Dear Commons Community,

New York State lawmakers unveiled legislation yssterday that would eliminate enormous property tax breaks for Columbia University and New York University, which have expanded to become among New York City’s top 10 largest private property owners.

The bills would require the private universities to start paying their full annual property taxes and for that money to be redistributed to the City University of New York, the largest urban public university system in the country.  As reported by The New York Times.

Columbia and N.Y.U. collectively saved $327 million on property taxes this year. The amount the schools save annually has soared in recent decades as the two have bought more properties, and the value of their properties has also increased.

Repealing the tax breaks would face substantial obstacles. The exemptions — which apply to universities, museums and other nonprofits — are nearly 200 years old and part of the state constitution. Overriding them would mean lawmakers would have to adopt the changes in consecutive legislative sessions. Then, voters would have to approve them on a statewide ballot.

“When the constitution of the state was written, there was no idea that such an exemption could apply to two of the top landlords in New York City,” said Assemblyman Zohran K. Mamdani, a Queens Democrat who is introducing the bill in the Assembly. “This bill seeks to address universities that have so blatantly gone beyond primarily operating as institutions of higher education and are instead acting as landlords and developers.”

The proposed constitutional amendment follows an investigation by The New York Times and the Hechinger Report in September that revealed that the city’s wealthiest universities were bigger and richer than ever before, amassing vast real estate portfolios that have drained the city budget.

The investigation also found that as Columbia has grown its physical footprint to become the city’s largest private landowner, it has enrolled fewer students from New York City.

A Columbia spokeswoman said university officials were reviewing the legislation. But she added that Columbia was a driver of the city’s economy through its research, faculty and students, and its capital projects, including $100 million in upgrades to local infrastructure since 2009.

A spokesman for N.Y.U. said that repealing the tax exemptions would be “extraordinarily disruptive” and that the university “would be forced to rethink much of the way we operate.”

“To choose two charitable, non-profit organizations out of the thousands in the state and compel them to be treated like for-profits certainly strikes us as misguided and unfair,” the spokesman, John Beckman, said in a statement. “We are deeply appreciative of those policies, which have been in place for two centuries, but we also take some modest pride in the many, many ways, small and large, that N.Y.U. contributes to the city’s well-being and its economy.”

All 50 states offer property tax exemptions for some private, nonprofit entities, which supporters argue are crucial so that these organizations can provide social, economic and cultural benefits to their communities. But in some cities, officials have pressured private universities to make voluntary payments, known as payments in lieu of taxes, or similar annual donations. Private universities often have billion-dollar endowments and charge annual tuition in the high five figures.

The legislation would only apply to Columbia and N.Y.U. and not other large private universities that own significant land, such as Cornell University in Ithaca. Lawmakers said that other universities would be excluded because their tax breaks are far lower than those of Columbia’s and N.Y.U.’s; the annual real estate tax exemption threshold would be $100 million.

“I don’t fault these institutions for pursuing their tax breaks and using the tax breaks to greatly expand their empires,” said State Senator John C. Liu, a Queens Democrat who is introducing the legislation in the Senate. “But this is a point where we have to look where all revenues are coming from and where all revenues are leaking. We have to stop those leaks.”

The city is facing a series of budget cuts to K-12 schools, libraries and police, among other programs, in part, Mayor Eric Adams has said, because of rising costs to care for an influx of homeless migrants.

CUNY, which is made up of 25 campuses throughout the city and which serves 225,000 students, has also been eyed for city cuts. Most of the university’s $4.3 billion budget is provided by the state, but earlier this year, the mayor proposed a 3 percent cut to the funding the city provides.

If the constitutional amendment were approved, the property tax payments would be directed every year to CUNY. That would make a significant difference in the quality of education students receive, said James C. Davis, the president of the Professional Staff Congress, which represents 30,000 CUNY faculty and staff.

“Would an additional infusion of operating funding affect retention and graduation rates?” Mr. Davis said. “Clearly the answer is yes. Even a relatively small amount of money would make a big difference.”

He noted that 80 percent of first-year CUNY students are graduates of New York City public schools, and a majority are students of color. Half come from families with incomes under $30,000 a year.

“If you’re talking about the city making a commitment to economic equity and social mobility,” Mr. Davis added, “there really is not a wiser investment than CUNY.”

As someone who has worked at CUNY since 1970, I am all in for this!

Tony

Jack Smith. Photograph: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Dear Commons Community,

In a bold legal move, Jack Smith, the special counsel prosecuting Donald Trump on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election, asked the Supreme Court yesterday to rule on Mr. Trump’s argument that he is immune from prosecution. The justices quickly agreed to fast-track the first phase of the case.

Mr. Smith’s request was unusual in two ways: He asked the justices to rule before an appeals court acted, and he urged them to move with exceptional speed.  As reported by The New York Times.

“This case presents a fundamental question at the heart of our democracy: whether a former president is absolutely immune from federal prosecution for crimes committed while in office or is constitutionally protected from federal prosecution when he has been impeached but not convicted before the criminal proceedings begin,” Mr. Smith wrote.

Last evening, just hours after Mr. Smith filed papers in the Supreme Court, the justices granted his initial request: to put their consideration of whether to hear the case on a fast track. The court ordered Mr. Trump’s lawyers to file their response to the petition seeking review on an abbreviated schedule, by Dec. 20.

Mr. Smith’s filings represented a vigorous plea to keep the trial on track by cutting off an avenue by which Mr. Trump could cause delays.

A speedy decision by the justices is of the essence, Mr. Smith wrote, because Mr. Trump’s appeal of a trial judge’s ruling rejecting his claim of immunity suspends the criminal trial. The proceeding is scheduled to begin on March 4 in Federal District Court in Washington.

Any significant delays could plunge the trial into the heart of the 2024 campaign season or push it past the election, when Mr. Trump could order the charges be dropped if he wins the presidency.

“The United States recognizes that this is an extraordinary request,” Mr. Smith wrote. “This is an extraordinary case.”

The trial judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, rejected Mr. Trump’s sweeping claims that he enjoyed “absolute immunity” from the election interference indictment because it was based on actions he took while in office.

A number of legal pundits last night commented on Smith’s appeal.  Most thought it strategically interesting and could settle promptly the issue of whether Trump is immune from prosecution.

Tony

Wion

Dear Commons Community,

The Texas Supreme Court yesterday overturned a lower court’s ruling that would have allowed a pregnant woman to get an emergency abortion under the medical exception for the state’s near-total abortion ban, granting a petition by Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton.

The unanimous ruling from the Texas Supreme Court came hours after lawyers for the woman, Kate Cox, said in a court filing that she had left the state to obtain the abortion, but nonetheless wanted to pursue the case. Cox has said her fetus had a fatal diagnosis and that her health was at risk if she continued the pregnancy to term, including her ability to have more children in the future.  As reported by Reuters.

The high court, whose nine justices are all Republicans, said in its unsigned opinion that a “good faith belief” by Damla Karsan, a doctor who sought to perform the abortion and sued alongside Cox, that the procedure was medically necessary was not enough to qualify for the state’s exception.

Instead, the court said, Karsan would need to determine in her “reasonable medical judgment” that Cox had a “life-threatening condition” and that an abortion was necessary to prevent her death or impairment of a major bodily function.

“A woman who meets the medical-necessity exception need not seek a court order to obtain an abortion,” the court wrote. “The law leaves to physicians – not judges – both the discretion and the responsibility to exercise their reasonable medical judgment, given the unique facts and circumstances of each patient,” the court wrote.

The case is a major test of the scope of the medical exception, an issue that is already before the court in a separate case brought by 22 women who experienced pregnancy complications, though none of those women was seeking an immediate abortion. Monday’s ruling appeared to reject a key argument by the plaintiffs in that case – that doctors’ good-faith belief should be enough to meet the exception.
“This ruling should enrage every Texan to their core,” Molly Duane of the Center for Reproductive Rights, a lawyer for Cox, said in a statement. “If Kate can’t get an abortion in Texas, who can? Kate’s case is proof that exceptions don’t work, and it’s dangerous to be pregnant in any state with an abortion ban.”

Paxton’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Cox’s fetus was diagnosed on Nov. 27 with trisomy 18, a genetic abnormality that usually results in miscarriage, stillbirth or death soon after birth.

Paxton had urged the Texas Supreme Court to quickly step in after District Court Judge Maya Guerra Gamble at a hearing in Austin last Thursday issued a temporary restraining order allowing Cox to have an abortion.
In his filing to the top court, Paxton’s office said Cox fell “far short of demonstrating” she met the criteria for a medical exception and warned that Texas courts were not intended to be “revolving doors of permission slips to obtain abortions.”
Cox, 31, of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, filed a lawsuit last Tuesday seeking a temporary restraining order preventing Texas from enforcing its abortion ban in her case.

Cox’s lawyers have said her lawsuit is the first such case since the U.S. Supreme Court last year reversed its landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, which had guaranteed abortion rights nationwide.

Cox, who was about 20 weeks pregnant when she first sued, said in her lawsuit that she would need to undergo her third Caesarian section if she continues the pregnancy. That could jeopardize her ability to have more children, which she said she and her husband wanted.

Cox said in her lawsuit that although her doctors believed abortion was medically necessary for her, they were unwilling to perform one without a court order in the face of a lack of clarity in how the exception would be interpreted and potential penalties including life in prison and loss of their licenses for violating the state’s abortion laws.

Tony

The appliances section at the Sears in Burbank, CA.  Samantha Delouya/CNN

Dear Commons Community,

CNN reported yesterday that retailer Sears had quietly reopened two stores after a decade of closures and bankruptcy.   We have been getting good economic news lately but this was a major surprise.  As reported.

“To the casual shopper, Sears, one of America’s oldest retailers, may appear to be on life support. The department store chain that once reinvented how Americans shopped now barely has a brick-and-mortar footprint after a 2018 bankruptcy and hundreds of store closures.

But talk of Sears’ demise may be premature: just two months ago, a previously shuttered Sears in Burbank, California, quietly turned the lights back on. Two weeks after that, another reopened in Union Gap, Washington.

I visited the newly opened Burbank store several times last month, including on Black Friday, retail’s busiest shopping day, to explore the storied brand. The new Sears looks much like the old one, a vestige from a time when department stores ruled America’s shopping landscape. While the store remained mostly devoid of shoppers when I visited, those who did drop in, along with some store associates, expressed hope and excitement of a new age for Sears.

Inside Sears’ revived Burbank store

The reborn Sears in Burbank looks like a typical American department store. Mattresses, appliances, and other home goods populate the ground floor. Up an escalator you find clothing, bags and accessories. Another escalator transports you up to a third floor, but it was roped off when I visited with signs promising something would be coming soon.

The store was clean and organized ­– but shoppers were sparse.

The newly reopened Burbank location, which initially closed one year ago, likely didn’t look so different from a typical Sears store in 2005, when hedge fund operator Eddie Lampert bought control of the chain for $11 billion and merged it with another retailer in his portfolio, Kmart. That year, the two brands counted 3,500 US stores between them and more than 300,000 employees.

Today’s Sears’ footprint is minuscule, with no more than 12 Sears stores remaining in the continental US, according to data from Google Maps. A November post in the Union Gap, WA Facebook group confirmed that store location’s reopening.

Some suggest that Lampert used the Sears acquisition as a play in the real estate market. His plans for the brand going forward are less clear. Attempts to get a clear answer proved unsuccessful. The brand exists under a holding company called Transformco. Calls and emails over several weeks to Transformco’s main line and executives went unanswered. The Burbank store’s manager passed along a phone number for Sears’ media department; the number was not in service.

One Burbank store associate, who asked not to be named since they weren’t permitted to speak to the media, told me they had worked at multiple Sears locations for decades and they were glad to be given the chance to come back.

“I love Sears. They’ve treated me well,” the person said.

I don’t remember Sears at the height of its influence: I was born just one year before the retailer discontinued its groundbreaking catalog in 1993. Half a century ago, the Sears catalog helped change the way Americans lived, allowing more people to shop from anywhere since they didn’t have to rely on nearby stores to buy goods. It was a proto-model of online shopping.

As Sears grew and pioneered its own brands such as Kenmore appliances, Craftsman tools and Allstate insurance, the company became a juggernaut, employing legions of workers to produce and sell the products in the rapidly expanding brick and mortar Sears stores. The Sears Tower in downtown Chicago, where the corporate parent operated, was the world’s tallest skyscraper until 1998.

More than one Burbank store associate said they thought their store might be a test for Sears’ parent company, Transformco, which is owned by Lampert, who is also Sears’ former CEO. They hoped that if their store proved successful, more locations would open and the brand might be revived.

How serious is Sears’ relaunch effort?

Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData’s retail division, had a different view of Sears’ relaunch.

“I don’t think it’s a serious attempt at revival,” he said.

Saunders said it’s likely Sears hasn’t found tenants for some Transformco-owned retail locations due to challenges facing the overall retail sector.

“I think there a lot of locations where retailers just don’t want to lease out that space, and so I think the view is ‘if no one is going to lease it out, rather than it sitting there idle, we might as well try and monetize it,’” Saunders said.

“For a very big space like Sears, you haven’t got many tenants. No department stores are really opening a lot of new outlets,” he added.

When I returned to Sears on Black Friday, few shoppers perused the aisles compared to other stores in the Burbank Town Center mall, where Sears is located. One Sears associate told me they hoped the store would be busier that day.

“Welcome back” signs lined the outside of the store, but perhaps people just hadn’t heard of its reopening: the announcement was made on Sears’ local Burbank Facebook page.

One shopper, Daisy Davis, said she only learned the Burbank location had reopened after a conversation with her neighbor about Sears prompted an internet search of whether any stores remained open.

“Sure enough, it said this one was opening. There’s still conflicting information too, because some of the maps say it’s closed,” she said.

Bankruptcy and closures in recent years

The Sears brand has been riding a rollercoaster for years. In the years after Lampert’s takeover, sales at the 137-year-old retailer slowed amid a lack of investment in store updates, a slower pivot to e-commerce, and increased competition from other big box retailers and newer online behemoths such as Amazon.

By 2018, the company had filed for bankruptcy. The next year, Lampert’s hedge fund bought the remains of the business out of bankruptcy and renamed its parent company Transformco. The retailer exited bankruptcy with 223 Sears and 202 Kmart stores nationwide. But four years later, most of those stores have closed.

Sears shoppers I spoke with shared the store employees’ excitement about the reopening.

“I’m just really happy they reopened. It feels like the Sears I remember, which is good,” said Katherine Sage, a shopper who stopped into Sears to pick up a polo shirt for her son. “I think they have good products; I think their mattresses are awesome.”

Armita Cohen, an 80-year-old retiree, said she visited the Burbank location often since its reopening after her local store in Glendale, CA closed.

“I don’t know why they closed that store. It was a wonderful store,” she said. “For Christmas I don’t have to go to any other place. I just go to Sears and I find everything.”

Cohen said she was “crossing her fingers” that the Glendale store would reopen.

Could Sears make a comeback?

Simeon Siegel, a retail analyst at BMO Capital Markets, said it was still possible for a store with strong brand-name recognition, like Sears, to make a comeback, even in the internet age.

“Big stores that offer a large variety of products, but do so in a curated way, putting together products that you want ­– those are thriving,” Siegel said.

“Recognizing that there is value in a brand name, even if that brand went out of business, is not something new,” he added. “You watched another company buy Bed Bath and Beyond’s intellectual property immediately after it went out because a brand is a tough thing to kill.”

At least one shopper was optimistic about a future for Sears if it embraces a more modern shopper.

“I think they need to consult with the younger generation to find out more of what they want,” Sage said, standing outside the Sears in Burbank. “Keep the products that people go in for, but innovate.”

Growing up in New York in the 1950-1960s and the several decades following, Sears was in every major shopping area of the City.  I have not seen one in a number of years.  I hope this is the start of something that will last!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd,  had a piece yesterday entitled, “The Ivy League Flunks Out,” that added her voice to those expressing dismay with the way the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT responded to questions about antisemitism on their campuses.  On Saturday, University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill resigned.  Harvard President Claudine Gay and MIT President Sally Kornbluth are still in their positions.  Here is an excerpt from Dowd’s column.

“I was still kvelling about earning my Ivy League degree when the glow of that parchment dimmed.

On Tuesday, the presidents of Harvard, M.I.T. and the University of Pennsylvania put on a pathetic display on Capitol Hill when they were asked if calling for genocide against Jews counted as harassment.

It depends, they all said. Penn’s Elizabeth Magill offered a chilling bit of legalese. “It is a context-dependent decision,” she told Representative Elise Stefanik, a Republican from upstate New York.

Not since Bill Clinton was asked about having sex with Monica Lewinsky and replied, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” has there been such parsing.

It’s hard to be on Stefanik’s side, given that she epitomizes the grotesque transformation of the Republican Party to an insane Trump cult, but she was right to pin down the prevaricating presidents.

Citing a Washington Free Beacon report, Stefanik noted in The Wall Street Journal that Harvard has cautioned undergraduates that “cisheterosexism” and “fatphobia” helped perpetuate violence and that “using the wrong pronouns” qualified as abuse.

When Stefanik asked Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, whether calling for the genocide of Jews constituted bullying, Gay said it could, “depending on the context.”

I felt the same disgust with the Catholic Church sex scandal, seeing church leaders who were charged with teaching us right from wrong not knowing right from wrong. University presidents should also know right from wrong. As left-wing virulence toward Jews collides with right-wing virulence, these academics not only didn’t show off their brains, they didn’t show their hearts. (Magill resigned on Saturday.)

“I think the inability of these individuals to articulate a simple, straightforward answer to what should have been the easiest question in the world was mind-boggling,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the director of the Anti-Defamation League, told me. “It’s like a hurricane of hate in the last few months. You ask yourself, how is this happening? Now we know.” He added, “The truth is that these presidents are not committed to free speech. They’re committed to favored speech. They selectively enforce the codes of conduct when it works for them or their friends in the faculty lounge.”

Leon Wieseltier, the editor of Liberties, a humanistic journal, has an essay on antisemitism in the next issue, echoing Greenblatt with a complaint about the “selective empathy” that made kaffiyehs “cool.”

“I think this is still America,” Wieseltier said, “but what is so wounding and intolerable is how we went from spending four years intensely and rightly focusing on one class of victims in society, and now are prepared to make light of the troubles that another class of victims are experiencing.

“The culture on campuses is a culture of oppressors and oppressed. Israel is now Goliath and no longer David — though God knows it has mortal enemies capable of the most astonishing savagery. The Jews were long ago stricken from the rolls of the oppressed because they are seen as white and privileged. We are a culture which loves victims and worships victimization and gives great moral authority to victims, but we don’t treat all victims equally.”

The entire column is worth a read!

Tony

Kate Cox as provided by her to the Associated Press.

Dear Commons Community,

The Texas Supreme Court on Friday put on hold a judge’s ruling that approved an abortion for a pregnant woman whose fetus has a fatal diagnosis, throwing into limbo an unprecedented challenge to one of the most restrictive bans in the U.S.

The order by the all-Republican court came more than 30 hours after Kate Cox, a 31-year-old mother of two from the Dallas area, received a temporary restraining order from a lower court judge that prevents Texas from enforcing the state’s ban in her case.

In a one-page order, the court said it was temporarily staying Thursday’s ruling “without regard to the merits.” The case is still pending.  As reported by The Huffington Post and The Associated Press.

“While we still hope that the Court ultimately rejects the state’s request and does so quickly, in this case we fear that justice delayed will be justice denied,” said Molly Duane, an attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, which is representing Cox.

Cox’s attorneys have said they will not share her abortion plans, citing concerns for her safety. In a filing with the Texas Supreme Court on Friday, her attorneys indicated she was still pregnant.

Cox was 20 weeks pregnant this week when she filed what is believed to be the first lawsuit of its kind since the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling last year that overturned Roe v. Wade. The order issued Thursday only applied to Cox and no other pregnant Texas women.

Cox learned she was pregnant for a third time in August and was told weeks later that her baby was at a high risk for a condition known as trisomy 18, which has a very high likelihood of miscarriage or stillbirth and low survival rates, according to her lawsuit.

Furthermore, doctors have told Cox that if the baby’s heartbeat were to stop, inducing labor would carry a risk of a uterine rupture because of her two prior cesareans sections, and that another C-section at full term would would endanger her ability to carry another child.

Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton argued that Cox does not meet the criteria for a medical exception to the state’s abortion ban, and he urged the state’s highest court to act swiftly.

“Future criminal and civil proceedings cannot restore the life that is lost if Plaintiffs or their agents proceed to perform and procure an abortion in violation of Texas law,” Paxton’s office told the court.

He also warned three hospitals in Houston that they could face legal consequences if they allowed Cox’s physician to provide the abortion, despite the ruling from state District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble, who Paxton called an “activist” judge.

What a horrible situation bordering on persecution for this woman to be in!

Tony

Liz Magill

Dear Commons Community,

University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill resigned from her post yesterday after facing intense criticism from the White House, lawmakers and alumni for appearing to dodge a question at a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism.  As reported by NBC News and other media.

“I write to share that President Liz Magill has voluntarily tendered her resignation as President of the University of Pennsylvania,” Scott L. Bok, the chair of the Penn Board of Trustees, wrote in a message to the Penn community. “She will remain a tenured faculty member at Penn Carey Law.”

Shortly after Bok announced Magill’s resignation, he announced he would also step down from his position, according to a statement from Bok published by the Daily Pennsylvanian student newspaper. “I concluded that, for me, now was the right time to depart,” Bok said in the statement.

A university spokesman confirmed Bok’s resignation.

In a five-hour House hearing Tuesday, Magill and her counterparts at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were grilled over how their institutions responded to the rise in anti-Jewish hate since Oct. 7.

In their testimonies, the three university leaders each condemned antisemitism. The outcry centered on a contentious exchange with Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., who asked whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” would violate each school’s code of conduct.

Instead of directly replying to Stefanik’s yes-or-no question, Magill said that decision would be “context-dependent.”

“If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment,” she said.

In his statement, Bok said Magill “made a very unfortunate misstep” in her testimony but praised her leadership skills and insisted she was “not the slightest bit antisemitic.” He went on to say that Magill was “worn down by months of relentless external attacks” and “provided a legalistic answer to a moral question,” making for a “dreadful 30-second sound bite.”

Harvard President Claudine Gay responded to Stefanik’s line of questioning in similar terms. She testified that when “speech crosses into conduct, that violates our policies.”

MIT President Sally Kornbluth said she had not heard of students on her campus calling for the genocide of Jews, adding that such rhetoric would be “investigated as harassment if pervasive and severe.”

In a two-minute video message posted Wednesday night on the social media platform X, Magill elaborated on her answer and condemned calls for the genocide of Jewish people in more unequivocal terms.

“I was not focused on, but I should have been, the irrefutable fact that a call for genocide of Jewish people is a call for some of the most terrible violence human beings can perpetrate,” she said in the video.

“It’s evil, plain and simple,” Magill added.

Gay has apologized for her remarks. In an interview with the Harvard Crimson student newspaper, she said in part: “I got caught up in what had become at that point, an extended, combative exchange about policies and procedures.”

“I failed to convey what is my truth,” she added.

Following Bok’s resignation, the board’s vice chair, Julie Platt, was named interim chair and will serve until a successor is appointed, the university said.

In a written statement, Platt, who also serves as the chair of the Jewish Federations of North America, said Penn’s change in leadership was “necessary.”

“As Vice Chair of the university’s board these past several months, I have worked hard from the inside to address the rising issues of antisemitism on campus. Unfortunately, we have not made all the progress that we should have and intend to accomplish,” she said. “In my view, given the opportunity to choose between right and wrong, the three university presidents testifying in the United States House of Representatives failed. The leadership change at the university was therefore necessary and appropriate.”

The university presidents’ exchanges with Stefanik went viral on social media and drew furious criticism from political leaders in both parties, as well as Jewish community advocates, alumni and donors.

In a statement Wednesday, White House spokesman Andrew Bates said: “It’s unbelievable that this needs to be said: Calls for genocide are monstrous and antithetical to everything we represent as a country.”

“Any statements that advocate for the systematic murder of Jews are dangerous and revolting — and we should all stand firmly against them, on the side of human dignity and the most basic values that unite us as Americans,” he added.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro told reporters Wednesday that Magill’s response was “unacceptable.”

“I’ve said many times, leaders have a responsibility to speak and act with moral clarity, and Liz Magill failed to meet that simple test,” Shapiro, a Democrat, said. “I think whether you’re talking about genocide against Jews, genocide against people of color, genocide against LGBTQ folks, it’s all in the wrong.”

The governor added that he believed the university’s board needed to make a “serious decision” about Magill’s leadership at the Ivy League university.

Ross Stevens, a Penn alumnus and the CEO of the financial firm Stone Ridge Holdings, sent a letter to the university Thursday threatening to pull $100 million worth of shares in his company that are held by the university unless Magill vacates her post.

In the letter, which was obtained by NBC News, Stevens cited Magill’s congressional testimony and said he is “appalled by the University’s stance on antisemitism on campus.”

Magill’s high-profile critics included the billionaire investor Bill Ackman, who repeatedly called for her ouster on X. “Now the focus turns to Presidents Gay and Kornbluth and the boards of @Harvard and @MIT,” he tweeted Saturday in the wake of Magill’s exit.

Stefanik announced Thursday that the House’s Education and Workforce Committee was launching a congressional investigation with “the full force of subpoena power” into Penn, MIT, Harvard and other unspecified universities.

“We will use our full Congressional authority to hold these schools accountable for their failure on the global stage,” Stefanik said in a statement.

Magill’s resignation is most appropriate! 

Tony

Photo from AP News.

Dear Commons Community,

European Union negotiators reached  agreement on the world’s first comprehensive artificial intelligence rules, paving the way for legal oversight of AI technology that has promised to transform everyday life and spurred warnings of existential dangers to humanity.

Negotiators from the European Parliament and the bloc’s 27 member countries overcame big differences on controversial points including generative AI and police use of face recognition surveillance to sign a tentative political agreement for the Artificial Intelligence Act.  As  reported by the Associated Press.

“Deal!” tweeted European Commissioner Thierry Breton just before midnight. “The EU becomes the very first continent to set clear rules for the use of AI.”

The result came after marathon closed-door talks this week, with the initial session lasting 22 hours before a second round kicked off Friday morning.

Officials were under the gun to secure a political victory for the flagship legislation. Civil society groups, however, gave it a cool reception as they wait for technical details that will need to be ironed out in the coming weeks. They said the deal didn’t go far enough in protecting people from harm caused by AI systems.

“Today’s political deal marks the beginning of important and necessary technical work on crucial details of the AI Act, which are still missing,” said Daniel Friedlaender, head of the European office of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, a tech industry lobby group.

The EU took an early lead in the global race to draw up AI guardrails when it unveiled the first draft of its rulebook in 2021. The recent boom in generative AI, however, sent European officials scrambling to update a proposal poised to serve as a blueprint for the world.

The European Parliament will still need to vote on the act early next year, but with the deal done that’s a formality, Brando Benifei, an Italian lawmaker co-leading the body’s negotiating efforts, told The Associated Press late Friday.

“It’s very very good,” he said by text message after being asked if it included everything he wanted. “Obviously we had to accept some compromises but overall very good.” The eventual law wouldn’t fully take effect until 2025 at the earliest, and threatens stiff financial penalties for violations of up to 35 million euros ($38 million) or 7% of a company’s global turnover.

Generative AI systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT have exploded into the world’s consciousness, dazzling users with the ability to produce human-like text, photos and songs but raising fears about the risks the rapidly developing technology poses to jobs, privacy and copyright protection and even human life itself.

Now, the U.S., U.K., China and global coalitions like the Group of 7 major democracies have jumped in with their own proposals to regulate AI, though they’re still catching up to Europe.

Strong and comprehensive rules from the EU “can set a powerful example for many governments considering regulation,” said Anu Bradford, a Columbia Law School professor who’s an expert on EU law and digital regulation. Other countries “may not copy every provision but will likely emulate many aspects of it.”

AI companies subject to the EU’s rules will also likely extend some of those obligations outside the continent, she said. “After all, it is not efficient to re-train separate models for different markets,” she said.

The AI Act was originally designed to mitigate the dangers from specific AI functions based on their level of risk, from low to unacceptable. But lawmakers pushed to expand it to foundation models, the advanced systems that underpin general purpose AI services like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard chatbot.

Foundation models looked set to be one of the biggest sticking points for Europe. However, negotiators managed to reach a tentative compromise early in the talks, despite opposition led by France, which called instead for self-regulation to help homegrown European generative AI companies competing with big U.S rivals, including OpenAI’s backer Microsoft.

Also known as large language models, these systems are trained on vast troves of written works and images scraped off the internet. They give generative AI systems the ability to create something new, unlike traditional AI, which processes data and completes tasks using predetermined rules.

The companies building foundation models will have to draw up technical documentation, comply with EU copyright law and detail the content used for training. The most advanced foundation models that pose “systemic risks” will face extra scrutiny, including assessing and mitigating those risks, reporting serious incidents, putting cybersecurity measures in place and reporting their energy efficiency.

Researchers have warned that powerful foundation models, built by a handful of big tech companies, could be used to supercharge online disinformation and manipulation, cyberattacks or creation of bioweapons.

Rights groups also caution that the lack of transparency about data used to train the models poses risks to daily life because they act as basic structures for software developers building AI-powered services.

What became the thorniest topic was AI-powered face recognition surveillance systems, and negotiators found a compromise after intensive bargaining.

European lawmakers wanted a full ban on public use of face scanning and other “remote biometric identification” systems because of privacy concerns. But governments of member countries succeeded in negotiating exemptions so law enforcement could use them to tackle serious crimes like child sexual exploitation or terrorist attacks.

Rights groups said they were concerned about the exemptions and other big loopholes in the AI Act, including lack of protection for AI systems used in migration and border control, and the option for developers to opt-out of having their systems classified as high risk.

“Whatever the victories may have been in these final negotiations, the fact remains that huge flaws will remain in this final text,” said Daniel Leufer, a senior policy analyst at the digital rights group Access Now.

We will have to wait and see what effect this agreement will have on AI development and deployment!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The University of Michigan said yesterday that its consumer sentiment index jumped 13% to 69.4, as people became less worried about inflation and more optimistic about a number of issues. That not only ended the downturn but reversed the decline, returning the sentiment index to where it was in August.

Quincy Krosby, chief global strategist for LPL Financial, wrote that the reading shows “a more optimistic view of economic conditions, which suggests that coupled with a stronger than expected payroll report, helps underpin the narrative of a still resilient economy.”

The report was a surprise to experts as well. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal thought sentiment would inch higher to 62.4 from November’s reading of 61.3, but the metric jumped instead.  As reported by NBC News.

“There was a broad consensus of improved sentiment across age, income, education, geography, and political identification,” said Surveys of Consumers Director Joanne Hsu. Year-ahead inflation expectations plunged from 4.5% last month to 3.1% this month. The current reading is the lowest since March 2021.”

Consumers generally haven’t felt great about the economy. They’ve been concerned about the possibility of a recession, which experts discussed a great deal in 2022 and 2023 even as the economy held up, and they’re feeling the continued effects of the inflation of the last few years along with other factors like rising credit card debt and the high cost of housing.

Inflation has been slowing for months and the job market has stayed strong, with wages for workers rising. And spending by consumers has stayed strong, which is a major reason there hasn’t been a recession. It’s possible that some of that sunk in this month.

The sentiment index is calculated based on surveys of Americans with questions about their current views on categories like inflation, personal finances and business conditions, as well as their expectations of how those things will change. Because consumer spending accounts for about 70% of the U.S. economy, the sentiment index is considered an important indicator of how much they are willing to spend and what the trajectory of the economy might be.

The recent dip in consumer sentiment was, among other things, a possible warning sign about holiday spending this year.

For comparison, the consumer sentiment index stood at 99.3 in December 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic took hold. It hit an all-time low of 50.0 in June 2022, when inflation was at a 40-year high.

The index’s all-time high was 112.0 in February 2000, at the height of the dot-com bubble of that era.

Hsu’s statement added that many respondents mentioned they felt better about the economy because they’re optimistic about elections in 2024.

Yea for “Bidenomics!

Tony

Sally Kornbluth of the MIT, Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania  and Claudine Gay of Harvard University, NBC News

Dear Commons Community,

Len Gutman, senior editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education, will publish an opinion  piece on Monday commenting on the recent Congressional hearing on campus antisemitism.  It is balanced and well-done.  Here is a preview.

“Tuesday’s congressional hearing on campus antisemitism, in which Republican lawmakers interrogated Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, MIT’s president, Sally Kornbluth, and the University of Pennsylvania’s president, Elizabeth Magill, represented the appearance on the national stage of the political interference state legislatures have been bringing to bear on colleges for the last several years. As is typical of congressional hearings, there was a lot histrionic grandstanding from the politicians and a lot of noncommittal circumlocution from those testifying.

Two plain truths emerged: First, many politicians misunderstand academic freedom, or pretend to do so, and if left unchallenged, might prove perfectly capable of McCarthyite interventions more repressive than anything seen in half a century or more. Second, elite-college leaders are unequipped to address the perception, held by much of the public and by many within their own institutions, that they tolerate an egregious double standard when it comes to academic freedom, one that punishes conservatives and consecrates the left. Each side sees the other as hypocritical; each side is to some extent correct about that.”

…

His conclusion:

“Bob Good, a Republican from Virginia commented at the hearing:  ‘Your institution is clearly producing students who are sympathetic to a terrorist organization. Don’t you think that’s a misuse of taxpayer dollars?’ There will always be politicians attracted to this sort of threat, and universities have weathered similar attacks before. They have done so in part because they have been able to persuade enough of the public that they are honest brokers, both of research and of critical disputation. They will need to learn to do so again.”

The entire piece is worth a read!

Tony