended London’s Harrow Art College and played drums in his spare time. London was home to a blues and jazz revival in the early 1960s, with Jagger, Richards and Eric Clapton among the future superstars getting their start. Watts’ career took off after he played with Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, for whom Jagger also performed, and was encouraged by Korner to join the Stones.

Watts wasn’t a rock music fan at first and remembered being guided by Richards and Brian Jones as he absorbed blues and rock records, notably the music of bluesman Jimmy Reed. He said the band could trace its roots to a brief period when he had lost his job and shared an apartment with Jagger and Richards because he could live there rent-free.

“Keith Richards taught me rock and roll,” Watts said. “We’d have nothing to do all day and we’d play these records over and over again. I learned to love Muddy Waters. Keith turned me on to how good Elvis Presley was, and I’d always hated Elvis up ’til then.”

Watts was the final man to join the Stones; the band had searched for months to find a permanent drummer and feared Watts was too accomplished for them. Richards recalled the band wanting him so badly to join that members cut down on expenses so they could afford to pay Watts a proper salary. Watts said he believed at first the band would be lucky to last a year.

“Every band I’d ever been in had lasted a week,” he said. “I always thought the Stones would last a week, then a fortnight, and then suddenly, it’s 30 years.”

For much of his career, Watts resisted the excesses of his bandmates, but he fell into heroin addiction in the mid-1980s. He would credit his stable relationship with his wife for getting him off drugs.

“I was warring with myself at that time,” he told Rolling Stone magazine.

With his financial future secure because of the Stones’ status as one of the world’s most popular live bands, Watts was able to indulge his passion for jazz by putting together some of the most talented musicians in Britain for a series of recordings and performances. They typically played during the long breaks between Stones tours.

His first jazz record, the 1986 “Live at Fulham Town Hall,” was recorded by the Charlie Watts Orchestra. Others by the Charlie Watts Quintet followed, and he expanded that group into the Charlie Watts and the Tentet.

Watts was an acclaimed jazz bandleader when he was stricken with throat cancer in 2004. He received extensive treatment and made a full recovery. His return to health allowed him to resume touring with both the Stones and his jazz band.

By then, the young man who had worn his brown hair down to his shoulders in the late 1960s had evolved into a craggy, white-haired, impeccably dressed senior statesman of rock. Getting Watts to talk about his place in rock history was almost impossible, but he seemed to enjoy talking about fashion. It was not unusual to see him attired in a custom-made suit and polka dot tie while his bandmates wore jeans and T-shirts.

In the tumultuous, extremely competitive world of rock and roll, Watts seemed to make few enemies.

“It all seems to boil down to a certain quality which is as rare as hen’s teeth in the music business, but which Charlie Watts is perceived to have in abundance. In a word, decency,” columnist Barbara Ellen wrote after interviewing Watts in 2000. “You’ve got to hand it to a … man who’s played with the world’s most influential rock ‘n’ roll band … and stayed happily married to his wife, Shirley … A man who, moreover, remains resolutely determined not to take his elevated position too seriously.”

Watts is survived by his wife Shirley, sister Linda, daughter Seraphina and granddaughter Charlotte.

For those of us who grew up in the 1960s, Watts was this quiet confident drummer of the Rolling Stones who seem to commend a presence even while Rick Jagger and Keith Richards were singing and strutting on a stage.

May he rest in peace!

Tony

Kathy Hochul

Dear Commons Community,

Just hours ours after being sworn in as New York’s first female governor, Kathy Hochul delivered her first address from Albany, laying out an agenda largely focused on combating the coronavirus pandemic.

Hochul, the state’s former lieutenant governor, who replaced Andrew Cuomo following his resignation in the wake of a report that found he had sexually harassed 11 women, said Tuesday that she was ready to take “proactive steps” to curb the rapidly spreading Delta variant of COVID-19, particularly when it comes to reopening schools.

“I am also immediately directing the Department of Health to institute universal masking for anyone entering our schools,” Hochul said.

Vaccination against COVID-19 will be required for all school personnel, she said. Those who do not wish to be immunized will have the option to undergo weekly testing for the virus, and the state will make tests more widely available in the coming weeks.

Hochul pointed to the Food and Drug Administration’s full approval of the Pfizer vaccine on Monday, saying that “New Yorkers can expect new vaccine requirements” as a result.

New York is gearing up for the distribution of booster shots, Hochul said, adding that she had consulted with Dr. Anthony Fauci to ensure they would be “available and distributed quickly and reliably.”

Although the new governor did not mention Cuomo in her speech, she made it clear that she would follow through with her pledge to make sure her office was free of the toxic environment that former staff members said characterized the administration of her predecessor.

“That begins with a dramatic change in culture, with accountability and no tolerance for individuals who cross the line,” Hochul said.

She also announced that she will “overhaul state policies on sexual harassment and ethics” and require live ethics training classes for all New York state employees.

Her final priority, Hochul said, was to make sure New Yorkers receive financial assistance in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, including relief for renters and landlords, with aid for undocumented immigrant workers set aside as part of the Excluded Workers Fund.

In the coming days, Hochul will continue working on filling out her Cabinet. On Monday she appointed two women to top government posts. Karen Persichilli Keogh will become secretary to the governor, the highest-ranking appointed position in the state, and Elizabeth Fine will serve as counsel to the governor. The lieutenant governor, whose position Hochul left vacant, is yet to be determined and is expected to be announced next week.

Good start!

Tony

Kathy Hochual Sworn In as Governor of New York

Dear Commons Community,

Kathy Hochul became the first female governor of New York at the stroke of midnight, taking control of a state government eager to get back to business after months of distractions over sexual harassment allegations against Andrew Cuomo.

The Democrat from western New York was sworn in as governor in a brief, private ceremony in the New York State Capitol overseen by the state’s chief judge, Janet DiFiore.

Afterward, she told WGRZ, a Buffalo television station, she felt “the weight of responsibility” on her shoulders.

“I’ll tell New Yorkers I’m up to the task. And I’m really proud to be able to serve as their governor and I won’t let them down,” she said.

Cuomo left office at 12:00 a.m, two weeks after he announced he would resign rather than face a likely impeachment battle. He submitted his resignation letter late Monday to the leaders of the state Assembly and Senate.

On his final day in office, Cuomo released a pre-recorded farewell address in which he defended his record over a decade as New York’s governor and portrayed himself as the victim of a “media frenzy.”

Hochul was scheduled to have a ceremonial swearing-in event Tuesday morning at the Capitol, with more pomp than the brief, legally required event during the night.

She planned to meet with legislative leaders later in the morning and make a public address at 3 p.m.

For the first time, a majority of the most powerful figures in New York state government will be women, including state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, Attorney General Letitia James and the chief judge, DiFiore. The state Assembly is led by a man, Speaker Carl Heastie.

Hochul will inherit immense challenges as she takes over an administration facing criticism for inaction in Cuomo’s final months.

COVID-19 has made a comeback, with new cases up nearly 1,370% since late June. Hospitalizations are climbing even as schools prepare to go back into session.

Big decisions lay ahead on whether to mandate masks or vaccines for certain groups, or whether to reinstate social distancing restrictions if the state’s latest wave of infections worsens. Hochul has said she favors making masks mandatory for schoolchildren, a contrast with Cuomo, who said he lacked that authority.

The economy remains unsettled. Jobs lost during the pandemic have been coming back, but unemployment remains double what it was two years ago.

New York has also struggled to get federal relief money into the hands of tenants behind on their rent because of the pandemic, releasing just 6% of the budgeted $2 billion so far. Thousands of households face the possibility of losing their homes if the state allows eviction protections to expire.

Hochul also faces questions about whether she’ll change the culture of governance in New York, following a Cuomo administration that favored force over charm.

Hochul, who once represented a conservative Western New York district in Congress for a year and has a reputation as a moderate, is expected to pick a left-leaning state lawmaker from New York City as her lieutenant governor.

State Democratic Party Chair Jay Jacobs praised Hochul as “formidable.”

“She’s very experienced and I think she’ll be a refreshing and exciting new governor,” he said.

We wish her well!

Tony