Week 27
July 21-25, 2028 - dinner parties at the end of the world
Hello friends!
In a marvel of calendaring coincidence, we had a glorious run of dinner parties in the past week. These were the kinds of evenings where I slip into a hazy, golden kind of reverie. I get mesmerized by textures and details: linen napkins, the stem of a wine glass. Coltrane. Three choices of cheese? Heaven.
And yes, these dinners are the result of effort and money, but the glorious thing about them really is the people. Even though they have lots of different skills and jobs and titles, the people I love most are artists and activists, thinkers and teachers whose conversations weave and wander over landscapes of ideas that inspire and delight me. I marvel at how smart they are, how cool they are, how kind they are. They’re all so beautiful it almost hurts, and I stare at them, thinking, “This is what I always dreamed of.”
It’s not quite how I imagined it, though, because these dinners aren’t removed from the moment, they’re OF it. This isn’t about escapism or denial: we’re not avoiding painful and frightening conversations, we’re figuring out how to cope with the circumstances that make them necessary. Crucially, we’re doing that sensemaking together. It’s beautiful because it means nobody has to hold it all themselves.
I wish I could pour you a drink, light the candles, and tell you that I made dessert. I do hope you have people who create these moments with you. Instead I’ll share the album I have on in the background right now (Coleman Hawkins encounters Ben Webster) and invite you to sit and think with me for a little while.
This was week 27. If we were having dinner tonight, here’s what we’d dig into.
What’s happening now
There were big headlines this week about Columbia’s settlement with the administration. After months of negotiations (but notably, no action to litigate the issue), the university has agreed to pay the administration more than $220 million over the next three years.1 It is being framed as a necessary decision so researchers will be able to access frozen grant funds and compete for billions of dollars of federal funding in the future. I hope we can all agree that the situation was unfair and untenable. The question is whether this was the best choice from a bad set of options. I recommend watching this short CNN interview: I appreciate the directness of Kate Bolduan’s questions. President Shipman encourages everyone to read the intensely-negotiated deal in its entirety, which I now have and you can do here. Honestly, I don’t see how to square her assurance that, “this agreement protects our academic integrity” with, for example, the requirement to appoint new faculty to a specific institute and departments (paragraph 13). I also don’t see how the forced (continued) dismantling of DEI efforts or measures that intensify surveillance and decrease the enrollment of international students2 fail to cross red lines of independent governance. But then again, I’m not a university president. Fortunately, Michael Roth is. The Wesleyan President just gave an emphatic PBS interview laying out why the decision represents a distressing and dangerous path for institutions across the country.3 There’s lots of other commentary to read from constitutional lawyers and education professors, and I think it’s important to discuss strategies for responding to extortionate deal-seeking - not because coping with it is easy or straightforward, but specifically because it is so very hard.
In other hard news, we need to talk about the USDA. Thousands of employees must now move out of DC, while regional offices for the Forest Service and Agriculture Research Service are being downsized and phased out. To put this another way, we’re facing a massive reorganization of the agency tasked with wildfire management, one that ProPublica just revealed to be staggeringly understaffed,4 just as we enter peak fire season. I would be worried about this even if we had plenty of federal support standing by for communities impacted by natural disasters. But that funding is being denied to political adversaries. Worse, new memos leaked today show that FEMA plans to cut a further $1 billion in emergency funding and entirely eliminate key programs like the Next Generation Warning System initiative.
Oh and while we’re talking about the destruction of key programs, I’m sorry to say that the Wall Street Journal published a scoop a few hours ago that all 16 members of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) are about to be fired for being “too woke.” This is an advisory panel that’s been in place for almost as long as I’ve been alive, and sets recommendations on things like cancer screenings and testing for sexually-transmitted infections. The news of its potential demise comes two weeks after the panel’s most recent meeting was abruptly cancelled and a month after the HHS Secretary fired all 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.5
I don’t want to leave us in that dark place though. We need to celebrate the wins where we see them. I’m looking forward to learning more about the five billion dollars of educational funding that were released today and are set to flow out to states come Monday. The funding freeze was challenged in court and critidized by representatives from both parties. It makes me feel slightly more hopeful when I see other news about, for example, fourteen Republican senators calling for NIH funding to be restored, or appropriation committees explicitly prohibiting the development or implementation of sharp cuts in indirect cost rates.
What’s next & what to do
Sit down with your people and talk about things that worry you. Do this in detail. Explore all the thorny ins and outs of issues you’re not sure how to handle. Talk through how you’d share information if you were the one who had to make a difficult decision, especially if there are reasons you couldn’t share all the details.
Ask each other questions that take shapes like, “If that were our problem, how would you want me to handle it?” or “What do you think we have to be willing to risk?” It doesn’t have all be serious - we spent an incredible and incredibly fun hour dissecting the specific archetypes and business models our evil alter egos would adopt. There are all kinds of ways you can talk about the future together.
Try it. In small doses or long weekends. Try it over coffee. Over zoom with your team. On walks with your partners or dinners with your friends. I bet you already are. We need to process together: we crave it. But it’s surprising how hard it can be to actually do that. I really love this conversation between Dean Spade and Mia Birdsong, on “Sticking Together in Tough Times."
And notice how it feels. Maybe this isn’t the right fit for you and your people right now. Maybe what you really need to do is unwind, to spend a precious few minutes or hours with no screens and blessed silence between you. Maybe you need to play - to goof around with your dogs or dance with your kids. Maybe you need to touch your plants. Smell the dirt, get your fingers in there. We are all in our own worlds: we are all in a shared reality.
We are in this together. We have to figure it out together. The only way we’ll get through it is together.
Liz
As ever, thanks for reading & thinking with me. Please share it with your people. We’d love you to join us for ⤵️
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Which, we might note, is variously described as a “fine” or “penalty fee” but explicitly decoupled from any admission of wrongdoing. That’s WEIRD and we should say so! ↩
Given existing enrollment, this is going to disproportionately affect graduate programs, especially master’s degrees. (You may have seen me post this on Bluesky, but I kept mistyping “master’s” as “hamster’s” degrees. I am telling you, if I had a Hamster of Arts, I would never stop talking about it.) ↩
“I was and I am distressed that, in this country today, the executive branch of the federal government wants to be able to dictate terms to private universities, law firms, newspapers, TV stations…” he says. “If you annoy the White House in this regime, you could get sucked into a process of litigation or fines that bear no relation to the facts of the matter, but just become a way of expressing loyalty.” He later goes on to say, “How does paying the government $220 million to do basic science make Jews safer? As a Jew, I find this horrific. I know antisemitism is real, and I know it was real and is real at Columbia, as it is in Congress, as it is in most places in the United States. But the idea that you pay off the government in order to get them off your back so you can do cancer research, and that's good for the Jews, I think it's ridiculous.” ↩
Per ProPublica’s review of internal agency documents, more than 4,500 Forest Service firefighting jobs were vacant as of July 17. That’s more than a quarter (27%) of those particular positions. ↩