Bill Gates Is Pissed and Colleges Are Reeling From COVID-19 Fallout
If you come at the king of the tucked in shirt, you’d best not miss. Plus: Hiring freezes, salaries locked in, and other troubles in Higher Ed.
God decided to punish me for not putting out a newsletter last week by giving me so much news that I had to do two this week whether I wanted to or not. I’ll hear no opposing arguments to this theory.
Everything is fine, nothing is different from normal in the world, and you should subscribe to this goddamn newsletter.
Let’s get started…
News Hits: PUT THE 2009 MICROSOFT PHONE DOWN, BILL GATES, DONALD ISN’T LISTENING
I assume that’s how Melinda Gates reacted when she found out Bill was logging back onto his ThinkPad to express his discontent for Trump’s insistence on defunding the WHO for reasons that aren’t...completely clear. Here’s the tweet, here’s some coverage on the issue (I’ll give you a metaphorical cookie if you click on all six links in this sentence, shoot me an email or whatever), and I’d attach a picture of my getting 14 different notifications from the Times, the Journal, the Globe, The Financial Times, the Post, and God coming down from on high to let me know that Trump decided to take his frustrations over perceived anti-Trump media coverage concerning his handling of the coronavirus outbreak and pandemic, but I’m afraid that image is cursed and cannot be published under any circumstances. [Breathes out, sighs.] It’s possible that this particular New York Times story that generated a lot of press, including on the Sunday shows this weekend, prompted Trump’s move to “review” the WHO. I guess the bright spot is that maybe Bill Gates will create his own version of the WHO that saves all of our lives the same way Windows XP did 20 years ago—the other bright side is this tweet thread I randomly came across that reminded me that not a lot actually gets done, even when the Trump administration makes big declarations. It’s a tweet thread from a random guy so take it all with a grain of salt, but I’ll speak for myself and say I enjoyed the Mark Meadows content—hopefully enough people will be pissed about this combined with the absolute power comments Trump made earlier in the week that he decides to take his anger out on somebody else.
Part of me just wonders if he’s in a bad mood because former U.S. President Barack Obama officially announced his return to the political spotlight when he endorsed former Vice President and presumptive Democratic nominee for the U.S. presidency Joe Biden on Tuesday...I think that’s via periscope? I don’t know, it wasn’t a normal video despite the fact that it had more cuts than a Steve Dangle LFR in it.
God I am testy in this newsletter I can hear my general state of annoyance through the screen.
For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction, and Obama’s endorsement—as well as Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren’s—were precipitated by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders dropping out of the race for the highest office in the land. I’d run through a whole analysis of this, but it turns out Sanders was mathematically out of the race about a month ago now, I’ve printed it seven thousand times, and it isn’t breaking news when I say the biggest roadblock on Biden’s run for the presidency is winning over the Sanders voters who hate that Biden isn’t as progressive as Sanders. How do I know that? I think because every political analyst in the world has pointed it out and plenty of Bernie voters have had a similar reaction to Jon Bois’. November is far away, I can assure you there’s going to be a lot more coverage of Biden’s simultaneous moves to the left to satisfy progressive voters and to the center to try to sate potential 2016 Trump voters that Democrats no doubt would like to lure back to the blue side of the not mailed in voting ballot. It’s not going to be an easy balancing act, and we’re still not completely aware of how the ripple effects from the virus will change Biden world’s calculus on the matter.
I just opened Twitter on my computer for the first time today (don’t judge me this is like 99% of what journalism is now just because it’s different doesn’t mean you need to bury me as an octogenarian even though I just buried Bill Gates on the exact same topic). Here’s what I see: A picture of people in masks walking away from a store called...XXXLutz? What? The headline is “Coronavirus: EU proposes ‘roadmap’ out of lockdown.” I don’t know what XXXLutz is and I’m not going to google it because I don’t need John Lutz porn (that link isn’t Lutz porn it’s a reference explanation I promise, it’s a 30 Rock joke, stay with me here) clogging my cache, but I can certainly assure XXXLutz isn’t under lockdown because of the coronavirus it’s locked down because the police had to shut that s—t down immediatly. The venereal diseases that must call that place home have to be worse than anything you’ve ever imagined. Alright back to news.
People are also fighting with Trump and Republicans over how voting should take place. Last week’s primary election in Wisconsin was marred by controversy when the state’s governor essentially got into a fight with the state’s legislature over whether to delay the election and then whether to delay the last day mail-in votes could be postmarked, with the final outcome being decided by the conservative-leaning state supreme court against the governor on both counts—it should be noted that as I write this, Wisconsin has, according to CNN’s tracking, the 24th most confirmed cases (their death total pushes them a little higher up the list but death reports aren’t 100% accurate on a day-by-day basis) among U.S. states, so they’re in a slightly different stage of fighting the virus than New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, or Michigan. The problems that come with voting during the coronavirus pandemic have been a national issue for some time—Democrats tried to open a dialogue with Republicans (which if I’m remembering correctly is just a nice way of saying they demanded this before backing off) over adding nomenclature to the federal bailout bills opening up mail-in voting on a mass scale to prevent turning polling stations into potential mass infection hubs. Republicans haven’t said a whole lot about the issue but it’s clear they aren’t into it—at least not yet—partially because Trump is ardently opposed to opening up mail-in votes. He has said that his opposition is out of a fear of increased ballot-fraud, but it’s more likely a voting suppression issue but nobody will say it on either side since there’s massive political implications surrounding it, as well as potential bad press. Either way, the issue of how people can vote this November is sure to become a knock down, drag out fight if health officials publicly declare voting in-person during the pandemic is an actively dangerous choice. I can’t imagine anyone is going to cross that line anytime soon, both for political reasons (see: the fire Fauci people—it doesn’t take much to end up in employment hot water right now) and because November is so far away we have no idea how the COVID-19 infection and mortality curves are going to shift over the next six to eight months.
Normally, this is where we’d do some Massachusetts coverage, but we’re going to skip that today because there isn’t much and all of it is bad. If you’re dying for details, I will point you toward the always stellar and thorough Stephanie Murray Politico newsletter on the happenings statewide. If anything insane happens, I’ll put it in tomorrow’s edition at the top before the sports.
Salary and Hiring Freezes Staples of Higher Education Moves in Wake of Pandemic
The education economy is getting hammered at the moment, particularly because there isn’t any clarity regarding whether or not students will, or should, be allowed to return to college campuses across the country this fall. The Boston Globe put out a story Monday night that noted that Boston University, the University of Massachusetts system, Harvard, MIT, and Brown are all putting together contingency plans for how to finance a full online fall semester. Issues in play are hiring, tuition, testing, budget plans, partial reopenings, and conceivably much, much more.
Harvard has already begun to cut costs: The university announced Tuesday that salaries and new hirings are being frozen, while capital projects are being put on the back-burner and top administrators are receiving pay cuts. Harvard administrators are also reportedly contributing to a fund that is geared toward supporting “university employees facing economic hardship” thanks to the economic fallout triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Globe. Harvard hasn’t furloughed or laid off anyone yet, but officials told the Globe they haven’t ruled out any such moves yet. Theoretically, Harvard’s nearly $41 billion in endowment funds could be used to make up any sort of financial shortfalls triggered by the oncoming recession, but administrators wrote to the Harvard community that the fund is legally restricted, making the repurposing of the funds within it difficult to pull off. It’s most likely that endowment funds will be used to try to make up the increased demand for financial aid, since endowment funds at Harvard are already being used for that purpose. Expanding aid seems like the most plausible way funds can be used without violating any agreements, based off what I’ve read both in the Globe and on Harvard’s website, though it isn’t clear how much of an increase in financial aid is practically possible. Harvard cost of living (for in-person classes) is around $70k a year, its tuition is around $46k. I’m not sure if classes are all online if the university will be forced to consider a cut—Harvard is so high up the education totem pole they may not be subject to that sort of move.
Other colleges in Massachusetts will be though. It’s likely given how many petitions have been passed around at various institutions over the last three months that BU, Northeastern, and Boston College will likely face scrutiny over how they decide to handle the changes. BU President Robert A. Brown told the Globe the university’s fall plans would hopefully be in place by July 1. Brown said that he did not think, regardless of whether students are able to return in August or not, that things on campus will “be business as usual,” indicating that large classes or any other type of mass gathering probably still won’t be on the table this fall. It should be noted that vaccine completion for COVID-19 is estimated to be in the 12-18 month range, which means no vaccine until early 2021 at the earliest, and no palliative care is currently FDA approved, while antibody tests are still not working at 100% capacity, nor are they available at a mass scale yet based on how many more Americans would need to be tested. In addition, though contact tracing for the virus has been proposed and is a project I’m sure thousands of people are currently working on, no solution for such a move at either a nationwide or state-by-state scale is currently announced. In addition, Globe coverage has also noted potential issues regarding international travel—and I wonder even about state-to-state travel—could prevent students from returning to their respective college campuses in the near future.
As I worked on what would’ve been a different iteration of this newsletter (you’ll see a lot of it tomorrow), Boston College President William P. Leahy, S.J., announced similar measures to Harvard: In a cost cutting effort, merit-based salary increases have been frozen, as have new hirings. Only “positions determined essential for core strategic and academic purposes” will be filled.
This could be a particularly difficult development for the computer science department, political science department, and new engineering program announced by the university this week. Computer science has been beset by staffing issues for years—the major has seen a 630% increase in interest in the last decade, and the minor is popular as well. The department added five more professors a year ago to bring its total to 13, and its website currently shows it has 16 professors now, with an additional three who are either part-time or emeritus. Its nadir in terms of staff came in January, when enrollment in the major had to be stopped for a short period of time due to extremely high demand. That article from friend of the newsletter Jack Miller notes, though, that additional logistical support, as well as additional general resources, were still a few years away. Less than a year has passed since that article was published, so it’s unlikely that computer science’s issues are completely solved yet, and additional faculty hires were surely on the horizon. The international studies major has had a 101% increase in enrollment over the last decade and was probably on deck for additional hires, and the political science department has seen a 31% increase that has been mostly taken place since 2016, leading to political science taking, you guessed it, international studies courses to fulfill major requirements due to their not being enough sections of core classes in the poli sci major—it takes no stretch of the imagination to think the department was also due for additional hires as well. The move will also slow down faculty diversification—BC has taken flak for its faculty not being diverse enough over the past few years, and the administration was listening: hires of professors who identify as being a part of minority populations are significantly up, and after the latest round of hirings completed before this past October, administrators said it was trying to bring more women onto the faculty moving forward as well. With the hiring freeze, those diversification efforts won’t be halted in the long-run, but in the short-term they could be slowed.
The new engineering program was announced by the university this week and is scheduled to kick off as a major in the fall of 2021. It’s certainly possible engineering is considered “essential” in the eyes of BC, and I reached out to see exactly how the freeze affects professors and I’ll update this when I know more, but I don’t think a single member of the engineering faculty has been hired yet, and presumably those hires would be scheduled to take place over the next six to nine months. Unless BC isn’t allowing the 79 professors it hired over the course of the past year to join the faculty—which I’d argue is unlikely since most of those professors, if not all of them, have already started their BC tenures by now—it’s likely that filling in the engineering department’s ranks is both a top priority and a high expense, potentially throwing its immediate future into doubt. The engineering program will happen, the question is when.
BC also announced that about $45 million in expenditures are being delayed via postponing aspects of capital building projects it’s been working on. The aforementioned engineering program is a part of the Schiller Institute of Integrated Science and Society, which is currently under construction, and according to Leahy’s letter “certain construction/renovation projects related to [Schiller], the Frates Center on Brighton Campus, Bapst Library, and additional undergraduate housing in Rubenstein Hall will be completed.” It’s unclear whether that means construction on the Schiller building is being slowed, but it’d be shocking if it’s on the exact same timeline to be opened as it was two months ago. The development could also affect engineering, as well as anyone else who’s expected to move into that building who is a part of the science department, the computer science department, or any new hire that will be based out of there from any department—integration means a lot of different things will be based out of the building, like the Shea Center for Entrepreneurship. I said it in a tweet late Wednesday night, but it’s hard to imagine that after everything that has changed at BC over the last month there is even a single aspect of the university or member of the university community who isn’t affected by the pandemic.
The major BC issue that had cropped up before Wednesday, though, was that BC effectively laid off every student on a work-study when the university sent students home in March. The Heights did a long article on this, but my understanding of it is that work-study students aren’t being paid because they can’t work—I see it as a lay off, but the issue is those students aren’t going to be filing for unemployment and made whole. Students declared as dependents won’t get $1,200 from the government in the next month, which is most students, and I did the math: Students who aren’t being paid for the rest of the semester because their jobs don’t exist at the moment could be out $2,000. Work-study is generally federally categorized, and that’s why universities don’t have to continue to pay their work-study students—the federal government quite literally said that would be ok. The issue is those students tend to be financial aid students who need the money for a variety of potential expenditures, such as food, rent, or even to pay off a part of their tuition expenses. Work-study jobs are often added as an incentive to financial aid packages—in fact, Harvard has done the same thing as BC, but the way it’s going to make students whole is by using endowment funds to provide more financial aid to affected students. Harvard’s endowment was $41 billion before the pandemic struck the world, and it’s probably worth quite a bit less as I type this sentence, but they do have the flexibility to use what’s available to increase financial aid awards. BC does not have the same size endowment—it sat around $2.4 billion in assets as of February—but the University is need-blind and there’s no doubt they’ll see an increase in financial aid requests (the other matter is I’m not sure how much of BC’s endowment funds are restricted to financial aid compared to Harvard’s—BC has donor restrictions earmarked for capital projects like Schiller, Frates, and the Connell center, I don’t think Harvard has nearly as many obligations to capital projects in its endowment because its infrastructure is not undergoing the same face lifts or seeing the number of new additions BC has seen over the last three decades; I could see that making it even more difficult for BC to increase financial aid donations and the worst case scenario is that financial aid eligibility can’t be opened up any further than it already is, creating a lot of potential problems).
I’m not sure if students will ever be made whole—BC may have enough ground to stand on since those students really are not working right now to successfully argue this is a good move, even though the move only saves them between $700,000 and $3.7 million depending on how many students were in work-study jobs (the actual number doesn’t appear to be publicly available based on my research, but the university awards financial aid to 42% of undergraduate students based on need, and an additional 26% receive federal aid—the undergraduate student population is 9,370, many of those who receive aid had work-study jobs, but the actual number isn’t clear: It could be anywhere from 2,500 to 6,300 students), which pales in comparison to the construction expenditures saved and potential savings on salaries during the raise and hiring freeze. Leahy wrote in his letter that the University housing reimbursements cost BC $23.6 million, so the margin gain from the delay of construction expenditures isn’t as large as it may have initially seemed on its own, and who knows where else those funds are going to fill in the economic gaps presumably created by the outbreak that the public isn’t aware of—that the public may never be made aware of, since the university is private. We won’t know exactly how badly students who aren’t getting paid are being affected by this policy until months have passed or work-study students revolt somehow, but since most other universities have either guaranteed additional financial aid in the future to make up the shortfall or are outright paying the work-study students, BC has wandered onto shaky ground on this issue—whether administrators are doing this rightfully or not—despite somehow there being no reports of layoffs, furloughs, or pay cuts for any member of the administration, faculty, or staff (yet). Students will probably react negatively to the fact that administrators haven’t taken any pay cuts as far as I can see, but if that happens and all students lose is part of a stipend they didn’t get to work for because of the virus, BC’s PR hit might not be particularly problematic since they can compare the decision to businesses laying off part time workers who have nothing to do. Only time will tell though.
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Alright I think that’s enough. If I think of any other things I can try to analyze from what’s come out this week, I’ll include it at the top of tomorrow’s newsletter. You should know there’s a 99 word sentence in this week’s newsletter. That almost makes up for not putting one out last week if you ask me. Where else are you going to find content like that except for the text messages of a 5 year-old addicted to run-on sentences?
Tom Shea will make his triumphant return tomorrow with an excellent article on the future of centers in the NBA. I’ll chime in with a couple more NHL offseason previews, I’ve already decided on doing the dreaded Vancouver Canucks and sometime after this newsletter is published I’ll have picked a second team to take on as well. Maybe I’ll even do a “what I’m watching/listening to/reading when I’m not staring into empty space, wondering when we’re all going to be able to go outside again” article. Finally, I’ll achieve my dream of becoming a true trendsetter. A tastemaker, if you will.
Or maybe I’ll get tired and I won’t.
[insert prolonged shrug here]
See you tomorrow for the bonus edition!
Jack Goldman is the publisher of this here newsletter and an independent reporter who goes to Boston College in his spare time, apparently. You shouldn’t follow him on Twitter @the_manofgold.