Adam Harris | The Atlantic

Trump Is Wishcasting Victory in Iran

2026-04-09T06:00:00-04:00

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Early on Easter morning, President Trump went on a tirade about the ongoing war in Iran; the Iranian government had closed the Strait of Hormuz, and he wanted it reopened. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell!,” he wrote on Truth Social.

Trump had given Iran an ultimatum a few days earlier: make a deal or the United States and Israel would bomb Iran enough to “bring them back to the Stone Ages.” The American barrage he promised would target desalination plants, power plants, and bridges—i.e., civilian infrastructure.

As the deadline approached, the president’s posts somehow became more incendiary. On Tuesday, he threatened: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” rhetorical territory unseen among international leaders in an era of the United Nations and mutual assured destruction.

Hours before the deadline arrived, however, the U.S. announced a two-week cease-fire. The news was not such a shock, given that Trump has made a habit of issuing harsh threats before retreating, but it nonetheless offers a reprieve for Iranian citizens. While negotiations took place, Iran would reopen the strait, and the U.S. and Israel would stop their bombing. Both sides declared victory in the deal. But the compact’s shaky foundation began wobbling almost immediately; and in the aftermath of Trump’s threats, America’s standing in the world had already fallen. On this week’s Radio Atlantic, our staff writers Tom Nichols and Nancy A. Youssef explain the war in Iran after an apparent threat of genocide, and how no deal can undo the damage of those words.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Adam Harris: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Adam Harris, in for Hanna Rosin. This week began with President Trump giving Iran an ultimatum: Open up the Strait of Hormuz, cut a deal, or face attacks on civilian infrastructure.

President Trump: We have a plan, because of the power of our military, where every bridge in Iran will be decimated by 12 o’clock tomorrow night, where every power plant in Iran will be out of business, burning, exploding, and never to be used again—I mean complete demolition.

Harris: That was him speaking at a Monday press conference.

The next morning, he was even more direct: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” he declared on Truth Social. “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”

[Music]

Harris: In the hours before his Tuesday-night deadline, the United States announced a two-week cease-fire while the talks play out.

The deal already looks shaky, with Israeli striking targets in Lebanon and Iranian state media saying the strait is again closed in response. Talks are set to begin in Pakistan this weekend.

But in the meantime, the president can’t take back his words, words that appear to meet the UN definition of genocide and, when uttered by a world leader, are taken as policy.

To understand what comes next, I’m joined by two Atlantic staff writers who follow the military and foreign affairs, Nancy Youssef and Tom Nichols.

Nancy, thanks for joining.

Nancy Youssef: Thanks for having me.

Harris: And, Tom, it’s great to have you.

Tom Nichols: Hey, Adam. Thanks for having me.

Harris: So, Tom, we’re speaking on Wednesday. As the clock was winding down on Tuesday, I guess a very blunt question: Did you think he was going to go through with the threats?

Nichols: I didn’t think it was impossible, but I think it would’ve provoked a constitutional crisis, which means that it was much less likely than not to happen, because I think he would’ve had to order the military to do things that the military, this time, would’ve balked at.

There are reports that the military is already giving the president lists of things that only had military applicability, which is not the same thing as erasing a civilization. So I didn’t think it was likely to happen, but as I said in the piece I wrote that afternoon, when the president of the United States talks, you have to take it seriously.

We’re used to Trump saying kind of loopy things and talking about sharks and his uncle and electricity and whatnot. But nonetheless, he is the president, and the president’s statements are policy. And so I said, well, it’s not likely to happen, but we have to treat his statements as if it could happen and go from there.

Harris: Yeah, and, Nancy, what were your sources telling you about Trump’s threats in the lead-up to that deadline?

Youssef: So there was a lot of anxiety after that social-media post right after Easter in which he threatened the destruction of civilization. And people were really trying to figure out what was in the realm of possible in terms of what could be done.

The conversation I heard in the run-up to the deadline was that the U.S. wouldn’t be hitting historical sites or civilian infrastructure, but that they would go out for what’s called “dual use,” things that are used both by the military for military purposes and for civilian use.

But then you can’t just sort of declare “dual use” and then strike. It has to be proportional. You have to demonstrate it. So I think that was sort of the start of people looking for an off-ramp from the rhetoric that we heard. And then by day’s end—I couldn’t figure out why at the time—you could feel that things had sort of calmed down in terms of the anxiety that I was feeling in the morning from sources, but we didn’t quite understand why at the time.

And I thought that maybe it was because even if the military had gone through, which, as Tom noted, would’ve caused a lot of mayhem, even that wasn’t gonna guarantee the fall of the regime. So the question I kept coming back to is: What is the military gain that comes with doing these unprecedented strikes?

We’ve seen the Iranian regime survive the decapitation of its leadership, the destruction of its ballistic-missile and drone capability—to what extent, we don’t know—the destruction of its navy, largely, and they have survived. And historically, we’ve seen them quite resilient. They were in an eight-year war with Iraq and survived that. And so I couldn’t understand how those strikes, had they been carried out, with all the consequences associated with it, got the president one of the outcomes that he said he was seeking, which was the collapse of the regime.

Harris: Yeah, and actually, speaking of those outcomes that the president said he was seeking, right, you go even back to January and you think about what the president was saying about the Iranian people, right—this was to help them overthrow the regime. And now we have something like 1,700 Iranian civilians who have been killed in the strikes, including at least 250 children.

What of the Iranian people in all of this? What was the administration thinking about those people when you were having these threats from the president?

Youssef: Well, it’s an interesting question because this started at 2:30 in the morning in terms of presidential statements, which he made from a Truth Social video, that this was for the Iranian people.

Trump: Finally, to the great, proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand. Stay sheltered. Don’t leave your home. It’s very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere. When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.

Youssef: And I think there were a lot of Iranian people who welcomed it and even still welcomed it because there was such profound frustration with the regime. We had seen massive protests in the run-up to this in December and January, and real threats to the durability of the regime.

But over time, not only through the strikes, but through the rhetoric we heard from the U.S., I think we saw an administration that conflated the regime and the people. And we use this phrase sort of “hearts and minds,” and maybe people are quick to dismiss it. But if the objective was to get the Iranian people to rise up and to challenge the government, it’s very hard to get that kind of mobilization when you’re also attacking them and making what they saw as derogatory comments about their religion on Easter Sunday and all these things.

And so I think for some Iranians—we heard about real splits within the diaspora—but internally, I think there was a real struggle between those who both found themselves stuck with a regime that they didn’t want and a war that was conducted in a way that they didn’t want.

Harris: On those goals and thinking about this was a war that the people didn’t want, but now we’ve reached a point where we have reached a cease-fire. But I’m still kind of stuck in this idea that I don’t know that we’ve ever gotten a clear definition of why the administration is there.

They’ve said all of these various reasons why they’re there, and now they’re saying that, well, the Strait of Hormuz, it’s reopening, and that’s the sort of victory, but that was just a byproduct of war. So, Tom, Nancy, either of you can answer this one, have they clearly defined our reason for being there?

Nichols: No. No. (Laughs.) Now we have a very clear reason, which is to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which wouldn’t have been closed if we hadn’t gone to war in the first place. In that sense, yes, we created a clear war aim by starting a war.

I think the important thing is to go back to the first day of this war and to realize, regardless of how many times Trump denies it, this was a regime-change war. It was meant to be a regime-change war. And we’re seeing that now—there was this piece from The New York Times that was very detailed and was kind of a minute-by-minute explanation of how the administration went to war.

It was clear Trump said, We’re gonna hit them really hard, and then the regime’s gonna fall. And, boy, how rarely do I say this about people in Trump’s orbit, but to their credit, people like the CIA director said—I believe the word he used to describe that scenario was “farcical.”

But Trump didn’t wanna hear it, because remember, Trump wish-casts; I say this every time we talk about him. He tries to manifest things into being. He’s like, Yeah, yeah, I know it’s a problem, but if we just do it, it will happen—“if you build it, they will come” kind of thinking. And he launched the war, expected the regime to fall, and it didn’t.

And when that didn’t happen, everything went to hell. They didn’t know what to do next. So he just said, General, have you got more operations here? [General:] Yeah, we can hit plenty. Iran is a target-rich environment. We can bomb stuff all day long.

But as I used to teach at the Naval War College years ago: Operational successes without strategic direction don’t get you toward victory.

Harris: And what does the military do when they don’t have that strategic direction and when they’re pulling all of these different threads, right? If this is a regime change, you’re going to do a specific thing for regime change, as opposed to I’m doing a specific thing for liberation of people, as opposed to I’m doing specific things to open up a street that wouldn’t have been closed otherwise. So how do they plan when there is no strategic direction?

Nichols: That’s not their job. Their job is to plan operations. The very senior military leaders are supposed to ask that question: We have these packages. We have these target sets. We have these objectives we can achieve. What is it you want us to do, Mr. President? Where are we supposed to be going with this?

And in the absence of that, they do operations. They say, Okay, well, we can destroy some more factories. We can blow up some more airfields. We can take out some more boats. We can do that all day, at least until we start running out of ammo.

So in the end, the people that are supposed to know that are the kind of people that Pete Hegseth has been firing left and right.

Look, this is one of the most war-gamed scenarios in modern American history. We have been war-gaming scenarios about fighting with Iran for almost 50 years. They’ve got tons of operational plans sitting on the shelves about everything. But if the president just kind of wanders into the candy store and says, Gimme one of those, gimme one of those, and give me one of those, the military salutes smartly and says, Yes, sir.

Youssef: Can I jump in, Adam? ’Cause Tom made so many great points, and I wanna just build on a couple of them.

Harris: Yeah, absolutely.

Youssef: The firings—we’ve had a lot of generals and admirals fired, including the head of the Army, during this conflict. Now, usually, when a general or admiral is fired during war, it’s for the conduct of the war. That didn’t appear to be the case in this instance; this was personal animosity—a secretary who was micromanaging personnel decisions in the Army, looking to put his own stamp on that service.

And while this was largely a war from the air and sea, the Army had an important role. The air defenses that you heard about, the Patriots and the THAADs, those are Army-operated system. Restocking the munitions that were used for them, it falls on the Army chief of staff, and he was fired during this conflict. And so I think that’s important to note, just the pace at which these personnel changes were happening.

The other thing I wanna point out is, for all the reasons that the United States gave for conducting this war, Iran was very consistent throughout: They wanted to survive as a regime. They wanted compensation for the damages to their country. And so I think, to Tom’s point, when one side doesn’t have clear strategic aims and the other does, no amount of firepower can resolve that. And what you saw the Iranians do is take that strategy and marry it with an asymmetric-warfare approach to take away the advantage that the United States had, with much stronger munitions training, planes, weapons, ships. And so that’s where the strategy, I think, sort of—or lack thereof—played out on the battlefield.

Nichols: Two quick points—the other thing about Nancy’s point about the Army: The Army took casualties. We spent a lot of time on watching television about the air war, but when some of those bases got hit, those were Army people that we lost.

The other is, this looks a lot like Ukraine. It was exactly the same imbalance of interests. [Russian President Vladimir] Putin went in, thought he was gonna just knock the Ukrainian regime over in a day—or three days or four days. But also, when that didn’t happen, Putin didn’t have a clear set of goals. It was just: throw more guys and more bodies, and blow up more buildings.

And just like the Iranians, the Ukrainians had a strategic goal: survive, and control the territory and the government of Ukraine. And they have, so far.

Harris: Nancy, we know that no one really wins in war in terms of human suffering. But even so, we now have this cease-fire, and I wonder, based on everything you’ve said here, is Iran actually the winner of the cease-fire?

Youssef: Well, I should start by saying that the cease-fire is very tenuous. Almost immediately, Iran announced that the strait would be effectively shut down again because Israel, which did not believe in the part of the agreement that said that Lebanon would not be attacked, carried out extensive attacks on Lebanon. So it’s all very fragile because there are three parties with three different interests, and we don’t know the specifics of the deal.

Now, having said that, Trump, among the reasons he gave is that he didn’t want Iran to have a nuclear weapon. But I think what Iran discovered is that they actually have a deterrent capability that is immediately available to them right now, that allows them to make revenue off of it, that allows them to have great influence over the global economy, and that was the Strait of Hormuz.

I don’t know that Iran needs to look to nuclear capabilities as much, having now been empowered with some control over the Strait of Hormuz. One of the things that they have said is that they wanna maintain that control. And so what Iran has come out of this, I think, is a new form of deterrence against future warfare—not inviting sanctions through the prospects of a nuclear program, but rather sort of saying, If you punish us, it now affects the global economy, or certainly has that potential.

That was always sort of their nuclear option of sorts, that if it came down to the threat to their survival—which this, for them, was—that they would exercise that option of the strait. And now that they have, and I think, going forward, we’re gonna see them try to continue to collect revenue, as they did during the war, to rebuild and potentially rebuild the regime from the strikes that they’ve endured throughout these past 39 days.

[Music]

Harris: After the break, the turmoil inside the Trump administration over this war and what that means on the battlefield.

[Break]

Harris: Tom, one of the things that I couldn’t necessarily wrap my head around, it was maybe an irony that was really troubling me on Sunday into Monday into Tuesday, as the president’s threats became more hostile, severe, incendiary—whichever adjective you’d like to use there—and that was that he was saying things that people clearly identified as war crimes and Congress has not yet declared a war. And so I guess, constitutionally, this is still something that’s worth asking: Will Congress ever declare a war, or does it matter at this point?

Nichols: No, and it doesn’t matter at this point. There’s a couple of things to think about and reasons that Democrats would be hesitant to declare a war as well. Wartime conditions vastly empower a president.

What I think people like Tim Kaine and others among the Democrats wanted was a war-powers resolution, to be able to rein in Trump by law and by budgetary authority from this conflict. But now that it’s over—and I think it is over for the foreseeable future—there’s no point in it.

Republicans didn’t wanna do it because Trump kept sending them signals: Stop saying “war”; it’s a military operation, which is part of the reason, I think, that the war was never popular. I’ve never seen this happen before, where a president embarks on a major military operation and not only gets no bump out of it, but actually starts to bleed support over time. Even in the first stages of Vietnam, the American people rallied around Lyndon Johnson. This is really unprecedented in modern times.

Harris: Yeah, and you said that you think that it’s over for the foreseeable future, right? But if we are operating under the idea that the cease-fire is tenuous, what leads you to say that it’s over?

Nichols: Because Trump’s entire political body language for weeks now has been, Get me out of this.

I think what we saw, from Easter onward and leading up to those really feverish statements, was panic and flailing. He lost control of the situation within the first week, when the things he wanted to happen didn’t happen.

And ever since then, he’s been trying to manipulate markets and wish-cast solutions and announce things, hoping that just by announcing them they become reality, like deals: We’re gonna make a great deal. They’re begging me for a deal. None of that happened. And I think the last thing anybody wants in Washington right now is to have to go back into this.

Nancy and I were talking at one point about General [Dan] Caine’s briefing, which really sounded like a wrap-up. It didn’t sound like a Here’s where we are on the eve of a cease-fire. It sounded like a Welp, it’s been 39 days. Here’s all the stuff we destroyed. Thank you, and good evening.

Harris: I was watching that press conference on Wednesday morning as well, and there seemed to be two different postures that were coming from Caine and Secretary Hegseth. Am I wrong in that? ’Cause General Caine did seem as if he was wrapping things up.

General Dan Caine: Over the course of 38 days of major combat operation, the joint force achieved the military objectives as defined by the president. We welcome—

Harris: But Secretary Hegseth kept going back to this idea that, Well, the reason why we’re at the cease-fire and the reason why this deal came is because of the president’s threats.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth: Other presidents marked time and kick the can down the road. President Trump made history.

Harris: Because he’s shown that he’s willing to go there, and he is still willing to go there.

Hegseth: So they still may shoot here and there, but that would be very, very unwise.

Harris: Kind of leaving that option hanging out there felt like a different thing than what General Caine was saying.

Nichols: Yeah, of course that’s what Pete Hegseth’s going to say, because while this war has been going on, there’s been another drama going on at the Pentagon: Pete Hegseth’s worried about his job.

And if you wonder why the secretary of the Army came out in recent days and said, I’m not quitting; I have no plans to resign; I’m not getting fired, as far as I know, that’s Dan Driscoll, and he has been floated as the most likely replacement for Pete Hegseth.

So every time you see Pete Hegseth, just assume that all he’s doing is speaking to Donald Trump and saying, Please keep me in my job.

Harris: Nancy, one of the things Tom mentioned was the deference that Republicans have had, traditionally, to the president over the last several years, in both terms in office. But some members of his own party, right, had become vocally critical of his threats in recent days. What are they saying now that this cease-fire has gone into effect?

Youssef: I think that you’re hearing relief. Throughout those statements, it was notable to me, yes, there were Republicans that spoke up, but the silence that happened throughout, particularly after the president threatened to destroy a country’s civilization; the silence after Hegseth, in one of those press conferences, talked about “no quarter,” and then, days later, U.S. service members were flying an F-15E over Iran and had to escape because the Iranians shot it down.

There was a lot of really bombastic language that happened throughout this war. And again, I think Tom’s right in terms of the audience that often Hegseth is speaking to, but it is heard around the world. And it was striking to me that we didn’t hear the kind of pushback I think that maybe some would’ve expected, given the impact on the battlefield. You could feel the discomfort in that silence, but it wasn’t enough to challenge the president’s assertions, and that was striking to me.

I should also note that there was a willingness to kind of support funding in the war, which, at the time, the president was asking for $200 billion. I think the question going forward will be whether they continue to support the military in terms of the budget. The president’s asking for $1.5 trillion. Much of that will go towards rebuilding some of the damage that happened to ships—we saw the USS Gerald Ford, the newest aircraft carrier, caught on fire during this conflict—the restocking of munitions, particularly those air defenses.

There is a cost, and I think the Republicans will be confronted with sort of whether they’re willing to pay for it literally and then in terms of political costs, given that the president had campaigned on the promise to not go into these kinds of wars in this region specifically.

Harris: Yeah, and even, right, considering his promises not to go into wars in these regions specifically and other ways that the president has sort of gone back on things that he said during the campaign, alongside the sort of increasingly erratic, of sorts, behavior that he has been exhibiting, Tom, right, there have been calls from notable right-wing figures for the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to be invoked. Of course, that is the most nuclear option there and probably the most involved option. But those folks were former representatives, folks like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Joe Walsh, Adam Kinzinger, but you ended up getting folks like Alex Jones. Is there a point where the sort of more mainstream part of the party starts to push back if the president’s behavior becomes even more erratic than it has been in recent weeks?

Nichols: Boy, that is a great question because what would constitute more erratic than starting a war half a world away with a country of 90 million people and then threatening to erase their civilization from the planet?

I think what you’re seeing, though, is Republicans, rather than rising in opposition or thinking about the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, they’re doing a much more time-honored Washington tradition. They’re going to the press, and they’re ratting each other out. And they’re distancing themselves from the president.

That whole report about the decision to go to war, basically, you had everybody in the room saying, Well, I didn’t think it was a good idea.

Harris: Yeah.

Nichols: The only guy who gets thrown under the bus in that whole account—and he’s thrown under the bus by all of his colleagues—is Pete Hegseth.

The other thing that’s happening—and this goes back to the conversation you were just having with Nancy about budgets—do the Republicans really wanna go out there in a few months? Because, just to back up for a moment, the economic damage from this war is going to reverberate now for months. And I think a lot of Republicans out there are saying, I can’t really do anything about the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, but I don’t wanna run on a 40 percent defense budget increase while the president’s saying we can’t fund Medicare.

So I think there’s a lot of trouble for Republicans because of Donald Trump, but I don’t think he goes anywhere, and I think that’s actually worse for Republicans. Instead of becoming the fuel for more Republican victories, Donald Trump has become a giant millstone, an albatross around the necks of Republicans now.

Harris: Yep. As he is, in your words, right, an albatross around the neck of the Republicans, I still come back to this thought that this is just the second year of this administration. And so even if we have the sort of changeover in Congress, if Democrats reclaim the House, there are still several more years of a Trump administration. And I am kind of left to wonder, where do we go from here, Tom, Nancy? Where can the U.S. go from here in terms of its reputation? We have turned war crimes into a bargaining chip of political policy.

Nichols: I think if the Democrats win in November, his presidency’s effectively over. And I think that will make him completely bananas, and he will say and do even crazier and more dangerous things that will harm the reputation of the presidency and the United States. But I also think that he will now be more constrained in what he can do, especially—I can’t believe that we’re even thinking of this, because this was impossible a few months ago—especially if he loses the House and the Senate. But if he loses the House, which you don’t ever wanna say anything’s inevitable, but seems inevitable, then I think you get crazier rhetoric, but more responsible government in the short term.

Youssef: I think on a global scale, what we saw from this war is another region that is sort of reconsidering its relationship with the United States from a security perspective. In the run-up to this, you’ll remember that the president threatened to attack Greenland, and you saw the sort of shocks of that go through Europe in terms of could they count on the United States as a reliable partner. During this conflict, he threatened to leave NATO because they wouldn’t come to the defense of the strait and then later said that we didn’t need NATO, because we don’t need the oil and we don’t care about the strait. So again, there was sort of a tension there.

The Gulf states had really pinned their security on their relationship with the United States. They had bases throughout the region because they thought those bases would be a security guarantee. As it turns out, it made them a bigger target. They had built defense relationships with the United States, hoping that that would lead to security, and again, it ended up making them a target. Now, there are a few options for the Gulf in terms of how they look at alternatives, but I do think we’re gonna see them start to diversify in light of how these past 39 days have gone.

And so I think the most immediate takeaway is we’re gonna see another consequential part of the world really reassess its relationship with the United States, given the events of these past 39 days and how the war has played out and the impact that has had on them and the U.S. response to that.

Nichols: One interesting thing here, I think, is we’ve worried a lot about terrorism and payback and all those other things that you should worry about when you embark on this kind of war. But Nancy’s point about the Gulf states—the Iranians may decide to play nice with Europe and the United States to keep us occupied elsewhere, but really take it out on the Gulf states and make it clear: Don’t ever do this again. You chose poorly. It’s possible that the Gulf states have to be more worried about that even than we do.

Harris: Yeah. Well, there will be a lot to look out for in the coming days and weeks. Tom, Nancy, thanks for joining me.

Nichols: Thank you.

Youssef: Thank you.

[Music]

Harris: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Rosie Hughes and Jinae West. It was edited by Kevin Townsend. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music. Sam Fentress fact-checked. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

I’m Adam Harris. Hanna will be back next week. Thanks for listening.

What Can the Texas Primary Tell Us About Democrats?

2026-02-28T06:00:00-05:00

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This week, the Atlantic staff writer Elaine Godfrey was covering a campaign rally in Texas when she was ushered out. Elaine has been covering national politics for years, and has been turned away before—but, she says that has usually happened to her at Trump rallies. This time, she was turned away by a Democrat running in a Senate primary.

Representative Jasmine Crockett is known for her confrontational style, and it serves her well with her constituents, voters, and Democrats who are tired of playing nice when Republicans don’t. Last year, Godfrey profiled Crockett for The Atlantic, a story that Crockett tried to “shut down” when she found out her House colleagues were being interviewed. “Crockett is testing out the coarser, insult-comedy-style attacks that the GOP has embraced under Trump, the general idea being that when the Republicans go low, the Democrats should meet them there,” Godfrey wrote at the time. Is that where the rest of the party might be heading? We talked to Godfrey about her experience at the rally and the upcoming primary election in Texas.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Adam Harris: The Texas Senate primaries are drawing national headlines. You may have heard of the Democratic candidates: Representative Jasmine Crockett, whose spat with Marjorie Taylor Greene in 2024 lit up social media

Representative Jasmine Crockett: If someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleach-blonde, bad-built, butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?

Representative James Comer: A what now?

Harris: —or James Talarico, who was recently interviewed by Stephen Colbert—an interview Colbert said CBS tried to bar him from airing.

State Representative James Talarico: I think that Donald Trump is worried that we’re about to flip Texas. (Applause.)

Harris: And both candidates would have a big hill to climb. No Democrat has won a statewide election in Texas since 1994, and promising candidates, from Beto O’Rourke to Wendy Davis, have tried and failed to change that fact.

But people think Crockett or Talarico really could. And it’s making them wonder: Is this the year for a Democrat in Texas?

This is Radio Atlantic, and I’m Adam Harris, sitting in for Hanna Rosin. Atlantic staff writer Elaine Godfrey has been covering this Texas race and also following Representative Crockett. She profiled her last year.

And then, while Elaine was at a Crockett campaign event this week, this happened.

Elaine Godfrey: Why are you asking me to leave?

Woman: They just said, “Elaine from Atlantic, white girl with a hat and notepad. She’s interviewing people in the crowd. She’s a top-notch hater and will spin. She needs to leave.”

I told her to get her bag and—

Harris: We’ll get into that soon.

Elaine, welcome to the show.

Godfrey: Adam, thank you for having me.

Harris: So the Texas Senate primary, why has this race captured the national media attention? What’s going on in the Texas primary?

Godfrey: I think what’s made the Texas primary on the Democrat side so exciting is that both of the candidates are really popular. Voters are excited about them both, genuinely. And also, the dynamic here is you have two fighters, and Democrats have been saying they want fighters against Trump. And each of these candidates does so in a different way.

So you have Jasmine Crockett, one of the Democrats. She’s a two-term congresswoman who is much sharper in her criticism of Trump, much more willing to throw insults, much more bombastic. She’s on cable news all the time. She’s in hearings blasting Trump and aggressively sort of questioning witnesses. And Democrats love this. They love to see a capital-F fighter.

Harris: Yeah.

Godfrey: You also have James Talarico, who is running against her, who is a state lawmaker in Texas; they used to be colleagues in the state legislature. He’s also a preacher in training. And he’s a little quieter. His approach is a lot more peace and love: We need to heal as a country. He talks a lot more about Let’s join hands with our Republican friends. Trump is made in the image of God, and we should be fighting against the top and the billionaires rather than each other.

So they’re both fighters, and they’re both sort of channeling Democratic rage and the rage of voters at this moment, but they’re doing so in very interesting ways. It’s such a perfect encapsulation of this moment, so it’s very exciting to watch.

Harris: Yeah. And so you’ve been watching this for a while. You go to Texas to cover the race. And then what happens?

Godfrey: I go to Texas to cover the race. (Laughs.) And this is my first event. I show up on Monday morning to an event for Jasmine Crockett. There’s a line out the door. It’s in Lubbock, Texas. It’s in a rural area, an event center on a county road. I’m interviewing all of these people who have come to see Crockett. They’re so excited. The vibes are really good.

I come in. I show my badge. They put me in the press section. I watched the whole rally. I was taking notes the whole time. It was the kind of rally that I think, if you’re a candidate, you want a reporter to be at ’cause she looked great. She came off great. People loved it.

Afterwards, they had a press availability for her. And there were only a few press there, most local. And I went over to join, and after I identified myself, one of her press people said, It’s already full. You can’t go in there. I said, Okay. So I went back to keep interviewing people who were lingering in the building.

And then a different person came up to me and said, Her team wants you to leave. And I said, Why? She read from her phone, and she said, They’re looking for Elaine from The Atlantic, a white girl in a baseball cap with a notepad. She’s a top-notch hater, and she will spin. She needs to leave.

I don’t think they were supposed to have read that message to me. (Laughs.) But they did, and then, immediately, security guards surrounded me and escorted me out of the building, through the parking lot, to the edge of the county road, where I had to get an Uber.

Harris: And you recorded this whole interaction, and it’s a good thing that you did record it ’cause after you published the article, the campaign denied it. They said that they didn’t actually say that.

Godfrey: Yeah. First, a spokesperson for Crockett said that that didn’t happen. Then a CBS reporter was interviewing Crockett and asked about it, and Crockett said, There’s no evidence that a reporter was ejected from my event. She also said, The specific reporter in question has a reputation for not being truthful and has been sued for defamation successfully.

She didn’t say my name at any point, but it was pretty clear she was talking about me. (Laughs.) I have since reached out to her and to her campaign multiple times to say, Could you clarify what you meant?, and I haven’t heard anything back.

Harris: And for the record, have you been sued for defamation successfully?

Godfrey: (Laughs.) I have not. No, I haven’t.

Harris: (Laughs.) Yeah.

In thinking about being turned away from rallies, we’ve seen, over the last several years, instances of reporters being turned away at campaign events. Has something like this ever happened to you before?

Godfrey: Yeah, at Trump rallies.

Harris: Hmm.

Godfrey: But they’ve treated me better at Trump rallies when they do this, I would say. (Laughs.) This has only happened a couple times at Trump rallies, where they’ve sort of said, We don’t have room for you, which that’s never true, but it’s never You’re a top-notch hater kind of thing.

And so, yeah, it has happened. I would say the kicking reporters out of rallies, Trump’s fans love that. A lot of Jasmine Crockett’s fans seem to like that too. They like the way that she sort of manhandles people, the way that she says, You know what? I’m not putting up with that.

hat she didn’t like and that she had tried to shut down because it was something that she thought was gonna be unflattering.

Harris: How did she try to shut it down?

Godfrey: So she called me four days before that profile of her was gonna be published, and she said, I heard you’ve been talking to members of Congress, my colleagues—her colleagues—without asking me, without my permission, she said, and so I will be revoking all permissions and shutting down the profile.

That is, obviously, not how journalism works. (Laughs.) So we published it. You can read it at TheAtlantic.com. I think it’s pretty fair and good. She gave me tons of access for that story. She talked to me a lot for it. I think it’s pretty fair, and I think that was pretty surprising, that she tried to shut it down and even more surprising that now, she appears to be holding that against me to this day. (Laughs.)

Harris: Yeah. So you mentioned that she’s sort of no shrinking violet, right? This is a part of who she is as a politician. It’s a capital-F fighter. You put it in your piece—you said she doesn’t wilt before the president “like cut hydrangeas.” So is this indicative of maybe a broader trend in the party? That we had the classic Michelle Obama “When they go low, we go high”—is this a way of sort of signaling that there’s an end to that?

Godfrey: I think, for some candidates, yeah. Republicans have already blown past that benchmark, right? There is an appetite now for Democrats to do the same.

And I don’t know if it means we’ll see more reporters getting thrown out of rallies, but specifically, when it comes to swearing, insulting people, not being willing to correct the record if you make a mistake or if accuse someone of having been accused of defamation, I think there is just a real increase in tolerance on the left now for that because they’re saying, Well, look at the guy in the White House. He does that all the time. Why can’t we? More importantly, why shouldn’t we? If we wanna win, we might have to play dirty. I think the midterms are probably gonna have a lot more of that than we’ve seen before.

Harris: Yeah. So of course, you were in Lubbock, so you’re in West Texas. You don’t just stay in West Texas and then leave. You continue on, continue to cover this race, so you go out to Tyler, and there’s a part in your story where you say you were asking folks, Why James Talarico?, and at the Crockett rally, similarly, Why Jasmine Crockett? And they seem to have a interest in the other candidate, but it was just about that style.

Can you just talk to me a little bit about that? What is that actually saying, that they’re both interested in the policies and the people, but the style is really what’s different?

Godfrey: Yeah. I was surprised, given how controversial or ugly the primary has seemed online and from the outside, that when I got there, people who like Jasmine Crockett still told me, But I like that James Talarico too. He seems nice. I’m not gonna vote for him, but he seems nice. And if he was in a general, I’d vote for him.

People were not so much interested in their policies. They were interested in style. People who liked Crockett liked that she was gonna go out there and go after Trump, gonna prosecute people when Democrats were back in power.

People who like Talarico, they were kind of playing a little bit of 3-D chess, right? They were saying, Well, I like Talarico because I think he’ll appeal to more Republicans and independents and moderates when the general election comes. So maybe some of them would prefer Crockett, but they were thinking about electability. And I think Democrats in Texas are really balancing this urge for a fighter with a desire to win.

Harris: So we’ve been talking about the Democratic candidates. Obviously, the primaries are on Tuesday, and you’ve been watching the Republican side as well, so what should we be looking out for?

Godfrey: So I think the Republicans have their own real mess over there, I would say. There’s three Republicans in the race: John Cornyn, who’s already a senator, who’s running for reelection; Ken Paxton, attorney general, who is running against him; and Wesley Hunt, who is sort of the spoiler in the race. (Laughs.) People like him. He may be the force that sets the race to a runoff.

But I’m watching what happens if Paxton is the nominee. Right now polls show he’s probably gonna beat Cornyn; he’s probably gonna be the Republican nominee for the race. And here’s why Democrats love to hear this: because Paxton brings a ton of baggage. He was impeached and acquitted over allegations of bribery and corruption. He was accused by his wife of having an affair. He has this long laundry list of scandals that Republicans are worried is gonna make him just a toxic candidate and Democrats are really excited will make him so weak that a Democrat could finally win in Texas.

And I think part of what makes Talarico particularly exciting for a lot of Democrats is they think he has the best chance to beat Paxton if it comes down to a head-to-head. I think Crockett probably would have a good chance, too, although her unfavorables are very high compared Talarico’s.

So that is something I’ll be watching too—that’s something we’ll all be watching—is what happens on the Republican side, ’cause that’s really gonna determine what the chances are for a Democrat to win statewide in Texas for the first time in, like, 30 years.

Harris: Yeah. So they’re thinking it could be like a Doug Jones–Roy Moore situation.

Godfrey: Exactly. Yep.

Harris: Well, we’ll be watching, Elaine. Thank you so much.

Godfrey: Thank you for having me.

Harris: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid. Rob Smierciak engineered this episode and provided original music. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

I’m Adam Harris. Thank you for listening.

Black History Month Is Radical Now

2026-02-19T07:00:00-05:00

America loves its heroes. The nation has made lions of the men who signed a document 250 years ago to declare independence from the English crown; it’s made saints of the 55 men who gathered in a sweaty room in Philadelphia to draft its Constitution. Time elevates those people and their deeds to the heights of deities, and American gods must be faultless. But those heroes are not gods; they were, indeed, men—fallible as all others.

In the same city where the Founders wrote the words that have guided the nation for more than two centuries, George Washington—the most esteemed of them—made a home as America’s first president. He brought men and women he had enslaved with him, and rotated them between Philadelphia and Mount Vernon, in Virginia, so that they would not earn their liberty under Pennsylvania law. He shuffled them back and forth so that they would remain his property. These facts cannot be changed; only how they are remembered can.

For 16 years, an exhibit at Washington’s Philadelphia home, “The President’s House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation”—situated in the shadow of the Liberty Bell’s unambiguous nod to freedom’s ring—highlighted that difficult history. But in late January, a cadre of federal workers yanked placards from the site’s brick walls in response to a March 2025 executive order from the White House that shunned complication. In the order, President Trump had charged the secretary of the interior with ensuring that public monuments “focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.”

[Clint Smith: What it means to tell the truth about America]

Black History Month is sometimes treated as little more than an opportunity for corporate branding and, maybe, school assemblies; but in the face of such erasure, observing it this February feels radical. Black history in America is, of course, more than the story of enslavement and what was done to Black people on this continent across hundreds of years. It is a story of family, love, resilience, determination, achievement, and, yes, despair, wrapped into one package—what Black Americans achieved in spite of the fact that, for many years, they were not seen as fully Americans. It is not a simple history and it is not a story of unrelenting progress, because America’s history is neither of those things. To acknowledge the troubling, shameful aspects of American history is not to denigrate the Founders but to see them, and the others who made their livelihoods possible, as people. Black History Month calls on us to remember their humanity, and to remember the heroic and human deeds of those who have always been unsung.

This is a milestone year for America. It marks both the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the 100th anniversary of an effort to recover and recount the contributions of Black Americans left out of the national narrative—what was launched in 1926 as Negro History Week and then became Black History Month in 1976. One anniversary honors the nation’s founding ideals; the other reckons with its failures to live up to them. Both offer an essential—and timely—opportunity to acknowledge the ambitions and shortcomings of America’s grand and unfinished experiment.

The majority of Americans experience Black History Month as a formula. Students prepare PowerPoint or posterboard projects about people such as Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, or Jackie Robinson—or, for those who would venture further in our history, Phillis Wheatley, the nation’s first published Black poet. Businesses invite speakers and hold events for staff. Civic associations host dinners.

That is not how Black History Month began, though. Its precursor was established by Carter G. Woodson, the historian and founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, at a time when eugenics—race science and the idea that white people were genetically superior to Black people—was finally being challenged as the pseudoscience it is. “The greatest scholars of today are saying that there is no such thing as race in science, and that there is nothing in anthropology or psychology to support such myths as the inferiority and superiority of races,” the 1927 announcement for Negro History Week reads. “These truths, however, will have little bearing on the uplift of the negro if they are left in the state of academic discussion.” From its inception, the event was designed to be a chance to tell the truth about the past in public—the whole truth.

In 1976, Negro History Week became Black History Month, and was officially acknowledged by President Gerald Ford. The nation, founded on “individual rights,” was turning 200—but Black Americans had only just had their right to vote reinforced by law. Every president since then has issued a proclamation to celebrate Black History Month. Freedom is a struggle, Ronald Reagan’s proclamation said in 1986, echoing Frederick Douglass’s exhortation that if there is no struggle, there is no progress. “The American experience and character can never be fully grasped until the knowledge of black history assumes its rightful place in our schools and our scholarship,” Reagan wrote.

[Vann R. Newkirk II: American democracy is only 55 years old–and hanging by a thread]

On February 3, President Trump continued that tradition, and signed a proclamation of his own for Black History Month. “From the very beginning, our country has been blessed with countless black American heroes,” he stated, before lambasting people who have “needlessly divided” the public over race. “As President, I proclaim that ‘black history’ is not distinct from American history—rather, the history of Black Americans is an indispensable chapter in our grand American story.”

But what his administration is doing belies whatever nice words Trump had to say about Black heroes. Its actions to limit what aspects of Black history can be included in the American story betray Trump’s real meaning. His administration has renamed monuments for Confederate traitors, scrubbed memorials to the contributions of Black military service members, and purged writings by authors such as Maya Angelou from the U.S. Naval Academy library; this is an ongoing project.

Other politicians have made a concerted effort to curtail examinations of American history over the past several years. State lawmakers have limited what can be taught in public schools. Florida passed a law that warns teachers not to “persuade students to a particular point of view,” and blocked an Advanced Placement curriculum for African American studies. Oklahoma barred “discriminatory principles,” such as the idea that people bear responsibility for what someone of their race did in the past; teachers at one school said they were told to stop saying “Black excellence” to motivate their students. The Trump administration’s executive orders targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives have created confusion and a climate of fear—not least because administration officials have been vague about what punishments districts, universities, and nonprofits might face for running afoul of their ideological standards and about what would even constitute a violation.

That haze has led to a drawback of even the most anodyne of celebrations honoring Black achievement. Last month, Indiana University at Indianapolis canceled its annual Martin Luther King Jr. Dinner—held, without fail, every year since 1969—citing budget cuts. As a joint production of the university and its Black Student Union, the dinner was a marquee event in town. But halfway through 2025, IU closed its DEI office. State law had mandated that it shut down all DEI-adjacent programs, which meant the Black Student Union would lose a portion of its funding—funding that would have helped support the dinner.

On January 13, in response to a community outcry, the chancellor, Latha Ramchand, said the university was trying to “reimagine” its “affinity dinners” and other such events. “In short, the MLK Dinner is not going away—rather we are in a moment of transition and the work of this task force will help us create its next iteration.” But traditions gain salience through time and repetition. When they are interrupted, when we stop choosing them consistently, they lose their heft.

[Clint Smith: Those who try to erase history will fail]

At its most elemental, Black History Month is about seeing the nation in full. It invites complexity. Booker T. Washington, who created the Tuskegee Institute and built it into an academic juggernaut for Black students, was the most powerful Black man of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Even his critics were forced to confess as much and admire his brilliance. Acknowledging his greatness does not mean forgetting that his philosophy would have allowed—at least in the short term—the continuation of Black Americans’ second-class citizenship. “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers,” he told a predominantly white audience at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta in 1895, “yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”

Trump is correct that the United States is one nation with a shared history—people, places, dates, and events. But that history has been experienced differently by different people. It is a nation of the enslaved and the enslaver. It is also a nation built on principles. And one feels bad about telling the true legacy of the slaveholder only if one identifies, in some way, with his actions rather than his nobler ideals. To recognize the divide between someone’s stated values and their actions is to recognize where they should have done better and where we can still do better.

On Monday, citing George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, a federal judge ordered the administration to restore the placards at Washington’s old home in Philadelphia. History could not be erased. “The government here likewise asserts truth is no longer self-evident, but rather the property of the elected chief magistrate and his appointees and delegees,” Judge Cynthia Rufe, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote. “An agency, whether the Department of the Interior, NPS, or any other agency, cannot arbitrarily decide what is true, based on its own whims or the whims of the new leadership, regardless of the evidence before it.”

A day later, Jesse Jackson died at the age of 84. The civil-rights leader’s two upstart presidential campaigns revealed how limited America’s political imagination was at the time; his platform would become the foundation of the progressive movement for the next three decades. Sometimes I look at black-and-white photos of Jackson—playing basketball with Marvin Gaye, standing next to King on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis before he was murdered, or preparing to deliver the first joint address by a Black man to the Alabama legislature since Reconstruction. It’s easy to think of Jackson in the past. But he was also human, and lived until it was no longer this world but his friend John Lewis that he would see in the morning.

In 2019, members of Congress were preparing to discuss H.R. 40, a bill that would study reparations for slavery—a bill to atone for history. I spoke with Jackson ahead of the hearing. We talked about racism, reparations, and ultimately about hope. It felt natural to wonder where someone who had seen so much bad in U.S. history continued to draw his resolve from. Jackson told me that his own hope stemmed from the fact that the truth cannot be erased. “The truth of slavery—that Africans subsidized America’s wealth—that truth will not go away,” he said. History must be remembered. His death is a reminder that the duty to contend with that history falls to those who are still on this Earth.

One of Our Own

2026-01-30T12:00:00-05:00

For Lowell

There are things which, said and true,
are of this generation’s past;
of fighting freedom’s battles
and of taking off the mask—

stories of the actions taken,
to blot out the blights of sin,
how heroes and the valorous
fought their enemies within,

of turning boldly with the light
to evil’s war against the truth.
And now that struggle is renewed:
given birth and a new youth.

We must fight this same malady
with courage and resolve,
for our nation is the sum
of the action of us all.

Would we be traitors to our
bugle, which beckons with its call?

—

Children used as bait to bargain
with their parents in deceit;
bodies lying lifeless, static,
shot dead, cold, in the street.

This has been the nation’s song.
Read of Adams’s decree:
There’s “Dignity” and “Majesty”
in tea thrown in the sea.

“Something notable And striking,”
he wrote in his diary.
One could not help but to see
an “Epocha in History.”

They quartered troops among them,
amid times of bitter peace,
when that massacre in Boston,
for a nation, stained a lease.

They won freedom for their people
but in fine print said: be damned.
To that man who said, of ham, they’d
“rob old Tony, Doll, and Sam”

the hypocrisy was notable,
and took some years to fight—
those critics of the sheep-stealer,
who in man-stealers delight—
Until those people stole away,
and set fire to freedom’s light.

—

Those things ripple and echo,
blaring loudly on repeat
that which would better a re-
public: from sea to shining sea.

Our nation needed purpose
and it lacked, almighty, God.
He who told of tribulations
warned us of the chastening rod.

As the great believer cautioned,
treachery says up when down;
it “scatters whole families”
without second thought or sound.

“New occasions teach new duties”;
again we’ve found this to be true,
and the only question lingering
is what are we to do.

Virginia
January 24, 2026

Gregg Popovich’s Life Lessons

2025-05-08T09:30:00-04:00

Last Halloween, not long after the kids finished trick-or-treating and got in bed, I settled on my couch to watch the San Antonio Spurs, my favorite basketball team. Five games into a new season, I was full of optimism. The team was a healthy mix of savvy veterans, young stars, and Victor Wembanyama, the most hyped NBA prospect since LeBron James. If the players found the right chemistry, perhaps this could be the year that the Spurs snapped an uncharacteristic playoff drought. And led by Gregg Popovich, a Hall of Fame coach who directed his players like a maestro conducting an orchestra, this scenario really did seem possible.

That night, the Spurs won the game, Wembanyama had an insane stat line, and everything was looking up. But a few weeks later, I got the sinking feeling that it might have been Popovich’s final hurrah. In mid-November, the Spurs announced that Popovich had suffered a mild stroke that would keep him off the sidelines for the foreseeable future. As the season progressed, he continued to stay away from the team. And on Friday, Popovich—or “Pop,” as he is often called—announced that he would be stepping down as head coach after nearly 29 seasons at the helm, and transitioning into a full-time role as the team’s president of basketball operations. Every Spurs fan had been mentally preparing for this moment since Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili, Tony Parker, and other defining players of the 21st century, all of whom Popovich had coached, hung up their sneakers one by one. Popovich himself is 76 years old, and Father Time is undefeated. But to realize that he was indeed mortal was heartbreaking.

In the symphony of tributes that followed the announcement, I thought of one person: David Robinson, the first superstar to play with Pop. San Antonio is a military city with one major sports team, and Robinson, the U.S. Naval Academy graduate whose playing nickname was “the Admiral,” was an informal figurehead. In October 2014, I attended a conference in a hotel ballroom outside of Austin where Robinson delivered a keynote address about leadership. Naturally, his speech turned to Pop. “He’s not afraid to be countercultural,” Robinson said. Mainstream basketball culture was self-congratulatory, but Pop’s style, Robinson suggested, was to say, “No, don’t look at me.”

Countercultural was exactly right, because Pop did things differently. In a league built around individual personalities, Pop created a winning team environment. He brought an internationality to the game—in terms of both the players he pursued and the style of basketball they played. Perhaps most important, he realized that although basketball is a game with winners and losers, the National Basketball Association is a business. Coaching was his job, not his life—a perspective he tried to inculcate in everyone, players and fans and sports journalists alike.

John W. McDonough / Sports Illustrated / Getty

Pop’s global perspective came from his own background. He was born in Indiana to a Serbian father and a Croatian mother; for college, he attended the U.S. Air Force Academy and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Soviet studies. After his mandatory five years of service in the military, he began coaching at Pomona College in Southern California, where he became the head coach in 1979. He made himself at home, talking politics with students, popularizing something called a “Serbian taco,” and playing intramurals with professors. Eventually, the Spurs came calling.

By 1996, Popovich had risen through the organization to become the head coach. The next year, a series of unfortunate injuries—primarily to Robinson—meant the team was one of the worst in the league, giving them better odds in the NBA draft lottery, where they won the No. 1 pick: Tim Duncan. A native of the Virgin Islands, Duncan became the ideal linchpin for Popovich’s tenure. Pop would later explain that Duncan was something of a soulmate—the one person he would prefer to have a conversation at dinner with over anyone else. “He is the most real, consistent, true person that I have ever met,” Popovich once said.

[Read: San Antonio, the Spurs, and me]

To complement Duncan, Popovich ignored American high-school prodigies and blue-chip college prospects and instead drafted an array of unheralded international players who were a fit for his preferred style of play: cohesive, defense-first basketball that emphasized passing. No single player was bigger than the team. Pulling from his experience overseas, Pop’s teams resembled the pass-heavy, positionless style of European soccer revolutionized by the Dutch legend Johan Cruyff. Players were essentially interchangeable, whipping the ball around quickly and dizzying opposing defenses. The result was basketball in its purest form. Players would pass up a good shot at the basket if it meant their teammate could take a great shot at the basket. Watching the Spurs offense, to me, felt like watching an artist at work—every brushstroke was intentional, and the finished product a masterpiece. (During Pop’s time as coach, the Spurs ultimately won five championships.)

Under Popovich, the Spurs drafted the French speedster Tony Parker and the Argentine dynamo Manu Ginóbili, whose respective “teardrop” and “Euro step” techniques were quickly emulated across the American game. The team’s roster often resembled a United Nations conference, with other players from Slovenia, Brazil, Australia, and Italy. More than internationalizing the game, though, Pop brought perspective. Players gushed about his infamous dinners, where he covered the tab and let the wine flow freely. He cared about his players as people, and worked to develop relationships that would outlive anyone’s tenure in the NBA.

“Winning the championship is great, but it fades quickly,” he once said. “The satisfaction I get from Tony Parker bringing his child into the office, or some other player who came through the program and now I hired him as a coach and he’s back—that’s satisfying.” This style was uncommon, yet contagious. In the business of sports, it’s natural to want to be the best at any cost—to be paid the most money, to get the most playing time, to win the most acclaim. But Popovich always behaved like his position was about more than just basketball.

Pop isn’t leaving the organization; still, this feels like an end, one that’s tugged on every emotion for me. Pop was the only head coach of my favorite basketball team for as long as I’ve been able to watch the sport. When I saw the news on Friday, I messaged Allen, my best friend of almost 20 years, with whom I had been texting back and forth during the game on Halloween—Pop’s last as the maestro.

I offered the only words I could summon: “Damn. Pop really retired.”

The Long Simmer of Political Violence in America

2024-07-15T16:39:54-04:00

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For the past several years, American politics have heated to a rolling boil. Members of Congress have been shot, an intruder attacked the House speaker’s husband in their home with a hammer, and a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Political violence is not new. Yet this weekend, when former President Donald Trump was shot at during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania—an apparent assassination attempt that left one person dead and two others injured—it felt as if the kettle had boiled over.

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, some officials across the political spectrum called for de-escalation. American politics have grown too pitched, they argued, and it is time to turn down the temperature.

The incident has turned a mirror on America. How did we get here? How true are the claims, as President Joe Biden put it in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, that “this is not who we are”? What does history tell us about the necessary steps to reclaim a peaceful democracy and retreat from what seems to be the point of no return?

On this bonus episode of Radio Atlantic, I spoke with staff writer Anne Applebaum and executive editor Adrienne LaFrance, who have both written about political violence in America and abroad, to examine these questions.

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

(Music)

News Archival: Oh, we see Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania. You can see his face. There’s blood coming from his ear. Not exactly sure what’s happened, but those are Secret Service agents trying to pull Donald Trump off the stage.

News Archival: The FBI continues to search for a motive in the shooting. All of this comes as the Republican National Convention begins today in Milwaukee.

President Joe Biden: A former president was shot. An American citizen was killed, while simply exercising the freedom to support the candidate of his choosing. We cannot—we must not—go down this road in America

Adam Harris: This Saturday, a gunman opened fire at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania, injuring candidate and former President Donald Trump, killing one person, and critically injuring two others.

We’re still learning details about the gunman himself and how people react to this horrible event.

What we do know now is that it was a tragic and terrifying inflection point in an already tense presidential campaign. I’m Adam Harris, and this is Radio Atlantic. Our regular host, Hanna Rosin, is working on a special project.

And with me to talk about this distressing moment in American politics and history are two Atlantic voices.

One is staff writer and historian Anne Applebaum. Hello, Anne.

Anne Applebaum: Greetings.

Harris: And Atlantic executive editor Adrienne LaFrance. Hey, Adrienne.

Adrienne LaFrance: Hey, Adam.

Harris: Thank you both for joining me on this bonus episode of Radio Atlantic. So, Anne, on Saturday, Americans saw something that they aren’t used to seeing in this modern era. As you’ve processed this with everyone else, what have you been thinking about over the last few days?

Applebaum: I’ve thought quite a lot about the normalization of violence.

There was an attempt to kidnap Nancy Pelosi.

The attacker used a hammer to attack her husband but had meant to reach her.

During the January 6 events, there were calls for the murder of Mike Pence. Somebody had a noose there ready for him. It’s hard to know how serious that was, but it was certainly—the language of assassination was present. And then there was also an attempt—however serious, still hard to tell—to kidnap and assassinate the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer.

So we’re actually in a moment when the normalization of violence, to use that phrase again, is part of the culture. And I should say it’s not only famous people, it’s election officials. It’s ordinary, low-level, local politicians. The idea that violence is an okay way to express your political opinion is much more widespread now than it was even just a few years ago.

Harris: And Adrienne, you know, responding to that, thinking about these previous events that we’ve seen even in this election cycle. In a cover story about extremism last year, you cited a 2022 UC Davis poll that found one in five Americans believed that political violence would be at least sometimes justified.

So what does this most recent instance say about the undercurrent of political violence in America?

LaFrance: I think Anne is exactly right that the signs of a society becoming more comfortable with political violence have been all around us for a while now, concerningly. It’s terrible. You mentioned the UC Davis study. They found a small but substantial percentage of Americans believe that lethal violence is justified to get to their preferred political ends.

You see more Americans bringing weapons to political protests in recent years, political aggression often expressed in the rhetoric of war, the building of political identities around hatred for the other or hatred of one’s political foes rather than articulation of whatever value someone might have.

So this has been in the air, in addition to the concrete examples that Anne provided of actual violence. Anyone who tracks this has been warning for years that we’re in it and that it’s getting worse.

Harris: And you mentioned something that, thinking about weapons and how guns factor into all of this—what is the sort of ramping up of access to firearms meant for the forms that political violence can take in American society?

LaFrance: One expert who I talked to in recent years—you know, I had been asking about where we should anticipate there to be violence, because the nature of political discourse is so dispersed. Often you hear people invoke the possibility of another civil war. And for Americans, I think you think of the Civil War of the 19th century understandably. But the kind of fight we’re having politically is different today. It’s just the way society is organized is different. And this person that I asked—I had asked, “Where should we look for the threats of violence?”—and I remember more than one expert telling me that it’s likely to be in places where there are already militia groups emerging, where people who do disagree strongly with one another bump up against one another, where there’s heightened partisanship, and in particular swing states.

So the states that came up again and again in those conversations were Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona. And so you know, I think guns are broadly available in America, generally, but with an incident like this, you have to ask about access to the weapon that was used.

Harris: And so as Adrienne mentioned, we often bring up this idea of a civil war, kind of around when we’re thinking about political violence, because that’s our sort of touchstone example. But is that the right way to be thinking about political violence in America?

Applebaum: It’s funny, I saw the movie Civil War, the one that came out recently, and although it was better than I thought it was going to be, it struck me as wrong. Because for those of you who haven’t seen it, there are sort of two sides fighting, and they have big weapons—they have tanks and helicopters, and there’s a literal war inside the United States with teams of people shooting other teams of people. And that doesn’t feel to me like what could happen here.

I think the better idea of what could happen here is something that looks more like civic breakdown, and a really good example might be Northern Ireland. So Northern Ireland was a very, very bitterly divided community in which people literally had different identities. Some people felt themselves to be Irish; some felt themselves to be British. And that wasn’t reconcilable. You couldn’t find a halfway point in between where you were half and half. And what you had in Northern Ireland was a low-level, constant violence. So bombs, murders, assassinations, explosions. So the province was roughly ungovernable.

And over the years there were different phases—I don’t want to overgeneralize it. There was a British police force that tried to bring calm to the situation. There were many years of negotiations. But that seems to me the kind of world that we could wind up living in, or maybe parts of the country could wind up living in. As you say, maybe Pennsylvania. Arizona seems like a good possibility given how many death threats have been made to Arizona election officials and other nonconformist Republicans in Arizona, some of whom I’ve talked to.

And that’s a model of a society that feels ungovernable, and people are frightened to go out of their house at night—not because of crime but because they might be assassinated by the other side, or even assassinated by their own side if they’ve been insufficiently partisan. Northern Ireland also felt a little bit like a gang war.

People who tried to reach out to the other side or who tried to become peacemakers could also become victims of violence. Anybody who was in the center, or anybody who wasn’t a participant, became a target. And that’s actually where I see the United States going, and in some senses, we’re already there.

If you hear stories, as I say, from elected officials and others in states where they haven’t conformed to whatever the partisan rules are, you hear them afraid of violence. I was actually in Tennessee a few months ago, and I met Republicans there who didn’t go along with the MAGA version of Republicanism that’s prevalent in Tennessee, and some of them were afraid.

I mean, you can’t say it in public. You have to be careful how you talk in front of your neighbors. It’s even worse, of course, if you’re a Democrat. And people are afraid to participate in politics. They’re afraid to work for political campaigns. It’s very hard to get Democrats even to be candidates for the state Senate and legislature in parts of Tennessee because it’s so dangerous to be a Democrat.

And I think we’re already there in a lot of parts of the country.

Harris: What would that sort of chilling effect on people’s ability or willingness to want to go into politics—what does that mean for our broader democracy?

Applebaum: It means that, you know, politics become, instead of a forum for civic participation and a place where we can iron out our difficulties and our differences through dialogue, it becomes something that’s fraught with danger.

People want to stay away from it. Maybe people become cynical and nihilistic. This is what happens in authoritarian countries—people don’t want to participate in politics because it just feels like everybody is corrupt, everybody is violent. The extreme language puts a lot of people off—not just from being a candidate but from participating in any way, even from voting or even listening to the political news.

And by the way, I’ve heard that a lot in the last few days, from people who are not journalists, or not in politics. You know, I just don’t want to hear what’s going on. I don’t want to listen to the news.

Harris: It’s almost like I just want to tune it out.

Applebaum: I just want to turn it off.

Harris: Adrienne, you’ve reported recently on the sort of rise of political violence in America.

One thing that you said you learned in your reporting was how other cultures managed to endure sustained political violence and how they ultimately emerged with democracy still intact. And I think that’s the thing that’s kind of on all of our minds, like, how do we keep this democracy intact? So what are the necessary next steps to ensure that democracy sort of lives on?

LaFrance: I think Anne hit on it exactly. I mean you need people who are willing to participate in the project of self-governance, and that requires capable people to lead at all levels of society.

It requires, in my view, voters who are willing to say, Enough, we are not going to tolerate violence, and we are going to elect people who unconditionally reject violence as a way of governing or as a way of life. I mean, the tricky part is, the history is not tremendously hopeful, and there isn’t one blueprint. You know, when I set out to report the story you referenced, Anne and I actually talked about this a lot in the early stages of my reporting, in part because I wanted to hear from her about sort of what are the other countries that got it right, and what can we learn from conflict resolution in Ireland or elsewhere?

And the truth is, once you’re in endemic political violence, it can take generations to get out of it. I mean, I certainly hope that’s not the case for us here, but it’s the sort of messy, almost boring, day-to-day work of democracy that needs to be done, and that’s exactly what’s declining.

Harris: Yeah, you mentioned that there isn’t necessarily a road map. When the U.S. has reached these sort of pitched moments in the past, how did we work our way back?

LaFrance: Right, so one example that I thought might be—which I hoped was a hopeful example going in, but then was sort of disabused of that optimism—was, I had thought about the paramilitary movements of the 1990s and the post–Waco climate of political violence, and how in the late ’90s, after the Oklahoma City bombing, it seemed like tensions had cooled.

This was my sort of, like, remembering that moment. It was like, Oh, things were tense, but then they domestically cooled. I talked to some scholars who study closely that era and those movements. And what they had told me was, actually, it wasn’t that we did something right, or there’s something positive we can replicate. But in fact the Oklahoma City bombing—which was, you know, a terrible attack that killed, I think, 168 people—that that was a cataclysmic act of violence that then, of course, led to accountability by law enforcement, which sort of cooled the movements for a while but didn’t totally dismantle them. And so obviously, you don’t want to think that worse violence is the only path out.

But that is something I heard from lots of scholars. Sometimes it takes people being startled into recognition of how bad things are in order to move past periods of violence.

Harris: And this is one for both of you, just thinking about this moment and how it situates in the sort of broader historical timeline of American politics. Thinking about the fact that this is a nation that began with a revolution; it kind of began with violence and in a sort of different way. How does this moment fit for you into the timeline of American history?

Applebaum: It’s funny, I recently read a book that was published decades ago, which is Bernard Bailyn’s book, which is called The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. And one of the revelations in it for me was, first of all, the amount of violence that preceded the revolution.

So, burning down the houses of colonial governors. Also the widespread conspiracy theories, that, you know, the British had a secret plot to do this or that and we need to defend ourselves against it.

In addition, of course, the colonists had real grievances; and there were also many brave and valiant and amazing people among them; and the process by which we eventually wrote a constitution is pretty extraordinary.

But the resemblance of that moment of violence and that moment of anger to other moments that came later … I mean, the most obvious one is the lead up to the Civil War when you had cycle after cycle of violence—whether it was in Kansas, whether it was in the southern states. There was a series of violent events that preceded the Civil War, and then, of course, there were a series of violent events that followed the Civil War as the North tried to reestablish the Union and tried to reestablish a constitutional state. There was a rebellion against it, in effect, that ended with Jim Crow and the segregated South, which kind of kept the lid on things for a while. And then we had the civil-rights movement, which was another era of extraordinary violence.

I was recently in Birmingham, and I went to the Civil Rights Institute, and there’s a long wall there where they have a timeline.

And if you start in the ’40s and go into the ’50s, I mean, every week, every few days, every month, there are incidents of violence, whether they’re bombings or protests or somebody being beaten up. So some of what’s happening now feels very much to me like it’s a continuity. We’ve reached these moments of bitter conflict in the past and they’ve sometimes had very violent resolutions.

What you just said, Adrienne, I think is incredibly important, which is that sometimes there has to be a cataclysm before people understand how bad things are and they move back. The Second World War had that function in Europe, you know; after the Second World War, people said, Never again. Let’s rewrite the rules. After the American Revolution, same thing: Never again. Let’s write our Constitution to make it possible to have a democracy and not to have constant strife. I don’t know that we’ve reached that moment yet in American politics where something happens and it makes everybody draw back and say “Never again.” I mean, even in the wake of this attempted assassination of Donald Trump, one of the first reactions from one of the most prominent Republicans, J. D. Vance, was to essentially say, “This is Biden’s fault.” There was an immediate partisan ugly reaction on the part of a lot of people.

LaFrance: And that’s so interesting to me, too, because we absolutely need to assess who is responsible for stoking political violence in America. I think calls for unity are important, but not without the need for scrutiny. At the same time, if you look at the way political violence operates, it really does operate similarly regardless of the ideology behind it.

And so that’s not to say we should both-sides it; obviously we shouldn’t. But I have found it instructive to look at past periods of political violence across the ideological spectrum because you see the same things happening over and over again.

Harris: With that actually in mind, you mentioned a little bit earlier that the way out of this is for people to have the confidence to run for office, or people to become politically engaged—all of that good rosy stuff that would actually be good for the fabric of American society. But you’ve also written about how officials have been warning about potentially increased attacks and political violence as we move toward this November election date, which is only a couple of months away. What are we doing to ensure that we are steering away from more violence in the next couple of months? How do politicians ensure that we’re not moving toward more violence?

Applebaum: The best way to do this—and … there’s a lesson from Northern Ireland here—the best way to do this is to make as much of the conversation as possible about real life. In other words, as opposed to your political identity. So, about the economy, about building roads, about schools, about education, about health care. Because those are issues that we can disagree about, and maybe even strongly disagree about, but we’re probably not going to kill each other over them.

Whereas when the argument is about your identity versus somebody else’s identity, then you might kill them. The Northern Ireland lesson, actually, the peace process, was not about making Catholics and Protestants like each other. That was pointless. I mean, they’re not going to like each other. But just to bring them into common conversation. So, okay, you don’t like each other, but you can talk about “Should the bridge be on this part of the river or should it be further down the river? And should the road go through this neighborhood or should it go through another neighborhood?”

And this was very granular work, and there are some people who argue that even that didn’t work and people still don’t like each other, and there still could be another cycle of violence there too. But the more we talk about concrete things in the real world, and the less we are having battles of dueling identity, the better.

The catch is that battles of dueling identity are more emotional and attract more attention, and make people care more than the conversation about how health care should be financed. And actually the politics of the United States, certainly since the Second World War, have mostly been conducted on that level.

These were policy arguments. What made Barack Obama and George W. Bush different wasn’t some big identity clash. It was about, they had different views of how the economy should work, for example. And the more we can get back to that, the better.

LaFrance: Well, and one thing I would just add to that is, we also have to recognize that relative to earlier periods of political violence, the informational environment we’re in is different. And that’s not a good thing. I mean, talk about stoking emotional reactions. The architecture of the social web is designed to reward anger and a lack of restraint and outbursts that we of course are seeing now.

And that’s a whole other factor to contend with as we’re trying to navigate this as a country.

Harris: This is my last question, for both of you, and it’s about the reactions that people have had to Saturday’s shooting. Democratic Representative Jared Golden of Maine has cautioned against what he called sort of “hyperbolic threats” about the stakes of this election and said, “It should not be misleadingly portrayed as a struggle between democracy or authoritarianism, or a battle against fascists or socialists bent on destroying America. These are dangerous lies.” Now you both have written about the high stakes of this election and the danger of another Trump presidency. What’s your reaction to his comments and the other calls to tamp down criticism of the former president?

LaFrance: I think you’re seeing this a lot, not just from him, but you’re seeing this a lot on the right. And you know, my belief is that Americans are sophisticated enough to be warned against authoritarianism when that threat is credible, which it is. And also to not take that concern and turn it into violence. And so, you know, I think we need to be more sophisticated than say, you know, Never criticize anyone truthfully, lest someone take that as a call for violence. And the stakes of this election are high.

Our colleague David Frum wrote a powerful essay about the need for nuance. It’s an extraordinarily complex moment, but the idea that you can’t criticize a very powerful person credibly is not the way to run our country either.

Applebaum: And this, the one very difficult point, and I think I alluded to this already, is that one of the main sources of the normalization of violence in our political culture is Donald Trump, who laughed at the attack on Nancy Pelosi, who’s talked about using violence against political demonstrators, and on and on and on and on.

And I think if we’re somehow not supposed to talk about that, then we’re doing everybody a disservice, because that is a very important source of the fraught nature of the current moment.

Harris: We’ll of course obviously be learning more over the coming days, but thank you both for talking with me.

Applebaum: Thank you.

LaFrance: Thanks for having us

(Music)

Harris: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Sara Krolewski. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Adam Harris, and thank you for listening to this bonus episode of Radio Atlantic. We’ll be back with a new episode as usual on Thursday.

How the Biden Administration Messed Up FAFSA

2024-04-16T07:00:00-04:00

In late March, months into the Free Application for Federal Student Aid–rollout debacle that has thrown millions of students’ college plans into a state of flux, the Department of Education let universities know there was yet another issue. The data that the IRS automatically fed into the form were inconsistent. In some cases, those inconsistencies led to students being awarded more aid than they are eligible for—in other cases, less. The department had begun reprocessing the applications with missing data points that it believed would result in students receiving too little aid—but stopped short of redoing all of the inaccurate forms. Those students they expected would receive too much aid, well, they could keep the money.

“The department is essentially saying, Go ahead and award somebody financial aid based on information that is inaccurate. It just completely goes against every instinct that we have as financial-aid administrators,” Jill Desjean, a senior policy analyst at the nonprofit National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, told me. “We’re worried about risks. We’re worried about program integrity, we’re worried about taxpayer dollars and being stewards of those funds.” A week later, after fielding the complaints from administrators, the Department of Education said it would reprocess all of the incorrect applications; but if institutions did not want to wait, they could make students aid offers based on the old forms.

Normally, the FAFSA is available at the beginning of October. Students fill it out and send it to Federal Student Aid, an office within the Department of Education. Then, FSA calculates how much federal aid a student can receive (through loans, grants, and work-study programs) and transmits those data to colleges, which then create a student’s financial-aid award letter, which explains to admitted students how much money—federal and from the school itself—they’ll receive to attend that college.

[Read: The confusing information colleges provide students about financial aid]

But for the 2024–25 academic year, the Department of Education introduced a new FAFSA. It has fewer questions and is designed to allow 1.5 million more students access to the maximum Pell Grant each year. Updating the FAFSA took longer than expected, and the form didn’t go online until the end of December. The formula for how much aid students should get was wrong—leading to a nearly $2 billion undercalculation in total. Meanwhile, the department has blown past self-imposed deadlines to fix other issues as they have arisen. This fiasco has left students unsure if they’ll have the money to pay for college, necessitated that institutions change long-set deadlines, and, to some extent, justified Republican lawmakers’ charges of government ineptitude in an election year when Democrats can least afford it.

The new FAFSA rollout did not have to be this way. The Biden administration could have focused on making sure that FAFSA worked, though it would likely have had to punt on other priorities, such as student-debt relief. And that may have made a good deal of sense: After all, changing higher-education regulations and canceling debt won’t help students if they can’t figure out a way to pay for school in the first place. Interviews with several current and former Department of Education officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information, as well as a review of public records reveal how the FAFSA-overhaul process was flawed from the beginning, and the ways that the administration’s ambitious agenda, plus a trail of missed deadlines, communication breakdowns, and inadequate funding, have led to a massive disruption in higher education. All of this could have been avoided, but now it must simply be managed.

Ask 100 people, and you will get 100 different explanations for how and why things went wrong with this year’s FAFSA, but they all have a starting point in common.

On December 27, 2020, then-President Donald Trump signed the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act into law. The omnibus package included the biggest legislative tweak to federal financial-aid policy in years. That update was the FAFSA Simplification Act, which would reduce the number of questions on the form from 108 to a maximum of 36. It threw out questions about Selective Service and drug convictions. But the changes were not only about process: The act also expanded the amount of federal aid that hundreds of thousands of students would be eligible to receive.

Career government officials routinely quip that it’s harder to work for Democrats than Republicans because Democrats want to expand the government’s reach and Republicans want to limit it. Staffers I spoke with at Federal Student Aid said the past four years have been proof of the concept. When the Biden administration assumed office, they inherited a healthy workload: overhauling loan servicing, FAFSA simplification, and the return to loan repayment after the pandemic pause. But they also added to those tasks with their own ambitious agenda for the Department of Education generally and the Federal Student Aid office specifically, including student-debt cancellation (a campaign promise) and undoing several Trump-era regulations, such as the borrower-defense-to-repayment and gainful-employment rules.

Yet their plans quickly confronted reality. The Department of Education’s workforce was severely depleted. In the first two years of the Trump administration alone, the department had the highest turnover—13 percent—of any federal agency, according to a Government Executive review. Now that culled workforce was trying to help colleges and students navigate the pandemic. Two sources told me that career staff warned Biden transition officials that they would be walking into a department full of dedicated workers who were, plainly, burned out.

In the early days of the Biden administration, however, there wasn’t much that staff at the department, regardless of seniority, could do to slow the agenda down. Many of the directives about what to pursue—and when—came directly from the White House and the Domestic Policy office. “There are people who’ve been at FSA for nearly 30 years, and they’re like, ‘The amount of White House involvement is totally insane,’” one staffer at the organization told me.

When Education Secretary Miguel Cardona was confirmed in March 2021, it was already clear that the timeline set out to revamp the FAFSA was too optimistic. Accordingly, department officials asked for additional time to complete the task. In June, Congress granted an additional year extension. But staff members at FSA had argued since early February of that year, in the weeks after the inauguration, that even that would not be enough time. Between the lack of manpower and the complexity of the rebuild, they would need at least two years to update the database, change aid formulas and tweak questions, get public comment, and test their systems to ensure everything was in order before the rollout.

The architects of the FAFSA Simplification Act on Capitol Hill did not expect that the department would overhaul its back-end systems to comply with the law—and several lawmakers have argued that perhaps they didn’t have to, but once the process of rebuilding the system from the ground up began, it was difficult to stop.

“The new FAFSA is, of course, more than a new form,” a senior department official told me. “But it was a complex undertaking on our side that required replacement of more than a dozen computer systems, including some that are older than the parents filling out the form now.” The system’s update was necessary, the official said, to meet the security standards around handling tax data.

Lawmakers were eager to get the new FAFSA online, though, which made securing more time politically difficult. “The FAFSA simplification is two bipartisan pieces of legislation that are important accomplishments that members of Congress were rightly very proud of, and they were eager to see the benefits of FAFSA simplification reach students,” the senior department official told me.

Somewhat predictably, the project encountered routine hiccups: Contractors offered deadlines that they failed to meet; staff was delayed in revamping systems written in COBOL, an archaic programming language; and important details were not fully comprehended as political staff—more skilled in policy than implementation—did not understand the severity of the issues. One former political appointee at the department told me that Biden officials stumbled because they were too confident about their ability to solve problems as they arose. “There was this perception that even though we’re finding problem after problem after problem, it’s okay because we’re already solving for them in real time,” the appointee said. “They believed they didn’t have to worry about it and they could just keep focusing on other things that were more interesting, because FAFSA simplification was inherited anyway. It created a lack of urgency until it was too late.”

Staffers at FSA agree. “I’ve experienced this where they would be pissed if you don’t offer a solution,” one staffer told me. “So we’d say, ‘Here are a few options to choose from, and most of these options aren’t great, because we’re out of outlets when you don’t have money and you don’t have enough staff.’” But the fact that the options weren’t great, they argued, was lost in translation.

The administration went to Congress, several times over, for additional money for Federal Student Aid. They requested that lawmakers increase the organization’s budget by a third in their 2023 ask, and an additional $620 million in the 2024 budget proposal to ease the return to repayment and update FAFSA. But in each year, the organization was flat-funded. Republicans viewed additional funding as a nonstarter. “This is not a funding issue. This is a management one,” Virginia Foxx, the chair of the House Education and Workforce Committee, wrote in a letter to the editor of The New York Times. And Democrats, although generally inclined to help the administration’s Education Department, were unwilling to allocate the additional funding to FSA at the expense of other budget priorities, particularly because some of the more progressive members would like to move the country away from the current system of the government financing sky-high tuition—a system in which FSA plays a major part.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s other priorities, such as the push for debt cancellation (which was later blocked at the Supreme Court and which the administration has subsequently initiated through other programs, such as the expansion of eligibility for Public Service Loan Forgiveness), required immense resources and attention. The totality of these efforts amounted to a lot for the already overworked FSA staff.

If at one point the FAFSA overhaul was neither a money nor a management issue, it is now both, and students will continue to suffer for it.

Last Wednesday, lawmakers vented their frustrations about the process as they held dueling congressional meetings—one with Education Secretary Cardona, another featuring a panel of financial-aid experts. During a hearing about the Biden administration’s budget, Republicans criticized the administration’s focus on other priorities. “The American people want to see you focused on getting students into the classroom, not repaying loans for people who have already been there,” Representative Julia Letlow of Louisiana told Cardona.

Cardona tried to repel that criticism. “I don’t want you to think they’re not doing FAFSA because they’re working on something else,” he told the panel. “FAFSA has been a priority since day one when we got into these positions, and it will continue to be a priority until we deliver for those students.”

FSA staff members agree that this was not an issue of moving people onto the wrong projects. But they remain upset that the FAFSA problems did not receive the attention they should have. “We have been saying for the last three years that we can’t get all this stuff done, this is too much, the servicers can’t do all of this … and now that the FAFSA is falling apart, there is a little bit more like, ‘Oh shit, maybe FSA wasn’t lying,’” a frustrated staffer told me. Meanwhile, political officials continue to set ambitious deadlines—ones that staffers who are working around the clock are already unsure they’ll be able to meet.

[Rose Horowitch: Colleges are facing an enrollment nightmare]

Had this year’s FAFSA rollout gone according to plan, millions of students would already have their aid packages; some students would have already committed to attending college, secure that they could afford it.

By now, the department would have turned its attention to next year. Staffers would already be figuring out how they could make the process smoother. They’d be revising questions, updating the form, and submitting it for public comment. But as they continue to try to amend the form and address the errors for this year, they have put themselves behind the curve.

The best hope is that the FAFSA rollout turns out to be a lot like healthcare.gov: a disaster by any measure at first, but one that eventually did improve an old, broken system. By then, though, some students will have decided against college, some institutions will have struggled with enrollment dips, and faith in government will have taken another hit.

Private Equity Has Its Eyes on the Child-Care Industry

2024-02-21T08:13:41-05:00

Updated at 1:30 p.m. ET on February 22, 2024.

Last June, years of organizing in Vermont paid off when the state’s House and Senate passed landmark legislation—overriding a governor’s earlier veto—that invests $125 million a year into its child-care system. The bill expanded eligibility for state assistance to 575 percent of the federal poverty level, meaning that more than 7,000 new families are expected to receive money for child-care expenses. Funding will also become available to help day-care centers recruit and retain teachers and expand capacity; centers will also receive additional money for providing nonstandard hours of care.

But now advocates are worried that the wrong people stand to benefit from the program’s generosity. Any time there is a windfall of public money, with few strings attached, unintended consequences are nearly certain to follow. Thanks to the new law, more Vermont families will have more to spend on child care, and centers will receive additional money without explicit rules around how to spend it. Both of those facts will make child care an attractive target for private-equity groups looking for an industry with lots of incoming revenue.

Private equity’s interest in child care has been growing in recent years. “While there has been corporate for-profit child care since the 1970s, private equity only got in starting in the early 2000s,” Elliot Haspel, a senior fellow who studies early childhood education at the nonpartisan think tank Capita, told me. Now four of the top five for-profit child-care chains—KinderCare, Learning Care Group, the Goddard School, and Primrose Schools—are controlled by private-equity funds, and private-equity-backed centers represent 10 to 12 percent of the market.

Private investors are intrigued by child care for the same reasons they became interested in nursing homes and other health-care services: intense demand, government money, and relatively low start-up costs. “Their goal is not long-term sustainability; their goal is to try to turn a profit,” Haspel said.

[Rogé Karma: The secretive industry devouring the U.S. economy]

Private equity’s foray into child care could go a number of ways, but its introduction has largely not worked out well for other sectors—and certainly not for many people who rely on those sectors’ services. In his book, Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America, Brendan Ballou, who investigated private-equity firms at the Department of Justice, posits that the private-equity business model has three basic problems. First, these firms buy a business with the intention of flipping it for a profit, not long-term sustainability, meaning that they are trying to maximize value in the short term and are less likely to invest in staff or facilities. Second, they tend to load businesses up with debt and extract a lot of fees, such as charging child-care providers for the privilege of being managed by the firm. And perhaps most important, their business structure insulates firms from liability.

In 2009, Annie Salley, a resident of a nursing-home chain purchased by the private-equity group Carlyle, died after an injury she sustained while going to the bathroom. Her family sued Carlyle, but a judge dismissed the case after the firm argued that it didn’t own the chain—instead, it said it advised a series of investment funds, such as Carlyle Partners V MC, L.P., that were the lone shareholders in the chain. Children get hurt in child care; children occasionally go missing from a care facility; every year, some children die in day cares. If private-equity firms can structure their relationship to day-care centers as they have nursing homes, families may have little recourse should they encounter a serious problem.

Though private-equity-backed child-care providers can—and often do—offer good services to families, their business model can also prove ruinous. In other sectors, private-equity groups have been notorious for extracting exorbitant fees from businesses they’ve acquired in leveraged buyouts; when they’ve had a chance to raise wages for workers or pay down their private-equity debts, they’ve regularly opted for the latter. Although Vermont’s bill sought to improve the wages of educators, it does not include a salary floor—which means that money that flows into centers may not necessarily go directly to staff—and without such a safeguard, what is stopping outside firms from taking the first, significant cut?

Miriam Calderón, the chief policy officer at Zero to Three, a nonprofit focused on babies, toddlers, and their families, hopes federal lawmakers consider these concerns as they begin to reimagine the federal footprint in child care. Calderón worked in the Biden administration during its first year and helped conceive the early-childhood-education components of the Build Back Better Act, which would have established a child-care entitlement program for a majority of families. Congress isn’t moving on the issue now, but Calderón and advocates told me it would be foolish to wait until Congress was working again to think about protections around public dollars. Private-equity-backed chains will likely continue to grow as a share of the market, and if they gain too much of it, they would have the power to fight back against policies that ensure that staff are fairly compensated and families aren’t paying even more exorbitant fees than they already are. “The work now is to really think through the right guardrails and the right policies so when we get to a moment, again, we’re ready,” Calderón said.

As Haspel put it, “The time for the government to act is now, before private equity is so entrenched in child care that it becomes impossible to exorcise.”

This article originally misidentified Bright Horizons as a private-equity-backed chain. It was previously, but it is no longer.

A New Threat to Diversity at Elite Colleges

2023-12-15T07:23:20-05:00

The Supreme Court’s June decision to curtail the use of race in admissions shook American higher education. Absent affirmative action, Black and Latino enrollments drop, and highly selective campuses become less diverse. But a new threat to diversity at these colleges emerged this week—one that could deal just as damaging a blow to their socioeconomic and racial compositions.

On Tuesday, members of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce met to discuss a bill that would expand short-term Pell Grants. But deep inside that bill was language that would have a far more dramatic effect on higher education: It would ban students who attend Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or any of the roughly 50 other wealthy, private colleges subject to a tax on their endowment from taking out federal student loans.

America’s reliance on student loans is imperfect, but this move would hurt students far more than the colleges they attend. According to the National Association for Independent Colleges and Universities, approximately 64,000 students stand to lose $1.8 billion in student loans aid if the bill passes in its current form. Duke University, for example, estimated that 3,400 of its students, including 700 nursing students, would lose access to loans.

[Ronald Brownstein: Curtailing affirmative action is a blow against a rising generation]

On Tuesday, however, committee members argued that the ban is necessary. As with any bill before Congress, lawmakers considering the short-term Pell expansion were asked to find a “pay-for”—that is, to find money elsewhere in the budget to cover the cost of the new grants. In a bipartisan effort, both Republican and Democratic members of the committee looked to the wealthiest colleges in the nation as the ideal place to find the extra cash. If the ban, which passed out of committee with 37 representatives voting yes and eight—six Democrats and two Republicans—voting no and which will be considered by the full House, becomes law, the money that would otherwise be necessary to originate and service students loans at wealthy, highly selective institutions would be used to cover the short-term grants. The ban would take effect on July 1, 2024.

The assumption by lawmakers on the committee is that the colleges subject to the ban would just foot the bill for all of their students. As Lucy McBath, a Georgia Democrat, put it, “the intent of the offset is to require institutions with large endowments to meet the financial obligations of all students.” In many cases, institutions like Harvard and Yale already cover the cost of tuition and fees for low-income undergrads, but many middle-class students would be forced to take out private loans, which can have astronomical interest rates. Graduate students, many of whom rely heavily on loans to subsidize their education, would be forced to look to private loans as well. If they were unable to secure private loans, they could not attend.

“I find it astounding that the very Democrats who railed against the Supreme Court on affirmative action voted yes on this bill,” Amy Laitinen, the senior director for higher-education policy at New America, a left-leaning think tank, told me. “How can we say we are concerned about diversity at the elite institutions in this country and take away the ability for anybody who is not exceedingly wealthy to pay to attend?” In plain terms, the result would be that these colleges, law schools, medical schools, and other graduate programs would look for more students who could cover the full cost of their attendance—meaning the institutions would likely become even more racially and socioeconomically homogenous.

“We can wish for a loan-free system all we want, but the truth is until we actually start to pay for everything with grants, we’re going to push people into predatory private student loans,” Laitinen said. The Senate has a similar short-term Pell bill to consider; it does not have the pay-for included, but advocates worry that if such a provision so easily slipped into the House legislation, it could be slotted into the Senate’s version as well.

[Adam Harris: The decision that upends the Equal-Protection clause]

The institutions that would be subject to the ban—several of which are still dealing with the fallout from a disastrous performance on Capitol Hill during a hearing about anti-Semitism on campus—have been quiet on the issue. The argument that the colleges do not have the resources to fully fund all their students was always going to be tough to make—even if they might have a reasonable case about the sustainability of doing so for a long time. But now isn’t a good time for these institutions to need friends on Capitol Hill.

Some of the committee members may hope that the pay-for is removed during further deliberations, but there’s no guarantee that it will be. “When we’re close to getting something bipartisan, people often bend over backwards,” Laitinen said. “But I don’t think bending over backwards at the expense of Black and brown students is the way to do it.”

The College Board Tries Again

2023-12-08T08:36:43-05:00

Earlier this year, the College Board—which administers Advanced Placement courses at high schools across the country—faced a fierce backlash. On January 23, during a press conference at Duval Charter School at Baymeadows, in Jacksonville, Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis attacked the organization’s pilot course in AP African American Studies as a radical revision of history.

“This course is not education; it’s indoctrination,” DeSantis told reporters. The state’s board of education had rejected the course, arguing that its content violated state law, and DeSantis railed against the curriculum’s inclusion of topics such as queer theory, intersectionality, and the Black Lives Matter movement. “When you try to use Black history to shoehorn in queer theory, you are clearly trying to use that for a political agenda,” he said.

[Lonnie G. Bunch III: Why is America afraid of Black history?]

A little more than a week later, the College Board released its updated curriculum, and a few changes were immediately obvious. The scholarship of Kimberlé Crenshaw, a pioneering scholar in critical race theory, had been scrubbed; bell hooks’s work was gone as well. Intersectionality—the idea of interlocking systems of oppression—received a single passing mention, and Black queer theory was not broached at all. Though scholars had poured time and resources into helping develop the curriculum, it fell far short of their expectations for a serious introduction to the field.

On Wednesday, the College Board released a new structure that attempts to rectify that misstep and significantly overhauls the version released in February. “We heard that the second version of this framework rendered too much of the core content from the field as optional,” Brandi Waters, who runs the African American Studies program for the College Board, told me.

In raw terms, this means that crucial ideas in the field such as intersectionality; topics such as Black resistance and athletics; and words such as systemic, as a descriptor for the ways that racism is embedded in institutions, have been returned to the curriculum, while other topics, such as Black Lives Matter and the reparations debate, remain optional. Still, the update is a necessary corrective, providing a solid foundation for students in nearly 700 schools across 40 states who will be offered the program.

When developing this version and considering what should be required versus optional, the College Board surveyed syllabi for entry-level college courses. “There are a couple of texts that emerge as common to an experience,” Waters told me, such as The Souls of Black Folk, by W. E. B. Du Bois, and the works of Frederick Douglass. But the College Board wanted to make sure that it balanced documents students were likely to read in other classes, such as Douglass’s Fourth of July speech, with those that are more exclusive to the field. They added foundational documents in Black feminism, such as the Combahee River Collective statement, which argued that the white feminist and civil-rights movements neglected to address the concerns of Black women, and Black lesbians in particular. They also now recommend that teachers spend two days, not one, covering white-supremacist violence such as the Tulsa Massacre.

[Yascha Mounk: How to save academic freedom from Ron DeSantis]

The fact that so many of the original figures who provoked the ire of Republicans have been returned to the curriculum means that it will undoubtedly be criticized once again by right-wing politicians. On the left, critics will likely take issue with making such topics as mass incarceration and contemporary organizing optional.

Some things are bound to get short shrift in an AP course meant to introduce an entire rich academic field. Educators hope that students learn enough to become interested in continuing to explore the African diaspora. And there is some evidence that, even with its flaws, that was already happening under the previous curriculum. According to a College Board survey of students currently enrolled in the pilot, 80 percent said they were likely to continue pursuing the field after completing the course.

Trump Wants to Create a National University?

2023-11-28T06:30:00-05:00

In his final annual address to Congress, George Washington was convinced that America needed new colleges. Two institutions in particular occupied his mind: a national university and a military academy. “The desirableness of both these institutions has so constantly increased with every new view I have taken of the subject that I can not omit the opportunity of once for all recalling your attention to them,” Washington said in his speech. He was among a minority of the Founders—including Benjamin Rush, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison—who believed that such institutions were necessary to build national character. “The assembly to which I address myself,” Washington told members of Congress, “is too enlightened not to be fully sensible how much a flourishing state of the arts and sciences contributes to national prosperity and reputation.”

Earlier this month, in an announcement that surprised both liberal and conservative observers of federal education policy, former President Donald Trump proposed his own sort of national university: the American Academy—a free, online institution intended to compete directly with the nation’s existing colleges. “We spend more money on higher education than any other country—and yet, they’re turning our students into Communists and terrorists and sympathizers of many, many different dimensions,” Trump said in an announcement video on his social network, Truth Social. The university would be funded, he said, by “taxing, fining, and suing” private-university endowments, and would offer curricula covering “the full spectrum of human knowledge and skills.” Why is the former president, who is not in the middle of rolling out a serious list of new policy ideas, so interested in a national university?

[Peter Wehner: Have you listened lately to what Trump is saying?]

American leaders have long considered national institutions of higher learning at moments of turmoil, in part to teach the sciences, arts, and literature, but also, crucially, to acculturate the population. “A primary object of such a national institution should be the education of our youth in the science of government. In a republic, what species of knowledge can be equally important and what duty more pressing on its legislature than to patronize a plan for communicating it to those who are to be the future guardians of the liberties of the country?” Washington said. Early wars gave the nation West Point, and the Civil War assisted in the passage of the first Morrill Act, which gave states land to sell in order to fund colleges. But Trump’s plan takes this rather high-minded tradition and distorts it, draping his bombastic brand over those older ideas.

Trump’s proposal is in some ways the next step in a recent shift that has seen conservatives attempting to assert greater control over higher education. Efforts to water down tenure protections, change how board members are selected, and limit what can be taught have caused consternation among liberals and college presidents but have successfully been passed by legislatures in several states. Trump’s proposal to create a national online university—using money from established institutions—is in line with these efforts.

Trump’s pitch also comes at a time when Americans are watching closely what’s happening on college campuses in response to the Israel-Hamas war. Such a move—zeroing in on the topic that will generate a strong emotional reaction, and using it to provoke his audience to maximum effect—is very Trumpian. However, that political instinct makes the lack of traction the proposal has gained among his base since its introduction all the more interesting.

Perhaps the absence of enthusiasm for the plan stems from the fact that Trump’s idea has very little chance of producing a real institution of higher learning. In decades past, Congress would update the law that governs higher education—the Higher Education Act—every four to six years. But it has gone untouched since 2008, and despite marathon committee markups, there’s no indication that it will receive an update within the next several years. Moreover, Democrats, who no doubt have Trump’s previous foray into online education—the defunct real-estate course known as Trump University—top of mind, would likely reject the proposition outright. And although Republicans have routinely lined up to support other Trump policies, they have not had the same appetite for a major, national education push like the one Trump has suggested, even as they work to change the sector in other ways.

[Adam Harris: ‘An existential threat to American higher education’]

The fact that Republicans have not lined up behind the deal isn’t necessarily a surprise, Andy Smarick, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think-tank, told me. “When I saw the proposal initially, my instinct was to wonder if anyone on the right is going to get behind this quickly,” Smarick said. And when they did not, he added, it was an indication that although conservatives want to radically change American higher education, they remain wary of a federal role in it. In fact, several prominent Republicans—including the former president—have backed the idea of eliminating the U.S. Department of Education altogether to decrease the federal footprint. “In the No Child Left Behind era, in the Common Core era, in the student-loan era, there’s just been a sense among those on the right that, if anything, we need to dial back the federal government’s role in a lot of areas and allow states to do more.”

Still, Trump’s proposal makes clear that he still sees higher education as an issue that can animate his base. A recent survey from Third Way showed that 85 percent of Republicans support higher-education reform, so it makes sense that the former president would steer into it. But the conservative cavalry has not come, and Trump’s university will likely end up as another in a long line of flashy policies the former president has floated, never to become anything more.

How Reconstruction Created American Public Education

2023-11-13T05:55:00-05:00

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “On Reconstruction,” a project about America’s most radical experiment.

Before the Civil War, America had few institutions like Antioch College. Founded in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1850, Antioch was coed and unaffiliated with any religious sect; it was also the first college in the nation to hire a woman to serve on its faculty as an equal with her male colleagues. It was unquestionably progressive, and would not have been that way without its first president: Horace Mann.

Mann, the politician and education reformer from Massachusetts, sought to mold a certain kind of student: conscientious, zealous, inquisitive. For years, Mann had opposed slavery; he hoped his students would as well. He charged those he taught at Antioch to dedicate themselves to eradicating injustice with sedulous care. “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity,” Mann told the graduating class of 1859.

Mary D. Brice was one of Mann’s students at Antioch, and she was a true believer in Mann’s vision. In December 1858, alongside her husband, Brice traveled 900 miles to New Orleans, to teach.

Brice found a city that was like no other in the antebellum South. In New Orleans, a small class of free Black people lived and worked as citizens alongside white people; they owned businesses and, in some cases, plantations. And if they were wealthy enough to afford tuition, or light-skinned enough to pass for white, they could attend school.

Yet the free Black New Orleanians who were neither wealthy nor light enough had few options. In 1865, Benjamin Rush Plumly, a white abolitionist politician who’d joined the Union army at the outset of the war, and who would eventually lead the Board of Education for the Department of the Gulf, described the antebellum situation in the region bluntly: “For the poor, of the free colored people, there was no school.”

Brice, a deeply religious person, believed that God meant for her to create one. She opened “a school for colored children and adults” in September 1860, at the corner of Franklin and Perdido Streets, near present-day city hall. The effort was short-lived. In June 1861, two months after Confederate troops fired the first shots of the Civil War, Brice was forced to close the school.

But the war could not stop Mary Brice. By November of that year, she had moved to Magnolia Street and reopened her doors. Again she was shut down, this time more forcefully. Confederates began a terror campaign against the school, leaving signs outside her home: Death to nigger teachers, they declared. So Brice began teaching in secret, sneaking to her students’ homes under cover of darkness.

By the end of April 1862, Union troops had captured New Orleans. Brice was now able to conduct her work without the constant threat of violence. With funding from northern missionary associations, other private teachers began to travel to New Orleans. The poor Black people of the city—including the formerly enslaved—wanted an education.

The educators’ efforts were slow and piecemeal at first, but eventually, with federal assistance, they helped create the infrastructure for public education in Louisiana. There, and across the South, education reformers and abolitionists like Brice carried out Mann’s vision for schools that were free and universal. The existence of public education today in the South—for all children—is largely their doing.

In the early days of the republic, the Founders often wrote and spoke about the need for an educated population. Yet schooling was typically reserved for the elite. Wealthy families hired private tutors, and those in the middle class sent their children to subscription schools (parents paid only for the period of time their students attended), where they learned the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Higher education was rarer still: Even into the late 1860s, only about 1 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds were enrolled in postsecondary schools. Before the Civil War, many children were limited to learning whatever their parents were able to teach them at home.

The idea of public common schools—that is, schools funded and organized directly by communities and free to most children—had been slow to take off, though Mann had been proselytizing for them since the 1830s. In time, his approach took root in the Northeast and crept into the rest of the country, but such schools were more typically found in cities than rural areas. White southerners, in particular, were skeptical of Mann’s ideas. The contours of a slave society were fundamentally incompatible with widespread free education—public goods of many kinds were eyed with suspicion as potential tools of insurrection.

New Orleans, however, had a rich history of parochial schools. In 1841, the state legislature hoped to extend this tradition when it first approved funds for a public-school system in New Orleans, one of the oldest in the South. The schools there thrived—but they were available only to white students.

Education in the rest of Louisiana and the South was still rudimentary, even as the rest of the country made strides. In the years preceding the Civil War, Justin Morrill, a shopkeeper turned congressman from Vermont, tried to create a nationwide system for training workers by introducing a bill to give states land they could sell to fund colleges. The bill was opposed by southern congressmen wary of federal intervention in their states, and was ultimately vetoed by President James Buchanan.

After the war began, however, Morrill saw an opportunity. Southern lawmakers had been expelled from Congress for treason, and the nation was in need of skilled military minds. He reintroduced the bill in December 1861; the Morrill Act was signed by President Abraham Lincoln the following July. States in the North quickly began building land-grant universities.

Under the law, all southern states were barred from the program while in rebellion against the Union. But because New Orleans fell so early, the war presented an opportunity for the city. Major General Nathaniel Banks, the Union commander of the Department of the Gulf, issued General Order No. 38, which established a “Board of Education for Freedmen.”

The smattering of schools that had been established for Black students by missionary associations and individual citizens, including Brice’s, were quickly subsumed by this newly created board. The student rolls grew from an average of 1,422 in April 1864 to 9,571 by the end of the year. The board had established a foundation for education through a “unity of purpose and concert of action,” Plumly, the chair of the board, wrote. “In nine months we have succeeded, against the grave obstacles incident to the beginning of so great an enterprise, in gathering under instruction half of the colored juvenile population in the State.”

In 1865, Plumly released a report on the state of education in New Orleans, trumpeting his board’s success in expanding schooling through the example of Brice, whose school “continued to thrive” under his board, where she was known as “an efficient and honored principal.” Plumly’s report quickly spread across the nation, and after Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s surrender in April 1865, it served as a model for those who hoped to establish public education in the South. The reunification of the country would be an enormous task, and no one knew what would become of the millions of Black Americans who were now free citizens—not to mention the masses of white southerners who would need to be reintegrated into the nation. Perhaps, the thought went, education could help make citizens of both the white and Black poor.

On April 3, 1865, the Chicago Tribune, opining about the New Orleans project, noted that although many of the teachers struggled “with every manner of difficulty—insufficient accommodations—leaky sheds with ground floors,” they were heartened by the fact that the school system had grown at such a rapid pace. The editors thought that the project might serve as a model for children, both white and Black, across the entire South.

“This is … but the beginning of a work which must spread over the entire Southern States, until both freed blacks, and the almost equally ignorant and even more degraded and vicious ‘poor whites’ have been brought within its christianizing and civilizing influences,” the Tribune article read. The work of expanding the nation’s schools no longer had to be “slow or tedious,” it said, “but can be accomplished rapidly and encouragingly.”

Outside New Orleans, however, there was less infrastructure for this kind of rapid transformation. Southern states were in the early process of being readmitted into the union, which required the states to disavow secession, repudiate war debts, and write new constitutions, and they could not yet access funds from the Morrill Act. If there was any hope for the sort of mass education that the Tribune editors believed was necessary, it would require private associations to step into the void. Groups such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the American Baptist Home Missionary Society began establishing primary schools and colleges, as well as schools to train teachers.

Major General Oliver Otis Howard, who became the commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau, was unsure that his agency had the authority or money to set up such institutions on its own. Yet he found the schools operated by military governments, such as Louisiana’s under Major General Banks, to be a good model. “More than 200,000 people, old and young, in the insurrectionary states, have learned to read in the last three years,” Howard wrote in a letter to the American Institute of Instruction. The letter was read aloud to the nearly 1,000 people who had gathered in New Haven, Connecticut, for a meeting of the group on August 9, 1865.

Howard worked to establish a network similar to Banks’s, on a larger scale. Among the institutions founded in this effort were the Fisk Free Colored School, now Fisk University, and the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia, Booker T. Washington’s alma mater. Howard also personally helped create Howard University, named in his honor, and later served as its president.

[Read: Why America needs its HBCUs]

Because of its small budget, the bureau primarily operated in a supervisory role. Howard appointed superintendents to oversee the logistics of the schools, which included training and hiring teachers, ensuring that they had military protection to conduct their work safely, and providing schoolmasters with fuel and provisions.

Most of this work was conducted out of the public eye, with missionary organizations in leadership roles. Even so, the bureau’s efforts ran the risk of vexing white southerners, many of whom simply opposed the idea of educating Black people at all. White objections to the involvement of the Freedmen’s Bureau in southern affairs often mentioned reports of ineptitude, poor administration, or outright fraud in its operations. Certainly, the administration of these new public schools left much to be desired. As Plumly wrote in his report about local schools, 1864 was a year “of great financial delays and embarrassments in this Department.” Teachers would routinely go months without pay—and although Plumly noted that the educators rarely complained, conditions wore on their morale.

But, in the main, the white objection to the bureau was still, simply, its existence. “Even the most friendly studies of the Bureau have exaggerated its weaknesses and minimized its strengths,” the Reconstruction historians John and LaWanda Cox wrote in 1953. “At the vital core of the Bureau’s activities was the explosive and still unresolved problem of the nature of race relationships that should follow the forcible destruction of slavery.” And as prominent physical reminders of the bureau’s presence, schools became a target.

Mobs routinely burned buildings and churches where classes were held. In some cases, teachers and agents of the bureau were murdered. According to James D. Anderson, professor emeritus of education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, at least 126 public schools in Louisiana overseen by the bureau faced closure from the combination of white terrorism, financial woes, and incompetence.

Still, the bureau’s work improved the educational outlook for millions of people who’d previously had no access to formal schooling. According to records gathered by Kamilah Stinnett, a specialist with the Smithsonian’s Freedmen’s Bureau Project, many Black people felt empowered to shape their education themselves. On March 17, 1866, a school official in Louisiana wrote to the bureau that Black residents were requesting Black instructors because they “object to paying [white] persons who continually insult them.” In 1868, the board of a “colored” school in Henderson, North Carolina, asked the bureau for $300 “for assistance in finishing our school house.”

Soon the number of people in the South entitled to common education was expanded even further. In 1867, Louisiana held an election for its constitutional convention; ultimately, aided by votes from freedmen and the disenfranchisement of former Confederates, 49 white delegates and 49 Black delegates were chosen. The constitution they produced guaranteed integrated public schools.

Across the South, state conventions established similar constitutional provisions, and states were subsequently readmitted to the union, which also allowed for the expansion of college access through federal programs such as the Morrill Act. By 1870, five years after the bureau was established, roughly 78 percent of children of all races between the ages of 5 and 14 were enrolled in public schools.

That would prove to be the high-water mark for most of the next century. When the bureau was dissolved by Congress in 1872, a large share of the federal government’s oversight of common schools disappeared. Over the next decades, the educational foundation built by the Freedmen’s Bureau endured a concerted assault from white supremacists. The so-called Redeemers, who sought to reclaim political power through coercion and violence, had objected to the Reconstruction constitutions from the beginning and fought to overthrow them. They also objected to integrated education. Faculty at the University of Mississippi revolted, arguing that they would rather resign and the university close its doors than educate a single Black student. State legislators in North Carolina went even further, stripping UNC of its funding and forcing it to close in 1871. When the university finally reopened in 1875, several avowed white supremacists sat on its new board of trustees, including one former leader of the state Ku Klux Klan.

That same year, members of Congress introduced legislation that would endow common schools via land grants, and expand Morrill’s funding for land-grant colleges. Southern lawmakers helped kill the legislation, fearing that introducing additional federal money also meant introducing federal oversight of their activities. Such oversight of the public schools in New Orleans, for example, would have revealed that, in 1877, the state legislature reduced school-tax rates by 80 percent, dramatically cutting back resources for education.

Meanwhile, violent campaigns raged across the South. School buildings were once again burned. Educators were threatened. The network of common schools established by the Freedmen’s Bureau remained, although diminished. Some struggled until they fell apart; others hobbled along, underfunded but resolved to continue the work of educating those who were being shut out of other institutions.

By 1890, Morrill had untethered his new bill to endow land-grant colleges from the common-school bill, and it passed—with a caveat. Colleges could not make a distinction of race in the admission of students; states could, however, operate separate colleges for Black students. They used a portion of the funds to endow schools born of necessity—Black colleges such as Tuskegee University, North Carolina A&T State University, and Langston University.

[Adam Harris: The government finally puts a number on the discrimination against Black colleges]

Six years later, after the mixed-race activist Homer Plessy sued for the right to ride Louisiana railway cars reserved for white people, the United States Supreme Court decided that state-mandated segregation laws did not violate the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Plessy v. Ferguson ushered in the era of formalized segregation in the South, but America’s higher-education infrastructure had already taken to the idea. Soon, its common schools formally did so as well.

When Mary Brice moved from Ohio, she hoped that she might be able to bring education to Black New Orleanians—and, in the spirit of Horace Mann, win a victory for humanity. The Freedmen’s Bureau helped expand Brice’s vision to the entire South through federal intervention, providing what became the political and administrative scaffolding for all public education. But as remarkable as that achievement was, it could not withstand the extraordinary efforts by Redeemers to claim the benefits of such an education for white Americans and deny them to Black Americans.

On February 8, 1898, a group of white Louisiana Democrats gathered in Tulane Hall, in New Orleans, for a constitutional convention. The primary agenda item: to settle the question of whether Black men in the state should be allowed to vote. There was little question of what the convention’s result would be.

The convention could not explicitly circumvent the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, but Democrats got as close as they could. They established a poll tax and literacy tests, and required voters to own property. Ernest B. Kruttschnitt, the president of the convention, bluntly admitted the purpose of these laws. “What care I whether it be more or less ridiculous or not?” he said to applause. “Doesn’t it meet the case? Doesn’t it let the white man vote, and doesn’t it stop the negro from voting, and isn’t that what we came here for?”

This Jim Crow constitution worked as intended. There were 127,923 Black voters on Louisiana’s rolls in 1888; by 1910, that number had dropped to 730. From 1896 to 1900 alone, there was a 96 percent decline in registered Black voters. When the convention ended, Kruttschnitt returned to his day job—leading the New Orleans school board.

With the Plessy decision propping him up, Kruttschnitt launched what Donald E. DeVore and Joseph Logsdon, the authors of Crescent City Schools, called a “massive cutback in educational opportunities for black children.” Under his leadership, the district cut public schooling for Black students down to grades one through five, and the board announced, as DeVore and Logsdon put it, “that they were giving up all pretense of creating separate schools ‘identical with that of white schools.’ ” By 1920, there were about four times as many schools for white students as there were for Black students in New Orleans. The city’s idea of a universal, free public-education system, established in large part to serve Black students, now only feigned doing so.

It would take 40 more years, another federal intervention, and the protection of U.S. Marshals before Ruby Bridges and the McDonogh Three would reintegrate public schools in New Orleans—schools that likely never would have existed in the first place if not for the work of the federal government and the Freedmen’s Bureau.

For Black people who’d been emancipated, the full experience of citizenship that the Founders believed comes with education was short-lived. The country has been shaped in many ways by their subsequent exclusion. Even after court-mandated desegregation, educational opportunity has been highly stratified by race, and both educational attainment and quality in America as a whole have lagged relative to other wealthy countries. In 2023, the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action, the most serious effort to date at realizing Brice’s dream nationally. The history of the South illustrates that efforts to splinter or deny education on the basis of race will inevitably diminish even those who lead those efforts. “Create a serf caste and debar them from education, and you necessarily debar a great portion of the privileged class from education also,” Mann once argued. But the history also demonstrates the inverse: Making public education truly public and equal for all is the cornerstone of a nation.

This article appears in the December 2023 print edition with the headline “The Black Roots of American Education.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

How the Democrats Won Virginia

2023-11-08T13:58:25-05:00

On the eve of Election Day in Virginia, Russet Perry was confident she’d knocked on enough doors in Loudoun and Fauquier Counties to know what voters wanted. “Abortion is a huge thing here, with Virginia being the last southern state to have the protections promised in Roe,” she told me. For months, Perry and other Democrats across the state had stressed that the stakes of yesterday’s election were clear: Republicans had control of the House of Delegates, and the state Senate was the only thing preventing an abortion ban from making it to Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin’s desk. And in the state’s Thirty-First District, where Perry was on the ballot, voters could help maintain that majority.

Last night, those voters delivered the seat to Perry; she defeated Juan Pablo Segura by more than 5,000 votes. Perry was part of a trend: Across the state, Democrats won expensive, sharply contested races and not only kept the senate but won back the House of Delegates as well. The Democratic victories in Virginia—as well as the passage of a constitutional amendment in Ohio that guarantees access to abortions—underscored the fact that many voters are still unhappy about the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, and, as in 2022, they are turning out to vote and protect the right to an abortion. Moreover, Democrats’ victories last night also raise doubts about the effectiveness of the Republican focus on crime and schools that they believe lean too far left—two areas where they perceive Democrats as weak. Democrats, of course, are hoping that voters will continue to disagree, especially as the country heads into the 2024 election cycle.

[Read: What winning did to the anti-abortion movement]

In the lead-up to Virginia’s election for governor just two years ago, Loudoun County became shorthand for the issues that defined the race. Conservatives who were already upset with school closures during the pandemic had begun protesting several policies enacted by the local school board, including one that allowed transgender students to use the restrooms and locker rooms that conformed with their gender identity, and a curriculum that they argued was littered with critical race theory. Then-candidate Youngkin seized on that anger and made it a pillar of his campaign, blanketing radio and television with millions of dollars in advertisements promising that he would help restore “parental rights” to schools. “On day one, we are going to ban teaching critical race theory in our schools,” Youngkin told a Leesburg audience in September 2021.

And by and large, it worked. Youngkin won the governor’s mansion; Republicans in Virginia reclaimed the House of Delegates. Some observers saw the victories as evidence of a mandate: Voters were upset about what was happening in schools, and they were ready for a change. Results from other states, however, revealed a blurrier picture, given that several well-financed conservative anti-CRT candidates lost downballot school-board races. Last night was an opportunity to test whether Youngkin’s strategy was one with longevity or more of a blip, with abortion having emerged as the new driver of votes.

As Mark Rozell, a political scientist at George Mason University, told me, the race in Senate District 31 was a microcosm of the dynamics in Virginia more generally. The Republican candidate, Segura, sought to attack Perry, a former CIA officer and prosecutor, for her work at the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office under Buta Biberaj, a Democrat who’d said that she would no longer prosecute misdemeanors. As the official account for the Virginia Republican Party wrote on X (formerly Twitter), Perry was, to their mind, a “top lieutenant for left-wing Soros Prosecutor Buta Biberaj … backed by defund-the-police radicals.” At the same time, Segura also pushed to rebut the Democratic charges of extremism on abortion. Following Youngkin’s lead, Segura argued that the “entire Republican Party has come together around 15 weeks” as a cutoff for abortions.

But Perry and other Democrats argued that Youngkin’s 15-week proposal was disingenuous—an effort to attract moderate voters. After all, Youngkin had previously said that he would sign any bill to “protect life,” Perry told me, and this would not be the first time that someone said one thing and did another about abortion: “I watched the congressional hearings for the Supreme Court justices, and I watched person after person that got put on the Supreme Court raise their hand and say they thought Roe was the law of the land and that we need to stand by precedent. Then I watched as they rolled it back.”

[Read: Virginia could decide the future of the GOP’s abortion policy]

For Youngkin, a politician who has been regarded as a potential presidential candidate and who has just two years left in his term in office, these election results are a major setback for his agenda in Virginia and his ambitions more broadly. “If he had GOP control, he had unfettered ability to push a conservative agenda and parlay that into a future national campaign,” Rozell told me. Youngkin’s PAC has raised nearly $19 million since March, some of which he used to support 10 candidates in competitive districts, including Segura, and he made nearly 100 campaign stops. “Youngkin put a lot of political capital on the line, and that has some consequences for him in terms of his national political profile” Rozell said. If his stamp was unable to turn voters out in his own state, Republicans now have reason to worry about the broader appeal of his brand of conservatism to their base.

Last night, just after 9:30 p.m., Perry arrived at Stone Tower Winery, in Leesburg, to deliver her victory speech, in which she vowed to “ensure the right to choose here in Virginia.” Shortly thereafter, results came in showing that Democrats had also won a majority of the seats on Loudoun County’s school board. Republicans, meanwhile, were again handed a reminder that though they’d celebrated the end of Roe v. Wade, its demise has initiated a fierce backlash that the party is still struggling to overcome.

Where Are All the Missing Students?

2023-11-08T07:30:00-05:00

In 2006, the School District of Philadelphia, in partnership with Microsoft, opened the School of the Future. The idea was simple enough: Establish a learning environment centered on technology—no textbooks, just laptops and Wi-Fi—that would provide students in relatively poor districts the same benefits that those in wealthier areas enjoyed. The district built a handsome, well-lit building and filled it with state-of-the-art trappings including electronic lockers and Italian-marble bathrooms. It was heralded as a path-defining achievement for public-private partnerships in education.

Two years later, Michael Gottfried, now an economist at the University of Pennsylvania but then a graduate student there, was part of a team examining whether such a technological revolution actually made a difference in student achievement. But he soon realized that the technology was somewhat beside the point: “We were talking to a teacher [at the School of the Future] and she said, ‘Here’s the thing, we can talk all you want about smart boards and laptops per student and curriculum moving online, but I have a bigger problem: Half of my class isn’t here.’”

American schools have tracked absenteeism for more than a century; it’s a well-practiced routine. The teacher calls names. The students say, “Here.” Those who don’t respond are marked absent. If too many unexcused absences accumulate, the student is deemed truant. In many school districts, average daily attendance has mostly been seen as a goal tied to school funding; the more students a school has, the more money it receives. But over the past decade, as researchers began to examine the links between being present in class and performance, schools have started to recognize that attendance is a fundamental contributor to academic success. “Every day matters,” Gottfried told me. “After the first day [missed], test scores decline, and it declines in the same way as it does from the eighth or ninth day missed.”

Those academic consequences have left administrators, teachers, and researchers deeply concerned about the glut of students who are missing a significant amount of school since the coronavirus pandemic began. According to an analysis by the Stanford economist Thomas Dee, there was a 91 percent increase in the number of students who became chronically absent—missing more than 10 percent of school days in a year, whether excused or unexcused—between the 2018–19 and 2021–22 school years, which amounts to an estimated 6.5 million students. (After widespread pandemic closures in 2019–20 and 2020–21, almost all schools in America were fully open for the 2021–22 school year.) No state was exempt from the sharp uptick, and groups that researchers were already concerned about—students with disabilities, for example—have had rates of chronic absenteeism nearing 40 percent. “Students from risk groups were already engaging in high levels of absences before the pandemic, and those have just gone through the roof,” Gottfried told me.

There are several reasons a student might miss class, some of which cleanly map onto challenges that the pandemic exacerbated. Students may be ill, for instance; in the early grades, their parents may consider school an extension of day care and not worry about the amount of class time the student is missing; or, in later grades, the students themselves may not find the material engaging—which may be more likely to be the case if, during the pandemic, they missed out on education that their current coursework is intended to build on.

[Read: The long-term consequences of missing school]

But as Sarah Lenhoff, an education-policy professor at Wayne State University, in Michigan, explained to me, “The strongest correlate with chronic absence is child poverty and family poverty. The fewer resources a family has, the more likely they are to be absent.” There are layers to that, Lenhoff said, beyond the fact that “they just don’t have as much money.” Poverty often means that students don’t have access to reliable transportation—which is crucial when many districts face severe bus-driver shortages, if students have access to school buses at all. Many impoverished families also don’t have a well-resourced support network to assist them if they are evicted from their homes, or if they have an unexpected work conflict. On top of that, “children who are poor tend to have worse health outcomes, and their families have less access to health care, so they’re more likely to miss school because of that,” she said. Often, Lenhoff told me, those attendant factors related to poverty are misidentified as the parents not wanting to send their children to school.

Although the pandemic-era child tax credit, which cut child poverty in half, might have been expected to produce a drop in absenteeism rather than a spike, researchers have not yet studied how the tax credit affected school attendance, and because of the confounding factors related to the pandemic, any direct relationship will almost certainly be difficult to ascertain. For instance, though child poverty was reduced, students at the bottom of the economic spectrum were still more susceptible to the coronavirus; consistent housing is important for attendance, but financial pressures and other upheavals led many families to move during the pandemic, displacing students from their schools. Additionally, rolling school closures meant that students missed a significant amount of classroom time—which could have caused them to become disengaged from school.

Unfortunately, getting students back into the classroom consistently is not an easy task. Research has shown that most efforts to combat chronic absence have only modest effects on student attendance. In New York City, for example, researchers examined whether students receiving universal free meals attended school more frequently, and found that, if all other things were equal, students who received free meals attended an average of 1.8 more days of school than their peers who did not.

Several researchers agreed that the best way to get students back in school is by building strong relationships with families and students. “It’s really important that it’s a two-way communication and that families are able to talk to the school about what’s keeping them from school, the barriers they’re facing,” Lenhoff told me. From there, the school can put in place a plan to get students into classrooms one by one—but such individualized attention is difficult to imagine when the scale of the problem is so large, and the resources to meet it are so few.

‘An Existential Threat to American Higher Education’

2023-11-05T07:30:00-05:00

When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appointed six new members to the board of New College of Florida earlier this year, giving the oversight panel of the public liberal-arts college in Sarasota a decidedly right-wing bent, there was no ambiguity in the message he was sending. But in case anyone had doubts, one of his appointees, Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist who led the push to redefine critical race theory, quickly eliminated them.

“We are recapturing higher education,” he wrote on Twitter (now known as X). He also posted an agenda that included eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; hiring new faculty “with expertise in constitutionalism, free enterprise, civic virtue, family life, religious freedom, and American principles”; and creating a new core curriculum and an academic master plan. Within 120 days, Rufo told The New York Times, the school’s academic departments would look “very different.”

In the months that have followed, Republican state legislatures and governors have made other efforts to overhaul higher education. Texas lawmakers, for example, passed bills that banned DEI initiatives at the state’s public colleges and redefined tenure—lawmakers had considered banning tenure altogether but ultimately reached a compromise—and listed vague reasons a university can fire a tenured faculty member, including “conduct involving moral turpitude” and “unprofessional conduct that adversely affects the institution.” Free-speech advocates fear what that could mean in practice. Texas A&M University suspended and censured a professor after she allegedly made a “disparaging remark” about the state’s lieutenant governor. (She was reinstated after an investigation found no clear evidence of wrongdoing, and the institution’s president resigned.) And in June, the Supreme Court upended more than four decades of precedent when it ruled the race-conscious admissions systems at Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to be unconstitutional.

[Adam Harris: The government finally puts a number on the discrimination against Black colleges]

This year is a defining moment for American higher education, one that will decide whom institutions admit, who will teach those students, and what those professors can teach. For those on the right, it’s a reclamation, clawing back a set of American institutions that they believe have veered too far to the left. But for many administrators, professors, and historians, these changes risk destroying the pillars—shared governance, academic freedom, free inquiry—that have held up the world’s greatest system of higher education for more than a century.

Jerry Cirino did not intend to be a higher-education reformer. Prior to running for public office, in 2020, Cirino, a Republican, had for decades led medical-device companies in Ohio. But when he launched his campaign for state Senate, he began scrutinizing the local colleges a little harder. “One of the things I noticed when I was running for senate, in 2020, was that higher education was not going in a direction that I thought it should be going in,” Cirino told me. He mentioned conservative speakers being shouted down at universities and the relative absence of conservative voices on campuses. So he made “taking a look at how we can make higher education better,” as he put it, a plank of his campaign.

“Make higher education better” could mean a lot of things, but shortly after winning his election, Cirino began defining what he envisioned. He became the vice chair of the higher-education committee in the state Senate and introduced Senate Bill 135—a sweeping higher-education-reform bill that, among other things, would require schools to create a formal complaint system for students, groups, or faculty who were concerned that their free-speech rights had been violated. “If a student in a classroom feels their professor is overly liberal and expresses concern about how speaking up is impacting his grades, I wanted to have a process for him,” he said at the time. The bill was signed into law last year, and it achieved several of his aims, he told me. However, he had other things in mind that S.B. 135 did not accomplish.

I spoke with Cirino twice for this story, once in July shortly after the Ohio legislature went on recess for the summer, and again in mid-August, to better understand what about higher education—beyond what S.B. 135 did—he believed still needed changing. “I really was alarmed at the lack of diversity of thought on our campuses—that’s the nationwide view that I had,” Cirino told me. As an example of the lack of diversity, the senator noted concerns about conservative speakers being protested. When I asked Cirino if there were any specific instances he was thinking of in Ohio, he could not think of any, but he cited an event in March at Stanford Law School where a handful of students disrupted a conservative judge’s speech over his stances on transgender people. Cirino’s frustrations echoed those of many Republicans, who often point to a handful of incidents to argue that higher education is too liberal.

Several studies have shown that, across disciplines, college faculties do tend to lean left, but as Samuel J. Abrams, a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Amna Khalid, an associate history professor at Carleton College, wrote in 2020, “we should be careful not to assume that the mere disparities in the political composition of campus communities are responsible for shaping campus climate.” Still, the fact that so many professors lean liberal leads many Republicans to say, per a 2021 Pew Research Center study, that colleges have a “negative effect on the way things are going in the country” (nearly two-thirds of Republicans surveyed in the study agreed with this assertion). “In my view, as a legislator looking out for higher education—and we provide a heck of a lot of funding for higher education—I don’t believe it’s our role in the legislature to just write checks,” Cirino told me. “We should also have a little bit of say, so we can have a seat at the table in terms of what kind of job they are doing.”

In March, after becoming chair of the Ohio Senate’s higher-education committee, Cirino introduced S.B. 83—the Higher Education Enhancement Act. The National Association of Scholars, a conservative education nonprofit, called the bill a “higher education reformer’s wishlist.” The bill made changes to post-tenure review, banned faculty from striking, and required the elimination of DEI statements in hiring. It also altered how university trustees were appointed and trained. “The governing boards are appointed by the governor … and the senate has advice and consent,” Cirino told me in July. But whereas in the past, the senate’s role had been perfunctory, “we have a process in place now where we will be reviewing appointments in the higher-education committee and deciding whether or not those trustees should be kept in place after the governor makes the appointment,” he said.

“What we’re trying to do is shore up the governance model a bit,” Cirino said, “because we want to make sure that at the end of the day, they are the governing board of the university, and the president works for them; it’s not the other way around.”

Although Cirino argues that his changes simply bring more structure to board appointments, in practice, such moves have tended to bring more politics into university boards, not less. In 2019, caught between a conservative board of governors that wanted to return a Confederate monument to its pedestal and a campus community that wanted it permanently removed, Carol Folt announced that she would be resigning as the president of UNC Chapel Hill; she removed what was left of Silent Sam on her way out. The moment crystallized the new activist posture of boards of trustees, and bills such as Cirino’s could only accelerate that activism.

Critics immediately assailed the bill as an assault on higher education. “The ACLU of Ohio does and always has supported robust free speech, academic freedom, and intellectual-diversity protections on Ohio’s college and university campuses,” Gary Daniels, the chief lobbyist for the group, said during a committee hearing to discuss the bill. “However, we believe S.B. 83 is contrary, not complementary, to these goals.”

Cirino’s bill also bars colleges from taking positions on any “controversial belief or policy”—though the bill makes an exception for supporting the United States when Congress approves a war declaration, or if the college wants to display the American or Ohio flag.

The initial version of the legislation named, as examples, climate change, abortion, and same-sex marriage as areas of controversy, but Cirino stressed that that list was not exhaustive. “What is controversial today might be noncontroversial next year,” he told me. “What we want to guard against is the institutions themselves, as state institutions, taking positions on controversial issues.”

[Conor Friedersdorf: Free speech is not just for conservatives]

If a university was not allowed to take positions on controversial beliefs, what did that mean for an institution that wanted to celebrate Pride Month? I asked Cirino.

“If a group of students want to have a parade or whatever, they can do that,” Cirino told me. “If the university takes a position that one lifestyle is better than another or preferred to another or should be given more deference to another, that would be wrong, in my opinion … The students have their First Amendment rights that I will defend whether I agree with them or not.”

In the bill’s most recent version, some of the suggested topics tagged as being controversial have been tweaked. Notably, with generational weather events becoming more and more common—floods that have left cities devastated, tornadoes that have leveled entire towns, wildfires creating plumes that have ruined air quality hundreds of miles away and left skies a dystopian haze of orange—climate change is hardly controversial. Instead, the bill now refers to “climate policy.”

“Even though climatologists view climate change as settled science, there are different ways that you react to that from a policy standpoint and that should get lots of debate,” Cirino told me in August. “And in spite of what some people may say, it is a controversial topic. There are different views about how critical the situation is.” He reiterated that his bill was about having debate: “Nothing can be viewed as closed science, because we’re dealing with an academic community.” Cirino says he wants institutions that serve everyone regardless of their political bent. “I’m not trying to turn our universities into right-thinking institutions; they need to be neutral,” he stressed.

But there is a difference between an institution seeking neutrality for itself and the government dictating what it can and cannot do. For its part, the board of trustees at Ohio State University has said that the institution is already working to ensure a diversity of opinion on campus. In a statement, the board criticized the bill prior to its passage in the senate in May. “We share the General Assembly’s commitment to free speech, open dialogue, and the importance of diverse views,” it wrote. “The university is already taking steps to again emphasize that all viewpoints are welcome and respected on our campuses.”

But Cirino doesn’t trust that colleges will follow through. Universities, he told me, “have a terrible track record of self-correcting anything.”

Despite Cirino’s protestations to the contrary, several higher-education historians worry that the current movement in the United States to reconstitute university boards, establish guidelines for what universities can and cannot promote, and restrict faculty speech is exactly how leaders in authoritarian states operate. After all, some prominent conservatives have openly praised nations that have reshaped higher education, such as Hungary—which, as my colleague Anne Applebaum wrote, “is the only European country to have shut down an entire university, to have put academic bodies (the Hungarian Academy of Sciences) under direct government control, and to have removed funding from university departments that the ruling party dislikes for political reasons.”

In August, Rufo, who has led the conservative charge to reorient higher education toward conservative ends, wrote about a trip he’d recently taken to Hungary; its leaders, he argued, “are serious people combatting the same forces confronted by conservatives in the West: the fraying of national culture, entrenched left-wing institutions, and the rejection of sexual difference.” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was intentional about how he assigned members to the boards of its colleges, Rufo wrote, appointing “conservative stalwarts to the governing boards of these new institutions, with a mandate to advance a ‘national approach’ to education, rather than continue to serve as centers for left-wing ideology.” Orbán, he added, had introduced a new institution with the intention to “create a new national elite.”

Rufo praised the Hungarian government for the way it had inserted itself into established institutions, arguing that he suspected “that the real reason many left-liberals hate Hungary with such fervor is that its government has adopted their premise that the state has an abiding interest in managing and shaping society and used it to pursue goals opposed to theirs.”

It’s difficult to put moments into perspective as you’re living through them. But to John Thelin, an emeritus professor at the University of Kentucky who has made a career of studying higher education’s history, the efforts of Rufo, as well as of Cirino and politicians like him, have placed higher education at a crucial juncture—one that challenges not only the way universities are currently constructed, but also their core tenets, including academic freedom and shared governance.

“We’re talking about the character and essence of our universities for at least the next generation,” Thelin told me. The various governmental efforts to reform higher education—regarding admissions, curriculum, tenure, oversight—are sort of like the New Deal, he said. Typically, when an academic invokes the New Deal, they mean to suggest a positive, dramatic innovation. That’s not what Thelin meant, though: “I see it more as an unraveling.”

In 1915, the American Association of University Professors established a committee to take up the question of academic freedom. The panel was formed in response to threats across the country: At schools including the University of Utah, Wesleyan University, and the University of Pennsylvania, professors had been fired for teaching material that boards disagreed with; presidents had been fired as well. The cases were too voluminous to handle, so the committee dealt with the most pressing ones and established principles for others to follow. The resulting document came to be known as the 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure; the principles were updated and reaffirmed in 1940.

The panel aimed to enhance the dignity of the profession and reinforce the purposes of universities: promoting inquiry, advancing knowledge, instructing students, developing experts to serve the public. But the committee members were particularly worried about the boards that govern institutions of higher education. “The board of trustees is the body on whose discretion, good feeling, and experience the securing of academic freedom now depends,” said one president the committee spoke with. They saw the boards as a weak point in the protection of a university’s independence, and some people argue that those concerns now read prophetically. The takeover at New College began with a changing of the guard at the board level. For years, state leaders in North Carolina, Florida, and elsewhere have been remaking university boards to reflect the conservative priorities of state officials.

Eddie R. Cole, an associate professor at UCLA who studies how college presidents have shaped policy, believes that the principles laid out by the AAUP are being eroded, and that the public affront has to be met with equal force. “When you see a group of elected officials moving in a certain direction that’s counter to what we’ve understood higher education to be, that warrants a public response,” he told me. Administrators typically try to work behind the scenes with lawmakers and state officials, Cole said, but in the present circumstance, that’s unlikely to be enough: “Maybe conversations are happening behind closed doors, but you still need the public aspect of it too. You need to let your broader campus community know, let your state know, let everybody who has an eye toward the university know where the institution stands.”

[Annie Lowrey: Why you have to care about these 12 colleges]

John Thelin was more blunt. “This is redefining. So many values and principles and policies that were hard-fought to gain are being eroded before our eyes,” he told me. “And if there isn’t some vigilance from our presidents, they’re going to just evaporate before us over the next couple of years.”

In a 1916 essay, John Dewey wrote, “Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.” It’s an idea that animates liberal education. And Lynn Pasquerella, the president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, told me that she worries that if the attacks on the sector continue, and higher education’s central tenants are upended, other democratic institutions will not be far behind: “If we’re not able to train students to engage in civil discourse by modeling it, then we no longer have a system of liberal education as it was meant to be.”

Cirino argued that his goal is also to model civil discourse. When I asked him, during our conversations in both July and August, what that looked like, he pointed to a hypothetical conversation between a professor and a student about the Holocaust.

“What we’re saying simply is that different sides of issues, like the Holocaust-denier thing that I mentioned earlier, should be given open discussion,” he told me in July. He was referring to a question that he’s gotten several times since his bill first came out: What should professors do if a student continues to present dissenting views about the Holocaust? Earlier this year, Cirino was admonished by a colleague, State Representative Casey Weinstein, after he refused to unequivocally say that Holocaust denialism is outside the realm of legitimate classroom debate.

“There’s no question that it happened, but if I were teaching a class, and somebody came up and said they doubted whether it really happened the way everybody had reported it, the choice for the professor is that you can throw that student out of class, you can fail them, you can tell the other students to harass them, or you can persuade the student with the preponderance of evidence that the Holocaust happened,” he told me. “You may or may not convince the student, but that’s the kind of dialogue that should be happening.”

Of course, there are other options: The professor could have the student come and speak with them during office hours; a conversation intended to persuade a single student about the reality of a human atrocity does not need to occur during class, and certainly not if it risks legitimating Holocaust denial. But in Cirino’s formulation, even if a conversation verges on devolving the classroom into a glorified debate forum where one side is arguing with facts and the other with one of history’s most harmful conspiracy theories, as long as the argument remains respectful in tone if not in content, it should be had.

The Government Finally Puts a Number on the Discrimination Against Black Colleges

2023-09-20T10:39:59-04:00

On Monday, the Biden administration sent letters with a clear message to 16 governors: Over the past 30 years, their states have underfunded their historically Black land-grant colleges by hundreds of millions—or, in some cases, billions—of dollars. The memos, signed by Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, are the first time the federal government has attempted to put a comprehensive number on the financial discrimination against these institutions.

“Unacceptable funding inequities have forced many of our nation’s distinguished Historically Black Colleges and Universities to operate with inadequate resources and delay critical investments in everything from campus infrastructure to research and development to student support services,” Cardona said in a statement. (There are more than 100 HBCUs in the nation, but just 19 of them are land-grant institutions, or colleges designated for funding under the Second Morrill Act of 1890; it is these 19 institutions whose funding the government analyzed.)

At the outset of the Civil War, in 1861, shortly after southern legislators were expelled from Congress, Senator Justin Morrill of Vermont introduced a bill to educate the American workforce. Across the country, agricultural productivity was down sharply, and Morrill believed that education was the answer. There were only a smattering of colleges in the United States at the time, and they served primarily as finishing schools for the elite. “We have schools to teach the art of manslaying,” Morrill told his colleagues, “and shall we not have schools to teach men the way to feed, clothe, and enlighten the great brotherhood of man?” His idea was for the federal government to give states land that they could sell in order to fund a college. The bill, known as the First Morrill Act, was signed into law in July 1862.

[Read: Attending an HBCU has always been an act of courage]

Iowa was the first state to accept the land grant, which it used to fund Iowa State University; other states followed suit. By the time each state had taken advantage of its land grant, more than 17 million acres of land—10 million of which had been expropriated from hundreds of Indigenous tribes—had been doled out under the act. The institutions rarely, if ever, enrolled Black students.

By 1890, the colleges were starting to work as intended: They were, on average, enrolling more students than non-land-grant colleges were and expanding the college-going population. But the leaders of the institutions argued that they needed more money to do their work, and Morrill agreed. “Let me urge that the land-grant colleges are American institutions, established by Congress, and, if a small pittance is needed to perfect and complete their organization … I shall confidently hope that it will be granted without reluctance and with the full faith in the national benefits that cannot fail to accrue,” Morrill said.

He proposed a Second Morrill Act—one that came with a caveat: States could not receive funds to support a college that made a “distinction of race and color” in admitting students; states could, however, operate a separate but equal college for Black students. The bill was signed into law on August 30, 1890. Most southern states chose the separate-but-equal route; other states, like Iowa, where George Washington Carver enrolled at Iowa State University as its first Black student, in 1891, admitted Black students to their already established land grants.

Within two decades, however, it was clear that the states were shirking their duty to the equal part of separate but equal. On February 5, 1914, senators convened to discuss a sharp disparity among land-grant colleges. Wesley Jones, a Republican from Washington, had gathered data on the differences between the white land grants and the Black land grants. Georgia, Jones told his colleagues, was a prime example of the disparity in funding. There were 423 students at the white land grant—the University of Georgia—and 568 at the one for Black students, Savannah State College, but the University of Georgia’s funding far outpaced that of Savannah State. The government had provided UGA with $249,656—$50,287 of that coming from the federal land grant—whereas Savannah State had received just $24,667, with $8,000 coming from the federal government.

“Does that mean that they were trying to teach 500 colored students on $24,000 and 400 white students on $240,000, in round numbers?” Senator Albert B. Cummins of Iowa asked Jones during floor debate. “That seems to me a very startling disparity.”

[Read: The steep cost of decades of discrimination]

The very least the government could do, Jones argued, would be to require states to report how they spent their money, and he introduced legislation to make it so. But southern senators thought that went too far. The measure was voted down. Time passed. Other reports came and went, such as the Truman Commission for Higher Education and American Democracy’s analysis, which showed that no state in the union funded white and Black higher education equally—including at a rate of 42 to 1 in Kentucky. Still, it took more than a century for the federal government to finally require states to report their land-grant spending, which it did in the 2018 Farm Bill.

Cardona and Vilsack’s letters to the governors outline the exact amounts each land-grant Black college would have received from 1987 to 2020 if the institutions had been funded at the same level per student as the 1862 land grant stipulated. If Alabama A&M University had received its fair share in comparison to Auburn University, which has been dogged for decades by low enrollment figures for Black students, it would have had an additional $527 million over the period; meanwhile, Tennessee State University may have had an additional $2.1 billion if it had received an equitable share of the pie.

The land-grant colleges are not the only Black colleges that have been mistreated by state governments; each institution has many stories of unfair policies it has faced. Savannah State is no longer Georgia’s historically Black land grant—that designation now lies with Fort Valley State University—but it still must deal with the consequences of a state government that has failed to adequately fund it since its founding.

There is now a number attached to the legacy of discrimination at historically Black colleges, at least for the most recent decades. The lingering question is whether states will actually atone for it.

The Decision That Upends the Equal-Protection Clause

2023-06-29T15:02:54-04:00

The Supreme Court’s decision today that the race-conscious admissions programs as practiced at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Harvard—the nation’s oldest public and private universities, respectively—are unconstitutional upends more than four decades of precedent on the use of race in college admissions. The decision could have major implications for the country’s approach to the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise of “equal protection of the laws.” Meanwhile, its consequences for diversity at institutions of higher education are far from clear.

In a 40-page opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, argued that the institutions violated the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution by failing to use race “within the confines of narrow restrictions outlined by the court.” The programs, Roberts wrote, effectively require stereotyping of underrepresented minorities. “When a university admits students ‘on the basis of race, it engages in the offensive and demeaning assumption that [students] of a particular race, because of their race, think alike,’” Roberts wrote. He also pointed out that the Court has, in the past, suggested that such programs need a sunset date and lack a “logical endpoint.”

But Roberts stopped short of banning institutions from considering race at all in their admissions programs. He included a significant caveat that institutions could consider an applicant’s discussion of “how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise,” on a case-by-case basis. Additionally, in a footnote, he wrote that military academies could continue to operate their race-conscious systems in “light of potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.” (Roughly 18 percent of military officers come from the five service academies.)

[Ronald Brownstein: Curtailing affirmative action is a blow against a rising generation]

Legally, the decision is a landmark, taking a tool—the Fourteenth Amendment—meant to prevent discrimination against Black Americans in a post–Civil War landscape and turning it on its head, into a guarantor of a “race neutral” approach. The amendment has been used in the past to guarantee the rights of marginalized groups in voting and employment; it animated the decision in Brown v. Board of Education. In this case, the Court took Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, that “our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,” to upend that historical purpose, a result that Justice Thurgood Marshall had in some ways predicted four decades ago. “It would be the cruelest irony for this Court to adopt the dissent in Plessy now and hold that the University must use color-blind admissions,” Marshall wrote.

The term affirmative action first came into the federal lexicon in 1961, when President John F. Kennedy issued Executive Order 10925, aimed at banning discrimination in the federal government and diversifying its workforce. In short order, colleges—which had become subject to enhanced federal antidiscrimination laws after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Higher Education Act of 1965—began to implement affirmative-action programs to build up their enrollment of students from historically marginalized communities. The programs were intended to correct a history of segregation and inequity in America’s higher-education system—a system in which no state in the country funded Black and white students, or the colleges they attended, equally.

[Uma Mazyck Jayakumar and Ibram X. Kendi: ‘Race neutral’ is the new ‘separate but equal’]

But nearly as soon as affirmative action was put in place, a Supreme Court case severely limited its scope. In the 1970s, Allan Bakke, a white applicant to the medical school at UC Davis, contended that he had been denied admission because of an admissions program that allotted seats for minority applicants. The university set aside 16 seats each year, out of a 100-person class, for such students. By 1978, when the Court issued its ruling, the justices came to a compromise opinion written by Justice Lewis Powell, who wrote that race could not be used to remedy past discrimination; it could be used only for the approved goal of diversifying the student body for the sake of the educational experience of all students.

In his opinion today, Chief Justice Roberts took a sledgehammer to that diversity rationale, arguing that it gives too much deference to universities. “Unlike discerning whether a prisoner will be injured or whether an employee should receive backpay, the question whether a particular mix of minority students produces ‘engaged and productive citizens,’ sufficiently ‘enhance[s] appreciation, respect, and empathy,’ or effectively ‘train[s] future leaders’ is standardless,” Roberts wrote. “The interests that respondents seek, though plainly worthy, are inescapably imponderable.” Powell’s articulation of the reason for race-conscious admissions became its undoing.

Now institutions are left to decipher what this all means in practice. America has examples of what happens when race-conscious admissions programs go away. Michigan experienced a 10 percent decline in its Black enrollment in the three years after the state banned affirmative action through a 2006 ballot initiative. California saw a similar decline following its 1996 ban—and consequently, as the education-policy researcher Kevin Carey wrote, Black and Hispanic students were “less likely to earn bachelor’s degrees in a science and engineering field, as well as less likely to graduate overall,” than they were before the ban.

[Drew Gilpin Faust: The blindness of ‘color-blindness’]

Meanwhile, a 2020 report from the nonprofit Education Trust showed that Black enrollment had already been declining at 60 percent of the nation’s most selective public colleges—that is to say, the types of institutions that reject enough students to have to consider race in admissions. These institutions rarely enroll underrepresented students at rates proportional to their state populations in the first place. This inequality is now poised to get much worse. Private institutions, such as Harvard and Yale, may be able to marshal their resources to allow admissions officers more time to review applications on the first read—at many of the most selective schools, reviewers have only a few minutes to spend with each application. But even that might have a limited life span. After all, deciphering how race has affected a student’s life and employing that in individual admissions decisions will not erase the haziness around selective admissions that invites these legal challenges in the first place.

In her dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson zeroed in on the irony of this decision being based in the equal-protection clause. “With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat,” Jackson wrote. “But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.”

San Antonio, the Spurs, and Me

2023-06-22T11:07:45-04:00

Updated at 5:45 p.m. ET on June 26, 2023.

Each October for the past several years, when I prepare to fork over too much money to stream every single San Antonio Spurs game, it has been with an eye to the past.

I rationalize the expense: Gregg Popovich is the greatest basketball coach of all time; over the course of 27 years leading the Spurs, he has won five championships and more than 1,300 games, and given San Antonians a lifetime of memories. And although in the past few seasons the Spurs have won … less, to put it mildly, they’ve played with the same passion and reverence for the game of basketball that Pop demands. There’s no way I can stop supporting him and the team just because they are in a slump. When Keldon Johnson dives for a loose ball in a meaningless-but-close game in April of a 20-win season, I think of the way Manu Ginóbili used to throw his body around for the team and smile. Or, when Sandro Mamukelashvili comes out of nowhere to steal the show against the two-time NBA MVP Nikola Jokić in a surprise March win, I’m reminded of leaping out of my seat in the Alamodome, cheering for another gritty Malik Rose performance.

I hold on to the hope that with Pop still in control, things might turn around. He might still be able to squeeze a bit of greatness out of players who don’t know how good they could be. Luckily for the franchise, there’s reason to believe that a player is on the way who has the chance to be an all-timer.

[Prashant Rao: Why it’s good that Americans don’t dominate basketball]

Last month, the Spurs won the first pick in the NBA-draft lottery—where teams who missed the playoffs find out the year’s draft order; the worse your team was, the better odds you have of getting an early pick. If all goes as expected tonight, they will select Victor Wembanyama, the 19-year-old French generational prospect who, at a height of at least 7 foot 3, has the frame of a center with the ball-handling ability and finesse of a guard. NBA scouts have salivated over “Wemby” for years, calling him the best prospect since LeBron James (no pressure), and soon, he will likely call San Antonio home.

“The Spurs are part of the lifeblood of the city, and almost instantaneously you saw the mood shift and the hopes of the city just shoot through the roof,” San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg, who watched the draft lottery in his car, told me. “The Spurs have been through some tough times over the last several years, and fortune seems to have shifted in an instant.” If you need a gauge for the excitement in the city, roughly 3,000 fans made deposits for season tickets in the two days after the lottery, and the first three rows of courtside seats sold out, as did the suites. One NBA scout estimated that Wembanyama could add $500 million to the value of the franchise thanks to his name recognition, international celebrity, and talent. And Spurs fans know what a No. 1 pick means for the city—we’ve seen it before.

On May 18, 1997, the day of that year’s lottery, the Spurs had just come off a surprisingly terrible season. David Robinson, the star big man whom they had taken with the No. 1 draft pick a decade prior, had been sidelined the entire year with a back injury. With Robinson, the Spurs had been a 60-win playoff team over the previous two seasons; without him, they struggled to cobble together 20 victories all year. But that night, the Spurs were putting the season behind them, because their struggles meant they were again well positioned to land the first pick.

That year’s drawing was the Tim Duncan sweepstakes. Duncan, who’d shone as a power forward at Wake Forest University, snagging rebounds in games like he was the only man on the court, was no doubt going to be selected first. The Spurs didn’t have the best odds of getting the first choice—that honor went to the Boston Celtics, who’d lost 34 of their final 38 games of the season—but they had hope. And as the lottery went along, that hope turned into belief. “I was nervous,” Spurs chair Peter Holt told reporters at the time. “But when we started getting down to 3-2-1, I got excited.” When the envelope was opened—revealing the fiesta-colored Spurs logo—Holt could do nothing but pump his fists.

On June 25, a little over a month later, during the draft itself, the Spurs made their selection official. Two first-overall picks—Duncan and Robinson—would be teaming up, and the league was terrified. As Stu Jackson, then general manager of the Vancouver Grizzlies, put it at the time: “I don’t mind getting the fourth pick … What I mind is having to face Robinson and Duncan in the West four times next season.”

I turned 6 the next day; Duncan became the birthday gift that kept on giving.

Two seasons after the Spurs selected Duncan, their luck began to pay off.

It’s Memorial Day, May 31, 1999, and the Spurs are in the Western Conference finals—one series away from the big dance. There are 12 seconds left in the fourth quarter. The Spurs, down 18 points in the third, have clawed their way back to within two. Sean Elliott, the Spurs forward, doesn’t so much as pirouette as look like someone just bumped into his shoulder on the street. His pinkie toe is practically hugging the sideline as he catches the ball. Somehow—divine intervention, maybe—Elliott composes himself with a hop and one dribble while orienting his body toward the hoop. His heels hang out-of-bounds, the balls of his feet planted firmly inside the line. Rasheed Wallace, the Portland Trail Blazers power forward, uses every bit of his 7-foot-4-inch wingspan to try to get a hand on the ball. It is no use. Elliott’s eyes lock on to what he can see of the rim as he rises with the picturesque form of basketball-shooting manuals.

“He fires the three,” Bob Costas, the NBC announcer, says. “And he hits it!” The Alamodome erupts—logically, some Trail Blazers fans must be there, but it seems like all 35,000 people in the arena have joined in an ebullient chorus. About 20 miles away, at our home on Randolph Air Force Base, my living room erupts in screams as well.

Some say that shot set the Spurs dynasty in motion. Neither Robinson nor Duncan took it, but it showed that this team was going to fight until the end for a victory, that the basketball gods were smiling on San Antonio. The win led the Spurs to sweep the Trail Blazers and catapulted them into the NBA Finals.

[From the January/February 2019 issue: Tibet is going crazy for hoops]

It’s nearly a month later—June 25, the fifth game of the Finals—and the Spurs are leading the series 3–1—one victory away from winning the whole thing. My family is huddled around the television. There are 2.1 seconds left on the clock. The New York Knicks guard Charlie Ward is trying to inbound the ball at half-court; the Spurs guard Avery Johnson—the “Little General”—is jumping around in front of him. Ward lobs the ball to Latrell Sprewell, who is immediately met by Duncan and Robinson. They don’t swat at the ball, just hold their arms erect—the “Twin Towers,” they called them—and make Sprewell’s shot near-impossible. He barely gets it over them; it’s an air ball straight into the hands of Elliott, who slams the ball into the ground as the buzzer sounds. Duncan, who averaged 27 points and 14 rebounds in the series, is named Finals MVP.

We put our Spurs flags on our Ford Windstar and drive downtown. It’s mayhem. Horns blare. My dad rolls down the windows and we join in the celebration.

I wake up the next morning as an 8-year-old. What a gift.

The finals never came that close to my birthday again, but each June that the Spurs hoisted the Larry O’Brien Championship trophy—1999, 2003, 2005, 2007, and 2014—was a gift to the city of San Antonio. The Spurs became a model of consistency, and even as the roster changed, the core held—Tim, David, Avery, and Sean became Tim, Tony, and Manu, which became Tim, Tony, Manu, and Kawhi—and Pop remained their leader. Even when the Spurs did not win, or (sigh) even make, the Finals, they won a lot. For 18 consecutive seasons, from 1999 to 2017, the Spurs won at least 50 games.

No one expects Wemby to come in and return the franchise to its status as a perennial finals contender overnight. (Okay, maybe some people do, and he might, but that’s beside the point.) What Wembanyama will bring back to San Antonio—what we pray he’ll bring back—is a foundation to build on. “It’s almost as if the success of the Spurs is the cool wind that comes in for the spring,” Nirenberg told me. “When we’ve been through the losing seasons over the last several years, it’s almost been in anticipation of when the ice would thaw; and when you see that pick come in … it’s just, it’s just like everything starts to bloom again. That’s really the outlook.”

Basketball fans everywhere—regardless of whom they support—should be glad that this potentially generational player isn’t going to be thrown into a team that’s expected to win right away. No one else in the NBA has the sort of job security that Gregg Popovich does—a security that allows him to let players develop instead of overworking them early. Wemby will be mentored by two of the best big men—in Duncan and Robinson—to ever play the game; both first-overall picks who know the pressure that comes with that designation.

Two decades from now, I hope I’ll be writing about how June 22, 2023, four days before my 32nd birthday, was the day that the dynasty was renewed. And even if that’s not meant to be, I’m going to fork over my money and enjoy the ride with a team that’s given me and my hometown so much.

This article originally misstated Wembanyama's height.

America Isn’t Ready for the School-Funding Crisis Ahead

2023-05-15T10:36:19-04:00

For nearly a decade, America’s students have been backsliding on the nation’s report card, which evaluates their command of math, science, U.S. history, and reading. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, first began displaying the decline in 2015—when math scores were, on level, five points lower than expected. But even those numbers could fall, and during the pandemic they did.

[From the June 2011 issue: The failure of American schools]

Roughly 40 percent of eighth graders scored below the basic level in U.S. history, and only 13 percent of students were “proficient” in the subject, according to NAEP results released this month. Civics scores were down as well. Last October, the same test showed that, across nearly every demographic group, scores were down in math, science, and reading.

Students need help catching up. And experts seem to have some consensus about what teachers and administrators should do. They should spend more instructional time on history and civics; both subjects have received less time since the introduction of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002. They should also spend time helping students with their reading comprehension. In addition, some people add, schools should spend more time on math and science to improve those scores as well.

Each of these ideas seems simple enough. But they are all based on an assumption that schools have the resources—time, money, and people—to make this happen. There is only so much instruction time—unless states add weeks on to the school year, as New Mexico recently did. And reallocating resources on this scale takes time, while the kids who need help need it now. America appears to have no way of addressing this crisis, particularly in the hardest-hit schools, on a timescale that would actually help those kids succeed in the long run.

Before the pandemic, many school districts—particularly in high-poverty areas—already had very difficult problems on their hands. Teachers reported being twice as stressed as adults in other professions did; on average, districts had just returned to the levels of per-student funding they had received prior to the Great Recession; and national assessment scores were trending in a negative direction. A bright spot, however, was that most administrators said they felt ready to take on the challenge of leading their schools. In 2019, a survey from the National Association of Secondary School Principals found that 63 percent of principals “strongly agreed” when asked if they were generally satisfied with leading their school. Just four years later, however, only a third of principals are able to say the same; and nearly 40 percent believe they will leave the profession in the next three years.

[Read: What school-funding debates ignore]

“We act like we were starting from a great place in February 2020,” Jess Gartner, a former social-studies teacher who founded Allovue, a tech company that specializes in K–12 finance, told me. “So much of [our system] is held together with duct tape and glue. When you have a scenario like COVID that really threatens the stability of even a high-functioning district, of course we’re going to see disproportionate impacts on those districts that were already teetering on a precipice of insolvency and instability to begin with,” she said.

America’s school system is structured around local control of public education—so much so that federal funds make up, on average, only 8 to 10 percent of school funding each year. That has often changed during moments of crisis. In an effort to stabilize schools during the pandemic, federal lawmakers included more than $120 billion in the American Rescue Plan to help them reopen and prevent “learning loss.” Some districts used the money to hire counselors to assist students with mental-health needs, or to supply students with laptops; others used the money to revamp their HVAC systems to provide better air filtration and get students back in classrooms; leaders also provided summer-learning opportunities for students to make up for lost time. Most districts did not seek to hire additional faculty with the onetime injection of funding. Some did, though. Woodland Hills, in Pennsylvania, for example, reinstated 70 full-time positions that had been axed in 2019.

In a way, that funding provided another piece of chewing gum to plug the holes in the education-funding infrastructure. And what schools were able to achieve with it may have prevented further declines on the NAEP and similar assessments. But now districts worry about what will happen when that money goes away.

“The federal funding budget that we're negotiating right now—the one that Republicans want to add deep cuts to—those funding cuts would come to fruition at the exact same time that American Rescue Plan dollars dry up” in 2024, Noelle Ellerson Ng, the associate executive director at the School Superintendent’s Association, told me. “So as much as the federal government wants to drive this narrative of doing more to close achievement gaps and close testing scores, we’ll see the end of ARP dollars, and you’ll see the rescission of federal funding levels.” Add the prospect of a recession—which would bring with it a loss of revenue for schools—and the situation shades more dire.

Districts that used federal money to hire more teachers are readying those faculty for layoffs. Summer programs may soon sunset. Though some efforts—like distributing internet-enabled devices to close the broadband gap or hiring additional counselors—may not go away, school leaders will need to find alternative funding sources for them, which could mean cuts elsewhere.

[Read: The biggest problem for America’s schools]

The federal government is unlikely to step in once again. “I’ve been here 15 years now, and the only time I’ve seen an infusion of funds of the magnitude we’re talking about was the great recession, we saw an infusion of funding during COVID, and then we see an infusion of funding and resources after any major school shooting,” Ng told me. In an ideal world, she said, Congress would fully fund IDEA—the federal program that helps schools serve students with disabilities—which would free up the billions of state and local dollars that currently cover the shortfall to go back into the general education budget. Congress has not given a hearing to a bill to fully fund the program in more than a decade.

The experts I spoke with agree that there will likely be a wave of downsizing—layoffs, furloughs, or even school closures—if this confluence of funding woes is not addressed. And those most in need of additional help will again be left without it.

Montana’s Black Mayor

2023-01-30T11:05:00-05:00

In his office overlooking Sixth Avenue in Helena, Montana, Wilmot Collins leans back in a chair at his conference table and recounts all of the ways his being here, as a Liberian refugee who in 2018 became the first Black mayor of any city in Montana since the state joined the union, was unlikely to happen.

Perhaps it all traces back to April 12, 1980, when a faction of armed militants in Liberia, led by Master Sergeant Samuel Doe, entered the executive mansion in Monrovia, the nation’s capital, and murdered President William Tolbert. They dumped his body into a mass grave with those of 27 of his colleagues—members of the West African nation’s single-party leadership—ushering in a new era of military rule. Collins was a senior at Carroll High School in Yekepa then, and he remembers the string of killings and atrocities that began shortly after the start of Doe’s rule. “Things were bad,” he told me. They soon got worse. Those years started Collins’s thinking about political systems and how they could be made better—what they might look like if they worked.

[Read: The new Southern strategy]

After high school, he attended the University of Liberia, where his interest in politics deepened. Specifically, he was fascinated by America’s system. “Professor [D. Elwood] Dunn taught American government; that’s where we learned about Roe v. Wade, Brown v. Board of Education; and the system of government intrigued all of us,” he told me. Liberia had a three-branch federal system as well, but studying the clear divisions of power in America captivated him; he imagined a better Liberia.“We had the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary—but the executive was always meddling into every other branch … But then to see that working,” he said, “we had hope.”

Nearly 10 years on, in 1989, his country was on the verge of a second coup. Charles Taylor and his rebel army had been training in Libya and entered Liberia through the Ivory Coast—gaining support along the way from people who had felt left behind by the ever more ruthless military dictatorship. “When Taylor came in with his rebels promising honey and gold,” he said, people thought, This is who we want. But Taylor was a warlord, an ethnic conflict broke out, and Collins eventually fled to the United States.

Collins took some basic lessons from the destabilization of his home nation: the importance of a peaceful, functioning government and the dangers of despotism. It’s wisdom he wishes was not so hard-won, and wisdom he gained only in hindsight. His concern at the time, of course, was escaping.

Twenty-five years after moving to Helena, Collins was serving his first term as the city’s mayor and had eyes on running for statewide office. But then he learned a few more lessons, ones that received only passing mentions in textbooks on American government in the 1980s: that the party system has tremendous influence on who prevails politically. That gatekeeping can exclude candidates who lack the right connections. That hopefuls can have their campaigns smothered by their opponents’ cash.

Collins learned those lessons in his own bid for Senate, a race he was elbowed out of when a candidate backed by the Democratic Party establishment jumped in, only to then lose to the Republican. To Collins, the whole experience was dispiriting. “When the establishment is not in your corner, you will struggle, and struggle raising money,” Collins told me. “I was pissed; I was angry because I didn’t get the support.”

But he still thinks he has a path ahead. He cites a colloquial definition of insanity: “to do the same thing over and over hoping for a different result.” But he hopes that here in Montana he can get a different result.

Liberia began as an idea: that Black people might better prosper in Africa than in the United States. The American Colonization Society sent more than 13,000 free Black people to the west coast of Africa—and though some believed it to be a potential remedy to slavery, it was also a mass exile.

By the time Collins was born, in 1963, Liberia had grown into an independent state. His father was a civil engineer; his mother was the superintendent of schools. “Growing up in Liberia was calm,” he told me. “We grew up just like [in America] basically.” He went to school, played baseball and tennis. Then the first coup happened, then the second. “And life ceased as we knew it.”

On December 24, 1989, the First Liberian Civil War began. Food supplies grew scarce. Each day, Collins or one of his siblings would leave the house to find food, which was concentrated in rebel-held areas. In October 1990, when it was his turn to venture out, he and his fiancée, Maddie Muna, were able to find only a tube of Pepsodent toothpaste.

[From the December 1992 issue: Liberia]

“They say hunger is the best sauce,” he told me, explaining how he guzzled down half the tube before sharing the other half with Maddie. He furrowed his brow as he related the story, but allowed himself to laugh. “I’m not kidding you, that thing tasted like, Oh wow!” His speech slowed down a little again as he remembered how they were almost killed.

On their way back to his family, they were stopped at a checkpoint by rebel troops. The armed men called Maddie over for questioning first. “Where are you from?” he recalled them asking. “What do you do?” Then they pointed at Collins, who had been standing quietly to the side. “Who’s that? Is that your man?” “Yes,” she replied. “You are very lucky. I’m done killing for the day,” the rebel told her.

They sprinted away. “We ran until we got home; we didn’t stop,” he told me. “I’m talking about three, four miles.” That’s when they decided to leave. “We will die,” he remembers thinking. “We didn’t have any food; we’ve been threatened. We’ve gotta get out of here.” But they didn’t know how difficult getting out would be.

A peacekeeping force, led by Nigeria, was helping Liberians escape on cargo vessels, but the lines were staggeringly long. He and Maddie queued at 9 o’clock in the morning on a Friday later that October—only leaving their spot, in shifts, in order to use the bathroom. Almost three days later, on Sunday, at about 10 o’clock at night, they boarded. Three more days passed before they arrived in Ghana—it had been nearly a full week since they had eaten. “Imagine,” he told me, his eyes welling up, “seven days without food and water, barely drinking. And no change of clothes. Nothing.”

He eventually got a job in Ghana, working for SOS Children’s Villages as a teacher—the same job he’d held in Liberia before the war began. But after a few months, he and Maddie, who’d married at the start of 1991, were still struggling to make ends meet, and Maddie offered a suggestion: They should move to America.

“How are we supposed to do that? We don’t have any money,” he responded. “We’ll go to Montana,” Maddie said. Years earlier she had been an exchange student at a high school in the state, and she thought her host family might be able to help.

She wrote a letter to the family, who contacted Montana’s congressional delegation, including Senator Max Baucus. The best way for Maddie to get back to the United States would be on a student visa. With the delegation’s help, the family reached out to a Catholic institution, Carroll College, in Helena, where they lived. Soon after, she was awarded a full scholarship to study nursing at Carroll. She would once again live with the family that had hosted her. But getting to the States would prove a little more difficult for Wilmot. Two weeks before Maddie left for Montana, the couple learned that she was pregnant; they resolved that Maddie should go ahead. It would take two more years before Wilmot would be able to join his family.

“Welcome to Helena, it’s sunny and warm at 32 degrees,” the pilot said over the intercom on February 17, 1994, as Wilmot’s flight from Salt Lake City descended. He was the last one off the plane, and as he walked into the terminal he spotted a sign that read Welcome home, Wilmot. Carroll College faculty and the institution’s president were waiting for him—there to support his wife and child. “I saw my wife for the first time holding my daughter up, and she put her down and said, ‘There’s Daddy, go to Daddy,’” he recalled. The tears start again as he remembers that day. “So my daughter started to walk towards me … and then she just started to run and I just fell on the ground and grabbed … ”

He stops. It’s still fresh.

“I started screaming, calling my wife. ‘Maddie, Maddie, she came to me! She came to me!’”

They moved into low-income housing around the corner from Helena High School, which Maddie had attended as an exchange student, and began their life in America.

Each day, he’d get dressed, leave their eggshell-white townhome, and turn onto North Montana Avenue—both in search of a job and to acquaint himself with his new home. One day, he explored a bit farther than normal and stumbled upon the state capitol.

He walked inside and was immediately struck by the marble columns and grand rotunda. He marched up the stairs and saw the governor’s office. “And I decided to go meet the governor,” he told me, matter-of-factly. The governor’s scheduler stopped him. “Do you have an appointment?” she asked. When he shook his head, she asked if he’d like to make one and took his information. Then a man came up behind him.

“May I help you?” he asked.

“No, I’m here to meet the governor,” Collins responded.

“Well, I am the governor, Marc Racicot,” the man responded.

Collins was floored. He explained that he’d just come from Africa—that he was a Liberian refugee—and that he was looking for work. He handed the governor his paper résumé, and Racicot quickly phoned his educational adviser, who in turn realized that her daughter and Collins’s wife had a few classes together at Carroll College. Racicot and his adviser told Collins to apply for a job at Intermountain Children’s Home, a mental- and behavioral-health facility for young people, and to list both of them as his references. By March 31—a month and a half after arriving in the United States—he had work. Soon after, he joined the Army National Guard as well.

Over the course of two years, Collins told me, he saw the best of America. Yes, his visa application and resettlement paperwork were held up in bureaucracy, but his application process was helped along by Senator Baucus, a Democrat, and he’d found work through Racicot, a Republican. He saw a system functioning without violence or corruption, and he saw what could happen when politicians tried to help someone.

Collins told me he later realized that not everything was as idyllic as he had wanted to believe—something Racicot’s own trajectory would soon demonstrate. The rising star in the Republican Party was praised by both liberals and conservatives for his hawkish approach to budgeting and his personal touch, and he was so popular that one pollster jokingly suggested he “could run for king.” But just a few years after helping Collins, he was deemed too moderate by the Bush administration to be considered for attorney general. Harsher undercurrents were at work.

Still, Montana proved a soft landing ground for Collins, and the assistance he received from Racicot and Baucus helped solidify the raw idea about American politics that he’d had in Liberia. They were models of the kind of leader he was starting to think he might one day become.

The Montana state capitol building, in Helena, Montana (William Campbell / Corbis / Getty)

On February 10, 2007, Barack Obama traveled to Springfield, Illinois, to announce, on the steps of the building where Abraham Lincoln began his political career, that he would be running for president of the United States. He spoke of Lincoln’s fortitude. “He tells us that there is power in conviction,” Obama told the crowd of 17,000. “That beneath all the differences of race and region, faith and station, we are one people. He tells us that there is power in hope.”

[Read: My president was black]

Ten days later, Wilmot Collins awoke to the words KKK: Go back to Africa scrawled across the side of his house in spray paint. He was scheduled to testify at the state capitol that day about a bill that would have expanded the definition of hate crimes in the state. His mailbox had been destroyed before; his car had been set on fire. According to a report from The Great Falls Tribune, his then-14-year-old daughter regularly heard racial slurs; and his 10-year-old son, Bliss, no longer wanted to go to school. “They shouldn’t have to go through that,” he told lawmakers at the time. “Please, for decency’s sake, let’s do something now.” But he was heartened by how his neighbors had rallied around him each time something like that happened. He had seen Helena at its worst, but he’d seen his neighbors at their best.

In 2016, as he was staring down retirement from the National Guard, he began to look around for what to do next. His son, then a junior at the University of Montana, was visiting home from school and asked what Wilmot might do with all of the free time he would soon have. “I’ll never have free time, because your mom will make me work,” he told me he joked at the time. “But why are you asking?” Bliss suggested that he enter politics. “Dad, I know you. You know a lot of people; a lot of people know you—I think you’re ready.”

Eventually, Collins was persuaded. The first order of business was to figure out what his platform would be. He began knocking on doors. He needed to introduce himself to people in the community, but he also needed to hear what they were most concerned about in Helena. In those early conversations, three things came up repeatedly: funding essential services such as firefighters, EMTs, and police officers; increasing affordable housing; and curbing teenage and veteran homelessness. Those became his campaign planks. “I always call my issues ‘human issues.’ I don’t call them ‘political issues,’” he told me—a common refrain for Democrats in red states. The mayor’s office is nominally nonpartisan, and a broadly appealing platform was important not only to being elected, but to properly serving his community.

Many Black politicians would find Collins’s goals familiar—a strategy political scientists call “targeted universalism.” In a city like Helena, which is more than 90 percent white, candidates like Collins need to find ways to appeal to a broad swath of the public. When candidates travel to the rural outskirts—or the wealthier suburbs—of their district or city to campaign, they have to align their messages to the interests of those communities. But that does not have to mean compromising a candidate’s own beliefs. Instead, as Ravi K. Perry, a political scientist at Howard University, explained to me, targeted universalism is the practice of making clear to those voters why the candidate’s policies—such as a large increase in low-income housing—would benefit the entire community. Even if a person is not experiencing homelessness themselves, or is not in need of low-income housing, many people can understand the ways material improvements to housing and roads in areas that need them can boost the city’s bond rating and may—down the road—contribute to lower taxes, or other opportunities across the city.

Collins also knew that there was power in alliances. He and a pair of city-commission candidates, Andres Haladay and Heather K. O’Loughlin, decided that it would be best to run as a unified bloc—billed in local newspapers as the progressive ticket whose ideas were to the left of the incumbent mayor’s more conservative stances on issues such as Medicaid expansion and public-works projects like fixing roads.

As Election Day 2017 approached, polls had Collins running within a point of Mayor Jim Smith. As votes were tallied, Collins eked out a marginal victory—earning 51 percent of the vote to Smith’s 48 percent—to become the first Black mayor since Montana joined the union. (The election of a Black barber by the name of E. T. Johnson, in 1873, continues to be the subject of some debate among local historians.) Haladay and O’Loughlin won their races, for city commission, as well.

National outlets seized on the story, lumping Collins’s victory together with other elections that they cast as a repudiation of President Donald Trump’s first year in office. But Collins had campaigned on local issues, and he kept his focus on Helena. Alongside the city’s commissioners and manager, his administration began improving roads, provided greater funding to the fire and parks departments to help limit the spread of wildfires, and broke ground on new affordable-housing developments.

Collins had built some momentum: He’d defeated a popular incumbent with an upstart campaign that had generated national interest. His was a story that people could believe in. And he’d never felt more like a Montanan. Perhaps, he thought, a statewide campaign might someday be in order.

He’d learned that the hardest part of running for office was fundraising. “Calling people and begging them, writing people letters—it was hard for me,” he said. “I did that when I was homeless; I didn’t want to do that when I was not homeless.” Without a personal network of wealthy donors, he knew he’d have to get started early. And so, in 2019, nearly three decades after fleeing Liberia, Collins announced that he would be running to unseat Republican Steve Daines in Montana’s 2020 U.S. Senate election.

Wilmot Collins visits with a colleague during his first month in office. (William Campbell / Corbis / Getty)

in July 2019, standing before a group of Democrats assembled for the state party’s rules convention at the Colonial Hotel in Helena, Wilmot Collins wanted to talk about division. “It’s not about Democrat or Republican,” he told those in the ballroom. “That’s what we need to bring this state back to. We’re divided. If I’m representing you, I’ll represent all of you.”

There was no need to explain who he was; by that point, Collins was a known quantity in the state—and nationally. What he really wanted to highlight in his brief remarks was that he intended to be the kind of political leader who cared about people—like those who had helped him come to Montana and get a job to support his family.

But he also wanted to talk about money. “I am you,” he told them. “We’re not rich.” He was painting a contrast between himself and his would-be opponent were he to become the official nominee. In 2018, Daines had a reported net worth of more than $30 million. “Not only the rich should be able to govern,” Collins told the Montana Free Press.

He may have felt personally aggrieved as well. Prior to announcing his candidacy, Collins had met with Montana’s then-governor, Steve Bullock—a Democrat who had launched a presidential campaign—and asked for his blessing to run for office. But, according to Collins, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee was convinced that the governor would ultimately run for the Senate seat if his bid for the White House was unsuccessful. “They tried to dissuade me and discourage me from announcing—and I announced anyway, so I didn’t have any support from them,” he told me. (The DSCC did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Of course, parties are risk-averse and rally behind their perceived best bets all the time. But that tendency can have the unfortunate side effect of limiting, rather than deepening, the party’s bench, and party leaders’ instincts for who will succeed with voters are not always right. For example, when Jon Tester—Montana’s senior senator—first wanted to run for his seat, the party wasn’t interested, preferring John Morrison, then the state auditor, whose father had been a state-supreme-court justice. “A lot of Democrats tried to dissuade him as well, including people like Max [Baucus], [Chuck] Schumer, and Harry Reid,” Bill Lombardi, who ran Tester’s primary campaign in 2006, told me. But Tester, a farmer who was in his first term as State Senate president, managed to win the primary anyway, and has been popular with voters since, having won his seat three times now. Democrats are hoping he will run again in 2024, in what is expected to be a tough race for the party.

Collins’s appearance before the Democrats in Helena in 2019 was brief, but he laid out the ideas that would underpin his campaign as well as the primary obstacle he would face. Alongside his small team, he began traveling the state to raise money—a difficult task in the fourth-largest state, but a necessary one for a candidate without party funding. He often played to small crowds, even if they weren’t small for the area. “We went to Fort Benton,” he told me, a two-hour drive, minimum, from Helena. “And when we got to the hall, there were 50 people—and I turned to my campaign manager and said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’” (A local Democrat later explained that it was the most people that that corner of Montana had seen turn out for someone in their party in a long time.) People would donate $5, $10, $20—anything that might gas up his tank to get him and his team to the next city to continue campaigning. “I raised $350, $400 from that crowd [in Fort Benton], but it really showed me what grassroots campaigning is.”

Over the next several months, Collins raised nearly $300,000. But in December, Bullock dropped out of the presidential race. And in early March, just as America began to implement restrictions to stem the coming surge of COVID-19 cases, the governor called Collins and asked for a meeting. They met at the governor’s mansion for lunch. “He told me, ‘Things have changed. I’m planning to get back in the race.’” In the 24 hours after he made his announcement, on March 9, Bullock raised $1.2 million; quadruple the amount that Collins had raised in nearly six months.

Bullock was someone whom party bosses were excited about. He had already won statewide office, and he was the kind of centrist that Democrats believed Montanans could get behind. But that wasn’t enough—he lost by 10 percentage points, sending Daines to the Senate.

Was Montana destined to vote for Daines regardless of who was on the Democratic ticket? Or, in a year when Democrats won the White House, retained control of the House, and got to 50 seats in the Senate, could a different candidate have earned a different result? If not for gatekeeping, would a candidate like Collins, a refugee who had served in the military for two decades before ascending to the mayor’s office in a city where only a handful of people look like him, have won? Bill Lombardi isn’t sure. “There aren’t a lot [of Democratic candidates] rising to the top who can bridge the rural-urban divide” in the state as well as energize Montanans who have simply soured on the Democrats’ brand, he told me. Candidates need to be able to show they’re willing to buck the party, and party favorites may not be the people most likely to do just that.

Both Collins and Lombardi agree on one thing: Democrats in Montana need more future leaders. “I’ve been asking people, in traveling around the state at different events, ‘Who are the candidates who can reach across the aisle?’ and people are stumped because they can’t think of anyone on our statewide bench,” Lombardi told me.

Collins worries that a lot of young Democrats have been cowed by the party’s rigidity. “I see a lot of prominent, young Dems who want to get into politics who don’t know how—they’re scared,” he told me. If the party does not start training and encouraging them instead of going “back to the same old people who are still losing,” those young Democrats will run away.

A late-summer evening in Helena is unnerving in its beauty. The walking mall down Sixth Street is bustling; patrons sit outside one of the several breweries; remnants of the Pride rally—the largest in Montana’s history—still line the street. On a bench, Collins sips his beer and holds court. Not officially, but everyone here seems to know him.

In 2021, Collins was close to running unopposed for reelection—in fact, in some ways, his tenure has been marked by very little friction, though there are things that residents hope can be improved. Homelessness is still a major issue—one Collins has taken to saying can’t be solved by Helena alone; he has begun calling on surrounding cities for help. On the day before campaign filing closed, he received a challenger, Sonda Gaub. “I wanted a choice, and no one was stepping up,” Gaub told a local television station after her announcement.

[From the August 1866 issue: A year in Montana]

Gaub, like others in the city, worried about Helena’s unhoused population. And she sought greater transparency in local government, though, as the Independent Record noted, she conceded that a lot of that transparency work—publicly available meetings where the community could hear directly what went into decision making—was already happening.

Though it was her first foray into politics, her husband, Darin, had run for public office in 2020, and has since become deeply involved in Republican politics in the state. “Here in my small town of Helena, Montana, we’ve got a mayor and a commission that constantly puts us in debt over things we don’t need,” Darin, the chair of the Lewis and Clark County Republican Central Committee, said on a podcast in August, on which he also made several references to disbelieving the 2020 presidential-election results. (Neither of the Gaubs responded to multiple requests for comment.)

Ultimately, though, a majority of voters thought Collins had done enough to serve a second term, and he was reelected—this time with more than 60 percent of the vote. His campaign was still built around issues that residents felt were most important: fixing roads, making housing affordable, improving wastewater treatment and snowplowing, expanding trails to allow for e-bikes. He’s open to seeking statewide office again, but right now he’s focused on helping train young Montanans to run for office; building a bench for the future through the coalition approach he used to get elected.

After more than 20,000 miles crisscrossing Montana with the hope of a Senate election, he’s back where he feels most comfortable: in Helena. He’s still the guy who fell in love with American democracy in Liberia, and who has had to learn, over and over again, the ways it falls short. But even if he never wins statewide office, he’s part of that system now, and what could be a better testament to its ideals than that?

Why Yale Law School Left the U.S. News & World Report Rankings

2022-12-31T07:00:00-05:00

Each year, the U.S. News & World Report’s rankings of top colleges, law schools, and medical schools land to a chorus of groans and cheers. The rankings began in 1983, and were originally drawn solely from peer reviews of institutions. Did the provost at Brown think better of the University of Virginia than the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill? Since then, the publication has tinkered with the rankings several times—taking into account factors such as how many students an institution rejects each year, how much it costs to attend, and the student-to-faculty ratio—to give more rigor to its methodology.

College leaders have mixed feelings about the listing. They criticize the formula for the things it doesn’t count—such as aid for low-income students and graduation rates—while simultaneously lauding their institution’s own position on the leaderboard, at least for those at the top.

But in recent months, even some leaders of the top-ranking institutions have reassessed their relationship with U.S. News. In November, the dean of Yale Law School, Heather Gerken, announced that it would no longer contribute data to the rankings. Pointing to the lack of emphasis on public-interest fellowships and recruiting working-class students, Gerken wrote in a statement, “We have reached a point where the rankings process is undermining the core commitments of the legal profession.” Soon after Yale’s announcement, Harvard Law School—which recently came in fourth on the list—also said it would pull out of the rankings. All but two of the top 14 law schools have since joined the exodus.

[From the September 2014 issue: The law-school scam]

I spoke with Gerken about the decision to no longer participate in the rankings, what it means for the future of legal education, and whether undergraduate institutions should follow her law school’s lead.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Adam Harris: I was reading the letter that you wrote about why you decided to drop the rankings. For years, people have been really critical of the rankings. Why did you think that now was a good time to stop contributing to those rankings, and what was the final straw?

Heather Gerken: There are two things. I’m just beginning my second term, so this is an opportunity to sit back and reflect on the work that we’ve done—and this is very much part of that larger work. It’s also a moment when economic equity is at the heart of conversations about higher education. And it seems to me this isn’t just a time for Yale Law School to step back but for everyone to step back, and really think hard about what we’re doing.

Harris: So this was something you were thinking about during your first term as well?

Gerken: Yes. I believe in trying to give institutions a chance to change, and so like many other deans, we spent a lot of time talking to U.S. News about the core problems with the rankings, and I’m sorry to say that we got nowhere with it. Since our announcement, we’ve had this remarkable response from the world of education, from the alumni community, from our students and faculty, but subsequent conversations with U.S. News have really cemented our decision to leave the rankings.

It’s a commercial entity. It does not have expertise and legal education, and it has produced a set of rankings that don’t give a full and accurate picture for the huge, varied set of institutions. And as you know, as I said in my statement, I’m particularly concerned about low-income students and students interested in doing public-interest work.

Harris: And when you say it further cemented your decision, do you mean their reluctance to change those fundamental parts about the rankings?

Gerken: Yeah. If you want to fix the rankings, it will require a major overhaul. And U.S. News has said publicly, even with regard to the public-interest fellowships, that it is not going to focus on this. So it just cemented the decision to think that this is not where students should get their information from.

Harris: One point that some folks who have supported the rankings raise is that if institutions don’t share as much information with the rankings, then the students who might still turn to the rankings for guidance will be working with less information. What do you think about that argument?

Gerken: I believe in transparency. I believe in data. I helped build a ranking myself. So I just want to say I plan for Yale Law School to lead here. I know exactly why it matters to get people good information. And we are committed not only to doing that for ourselves, but to help lead the conversation about how all law schools should do this.

The American Bar Association has an enormous amount of data already, so we have a good place to build from, but there’s more work to be done.

Harris: And so, in the interim, you’re pointing prospective students to the information that’s already out there from ABA, etc.?

Gerken: Exactly.

And this is part of a bigger mission. I mentioned that this is the second term of my deanship, and everything that we did for the last five years has dramatically changed this law school. From diversifying the student body—when I began, it was roughly steady over 10 years at 32 percent students of color, and we’ve admitted the six most diverse classes in our history. The current class is 54 percent students of color. We’ve increased the number of students who are first in their families to attend professional school by 80 percent. We’ve more than tripled the number of veterans on campus—they’re now 7 percent of our student body. So there’s been a sea change inside the law school. And now we are building out infrastructure to give them the support that they need.

Harris: What do you hope will change following your decision?

Gerken: The problem in legal education is that we are drawing, as a collective, from too narrow a pool of students. So only 15 percent of lawyers are people of color. One of the biggest reasons for that is the cost of attending law school and the many, many obstacles that exist for students who come from low-income backgrounds. These are some of the most talented, entrepreneurial students on the planet. We should be reaching out and bringing them into our midst and providing them the support they need to thrive. That is the only way that legal education can move forward. And that is what our profession needs.

U.S. News is part of the set of obstacles, but there’s a lot more for us to do. So I will just say financial aid being put in the hands of the students who need it most matters enormously. That’s where we should be devoting our resources, and we should also be providing students the training they need inside of law school, to go out and change the world, change their communities, make a difference. Everyone needs to be at the table for that conversation.

[Read: Your annual reminder to ignore the U.S. News & World Report college rankings]

We also need to meet students where they are. For example, we know that students who come from below the poverty line—students from low-income backgrounds—often come to law school without a professional network. At some places, they just kind of give people a manual (on how to build a network) as if that’s going to fix the problem. Here, we are building out a system to provide our network of lawyers and leaders to our students to serve as mentors to give them a helping hand that everybody needs along the way.

Harris: To this point, all except for two of the top 14 law schools have now pulled out of the rankings, and Campbell University’s law school, in North Carolina, just recently pulled out of the rankings too. Do you think that the same collective action needs to happen—or is possible—at the undergraduate level as well, where there’s also been a large outcry against these U.S. News rankings?

Gerken: I’m obviously focused on legal education; it is the ranking I really understand. But I will just say that everyone should be taking a step back at this moment and thinking about whether or not they are doing enough to further equity in this country. This is a moment when universities have to be part of that conversation. Part of that conversation is what they do internally; part of that conversation is how they train their students to go back and serve their communities in their country; and part of it is questions like participating in the ranking.

One of the things that has been really moving about the last few weeks is how powerful the response has been, and how every dean, as they enter the conversation, adds another piece to it. What you see is a set of deans who are really thinking hard about the future of legal education, the future of our profession. And although you know these are all independent decisions, you can see that the conversation is actually iterative, and it gives me a lot of joy to see so many people thinking hard and taking part in this conversation, because it matters enormously for our future.

The Wizardry of South Korea’s Win

2022-12-02T18:22:00-05:00

This is an edition of The Great Game, a newsletter about the 2022 World Cup—and how soccer explains the world. Sign up here.

The World Cup is never short on magic, and today, South Korea needed some.

After conceding an early goal to Portugal in the game’s first half, the Reds had fought back to level the match that could send them to the knockout stages of the competition. But a tie would not be good enough. They needed a goal. Then, just before the 66th minute, the camera panned to Hwang Hee-chan, who had begun to put his jersey on. I let out a small shriek in an agonizing mix of nervousness and excitement.

The South Korean winger plays his club football for my preferred Premier League team, Wolverhampton Wanderers; I know what he is capable of when he’s on his game. In his debut for Wolves, after signing on loan from RB Leipzig in the German top flight, Hwang showed his knack for being in the right place at the right time, tapping a ball into the back of the net to seal the win against Watford. Three matches later, brilliance again, as his knack for finishing saw him net two goals—including the winner—against Newcastle United.

But injuries hampered Hwang’s promising start. The goals dried up. In fact, he hasn’t scored in more than 25 league and cup fixtures for Wolves. His tendency to pick up injuries at the least opportune moments surfaced again just before the World Cup.

Until today, Hwang had not seen the pitch since a narrow 1–0 victory against Leeds United in the Carabao Cup in early November; there was worry in the South Korean camp that he would miss out on the tournament altogether. A week ago, just before South Korea played Ghana in its second match of the World Cup, the Korea Football Association shared a post on Instagram showing Hwang running again during training. But after he failed to feature in the game, it seemed that those worst fears might be realized.

As those thoughts informed my audible expression, Hwang entered the match. He looked bright from the beginning, showing flashes of his speed and ability with the ball at his feet. With Uruguay leading Ghana 2–0—meaning that the South Koreans would finish group play in third place and be eliminated, unless they scored—the Koreans pushed forward at every chance they had, often leaving their back line exposed by committing so many players toward Portugal’s goal.

Then the wizardry Korea needed arrived. In the 91st minute, Heung-min Son, Korea’s captain and a star forward for the English Premier League’s Tottenham Hotspur, raced up the right wing after a Portugal corner kick fell to his feet. Three Portuguese defenders closed down on him; four were tailing him. Hwang darted down the middle of the pitch with one defender on his outside hip. Son slotted the ball through the defense, and Hwang—right place, right time—angled it past the Portuguese keeper into the bottom-left corner of the goal. Bedlam. The camera panned the crowd as the Korean fans’ excitement welled into puddles under their eyes.

This is the second time in two decades that South Korea has gone through to the World Cup knockout stages by beating Portugal on the final day of group play. In 2002, South Korea won 1–0 and went on to enjoy its most successful tournament in the team’s World Cup history. Lining up across from them on the field that day in the early aughts was the coach of this year’s iteration of the Reds, Paulo Bento.

As I’ve written before, that was the World Cup that made me a fan. As the final whistle blew on that day, Korean players fell to their knees, and supporters hugged in genuine elation that their nation had done all it could to move forward in the competition. I can only imagine what Son and Hwang’s moment of magic has done for a new generation of Korean soccer fans.

American Soccer Comes of Age

2022-11-21T13:13:00-05:00

This is an edition of The Great Game, a newsletter about the 2022 World Cup—and how soccer explains the world. Sign up here.

On June 10, 2002 in Daegu, South Korea, Claudio Reyna led the United States men’s national team onto the pitch to face the World Cup’s host nation. Daegu stadium was a sea of red bandanas, T-shirts, and scarves emblazoned with the nation’s name in Korean—Daehanminguk. Two and a half hours away, my family crowded in front of our television inside the cramped housing on Osan Air Base, in Pyeongtaek, to watch.

Admittedly, I had not watched much football to that point. All I knew was that the American women’s team were world-beaters, and the men’s team had been, routinely, beaten by the world. Across the previous three World Cups, the U.S. had played a combined 10 matches and won just one of them. In 1998, they’d scored only one goal the entire tournament.

American men’s soccer was behind. Major League Soccer was but eight years old—established, in part, to boost the U.S. bid to host the World Cup in 1994. And the league was bleeding cash at a rapid rate; it lost roughly $250 million in its first five years alone. Although the U.S. men’s team was beloved by those who followed the sport passionately, it was the dutiful kind of love I’d long had for teams in Cleveland (my dad’s from nearby Sandusky)—I’ll watch, but I know we’re probably going to lose.

But 2002 was different. There was hope for the men’s national team, or so I had heard. Five days prior, the U.S. had beaten a technically gifted Portugal side 3–2, and it seemed to be all my friends were talking about—mostly because they now worried that the perennial losers might beat Korea. Until the Americans’ triumph over Portugal, it had seemed a favorable match-up, as the Korean team had had a similarly poor run of tournaments. Thanks to a series of draws, they’d lost fewer matches than the U.S. since 1990, but they’d also never won a World Cup game.

I don’t remember much from the 90 minutes of play, only that Korea seemed to have the better chances and that the game was played to a 1–1 draw. What I recall most clearly, though, is the way the stadium roared throughout. The way our apartment seemed to vibrate when Ahn Jung-hwan headed in an equalizer in the 78th minute and imitated a speed skater—a nod to the disqualification of his countryman Ahn Hyun-soo at the Winter Olympics, which led to the American Apolo Ohno winning a gold medal. The way my friends beamed with pride as their young team played their way to the semifinals that year and finished fourth was my first experience being swept up in the passion of the sport, and how it brings people together. And by the tournament’s end, my family had our own “Be the Reds!” shirts and bandanas.

Every four years since 2002, I’d find myself with a soft spot for the Red Devils—rooting for them as if they were my own national team. Meanwhile, the U.S. team began performing better as the sport continued to grow at home. A generation of players—Clint Dempsey, Tim Howard, Eddie Johnson—came, excited fans, and went.

They were followed by what many have called the most talented crop of American players in the nation’s history.

On June 6, 2021, nearly two decades after watching the U.S. men take on South Korea, I plopped down on a couch to watch soccer. It was the CONCACAF Nations League final between the United States and Mexico. A classic rivalry. Mexico found the back of the net within the first minute of the match. I couldn’t help but think another disappointment was inbound. Twenty minutes later, another Mexico goal. But then came a surprise turn of events; referees ruled that Mexico’s player was offside and struck the point. A break. Then, at the 26th minute, the then-22-year-old American winger Christian Pulisic whipped a ball into the box off a corner. It was headed into the post and fell to 18-year-old Giovanni Reyna—son of Claudio, the U.S. captain I’d watched nearly 20 years earlier in Korea—who tapped it in to tie the match. The U.S. would go on to win 3–2 on a penalty kick from Pulisic in extra time.

Whatever pride my friends had swelled with in 2002, I found in this team: no longer simply lovable losers, but a promising young group that breeds hope in its fans. I’ve followed Cleveland sports long enough to know that hope can tear your heart out. But it’s fun to finally have some.

Listen to writer Clint Smith discuss the complicated feelings he has for soccer on a special episode of Radio Atlantic:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

Mandela Barnes’s Last Punch

2022-11-08T11:19:52-05:00

NORTH MILWAUKEE, Wis.—Just three weeks before Election Day, inside a neoclassical bank building turned café, Mandela Barnes, the lieutenant governor of Wisconsin and Democratic nominee for Senate, sat at a table listening to nine Black women share their birthing stories. They spoke of miscarriages, hospitals that ignored their pleas for help as they labored, and postpartum depression. They said they wanted him to be a deciding vote to provide more support for doulas, Medicaid funding for care after birth, and other priorities that might improve the lives of Black women.

“There are not enough people who want to take the time to consider what somebody else’s life has been like,” Barnes said. “And they want to bastardize people because of decisions that had to be made.” As he began talking about his plans, two gunshots rang out in the distance. A member of his security team peered outside. But Barnes stayed on message, forging ahead as if nothing had happened. “We’ve got to be intentional about this, about better birth outcomes.”

Following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Barnes campaign has focused heavily on women’s health. “People think of abortion as an isolated issue,” rather than a general health-care issue, Barnes told the roundtable—or even an economic issue, when one considers the costs of raising a child. For much of the summer, that looked like a winning strategy; polls showed Barnes with as much as a six-point lead over Johnson.

But things look tighter now, as Barnes’s effort to define the race around women’s health has been challenged by his Republican opponent, Senator Ron Johnson, who has seized on voters’ rising concerns about crime. In the fall, Johnson blanketed the airwaves with ads that painted Barnes as nonchalant about crime, and during a recent campaign event with Wisconsin’s Fraternal Order of Police, Johnson told those gathered that Barnes has “far greater sympathy for the criminal or criminals versus law enforcement or the victims.”

These attacks would prove quite effective—for clear reasons. In 2019, there were 185 reported homicides in Wisconsin; by 2021, that number had skyrocketed to 315. A recent Marquette University poll found that 92 percent of registered voters in the state were at least somewhat concerned about crime—with 68 percent reporting they were very concerned.

In Milwaukee, near the Barnes event I attended, the crime increase has been particularly dramatic. Over the first half of the year, Milwaukee registered the most dramatic homicide spike among any of the 29 large cities studied in a recent report from the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice. Milwaukee is the biggest Democratic stronghold in the state; more than 300,000 people there voted for Joe Biden in 2020. If Johnson’s crime messaging resonates particularly with voters in and around Milwaukee, Barnes will take a considerable hit.

And that seems to be what is happening. As Johnson’s ads played on loop this fall, Barnes saw his lead steadily shrink, then disappear altogether. In recent weeks, Barnes has tried to push back, telling MSNBC that he “won’t be lectured about crime from somebody who supported a violent insurrection that left 140 officers injured.” That may not work when it’s local crime that voters are worried about. Democrats, meanwhile, do seem to be fairly concerned about abortion—a large majority of Democrats in Wisconsin, 81 percent, rank abortion policy as their primary concern in this election—but, at least by the polling, that seems to not be drawing out voters with quite the same urgency as crime. What once seemed like one of the Democrats’ best chances to flip a seat and preserve their slender hold on the Senate, and with it Biden’s hopes of pursuing his legislative agenda, is now at best a toss-up.

This follows a national pattern. In races all across the country—Pennsylvania, New York, North Carolina, Oregon—Republicans have used concern about crime to hammer their Democratic opponents. As my colleague David A. Graham writes, “The party [has been] left without a message—much less an actual policy—that steers between being electorally disastrous and morally monstrous.”

[David A. Graham: Why democrats keep struggling on crime]

Still, Barnes hopes his strategy of touching every part of the state—and relentlessly highlighting what he sees as Johnson’s failures—will lead to success at the polls. “We’re talking about all the ways that he has left people behind for 12 years, and how we plan to right those wrongs,” he told me.

Barnes’s campaign has leaned heavily on his biography. He sailed to the Democratic nomination earlier this summer after his primary opponents bowed out of the race and threw their support behind him. Barnes, who in 2018 became the second Black person ever elected to statewide office in Wisconsin, has deliberately stressed the aspects of his upbringing to which swing voters are likely to relate. In a state where the first unions were formed before the Civil War, and continue to play a significant role in the state’s politics, both of his parents were union members. His mother was a teacher; his father worked the third shift on an assembly line, as Barnes frequently reminds voters.

And they also hope to paint Johnson as out-of-touch with the state. In a recent interview, Jim Paine, the mayor of Superior, who has endorsed Barnes, pointed to what he believes is a prime example of Johnson’s neglect. On April 26, 2018, the fire from an explosion at Wisconsin’s only oil refinery, in Superior, shot black plumes of smoke into the air. Three dozen people were injured. Many of the city’s 27,000 residents were forced to temporarily evacuate to avoid the potentially noxious chemicals in the air. It was one of the largest refinery fires in the history of the United States.

Following the explosion, Paine heard from state leaders and federal officials who offered to help. Scott Walker, the Republican governor of Wisconsin, came to Superior; so did Tammy Baldwin, the state’s Democratic senator. Minnesota’s governor called. The White House, under President Donald Trump, reached out to ask what support Superior might need from the federal government. “But I never heard from Ron Johnson,” Paine told me. “It is as stark a failure of leadership as I have ever seen.” (Johnson’s office did not respond to a request to comment for this article.)

[Read: What democrats don’t understand about Ron Johnson]

Of course, there’s more to politics than simply being somewhere, but people remember absence as much as presence. “I’m closing in on six years here, and I have met every single person that directly represents me or the city bottom to top, including the president of the United States,” Paine offered, but he’s not yet met Johnson. Meanwhile, he added, he’s probably seen Barnes in Superior more than any other elected state official. That has been part of Barnes’s electoral strategy as well. Through tours at family farms—which the campaign has called Barns for Barnes—and aggressive campaigning outside cities, Barnes has hoped to broaden his coalition beyond liberal strongholds like Milwaukee or Madison.

Barnes has also been aided by grassroots efforts such as Moms for Mandela, which began as an Instagram account started by Kate Duffy, who lives just outside Milwaukee, and grew into a movement of its own. “I knew how important the Senate race was going to be not only for Wisconsin, but for the entire country,” Duffy told me. She had never been an active participant in organizing before. “I wanted to get involved, and started it on Instagram because that’s where the moms are.” She found that others, like her, were “equally upset” about Dobbs and mass shootings, but did not know how to engage politically. They found community through the group—but they also found a candidate they believed in, one with a positive message for the country.

Democrats pinned their hopes on Barnes as a promising candidate running a pro-union, progressive campaign in a purple state against an incumbent who has refused to acknowledge that January 6 was an armed insurrection, and who questions the legitimacy of the 2020 election. So if Johnson’s focus on crime secures his reelection, it won’t just be a defeat for Barnes—it will raise broader questions about the Democratic Party’s pitch to voters.

Justice Jackson’s Crucial Argument About Affirmative Action

2022-11-01T15:18:58-04:00

Yesterday, an hour and a half into the marathon hearings about whether colleges can use race as a factor in admissions decisions, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson began to rub her temples as she looked down at her notes.

“We’re entertaining a rule where some people can say what they want about who they are and have that valued in a system,” she said. “And I’m worried that that creates an inequity in the system with respect to being able to express our identity.” Black and Latino applicants would be limited if they can’t express their race in the selection process, she said. She almost laughed with exasperation. “Is that a crazy worry or is that something I should be thinking about and concerned about?”

In previous arguments this term, Jackson was a forceful voice on issues of racial discrimination and the intent of the constitutional amendments designed to protect against it. For many in favor of race-conscious admissions, she has been a welcome presence on the Court, asking, in a way, the question at the center of the cases: Have less than 50 years of affirmative action put enough of a dent in the inequality fostered over more than two centuries of racial discrimination in higher education to merit eliminating the practice?

[From the September 2021 issue: This is the end of affirmative action]

For roughly five hours, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in cases of Students for Fair Admissions, a coalition of unnamed Asian American students brought together by the conservative legal strategist Edward Blum, against the University of North Carolina and Harvard. If the cases are successful and the justices side with SFFA—which a majority of the justices seemed quite open to in their questioning yesterday—the decision would overturn the precedent established in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke in 1978, which has been upheld for more than 40 years. Because of her previous tenure on Harvard’s Board of Overseers, Jackson recused herself from the Harvard case and sat for only the UNC case. But she did not waste the time she had.

Although relatively few colleges are selective enough to have reason to consider race in admitting students, there is significant evidence about what happens at those schools when such programs go away. Michigan and California, for example, saw precipitous declines in Black enrollment at their flagship campuses after those states banned the practice. (By SFFA’s own estimates, described during oral argument, Black enrollment at Harvard would fall from 14 to 10 percent without affirmative action.) In some ways, that’s the backdrop to Jackson’s questions. She was driving toward a fundamental statement about what the programs are for: Race-conscious admissions are designed to help students get into college, not to exclude students as a result of their existence.

Jackson’s point is well worn. In 1978, during the oral arguments in the Bakke case, Justice Thurgood Marshall identified it. In an exchange where he prodded Reynold Colvin, who argued for the plaintiff, Allan Bakke, Marshall pointed out, “You’re arguing about keeping somebody out and the other side is arguing about getting somebody in.” Colvin agreed. “So, it depends on which way you look at it, doesn’t it?”

Once again, Colvin agreed. “It depends on which way you look at the problem,” Colvin said.

Marshall’s voice changed. “It does?” he said, with a rise in inflection.

“The problem—” Colvin began to say before Marshall cut him off.

“It does?” Marshall said, frustrating Colvin. “You’re talking about your client’s rights; don’t these underprivileged people have rights too?”

Yesterday, Jackson was less direct, but no less potent, in an exchange with Patrick Strawbridge, the lawyer for SFFA. She offered a hypothetical to emphasize her point. There are two applicants who would like their family backgrounds recognized. One writes that their family has been in North Carolina since before the Civil War, and that if they were admitted to the university, they would be a fifth-generation student there. The other student is also a North Carolinian whose family has been in the state since before the Civil War—but their ancestors were enslaved and, because of years of systemic discrimination, were not allowed to attend the university. But now that they have the opportunity, they would like to attend. “As I understand your no-race-conscious-admissions rule, these two applicants would have a dramatically different opportunity to tell their family stories and to have them count.” Both applicants were qualified, Jackson offered, but the first applicant’s qualifications could be recognized in the process, whereas “the second one wouldn’t be able to [get credit for those qualifications] because his story is in many ways bound up with his race and the race of his ancestors.”

[Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone: The end of affirmative action would be a disaster]

Strawbridge thought for a moment, then offered that UNC does not have to give a legacy benefit to the first applicant if it doesn’t want to. This is true, but it was not Jackson’s point: “No, but you said it was okay if they gave a legacy benefit.” Race, she said, would be the only thing that couldn’t be considered under that program. And that would disadvantage the Black student who, in a similar set of circumstances, wants “the fact that he has been in North Carolina for generations through his family” considered.

In a day filled with questions about the meaning of “true diversity” or the educational benefits of diversity, Jackson’s questions cut through the muck. Some students had historically been denied access to some of the nation’s most well-resourced institutions of higher education—feeder campuses for prominent roles throughout society—because of their race. If SFFA wins, that fact will be one of the only things a university cannot consider in its admissions process, as though that history never happened—as though the system is fair enough already.