JOH NEJHE Blog

Pick at this …

Duck or Tunapoo?

I don’t know if it’s the book Joanne got me about forever chemicals poisoning water supplies or the second straight Indian dinner, but last night, I dreamed I was pregnant.

The baby was growing in my arm. I had gas, and I was anxious about from where/how the baby would get out.

Read Thomas Jefferson was friends with DuPont. Thus roots of polluters influencing American policies.

As the press explained the US invasion, “dense, sticky and heavy: why Venezuelan crude oil appeals to US refineries.” Fly ash.

Scal and Drew made me turn on the Cs.
Brick and Jack made me turn on the Bs.
Harry Enten may make me turn on news.

Neighbors had a costume party the week before Halloween.
But the cars parked out front say they’ll all go as Joneses.

So much uptalking. Superexcited about journaling. Next level, man.

At a certain point, you become too old to fight to save yourself, then too old to run, then too old to reason.

Stretched out on my bed like Vitruvian man.

Couldn’t get the doggie into the selfie frame
Along with the indoor statuary
In the great room of my recurring dream
But there was a delivery of tons of fish and shellfish
I said it came from the Beveridges
The US “progressives”
Not the beverage of the day, which was corn niblets

Can’t picture Billy in the fashionable pink slacks, but I’m sure the balding figure he has his arm around is me. And that’s Nastya watering the wildflower garden-to-be.

The visit also gave me a chance to view the fascinating diorama of the Greenway and surrounding buildings in the Greenway Conservancy Office.

And a new entry perhaps for the slow-developing Strange Infrastructure series?

Also note Lilies, Rosemary and the Bleeding Hearts and other dispatches from Greenway.

A sequestered wisdom tooth that should have gone years ago
But Foxx’s whirlpool’s got such seductive furniture
It’s so pleasant retrieving root fragments or jawbone

I have a vivid memory of this event as a UFO-curious youngster. Reignited by a recent trip to Wakefield, NH, of all places.

As the The New York Times reported at the time, “Up at the farm, a group of young men with new boots and beards, who looked as if they cared about ecology, frowned at the ice. An unshaven Hampshireman, a bottle of Budweiser tucked in the pocket of his orange thermal sweatshirt, speculated on whether the land would ‘command an outrageous price.’”

I was pleased to publish this piece authored by Patricia Steiner in The New England Journal of Higher Education (NEJHE) in August 2014 …

Business advisor and Northeastern University professor Patricia Steiner explores theories of self-awareness and self-deception as applied to both leaders and students. “Self-awareness theory suggests that individuals who are more cognizant of how they are perceived by others are better at incorporating information from others into their self-appraisals and, ultimately, into their behavior,” she writes. “In general, people dealing with self-awareness problems blame others around them for things that go wrong and block their awareness of their own responsibility for the problems they face, thus preventing solutions or progress.”   

#NEJHE @nebhe

The 2025 celebration of Ukraine’s independence at Boston’s Government Center featured a flag raising and short talks by immigration advocates.

When the speeches ended, a US Marine Corps band began playing contemporary hits on the adjacent section of the plaza.

When the music stopped, one marine and his Ukrainian partner held hands as they shopped in a pop-up Ukrainian gift market.

A few days later, Russia launched one of its biggest attacks on downtown Kyiv, killing at least 21 people and wounding more than 60.

Not so-fellow-travelers thought Joe Walsh would’ve made greater music if he lived a cleaner life.
“Not the fucking Eagles,” I said several times (and mentioned Keith Richards).

I related a childhood memory of an object melting pond ice in the very New Hampshire town where we gathered.
Heard of people scaring the shit out of themselves, especially in choruses.

Took the ferry to Lynn, Lynn, the city of sin.
So beautifully oceanic and cool to escape the summer heat.

But poorly signed and still dismal.
A fire erupts, a ferry passenger says, in a homeless encampment.

It’s not crickets, like some TV people say.
It’s sheep.

Young confident tour guides on travel videos annoy me to no end.
Talk with new foods in their young mouths as their partners look on.

Some colleagues thought reality began the instant they were born.
History may not repeat but you should know something about the fucking past.

Late summer, avoiding houseguest, I walk down the street on a rainy night.
By the Church of the goddamned Good Shepherd.

A woman crosses to the other side of the street.
And I don’t blame her.

My brother Mike and his wife Jane bought this antique colonial house in Rowley, Mass., in 1978.

Mike and Jane, both public school teachers, worked hard to rebuild and restore the colonial home faithful to its early 1700s origins.

Mike and Jane became something akin to “gentleman farmers” on the property where they grew wonderful flower and vegetable gardens and raised three fine children.

When they first bought the house, a black Rover from the sixties sat rusting in the yard. Dreaming of getting my license at the time, I would sit in the driver’s seat and imagine taking girlfriends (nonexistent) on entertaining rides.

Recently, Ipswich, Mass. historian Gordon Harris published this account of Mike and Jane’s house on the Historic Ipswich website.

Among other things, the write-up reminded me of the Rowley house’s provenance with deed-holders named “Whitcom,” “Wicum” and “Wycom”—fodder for New England conversations with friend and former Providence Journal vp Robert Whitcomb, who sometimes reprints my columns on his New England Diary blog.

I was pleased to publish this piece by Diya Kallivayalil in The New England Journal of Higher Education (NEJHE) in March 2021 …

NEJHE has spilled much ink (pixels?) on stories related to trauma, the coronavirus pandemic and immigration, treated as mostly distinct issues. In this NEJHE piece titled Trauma, Pandemic and Immigration, psychologist Diya Kallivayalil explains how the the three forces interact. The Victims of Violence Program that she directs at Cambridge Health Alliance pursues its mission of bringing health equity and social justice to underserved, medically indigent populations. A faculty member in the Psychiatry Department at Harvard Medical School, Kallivayalil writes of many patients who have lost their incomes and faced racialized targeting of immigrants in workplaces and beyond.

Notably, among the “Related Posts” that we list with the Kallivayalil piece, check out World-Class Care: Boston Welcome Back Center Puts Internationally Educated Nurses Back To Work. That piece is from 2008, when NEJHE was called Connection and the journal was published in print on paper. It examines New England’s vexing shortage of nurses just as immigrant nurses who were trained in their home countries could not penetrate this market due to red tape and differences in healthcare credentialing. It’s a problem that seems to be only getting worse from what I see in my post-NEJHE gig helping teach English (and, of course, job search) at the Malden, Mass.-based Immigrant Learning Center.

#NEJHE @nebhe

I was pleased to publish this piece by George McCully in The New England Journal of Higher Education (NEJHE) in April 2021 …

“There has been a growing consensus among authorities, especially in the Trump era, that the U.S. is in an epistemological crisis that threatens our democracy,” writes historian and former professor George McCully, founder and CEO of the Catalogue for Philanthropy. In this NEJHE piece titled Truth, Education and Democracy in an Era of “Alternative Facts,” McCully quotes former President Barack Obama’s assertion that “if we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition, the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition, our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis.” If this is true, McCully suggests, it’s up to the academic and journalistic communities to sort out the truth.

We also published these NEJHE pieces by George McCully …

Is This the End of Higher Education? A Historian’s Perspective

Guides to Ascending the On-Ramp in Higher Education: Connecting Dots

Academic Disciplines: Synthesis or Demise?

Pushing Back on Higher Education as Trainer for High-Tech Jobs

Pushing Back on Idea of Learner-Centered Institutions

What Philanthropy’s Paradigm Shift Means for Higher Ed Fundraising

“University Unbound” Rebounds: Can MOOCs Educate as well as Train?

What Gives? Perspectives on Philanthropy and Higher Education

#NEJHE @nebhe

My sister Jean passed away last November. Recently, Jean’s (and my) great niece Sasha Malley, while studying in the Scripps College Premedical Postbaccalaureate program in California, arranged for this memorial bench to honor Jean.

The bench sits on a newly built pier behind the former McDonalds restaurant overlooking the harbor in Jean’s hometown of Beverly, Mass.

Sasha, who recently earned her bachelor’s degree from Barnard College, plans to follow her parents, obstetrician Kate Harney and infectious disease specialist Rick Malley, in becoming a medical doctor.

The bench location was a favorite spot of Jean’s. Among other things, Jean would add her nephews and nieces to McD’s “billions and billions served” and always treated our dog Casey to burgers there on his birthday.

The quote on the bench is from one of Jean’s favorite poems, Abou Ben Adhem.

Lost my shirt
Walking to the high school
on Odell
Which at first seemed empty
Like it was not a school day
Stopped for breakfast
Smoked a joint, unlike me
Odell turned into a grand old downtown Boston shopping street near the State House
Saw a fancy store to buy a shirt
But could only enter from the second floor
Above the sales operation
Stopped in a fancy auditorium
Sat next to a brown businesswoman I knew from television
Told her I literally lost my shirt
She asked had I ever gone without it before
I said yes when it’s hot, but not for the whole day

I did my customary check of the Greenway bubblers. No water turned on yet on this chilly day. And Joanne’s paver. Looking as sharp as ever. Others were fading fast.

There was not much color except white snowdrops and gold, white and purple crocuses, a few dusty-pink hellebores and witch hazel shrubs blazing yellow.

Many daffodils and irises were starting to green but not yet flowering. Yellow- and red-twig dogwoods showed tough pruning but good bark color.

The Native Land Acknowledgement on Parcel 21 is back just in time for Trump’s war on DEI.

In Parcel 22 across from the Boston Fed, boxwoods provide a good earthy smell.

For more than 30 years, I was the executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education. In 2023, I left the editorship and began volunteering in phenology at the Rose Kennedy Greenway and in English language teaching at the Immigrant Learning Center in Malden, Mass. Also see A Volunteer Life and Back to Green and Witnessing Beauty but Wilting in Empathy and What To a Volunteer is Labor Day?

Note the pilcrow
Don’t just change … change up
You can smell the petrichor
That good old geosmin, sweetening near the shore
Though you’re a freeborn man of the USA, they attack you as some kind of queer
Be biting your tongue for four years, less if people stand up, more if they fold
Under the fart of the deal
Insist on hypotheticals
As their evasion becomes regrettable
What date on the calendar could be more unremarkable
Than January second
She told him I like the bullshots
But no
When he did return, the mouse sent to space was fatter than when he left
Due to lack of gravity, inactivity and ingestion of brain and intestines
Vegans living in box trucks not paying rent after the pandemic
Zizians harken the Rise of the Moors
Like my old data connections in an inadvertent conspiracy
Like the figures in the lighted windows who look so small in the big house
It’s a Message to You Rudy
And Rudie Can’t Fail

Some of my proudest moments as editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education (NEJHE) came when I was able to use my brother Tim’s paintings to illustrate articles. See some of the NEJHE articles with Tim’s artwork here.

Recently, Tim worked with students to refresh his website. Visiting the site is like taking a trip through a secret fine art museum. As he has noted, “family, history, memory, dreams and loss are the stuff of living and breathing and obviously, painting.”

Please enjoy https://timothyharney.com/home.html …

Sad to say goodbye to sister Jean in November.

Jean left this earth on November 10 at age 82 due to complications from Covid.

Besides being a great sister, Jean was cherished as a loving—and fun-loving—aunt to 10 nephews and nieces and 11 grand-nephews and grand-nieces. She often entertained them with visits to local beaches and informal baking lessons in her home in the Beverly Cove. She passed along classic poems and old songs that she learned as a child. And she’d always send them home with a few homemade treats, often an old toy and usually some new knowledge. Most of all, she passed along a love of family and the importance of humor.

See the full obit here.

Even with my earbuds in
Little Johnny Jewel
Has the local dogs barking
Like being young, in love with Backstreets
Before time crawled in three-hour increments

Break the grid with me
So inaction’s not complicity
Some gout, some doubt
When I’m out and about
Looking for a G-spout

My skills are confined these days
To sentences, if not phrases
Bigger frames, fuller stories … no way
Like someone said of Miami Vice
No real story development at play

Some friends never fed their heads
Like leaders who never drink
Some think we’re artists and don’t look back
The ocean snob sees a lake visit as a piss bath
And weird communal wrath

A neighbor lacks self-awareness
His pickleball courts are just one sign
I had to repost: The Impact of the Self-Awareness Process on Learning and Leading
He’ll trudge into the kitchen
Swatting at feedback loops

On TV, a purported liberal pundit says US presidents have never cozied up to autocrats
Right
Now, as always, they are at war against Islam
TV is mostly ads interspersed with a few minutes of content
“Built for Apple Intelligence to help you write, express yourself, and get things done effortlessly”

Following Vancian logic that childless women have no stake in future
The first suspects in school shootings will be homeschoolers
As LinkedIn pros on Thanksgiving
Give thanks for collaboration and resilience
I use the free version

They’ll be carrying antimatter in trucks across Europe
To see why it vanished from earth
Stretching the Tren Maya to the Lobito Corridor
All in Dennis Silvio’s secret book
About his dark days with the Rise of the Moors

Your disease’s range expands by tropicalization
Your product’s integrity dips through financialization
Your complexity is compromised by disinformation
Your writer’s block hardens circumelection
Waiting for the gift of sound and vision

Brother Bill got me a viking ship
As a child
While he read me Beowulf
And practiced some Greek

Son Bill proclaimed a goal to “topple orthodontics”
But I wonder if he should have started with dentistry
With its business model to hurt you enough each encounter
To get you back quickly for correction

I hear the local gun range
Cheek to jowl with the rink where the hockey dad murdered a referee
With his bare hands
Now they are beginning to assert their right to start a militia
If things don’t go their way
If there’s no crosschecking call

Observing blooms on the Rose Kennedy Greenway from mid-August to Labor Day weekend had me paraphrasing Frederick Douglass: What to a volunteer is Labor Day? Actually, the change of seasons evident on the Greenway during the period had me feeling as if I were headed back to school. And realizing fall has its own blessings in the garden.

On one visit, I notice for the first time shelf fungus of some kind on the tree snag across from International Place (not one of “my parcels” but a regular spot of interest). Not sure if I just missed the conks on earlier visits nor if their appearance helps clear up my confusion of how much of the tree snag is natural and how much fabricated.

I watch a rabbit stand on hind legs to munch on tall phlox. In my yard, I hurl expletives and small rocks at their brazen cousins, try to spray them with the garden hose and threaten to skin and roast them with mustard sauce. The neighbors think I’m crazy. On the Greenway, the rabbits are more of a marvel. By what grassy conduits do they find their way get to the middle of an overdeveloped metropolis? In another part of the parcel, irises look live their leaves have been sheered off by rabbits if not by a gardening machine.

Another day, I visit with a friend who works as a volunteer observing butterflies on the Greenway. He points out three cabbage whites (always very common, he tells me), nine pearl crescents (a first-time siting this year), one orange sulphur and one unidentified long tail.

Some of the Greenway’s hydrangeas that wilted so noticeably during July’s heatwaves have recovered in a dirtier blue and pink. But the a stand of white hydrangeas that looked particularly sad one previous visit have now been cut down.

Anemones have been impressive. Most recently, anemone x hybrida ‘Pamina’ (windflower) shows scattered brilliant pink flowers with yellow centers along Pearl Street in Parcel 21. Meanwhile, white anemones are no longer flowering along Pearl in stark contrast to their lush carpets of white a month earlier. Now just a few of their white flowers poke out along Congress.

Parcel 21’s beds along Congress Street look especially dried out and barren. But the stalk of the pea-like fruit of the dracunculus still impresses me though it’s now laying flat on the ground. And now its fruits are turning from green to orange.

In Parcel 22, I happen upon the changing of the Greenway mural on the vent building near Dewey Square. The next featured mural will be by Jeffrey Gibson, a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent.

Along the vent, signs explain in English and Chinese the experimentation the Greenway is doing on the grassy area near the vent. It’s a combination of clover and three turf grasses: fescue, ryegrass and bluegrass, which don’t need fertilizer or much water and can withstand heavy foot traffic. It’s a noble cause but I still miss the towering sunflowers that grew here last year.

In Parcel 22, the elderberry that was blooming white, now shows clusters of reddish tendrils that remind me of grape stems. In the raised bed next to little library, zinnias flower yellow-green (but seem to have some kind of white scale like the Joe Pye weed in Parcel 21). The cucumber near the tunnel shows a few yellow flowers, but also seems to have some kind of white scale on its leaves.

Near the Red Line plaza on Parcel 22, flowering calamint swarms with bees, Russian sage sands strong with its purplish blooms, broken by occasional roses flowering pink and fleabane’s yellow and white. It’s one of the most resilient spots on the Greenway.

A bit about me: For more than 30 years, I was the executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education. In 2023, I left the editorship and began volunteering in phenology at the Rose Kennedy Greenway and in English language teaching at the Immigrant Learning Center in Malden, Mass. Also see A Volunteer Life and Back to Green and Witnessing Beauty but Wilting in Empathy.

I’ve been captivated by a book on herbs that combines the text of 17th century herbalist Nicholas Culpeper with usage information updated in the 1980s in part to help avert poisonings that were surely a byproduct of the original.

Besides descriptions of about 400 medicinal herbs and their connection to astrology (a thing back then), the book offers an interesting survey of the ailments and maladies of the time.

For example, certain herbs are recommended to treat: falling sickness, agues, dropsy, St. Anthony’s fire, ringworms and tetters, passions of the heart, giddiness or turning of the brain.

Some also: take away wens and hard kernals that grow about the neck, kill broad worms in the belly, provoke women’s courses and urine, break the stone, help conception, dissolve wind or purge melancholy.

Even the mundane common garden lettuce offers special gifts.

“It represses dreams if outwardly applied to the testicles with a little Camphire,” writes Culpeper. “If applied to the region of the heart or liver, it will reduce heat and inflammation therein. The juice of the distilled water into which some White Sanders or Red Roses are placed, can be used instead to comfort and strengthen the parts and also to temper the heat of the urine.”

Author’s note: Many thanks to my brother Mike, a retired teacher, graphic artist and craftsman, who made me aware of the Culpeper work and who, with his wife Jane, has taught me much about gardening and the love of plants.

A few sweltering Wednesdays ago, I spent my 12th day of this 2024 season observing blooms on the Rose Kennedy Greenway. The temperature topped 90 degrees for the third day in a row and the eighth day of the previous 11. The plants were wilting. And so was I.

The chief wilters were the white hydrangeas, despite 2024 being widely acclaimed by the media and others as a special year for hydrangeas, at least before the punishing heatwaves.

That roasting Wednesday, the drying, drooping plants and I all looked like we needed a frosty glass of iced compost tea.

For most of my Greenway visits, I’ve enlisted company, either friends of family members. That scorching day, I planned to take Commuter Rail into Boston’s North Station to meet my wife who was scheduled to arrive in the afternoon at South Station from a trip via Amtrak to New Jersey. People complain understandably about there being no direct rail connection between North and South stations. But this day seemed perfect for me. I could sneak in my volunteer phenology observations by walking the Greenway between the two train stations and meet my wife for dinner. But Amtrak and Commuter Rail are famously unreliable. And the meetup was not to work.

I’m gearing up for a closer look at “my parcels,” Parcels 21 and 22. Once home, I planned to combine a phone app called PlantNet and Google Photos for IDing purposes. Like a well-meaning teacher, I’m often guilty of grade inflation. Lots of blooms that I give 3s under the Greenway ranking system (3 being essentially peak) probably would be 4s (past peak, headed toward winter vacation) if I were tougher grader.

In my area of the Greenway, some things are leafing but not flowering: lamb’s ear, wild ginger, rhubarb, ironweed and several violet intruders.

The image of this season on Parcels 21 and 22: showy coneflowers flowering pink and yellow amid passing alliums, whose globes remain partly intact but have lost color (despite the look of an egg yolk-like center recently. A bug perhaps?)

Another star of this season: liliums, as tall as me and flowering crimson and white.

Isolated daylilies are blooming orange, deep bronze and the yellow of Stella D’Oro?

Once vibrant white anemones in the bed along Pearl Street now show stems but no flowers. I’ve learned there are at least two kinds of anemone in my parcels, including one whose flower morphs into a fluffy white top. Interesting, but a 4 by the rating system, I suppose.

Some hostas are flowering pinkish-purplish at the corner of Pearl and Atlantic. I generously rank them 3s, though they still strike me as commonplace suburban landscape plant.

A Magnolia near Pearl and Atlantic is “passed,” no longer imparting heavenly flowers and fragrances, but now showing interesting gourdy-looking white cones.

Astilbes that flowered vibrant pink now mix with some fading brown. In some spots, they nearly merge with the more grand aruncus, which requires me to do a double-take as I ID.

Grape hyacinths are long passed with now-whitish disks where their purple and blue flowers were. Joe Pye weed is soon to come, reaching up like a refined man’s milkweed.

Dicentra is resilient, not the Asian bleeding-heart style with bright fuchsia-pink and white flowers that my mother grew in her garden, but the more common North American native bleeding heart apparent on my Greenway parcels.

I also have a new respect for goldenrod (solidago), after all those years thinking it was up there with ragweed in causing my spring-destroying hay fevers. Alas, many experts now say goldenrod is not the culprit.

The purplish flowers of catmint (nepeta) are fading a bit. Catmint has become something like a lowest common denominator in suburban gardens and strip mall landscapes, but it’s still striking on the Greenway. Also blooming purplish are wild geraniums, macrorrhizum and rozanne, and stokesia. A few meadow phloxes bloom white near the magnificent umbrella pine, with its touchable needles. Baptisia is not flowering but showing blackish buds, a bit like its usual seed case (odd year for my home one too).

Dracunculus, which has caught my eye in various phases, is passed but showing a fascinating pod of pea-like fruit.

Also, beebalm flowers vibrant red—what Greenway folks ID as Monarda Oswego tea. And impressive filipendula flowers furry-looking pink clusters.

In a raised bed next to a little library, grows parsley (the curly kind), zinnias, dahlias and lavender.

These are near the edible garden: Orange and yellow flowers peek out from the dense leaves of pumpkin and cucumber plants. Carrots are bushy and presumably sinking tasty taproots.

Along the wall to the the tunnel, honeysuckle vine blooms red-yellow and intertwines in spots with the vibrant pink-white edge flowers of sweet pea.

An Asian pear shows strong yellowish fruits, boneset is flowering white and juniper shows grey-blue berries. My favorite plant in this area is the flowering raspberry—distinct from the more common caney, thorny raspberries I grew up with—but instead, a bush adorned by showy pink flowers, and a few dried-out fruits too.

I still gravitate toward what some call weeds: cardoon blooming thistle-looking red globes, fleabane flowering yellow and white like miniature daisies. Then on to calamint flowering white, amaranth with its red spikes against reddish foliage and rudbeckia flowering like black-eyed susans. Near the Red Line plaza, roses flower pink but their fading hips don’t lie. Russian sage battles for a bridgehead along Atlantic.

With the heat dome passed—only temporarily of course given our climate and climate politics—I look forward to the next visit to a lusher Greenway.

Going out for dinner in Revere recently conjured up many unrelated memories. A collage really.

The restaurant was along what I always called the airport road, which was near the marsh road and broken up by various dangerous traffic circles. Such as Bell. I had gone to a restaurant at the same spot with my mother the summer before I began college. The place was called something else at the time.

For me growing up further up the North Shore, Revere was its own black box. Beyond Lynn, the city of sin, but somehow more daunting … a subway city, cheek by jowl with the more “urban” Chelsea and Everett.

Revere was served by the Blue Line. A backup choice to B&M Buddliners for getting into Boston from the North Shore. On the clickety-clack Blue Line cars, older men with eyes glued to racing forms rode expectantly to Wonderland and Suffolk Downs, hoping to win, place or at least show.

I remember later winning $25 myself on the greyhounds at Wonderland. My dog nearly caught Swifty, the mechanical rabbit. Apparently, when dogs do catch the fake rabbit and realize they’ve been fooled, they never race again. And I never gambled again. Finally, a vice I didn’t have.

I vividly recall Roland Merullo’s book about families shocked by the plane crash at nearby Logan, and kids necking on the Revere Beach wall.

Historic markers note that Revere Beach was the first public beach in America (saying something, considering the commonwealth’s historic lack of public access to the ocean). Revere Beach also hosted the world’s tallest (and some claimed, fastest) rollercoaster, a hulking wooden structure that I never rode, but often marveled at before it burned down.

During summers of college (and high school?), friends and I made careful forays into the bars along Revere Beach. We started with the Porthole Pub (which is actually in Lynn but had the latest last call on the North Shore and was a natural crossing into Revere for kids up to no good). I recall the Driftwood. Always with rumours of gangsters. And undoubtedly cops.

Ah, pretty, tough Revere.

A few thoughts …

• For years as editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education (NEJHE), I invited authors to contribute “issue-oriented, non-marketing” commentaries to our journal. I often told them to write in the style of two of my favorite publications at the the time, The Nation or the Chronicle of Higher Education Review. Some did. Eventually, between Trump-style fake news and the mission creep of public relations, I think I should have added “fact-based” to the requirements. All along, I also encouraged “opinion-based commentary”—more real, I always thought, than pure “objective” reporting.
• Connecticut’s Greenwich Free Press ran a bionote following a recent column on local school politics, noting: “His opinions are obviously his own.” The “obviously” seems gratuitous.
• A skill I thought I had (if I do say so myself) was collecting and juxtaposing obscure but interestingly related facts and opinions. The runaway internet (to say nothing of AI) has destroyed my imagined advantage.
• Reading freelance writer Freddie Deboer’s Substack piece titled, I Assure You, Writers Would Be Fine Without Twitter, I reflected on a few of my own quarrels with the platform. True, I had noted  that NEBHE’s Twitter content allowed us to bring readers a larger resource base than NEJHE articles alone. But I frequently, if subtly, dissed the platform, suggesting that measuring success by more “hits” isn’t everything. As Deboer writes in this Substack piece, “one thing the massively-social internet has done has been to erase the line between drawing validation from a limited intentional community of peers and seeking that validation from everyone.”
• As for Twitter, I don’t ever want to enrich Elon Musk, even practicing the modest civil disobedience of refusing to say “X (formerly known as Twitter).” I’ve hesitantly favored Facebook and the career-obsessed LinkedIn but I doubt they’re much better.
• Becoming editor of a publication changes the joy and stress of writing your own bylined pieces. I read an interesting observation about this phenomenon from James Fallows. But I couldn’t find the exact source and, with the journalism world so full of legal baloney, I chickened out on referencing it.
• My old role as style arbiter for the journal has helped turn me into a grumpy old man. Among recent peeves … Why do today’s journalists say “gifted” where we learned to say “given,” and “loaned” where we learned to say “lent.” Also noted a journalist’s tease that “Local tensions over the conversion of a former prison in Norfolk, a town close to Foxborough, are easing …” Interesting to describe Norfolk by its proximity to Foxborough, which happened to house a stadium vs Norfolk with its former prison.
• Also, why did journalists describing Joe Biden’s debate performance run out of synonyms for “disastrous”? Maybe because the threat to democracy is “existential.”

I had to go in my friend the congressman’s house for something. Exhausted, I flopped into an old bed in one of the rooms. Someone else got into bed beside me without saying a word. I snuck out of the room and headed down a flight of steps through the labyrinthine house. Once outside, I sensed that a large crowd was gathering. I squeezed behind large foundation plants to hide from the guests.

The family was preparing to host a big political event.

Aides quietly confirmed the guest of honor was Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega. He was an odd guest given the congressman’s notable history as a whistleblower of sorts about the misdeeds of US-backed Latin American dictators.

Nonetheless, the strongman was being feted at the congressman’s house while the dictator was in the area to receive an honor from Salem State University.

And I was briefly in bed with him.

Several of the congressman’s grandchildren were there with their babies and at least one small dog.

I was playing with the small dog who took off and jumped over the railing into the ocean. Much worry ensued. A boat quickly steamed from the dock carrying a rescue party. They rescued the dog to much relief. In the cove below, the rescuers celebrated with a synchronized swim.

John F. Kennedy then appeared as a young man with several of his friends. They mixed much horseplay and razzing about JFK’s purported sexual affairs.

I somehow knew when one of the congressman’s children was headed secretly to an old neighbor who could help sort all this out. It was all a bit Chappaquiddicky.

.

Hoping for a party at the corner of Vine and High
I was guzzling Phisohex since the Zarex tap ran dry

This year’s extravagant calendar arrived, addressed to a journal editor who chased a train
As future Harvard lawyers were forced indoors by rain

A musician hyped over AI didn’t know he’s buying the lowest common denominator in voice
I could direct him to Meghan O’Gieblyn, but that might not be his choice

He’s at that stage of becoming, I’m just being
Sometimes fleeing

I began volunteering as a phenologist on the Rose Kennedy Greenway in spring 2023 and returned a few weeks ago for the 2024 season.

Peppermint-striped tulips are flowering along Pearl Street. Grape hyacinths create purple blankets; anemones whitish carpets. Hellebores that made an early spring show with dusty green-white and pink flowers are already fading. In one spot, it looks like a resting animal has flattened a bed of irises and allium.

Last year, all narcissuses were daffodils to my hardly trained eye. This year, I think I’m seeing poeticus with white petals and yellow and reddish-outlined centers, sagitta with yellow double flowers around an orange tube and pheasants eye with its complex yellow and orange center. But I could be wrong.

These are early days on the Greenway. Many plants are leafing and budding but not yet flowering: irises, alliums, yellow- and red-twig dogwoods, lamb’s ear, roses, penstemon leafing purplish, dracunculus, astilbes, peonies, tickseed in a tough place along Purchase Street, nepeta, grasses near the tunnel vent still yellowish but with a few strands of green, achillea, aruncus and hosta shoots I’ve watched turn from young purplish shoots to fat green leaves reminiscent of a Rousseau painting. Few veggies or fruits visible. No sunflowers yet.

(By the way, in my old job as a journal editor, I was in charge of editorial style rules … things like when to capitalize words, including names of plants I suppose. It always seemed too arbitrary, and, in retirement, I don’t bother.)

At the corner of Congress Street, I notice a mat of creeping blue phlox with its many light blue-purplish flowers—not, to my eye at least, the pink phlox associated with April 2024’s pink moon.

Speaking of such connections, serviceberry shrubs (also known as shadbushes) have flowered, mirroring the season when shad fish run up New England rivers and, for me, the promise of the delicious season of shad roe.

Jumping out to me on Parcel 21 is a humble dandelion. I note that, sure, it’s a pest, but it’s flowering full yellow, so it gets a 3 in the Greenway ranking system that I’ve never quite got my head around, as they say. The “best” rank among 1 to 5 is 3, not the lowest or highest, but 3 for full flower … peak.

A few other observations …

• Maybe it’s the natural magnificence of the Greenway that somehow makes man-made signs catch my eye. Even the troubles of the world pierce the serenity of the park. Take the spot near the North End where a Priority Mail sticker on a park sign reads: FROM: POWER TO THE RESISTANCE TO: GLOBALIZE THE INTIFADA

• Then the welcome reminder of “No mow May on the Greenway … The Greenway Conservancy is participating in Plantlife’s No Mow May initiative to support local pollinators, reduce lawn inputs, and grow healthier lawns. Certain areas of the Greenway will not be mowed in May.” A noble goal for homeowners too.

• Nice to see a rare nametag on the Greenway identifying the good-looking and great-smelling Koreanspice viburnum. I had proposed such tagging last year in my piece on A Volunteer Life. Undoubtedly, others made similar suggestions. Still, I naively congratulated myself for any role in the tag, as two houseless people tried to tell me that there are apps on the market that ID plants. Immersed in my headphones, I reacted dismissively. Like a jerk, really. Quickly realizing my rudeness, I returned and apologized. These gardens are theirs more than mine.

• With the helpful tips from the houseless on my mind and my interest in signs piqued, I also noticed for the first time, in Parcel 22, a green sign reading: “PARK CLOSED, 11 PM – 7 AM Trespassers will be prosecuted.”

• With its tunnel vent, Parcel 22 is a big part of my Greenway life partly for its proximity to the park’s edible and pollinator gardens and Dewey Square and the Red Line plaza. The tunnel vent holds the Greenway mural. A sign reads: “What has this mural meant to you?” A mailbox is supplied for reader comments. One of the recent murals depicted a youth from the city, who critics insisted was a Middle Eastern terrorist. (Murals are dangerous business in New England. See here and here.)

Soon to dazzle the Greenway presumably: colorful coneflowers, sturdy Joe Pye weeds, beebalm, furry salvia, white fringe trees, flowering black elderberries and hydrangeas.

Is it wrong to find the “strong woman” concept as annoying as the “strong man” concept?
For some I’ve met.
It’s not them, it’s me.
Isabel writes: “illness was her way of avoiding boring household duties, her marriage, herself. Sadness and boredom were more bearable than the effort of living a normal life.”
Which is not to say that physical-emotional pain can’t be debilitating.
But not Lucinda, who makes me sad and happy.
Also, amazing how many people touch the pretty owner of the Chinese restaurant.
Aw, maybe I’m just sore.

I prepared for a recent trip to South America by reading short stories by Jorge Luis Borges. I think a combination of those surreal stories and a recommended typhoid shot gave me crazy dreams before departure.

To make a long dream short … I had finally got on the roof of the house where I grew up. It was covered with moss and tumbleweeds. And it was windswept. I could see Gloucester City Hall and a quaint but industrial-looking Danversport. I considered descending a dangerous outside ladder and creaky indoor stairs. The only person who could walk carefree on the roof was Billy Jack. …

“From the sun and fun capital of the world …”

The trip to South America began in Miami, USA.

From the plane, the sweep of the eastern seaboard immediately pulled me in. Some freighters. Going where? Even saw the western edge of the Bahamas (as I had claimed to make out the distinct port of Hamburg during an earlier trip). The bright-sky offered another reminder of my floaters.

Miami Beach has great beachfront and the kind of public access that all states should require. The art deco history is interesting. Much of the food and drink is fancy and good. The vegetation is lush and succulent. The ritzy neighborhoods remind me of Scarface. But the main cultural memory is Jackie Gleason. It being Florida, beachgoers are treated to a banner ad with the pitch: “Shoot Machine Guns @ Lock and Load Miami.” (Thanks Gov. DeSantis.)

We had gourmet hotel fare at upscale Byblos and at the bar of world hero Jose Andreas, whose MB restaurant is at the Ritz (though I’m always embarrassed to be at a Ritz). Jose served good apps but the pressed caviar was hard to figure. Served on beeswax?

Stepping back down to earth, we found good Peruvian and Colombian restaurants. A Cuban dinner in MB was better than the Little Havana meal I remember a year earlier. Our favorite happy hour spot on Española Way was playing the Clash and T-Rex. And a dive called Cucu’s Nest attracted a mix of hillbillies and underage drinkers downing shots.

Miami Beach Botanical Garden never disappoints. Lizards and all manner of tropical flora such as vining orchids and Florida Pines. The powerful Holocaust Museum sits astride. Fried fish in Stiltsville. And myriad canals with true small boat life.

At North Beach, the abandoned storefront of Goldstein’s Prime Kosher Market reminds me of the Jewish heritage of the area. A few miles away in Miami’s Bayside, a single Palestinian protester asks if we are American, then scolds us for the current genocide in Gaza.

A water taxi from MB to downtown Miami is very informal and unreliable (we waited for one that was more than an hour late) but offers a good chance to see interesting infrastructure in the biggest cruise ship port in the world. (Can’t hold a candle to similar cruise around port of Rotterdam, but still cool.)

Downtown Miami has mostly not come back. The Metro Mover monorail is free and efficient but its tangle of tracks at tree level mars the city landscape. The Brickell biz district is sickeningly corporate.

The Perez art museum is interesting with shows on Gary Simmons and Yayoi Kusama. Rubell Art Museum in Allapattah is also impressive. The wall space in both contemporary art museums is enormous. And the cafes in both museums offer a refuge in otherwise dismal neighborhoods. I’m especially impressed by the healthcare students celebrating promotions over a meal at the Rubell museum cafe.

The flight of the Condor …

After Miami, we continue on to Uruguay and Argentina. We start with a layover in gigantic São Paulo, whose sprawl from the air seems endless. We don’t leave the airport, trying to avoid exposure to yellow fever. We meet Steve and continue on to Uruguay. A handful of freighters seem close enough in line to talk with each other.

First day in Montevideo, we have lunch at a market that reminds me of the larger central market in Santiago. I’ve told myself I can’t avoid the grilled meat that makes Uruguay famous. But conscious of a meaty future, I chose baby squid grilled on the parrilla. Steve gets suckling pig, a favorite memory from Spain. We share beer in liters and continue on the street after lunch. A danger and pleasure of getting together with Steve.

Joanne’s cousins had asked before the trip, why Montevideo? When Billy and Nastya toyed with honeymooning there, I entertained the same question. Turns out it’s a fascinating city with ocean and river confluence. We stayed in Ciudad Vieja across from the Mercado de Artisanes. Beyond the old city, shop-filled streets of the Centro neighborhood are lined with sycamores. No department stores, but small specialized shops that cluster in neighborhoods: one bookstores, one fabric shops, one furniture … and so on.

Inevitable mixed grill on parilla featured sweetbread and kidneys for me. Death on a plate. And delicious in memory. But ofally disgusting. (Later, I was a bit nauseated to read that a New Haven shop was offering a smoothie that includes organ meat.)

Uruguay and Argentina, along with Chile, made up key Operation Condor countries whose dictators worked with each other and the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas to “disappear” and murder critics in the 1970s and 80s. Markers of that grim past—from understated street memorials noting victims of “el terrorismo de estado” to dedicated memory museums—comprise significant sightseeing in these places.

The Museo de la Memoria in Montevideo is smaller than the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos we had visited in Santiago. Clearly, it hits a raw nerve with our tour guide. As it did with out hotel host Juan, who turned out to be a parking garage attendant and curator in his other jobs. He and the guide tell of families being exiled to Argentina, Columbia, Costa Rica, anyplace the Condor had not yet swooped. One museum exhibition shows the pots and pans Uruguayans clanked to protest the dictatorship (calling to mind their use to celebrate the heroics of healthcare workers during Covid). Abundant graffiti honoring the “disappeared” and praising labor actions seems to suggest that protest and activism are alive and well. But there’s also a sense it could be fleeting.

The Paris of South America?

I had hoped the Buquebus ferry up the Rio de la Plata from Montevideo to Buenos Aires would be a highlight of the trip. Unfortunately, you couldn’t go outside, and the windows were fogged. Where I could see out, the river was wide and the shores too far away to make out much, until the towers of Buenos Aires loomed ahead.

Buenos Aires is almost Madrid, but not. The city and country are in a sort of state of economic civil war. The recently elected president has downplayed the crimes of the country’s dictatorship and called for economic shock therapy. ATMs and corner stores don’t want to dispense cash. Service staff are elated by tips in US dollars.

Our airbnb in San Telmo is beautiful, spacious and artsy feeling.

The San Telmo flea market is fascinating. Mate cups and straws, antiques, old LPs, crafts, lots of kitschy images of Messi and Maradona.

In Buenos Aires, good fish is hard to find. But we find a marisco soup between the grand Avenida 9 de Julio (the model perhaps for the schoolbooks I remember calling BA “the Paris of South America”) and the Congress building, where I imagine some sort of Jan. 6 kind of disruption in the future.

Running water

One of our main sightseeing targets in Buenos Aires was the Palace of Aguas Corrientes—the toilet museum to you and me. On our first attempted visit, it was closed thanks to an employee strike against the government. On our second attempt, the palace was open. It is a true paradise for a man obsessed with infrastructure and good toilets

Not sure why South America turns my mind to plumbing? During a trip to Chile a few years ago, I prioritized seeing the water swirl a new way down drains, thanks to the Coriolis effect. Not so far South, but in Isla Mujeres, I obsessed about what could and couldn’t be flushed down fragile toilet systems.

The Palace of Aguas Corrientes (Running Water), built in the late 19th century, features French-style mansard rooves beautiful tiles and three floors of giant iron water tanks holding water pumped from nearby rivers then distributed to the city. The museum on the site features a collection of tiles, faucets, old toilets, bidets and pipes.

At the Buenos Aires Catedral, I realized Catholicism has taken up a disproportionate share of my sightseeing over the years. A bit more important here, where the native son pope spars with Messi as the world’s most famous Argentines.

At a nice lunch, our lefty friends diss bourgeois neighborhoods … but, of course, those places have their guilty comforts. Recoletas is one of the truly bourgeois neighborhoods, and Recoletas Cemetery is sadly beautiful. Still, the crypts are too much. I wonder if the operators will come around to cremation.

Patrick O’Donnell eased his heavy frame into the Ritz bar. He was there to meet his fellow old-timers Jacques Pierre and S.P. Youlcie.

At the bar, O’Donnell orders a peaty whisky. Pierre has a glass of wine. But O’Donnell was worried about his countryman, Scotty O’Conner.

Young Scotty O’Conner was easily led. He might be falling under the influence of his peers, the womanizer Dennis Silvio and the dashing Norwegian Eric Saghnt.

O’Donnell’s worry stemmed from reports of a raucous night at Silvios, where several underage girls were discovered. Rumors tied the event back to earlier gun-and-drug smuggling from Ireland and later human trafficking involving countries that the police determined to be fictional (not akin to say the Rise of the Moors and their ill-fated trip to target shooting in Maine, but rather real fictional countries with long-established cultures and histories).

Roughhousing was often reported at the parties. In one instance, there were reportedly violent squeals some witnesses compared to a rabbit or other small mammal being devoured by a coyote or larger predator. It all made for salacious fodder in the big American cities of the club teams. But the real hell to pay would be back home among fans of the national teams. These minor stars, after all, were ambassadors.

Pierre, for one, was a promising writer of rom-coms until he rather abruptly lost the writer’s touch. …

Click here to view printed issues of NEJHE and its predecessor Connection.

The New England Board of Higher Education began publishing a quarterly journal, titled Connection: New England’s Journal of Higher Education and Economic Development, in magazine format in 1986. In 2007, NEBHE rebranded the journal as The New England Journal of Higher Education (NEJHE). In 2010, the journal moved entirely online at http://www.nebhe.org.

I was fixated by a[n] opossum
In my dark yard
Telltale rat tail
Pointy nose close to the ground
As it sniffed in close circles
Far from playing dead.

My oldest brother Bob, historian, social observer and role model, died nearly 35 years ago after an unsuccessful heart transplant. One doctor quipped that there was not a heart big enough to replace Bob’s.

Memories of my childhood feature Bob’s summer visits to the North Shore … Essex clams, tennis, various adventures. Also my visits to him in Toronto, where he led the Multicultural History Society of Ontario. I still often have questions I wish I could ask Bob on issues ranging from family history to world tensions. (To say nothing of his take on the explosion in amateur ancestry.)

After being surprised at how little Bob’s important work interested with the age of the Internet, I was recently cheered to see so many references to Bob’s important work.

But even with all his fascinating work in multiculturalism, it is humanity that sticks with me. Check out this poem …

Blueberries

It took the better half of the day
to reach the woods and piggery
up beyond the Lynn road
blueberrying with Capt.
He knew the route. the sun,
prickly shrubs and soggy spots.
He knew the granite outcroppings
beneath the berry bushes
the snakes nesting there—
garter, milk, and copperhead.
He overturned the stones with sticks
making startled humus steam
and baby snakes wriggle
like green tendrils at low tide
of shorewall seaweed.

Beyond the ledge was the piggery fence.
Sows and swill, the farmer’s share
of Salem’s scavenger economy.
The sun made us giddy, the brambles stung
we dreamed Capt.’s tales of bears and lynx,
and so a grunting sow, a piglet’s squeal,
a towhee rustling through the leaves
made the stooping berrypickers freeze.
My sister and I believed in bears
in Salem’s woods.
The old man’s stories made us surer,
gave circumstances and color to the dream.
The fear we knew to be untrue,
for what they didn’t convert,
the Puritans drove away or slew,
and that included beasts as well as men.

Then to show our own descent,
our links in time and space to them.
We threw the little snakes by handfuls
as morsels for the hungry sows
propitiating bears and
exorcizing woods.
Making the ledge
forever safe for blueberrying.

This piece was also published in New England Diary, headlined John O. Harney: Remembering my brother; ‘safe for blueberrying’.

2024 and again, the media and otherwise sane people are giving attention to the insane Trump.

Stuck on steampunk images … two-minute mysteries and whatnot.

Nagged by a paramecium-shaped floater.

After making cappuccinos in a hotel machine, I dreamed a friend made up like Einstein was demonstrating how to froth milk.

At one point even adopting Albert’s white hair from the overflowing frothed milk.

A knight in pink statins.

Not really thinking about the Singularity.

Just a bag of beer and wine, leaking out ill-considered observations?

I just get bored.

You don’t have to be a historian of me.

How did I learn so well a look of disapproval … and skepticism?

She doesn’t like to be uncomfortable or countered but who does I spoze.

The stress of feeling inadequate is not good for me either.

Numbed.

Not comfortably.

Did you ever try to assassinate

Georgie Passinate

You end up in a big fat crate

And that ain’t all.

_{Co-authored by Steve Toronto Harney during the George Ausosable sessions.}

Nice, France, had two associations for me (besides Niçoise salad). One is a robbery in which burglers hid out in the sewers and, as I understood it, feasted on French sandwiches before sneaking through a wall and grabbing the booty. The other is the more recent horrific attack when a terrorist used his truck to massacre people on the shoreside Promenade des Anglais, named after the British who saw Nice and the surrounding French Riviera as their playground.

I always yearned to see the French Riviera, having enjoyed Barcelona (a sort of Spanish Riviera?) and the suburbs of Genoa (a sort of Italian Riviera?) and heard jokes from Bostonians about the South Shore being the Irish Riviera. Bond movies and Yéyé beats instilled in me a poppy perception of the area’s lush landscapes and opulent culture. So it was a kind of serendipity when Joanne and I found a relatively affordable self-guided walking tour of the Riviera, now marketed as the Côte d’Azur and Nice.

The trip began with our flight to Nice via Zurich. We had enjoyed visiting Zurich in 1991 en route to Italy. This time, the seats feel small. What was then SwissAir now goes by SWISS in a bit of branding bologna. Zürich airport does not run like clockwork. I wonder if I am losing my wanderlust.

Once in Nice, we take a short tram ride from the airport toward Gare Nice Ville, where we will catch a local train to the Gare de Carnolès in Menton near the Italian border. Any mention of gare brings me back to childhood friend Finny meeting me on a trip to Paris and leaving his clogs in a locker at “the gare” (which of the city’s six gares he wasn’t sure).

The trains on the Nice and Côte d’Azur line run a breathtaking coastal route, reminiscent of the lines between Lisbon and Cascais or skirting Long Island Sound. The French Riviera trains are overcrowded. Many of the passengers turn out to be heading for Monaco. One loud passenger shouts “we’re two stops from Morocco.”

In Menton, we stay at Hôtel Prince de Galles. The sea is crashing outside. The waves seem more frequent than I’m used to. Less boat traffic too. The tide seems rarely to be low. I have liked seeing the sky in a bedside mirror.

Young gendarmerie hang around the lobby of the Hôtel Prince de Galles, watching for migrants fleeing and dying in the beautiful blue sea. A staffer at the desk implies the heavy police presence is because Menton is so close to Italy, where the migrant “crisis” is more widely reported (though it’s hard to understand why, in the global age of the EU and a shared sea).

One day, we walked, then trained, across the unguarded Italian border. The Italian carabinieri parked near the frontier are even more on edge than their French counterparts about the migrants.

Lunch in Ventimiglia offers a refreshing and down-to-earth culture change after France and Switzerland. As well as a memory of wonderful children’s enjoyment of Halloween as we had enjoyed in Rome in 2015. The restaurant we stumble upon is wrapping up a birthday party and technically closed, but cheerful owners let us in to order anything they haven’t run out of. I have tender veal sauteed in delicious butter and wine.

Back in France, frog legs, which never seem to match the Madrid version with their perfect blend of garlic and oil and dressed in pants like humans. Gardens boast all kinds of citrus for good reason. The restaurants are overrated in keeping with French cuisine, especially when it comes to seafood.

A sappy cover of House of the Rising Sun plays in Menton. Complimentary frozen limoncellos (which are also sold unfrozen everywhere as souvenirs).

Famous Riviera residents and visitors include Matisse, Chagall, Cocteau, Charlie Chaplin, Somerset Maugham, Winston Churchill …

Cocteau’s opposing mirrors in the wedding hall in Menton reminded me of my brother Tim and me’s old gimmick about an ad for a tv in a tv in a tv in a tv. (Photo at right.)

Quite a walk along stunning Riviera coast on Cap Martin, then train to Welcome Hotel in Villefranche sur Mer. Usually, we haven’t paid for the beautiful train rides, which I have mixed feelings about given my love for trains (but especially free trains). Cocteau’s illustrations in the Saint-Pierre chapel in Villefranche sur Mer are stunning.

A day trip to Monaco marred by bad transit connections and high prices is a test of nerves. And a reminder that such travails should not irreparably damage the memory of a specific place.

We return to VSM and find the Mediterranean overspilling the pretty little harbor and lagoon on a not particularly stormy night in autumn. Waves lapping over patio outside VSM breakfast room.

Then it’s back to Nice to La Villa Victoria in a ritzy part of the city that reminds me of parts of Madrid. Good Lebanese dinner at Cafe Beyrouth. Next day, good Cambodian lunch at Angkor Fast Food. And good visits in the rain to the Chagall museum and Matisse museum in Nice.

Heading back to Boston, it’s a pleasure to return to Nice’s efficient tram system linking airport terminals (if only Boston had such a thing), though our flight is delayed. Late for Boston connection in Zurich and highly stressed, I took a wrong turn on the jetway and had to embarrassingly knock on the window of the closed-up plane, sparking a flurry of security phone calls among Swiss airlines security officials. Surreal. Watched Taxi Driver and Nope on flight home.

The sound of crickets brings back good memories of late summers and uncertain memories of falls.

And a phrase like “paw break” I associate with Spenser’s queen throwing up frogs and toads.

Long way from up on the double divide, down on filbert’s rise (a hazelnut to you).

Is there any cockier job title than “tennis pro”? Perhaps “director of grand strategy”?

Preparing for jobs that don’t yet exist was a sort of mantra. But on further look, it’s an absurd notion.

News releases on partnerships with St. George’s make no mention of the med school’s odd role in America’s invasion of Granada.

The all-male Bohemian Club isn’t only for the world’s most powerful. Some fakers associate with it too.

I like Mahones but not all twerps who wear his shirts.

Having a frappe in Entitled Town where there’s hardly any sidewalks. And the help refreshes water dishes for dogs.

Whether professional or volunteer, the question comes down to value: who gives two shits?

In 2021, dozens of female students at Bartram Trail High School in St. Johns County, Fla., had their yearbook photos edited to have their cleavage removed, leading to a public outcry and lots of media coverage.

“Reporter Ben Ryan of Action News Jax out of Jacksonville investigated the story and shared examples of some before and after photos on Twitter, explaining that the before photos were deemed “inappropriate” by the school.”

The public high school noted on its website that yearbook photos “must be consistent with the St. Johns County School District Student Code of Conduct or may be digitally adjusted.”

This discipline seemed to happen only to girls, according to media and parent stories.

Sad to say, I saw this tricky war on low necklines in a report we published on “Building Human Capital.” Stock art had to be Victorianized.

It’s amazing what offends the new prudes. And I’m guessing it still happens frequently.

And as I noted in Rich and Musty: Archiving “Old Prints, I fancied myself an “artist” of a sort and the old print editions of the journal as minor “masterpieces” … this one my Sgt. Pepper’s … that one my London Calling … and so on. Other editions marked the way I told time. There was the edition when my first child was born … then the “Emotional Rescue” edition when I took a vacation in Ireland (and some colleagues took advantage of my being away to airbrush out the UConn logo on a cover photo of students misbehaving) …”

Fairytale Of New York. A family favorite of ours … and not just at Christmas.

Fall In Love With Me. Iggy Pop or Japan by the same name found a place my desperate heart at times.

Fantastic Voyage. Not Raquel Welch in a tiny submarine that I picture with every daring medical procedure.

Faraway Eyes. If you’re down on your luck/And you can’t harmonize/Find a girl with faraway eyes.

Fascination. The greatest disco song of all time on the greatest disco album of all time, Bowie’s “Young Americans.”

Fashion. “There’s a brand new talk,/But it’s not very clear/That people from good homes/Are talking this year/It’s loud and tasteless/And I’ve heard it before/You shout it while you’re dancing/On the whole dance floor.”

Fatally Beautiful. “In a restaurant in Brussels she pulls back her hair/Picks up a candle and lights a cigarette/And she’s recognized by a tourist/Who can’t see her face but knows her silhouette … Still I couldn’t help but notice her/She was fatally beautiful/Ever since she was a girl/She was fatally beautiful.”

Feel Like Going Home. When I listened to this Notting Hillbillies cover of the Charlie Rich song, I thought I’ve known this song all my life, but why?

Fields of Athenry. Billy and his friends covering the Irish folk song for their Latin class. As Billy said, he, Jimmy and Evan are quite the Irish tenors.

Fiesta. The Latin beat of this one would always awake an already Irish-rocking Pogues concert. As Shane mumbled, “Elvis es el Rey de America.”

First We Take Manhattan. Prefer the Jennifer Warnes version. My sister Jean called more famous collaborator Leonard Cohen “Lennie.”

First Week/Last Week … Carefree. “This report’s incomplete/I see for myself/Every appointment has been moved to last week.”

Five Years. As the maestro crooned: “And all the fat-skinny people, and all the tall-short people/And all the nobody people, and all the somebody people.”

Flesh And Blood. Slick, artsy, disco pop … and irresistible.

Fly. The first Jam song I fell in love with. Pictured the British countryside. Also use of “demi-monde” that my mentor Jack Hoy used to refer to the policy world as only Jack could.

Fly On The Wall. One of many that makes XTC’s English Settlement album a masterpiece. “I know your income/Your daily crust/I know your pleasures/Your passion/Your lust/I know when you’re living and I know when you’re dust.” New meaning in light of NSA spying.

Follow. Susan Tedeschi is good. Attended Berklee, where my nephew Andrew later went, played guitar and harp and then dropped out, which legend has it is the mark of success for a Berklee student (despite all the empty talk about “retention” and “completion.”) Don’t people know what art is?

For Rose. Hard to believe Mary Gauthier ran the Dixie Kitchen in the Back Bay, where I spent some long lunches before I knew MG or her singing. My Billy is a fan or her “Sugar Cane,” a piece of cultural history I never knew until the song. “Long Way To Fall” is also a neatly packaged short story.

From A Buick 6. Remember the 45 with Positively 4th Street on the A side.

From the Flagstones. A reviewer said the Cocteau Twins vocals were like fine musical instruments. Mr. Chocolate!

Funtime. Per Iggy, “Last night, I was down in the lab/Fun/Talkin’ to Dracula and his crew/All aboard for funtime.”

Inspired by the story of George Orwell caring for his roses while writing masterpiece essays, I looked forward to a retirement spent partly watching over the plants on Boston’s Rose Kennedy Greenway. Sure, I got a bit stressed over whether the fading white blooms I saw were Virginia Sweetspire Itea Virginica or Witch Alder Fothergilla. As I had earlier over whether the purple perennials were Salvia or Veronica. But for the most part, my most stressful dilemma would be choosing which dim sum joint to hit near the Greenway’s Chinatown “parcel.”

As for my own essays, never brilliant like Orwell’s, they’ve slowed to a crawl since the beginning of this year, when after 30-plus years, I left the editorship of The New England Journal of Higher Education and began volunteering in phenology at the Greenway. (Regrettably, I may have planted a kiss of death on the journal, where you’ll see few new postings since my departure.)

Fearing America’s increasing flirtations with nationalism and Us vs. Them politics, I also began volunteering in English language teaching at the Immigrant Learning Center in Malden, Mass.

On the Greenway

Early on, a Greenway staff member gave me her cell number in case I needed help ID’ing plants or, she quipped, if I needed to report anything unusual on the Greenway “like a body.” A staffer mentioned during an earlier volunteer pruning day, “the Greenway is enjoyed by all kinds of people so watch out for needles as you clean up around plants.”

The Greenway retirement gig also reminded of my work days, attending economic conferences at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston directly across the street from Parcel 22. That Dewey Square stretch of gardens was then housing Boston’s version of the Occupy Wall Street movement. (Sometimes, feeling out of place in my poor-fitting suit, I wished I was helping their cause rather than returning to my office.) By now, though, the whiff of rebellion had yielded to a riot of pink and white Coneflowers Echinacea and a Boxwoody imperial fragrance in the parcel near the Fed.

Earlier in the summer, the Greenway folks worked with local nonprofit groups from Roxbury to plant massive stands of Sunflowers, the unofficial flower of my daughter-in-law’s war-torn Ukraine. In August, the Sunflowers bloomed gloriously around the vent and mural on Parcel 22. But more recently, it looked like some force had crashed into the middle of the main patch, pushing the Sunflower stocks outward like the Tunguska event in Siberia.

Nearby, I’m fascinated by the Pawpaw tree because of my childhood memory of a nursery rhyme that went: “Where, oh where oh where is Johnny [personalized for me], way down yonder in the Pawpaw patch.”

I’m also drawn to the paver my kids and I placed at the corner of Milk St. for my wife, saying “Joanne Harney We Love You.” I still check on the paver when I go to visit my “parcels.” And it looks sharp, as if a good angel has been coming along and buffing it. A half-joke in my house was that we could all meet there in case of disaster (though the urban location 500 feet or so from a rising sea may not be a safe haven forever.)

I am also heartened by the Greenway’s small steps in food equity. In the edible garden, a sign reads:

ATTENTION GARDEN VISITORS: Please help us share the harvest!
The produce grown here is specifically cultivated and donated to our local homeless shelters.
Kindly refrain from picking the food to ensure it reaches those in need.
Your cooperation will help us make a difference in our community.

I’ve noted the ferny asparagus and carrots as well as strong corn and tomatillos. One day, a woman emerged from near a small houseless encampment and asked me if there was any mint in the garden. I said I thought there was some in Parcel 22, to which, she seemed relieved, saying that her husband, who camps out with her, eats it from time to time. A staffer suggested some of the Milkweeds in the gardens were planted secretly by visitors hoping to encourage monarch butterflies on the Greenway.

But I assume all know the stay clear of the purplish-leaved Ricinus growing in a galvanized bucket on Parcel 22 … host of the castor bean but also of famously deadly ricin.

My confines became Pearl, Congress and Purchase streets and Atlantic Avenue. The key reference points in my geographic descriptions were: the restaurant Trade, the Brazilian consulate with its national flag, the Native American Land Acknowledgment, the various Greenway maintenance sheds (and hangouts for the houseless), the Fed, the Red Line plaza, the Purchase Street tunnel (a reminder that the Greenway sits just a matter of feet over an interstate highway) and my favorite landmark, the Japanese Umbrella Pine in Parcel 21.

At the Immigrant Learning Center

Given America’s xenophobia, I also wanted to use my newly found time to help marginalized people in immigrant communities. I had tried to cover their predicament editorially in the journal. But retirement brought a new commitment. Reasoning that my decades of editing was something like teaching English, I applied for volunteer teaching of adults at the Immigrant Learning Center.

It has been a great pleasure to work with new immigrants from Haiti, Vietnam, China, Syria, Rwanda and elsewhere. When I helped one Syrian student read a children’s book about Winnie the Pooh, the description of the One Hundred Acre Wood reminded me of the Greenway work.

Many of the countries of origin of students at the center share a history of exploitation by the U.S., where these innocents fervently want to settle.

I have covered a few subjects probably too subtly for non-English speakers. Holidays, for example. I explained that Memorial Day was a day to remember people who died. Sure, it was originally people who died in wars, but really anyone who’s died. Back to my old view that people who resisted the Vietnam War were as worthy of honor on Veterans Day as those who served.

Of Juneteenth, I tried to explain that while Americans say they believe all are created equal, the concept of slavery clearly ran counter to that. And I reminded the many Haitians in the class that Haiti was among the many countries that abolished slavery before the U.S. I also mentioned to the Haitian students that I was rooting for the Haiti women’s national soccer team in the World Cup. To which, I was asked to explain the meaning of “rooting for.”

The immigrant lessons also teach much about the U.S. economy. One exercise focuses on occupations such as dishwasher, house cleaner, delivery driver and “manager.” One student noted getting a pay raise of 50 cents per hour—a modest honor. In one lesson, my lead teacher, himself a Haitian immigrant, drilled students on the difference between odd and even numbers … somewhat unimportant I thought until he noted smartly that Americans increasingly were getting shot knocking on the wrong doors.

Too much analytics

My aversion to analytics—clearly taking over the worlds of higher education and journalism that I recently fled—hobbles me even in volunteer life.

The Greenway folks prefer describing bloom progress with number rankings rather than comments. To make matters worse, the rankings are not the usual, 1 is best and 5 is worst, or vice versa. Instead, 3 is the best. It is peak flowering, then 4 is much less and 5 about done. 1 signifies just starting to bloom and 2 is progressing. Even an amateur like me can take a stab at peak flowering, but discriminating between 1 and 2 and between 4 and 5 is much tougher. And what to think of the Lamb’s Ear whose foliage graced two large banks in Parcel 21 but only shot out one flower on my watch.

The ranking snafu is familiar to anyone pestered by evaluation requests whenever you buy a product or service these days. As a former writer and editor, I’m happier with my rough notes than my arbitrary rankings.

I tell myself I may be a small part of a grand repository of plant info, or at least some effort to introduce identifying plant tags, which the Greenway lacks. Or an “interactive bloom tracker,” which seems to be always out of order when I try it. Of course, the data may be going into a black hole. But for me, the exercise is worth it.

Meanwhile, the immigration educators understandably discourage use of synonyms, puns and anecdotes that may just confuse new English learners. All tough for a guy who considered himself “thoughtful,” but may have really been “wordy” and “unfocused.”

This piece was also published in New England Diary, headlined My New Parcels of Volunteer Life.

I’m hoping the green water in this Reading Town Forest pond has a natural cause (though it brings back a childhood memory of the Nashua River near Fitchburg, painted green by the junk of paper mills, plastics companies and other manufacturers).

I have long planned a book on my music playlist. And I’ve posted a few passages in advance in case I don’t live to see the book.

Similarly, my nephew Stefano and I have joked about publishing a coffee table book on strange infrastructure. In case that one never sees the light of day, here are some pieces that have hit my eye. (By the way, Stefano, a constant world traveler, has also been collecting shots of hulking infrastructure from such places as Brazil and Germany. More on that in the book.)

A few caveats. I know book publishers have a thing about publishing content that has already appeared in blogs. As an editor myself for three decades, I get it. You don’t want to publish something that’s already been published. But as the kids say, chillax. This tease is just some eye candy for insfrastructuralists.

And to be sure, I’m no civil engineer (sometimes not even very civil). But I am a walker and I’ve always been curious about the odd pieces of infrastructure sticking up here and there on my walks. These have ranged from the disused air raid sirens of my hometown as a child to the many water-channeling oddities of my later years, and the increasingly prevalent markers of the telecommunications economy, including, the strange house I spied with all its windows boarded up and a small farm of antennas in the yard.

Noticing these oddities has made me think that some system of labeling strange pieces of infrastructure with a bit about their origins and uses would at least satisfy curiosities.

Here goes something …

Or is this entire blog a so-called tabula rasa?

Reminds me of rickety road and the cut-through to Carlman’s Pond where Knighty insisted the water under the frozen ice was made potable by the cold temps. Though it may have caused mental dysentery.

To wit …

I perseverated again about General Whitman booklets.

And reminded myself that no one likes a know-it-all. But some do.

As we cast aspersions on free press elsewhere, check out Mick Mulvany at CBS and Jen Psaki at MSNBC.

Saying things like, “I’m not going to negotiate that from this podium. I’m not going to get ahead of it at this time.”

Kick him when he’s up.

I had a colleague whose meddlesome ways are sanctioned.

Some spoke of “a” training or “onboarding” … next is reapplying for the job you already have.

But I’m “beyond excited.”

Dreamed I was with Beverly friends at a place that felt like Topsfield Fair, took a side road and ended up sorting out sweaters that all looked the same beige. Bad for OCD.

Dreamed I was awake.

Dreamed I caught a ride to Mississauga in an open-roofed truck from a man with coal for teeth when a giant storm hit.

I wonder as I stare in a friend’s toilet bowl, how do I argue for ocean access as an inviolable public right versus private property.

This post needs its own search tool.

So an entry was too long and out of style. Well fuck you. That’s the benefit of tabula rasa, right?

Joanne made a reference to the “iron maiden” in our garden, meaning the “oriental maiden,” a politically incorrect name the manufacturer and I gave to our nice statue. I snapped that “iron maiden” was an S&M term, which I picked up from a song.

Pillars of Leadership, Pillars of Reparative Justice … lots of pillars, but it’s tough to find a column.

The police dispatcher asked the person reporting the mass shooting in the Buffalo supermarket why she was whispering. We’re preparing a generation of confident loudmouths.

Looking in a direction I have forgotten or never knew from a room on Grenville Ave in Toronto. Another broken night I’m afraid. But Toronto has an enduring touch. Also, I have to admit I like this part of travel. Reminds me of looking out at the C line trolley in San Diego.

Personally, I love Miami, from the bronzed girls to the schlocky hotels and leisure spots. Never mind the Chinook helicopters combing the skies.

One thing that’s wonderful about retirement is seeing the latest big higher education news and thinking, who gives two shits.

Also reading a lot without worrying about ways to “use” what I read. Got lost in one story recently about the “mercy” rule, sometimes called the “slaughter” rule.

Is there any legitimate justification for tinted car windows?

Saw Soul Asylum at the local theater where I saw my first movie, “The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming.” They’re no Replacements, the Minneapolis brethren they are compared with. Leader’s dad jokes got deserved groans.

My aversion to analytics hobbles me even in volunteer life where the garden folks prefer describing bloom progress with number rankings rather than comments and the immigrant education folks preach against TMI. All tough for a wordy guy who claimed to be “thoughtful” but was actually “unfocused.”

As they say of peonies, pick your spot and prepare your hole well.

Teaching basic English reminds me of I bop, you bop, she bop and they bop …

Magical evening with family at “Barcelona,” not the city, the low-rise tapas joint on Mass Ave.

Considered the risky move of complementing the conductress on her new hairdo only to realize it’s not new, she just keeps it under her hat.

So chiseled.

I watch a show about a “gentleman thief”… a concept I never really thought about. But it takes me back to Robin Nichols. To which my oldest brother said Stealing Dimes. Me, I never stole. And was appalled when Smitty stole a yoyo.

In October, I wrote to NEBHE colleagues to let them know I would be retiring from the organization and the editorship of The New England Journal of Higher Education (NEJHE) in early January 2023.

While NEBHE has been my job, NEJHE has been my passion. I joined NEBHE in 1988 and, in 1990, became editor of NEJHE (then called Connection: New England’s Journal of Higher Education and Economic Development).

Thirty-four years for one outlet. Sometimes I forget I’m even that old.

I looked at the journal editions, printed on paper until 2010, as pieces of art (albeit imperfect ones) as much as a news service. The best issues I thought were like our own Sgt. Pepper’s album. Today, reminds me a bit of Maggie’s Farm.

I’ll miss working with our distinguished authors, sometimes goading them into writing their bylined commentaries—usually for no fee. Those writers also happened to be our readers … a community of policymakers, practitioners and regionalists we described variously as “opinion leaders” in the old days, “thought leaders” more recently. All bound together by an interest in higher education and New England (which I recall was a tough audience to quantify for analytically retentive advertisers).

I’ll also miss the editorial “departments” we developed, such as Data Connection, a sort of spinoff of Harper’s Index, but with a New England and higher education flavor. Reflective of a certain “NEJHE Beat,” these items—like a lot of NEJHE content—track along a unique constellation of issues anchored in higher education but also moored to social justice, economic and workforce development, regional cooperation, quality of life, academic research, workplaces and other topics that, together, say New Englandness.

In our print days, I was especially invested in my Editor’s Memo columns that opened every edition from 1990 to 2010.

A few of these Editor’s Memos noted the transition from Connection to NEJHE, an illness that forced me to take leave in 2007 and the journal’s shift from print to all-web in 2010.

Many pieces looked at the future of New England. One touched on our mock Race for Governor of the State of New England. That exercise helped midwife New England Online, an attempt by NEBHE and partners to take advantage of then-new networking technologies to provide something of a clearinghouse of all things New England—a bit unfocused perhaps, but poignant in a region where, the “winner” of that fantastic New England governor’s race, then state Rep. Arnie Arnesen of New Hampshire, quipped that the capital of New England should not be, say, Boston or Hartford, but instead something along the lines of “www.ne.gov.” (See our house ad.)

The House that Jack Built focused on the first NEBHE president I worked with, Jack Hoy, who passed away in 2013. Jack was a mentor who pioneered understanding of the profound nexus between higher education and economic development that is now taken for granted and that served as the basis for the journal’s name, Connection.

Among other of these commentaries and columns, several focused on the magical relationship between higher education institutions and their host communities. Even in the emerging age of a placeless university, there is no diminishing the correlation between campuses and good restaurants, bookstores, theaters and other amenities, driven by faculty, students and otherwise smart locals.

In this vein, I was personally sustained for more than three decades by NEBHE’s home in Boston. Despite its difficult racial past (which NEBHE and NEJHE have attempted to address), the Hub, and next-door Cambridge, comprise Exhibit A in such college-influenced communities. Indeed, our street in Downtown Crossing has offered a lesson in the region’s changing economy, transforming from a strip of small nonprofits that wanted to be located close to Beacon Hill, to dollar stores to, most recently, chic restaurants and bars. The foot traffic, meanwhile, has become much more collegiate as Emerson College and Suffolk University have expanded downtown.

I noted in my letter to colleagues that I strongly believe the regional journal is a key strength of NEBHE that should continue to be appreciated and bolstered.

For years, we characterized Connection and NEJHE as America’s only regional journal on higher education and its impact on the economy and quality of life. In addition, the topics we’ve covered are just too important to cast our gaze elsewhere. New England’s challenging demography—where some states now see more deaths than births—means there are fewer of us to nourish a workforce and exercise clout in Congress. This all makes our historical strength in attracting foreign students and immigrants to build our communities and industries all the more important. Growing chasms in income and wealth between chief executives and employees, meanwhile, agitate antidemocratic and racist forces. While too many critics dis snowflakes, dangerous trauma grows among students and staff. And a pandemic (that is not over) exposed our fault lines, but also showed the promise of joining together behind scientific breakthroughs … and behind one another.

NEBHE President Michael Thomas and I agreed that the weeks leading up to my retirement will provide opportunities to celebrate the journal’s four decades of contributions to the region—as well as to think about its future and the ways NEBHE can best inform and engage stakeholders going forward.

But these are tough times for independent-minded journalism—especially in the quasi-free press world of association journalism, where the goal is to be objective, but for a cause (and ours is generally a good one). NEBHE has launched a job search for a director of communications and marketing. To be sure, my functions at NEBHE also included PR and media relations and style maven (editorial style that is), and those too are key tasks that NEBHE must continue to fulfill. (Full disclosure, I always urged NEJHE authors to make their pieces “issue-oriented” and “avoid marketing.” The goal for the journal was to be thoughtful and candid.)

Just keep it real.

Here’s to the future of NEBHE and NEJHE.

John O. Harney is the executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education.

From 1990 to 2010, NEJHE Executive editor John O. Harney wrote quarterly columns on angles in higher education and New England for The New England Journal of Higher Education and its predecessor Connection: The Journal of the New England Board of Higher Education. Here are links to these “Editor’s Memos” …

NEJHE’s Paperless Future, The New England Journal of Higher Education, Winter 2010.

Campus Visiting, The New England Journal of Higher Education, Fall 2009.

Inspiration: Bob Woodbury, The New England Journal of Higher Education, Summer 2009.

Trends & Indicators, The New England Journal of Higher Education, Spring 2009.

Back with a Crash, The New England Journal of Higher Education, Winter 2009.

Support The Troops … with Education, The New England Journal of Higher Education, Fall 2007.

Changing Names, The New England Journal of Higher Education, Summer 2007.

Electives, Connection, Spring 2007.

Transparency, Connection, Winter 2007.

International Strategy, Connection, Fall 2006.

Thank You, Gadflies, Connection, Summer 2006 .

Trendspotting, Connection, Spring 2006.

Ready Yet?, Connection, Winter 2006.

Fifty Years, Connection, Fall 2005.

Artists Only, Connection, Summer 2005.

861,625, Connection, Spring 2005.

Deep Impact, Connection, Winter 2005.

Bully Pulpit, Connection, Fall 2004.

Unstable Futures, Connection, Summer 2004.

As Maine Goes …, Connection, Spring 2004.

Going Online, Connection, Winter 2004.

Regionalism and Affordability, Connection, Fall 2003.

Growing Our Own, Connection, Summer 2003.

Now and Then, Connection, Spring 2003.

Minding Our Business, Connection, Winter 2003.

New New Englanders , Connection, Fall 2002.

Issues in Campus Architecture, Connection, Summer 2002.

Data Rap, Connection, Spring 2002.

Who Will Teach, Connection, Fall 2001.

Research for the Community, Connection, Summer 2001.

College and Community, Connection, Winter 2001.

Labor Squeeze, Connection, Fall 2000.

News at 11, Connection, Summer 2000.

Access, Connection, Fall/Winter 1999.

NE Online, Connection, Summer 1999.

Future of New England, Connection, Spring 1999.

Pats Head to Hartford?, Connection, Fall 1998.

The House that Jack Hoy Built, Connection, Spring 1998.

Trends & Indicators, Connection, Fall 1997.

Distributed Learning, Connection, Summer 1997.

Knowledge Economy, Connection, Spring 1997.

International Trade, Connection, Fall 1996

Think Tanks, Connection, Summer 1996.

Higher Ed Investment, Connection, Spring 1996.

B-Schools, Connection, Summer/Fall 1995

Help Wanteds, Connection, Spring 1995.

Telecommunications, Connection, Summer 1994.

Coin of the Realm, Connection, Spring 1994.

Back of the Book, Connection, Spring/Summer 1993.

R&D, Connection, Winter 1993.

Regionalism, Connection, Spring/Summer 1992.

Working Smart, Connection, Winter 1992.

Disinvestment, Political Correctness, Connection, Summer 1991.

Thinking Environment, Connection, Spring 1991.

Roads to Recovery, Connection, Winter 1991.

NE Congressional Delegation Speaks Out, Connection, Summer 1990.

International Competitiveness, Connection, Spring 1990.

What does it mean that I dreamed about Weaf in a bear-fur coat

and joked that he should wear a yellow hunter’s vest so he’s not shot

and I suggested extra feta which made Sasha very upset

and that a massive fight broke out at the end of the hockey game

with a goalie vaulting at a player who’d delivered a cheap shot

and Wayne Gretzky, his face bloodied, seemed ready to black out?

Could it be the approach of opening day that made me dream the New England Board of Higher Education assigned me to celebrate the Boston Red Sox franchise?

And this while the board has explored a new reparative justice project.

I started out by reminding myself that the Bosox were the very last team in Major League Baseball to sign a player of color. Pumpsie Green.

Years later, the city of Calvin Coolidge mistreated Tommy Harper over racial and labor issues. Boston’s 10th man pestered underappreciated Dominican star Manny Ramirez. Led by the curly-headed boyfriend.

And except for some of the hot-dog sellers, the crowd at friendly Fenway is generally off-white.

Batter Up.

Even Mitt Romney’s seeming gaffe about Russia in 2012 seems timely.

Even numb-nut Republican politicians are grandstanding by urging boycotts of Russian vodka. (And some Dems too; it’s life during wartime.)

Even LinkedIn’ers are taking a break from their job-hunting sicknesses to offer a thought for Ukraine.

The time signature change in the somewhat sappy “We Can Work It Out” reminds me of this one.

This dream seemed laden with symbolism. I mean heavy. To me anyway. I was on my favorite rocks near Lynch Park. Rocks from which I’d once suggested my family cast my ashes, with or without Coast Guard permission. There, a few rocks down, Bill Moyers was conducting an interview. When his first guest finished, I began to make my move to invite Moyers to write for the journal. But strangely, on these rocks I once navigated so easily, I feared hopping the next daunting crevasse. So much so that I couldn’t scribble the handwritten invitation on my business card for Moyers. And quick as that, his next guest arrived. It dawned on me then that he was using the rocks as a backdrop for his show about religion and spirituality. And I’d missed my chance.

Better than “Chief Happiness Officer”

In their high school sports days, the kids used to call nearby Winchester Losechester.

But the town, with its pretty river features, often drew us in for walks and a few restaurants.

Most recently, I was captured by this mural in the lobby of the town’s public library. The piece has the telltale signs of a Works Progress painting, almost like the one we loved in San Francisco’s Coit Tower. But I worried that it would be newly considered offensive with its depiction of Europeans meeting Native Americans.

As it turns out, the library offers what seems like a worthy attempt to present the work in context: “While the painting my not be historically accurate in every detail,” an accompanying sign notes, “the work depicts a myth and a memory in a solemn, classical manner.”

It’s the kind of qualifier sorely missing from the debate over controversial statues and building names.

Hieroglyphs and Rufus Porter. I was at a place I knew in the dream to be Kate’s house. An imaginary one I half-remember from somewhere. Old, very spacious, some parts not totally renovated. Looking in an upstairs room with fascinating hieroglyph-type markings in the walls. I said unfortunately they don’t know who did these. Otherwise it could be like a Rufus Porter situation. Then I walked down their beautiful wide, but unvarnished, stairs. Almost like a mansion or royal palace feel. My arms were full with junk I’d been handed in the interesting upstairs room, including an old wooden tennis racket. Woven into that dream, I was at my NEBHE office typing out a memo on an old Wang computer I no longer remembered how to use.

Biting a Hijacker. I was landing in a 747, the imagined lounge section at the top, very smooth landing. But no one came to let us off. Felt like the Langoliers. Not mingling much with the fellow passengers until we were loaded onto a crowded elevator that got stuck between floors, but opened into another elevator where a crew of “hijackers” were leading us into a sort of container car toward a concentration camp. Made eye signals with another passenger to try to rebel. Actually bit one of them in the arm, an Asian woman, but it didn’t seem to hurt her. (See The Dreams Now Taste Like COVID.)

Jetlagged Dreams Upon Return from Croatia, Ukraine via Dublin. We were out with our friends, when I said I was tired of going to funerals. Joe asked if we were at the Joyce’s where he saw Heddy Gallstone. I wondered if she was someone I should know. Next dream, I walked my family behind the Cove School, where there was woods during my school days. But suburban McMansions now stand. To my surprise, there was a nice body of water there and my old Beverly friend Ross, whose house was now there, and some women from his neighborhood. I recall wetlands being diverted to make way for McMansions. One woman defensively said they chose the blue pond over a dirty brown brook (it was a suburban lesson in hydrology). I accidentally spilled a pail of dirt I was carrying on Ross’s floor

Quite a Paralytic. It must have been strong even without the paralytic they worried about from my ADEM adventure 10 years previous. It sure brought interesting dreams. First a one-day trip to NYC where Homeland Security was conducting a bioterror drill, which soon became a DHS conference with keynoters etc. I was also telling Joanne we should use the time to find a good ethnic restaurant close-by (even though we were in the 30s) and go visit a key landmark in the history of U.S. education that turned out to be not in NYC, but upstate. Couple nights later, entertained at Jack Hoy’s house, which had become a palace with a theater inside. I had a role in the production or the logistics of it.

Something dug up from a time when I had more soul …

I heard your poetry almost rose from the dead

and a rush of energy rose toward your head

and deep regret filled what you said.

I watched my mind open a brown envelope

and remove its contents

with the greatest pretense.

Don Fernando

It’s true

the family farm is so much more enjoyable

when guests bring their children.

Gathered around the fire to hear your brother’s

top 40 love song that hurts you so much,

but soothes your broken nation.

But tonight in Boston’s “best seafood”

you saw a pile of your bones in a dictator’s yard

and the rush of Spanish Nationalists.

At the Kentucky Derby, you bet on a horse

whose name is “Blacklist”

and whose hooves are two steps behind yours.

With a twinkle in your eye

and continental charm, you said,

you would consult Van Gogh.

Expressway

Daylily salad,

Hollyhock fritters,

Honeysuckle ice cream,

Drive safely,

Have a nice day!

Babies are Flying

Babies are crying

Fingering the air in a tight new circle

Biting at the air in a tough new climate

Figuring the voices in a tight little world

These babies are flying

Floating through the air on an angel’s breath

These babies are flying

Remembering the Train

Damn drawbridge is stuck up again

Stranded us like whales

That’s what I mean, bean

That’s what I mean, bean

Don’t you know they make jet engines there

And they sell shoes in the square?

That’s what I mean, bean

That’s what I mean, bean

Sausage Opera

Kid, don’t be a bratwurst

Just blame it on keilbasa

Or chorizo in Fall River

Or salchicha in Madrid

And kid, don’t knockwurst

Til you’ve had it.

add it.

babies are flying

Floating through the air on an angel’s breath

These babies are flying

An old piece from the New York Times called “This Life: The Stories That Bind Us” included a suggestion from a management type that “families create a mission statement similar to the ones companies and other organizations use to identify their core values.”

I shot the piece off to my brothers and sisters.

Sometimes you think “We should have written that down.” Or over time, you unconsciously rewrite it. And anyway, maybe is was inaccurate to begin with.

One brother answered: “We embrace family myth the way we celebrate national myth.”

And I realized that’s not a bad mission statement, though not quite: To Protect and Serve

New England has been clearing out its homeless camps. Most recently, Worcester Police on Oct. 20 cleared an estimated 10 to 25 tents out of woods along the Blackstone River directly behind Walmart. The crews hired by the state and a private railroad company began clearing possessions, trash and other detritus that were left behind. “The camp was cleared due to public health concerns and complaints from the nearby Walmart and people using the trail along the Blackstone River,” city officials told the local Patch newspaper. The Central Massachusetts Housing Alliance reports that between 2020 and 2021, the region saw a 30% increase in homelessness, “which may be due to evictions and job losses during the pandemic,” noted Patch reporter Neal McNamara.

In New Hampshire, officials issued a Nov. 8 deadline for clearing out one of the largest “houseless” encampments in the Seacoast at Willand Pond. They were preparing to move dozens of people currently living there in tents and under tarp on privately owned land, near the Dover-Somersworth line at the pond that also has a recreation area for the public. In Concord, N.H., meanwhile, police warned residents to leave an encampment near Interstate 93 to make room for a mixed-use development with as many as 266 housing units in five buildings, as well as a gas station, car wash, sandwich shop and convenience store. Many of the people had already been pushed out of another encampment along the highway. In November, the Dover City Council approved a resolution and awaits votes from the councils in Rochester and Somersworth to expand the Strafford County warming center into a full-time warming center.

In Vermont, Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger directed police to clear a homeless encampment on city-owned land in the South End.

In a higher-profile case, Boston Public Health Commission workers went tent to tent in late October to clear out Mass and Cass, ahead of an October nor’easter. The area, also known as Methadone Mile and derided as an “open-air drug market,” was home to an estimated 250 tents. An earlier proposal by Boston’s Acting Mayor Kim Janey to move the occupants to a Revere hotel was rejected by the Revere mayor. The conservative Boston Herald reported on officials “taking time to help occupants pack their things and transport them to temporary housing.”

Here’s how Luke O’Neil covered it in his Substack column.

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The Center for Immigration Studies continues its bad-faith effort. The center describes itself as “animated by a unique pro-immigrant, low-immigration vision which seeks fewer immigrants but a warmer welcome for those admitted.” On May 24, the center posted: “In addition to President Biden and Secretary Mayorkas, a handful of members of Congress are also calling for the release of child rapists, armed carjackers, and other criminal aliens into our communities. …”

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Isn’t it odd how we brand attacks by the enemy as “cowardly”? And PR people speak of things “rapidly evolving.”

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At a recent reunion of adolescent comrades, an old friend greeted me with, “Hey Harns, why do you have that mask on in your LinkedIn picture?” The pandemic was raging again at that time, and I could only answer with a joke. But the bigger question to me was, why follow LinkedIn so closely?

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Began working with some colleagues on a way to make our journal stories accessible by audio. I have mixed feelings about personally doing the voice. But I don’t think our stories are suited to actors with parts like some books-on-tape do. And I don’t like the idea of a robot-sounding auto-computer translation. By coincidence, came across a way to have a book I plan to read “read aloud” to me. Unfortunately, it’s about education programs that quickly prepare people for jobs. For me, a topic that is pure anesthesia.

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More on the hurry-up offense from the generally informative K-12 publication, the 74 … The gist of a piece headlined Accelerate, Don’t Remediate: “students who experienced learning acceleration struggled less and learned more than students who started at the same level but experienced remediation instead. Students of color and those from low-income backgrounds were more likely than their white, wealthier peers to experience remediation—even when they had already demonstrated success on grade-level content. Learning acceleration was particularly effective for students of color and those from low-income families.”

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As the conventional wisdom continues to trash the slogan “Defund the Police,” consider … In May 2021, Bates College officials took away the batons carried by its security officers, following a petition signed by 18 groups and 546 people related to an altercation in which a veteran officer tackled and handcuffed a first-year student who refused to identify himself. A student who had worked with administrators told reporters that Bates planned to move away from hiring people with police backgrounds of campus safety work and seek people with more expertise in social work and dealing with young people. Bates would also hire residential life staff to deal with issues such as noise and liquor complaints.

When Billy was searching for colleges, we thought of trying to get Irish citizenship in order to get free tuition at the University College of Dublin.

Joanne had the Irish-born grandparents on one side that could save big money in an age when exorbitant college prices were forcing such explorations. I also had Irish grandparents on one side but they were born in the U.S. In the end, the process required too much bureaucratic paperwork. Billy found a U.S. university that made him very happy. And we forgot about Irish citizenship. Until the rise of Donald Trump and American fascists made us wonder again if Irish citizenship might make sense. Then a cousin on Joanne’s side began to talk seriously about getting the citizenship … just in case.

Ironically, one of the triggers was the new radical laws against abortion in Texas. Ireland has not been especially enlightened on that front. In fact, Mexico may be much better. The Mexican Supreme Court just voted unanimously to decriminalize abortion. As Trump said during his campaign, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best.” Too bad, we could use their judges.

Still, we had traveled to Ireland and felt somewhat at home there. (Mexico too for the most part.)

I agreed with our cousin, but I suggested, maybe if it comes to that, we should stay and fight. Not that I had much fight in me, But it seems like the least the we can do?

Can any of this be considered good for the cause of education?

From Whiteboard Notes …

Microsoft Acquires Tutor Marketplace: Tech giant Microsoft announced that it has acquired the San Diego-based TakeLessons, the tutoring marketplace that allows students to connect with individual tutors in various academic subjects and recreational activities. Details of the deal were not disclosed publicly. The acquisition will allow TakeLessons to improve its products, expand its subject base, and attract higher-quality teachers, as well as give Microsoft the tailwind to expand in the online education space through TakeLesson’s infrastructure. [TechCrunch]

Higher Education EdTech Company Anthology To Acquire Blackboard: Anthology, a higher education software and services company, announced that it will acquire Blackboard in a deal that is expected to close by the end of the year. Blackboard is a leading provider of learning management software to higher education institutions, K-12 schools, governments, and businesses. Anthology CEO Jim Milton will serve as chairman and chief executive of the merged company, and Blackboard CEO Bill Ballhaus will depart once the deal closes. [Higher Ed Dive]

New Analysis Finds Twenty Percent Increase In EdTech Unicorns: An analysis by the global education research company HolonIQ found that a total of 31 edtech companies have a valuation of over $1 billion after eight companies crossed the “unicorn” threshold over the past few months. In addition, the analysis found that the United States hosts the most unicorns, with China and India following behind. The analysis includes a list of unicorns that is meant to be exhaustive, but HolonIQ CEO Patrick Brothers noted that it is possible some companies have exceeded the $1 billion threshold without disclosing their valuation. [EdWeek Market Brief; subscription required]

Do I have to draw you a diagram?

****

Just read an interesting tweet from Jason Stanley@jasonintrator who IDs himself as a philosophy professor at Kale University. I learned this week that an expression to avoid in describing the current situation in the US is “white Christian nationalism.” The right wing media flips out about that phrase like no other. If there is one thing we are not facing, it must be white Christian nationalism.

I imagine “christofascism” is also frowned upon.

****

usufruct (n.) “right to the use and profits of the property of another without damaging it,” 1610s (implied in usufructuary), from Late Latin usufructus, in full usus et fructus “use and enjoyment,” from Latin usus “a use” (see use (n.)) + fructus “enjoyment,” also “fruit” (from PIE root *bhrug- “to enjoy,” with derivatives referring to agricultural products). Attested earlier in delatinized form usufruit (late 15c.).”

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In May 2021, around the time of rising new awareness of violence against Asian Americans, a survey of almost 3,000 American adults found 42% of Americans were not able to name a famous Asian American. After the popular answer of “don’t know”, 11% of respondents named Jackie Chan, who is from Hong Kong, and 9% named Bruce Lee, who died 40 years earlier. No mention of the vice president.

****

Writing about Juneteenth recently, I came across this Wikipedia reference: “In 2018, Apple added Juneteenth to its calendars in iOS under official US holidays.^[59] In 2020, several American corporations and educational institutions, including Twitter, the National Football League, Nike, announced that they would treat Juneteenth as a company holiday, providing a paid day off to their workers,^[60] and Google Calendar added Juneteenth to its US Holidays calendar.^[61]“

We even turn to Big Tech to tell us what our holidays are.

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Whaddya do when a dear friend’s wife looks like Marjorie Taylor Greene?

Another friend and author looks like Roger Stone, but no Nixon tat as far as I know.

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Porn strikes me as something I missed out on, whereas I imagine many others see it as a sort of retrospective.

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When I was spending a lot of time walking in Boston, before the pandemic, I started a post tiled “Boxing in the New World.” I began that “on my recent walks from work, I look in very large windows and observe two things about the new economy: more women learning to box and more workers standing at their desks—they won’t take it sitting down, I guess.”

Then I thought someone would say I was creepy.

****

AARP says you live half of your life over age 50 now. Not me I assume.

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Please don’t balance the ledger … I appreciate all.

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Back to Sons of Pitches … the latest pitcher got me immediately with:

“Happy Monday! I wanted to quickly share …”

They are still mostly pathetic sales pitches … but perhaps a bit riskier like these?

Hundreds of Couples Saved by Shibari Academy

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Oct. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — This year’s quarantine has pushed many couples to the limit. Sharing the same space 24-7 has transformed cute quirks into annoying ticks and the bedroom into a dreadful place. Physical closeness does not equal emotional connection. Shibari Academy proposes a novel approach to breaching the communication chasm between couples by means of practicing the art of Shibari.  

That was a line I perverted from politicians who promised a chicken in every pot. But I delivered it with Mussolini-like theatrics from the rose garden at Lynch Park in Beverly.

I’ve had a long connection with homarus americanus, writing about it in one of my first editions of our journal in 1990.

And my hope that our trip to family nature camp at the College of the Atlantic would be one long lobster feast, but, sadly, the organic food impulse at COA took over.

And my surprise when I heard experts at the New England Economic Partnership in 2016 note that one growing export from New England to Canada is live Maine lobsters. One major import from Canada back to New England is processed and frozen lobster, much of it for casinos and cruise ships.

The sweet creature came to my attention again recently when Maine Public reported in June 2021 that the NOAA has started testing remotely operated drones with video cameras to dive underwater and send back images to a surface vessel. Speaking of tech, a Wisconsin group called Cultured Decadence started using cell culture and tissue engineering to create shellfish products, including lobster, which one reporter jokingly called “labster.”

I recently tuned into a webinar on “Intersectionality in Action: A Conversation with Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw.” My daughter-in-law, a non-native-English speaker, naturally wondered what “intersectionality” meant. As would most native English speakers.

I made a traffic joke. That all I know is stop at red, go at green, proceed with caution at yellow. Also not easily understood. In any language.

For the best definition of Intersectionality, Crenshaw drew from the Oxford Dictionary: “The interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage; a theoretical approach based on such a premise.”

The intersection is often where racists and misogynists blow through red lights. But I think it’s also much more.

As intersectionalists go, I also think back to what a friend told me once of his father, then sheriff in Yonkers, N.Y., helping protect a visiting Paul Robeson, in part from angry construction workers in the days before labor and civil rights advocates understood their common interests.

I also always thought environmentalists and labor organizers should be natural allies … finding compromises to preserve species like rare owls and jobs like lumberjacking.

I used to talk a ballgame

about quality of life

then business models

now sometimes intersectionality

in case there’s any doubt

let me assure you

I don’t know shit

Reading a very serious paper noting “misapprehension called spacetime,” I was taken back to a timeless wish: “Press your space face close to mine, love.”

I saw this posted recently on Twitter …

A friend of mine is creating an RPG and is seeking: * Black illustrators * Chinese illustrators (based in America or in China) * Indian illustrators (based in America or in India) This is paid work. DM or reply with a link to samples + contact, and I’ll pass the info on.

And I wondered: Isn’t an RPG a rocket-propelled grenade?

Piling on can be odd even for a good cause … like all the well-meaning organizations being sure to post their abhorrence of the latest well-publicized hate crime … and well-meaning beneficiaries who “reply all” to share their thanks for an act of kindness … The only real result is inspiring guilt in those who don’t join in the public part of the display …

What’s worse, joining the multitudes pursuing perverse incentives to earn a spot in college rankings by US News & World Report … or qualifying for a feature story about college amenities in Town & Country?

A few years ago, as part of a project to explore higher education business models, I found myself visiting a campus steeped in excessive amenities. My wife, who accompanied me, remarked that the place seemed a bit like Stepford. She had witnessed its staff polishing the bronze statues of heroes that line the quad, adding to the overall Wes Anderson-feeling presentation. Several of the buildings are named after donors, many, the furniture tycoons who represent the host city’s historical importance. Next, the university was angling for a gift from the homophobe CEO of Chick-fil-A.

The campus creates a white spot in a poor Black town (no distinctive feature there). A pr guy noted that you won’t see students with their “pants hanging down.” He showed us aerial photos of the sterile campus, taken from a drone (probably nothing new there anymore either).

The local alternative weekly noted at the time of our visit while the university might have good academics, “several other factors that make this very attractive campus a minus. To start, you can barely see how beautiful it is because a fence surrounds it and entrances are gated. This shuts off any potential communication students can have with the outside world. There are also no bars or places to gather near campus (As if [the place] wasn’t dull enough).”

Got more evidence that pop culture is passing me by with this piece on “dark academia” in a recent edition of The Huntington News, the student newspaper at Northeastern University. Learned that “Dark academia began years ago on Tumblr as a way for people interested in the humanities, especially the classical studies, to find others with similar interests, but during the COVID-19 pandemic, the subculture exploded and found a larger, captivated audience on TikTok.”

In the days before the internet posted seemingly everything, I used to see value in uncovering obscure references to higher education. Thought it was part of my talent as an editor. Plus, I especially loved the rich, maroon feel of dark gothic academe (even if my experience with it was mostly second-hand.) Hashtags have taken all that away. As the Huntington News piece notes, “common elements of the content under the dark academia hashtag (#darkacademia) on TikTok include studying the classics, vintage books, New England liberal arts colleges, Oxbridge universities, Victorian or Gothic architecture, Donna Tartt’s ‘The Secret History’ and tweed.”

Recent walks rediscovering open space in my hometown show some progress (though a bit sanitized) since the days when “the only relatively green space in the area winds along utility rights of way.”

These more recent walks have reminded me of what Harchester did right.

First, it had a Parks and Boulevards Commission that ensured major streets were both green and functional.

Second, it had a design commission that enforced good taste and reasonable scale in development.

Third, it encouraged appropriate amenities such as beer gardens on its small rivers.

Worth remembering when people say that the attempted coup at the Capitol reminded them of a Banana Republic.

We not only bought the bananas … but also propped up the republics.

On Dec. 31, 1999, the U.S. turned over the Panama Canal to Panama.

Ten years earlier, the U.S. invaded Panama, and overthrew Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega.

(Noriega was commonly referred to with that compound modifier as if it were part of his name like Muammar al-Gaddafi as Libyan strongman; Michael Skakel as Kennedy cousin; Pioneer Institute as right-leaning or sometimes softened to “market-oriented.”)

In the early 1990s, a NEBHE team undertook missions to Panama to study the possibility of turning old Canal Zone infrastructure into a University of the Americas in Panama.

NEBHE was asked because the new Panama institution would be modeled after the great liberal arts institutions of New England. It would seek U.S. accreditation.

It would aim to graduate students proficient in English and Spanish … and “through the quantitative analysis/computer science requirements, be sufficiently well educated to be able to confront … the promise as well as the pitfalls of technological change and information overload.”

Some of those New England missionaries were my most cherished mentors: NEBHE President Jack Hoy and Bob Woodbury of UMaine and UMass.

One of the other players was a business leader named Fernando Eleta, who apparently was also behind a very popular song in Panama. Others included players behind Suffolk Downs, the Boston-area horse track. And importantly, NEBHE delegates David Knapp (UMass president and friend) and Bennett Katz of Maine.

The Canal Zone ultimately became home to a branch campus of Florida State University (coincidentally, the institution that our journal made much of after FSU beat out MIT for a major research grant in the 1990s). Also a very NEBHE-ish City of Knowledge.

Panama has become something of a global center.

Social media messing. It’s interesting that some people get hooked on how many likes their Facebook posts garner. I find the fewest likes are often the most meaningful.

And generally, the incentive to gather a crowd strikes me as precisely why social media is so disappointing and conventional.

They want more, more, more.

Also I’ve overheard many convos lately with reference to “testing” and wondered if the subject was COVID testing or interminable academic exams.

And when people talk about “interrogating” things, do they mean “questioning” them? If so, I’m with them.

And what a curse it is to read everything with the thought of how can I re-use this in some way? Reminds me a bit of this piece we ran in NEJHE. Or am I some kind of Kierkegaard?

Also there’s so much well-intentioned recommendation of “journaling” these days. What does that mean for someone whose job is journal editor?

Will these new journalers start posting how many minutes it takes to read the piece?

And don’t get me started on LinkedIn. Recently read someone’s message ending: “Just as I was starting to give up, LinkedIn came to the rescue! I so appreciate this site! For those of you that are feeling the walls caving in, don’t give up. Stay vigilant. Things will change! Thank you LinkedIn!” It’s almost like a religion.

Hopeful election returns. Trump lost. The Sox are hiring back Alex Cora. The Rhode Island Working Families Party predicted several legislative victories, showing support for social spending and taxing the wealthy. Portland, Maine, voters approved referendum initiatives to increase the minimum wage, impose rent control and strengthen a ban on facial surveillance technology. All good, as they say. Which makes me nervous about what’s next.

The language. I recently edited an interesting piece on student attitudes toward learning during the pandemic. The terms “online,” “remote” and “virtual” were used almost interchangeably. My style book offered murky distinctions.

A population numbed to nuance couldn’t process the rhetoric of “defund the police.” As Boston Globe columnist Adrian Walker clarified: “The call to ‘defund’ is best thought of as an urgently-needed debate over what we want policing to be, and whom we believe it should serve. That is a question that resonates far beyond the minutiae of budget talks.”

GoLocalProv betrays its mindset with headlines, for example in June 2020 … “VIDEO: Black Lives Matter Spray Painted on $21M Providence Pedestrian Bridge” … like Trumpists seeing dollar signs in midst of pandemic and social upheaval.

Why have the Republicans decided that “packing the Supreme Court” could be a new bogeyman. Why did Trump refer to Kamala Harris as a “monster” after the first VP debate?

Pandemic talk. Cianbro Corp., a one-time NEBHE Excellence Award winner, announced it is working with Guilford, Maine-based Puritan Medical Products to use CARES Act funding to develop a second factory in Pittsfield, Maine, that will increase the production of COVID-19 testing swabs by millions per month and create more than 200 jobs for Puritan. Cianbro is working with Puritan to rebuild the former San Antonio Shoe site for the facility. Reminiscent of all the craft breweries that had taken over New England machine shops pre-pandemic.

Meanwhile, Williston, Vt.-based MicroStrain Sensing Systems is using a 3D printer to supply the Vermont Mental Health Agency, Howard Center, with face shields, allowing clinicians to communicate more effectively with children returning to school and maintain coronavirus safety protocols.

Still, on balance, the pandemic tends to favor harm over good. A Maine paper reported “Employees at the New Balance factory in Skowhegan returned to work Thursday after an investigation determined a COVID-19 cleaning product was responsible for a chemical exposure last week that sent five people to the hospital.”

Saw notice of Charlie Baker, recently among America’s most popular governors. participating in a “fireside chat” with JPMorgan Chase President and CEO Jamie Dimon to discuss investments to expand economic opportunity for young people and to prepare them for jobs in the future. Is Dimon a good role model for opportunities for young people? See his grilling by Congresswoman Katie Porter.

Honors mentioned. It was nice to see Maine Gov. Janet Mills recognize Senior Advisor on Tribal Affairs Donna Loring for her service to the state before leaving her position to pursue personal opportunities. Loring recently served on the 12-member Penobscot Tribal Council and was the first woman director of security for Bowdoin College and the first woman police chief in the State of Maine as police chief for the Penobscot Nation. She hosted Wabanaki Windows on WERU Radio where she discussed current issues within Wabanaki Communities. And she wrote this interesting piece on native education for our New England Journal of Higher Education. Kudos also to another former NEBHE delegate Rachel Talbot Ross, the first Black woman elected to the Maine Legislature and now the first person of color to serve in a leadership position as assistant House majority leader.

The NEJHE beat is semi-locked down, but not out. A little of what we’ve been following …

Counting heads. New enrollment figures show higher education reeling under the weight of COVID-19 and a faltering economy on top of preexisting challenges such as worries that college may not be worth the price. A month into the fall 2020 semester, undergraduate enrollment nationally was down 4% from last year, thanks in large part to a 16% drop in first-year students attending college this pandemic fall, according to “First Look” data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. In New England, the early data suggest New Hampshire and Vermont were among the handful of U.S. states enrolling more undergraduates than last fall, while Rhode Island reported a nearly 16% drop.

At community colleges, freshman enrollment sunk by nearly 23% nationally, the clearinghouse reports.

Interestingly, before COVID hit and when so-called “Promise” programs were in full stride, such programs across the U.S. showed big enrollment success with their free-college models, according to a study released recently in the Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association. Such programs were “associated with large enrollment increases of first-time, full-time students—with the biggest boost in enrollment among Black, Hispanic, and female students,” the study found, adding, “The results come as the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic is leading states to tighten higher education budgets, as low-income students are forgoing their postsecondary plans at higher rates this fall than their wealthier peers, and as community colleges are experiencing larger enrollment declines than four-year universities.”

On the other hand, a report from our friends at the Hildreth Institute examines 22 statewide, free-tuition programs established in the past decade, and finds that most do not address the real barriers that prevent many students from getting a higher education credential. The report notes that tuition and fees represent just 24% of the cost of attending a community college and 40% of the cost of attending a public four-year university. Beyond tuition, students struggle with necessities like textbooks, computers, software, internet access, housing, food and transportation.

Digital futures. The ECMC Foundation awarded the Business-Higher Education Forum (BHEF) $341,000 to fund the Connecticut Digital Credential Ecosystem Initiative, in partnership with NEBHE. A network of companies, community colleges, government agencies and other stakeholders, led by BHEF, will develop new pathways to digital careers, particularly for individuals unemployed due to COVID-19. BHEF will help community colleges issue industry-validated credentials to support transparent career pathways across Connecticut and the surrounding region. Participating employers will approve the knowledge, skills and abilities for these credentials, thus building recruitment and hiring links for students who complete the credential. The idea owes much to the work and recommendations of NEBHE’s Commission on Higher Education & Employability.

Organizing. I was happy to attend the virtual annual conference of the Hunter College National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, its 47th annual conference, this time held virtually due to COVID. The topic was “Inequality, Collective Bargaining and Higher Education.” It was a goldmine of perspectives on equity, antiracism and labor rights.

Among bright spots, talk of a possible student loan debt jubilee and increasing moves by campus CEOs to resist pay raises. Bill Fletcher Jr., former president of the advocacy group TransAfrica and senior scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, recounted the formation of labor organizing in the U.S. from America’s original sins of annihilating Native Americans and enslaving Africans through the birth of trade unionism and social justice efforts like Occupy and the National Education Association’s Red for Ed. We don’t need white allies, he added, but rather white comrades like John Brown on the frontlines.

Touting Joe Biden’s higher education platform, Tom Harnish, vice president for government relations at the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association and a faculty member at George Washington University, offered basic advice: If you want better higher education policy, get out and vote and put better people in office.

In a session on the evolution of labor studies, speakers noted that many labor education programs ironically have been folded into management schools or sometimes taught under the guise of the history of capitalism so as to attract students. We have to warn students that this is not the place if you’re aspiring to an HR position, one said.

No more boilermaking in Lewiston? No higher education models seem immune to COVID-19. Recently, Purdue University Global announced it is dropping its physical presence in Lewiston, Maine, when its lease expires in March. In spring 2017, Purdue University acquired most of the credential-granting side of the then-for-profit Kaplan University, as part of the Indiana-based public research university’s effort to engage the fast-growing adult student market. Kaplan had about 32,000 students taking courses online or at one of more than a dozen physical campus locations, including Lewiston and Augusta, Maine. The Lewiston building had been empty due to COVID. The Augusta building reportedly will continue to house the nursing program. Kaplan University, by the way, converted to nonprofit status as part of the deal.

See you in better times …

A version of this piece was posted in The New England Journal of Higher Education.

Interesting to see the rinky-dink town where my mother and I went to visit cousins Sara and Gerry caught up in the current racial reckoning … but it’s overdue everywhere.

My memory of that Sanford visit at age 10 or so was sailing and catching a perch with cousin Gerry, who I had never met. Gerry ran Hub Mail, a kind of package courier that I presume was soundly disrupted by Federal Express and its ilk.

Mostly, my mum caught up with cousin Sara, who she always liked. Unfortunately, at their cottage, I mistakenly fed their little dog the end of a popsicle and the pooch swallowed the stick. Much suspense followed about how it would be eliminated. I believe it all came out alright.

Years later, Gerry came up again when I became friendly with Sam Goodman, who worked on my street in Boston and went to Gerry’s temple. Sam was NEBHE’s neighbor as the proprietor of Goodman Studios, where he handwrote diplomas for countless New England college graduates as well as citations for people such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Jackie Robinson. (For more, see “Man of Letters” Short Course in this old issue of Connection.) Sam was a character who fought for the French resistance and still couldn’t fully accept the Middle Eastern guys on the street whom I befriended and whose place I frequented at lunch for falafel plates. He called them Syrians. He also gave me a children’s book his wife wrote called Ida’s Doll.

More recently, their son, who I hardly knew, contacted me about his research on the family genealogy. He noted that he had interviewed my mother about the family history in the 1970s and wondered if I could provide more. I thanked him for getting in touch and told him I remembered my mum being fond of his mum and the trip I made as a little kid to the lake place near Sanford. But an incurable smart ass, I had to add, “I sometimes tell my kids that family history is mostly made up, so what I have to give may be largely fiction!” We didn’t follow up.

Back to the Black Lives Matter, AP reported:

“An anti-racism demonstration that had been planned for this Saturday at the Sanford-Springvale Historic Museum has been postponed. … The demonstration had been planned for Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., at the Sanford-Springvale Historic Museum, at 505 Main St. in Springvale, according to the group’s Facebook post. https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html The museum is across the street from the Sanford GOP office at 510 Main St. in Springvale, where there is a different event — called “TrumpFest” — also planned for Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. … Fifteen-year-old Josh Wood, one of three local organizers who pulled together plans earlier this week for the Black Lives Matter Maine demonstration, said the event wasn’t originally intended as a counterprotest to the TrumpFest event. But that’s how many in the community came to see it, he said.”

Demands outlined by Black Lives Matter Maine: “The city should get rid of police department equipment that has contributed to distrust and intimidation for local Black and indigenous people and people of color … The Sanford School Department should instead invest in counselors, as part of an effort to end ‘the school-to-prison pipeline’ … the city’s schools to commit to hiring a more diverse staff, put counselors in a more active role and roll out new training by the end of the calendar year … update history curricula. … to teach us about colonization, oppression, and true Indigenous history in this country … hold local officials accountable.”

Reasonable enough.

From time to time, we revive the presentation of facts and figures called “Data Connection” that we had published quarterly for nearly 20 years in the print editions of The New England Journal of Higher Education (formerly Connection).

Among 112 New England colleges and universities surveyed by the Boston Globe, number with a Black athletic director: 5 Boston Globe

Among New England’s 58 collegiate football programs, number led by Black head coaches: 2 Boston Globe

Percentage of American adults who had an interaction with a police officer in the past year and say the interaction was an overall positive experience: 75% Gallup Center on Black Voices

Percentage of Black Americans who had an interaction with a police officer in the past year and say the interaction was an overall positive experience: 59% Gallup Center on Black Voices

Percentage of Americans who support requiring multicultural lesson plans in public school curricula, including antiracism studies: 65% Tulchin Research on behalf of the Southern Poverty Law Center

Percentage of America’s 101 most selective public colleges and universities that reported declines in Black student enrollment between 2000 and 2017: 58% The Education Trust

Number of M16 semiautomatic rifles that the University of Maryland police department announced it was returning to the U.S. Department of Defense in the wake of national protests against police brutality: 50 University of Maryland

Percentage of U.S. adults experiencing depression symptoms before the coronavirus pandemic: 9% Boston University School of Public Health

Percentage by mid-April: 28% Boston University School of Public Health

John O. Harney is executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education.

“Kitchen” collage by Montserrat College professor Timothy Harney.

Related Posts:

For earlier installments of “Data Connection,” see:

Data Connection: B.C. (Some Facts and Figures From Before Coronavirus)

Latest Data Connection: Some 2020 Visions

More Data Connection: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

Data Connection: Drugs, Rents, PR

Data Connection: Languages, Moods and Preferences

Data Connection: Immigration, Politics, Jobs, Absenteeism and Fishing

More Data Connection: Citizens

Numbers Game … More Data Connection

Data Connection: New England’s Patriots and More

More Data Connection: Peace in the Valley? Scientists and Kids

Data Connection: State Work, Guns, Sports

Return to Data Connection: Stats on NE Education, Economy, Life

Former print editions at NEJHE Archives

Axe-throwing bar in Somerville, Mass. Somehow feels related.

A recent pitch I got might as well have been from Gaylord Perry. “Do you have time to spitball a few story ideas? I’m still able to facilitate a chat with our lead researcher analyst and/or a higher-education expert, if interested.”

Or “I’m sure you get a ton of spammy submissions so I’ll get straight to the point.”

Or “Hello!  I hope you are having a good week thus far.”

Or “Sorry I keep popping into your inbox.”

And this beauty: “I’m not here to waste your precious time. I was wondering if you’d be open to a Sponsored post. Looking for long term collaboration and let me know your best possible price for the same.”

Meanwhile, a seemingly innocent pitcher sent me a piece I almost published until I found out he had pitched it elsewhere and got it published in a local paper. That despite our clear condition that we publish only original material. He lied a bit about the sequence of how he shopped the piece to me and the local. He and his boss have no idea they burned this bridge. For me, a last bit of integrity maybe. If I did publish non-original material, I’d poach The Nation or Dissent, not a local puff piece. And too bad for his small-time operation probably measuring success in pick-ups.

Reminded me why I’m happy I Am Not a PR Man.

When I saw it was inspectors from the U.S. Postal Service that arrested blowhard Steve Bannon, I couldn’t help thinking of this ditty I wrote titled: In Response to the Man who Sends Insane Packages …

Knocked out by the murals here (and even more so in Valparaiso). This one in Santiago of a “tree hugger” was by famous muralist Francesco Camillo Giorgino, known as Millo.

Dreamed I was back in Santiago, trying to show colleagues La Moneda where Allende was killed and trying to get into a subway station that was built like Boston’s old Government Center station and appeared to have no ways in. Yet another dream where I left like I was on a cliff.

I recently rode my bike 50 yards or so down a dead-ended “private road” in my hometown.

On my turn around, I heard a man who had been mowing his lawn, yell, “Can I help you?”

“I’m all set,” I said without totally looking to him.

He gave chase. And man, was he fast.

“Why are you running away?” he asked in a tone typical of the times.

I stopped. I told him I was just looking to see if they were still building houses there (as they had planned about a year earlier.)

“Why didn’t you just stop and ask me?” he followed. Then he ranted, “this is a private road, not a public road.”

I was thinking of the St. Louis couple who were all over the news defending their house with assault rifles. I had forgotten the local controversy that the houses would have been built on or near wetlands—the kind of thing people of the same race fight about even in “progressive” towns.

I confess I’m a serial offender, having taken pride in exploring “private” coastal roads on the North Shore and elsewhere. Still, I was shaken by this little man.

I’m no arbiter of style, but I play one at work. I’ve been editing our customized supplement to the AP Stylebook for decades. Our guide has always begun with the notice: “The following are NEBHE/NEJHE-specific style guidelines, meant to supplement the AP Stylebook. Where these conflict with stylistic guidelines in the AP Stylebook, follow the NEBHE/NEJHE-specific guidelines. Watch for regular updates to NEBHE/NEJHE style.”

And recently, there was a very big update. AP style always called for the word black to be lowercase, and we did too given the above policy. On Friday, June 19, AP adopted Black with a capital B as its style, noting that Black conveys “an essential and shared sense of history, identity and community among people who identify as Black, including those in the African diaspora and within Africa.”

The announcement came amid weeks of Black Lives Matter protests dominating the news and, presumably not coincidentally, on Juneteenth. One blogger wrote: “The Revolution Will Be Capitalized.”

AP made no immediate decision on white, although another blogger asked: “Doesn’t capitalizing every race/ethnicity save for ‘white’ just exacerbate the problem of whiteness being seen as normative in American life while everything else is viewed as some kind of ‘other’?”

Updating our own customized supplement has become an increasingly difficult “task” (to use the term modern managers have unwittingly borrowed from slavery). After all, language is a living thing, right? What right do I have to ask people to stop contriving “whom” and adding “st” to “among”? Especially in the social media age. Plus, the disease seeps into spoken language a la “based off of” instead of “based on.” And “reach out” instead of “contact.”

Generally, I stay out of it, admit I’m old.

I do stick to my guns on some entries. Our supplement notes: “Dr. Use as formal title for medical doctors, dentists and veterinarians only; not for Ph.D. holders.” I always admired my oldest brother, who had a Ph.D. in history, using his Doctor title to bolster his chances making restaurant and hotel reservations. But our authors have to be able to dispense meds or help someone who’s sick to say, Trust me, I’m a Doctor.

Some stylistic suggestions stay in a gray zone (an uncomfortable place for “rules”). For example, the best way to punctuate and capitalize items in lists. Does it depend whether each is a full sentence? And some entries in our supplement are seeming anachronisms such as “envirotech” and “Tech Prep,” betraying an origin when these terms were bigger in NEJHE content.

When I most recently shared updates with my colleagues, I noted that some of the rules are arbitrary to be sure … but the goal is to ensure consistency in style and usage so, as NASA puts it in its style guide, “readers can become absorbed in the content and avoid being distracted by curiosities in form.”

This New Yorker piece may have said it better than NASA. Indeed, style “rules” can be trivial. Still, the main reason for paying attention to them is to discourage language that is unclear, and sometimes even hurtful.

Many predicted that Donald trump’s instinct to lie would mean Americans wouldn’t believe him if there were a national emergency. There were many. He kept lying, including through coronavirus.

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Amazing how they even sound like assholes when they’re doing something good. In June, the U.S. Department of Education released a rule for public comment “that would help to ensure taxpayer-funded coronavirus relief money is distributed properly and does not go to foreign nationals, non-citizens, and students who may be enrolled in ineligible education programs.”

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As to the new press secretary, always wear a necklace with a cross when your job is to lie.

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Hartford Seminary runs interesting programs. Sign of the times: “On April 8, more than 90 people logged on to a live Hartford Seminary webinar led by the Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper on “How to Conduct a Funeral Online.” It was the first of five free webinars we offered in April to help our community during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the response has been overwhelming. Nearly 500 people have been involved in our webinars since then.”

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Interesting to hear so much talk about flattening the COVID curve just like we used to talk about bending the cost curve in higher ed. We’re obsessed with curves and thinking we can do something about them.

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I told a colleague embarrassingly that we should lay off exclamation points in stories about coronavirus.

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Another colleague, a decorated veteran of the war in Vietnam, wrote a heartfelt piece about the war, which he acknowledged was unpopular, but despite my prodding, retained his line: “Today, and throughout our history as a nation, young men and women have been called upon to fight in foreign lands for the advancement of democracy; to suppress dictatorial and oppressive regimes,” while resisting my edit: “to suppress (and sometimes unfortunately prop up) dictatorial …” We ultimately nixed the whole reference.

On another piece, I tempered the language of a goodhearted, but unconsciously racist, economist whose solution to the COVID recession was to prematurely reopen the economy.

What a subtle, incremental (futile) way I have of pushing an agenda.

NEBHE was having its board meeting at Lynch Park. Part of the agenda was a tour of a new hotel being built there (a very typical NEBHE mtg agenda item.) I told my colleagues that my nephew, the “jazz musician” played there. Then I passed people “swimming” in the sand area near the Lynch parking lot (where the whale sculpture used to be). I did a familiar walk on the rocks near Rice’s, which were very slippery … hazardous. Billy started tearing up. He’d gotten the news from Steve Toronto that Johnny Depp had died. Steve said he’d “jumped into traffic.” I said I should go see some of his movies. Then I went and saw my mother (who passed away 20 years before the pandemic) and asked her how she was. She said “I’ve been crying.” (But I don’t think it was about Johnny Depp.)

The night before I dreamed I was at Hurd Stadium and the football game was being played in the ocean below? I noted how beautiful it was, even when it was hard to see the players. I spilled a little water and it began running toward cheerleader Sue, but she didn’t seem upset.

Earlier in the pandemic, I was resting in a pile of rubble near Gloucester Crossing, showing a colleague Bennett Street where kids used to buy and sell pot. Tough kids came along looking for something. They dug up some kind of gold star. It looked almost like an old wrapped chocolate, as I remarked nervously. A girl tenant in the apartment came searching for her Pepsi, which I said was like a Big Buddy (the big bubble gum my friends bought from the ice cream man at little league games?) Then I showed my colleagues the entrance to the back of the United Shoe and tried to mention that a lot of Bennett Street etc. began as housing for Shoe workers.

See related at Hold Fast to Dreams?

128 was one of the first concepts I knew

And constant

As a child, riding with my mother to my father’s work in Gloucester

As a teenager, cowering as Gopher hit 100 mph and Harry flipped his bug

As a father, driving my kids out to see Gram one or two days a week

As an editor, lecturing a Korean delegation on how to replicate 128 and the high-tech economy

Did I forget to mention, forget to mention EOD and COB?

Seven Aprils ago, we flew home from St. Petersburg, Russia, to a Boston locked-down after the Boston Marathon bombing.

A different kind of lockdown than today’s inspired by coronavirus.

It was a strange world event to view from Russia before the second Cold War. All we could understand was some kind of global English news … Sky TV or CNN World News maybe and some cryptic Facebook messages on the kids’ phones. Not believable at first. And from a distance, it was easy to conflate the Marathon attack with a heavily reported chemical factory fire in Texas the same day.

When we got back to Boston, my colleagues urged me to write something about the situation. Having missed the actual event at home, I grabbed onto what I knew of how colleges and others were reacting to the trauma of it.

It was a moment, like 9/11, when Russia and the U.S. seemed to have a common enemy. But they didn’t grab at the opportunity to make peace. Instead, they stepped up a new more complex superpower relationship.

A few items from the quarantine …

Wisdom from Zoom. COVID-19 has been a boon for Zoom and Slack (for people panicked by too many and too-slow emails). Last week, I zoomed into the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) Leadership Series conversation with Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) President Paul LeBlanc and HGSE Dean Bridget Long. LeBlanc notes that the online programs adopted by colleges and universities everywhere in the age of COVID-19 are very different from SNHU’s renowned online platform. Unlike SNHU, most institutions have launched “emergency remote” work to help students stay on track. Despite worries in some quarters about academic quality, LeBlanc says the quick transition online is not about relaxing standards, but ratcheting up care and compassion for suddenly dislocated students. The visionary president notes that just as telemedicine is boosting access to healthcare during the pandemic, online learning could boost access to education.

Among other observations, LeBlanc explains that “time” is the enemy for traditional students who have to pause classes when, for example, their child gets sick. If they are students in a well-designed online program, they can avoid delays in their education despite personal disruptions. He also believes students will want to come rushing back to campuses after COVID-19 dissipates, but with the recession, he wonders if they’ll be able to afford it. Oh and, by the way, LeBlanc ventures that it’s unlikely campuses will open in the fall without a lot more coronavirus testing.

Summer learning loss becomes COVID learning loss. That’s the concern of people like Chris Minnich, CEO of the nonprofit assessment and research organization NWEA, founded in Oregon as the Northwest Evaluation Association. The group predicts that when students finally head back to school next fall (presumably), they are likely to retain about 70% of this year’s gains in reading, compared with a typical school year, and less than 50% in math. The concern over achievement milestones reminds me of the fretting over SATs and ACTs as well as high-stakes high school tests, being postponed. Merrie Najimy, president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, notes that the pause “provides all of us with an opportunity to rethink the testing requirements.”

Another WPA for humanists? Modern Language Association Executive Director Paula M. Krebs recently reminded readers that during the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration, though commonly associated with building roads and bridges, also employed writers, researchers, historians, artists, musicians, actors and other cultural figures. Given COVID-19, “this moment calls for a new WPA that employs those with humanities expertise in partnership with scientists, health care practitioners, social scientists, and business, to help shape the public understanding of the changes our collective culture is undergoing,” writes Krebs.

Research could help right now. News of the University of New Hampshire garnering $6 million from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to build and test an instrument to monitor space weather reminded me of when research prowess was recognized as a salient feature of New England’s higher education leadership. That was mostly before jabs like the “wastebook” from then-U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) ridiculed any spending on research that didn’t translate directly to commercial use. But R&D work can go from suspect to practical very quickly. For example, consider research at the University of Maine’s Lobster Institute trying to see if an extract from lobsters might work to treat COVID-19. Or consider that 15 years ago, the Summer 2004 edition of Connection (now NEJHE) ran a short piece (pictured above) on an unpopular research lab being built by Boston University and the federal government. The lab in Boston’s densely settled South End would study dangerous germs like Ebola. The area was also a leader in community relations and progressive politics, and the neighborhood was tense about the dangers in its midst to say the least. But today, that lab’s role in the search for a coronavirus vaccine is much less controversial.

Advice for grads in a difficult year. NEJHE is inviting economists and other experts on “employability”  to weigh in on how COVID-19 will affect 2020’s college grads in New England. What does it mean for the college-educated labor market that historically has been seen as another New England economic advantage?

Defense rests? One New England industry that is not shutting down due to COVID-19 is the defense industry. In Maine, General Dynamics Bath Iron Works ordered face masks for employees and expanded its sick time policy, but union leaders say the company isn’t doing enough to address coronavirus. More than 70 Maine lawmakers recently asked the company to consider closing temporarily to protect workers from the spread of the virus. But the Defense Department would have to instruct the shipyard to close, and Pentagon officials say it is a “Critical Infrastructure Industry.” About 17,000 people who work at the General Dynamics Electric Boat’s shipyards in Quonset Point R.I., and Groton, Conn., are in the same boat, so to speak. They too have been told to keep reporting to work. In New London, a letter in The Day pleaded with Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont to shut down Electric Boat. Critical Infrastructure Industry! If only attack subs on schedule could help beat an “invisible enemy.”

John O. Harney is executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education.

Painting of “Wong’s Pot with Old Flowers” by Montserrat College professor Timothy Harney.

This piece was cross-posted at The New England Journal of Higher Education.

AdviniaCare at Wilmington, the nursing home I knew as Woodbriar, announced plans to care for patients diagnosed with COVID-19 and in need of oxygen support. Couldn’t help thinking of it as my alma mater. I even remember the annoying voice of the respiratory technician early in the mornings when I was trying to get some shuteye.

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A scientist with a startup in Orono, Maine, suggested an extract from lobsters could work in treating COVID-19. Reminded me or our old belief that using lobsters any way other than boiled or in a lobster salad was a sinful waste of the delicious creature. And Maine’s constant quest for an economic panacea.

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In my freelance days, I did some pieces (I now consider mercenary) about healthcare. So much so that one newspaper briefly credited me as a contributing healthcare writer in the byline. Lots of it came down to cutting healthcare costs, determination of need and other austerity plans. The kind that now have left the U.S. ill-prepared to face the pandemic. Come to think of it, I’ve played a similar role in higher ed.

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The pandemic should remind us we’re all specks of dust. That news stories about Tom Brady are insignificant. The head of the UNH Carsey School of Public Policy seemed to get this with a bit of humility that is too rare among leaders. “The challenges faced by the Carsey School are, of course, trivial compared to those faced by multitudes of people, businesses, and institutions—and society as a whole,” noted Michael Ettlinger in a letter to the community, as he introduced adjustments at the school, ranging from moving classes to virtual to shifting its NH Listens convenings to online civic spaces.

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The Security and Medical Daily Digest–International SOS that I’ve been getting each day for years (see More Trouble in Burkina Faso) has changed its name to Security and Medical Digest. And these days, it’s practically all-COVID all the time. So much so that I was almost relieved to see in the most recent edition the more usual: “Chad: Lac region: Follow directives amid state of emergency in Fouli, Kaya departments after fresh militant attack (Revised)” and “Nigeria: Ebonyi state: Abduction of foreign nationals reflects HIGH travel risk, need for security precautions.”

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Good magazine ran an interesting piece headlined “What will business look like after the pandemic?” The piece notes that “it also seems unlikely that life will return completely to the ‘normal’ of before.” Among other things, “many stores will borrow a page from the restaurant industry and require reservations in order to allow shoppers their prescribed six feet of space” and “Restaurants and bars that survive the coming months may even choose to convert themselves to a membership model, where you’ll still mingle with people from your neighborhood, but you’ll theoretically have a better idea who is sitting nearby.” That’s progress? Oh, and the new age will bring more intentionality (and I don’t mean grounding.)

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My high-risk family has begun trading living will info.

In Ukraine, locals stoned buses carrying evacuees from Wuhan to a health spa in Novi Sanzhary. The violence was blamed partly on the fact that Ukrainians don’t trust the info they get from their government. Can you imagine such a thing?

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Back in Boston, could they be taking this time of low ridership to disinfect the MBTA cars of coronavirus? Perhaps employing the many people left jobless by the pandemic. Not as guinea pigs, mind you, like the worst criminals once thought to be suitable for jobs in melting down nuclear plants. But safe and now patriotic jobs.

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Some of my younger cousins got together via Zoom for a family catch-up. I remarked that the grid reminded me of Hollywood Squares … a too-dated reference that got some of the same blank reactions I can’t get used to among NEBHE colleagues. If I were an investor-type, I would have wished to have jumped the Zoom train.

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I received two suspicious emails on March 26. One from the EPA was headlined: EPA Announces Enforcement Discretion Policy for COVID-19 Pandemic. It noted: “EPA is committed to protecting human health and the environment, but recognizes challenges resulting from efforts to protect workers and the public from COVID-19 may directly impact the ability of regulated facilities to meet all federal regulatory requirements,” said EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler. “This temporary policy is designed to provide enforcement discretion under the current, extraordinary conditions, while ensuring facility operations continue to protect human health and the environment.” Evidence of a new convenient opportunity to sell watering down of regulations.

The other came from the righty American Policy Center, warning: “We must not back away from this fight. Once the current threat passes the Sustainable forces are going to rush into the void in a drive to keep much of these emergency powers in place./That’s just what totalitarians do./If you doubt that, take a good look at what we have just witnessed as the Pelosi/Schumer-led Democrats blatantly took advantage of this Corona crisis by packing the stimulus bill with Green New Deal policies that had nothing to do with the crisis.” Evidence of a new convenient opportunity to push nutjob politics.

On March 31, the EPA issued a sort of retraction: “We strongly encourage the press to actually read EPA’s Temporary Policy before repeating reckless propaganda about it. Instead of including factual information about the policy, outlets such as E&E News, The Hill , the AP, and  the New York Times are relying on sources who falsely claim that the policy provides a blanket waiver of environmental requirements or creates a presumption that the pandemic is the cause of noncompliance.” Interestingly, the same day, news broke that the EPA would relax emissions and fuel economy requirements set by the Obama administration to fight climate change.

“The Coronavirus Matters. The Stock Market Doesn’t,” noted the intercept.com. Trump and his disciples obviously disagree.

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In the age of coronavirus, some of the few recommendations come too naturally to me: drink lots of liquid and avoid crowds. Still, it’s all I can do to resist touching every one of the Charlestown Bells by Paul Matisse.

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In February 2020, a Gallup Poll reported “High Confidence in Government to Handle Coronavirus … Three in four Americans are confident in the U.S. government’s ability to handle a coronavirus outbreak—a higher level of confidence than Gallup has recorded for previous health scares.” I tweeted: “Always interesting when trusted poll results fly in the face of everything you read.”

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Same month I reported that panelists at NEBHE’s fall 2019 roundtable noted that recessions can result from global market downturns or be sparked by outside geopolitical events as in case of the Gulf War or subprime mortgage crisis. The #COVID19 pandemic was not yet on the radar screen.

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On Massachusetts primary day, Secretary of State William Galvin said voters can also bring their own pens—as long as the ink is not red—to cast their ballots.

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It fell to me (briefly anyway) to pilot NEBHE’s “communications” response to coronavirus. We urged readers to send related news to nejhe@nebhe.org for our vetting and possible posting to nebhe.org. A regular NEJHE contributor Karen Gross wrote an interesting piece on how coronavirus triggers trauma in college students.

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After much resistance to the trend of working remotely, my organization announced it would shift to virtual work “out of an abundance of caution.”

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Around the same time, Nick Martin wrote a piece in The New Republic, noting: “For those with the privilege and ability to conduct their work from home, the coming weeks should be a time to focus on ourselves, our communities, and our loved ones. It should be a time to do nothing and produce little without the accompanying feeling of guilt or panic caused by a ping from a higher-up that you should be doing more as the rest of your world slowly cranks to a halt.”

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In March, the Pentagon announced new travel restrictions on employees, including service members and their families. Peace at last, I wondered?

This piece was cross-posted at The New England Journal of Higher Education.

On the train

Every head is bouncing

Sideways

Only a little bit

But it seems like

Concussion scientists should know.

ICE-y conditions. MIT recently alerted its staff that federal immigration officials would be checking the status of foreign postdoctoral students, researchers and visiting scholars in the sciences, and urged them to cooperate. … Meanwhile, an Iranian student, returning to study at Northeastern University, was detained at Boston’s Logan International Airport then deported, despite having a valid student visa and court order permitting him to stay in the U.S. The stories reminded me of Politico’s report on “5 ways universities can support students in a post-DACA world” by Jose Magaña-Salgado of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration. And of our own NEJHE piece by Harvard attorney Jason Corral whose job is advising undocumented students in the age of the Trump administration.

Caste away. Brandeis University announced it will include “castes” in its non-discrimination policy. Discrimination based on this system of inherited social class will now be expressly prohibited along with more familiar measures such as race, color, religion, gender identity and expression, national or ethnic origin, sex, sexual orientation, pregnancy, age, genetic information, disability, military or veteran status.

Institution news. Massachusetts approved new regulations on how to screen colleges and universities for financial risks and potential closures. … The University of Maine System Board of Trustees adopted a recommendation from Chancellor Dannel Malloy to transition the separate institutional accreditations of Maine’s public universities into a single “unified institutional accreditation” for the 30,000-student University of Maine System through the New England Commission on Higher Education (NECHE). One institution the UMaine System is likely to collaborate with according to Malloy’s office: Northeastern University’s planned Roux Institute for advanced graduate study and research to open in Portland, Maine. … In Connecticut, meanwhile, Goodwin College became Goodwin University. Such rebranding has been something of a trend in recent years. … In other institution news, monks at Saint Anselm College challenged the New Hampshire Catholic college’s board of trustees over a move the monks say could lead to increased secularization. The college’s charter dictated that the monks have the power to amend laws governing the school. Saint Anselm President Joseph Favazza said in a letter that the board was not trying to change the mission of the college, but rather aiming to meet the standards set by NECHE, the accrediting body.

Cold War chills. Primary Research Group Inc. has published its 2020 edition of Export Controls Compliance Practices Benchmarks for Higher Education with this grim reminder: “Increasingly, US universities and their corporate and government research partners are under pressure to demonstrate compliance with US export control and other technology transfer restriction and control policies. The deterioration of US-relations with China and Russia threatens the return of export control philosophies common during the Cold War. Major universities in the UK, Australia and Canada, among other countries, are experiencing similar changes.”

Media is not the enemy, but … The free Metro Boston newspaper ended operation after 19 years, following the sale of the New York and Philadelphia Metro papers. One explanation offered by a columnist at the Boston Globe, which is a part-owner of the Boston Metro: more commuters using their phones to catch up on news.

Latest from LearnLaunch. Watch NEJHE for reports from the 2020 Learn Launch Across Boundaries Conference, including an exclusive Q&A with the new LearnLaunch president, former Massachusetts Gov. Jane Swift.

John O. Harney is executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education.

Painting of “If Wishes Were Horses (For Dad)” by Montserrat College professor Timothy Harney.

Casey and I relaxing.

Casey Dylan Harney and I had a very close relationship.

He was named by my brother Tim when adopted as a puppy near Amherst, Mass.

I called him Casey-Basey-Facey, August-Doggest and many other names. Coaxed him with Liv-A-Snaps and Chew-eez. Celebrated his birthdays with McDonalds burgers, wrote the classic, “Don’t eat your paw, because then you’ll eat your ma … and your aunts and uncles.”

In high school and college years, I recall Casey staring at me suspiciously some nights when I’d come in after being out with friends.

In more innocent times, Casey and I invented a sport called shlappers.

Shlappers left a slew of gooey tennis-ball marks on the walls of “the office” in the home where I grew up. A surfeit of fur and doggie germs.

Shlappers rules … seem ageless?

Four decades later, my own family, now with two grown kids, was ready to rescue a new dog. We began to investigate dog-proofing the house. And having always been allergic to cats, I decided I should make sure I hadn’t developed a dog allergy before getting a pup.

My visit to the allergy department was one of those rare medical appointments where I felt very relaxed. I felt like I aced the medical history questionnaire, relatively speaking. I was sure from the Casey days that no dog allergy would be found. In the doctor’s office, I settled in to reading My Struggle: Book 2 by Karl Ove Knausgaard while the skin tests were taken and evaluated. I was looking forward to getting home and letting my family know that I was ready for a dog, if not another Casey.

Then the dreaded news was delivery gently. I am now allergic to dogs. No more shlappers. And some dashed hopes at home.

As a young editor, I was very pleased with myself to hook the high-profile Alan Dershowitz to write a piece for our relatively unknown journal.

Joanne and I went to see the Harvard law professor talk up and sign his book Chutzpah at the Boston Museum of Science. His talk about herring on his breath in Ivy League crowds was somehow endearing. He seemed to respect justice in a particularly articulate way. He was a civil liberties icon, regarded in many circles as a liberal.

The subject of the piece in our journal was “political correctness” … at that time, a reasonable matter for exploration.

I added him proudly to our gimmicky “Read between our bylines” house ad.

This was all before Dershowitz became a crazy man, defending offenders like O.J. Simpson, Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump. Showing up on Fox and so on.

Of course, you can’t issue a correction for that.

Son Billy and new daughter-in-law Nastya during August 2019 ceremony in Kharkiv …

Newlyweds with Harneys after Kharkiv ceremony …

And during December 2019 North American celebration in Salem, Mass. …

And “first dance” (to This Must Be the Place) at December 2019 North American celebration  …

In 2010, I proudly bestowed on my beloved children my once-beloved collections: the cards, the stamps, the coins, the postcards … even the napkins. Yes, it was a heartfelt, but practical, Christmas gift on a year when I was behind on shopping.

This page of my football card collection still has meaning for me. When my parents brought me to see the Patriots practice at Phillips Andover Academy, I was excited to go see Gale Sayers. Turned out to be Jim Nance. I was still happy.

Also George Blanda. Played till a very old age. I got an autographed photo of him at the Boston Sports show at the old Hynes Convention Center with my friend Kurt and his family. The photo was already signed in blue ink to a kid by another name, so I scribbled it out in black and wrote over it, “To John.” So much for value with Antiques Roadshow types.

Saw Joe Theismann break his leg grotesquely. And did Larry Csonka really have a plate in his head? OJ needs no introduction.

The PawSox depart R.I. for Worcester, Mass., even though Worcester Has Been a ‘Death City’ for Minor League Sports, according to one local Providence news outlet  …

Major League Baseball threatens to cut 42 teams nationwide from their big league affiliates including teams in Burlington, Vt., Norwich, Conn. and Lowell, Mass.  …

The Boston Breakers of the National Women’s Soccer League cease operations. …

The Elm City Express announce a “hiatus” from the the National Premier Soccer League a few years after joining. …

The affiliate of the Colorado Rockies makes a splash in March 2019 when it announces a contest in which each month a lucky fan would have special dog added to the Hartford Yard Goats menu at the Kayem Hot Dog Cart …

The owner of the NHL Philadelphia Flyers starts a new ECHL franchise in Portland, Maine called the Maine Mariners, the same name as the American Hockey League that played in Portland from 1977 to 1992. As the Portland Press Herald reported: “Finishing a close second was Wild Blueberries. The other names not selected were Watchmen, Lumberjacks and Puffins.”

For yet another League of Their Own, see Scandals Rock Team Handball.

If putting out my old Gourmet magazines for trash pickup was traumatic, getting set to donate my music CDs was devastating.

Two instances shook my faith in becoming a so-called professional writer.

One was when my oldest brother, a historian and writer himself, saw a piece I had written on the-then new AIDS epidemic and wondered how I could write so dispassionately about such a life-and-death issue.

I had told myself in those days that I had some freedom in the John Hancock “marketing communications” department (distinct from the insurance behemoth’s PR arms) because our work was focused on health and benefit policy matters—and only half plugged the company by getting quotes from its experts.

Plus, I wasn’t nearly as dispassionate as the Hancock medical staff I “interviewed” for the piece. Their job seemed to be to give new employees physicals and, more importantly, protect the massive company from false claims. They were convinced the new disease must be a statistical quirk of some kind.

Back then, I found my brother’s writing too flowery and not journalistically austere enough. (Though now I’d call it “thoughtful.”) Besides, it was a small honor to author one of these several-page freestanding “Background Extras.”

Still it was a corporate work. I was aiding and abetting those dispassionate AIDS deniers. My brother was right.

The second time my faith was shaken in my career choice was 30 years later when I came back from a sick leave. A colleague wondered why, after my ordeal, did I want to come back to writing about connections to higher ed. By that time, I had been editor for 20 years. And the only censor was me (in some ways, the toughest of all.) My colleague struck me as shortsighted. To be sure, I had always convinced myself I was balancing true writing with “communications” work to pay the bills. (See I Am Not a PR Man.) But in retrospect, my colleague had a point too.

Donald Trump seems to be a teflon president. Less than half the nation’s popular support is enough to keep his travesties alive. But many think his teflon protection could not withstand recession.

Our journal has been editing the proceedings of a roundtable we held on how higher ed dealt with the Great Recession of 2008 and is preparing for the next one.

The discussion touched partly on when the next recession would come and whether it would be 2008-magnitude or “garden variety” (not that any recession can be diminished that way for those dragged down by it).

Having just published a piece on how school shootings are creating a generation of traumatized college students, I was especially struck by one roundtable panelist’s comment about trauma and recession.

“Kids who were watching their families go through the last recession may bring a separate set of anxieties with them if there’s another recession,” said Susan Whealler Johnston, president of the National Association of College and University Business Officers. “They may dial back what they think they can do even if the circumstances don’t require it.”

All the recession talk also brings me back to this 1974 Time magazine cover from my childhood. Before I knew Time was the mainstreamed righty news. A few months before that issue of Time appeared (cover price, 60 cents btw), a president, who also seemed teflon for a time, had been run from office.

So sad to line up the old Gourmets for trash pickup as part of a general move to downsize my paper junk.

I think my sister-in-law in Toronto bought us our first Gourmet subscription, shortly after the death of her husband, my oldest brother (and the first real gourmet I knew).

Eventually, we ordered hard-copy indexes of the recipes. It was a strangely inefficient system, noting a recipe in the index, then going back to the indicated edition for the actual recipe. Especially since the pages with the best recipes were permanently bookmarked by sticky sauce stains in our paper issues.

Finding the recipes online will be a less authentic experience. And no convenient interruptions by photos of great food and the interesting places where it’s discovered.

I hope our old copies will be appropriately trash-picked.

“Rosneft’s global expansion served a double purpose: first, to augment declining production in domestic brownfields with international projects, and, second, to contribute to Russia’s real and perceived geopolitical posturing.”

So wrote my son about Russia’s state-owned oil company in a piece published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Billy’s piece explores how Rosneft has responded to Western sanctions by supporting major projects with the Nicolás Maduro regime in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, the Kurdistani regional government in Iraq, the Arab Republic of Egypt and India.

I’m a very proud reader-father. Though I’m reminded I need to brush up on my international finance.

I got a call out of the blue from a man who designed maps we used on the cover of our Fall 2006 edition of The New England Journal of Higher Education titled World Ready? A New View of the Global Student Marketplace.

The man was Bob Abramms, founder of Amherst Mass.-based ODTInc.

Our cover juxtaposed two of his maps: a Hobo-Dyer Map and a Population Map, in which, the larger a country’s population is, the bigger it appears on the map.

His outreach caught my attention for a few reasons. First, the world has only gotten harder to read since we used those maps for the journal. Our higher education institutions depend increasingly on international enrollment to survive and our country thrives on immigration, despite Donald Trump. Second, I’ve always been something of a map enthusiast, even considered going to Clark U for cartography and invented a well-mapped Harchester.

But Abramms’s reason for calling was that he’s retiring and selling his map-making business in mid-October 2019. He’s donating a lot of the maps. And he thought since we used one before, we might be able to use one again. I sadly told him that I didn’t think I had use for one of the physical maps, but that I would spread the word that they are available to good causes.

To wit, please take a look at ODT’s page here for free downloads.

9:15 morning train from Woburn (that’s Anderson to you) on the B&M (that’s Commuter Rail to you) near a young boy, who asks his mother approximately every five seconds: “Is that the train museum? … Is that the train museum? … Is that the train museum?”

I’m not sure there even is a train museum in Boston, though I remember being intrigued by the cable car museum in San Francisco and getting a burning ember in my eye as a boy visiting Steam Town, near Bellows Falls, Vt. … the same trip where the guy with an artificial larynx at the Black Lantern restaurant in Keene, N.H., freaked me out to a new level of hypochondria.

Loco sueño. In one dream, I had a job interview in Madrid. To my surprise, they were looking for someone who spoke fluent Spanish. A woman who greeted me in the lobby tried to tell me how to say “Welcome” to the people who were to interview me. It was a word I’d never heard. I said my “boca” can’t say that word, and could I just say “encantado.” She said that would be a little too formal. We took a jury-rigged elevator up four or five flights to the top floor, which seemed to have no ceiling. That’s where the boss and his honchos—women and a successful guy who reminded me of Donald Trump Jr. or Jared Kushner—had their board meeting room. At one point, I tried to ask who is on the “caballo” on the Madrid statue visible out the window. Turns out he wasn’t on a horse after all, so I said the “sculptura” … seemingly no recognition (a reaction I learned from an old boss who was obviously crushed when a British p.m. we went to hear speak in Boston didn’t remember him from an event in Israel). I said the view was a beautiful “azul” and “verde” … still no recognition. Then I mustered, it’s “un poco dificil.” The boss reminded me of a banker who rejected me in my college years for an internship. He had said I looked like I slept in my clothes. The guy in Madrid said my problem wasn’t as much the language as how I kept fidgeting with the booklet in my hand. They seemed to be talking about hiring me anyway. I thought of asking for outrageous money like $500,000 or demanding to work from Boston. (A strategy I did in real life once insisting on days off for child rearing and sealing my fate on the job.)

***

Another night, my dream began with a much younger son Billy learning to hit a wiffle ball. I helped him struggle to switch his hands to bat from the left (though in real life, he is a natural lefty.) At one point, he smashed a foul and I said to my brother Bill, it’s funny how sometimes lessons really work. A short time later, we were on the Commuter Rail train arriving in Boston where the bridges cross the Charles and I tried to point out ahingas drying their wings as they do, but this time doing it while under the water. Then, the ahingas turned out to be a beautiful sea turtle that I tried to point out to daughter Cath but she couldn’t see it over the fence. Then we sat on a train in the station to stay warm, taking care to get off before the train left for its route.

***

No hazelnut please. I dreamed Cath brought home hazelnut toothpaste. When I told her in real life, she said, that’s funny, because I’m currently drinking a hazelnut coffee.

***

I was in my cellar with friends Theo and Billy S. First, a brief political argument where I shot my mouth off about Trump and General Flynn. I began to swing a curtain rod like a baseball bat and made a joke about wishing I had very small ball to hit with it. Even a mothball. We found a strange depression in the cellar with perfectly round holes in it. I was worried. Rodents possibly? Then someone found a lobster in it. And I noted, the lobster looked like it was cooked but not very old. What would eat lobsters, we wondered. Then, as we began to leave, I noticed an unmistakable shape and color pattern. It was a seal living in my cellar. I thought, of all the pests, who would mind a seal living in their cellar?

***

Upon return from Croatia and Ukraine via Dublin, jetlagged dreams took hold. I was out with our friends, when I said I was tired of going to funerals. Joe asked if we were at the Joyce’s where he saw Heddy Gallstone. I wondered if Heddy was someone I should know (never mind the Joyces). A bit later, I walked my family behind the Cove School, where there was woods during my school days. But suburban McMansions now stand. To my surprise, there was a nice body of water there and an old Beverly friend, whose house was now there, and some women from his neighborhood. I recalled (to no one in particular) wetlands being diverted to make way for McMansions. One woman defensively said they chose the blue pond over a dirty brown brook (it was a suburban lesson in hydrology). As I was leaving, I accidentally spilled a pail of dirt on my relocated friend’s floor.

***

Not the first dream with a Cove School theme (where I was probably traumatized by  having to habitually dump out my lunch carton of school milk into a provided trash bucket that stunk to high heaven … until I began to bring a little baggie of chocolate to make the milk palatable). In one, I was walking back from North Beverly in indirect ways. Went by Cove School, where people were set up with their cameras like birders, but they were watching odd mammals. Couldn’t be deer because they would run away, maybe moose? This part of the dream I had once before. This time, I asked myself in the dream if I were dreaming. In the background, the police were carrying out some kind of strange operation, an arrest. I asked myself it was an animal safety op. And there was heavy machinery working on the old path to the Cove School and drones flying overhead. Later, someone who had the character of Cath (but was dark-skinned with curly hair) and I were trudging up a hill that I said was the last hill I would go up; we got halfway and agreed to slide back down it.

***

They stole my drafts! In another dream, I dropped my old binder full of Connection (NEJHE) drafts on Temple Place near my NEBHE office. A woman picked it up and quickly buzzed herself into a different office on Temple Place. In an unusual first for me, I snuck into her office, then called her and said I’ll meet you in your lobby. It was a beautiful office like an old library. I remarked that, after all these years, I’d never been inside. She at first refused to hand over the binder and said it had very interesting content including the piece by James Comey, by which I think she meant not the FBI guy, but the Yale child psychologist Comer, who had once written for us years earlier. I went out the back of NEBHE to what in the dream had become the empty site of the Brattle Book Store. I picked up a pole, joking that I might need it to vault over a short fence in the back. That was surely based on the old NEBHE story that if we had to exit out the back, there’d be no escape from a fenced-in trash area (probably in violation of code?). I’m sure the dream was influenced partly by the scare we’d had years earlier when we were receiving strange packages with pro-life literature, righty threats, crazy repetitive scrawl along with receipts, church bulletins (and even a powder substance? It was during the anthrax attacks). We called the postal police on them. The PP acted like Jack Webb. They just winked and said, “Saint Francis House.”

Red letter day

In a way

Lunch where they call saag palak

A walk from Wakefield

One stop down the track

With two nice stops

At Reading on the way back

A reporter called today about demography and the enrollment problem colleges are experiencing.

All I could think of was the the crusty old demographers who said this part of the equation was simple because we know the story of birth rates at least 17 years ahead of when a bust actually hits colleges.

Of course, I would say there are also political issues. Like the fact that Reagan ushered in an era of making government spending the enemy. Especially spending on education. And then 40 years later, Trump. Scaring off the pools of foreign students who could help with the enrollment shortfall.

It all reminded me that I can help reporters by giving them various sides of the story, but not the sound bites some want. In fact, I sometimes offer so many angles and contradictions, I’m confusing. I tell myself that could be a good exercise for them … right?

In this vein, I’ve tried to convince my colleagues that my self-image and value to the organization is based on nearly 30 years as editor of an issue-oriented, non-marketing journal of commentary and analysis, not as a PR man, writing “press statements.”

I imagine they think I’m old, stubbornly wishy-washy and grouchy. It’s a perception I once was happy to cultivate.

To be sure, editors face problems too. I was at a conference recently where the speaker asked if there were any journalists in the crowd. I used to proudly self identify that way. But now it’s become too dangerous.

Andrew Delbanco is a professor of American Studies at Columbia University, author of several books, including 2012’s College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, and president of the Teagle Foundation. His latest book, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War, will come out in paperback in November. In the following Q&A, NEJHE Executive Editor John O. Harney asks Delbanco about the state of higher education and intellectual life today.

Our Twitter content allows us to bring readers a larger resource base—a larger canvas, in a sense—than NEJHE articles alone. We urge you to see us as parts of a whole.

Every NEJHE item automatically posts to Twitter, but we also use Twitter to disseminate interesting news or opinion pieces from elsewhere, and these tweets are often juxtaposed with something NEBHE has worked on in the past and sometimes are presented with an added comment.

In the past couple months, many of our tweets and NEJHE articles have touched on the enrollment pressures bearing down on higher education institutions and the often-underrepresented groups that could buoy them. These groups include traditionally underserved black, Hispanic and Native American students, but also Muslims, LGBTQ students, students with disabilities or social and emotional challenges, rurally isolated students, those affected by incarceration and the many caught in America’s harsh immigration system.

In May, we took to Twitter to re-post a piece from INSIGHT Into Diversity reminding educators to be mindful of students fasting during Ramadan.

Among other recent tweets you may have missed that also tease out the enrollment-financial sustainability conundrum, consider …

Meanwhile, the scourge of mental and emotional problems on New England campuses only intensifies as an opiate haze hits surrounding New England communities especially hard. Good news is that mental health stigma is being addressed and students are being helped by initiatives like CONNECT@UMB at UMass Boston.

The debate over immigration is also coloring our national and regional education and economic future. Note, for example, these key pieces we’ve re-tweeted from the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting’s Pine Tree Watch and the Boston Globe, as well as frequent NEJHE coverage of DACA and immigration.

And don’t forget incarcerated students; the U.S. jails more people than any other country in the world.

The challenges facing New England higher education and the regional economy are complex, marked in some cases by stale business models and, crucially, declining cohorts of traditional college-age students. One thing’s for certain: We need to make sure groups of people who may not have fully participated in the past are now afforded access to quality education and support to succeed.

John O. Harney is executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education.

This piece was cross-posted at The New England Journal of Higher Education.

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Limited Characters Spell Austerity

Real Tweets, Fake News … and More from the NEJHE Beat

Chance of Tweetstorms

From time to time, we revive the presentation of facts and figures called “Data Connection” that we had published quarterly for nearly 20 years in the print editions of The New England Journal of Higher Education (formerly Connection).

Change in U.S. college enrollments in languages other than English from fall 2013 to fall 2016: -9.2% Modern Language Association

Number of foreign-language programs that colleges closed during that period: 651 Modern Language Association

Rank of American Sign Language among most popular “foreign-language” majors for bachelor’s-degree recipients: 7th Chronicle of Higher Education analysis of U.S. Department of Education data

Percentage of Americans who are satisfied with the moral and ethical climate in 2019: 26% Gallup

Percentage who said they were satisfied in 2001: 36% Gallup

Percentage of Americans under age 30 who said during the first two years of the Trump administration they would like to move to another country permanently: 30% Gallup

Number of New England cities among the 50 most ethnically diverse cities in the U.S. in terms of ethnicity and race, language and birthplace: 13 Wallethub

U.S. ranks of Massachusetts and Connecticut among states whose residents and businesses contribute more in federal taxes than the states receive back in federal spending: 3rd, 4th Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government of SUNY

Overall admission rate among applicants to Harvard University: 5% The Harvard Crimson

Harvard’s admission rate from 2010 to 2015 for “legacy” students with at least one Harvard-educated parent: 34% Jennifer Lee of Columbia University in Los Angeles Times

Change in newsroom employment in the U.S. between 2008 and 2017: -23% U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Number of children who died as a result of workplace injuries between 2003 and 2016: 452 Government Accountability Office

For earlier installments of “Data Connection,” see:

• Data Connection: Immigration, Politics, Jobs, Absenteeism and Fishing
• More Data Connection: Citizens
• Numbers Game … More Data Connection
• Data Connection: New England’s Patriots and More
• More Data Connection: Peace in the Valley? Scientists and Kids
• Data Connection: State Work, Guns, Sports
• Return to Data Connection: Stats on NE Education, Economy, Life
• Former print editions at NEJHE Archives

From time to time, we revive the collection of facts and figures called “Data Connection” that we had published quarterly for nearly 20 years in the print editions of The New England Journal of Higher Education (formerly Connection).

The latest …

Estimated percentage of children in Cambridge, Mass., who have at least one foreign-born parent: 40% Cambridge Community Foundation

From time to time, we revive the collection of facts and figures called “Data Connection” that we had published quarterly for nearly 20 years in the print editions of The New England Journal of Higher Education (formerly Connection).

The latest …

Percentage of 18-24-year-olds who attended a political demonstration or march in 2016: 5% Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life

Percentage who did so in 2018: 15% Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life

Percentage of Americans who can pass a multiple choice test consisting of items taken from the U.S. Citizenship Test: 36% Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation

Percentage who didn’t know how many justices serve on the U.S. Supreme Court: 57% Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation

Number of women who had won the Nobel Prize in physics before Donna Strickland shared the 2018 prize for creating technology that generates high-intensity, ultra-short laser pulses, which are used for eye surgeries and material sciences: 2 Todd Adams, Florida State University, The Conversation

Preliminary average starting salary for Class of 2018 graduates: is $50,004 National Association of Colleges and Employers Fall 2018 Salary Survey

Preliminary average starting salary for computer and information sciences graduates in the Class of 2018: $73,768 National Association of Colleges and Employers Fall 2018 Salary Survey

Percentage of college graduates who say an undergraduate mentor provided advice on academic issues: 92% 2018 Strada-Gallup Alumni Survey

Percentage of college graduates who say an undergraduate mentor provided advice on the student’s career: 90% 2018 Strada-Gallup Alumni Survey

Percentage who say an undergraduate mentor provided advice on the student’s physical or mental health: 53% 2018 Strada-Gallup Alumni Survey

Percentage of college students who struggle with a mental illness: 35% American Psychological Association

From time to time, we revive the collection of facts and figures called “Data Connection” that we had published quarterly for nearly 20 years in the print editions of The New England Journal of Higher Education (formerly Connection).

The latest …

Inflation-adjusted increase in household incomes for the bottom quarter of Maine workers between 2016 and 2017 after the state’s voter-approved minimum wage increase: 10% Maine Center for Economic Policy

Reduction in number of Maine children living in poverty between 2016 and 2017 after the minimum wage increase: 10,000 Maine Center for Economic Policy

Percentage of respondents to the UNH Carsey School of Public Policy’s Upper Valley Child Care Survey who reported that child care is necessary in order for them to work: 96% Carsey School of Public Policy (The Upper Valley includes Orange and Windsor Counties in Vermont and Grafton and Sullivan Counties in New Hampshire.)

Number of children under age 5 in the Upper Valley Census who live in fully employed families (two working parents if they live with two and one working parent if they live with one): 7,300 Carsey School of Public Policy

Number of licensed slots available for children in this age group: 4,995 Carsey School of Public Policy

Number of reported hate crimes per 100,000 people in 2016 in Massachusetts: 5.9 WBUR (Data reported to the FBI from agencies—reportedly the highest rate of any state, but also drawn from more agencies than some states, including 70 communities, several colleges and the MBTA.)

U.S. ranks of Massachusetts, Vermont and Connecticut among “healthiest” U.S. states, according to United Health Foundation: 1,3,5 America’s Health Rankings, United Health Foundation

U.S. rank of South Burlington. Vt., among WalletHub’s 2018’s Best & Worst Cities for People with Disabilities, based on 31 indicators of disability-friendliness, ranging from wheelchair-accessible facilities per capita to rate of workers with disabilities to quality of public hospital system: 2 WalletHub

U.S. rank of New Haven, Conn.: 182 WalletHub

This piece was cross-posted at http://www.nebhe.org.

With votes still being counted and recounted and candidates already pondering their next campaigns, the 2018 midterm elections have left an indelible mark on New England and its representation in Washington, D.C. New Hampshire voters elected at least 42 state representatives under age 40 to the state’s 400-member House of Representatives—the third largest legislative body in the English-speaking world. They include Cassie Levesque. In 2017, as a senior at Dover High School, she began her push to raise the marriage age—then 13 for girls and 14 for boys—as part of a Girl Scouts project. Safiya Wazir, a former Afghani refugee, won a House seat representing part of Concord. A former Nigerian refugee was re-elected to represent part of Manchester. Former state Rep. Melanie Levesque became New Hampshire’s first black state senator.

In an election that saw record numbers of women and people of color win seats, Massachusetts and Connecticut elected their first black women to Congress—former Boston City Councilor Ayanna Pressley in Massachusetts and former National Teacher of the Year Jahana Hayes in Connecticut.

New England also has new power in Washington, D.C., with the Democratic takeover of the U.S. House. U.S. Rep. Richard Neal of Springfield, Mass. is poised to chair the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, where he is likely to push East-West rail between Boston and Springfield. Another fan of the route is U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern of Worcester, Mass., who is likely to chair the House Rules Committee. Rep. Katherine Clark of Melrose, Mass., and Rep. David Cicilline of Providence, R.I. are likely to be part of the House Democratic Leadership team should Rep. Nancy Pelosi be chosen as speaker.

Maine introduced the nation’s first “ranked-choice” voting system, which lets voters rank candidates from first to last on the ballot. It provides for eliminations of last-place candidates and reallocations of votes to ensure a majority winner. On Election Day, Nov. 6, incumbent U.S. Rep. Bruce Poliquin, a Republican, beat Democratic challenger Jared Golden. But Poliquin received only 46.2% of the vote—important because Maine’s ranked-choice voting law means a candidate must be the first choice of at least 50% of voters to win automatically. Otherwise, the votes of the candidate with the least support are reallocated to whoever those voters picked as their second choice. Nine days after Election Day, Nov. 15, the victory was called for Golden. And New England’s House delegation seemed to lose its last Republican member. But on Monday, Nov. 26, Poliquin called for a hand recount of ballots.

Nationally, a record 272 women ran as general election nominees for U.S. Congress or governor this year, and at least 124 were elected. An also record 219 people of color ran, with at least 115 elected. Nine STEM-related professionals are entering the U.S. Congress next year, including engineers, health professionals and a computer programmer.

New England—and the nation—have long suffered from an underrepresentation of women and people of color in higher elected offices. In the 2018 midterms, that began to change.

Editor’s Note: We are pleased to work with three 2018 NEBHE policy interns whose youthful smarts have energized NEBHE, as their generation is enriching American political life (The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University estimated 31% turnout among 18- to 29-year-olds voting in the recent midterm elections—the highest youth vote in the past quarter century). The NEBHE interns—Katheryne Martinez, Haya Bacharouch and Stephanie Suarez—are all graduate students at Harvard University. Watch NEJHE for their personal thoughts on the midterm elections and New England’s edu-political future.

For several fearful years, I’ve received a Daily Digest from International SOS and Control Risks warning of dangers to world travelers. The threats range from ebola to anti-immigrant unrest to a “persistent threat of militancy.” The wording is usually negative: defer non-essential travel … avoid planned protest … anticipate disruption. Increasingly, the land of the free also gets a mention. But one country’s warnings are framed in an odd positive voice … “Saudi Arabia: Jizan province: Missile interception highlights security force capabilities” … “Saudi Arabia: Missile interceptions underline security force capabilities (Revised)” … “Saudi Arabia: Al-Madinah province: Missile interception over Yanbu underlines security force capabilities (Revised)” … The reasons behind these prevalent missile attacks are surely as newsworthy as their interception.

After Mount Ida, what should a sustainable future for higher ed look like? https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2018/04/26/after-mount-ida-what-should-sustainable-future-for-higher-look-like/TY9YP3MCAWsSChIDmRovQP/story.html?event=event25 … via @BostonGlobe #HEIC 

Immediate concerns ran to: why didn’t Mount Ida let its students, faculty and staff know earlier about the college’s vulnerabilities … especially since it was laying on the positive marketing right till the end? Also, why would UMass Amherst emerge as the savior of the jilted students, rather than the closer-by, but perennially neglected, UMass Boston?

The closing also offered a powerful reason to re-envision NEBHE’s dormant, but obviously timely, Higher Education Innovation Challenge … for the hashtaggers out there, #HEIC. The idea behind the initiative was to help institutions adapt models to rein in costs and pass savings on to students—and given projections of lagging enrollment, avoid closure.

The anxiety behind NEBHE’s #HEIC is only heating up. For example, see:

The reasons are clear enough. Higher ed faces a “perfect storm” of runaway costs, enrollment pressures and a general lack of financial “sustainability”—just the stuff a reworked HEIC could address.

In the meantime, NEBHE is also working to help higher education institutions (HEIs) avoid such a fate. Consider the NEBHE-RSM University Executive Lunch Briefing held earlier this week on “Collaboration or Closure? The Landscape of Strategic Alliance and Mergers in Higher Education.”

Fascinating @nebhe discussion of Collaboration or Closure? The Landscape of Strategic Alliance and Mergers in Higher Education

Michael Goldstein, senior counsel at Cooley LLP, told the 90 or so gathered leaders that the demise of HEIs has been predicted at least since the rise of the internet. Most institutions are not at the edge of the cliff, he told the presumably nervous audience, but many see the cliff and don’t know what to do about it. Evoking New Hampshire’s “Live Free or Die” slogan, Goldstein dispelled the notion that higher education institutions must merge or die. There are a range of options such as partnerships and alliances for the institution to consider before death is at its door.

****

Immigration is another key NEBHE issue with limited characters. The stranding of DACA students not only pulls heartstrings, but also adds to a xenophobic environment that threatens a country and a region whose cultural and economic success is built on immigrants. There is occasional hope. For example, thanks to the persistence of NEBHE delegate and Connecticut state Rep. Gregory Haddad and others:

Financial aid for ‘dreamers’ becomes a reality in Connecticut https://ctmirror.org/2018/04/25/financial-aid-dreamers-becomes-reality-connecticut/ … via @ctmirror | http://www.nebhe.org/thejournal/back-in-the-shadows-the-daca-saga-continues/ … #nejhe #statecapitalnotes,

****

NEBHE’s chief focus these days is its Commission on Higher Education & Employability. Chaired by Rhode Island Gov. Gina M. Raimondo, the 50-member commission invested 11 months in public meetings and working group sessions exploring New England employers’ concerns about a lack of qualified, skilled workers, particularly in rapidly changing, technology-intensive and growth-oriented industries. The commission’s goal is to increase the career readiness of New Englanders. Its challenge is exacerbated by a decline in the traditional working-age population in the New England states.

We’ve connected a lot of tweets with the commission’s work (#CHEE, hashtaggers) and the region’s demographic challenges … and recently retweeted a piece from a place that can seem synonymous with work.

A view of work and skills from a place that knows a lot about both: Lowell, Mass. | http://www.nebhe.org/programs-overview/commission-on-higher-education-employability/updates/ … Students are being prepared for jobs that no longer exist. Here’s how that could change. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/students-are-being-prepared-jobs-no-longer-exist-here-s-n865096 … via @nbcnews #CHEE

****

Tweets can also touch on the more human side of New England higher education. Consider summer reading. A bane for some students, it is a fascinating way to get students thinking about key issues. Olin College of Engineering chose Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, in part to point to an under-discussed example of diversity in STEM. Recently …

St. Mike’s picks Hamilton the Musical as first-year Common Text https://prn.to/2GYqnnn 

****

We also killed two birds with one stone, recently. Former Southern Vermont College President Karen Gross shared with us two problems she saw in higher education. Problem #1 was that college students, despite their impressive activism, especially around the issue of guns, were too apolitical, especially when it came to voting: less than 50% voted in the 2016 election. Problem #2 was that the ubiquitous college rankings that guide prospective students’ views of colleges and universities carry a range of perverse incentives such as rewarding institutions that look more selective because they reject as many students as possible and those that reap advantages on measures of retention and alumni giving by avoiding nontraditional students.

Gross proposed ranking colleges based on the share of their students who cast ballots.

NEJHE NewsBlast, April 18, 2018 | Ranking Colleges Based on the Share of Their Students W… https://conta.cc/2HbKafZ 

Tweets also offer us a way to report on discussions in the field such as those at LearnLaunch’s sixth Across Boundaries conference. The Boston gathering brought together 1,500 educators, entrepreneurs, investors and others interested in driving innovation to transform learning and increase achievement using digital technologies.

Among other things, LearnLaunch explored Blockchain as it relates to “reverse transfers” as a verifiable third-party audit of learner’s accomplishments from dozens of issuers of credentials for learners.

Blockchain could dovetail with two of the key issues taken up earlier in this column: backstopping students from institutions that go out of business and helping employers better understand what learning jobseekers have completed.

As we noted, “tweets can be abused, even by presidents,” but if connected wisely, they can offer a compelling, if clipped, narrative of what’s important in New England.

John O. Harney is executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education.

This piece was cross-posted at http://www.nebhe.org.

When Teddy Green got a plate in his head

And Donnie drank too much before the junior high dance and had his stomach pumped

This was the immigration center near North Station. Now peddling a different “American Dream.” Same neighborhood as Public-Private Sweat Houses …

Post-Labor Days. For many, that means time to put away the white pants and relish that last summer getaway. Few will reflect on the true meaning of Labor Day (and May Day) or the too-often-denigrated labor movement in general. Fewer will think of the 19^th century mill girls in Lowell, Mass., and their successors who risked their jobs—and sometimes their lives—to create the day of recognition for workers. Many of today’s employers keep their shifts going even during Labor Day. Many professionals dabble with work even during the paid time off the labor movement won for them (though even today the U.S. is the only “first world economy” that doesn’t require employers to offer any paid time off). As historian Charles Scontras of the University of Maine’s Bureau of Labor Education recently noted, “Workers whose knowledge and skills are increasing[ly] linked to increased productivity and the creation of wealth, and who may have viewed with indifference the movement of manufacturing abroad for the past few decades are, themselves, increasingly experiencing living on the edge of economic insecurity.” Many students, meanwhile, got back to class in late August; speed counts. Labor Day is not what it used to be.

But labor is more crucial than ever.

Indeed, NEBHE’s Commission on Higher Education & Employability is heating up. The Commission will host a panel discussion at NEBHE’s board meeting on Sept. 14 in Maine, a full Commission meeting on Sept. 27 at Carbonite in Boston, and a summit Dec. 4 at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

The Commission is not some set of crass commercial tasks, but rather a deliberate initiative to help all New Englanders find fulfilling jobs and, in so doing, enrich the region’s economy. One concern for the Commission is bringing adult workers into the workplace to capitalize on the aging of the region’s population; Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire have the oldest median ages  in America. Why not go a step further and redouble efforts to make New England a world leader in all things geriatric, including deploying the region’s fabled health research expertise in a well-funded, concentrated fight against the scourge of Alzheimer’s disease?

The other side of New England’s demographic challenge is the need to engage groups who have not always been well-served by education. Obviously, Donald Trump’s suggestion to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) will not help.

A different brain drain. On the subject of age, New England is losing its claim to an 88-year-old genius. Famed left-wing social critic Noam Chomsky announced last month that he is leaving MIT, where he has been a linguistics professor since 1955, to join the linguistics department at the University of Arizona. Brain drain is a common worry. And the drain is often the Sun Belt (at least before climate change was understood). But the brain drain is more commonly seen through the lens of New England losing workers than losing intellectual capital, especially academics like Chomsky who have lost favor among corporate-minded higher ed thinkers.

You work too much. Most students (59%) work during college. But like countless moms advised, the key is moderation. Working while in college can be a good strategy for students from low-income families to get through and get ahead in college, especially if their enlightened employers offer flexibility. But an ACT Center for Equity for Learning report suggests that working more than 15 hours a week while in college may do more harm than good—especially for students from underserved backgrounds.

The findings come just as the Trump administration proposes cutting $500 million from the federal work-study program; some estimate that would lead to only 333,000 students awarded work-study aid in 2018, compared with 634,000 in 2017.

College readiness is inherently involved in the employability effort. Even in the age of alternative credentials, higher education of some sort is critical to the region’s employability future. Much talked-about 21st century skills generally include: collaboration (“teamwork”); communication; critical thinking (though more about solving problems than being critical of authority or mass media) and creativity (as long as it can be monetized?). Having been in Boston’s Kenmore Square around the Hub’s famed Sept. 1 move-in days, I would add one more: the ability to walk down a street without knocking anyone over.

Relevant for future enrollment? The Maine House considered a proposal to allow people with concealed carry permits to carry their firearms on public colleges (except in facilities that post signs barring them). The idea was rejected. The bill would have changed existing law that lets the trustees of the University of Maine, the Maine Community College System and the Maine Maritime Academy decide the rules for the campuses they oversee. In a line straight out of Miss Sloane, bill sponsor Rep. Richard Cebra (R-Naples) said the proposal is “a women’s issue” because “a small, concealed handgun creates an equality between a 100-pound woman and a 225-pound attacker.” Cebra and two colleagues also requested allowing members of the Legislature to carry concealed handguns in the statehouse, following a gun attack in Virginia on a congressional baseball practice. Across the region, Massachusetts bans guns on campus; the other five states leave it up to individual campuses, according to the Campaign to Keep Guns off Campus.

Regional thinking. When we staged our mock election campaign for “Governor of New England” nearly a decade ago, one of the “candidates,” Vermont’s then treasurer, and later real governor, Jim Douglas argued: “We have 250 towns (Maine has 435) and the Legislature offered an incentive a couple of years ago to provide more school construction aid for towns that would consolidate their schools and build a joint school. They pulled back because nobody wanted to do it. So before we talk about expansion and collaboration in the federation beyond the borders, we should realize it is pretty tough to cooperate even internally sometimes.” Hard as it is to join schools within states, Vermont and New Hampshire towns are among those considering a new interstate district. Previously, Vermont was part of the first joint compact district in the nation, when Norwich, Vt.  joined with Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1964 to form the Dresden School District.

Going coed. College readiness and employability both hinge on the economic sustainability of higher ed institutions. One strategy to bolster institutional finances has been to appeal to more groups of students. The University of Saint Joseph (USJ) announced last month that it will open undergraduate admissions to male students for fall 2018. Historically, USJ admitted only women to its main undergrad programs, but began introducing coeds to various graduate programs starting in 1959. President Rhona Free cited studies showing that less than 1% of full-time female college students attend a women’s college and only 2% of female high school seniors say they’d consider attending one.

Play ball! Major League Baseball (MLB) and Northeastern University entered a partnership to provide pro ballplayers with access to higher education programs. The agreement follows the inclusion of a new Continuing Education Program in MLB’s collective-bargaining agreement, which provides players with additional funds devoted to their educational development. Northeastern President Joseph E. Aoun, who is slated to speak at the NEBHE Dec. 4 summit, said of the baseball agreement: “We must be boundless, and meet learners where they are. That is why this partnership with Major League Baseball—to prepare players at all levels for the next step in their lives and careers—is so important.” The agreement provides a range of opportunities to interested players—both during and following their baseball careers—through in-person and online instruction. Players will have access to degree programs in fields such as finance, health sciences, information technology, human services, communications and psychology, data analytics, sports leadership, digital media and project management.

Peace in Maine. The Lewiston, Maine police have been holding neighborhood meetings to address complaints about Bates College off-campus housing. Lewiston Mayor Bob Macdonald was quoted in the Lewiston-Auburn Sun Journal as saying: “These are people who have lived there for years, and their quality of life won’t be ruined by out-of-state yahoos.” NEJHE has covered such delicate town-gown relations, including a full edition on Colleges In Their Places.

Being your Guide. Putting together our annual Guide to New England Colleges and Universities always offers an opportune time to inspect the region’s higher ed landscape for institutional comings and goings. What’s new this year? Facing declining enrollment, Andover Newton Theological School of Massachusetts signed an agreement to move into Yale Divinity School, in New Haven, Conn., and become Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School. The former Rockport College connected with the University of Maine Augusta is now Maine Media College. The entire board of the New England Center for Circus Arts (NECCA) stepped down after turmoil between the trustees, the founders and the staff. It sent us scurrying to make sure we hadn’t missed out on the circus, but alas, NECCA doesn’t fit the criteria for the Guide, notably that they be authorized to grant undergraduate or graduate degrees.

A little civility. Former NEBHE chair and frequent NEJHE editorial contributor Lou D’Allesandro reflected on the enactment of a Senate Bill he sponsored to develop a uniform framework for civics courses. “By outlining an instructional framework, this bill ensures that our teachers are teaching the fundamentals of democracy, the responsibilities of every citizen, and the tools to engage. At no additional cost to the state, this is a common sense measure for our students and our democracy.”

Collaborating. I was honored to join the July 2017 ACL Northeast Community Gathering at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. It’s a group of collaborators who could save higher education money by sharing rather than cutting. But the consortia themselves face challenges. Neal Abraham, executive director of Five Colleges Inc., notes that they are often seen as “cost centers” and collaboration is hardly mentioned to new officials stepping into higher ed leadership positions. At Five Colleges, which has 37 employees and is often seen as a leader among consortia, the directors of virtually every function area have turned over in the past eight years. Abraham, himself, is stepping down.

The featured speakers at the ACL Northeast Community meeting were Harvard Project Zero’s Howard Gardner and Wendy Fischman. They offered “impressions” from their work on “Liberal Arts and Sciences in the 21^st Century.” The study investigates how students, parents of students, faculty, administrators, trustees, young alumni and job recruiters conceive of the purposes, best practices and most challenging features of undergraduate education in the U.S., especially liberal arts and sciences. It’ll take time to see final results. But in the meantime, Fisher asks: Wouldn’t we all want a population that reads the newspaper and understands it?

Missing BIF. For the first time in several years, I’ll be missing this month’s Business Innovation Factory summit due to a conflict. It’s always a profound inspiration. I urge you to watch the videos, which generally are released within a month or so of the event.

John O. Harney is executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education.

This piece was cross-posted at http://www.nebhe.org.

Why is that not in the Dictionary of Occupational Titles?

Employability … Ever since my organization latched onto that term, I’ve careened between the ideal of meaningful work for everyone (a sort of benevolent twist on the Soviet five-year plan), the grim sense that education is merely job training, and the Jam’s lament: Work and work and work and work till you die/There’s plenty more fish in the sea to fry.