Dear Commons Community,

The veteran broadcast journalist shared one simple sentence on Facebook that got nearly a million likes and more than 60,000 comments.

Dan Rather has some choice words, or rather, a little proverb for President Donald Trump.

The veteran broadcast journalist and former “CBS Evening News” anchor seemed to hit a nerve yesterday, sharing on Facebook a post aimed squarely at Trump’s tumultuous administration — to nearly one million likes and more than 60,000 comments.

“When a clown moves into a palace he doesn’t become a king, the palace instead becomes a circus. — Turkish proverb,” the post reads.

Rather also shared a recent article of his in the comments of yesterday’s post about Trump’s steep international tariffs and the U.S. economy, seemingly confirming the proverb was about him.

The premise of a clown entering a palace seemed to strike a chord.

“Perfect description of what is going on right now. I never understood people’s fear of clowns, until now…,” wrote one Facebook user, with another commenting: “My daughter used to be afraid of clowns. Here is one we can all be afraid of.”

Trump has certainly created the current White House in his image.

The former reality television star forewent the Oval Office’s traditional decor to include more gold, hawked Tesla vehicles on the grounds for his billionaire tech mogul buddy Elon Musk — and is practically selling U.S. citizenship for $5 million a pop.

The proverb itself likely originated with the Circassians, Sunni Muslims from the Northwestern Caucasus, and is not specifically Turkish. 

“Turkish proverb / American reality,” one user nonetheless argued on Rather’s post.

In his career, Rather covered some of the biggest events in modern history, including the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Gulf War and 9/11. 

Popcorn anyone!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he arrived in West Texas after a school-aged child died at a local hospital where they were receiving treatment for measles – marking the second death of a minor in the state linked to the ongoing outbreak.  As reported by CNN.

“My intention was to come down here quietly to console the families and to be with the community in their moment of grief,” Kennedy said in a post on X yesterday.

A funeral for the latest victim was scheduled for yesterday afternoon, according to an obituary.

HHS is partnering with Texas health officials to better combat the measles outbreak in the state and has deployed teams from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the area, Kennedy added.

As of Friday, Texas has reported 481 outbreak-associated cases, according to the Texas Department of Health.

“We are deeply saddened to report that a school-aged child who was recently diagnosed with measles has passed away. The child was receiving treatment for complications of measles while hospitalized,” Aaron Davis, vice president of UMC Health System in Lubbock, Texas, told CNN in a statement.

“It is important to note that the child was not vaccinated against measles and had no known underlying health conditions,” he continued.

The measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine is the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles, Kennedy said Sunday.

A Trump administration official told The New York Times the child’s cause of death is “still being looked at.”

CNN did not immediately hear back from inquiries sent to the Texas Department of Health and HHS.

Texas’ first measles death linked to the ongoing outbreak was in an unvaccinated school-aged child in February. A death in New Mexico remains under investigation.

The outbreak – now spanning Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and possibly Kansas – reached at least 569 cases Friday, according to data obtained from state health departments.

In Texas, nearly all outbreak-related cases were in unvaccinated people, and 70% were among children and teens, health department data shows. Many of those cases have broken out in West Texas, with Gaines County accounting for nearly 66% of cases.

In Lubbock County, which accounts for nearly 7% of the confirmed cases in Texas, UMC Health has started offering drive-up measles screenings at both of its 24/7 urgent care centers.

Meanwhile, New Mexico has reported 54 cases, and Oklahoma reported 10 cases – eight confirmed and two probable – as of Friday. Cases in Kansas, which the state health department said may be linked to the outbreak, reached 24 as of Wednesday.

Many of those cases are among unvaccinated people, and experts say the numbers are most likely a severe undercount because many cases go unreported.

With most reported cases among minors, experts worry about increasing hospitalizations, especially in younger children who are at higher risk of complications.

“The more children who get the disease means that there’s an increased chance that there will be more children getting sicker with complications from measles,” said Dr. Christina Johns, a pediatric emergency physician at PM Pediatrics in Annapolis, Maryland.

US Sen. Bill Cassidy, who is a physician, called on top health officials Sunday to address the measles outbreak.

“Everyone should be vaccinated! There is no treatment for measles. No benefit to getting measles. Top health officials should say so unequivocally b/4 another child dies,” Cassidy wrote on X.

Kennedy has downplayed the severity of the outbreak and faced criticism of the agency’s response.

Kennedy’s response to the outbreak has been “abysmal,” said Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Philadelphia Children’s Hospital.

Offit highlighted the secretary’s history of decrying vaccines and minimizing the risk of measles.

“The disease has returned because a critical percentage of parents have chosen not to vaccinate their children, in large part because of misinformation provided by people like RFK Jr,” he said.

Trump put an unqualified maniac in charge of Health and Human Services.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Lawrence Summers, former president of Harvard University, had a guest essay yesterday in The New York Times, entitled, “Harvard Must Not Yield to Intimidation.”  His main message was that Harvard must resist the bullying tactics of Trump and his cronies and not capitulate to their financial threats as did Columbia University.  Here is his introduction:

“The U.S. government is trying to bludgeon America’s elite universities into submission. At stake is the future of institutions that graduated most of our recent American presidents and a vast majority of Supreme Court justices and that serve as drivers of our prosperity and shapers of our social values.

The Trump administration’s threats to withdraw billions of dollars in funding are little more than extortion. They must be resisted using all available legal means. Columbia University’s recent capitulation, in which it agreed to a raft of changes in an attempt to avoid losing hundreds of millions in funding, must not be emulated. Each act of capitulation makes the next one more likely. Each act of rectitude reverberates.”

Summers is so correct in what he says in this essay. I would add that all the major research universities take a united stand and refuse to buckle under the despicable Trump.

Harvard and the rest of higher education should remember the words of the Mexican revolutionary leader, Emiliano Zapata and others:

“”It is better that we should die on our feet rather than live on our knees.”

 Summers’ entire essay is below.

Tony

——————————————-

The New  York Times

Guest Essay

Harvard Must Not Yield to Intimidation

April 3, 2025

By Lawrence H. Summers

Mr. Summers, a contributing Opinion writer, is a former president of Harvard University.

The U.S. government is trying to bludgeon America’s elite universities into submission. At stake is the future of institutions that graduated most of our recent American presidents and a vast majority of Supreme Court justices and that serve as drivers of our prosperity and shapers of our social values.

The Trump administration’s threats to withdraw billions of dollars in funding are little more than extortion. They must be resisted using all available legal means. Columbia University’s recent capitulation, in which it agreed to a raft of changes in an attempt to avoid losing hundreds of millions in funding, must not be emulated. Each act of capitulation makes the next one more likely. Each act of rectitude reverberates.

As in most confrontations, the merits in this one are far from one-sided. Critics of elite universities, including Harvard, where I am a professor, are right that they continue to tolerate antisemitism in their midst in a way that would be inconceivable with any other form of prejudice, that they have elevated identity over excellence in the selection of students and faculty, that they lack diversity of perspective and that they have repeatedly failed to impose discipline and maintain order.

And universities’ insistence that they be entirely left alone by their federal funders rings hollow in light of the enthusiasm with which they greeted micromanagement when they approved of the outcome, such as threats from Washington to withhold funds unless men’s and women’s athletic budgets were equalized.

But the Trump administration is not acting in good faith in its purported antisemitism concerns, nor is it following the law in its approach to universities.

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President Trump offered praise to a white-supremacist rally that included chants of “Jews will not replace us,” publicly dined with Holocaust deniers, made common cause with Germany’s Nazi-descendant AfD party and invoked tropes about wealthy Jews. The true motivation behind his attack on universities is suggested by Vice President JD Vance’s declaration that the “universities are the enemy.” Shakedown is the administration’s strategy as it has gone after law firms, federal judges, legislators who disagree with its edicts and traditionally independent arms of the government.

Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act appropriately allows that federal funding of universities can be made contingent on their avoiding discrimination. But as a recent statement by a group of leading law professors points out, it also protects against this power’s being used to punish critics or curtail academic freedom. Among the law’s requirements are notice periods, hearings, remedies that are narrowly tailored to specific infractions and a 30-day congressional notification before any funding is curtailed.

None of this appears to be part of the Trump administration’s approach to universities.

The White House has not confined its efforts to claims about discrimination. The administration seeks to dictate what universities do on matters ranging from student discipline to academic organization to campus policing.

Universities facing those threats should make clear they are willing to negotiate with government officials only over matters covered by statute and through the procedures laid out in the law.

They should make clear that their formidable financial endowments are not there to simply be envied or admired. Part of their function is to be drawn down in the face of emergencies, and covering federal funding lapses surely counts as one. Believe me, a former president of Harvard, when I say that ways can be found in an emergency to deploy even parts of the endowment that have been earmarked by their donors for other uses.

And to maintain the moral high ground, which universities have in large part lost, they need a much more aggressive reform agenda focused on antisemitism, celebrating excellence rather than venerating identity, pursuing truth rather than particular notions of social justice and promoting diversity of perspective as the most important dimension of diversity.

That will not happen through universities’ usual deliberative processes, which give too much power to faculty members who have political agendas. It will require strong, determined leaders backed by confident and competent trustees. I wish Harvard and other universities had reformed much more rapidly after the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, so their changes did not appear to be a response to external pressure.

Institutions such as Harvard, the administration’s most recent target, have vast financial resources, great prestige and broad networks of influential alumni. If they do not or cannot resist the arbitrary application of government power, who else can? Without acts of resistance, what protects the rule of law?

I hope and trust, in the time of testing that lies ahead, universities will both reform themselves and stand up to external pressure. Their future and America’s are in the balance.

Elon Musk. Photographer: Jamie Kelter Davis/Bloomberg via Getty Images.

Dear Commons Community,

Elon Musk, who has remained relatively quiet about President Donald Trump’s tariff policy, said yesterday he hopes to see a “free trade zone” between the U.S. and Europe.

“At the end of the day, I hope it’s agreed that both Europe and the United States should move ideally, in my view, to a zero tariff situation, effectively creating a free trade zone between Europe and North America,” Musk told far-right Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini at a virtual event.  As reported by The Huffington Post

Musk’s comment came days after Trump announced a blanket 10% tariff on imports entering the U.S. from every country and a harsher 20% tariff on those in the European Union, including Italy.

Italy’s Premier Giorgia Meloni called Trump’s tariffs “wrong” and said it does not benefit either side.

“We will do everything we can to work towards an agreement with the United States, with the aim of avoiding a trade war that would inevitably weaken the West in favor of other global players,” Meloni said in a translated Facebook post.

Musk told Salvini he wants to see greater work mobility between the U.S. and Europe, stating: “If people wish to work in Europe or wish to work in North America, they should be allowed to do so in my view.”

“That has certainly been my advice to the president,” Musk said.

Musk, who has become a close adviser to Trump and defended the President’s agenda, had remained relatively quiet about the tariffs until Saturday. However, stock prices in his tech company, Tesla, have taken a drastic nose-dive following Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day.”

In a series of replies on his social media site X, Musk slammed White House aide Peter Navarro, a Harvard graduate who earned a PhD in economics and backed Trump’s tariff policies.

“A PhD in Econ from Harvard is a bad thing, not a good thing,” Musk wrote. “Results in the ego/brains>>1 problem.”

Musk launched another swing at Navarro in a reply to a user who defended the economist, posting: “He ain’t built shit.”

Another post quoted conservative economist Thomas Sowell: “In every disaster throughout American history, there always seems to be a man from Harvard in the middle of it.” Musk replied “Yup.”

Some predict Musk will step back from his role spearheading the Department of Government Efficiency in May, when his title of special government employee hits its 130-day expiration.

Trump and Musk are quite a combo!

Tony

Hand off rallies against Trump and Musk!

Dear Commons Community,

Thousands of people angry about the way Trump is running the country marched and rallied in scores of American cities yesterday in the biggest day of demonstrations yet by an opposition movement trying to regain its momentum after the shock of the Republican’s first weeks in office.

So-called Hands Off! demonstrations were organized for more than 1,200 locations in all 50 states by more than 150 groups, including civil rights organizations, labor unions, LBGTQ+ advocates, veterans and elections activists. The rallies appeared peaceful, with no immediate reports of arrests.

Thousands of protesters in cities dotting the nation from Midtown Manhattan to Anchorage, Alaska, including at multiple state capitols, assailed Trump and billionaire Elon Musk ’s actions on government downsizing, the economy, immigration and human rights. On the West Coast, in the shadow of Seattle’s iconic Space Needle, protesters held signs with slogans like “Fight the oligarchy.” Protesters chanted as they took to the streets in Portland, Oregon, and Los Angeles, where they marched from Pershing Square to City Hall. As reported by The Associated Press.

Demonstrators voiced anger over the administration’s moves to fire thousands of federal workers, close Social Security Administration field offices, effectively shutter entire agencies, deport immigrants, scale back protections for transgender people and cut funding for health programs.

Musk, a Trump adviser who runs Tesla, SpaceX and the social media platform X, has played a key role in the downsizing as the head of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency. He says he is saving taxpayers billions of dollars.

Asked about the protests, the White House said in a statement that “President Trump’s position is clear: he will always protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for eligible beneficiaries. Meanwhile, the Democrats’ stance is giving Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare benefits to illegal aliens, which will bankrupt these programs and crush American seniors.”

Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign advocacy group, criticized the administration’s treatment of the LBGTQ+ community at the rally at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., where Democratic members of Congress also took the stage.

“The attacks that we’re seeing, they’re not just political. They are personal, y’all,” Robinson said. “They’re trying to ban our books, they’re slashing HIV prevention funding, they’re criminalizing our doctors, our teachers, our families and our lives.”

“We don’t want this America, y’all,” Robinson added. “We want the America we deserve, where dignity, safety and freedom belong not to some of us, but to all of us.”

In Boston, demonstrators brandished signs such as “Hands off our democracy” and “Hands off our Social Security.”

Mayor Michelle Wu said she does not want her children and others’ to live in a world in which threats and intimidation are government tactics and values like diversity and equality are under attack.

“I refuse to accept that they could grow up in a world where immigrants like their grandma and grandpa are automatically presumed to be criminals,” Wu said.

Roger Broom, 66, a retiree from Delaware County, Ohio, was one of hundreds who rallied at the Statehouse in Columbus. He said he used to be a Reagan Republican but has been turned off by Trump.

“He’s tearing this country apart,” Broom said. “It’s just an administration of grievances.”

Hundreds of people also demonstrated in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, a few miles from Trump’s golf course in Jupiter, where he spent the morning at the club’s Senior Club Championship. People lined both sides of PGA Drive, encouraging cars to honk and chanting slogans against Trump.

“They need to keep their hands off of our Social Security,” said Archer Moran of Port St. Lucie, Florida.

“The list of what they need to keep their hands off of is too long,” Moran said. “And it’s amazing how soon these protests are happening since he’s taken office.”

The president golfed in Florida Saturday and planned to do so again Sunday, the White House said.

One pathetic president!

Tony

 Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo. Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/AP.

Dear Commons Community,

Mayor Eric Adams is opting out of New York City’s Democratic primary and running for reelection as an independent — embarking on a new path as he further isolates himself from the city’s dominant political party.

The mayor confirmed his plans to POLITICO. In an interview earlier this week, Adams said he would “mount a real independent campaign” that relies on “a solid base of people” outside Manhattan, with an emphasis on ethnic minorities who boosted him to victory four years ago. He lamented how the bribery charges federal prosecutors hit him with in September — which a judge dismissed Wednesday — “handcuffed” him, and he promised to be “uninhibited” on the campaign trail.

“I have been this racehorse that has been held back,” he added. “This is so unnatural for me.”

The result is likely to be a chaotic spectacle in the nation’s largest city, which shifted slightly to the right last November: A showdown between a pugnacious mayor who has irrevocable ties to President Donald Trump, and the winner of the Democratic primary, which Andrew Cuomo is leading.

Adams plans to submit the requisite 3,750 signatures due May 27 to secure a November ballot spot on a public safety-focused line, he and an aide told POLITICO. On Thursday he’s releasing a campaign video in which he discusses his personal trials, expresses regret for lapses in judgment and derides his opponents as soft on crime.

Adams spoke optimistically of his plan, despite the enormous challenges: persuading New Yorkers who typically pick Democrats to select a politically unaffiliated incumbent with a 20 percent approval rating, defending a record of criticizing his own party more than he has Trump and running at a financial disadvantage after being denied more than $4 million in public matching funds.

“I’m in the race to the end. I’m not running on the Democratic line. It’s just not realistic to turn around my numbers and to run a good campaign (from) where we are right now,” he told POLITICO. “It hurts like hell.”

The maneuver offers Adams more time to recover from the reputational fallout tied to corruption charges that Trump’s Department of Justice moved to drop. It gives the mayor a chance to connect with the city’s growing population of unaffiliated voters and avoid what polls show would be a resounding defeat in the June 24 primary. And Adams said he would “go to court if need be and fight for our matching funds,” which are controlled by the city’s Campaign Finance Board and are all but essential to running a successful race.

He also believes this liberates him to sell himself to voters as he has long wished: a former police captain dialed into public safety; a political enigma who doesn’t neatly fit into either major party. The federal case against him, he told POLITICO, has been personally and financially painful but is now part of a biography he will lean on to connect with voters who have struggled in their own lives. “My life story is what is my most potent weapon,” he said.

It is all a huge gambit.

Absent extraordinary circumstances — like the crime wave of the 1990s that lifted Republican Rudy Giuliani, a former prosecutor, to office, or the Sept. 11 terror attacks that elevated self-funded billionaire Mike Bloomberg in 2001 — New Yorkers generally elect Democrats to lead their city. Republicans will likely have their own candidate. That leaves Adams with seven months to reach less engaged voters he believes he will resonate with.

While he’s short on funds and friends, Adams has the advantages afforded to incumbents and all the free media attention that comes with it, as well as charm and retail political chops.

“Now I need this runway until November to redefine and remind people: This is why you elected me in the first place,” he said.

New York City is home to 3.3 million registered Democrats, 1.1 million independents and 558,778 Republicans. Though Democrats enjoy a major advantage, 220,346 more voters have enrolled as independents over the last eight years.

Adams and his team are counting on the Democratic nominee winning by a small margin — a safe bet given the crowded field and the nature of ranked choice voting. They’re assuming Adams can appeal to some of the Democratic voters who won’t have backed the eventual nominee — a riskier gamble given his apparent approval of much of Trump’s agenda.

Privately, some allies acknowledge he likely stands his best chance against Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, rather than moderate Andrew Cuomo.

No matter what, the specter of national politics looms.

New Yorkers rejected Trump by a 68-30 margin and are clamoring for someone to stand up to him, according to research shared by rival campaigns. And while the mayor said he will not change his party registration, he is more inclined to criticize the left flank of his own party and Joe Biden’s White House than he is the Trump administration.

He told POLITICO he seriously considered suing the Biden administration over the financial burden placed on New York City by an influx of migrants — before his City Hall staff advised against it on political grounds. He said he has finger-wagged city commissioners who were “silent” on Biden’s border policy but are quick to criticize Trump.

In remarks after learning his case was cleared Wednesday, he held up a book lambasting the “deep state” authored by FBI Director Kash Patel, one of Trump’s lightning rod appointments. Adams said he found the rationale behind his case in the book, “Government Gangsters,” which warns of a politicized justice system and is rife with MAGA talking points. “Read it and understand how we can never allow this to happen to another innocent American,” he said.

Nevertheless, Adams said he’s sick of political extremes in both parties and believes this election will vindicate that perspective.

“The mayor’s going to set forth policy he believes is right (and) he’s going to do it with authenticity, regardless of whether it’s coming from the Trump administration (or) coming from traditional Democratic leadership,” his close friend and adviser Frank Carone said in an interview. “He is the mayor of New York City, not the mayor of the Democratic Party.”

Carone called himself the titular head of the campaign and said a staff is being assembled. It does not appear that team will include two top aides from his 2021 race — consultants Evan Thies and Nathan Smith.

Carone and the mayor emphasized the successes they believe have been drowned out by a period of chaos and scandal at City Hall: a drop in crime, more housing construction and private-sector jobs, improved tourism numbers. They proactively tout the mayor’s decision to cut municipal services — an unpopular move at the time — as evidence Adams is courageous and sensible, given the city’s strong bond ratings.

“New York is just objectively in a better place today than it was Jan. 1, 2022, when the Adams administration began,” Carone said. “When the people of New York focus on that and not the rest of the noise … then I think you’re going to see a different tone coming out of the voting public.”

Adams unloaded on his rivals during the interview, namechecking Cuomo for signing into law changes to state bail measures that the mayor blames for a Covid-era rise in crime. “Look at bail reform — that’s Andrew,” Adams said. “He can’t say, ‘I’m going to save the city from the far left’ when he surrendered to the far left.”

Cuomo recently defended his approval of cashless bail.

“Bail reform righted a terrible social wrong. We were putting people in Rikers, in jail, who hadn’t been found guilty of anything, just because they couldn’t make bail,” he said. “It shouldn’t be that because you’re wealthy, then you can make bail and you’re released, but if you can’t make bail then you stay in jail even though you haven’t been found guilty of anything yet.”

Adams also laced into Cuomo for resigning in 2021 amid accusations of sexual misconduct that Cuomo continues to vehemently deny.

“I never put my personal challenges in the way of delivering for New Yorkers,” he said. “What happens the next time he has a personal crisis? Is he going to abandon the city?”

Adams, whose corruption case coincided with at least six top aides being embroiled in their own scandals, prides himself on giving no consideration to calls for his resignation.

And so the man who says God chose him to be mayor of the nation’s largest city, who hates backing down from a fight, is embarking on this untrodden path. It is a remarkable turn for someone who declared himself the “face of the new Democratic Party” four years ago.

On Monday, seated inside an ornate room in the official mayoral residence of Gracie Mansion with no aides present, the typically resolute Adams wavered when asked what still draws him to the Democratic Party.

“I think there are good people in the party,” he said, adding, “I think there are good people in all of these parties.”

Asked whether Democrats can reclaim voters in the working class, the self-avowed blue-collar mayor lamented extreme views on both sides, noted Trump fairly won the election and decried “hypocrisy” among those disturbed by Trump pushing to drop his case, but not by Biden pardoning his son, Hunter.

Asked again, he underscored his own intent to appeal to working-class voters before pivoting to an unprompted critique of Democrats who compared Trump to Adolf Hitler.

He did allow a few areas of disagreement with the White House when pressed: He reiterated his administration’s lawsuit over the Trump administration’s clawback of $80 million in federal funds from a municipal bank account, and he insisted he would refuse to cooperate in any civil immigration enforcement that may come.

The challenges before him are vast, but Adams is adamant about writing his next chapter — even if it is his last.

“If I’m able to come back, with all that I went through,” he said, “people were celebrating my demise, and I’m able to come back and be elected again as mayor, no citizen in this city will ever give up.”

Assuming Eric Adams is the independent candidate, Andrew Cuomo the Democratic candidate, and Curtis Sliwa the Republican candidate, the NYC mayoral race surely has the potential to be “a chaotic spectacle.”

Tony

Parents Protesting Cuts to Teacher Education. Photo courtesy of The Washington Post.

Dear Commons Community,

The US Supreme Court yesterday let the Trump administration temporarily suspend $65 million in teacher-training grants that the government contends would promote diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, an early victory for the administration in front of the justices.

The court’s order was unsigned, which is typical when the justices act on emergency applications. The temporary pause will remain in effect while the case is appealed.

The decision was 5 to 4, with five of the court’s conservatives — Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil M. Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Brett M. Kavanaugh — in the majority. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. voted with the court’s three liberal justices in dissent.

The order came in response to one of a series of emergency requests by the Trump administration asking the justices to intervene and overturn lower court rulings that have temporarily blocked parts of President Trump’s agenda.

The grants at issue in the case helped place teachers in poor and rural areas and aimed to recruit a diverse work force reflecting the communities it served.  As reported by The New York Times.

In February, the Education Department sent grant recipients boilerplate form letters ending the funding, saying the programs “fail to serve the best interests of the United States” by taking account of factors other than “merit, fairness and excellence,” and by allowing waste and fraud.

Eight states, including California and New York, sued to stop the cuts, arguing that they would undermine both urban and rural school districts, requiring them to hire “long-term substitutes, teachers with emergency credentials and unlicensed teachers on waivers.”

Judge Myong J. Joun of the Federal District Court in Massachusetts temporarily ordered the grants to remain available while he considered the lawsuit. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, in Boston, rejected a request from the Trump administration to undo Judge Joun’s order, saying the government’s arguments were based on “speculation and hyperbole.”

In temporarily blocking the cancellation of the grants, Judge Joun said that he sought to maintain the status quo. He wrote that if he failed to do so, “dozens of programs upon which public schools, public universities, students, teachers and faculty rely will be gutted.” On the other hand, he reasoned, if he did pause the Trump administration action, the groups would merely continue to receive funds that had been appropriated by Congress.

In its brief order, the court said that the challengers had “not refuted” the Trump administration’s claim that “it is unlikely to recover the grant funds once they are disbursed.” By contrast, the order stated, “the government compellingly argues that respondents would not suffer irreparable harm” while the grants are paused. The court said it had relied on statements by the challengers that “they have the financial wherewithal to keep their programs running.”

In a dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, countered that allowing the grants to be terminated would “inflict significant harm on grantees — a fact that the government barely contests.”

She added: “Worse still, the government does not even deign to defend the lawfulness of its actions.”

In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the teacher training efforts would be harmed by the court’s action.

“States have consistently represented that the loss of these grants will force them — indeed, has already forced them — to curtail teacher training programs,” she wrote.

When the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to intervene, Sarah M. Harris, the acting solicitor general, wrote in an emergency application that Judge Joun’s order was one of many lower-court rulings thwarting government initiatives.

“The aim is clear: to stop the executive branch in its tracks and prevent the administration from changing direction on hundreds of billions of dollars of government largesse that the executive branch considers contrary to the United States’ interests and fiscal health,” she wrote.

She added: “Only this court can right the ship — and the time to do so is now.”

In response, the states said that the justices should decide one dispute at a time.

The brief added that the cancellation of the grants had not been accompanied by reasoning specific to each grant. The boilerplate letters, it said, “did not explain how the grant-funded programs engaged in any of the purportedly disqualifying activities.”

This is not good news for K-12 education!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

This cartoon by Nick Anderson that appeared in yesterday’s New York Daily News says it all.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Anna Dumont, a Ph.D. candidate in art history at Northwestern University, had an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled, “What Autocrats Want from Academics: Servility.”  She recounts an episode in 1931 when Benito Mussolini demanded a loyalty oath from every Italian university professor.  All but twelve did so. While she clearly admits that we are not at that point in the United States, there are dark clouds brewing in the way the Trump administration is using its financial influence to have college and universities buckle to its whims. Below is the essay.

Important reading!

Tony

The Chronicle of Higher Education

The Review | Essay

What Autocrats Want From Academics: Servility.

By Anna Dumont

March 20, 2025

“Since Trump’s inauguration, the university community has received a good deal of “messaging” from academic leadership. We’ve received emails from our deans and university presidents; we’ve sat in department meetings regarding the “developing situation”; and we’ve seen the occasional official statement or op-ed or comment in the local newspaper. And the unfortunate takeaway from all this is that our leaders’ strategy rests on a disturbing and arbitrary distinction. The public-facing language of the university — mission statements, programming, administrative structures, and so on — has nothing at all to do with the autonomy of our teaching and research, which, they assure us, they hold sacrosanct. Recent concessions — say, the disappearance of the website of the Women’s Center — are concerning, they admit, but ultimately inconsequential to our overall working lives as students and scholars.

History, however, shows that public-facing statements are deeply consequential, and one episode from the 20-year march of Italian fascism strikes me as especially instructive. On October 8, 1931, a law went into effect requiring, as a condition of their employment, every Italian university professor to sign an oath pledging their loyalty to the government of Benito Mussolini. Out of over 1,200 professors in the country, only 12 refused.

Today, those who refused are known simply as “I Dodici”: the Twelve. They were a scholar of Middle Eastern languages, an organic chemist, a doctor of forensic medicine, three lawyers, a mathematician, a theologian, a surgeon, a historian of ancient Rome, a philosopher of Kantian ethics, and one art historian. Two, Francesco Ruffini and Edoardo Ruffini Avondo, were father and son. Four were Jewish. All of them were immediately fired.

In the years that followed, the Twelve paid for this act of conscience. Gaetano de Sanctis, the classicist, went blind during his years in the wilderness, and would never finish the book that was his life’s work. Others, like the linguist Giorgio Levi Della Vida and the art historian Lionello Venturi, were forced into exile. Mario Carrara, a doctor of forensic medicine in Turin, was jailed. Carrara, along with the chemist Giorgio Errera, wouldn’t live to see the end of the regime.

The price for the country was, however, steeper than any of these individual tragedies. As Giorgio Boatti recounts in his book on the loyalty oath, Preferirei di No, the signing of the oath by the vast majority of professors represented the surrender of Italian intellectual life to the regime. It signaled to the rest of the country that there would be no resistance in the world of Italian ideas. What followed — the 1938 racial laws, the deportation of thousands of Italian Jews to their deaths in the camps, a bloody war, the German occupation — would forever be on the moral accounts of every professor who capitulated.

The oath has been on my mind because it did not directly dictate anything about the research programs of any of its signatories, nor the content of their lectures. The professors vowed only loyalty to the king and the fascist regime, to perform their academic duties in the interest of producing loyal citizens, and not to belong to any opposition organizations. By demonstrating their assent in this way, however, the professors themselves created a political environment in which freedom of thought, of speech, and of conscience, was relinquished.

With every suggestion that we might continue to teach the art of Kara Walker and Faith Ringgold without publicly speaking about racial justice, that we should continue to think and write about Claude Cahun or Caravaggio without defending our queer and trans students, I am reminded of the absolute failure of such bargaining in the face of past authoritarianism. If our work as historians can teach us anything, it must be this.

Our teaching and research only matter under general conditions of freedom and dignity.

We are not yet in a moment like 1931. And in fact, the words ringing in my ears these past weeks have been those of a warning penned by the socialist historian Gaetano Salvemini in 1925. From France, where he fled under threat of a lengthy jail sentence for his political activities, Salvemini penned an extraordinary letter of resignation to his former colleagues at the University of Florence. Admitting that, prior to his arrest, there was no direct pressure on what he said in his classroom, he cautioned his colleagues that such a test was dangerously shortsighted:

If the members of the Academic Senate are waiting for this kind of pressure to feel limited in their scientific independence and personal dignity, it is not to say that they will not soon be satisfied in this respect as well: But when they have allowed themselves to have been led to this point, they will no longer have any dignity to protect.

Our teaching and research only matter under general conditions of freedom and dignity. These conditions do not exist under the threat of arbitrary arrest, imprisonment, deportation, or suspension of medical care. As academics, we do our work because we hope it will matter in the world, from our colleagues developing new vaccines, to those investigating histories of American colonial power. To pretend otherwise is, as Salvemini wrote, to reduce our intellectual work to either “the servile adulation of the dominant party, or mere erudite exercises.”

It may seem prudent now to keep our heads down and hope this storm passes. History tells us this is unlikely. Free inquiry and the public exchange of our findings pose a real threat to authoritarian government. If we continue to preemptively change our language, pretend that the deep inequities of class and race and global power that shape our world are not relevant to the governance of our institution, or demonstrate to both Trump’s agents and the public that we will fold under the slightest pressure, we will find ourselves, perhaps not so long from now, without any dignity left to protect.”

Dear Commons Community,

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who was one of only four Republicans to vote against Trump’s steep international tariffs Wednesday, says the policy is “bad” both politically and economically — and has led to utter “decimation” for his party in the past.

Paul noted tariffs didn’t work out so well for Republicans when then-Rep. William McKinley (R-Ohio) led the effort for the Tariff Act of 1890, nor when Sen. Reed Smoot (R-Utah) and Rep. Willis C. Hawley (R-Ore.) sponsored their own eponymous levies in 1930.

“When McKinley, most famously, put tariffs on in 1890, they lost 50% of their seats in the next election,” Paul told reporters Wednesday on Capitol Hill. “When [Smoot and Hawley] put on their tariff in the early 1930s, we lost the House and the Senate for 60 years.”

Trump dubbed April 2 “Liberation Day” and announced a sweeping 10% baseline tariff on all imports to the U.S., with levies on some countries set even higher. The European Union and China face tariffs of 20% and 54%, respectively. He has already set tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico at 25%

Paul and three other Republicans reached across the aisle Wednesday and helped the effort, led by Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), to oppose the Canadian tariffs, resulting in a 51-48 Senate vote in favor of terminating Trump’s emergency powers to impose them.

The GOP senator joined Kaine for a Fox News interview Wednesday to explain his view, stating that “we should not live under emergency rule” and that the U.S. Constitution specifically notes taxes, which the tariffs essentially are, “are raised by Congress” — not the president.

“But on the tariffs in particular and the idea of trade, trade is proportional to wealth,” Paul continued. “The last 70 years of international trade has been an exponential curve upwards, and the last 70 years of prosperity has been upwards, also.”

“We are richer because of trade with Canada — and so is Canada,” he argued. “Whenever you trade with somebody, when an individual buys somebody else’s product, it’s mutually beneficial, or you wouldn’t buy it. If a trade is voluntary, it’s always beneficial.”

Trump previously justified his tariffs against Canada as a matter of national security, or payback for Canada allowing “massive” amounts of fentanyl into America. In reality, only 43 pounds of the deadly synthetic drug were seized at the U.S.-Canada border last year.

“There is no ‘Canada versus the U.S.,’” Paul told Fox News. “The consumer wins when the price is the lowest price, tariffs raise prices and they’re a bad idea for the economy.”

Sorry Senator Paul but Trump is your guy!

Tony