Hello friends,

I had a chance to be interviewed about the USC Wrigley Institute Storymakers program today, and it was a delight. I’ve been leading these cohort-based creative retreats on Catalina Island each summer¹ since 2022. This program is specifically focused on climate and environmental sciences: grief and loss are always present. But so are wonder and hope, and a kind of defiant joy I’ve never found anywhere else. There’s something precious in thinking about life on this planet long after my own is over. I am phenomenally excited about the new 2026 cohort and the work ahead of us.

When the days and weeks feel heaviest, that long view keeps me going.

This was Year 2, Week 17.

What happened in science & higher ed

• We have a new and well-qualified nominee to take permanent leadership of the CDC. Dr. Erica Schwartz² earned her medical degree at Brown, and was the Chief Medical Officer of the Coast Guard³ before she became the Deputy Surgeon General.⁴ In that role, she oversaw the nation’s COVID testing program in the early days of the pandemic. If you remember getting one of those drive-through tests, it’s likely that she was the requisitioning doctor on your paperwork. It’s hard not to feel somewhat cynical about the influence of midterms in this decision, or wonder how Schwartz will be able to do a good job under existing HHS leadership, or worry about how this administration will treat her. In any case, the next step in this process is nomination hearings and Senate confirmation.

• Hampshire College, the small liberal arts school,⁵ is closing down. Just two years ago, it was being celebrated as a success story for how campuses could turn around their financial picture. The combined pressure of lower enrollment and higher operating costs is grinding many institutions down. Just under 90 nonprofit colleges and universities have announced closures or mergers since March 2020. The latest industry reports suggest that more than 400 private, nonprofit four-year institutions⁶ are at risk of closure in the next ten years. Small and rural schools are at the greatest risk. When a school abruptly closes, less than half of its students will re-enroll somewhere else: of those that do, only about half graduate. This isn’t just financially devastating to the students themselves, it ripples through the communities who depend on their labor, rent, and other contributions.

• This makes me think about graduate students. I’ve been hearing that incoming doctoral classes will be even smaller this cycle, though I haven’t found any trend stories yet. I hadn’t fully realized that thanks to Graduate PLUS loans no longer exist and that other new limits on federal student loans kick in this July. In the past ten years, roughly a quarter of professional students (doctors, dentists, veterinarians, lawyers, etc) have taken out loans that exceed the new thresholds (PDF). The new limits will force graduate students to look to the private sector for loans, and The Philadelphia Federal Reserve estimates that one in eight will struggle to secure the financing they need. I recognize that the issues of loan burdens, tuition increases, career potential, and cohort size is far from simple, but the thought of graduate education being (even more) limited to a tiny number of the wealthiest people in society is horrible.

• The PDF of The Scientific Integrity Policy of the US Department of Health and Human Services has been altered. Noam Ross flagged the removal of almost all references to political interference, as well as changes to definitions.⁷ As of this writing, the website says, “The effective date of the Policy is October 16, 2024,” but these changes were not present in February of this year and first appeared in the Internet Archive yesterday.

And what’s next

Earlier today, I noticed that the headlines were suddenly all about tomatoes.⁸ Turns out new Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that tomato prices are up 15% in March alone, and grocery store prices are the highest they’ve been in eight years. We can thank the war⁹, tariffs¹⁰, and weather¹¹ for a big dip in supply and quality. For a little bit, my news feed was about tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes… it felt almost goofy, honestly.

And then the next item in my feed was about the onset of full-scale famine in Sudan.

How do we possibly live our lives and do our work and try to raise money for our projects in the face of this?

I’m grateful that wiser people than me have been asking these kinds of questions for far longer than I have. This is from an essay from Dr. Lisa Graumlich, a fellow in our 2025 Storymaker cohort¹²:

“I have also stood at the edge of what we know and felt something else entirely. The places where a question opens into a larger question. Where the boundary between what I understand and what I am being asked to become starts to thin… This is not how we usually talk about science. But it is, I would argue, how science actually works at its highest register.”

In this piece, she makes a distinction between science as a contract, with all the deliverables that entails, and science as a collaboration—a covenant, as she names it, “a mutual binding”—to a question, to each other, to something far larger than any of us.

That is how we do this. That’s the work.

Liz

As ever, thanks for reading & thinking with me. Meeting the Moment will always be free, but if you want to contribute, you can ⤵️

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