Hello friends,

Last week, I published this newsletter just after 11:00pm and collapsed into bed. A few hours later, I was violently yanked back to consciousness with what I can only describe as a sense of imminent doom. I was choking and dizzy, somehow both cold and disgustingly hot: every siren for every system just simultaneously blaring. It was so overwhelming that it took me a minute to realize that what I was reacting to was the smell. Upstairs, downstairs, throughout the entire house, even the back garden: imagine a vat of putrid garlic bubbling over a pile of burning tires. Now throw a carton of cigarettes in. I think you’re still underestimating it.

We are the victims of a skunk that crept under our house and sprayed the foundation at 3:00am. The stench is ruinous. The insides of my kitchen cabinets reek.

There is no solution now, except time and ventilation. The best advice we have is to strengthen our pest-exclusion defenses—try to keep it from happening again. My nervous system is in rebellion. My head aches. I’m queasy and on edge. And this metaphor is entirely too on the nose.

This was Year 2, Week 17.

What’s happening in science & higher ed

• The philosophy professor who was forbidden from teaching Plato’s Symposium in his course, is leaving Texas A&M,¹ Dr. Martin Peterson’s case has become shorthand for the academic censorship being enacted by conservative state legislatures, but he’s not the only philosophy professor leaving Texas A&M. Dr. Linda Radzik, who specializes in “moral issues that arise in the aftermath of wrongdoing”, cites the censorship as grounds for her move to SUNY Binghamton. Yesterday, more than fifty philosophy societies and other academic associations issued a joint statement decrying violations of professional standards and intellectual freedom in Texas.

• The Harvard Graduate Student Union (HGSU) is on indeterminate strike. Since Tuesday, thousands of graduate research assistants and teaching fellows have been on the picket line, aiming to halt research operations. After 14 months of negotiation, striking union members are seeking to force the university to provide higher wages and protection for non-citizen workers, among other demands. The new Harvard Academic Workers union² has stalled in its contract negotiations and has opened a strike authorization vote. The next HGSU bargaining session is Tuesday, April 28.

• A few follow-up notes on items I’ve written a lot about already:

  • The Accreditation, Innovation and Modernization committee meeting wrapped its first week-long negotiation session earlier this month. Inside Higher Ed has a reported piece on how it went (mostly what you would expect). The next session will be May 18-22, rules will be finalized in November, and go into effect next July. More background on this consequential rule-making process is available here.

  • NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya personally blocked the publication of a new COVID study in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The study showed that vaccination of healthy adults reduced their emergency department visits and hospitalizations by almost half. It had already cleared the agency’s scientific-review process. Today, Dr. Bhattacharya spoke at a National Academies workshop event on Enhancing Scientific Integrity. He took no questions.

  • The good news is that NSF has awarded a record number of graduate research fellowships, and is finally poised to start disbursing long-delayed funding. The bad news is that despite guardrails written into Congressional appropriations for FY26, NSF leadership is planning to underfund the biological sciences and social and behavioral sciences directorates. Their likely budgets are 25-30% lower than FY25, respectively, according to Nature’s reporting. If you prefer to look farther ahead, a major update SCIMap released this week offers a new impact analysis of the proposed FY27 budgets for NIH and NSF. They estimate $35 billion in economic losses and 150,000 lost jobs across the country.

• Today was supposed to be the deadline,³ but Title II Web Accessibility compliance has been postponed for one year. Title II is the chapter of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) that governs technical specifications for the accessibility of online content and mobile apps.⁴ Since the Department of Justice revised Title II in 2024, universities have been working toward compliance for everything from catalogues and online courses to procurement systems and materials. Some materials (think of LaTeX documents, for example) require much more intensive updating. This then becomes a labor issue for adjuncts and instructors who are not paid for their time outside the classroom. This issue is a complicated one. I don’t think we do anywhere near enough to support the needs of people with disabilities, but new avenues for the administration to sue universities worry me, and I think it’s valid to worry about how standardizing and centralizing course materials intersects with data scraping and increasing classroom surveillance, as well. If you have insights, public comment on the compliance extension is open now and closes June 22nd.

• As we approach key implementation dates for more than a trillion dollars of cuts to SNAP and Medicaid, the outlook is grim for tens of millions of people. Universities and community colleges are bracing for budget cuts as their states scramble to provide urgently-needed services. State level-funding represents somewhere between 20% and 50% of public postsecondary institutions’ revenues, and historically, states reduce higher ed appropriations during recessions.

• And finally, a new national policy platform launched last week. The pitch for AFT & AAUP’s new Blueprint for Strengthening and Transforming Higher Education (PDF) is “ a vision of higher education as a public good and a democratic necessity.” I hope the details are as strong as the promise, because the dream of debt-free education, dignified scholarly work, and a strong democracy is really compelling. As one of my friends noted, “affordable, accessible, and relevant" is a fantastic tagline for higher ed, if we can live up to it.

And what’s next

The term “skunkworks” comes from a secret WWII lab built inside a circus tent⁵ downwind of noxious factory fumes. These days, it is used to describe projects in which small, innovative teams are released from routine and management constraints to supercharge their innovation. Now, that feels like a luxury and hard to imagine as our day jobs get squeezed ever tighter, but perhaps it’s a spirit we can bring to all the other efforts?

Who do we need to bring in, if we want to do things I’ve never done before? What expectations and baggage do we need to release?

As I write these letters every week, there’s always a fear in the back of my mind. I know that a litany of horrors is self-defeating if all it does is depress and demotivate us. So I felt a little thrill when I came across a new Nature Climate Communications megastudy looking at the persuasiveness of climate messages. The authors report that a “dire but solvable” framing is among the most effective for producing pro-environmental changes in attitudes, even across partisan divides. Rather than avoiding or minimizing the harm we face, a dire but solvable frame underscores that the threats are serious, but that solutions are both available and achievable.

From my perspective, one of the best available and achievable solutions to many seemingly insurmountable communication problems is to get out of our heads and into our local communities. A wonderful team of scientists I work with in Seattle did exactly that this past weekend. In partnership with some phenomenal librarians, we’ve been hosting a series of Science Sunday parties at the Southwest Branch library.⁶ Dozens of families explored together, got hands-on with crafts, and got to know faculty, staff, and students from the university. During our debrief today, I was struck by how happy one of our PIs looked. He’s someone I adore and worry about. After endless months of grant writing and worries, seeing him just absolutely beaming reminds me that these kinds of public engagement are something we need to do for ourselves too.

It’s National Library Week, friends, and the theme is Find Your Joy. I hope you do.

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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