Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

twice as many non-college-educated white men said Trump is providing helpful, rather than harmful, information on the virus; college-educated white women were more than three times as likely to say that his information was harmful rather than helpful,

“If they like him, everything he does just affirms why they like him, and if they don’t like him, everything he does reaffirms why they don’t like him.”

In last week’s national CNN poll, two-thirds of white men without a college degree said they approved of Trump’s handling of the outbreak

While 55 percent of blue-collar men said in the CNN poll that they are comfortable returning to their normal routines, 68 percent of college-educated white women said they are not

“I think, generally, the last two months have been a good reminder that most people made up their minds about Donald Trump a long time ago, and nothing is going to change their opinion,”

non-college-educated white women exhibit more strain over the outbreak than college-educated white men. In the Navigator polling, these women were considerably more likely to say that they worry about falling behind on bills. And while a slight majority of the men in the CNN survey said they are comfortable returning to their routines, three-fifths of the women said they are not.

while these women report more unease over the pandemic, they are more likely than the men to praise Trump’s response to it. In the Navigator polling, 56 percent of the women said they approved of Trump’s handling of the outbreak, compared with just 44 percent of the men

education trumps gender in shaping attitudes about the president’s performance.

Operatives in both parties believe that Trump’s volatile and often-erratic pronouncements about the outbreak—such as suggesting the use of bleach and ultraviolet light to treat patients, and announcing that he is taking hydroxychloroquine—have compounded existing doubts among many well-educated white voters about his fitness for the presidency.

the 2018 exit polls generally showed the GOP suffering some erosion among blue-collar white women, with the party’s advantage slipping to 14 percentage points. The latest round of surveys suggests that, among those women, Trump has stabilized at that diminished level, leading by roughly a dozen points (or slightly less) among them.

ox News surveys last month in Pennsylvania and Michigan put Biden even among non-college-educated white women, and he led Trump among them in the latest Marquette University Law School poll in Wisconsin.

Among nonwhite voters, gender, not education, remains the key divide

Is this fair?

That’s not a rhetorical question—it’s an unanswerable question. Because nothing is fair.It’s not fair that one kid is born in a mansion in Bel-Air, another kid is born in row house in Northeast Philly, and another kid is born in a slum in Mumbai.

Because in some ways we all are. Life is not fair.

It’s not fair that Bill Lumberg is an idiot, but he makes so much money that he drives a Porsche. It’s also not fair when people in Porsches get hit by drunk drivers.

There’s only one measure by which fairness exists in our world: That we’re all God’s children, with dignity and worth simply because we were loved into being.

And that is, ultimately, what I wanted to say about this college admissions story. Are you, personally, getting the short end of the stick? Look, I don’t know you. But yes. In some way you are. Even if you’re in that top 0.1 percent.

It’s not fair that some kids can get 1510 on their SATs and some kids struggle to break 900. It’s not fair that some kids are born with genetic disorders that cut their lives short long before they even know what the SATs are.

It’s okay to notice unfairness and it’s wise to try to remedy it where possible. But we shouldn’t dwell on it or let it define our worldview.

Maybe your kid got 1510 on her SATs but didn’t get into Brown. Or maybe your kid struggled to graduate high school. Or maybe you were never able to have kids, even though you desperately wanted them.

I don’t know if they teach gratitude and compassion at the Ivy Plus schools, but those are the two most important lessons for all of us.

This is the same question as “Should we notice and object to Jason Aldean’s not-really-veiled incitement—or should we let it slide so that we don’t give him a bigger audience?”

I can see both sides of the coin. But my tentative answer is that it’s better to push back against agitators (and law breakers), even if doing so elevates them.

The logic of the provocateur is the logic of the bully. They act because they believe they will get away with it. Some of them (like Aldean) will. But also, some of them won’t be able to ride the wave to greater prominence. Deterrence is real.

There may be obvious short-term benefits to not elevating bad actors, but there may also be non-obvious long-term costs. For instance: When the rule of law is set aside in one instance, it weakens the rule of law in all instances. Maybe this weakness has no practical consequences. But also, maybe it does.

Most bad actors can be safely ignored, because they will never become dangerous at scale. Only a handful of them have the potential to metastasize and build subterranean movements. But it’s hard to reliably tell these two groups apart.

Having your actions governed by fixed mores is not infallible. But relying exclusively on judgment calls is more fallible. In the long run, we’re probably better off just calling things as we see them, using objective standards, rather than trying to play bank-shots in order to jump to better outcomes. If someone in a prominent position is making noises about shooting people from groups he doesn’t like, for instance, we should say that this is irresponsible and dangerous. If someone is breaking the law, we should want the legal system to operate with due process rather than turning a blind eye to criminality.

For decades — and particularly since the 2008 recession — politicians in both parties have mounted a strident campaign against government funding for the liberal arts. They express a growing disdain for any courses not explicitly tailored to the job market and outright contempt for the role the liberal arts-focused university has played in American society.

Former Gov. Scott Walker’s assault on higher education in Wisconsin formed the bedrock of many later conservative attacks. His work severely undermined a state university system that was once globally admired. Mr. Walker reportedly attempted to cut phrases like “the search for truth” and “public service” — as well as a call to improve “the human condition” — from the University of Wisconsin’s official mission statement

But blue states also regularly cut higher education funding, sometimes with similar rationales. In 2016, Matt Bevin, the Republican governor of Kentucky at the time, suggested that students majoring in the humanities shouldn’t receive state funding. The current secretary of education, Miguel Cardona, a Democrat, seems to barely disagree. “Every student should have access to an education that aligns with industry demands and evolves to meet the demands of tomorrow’s global work force,” he wrote in December.

Federal funding reflects those priorities. The National Endowment for the Humanities’ budget in 2022 was just $180 million. The National Science Foundation’s budget was about 50 times greater, having nearly doubled within two decades.

What were students meant to think? As the cost of higher education rose, substantially outpacing inflation since 1990, students followed funding — and what politicians repeatedly said about employability — into fields like business and computer science. Even majors in mathematics were hit by the focus on employability.

Universities took note and began culling. One recent study showed that history faculty across 28 Midwestern universities had dropped by almost 30 percent in roughly the past decade. Classics programs, including the only one at a historically Black college, were often simply eliminated.

Higher education, with broad study in the liberal arts, is meant to create not merely good workers but good citizens

this is a grim and narrow view of the purpose of higher education, merely as a tool to train workers as replaceable cogs in America’s economic machine, to generate raw material for its largest companies.

Citizens with knowledge of their history and culture are better equipped to lead and participate in a democratic society; learning in many different forms of knowledge teaches the humility necessary to accept other points of view in a pluralistic and increasingly globalized society.

In 1947, a presidential commission bemoaned an education system where a student “may have gained technical or professional training” while being “only incidentally, if at all, made ready for performing his duties as a man, a parent and a citizen.” The report recommended funding to give as many Americans as possible the sort of education that would “give to the student the values, attitudes, knowledge and skills that will equip him to live rightly and well in a free society,” which is to say the liberal arts as traditionally understood. The funding followed.

The report is true today, too

the American higher education system is returning to what it once was: liberal arts finishing schools for the wealthy and privileged, and vocational training for the rest.

Reversing this decline requires a concerted effort by both government and educational actors

renewed funding for the liberal arts — and especially the humanities — would support beleaguered departments and show students that this study is valuable and valued.

At the university level, instituting general education requirements would guarantee that even students whose majors have nothing to do with the humanities emerged from college equipped to think deeply and critically across disciplines.

Liberal arts professors must also be willing to leave their crumbling ivory towers and the parochial debates about their own career path, in order to engage directly in public life

If Mr. Kahlenberg had his way, college admissions would be upended.

His basic recipe: Get rid of preferences for alumni children, as well as children of faculty, staff and big donors. Say goodbye to recruited athletes in boutique sports like fencing. Increase community college transfers. Give a break to students who have excelled in struggling schools, who have grown up in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, in families with low income, or better yet, low net worth. Pump up financial aid. Look for applicants in towns that do not normally send students to highly selective colleges.

elite colleges have become fortresses for the rich, he said. Harvard had “23 times as many rich kids as poor kids,” Mr. Kahlenberg testified in 2018 at the federal court trial in the Harvard case, referring to a 2017 paper by Raj Chetty, then a Stanford economist, and colleagues.

his 2012 study that found seven of 10 leading universities were able to return to previous levels of diversity through race-neutral means.

In 2020, Berkeley boasted that it had admitted its most diverse class in 30 years, with offers to African American and Latino students rising to the highest numbers since at least the late-1980s, without sacrificing academic standards.

In a simulation of the class of 2019, he found that the share of Black students at Harvard would drop to 10 percent from 14 percent, but the share of white students would also drop, to 33 percent from percent from 40 percent, mainly because of the elimination of legacy and other preferences. The share of Hispanic students would rise to 19 percent from 14 percent and the Asian American share would rise to 31 percent from 24 percent.

The share of “advantaged” students (parents with a bachelor’s degree, family income over $80,000, living in a neighborhood not burdened by concentrated poverty) would make up about half of the class, from 82 percent. SAT scores would drop to the 98th percentile from the 99th.

In the affirmative action trial, Harvard said that Mr. Kahlenberg’s model would produce too little diversity, and water down academic quality. Its actual class of 2026 is 15.2 percent African American, 12.6 percent Hispanic and 27.9 percent Asian American.

Edward Blum, the conservative activist behind the lawsuits against Harvard and U.N.C., said Mr. Kahlenberg came to his attention when “The Remedy” was published. The focus on class seemed like a powerful bridge between the left and the right, Mr. Blum said

Dr. Laycock, of the University of Virginia, expects that once the Supreme Court rules, conservative groups that are now promoting race-neutral alternatives will claim they are racial proxies and turn against them. “Everybody knows that’s why it’s being used,” he said. (Mr. Blum said his group will not, though other conservative groups could do so.)

There is no “We Believe” sign in the yard. But on the living room wall, a sign says, “Live simply, dream big, be grateful, give love, laugh lots.”

In that spirit, his stubborn campaign might be traced to being the son of a pastor whose family could afford to make him a Harvard graduate, twice over. “I do have some measure of class guilt,” he said. “I wish people who are far richer than I am had more class guilt.”

conservative pundits convinced that U.S. colleges are leftist indoctrination camps have taken up the Republican students’ cause. Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly referred to the professor’s words as an “assault” on her students — conflating words with physical violence in the same way liberals so often do.

In a similar vein, the conservative group Turning Point USA recently published a “Professor Watchlist,” a catalogue of what it thinks are dangerous and “anti-American” professors who deserve public shaming for allegedly trying to “advance a radical agenda in lecture halls.” (Among those “radical agenda” items: advocating gun control, calling Ted Cruz’s infamous “New York values” statement anti-Semitic.)

Coleman and his team are completing a major revision of the SAT to be unveiled in January 2014 and launched in the spring of 2015. He wants the test to “propel” students toward deeper learning of real things

That means fewer abstruse vocabulary words (like “abstruse”) and essays that are based on documents so human graders can evaluate the correctness of their writers’ arguments, not just their style.

The U.S. rode to economic supremacy with the world’s highest share of young college grads, but now its percentage of graduates at the typical age of graduation is behind those of Australia, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Sweden, and the U.K., the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development says.

The message: Real life is messy. You’re not given five answers to choose from. And America shouldn’t depend on something resembling an IQ test to rake geniuses from the rubbish.

The SAT and its rival, the ACT, are part of the problem. Designed to ferret out hidden talent, the tests have become, for some students at least, barriers to higher education. Scores are highly correlated with family income; Harvard law professor Lani Guinier calls the SAT a “wealth test.”

Since the earliest days of the republic, there have been two schools of thought about the merits of sorting students, as recounted in Nicholas Lemann’s 1999 book The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy. Thomas Jefferson, who believed in a “natural aristocracy,” said that in Virginia all w

New Englander Henry Adams was less disdainful of the rubbish. He said Jefferson’s natural aristocracy was no better than regular old aristocracy: “I would trust one as soon as the other with unlimited power.”

The SAT was launched in 1926 as a variant of an intelligence test used in World War I to place soldiers and sailors. Harvard adopted it in 1934.

The University of California long resisted using standardized tests but in 1968—swamped by more qualified applications than it could handle—began requiring applicants to submit SAT scores as a way to screen out lower achievers.

Admissions officers at about 850 four-year colleges now make standardized tests optional for some or all of their applicants

To be less cynical, the tests do stigmatize low scorers and distract people “from what they really need to do, which is mastering academic subjects in their high school,” says Wake Forest University sociologist Joseph Soares, whose school went SAT-optional in 2008.

“The American culture is so in love with athletics that even though many people know the right thing to do, they can’t do it.”

the growth in educational spending trails far behind that of athletic spending — especially at community colleges and Division II and III institutions.

“Increasingly, institutions of higher education have lost their focus on the academic activities at the core of their mission,” the association said in its report. “The spending priority accorded to competitive athletics too easily diverts the focus of our institutions from teaching and learning to scandal and excess.”

The fastest growth in athletic spending was at Division III schools without football programs, where median inflation-adjusted spending for each student-athlete more than doubled from 2004 to 2012.

Even colleges without powerhouse sports programs, she said, are racing to build their athletic programs as a recruitment tool.

“My hypothesis, and it’s not yet fully proven, is that these are mostly schools that are very tuition-dependent, and they’re spending more on sports to recruit more students,” Ms. Thornton said. “But I think it’s ludicrous.”

Faculty salaries increased 2.4 percent last year, on average, while top administrators received large raises.

"This study—its findings, as terrible as they are—honestly should not come as a shock to anyone who is willing to face the truth about employment and unemployment in the United States,

DiTomaso says the study, like other research, challenges the assumption that opportunity is available to all Americans who equip themselves with the right skills

Private-sector labor data reported to the federal government shows little change in the share of management and executive-level jobs held by racial and ethnic minorities since the 1980s, she said. In fact, in industries that offer workers the best wages, the share of white men in these jobs has actually grown

In her 2013 book, The American Non-Dilemma: Racial Inequality Without Racism, DiTomaso concluded that racial inequality isn't rooted solely in racist ideas or conscious efforts to exclude some groups from distinct opportunities. Instead, she argued that informal networks allow whites, who still hold most of the decision-making positions in the private economy, to hoard and distribute advantage among their family and friends, who tend to be mostly white.

The whites among those DiTomaso interviewed found 70 percent of the jobs they held over their lifetimes through inside information shared by a family member, friend, or neighbor, a direct intervention (someone walking a resume into a hiring manager's office or a direct request that a family member or friend get an open job) or other means not open to the general public. 

I think it's high time," DiTomaso said, "that we really started to look closely not just at the ways that the labor market is biased against blacks but the ways in which it is biased in favor of whites."

In the wealthier districts across the state, the news is better: 72 percent of students in “low need” districts are graduating ready for college or careers. But even that is well under the 95 percent of students in those districts who are now graduating.

A common reaction, Dr. Tisch said, is shock and hesitancy. There are fears of plummeting real estate values, as well as disagreement, particularly in rural areas, with the idea that all students need to be prepared for college.

All of the examples chosen that represent racial slights or overt racism only raise the specter of how these frat members are raised, what they truly believe, and how organizations that permit such behavior and encourage the newbies to go along with it perpetuate racism in all its forms. As such, the question "what should we do about fraternities" isn't any different from the same question with the terms "KKK", "Neo-Nazis", or "anti semetics" substituted in for "fraternities".

The fraternities are a reflection of college life and life in America.There is more polarization on campuses, with students not mixing, exchanging ideas and engaging one another. Instead, they are congregating with other students just like them, and this is occurring across the race and color spectrum. Several college professors blame the Greek system for seeming to foster this division, but I believe it is more of a reflection of what is going on in America, as society is similarly divided and not engaging with anyone who is not alike.Is it risk aversion, need for affirmation, security? Unknown, but while I'm not a fan of the Greek system/life, I do not believe it is the crux of the problem.

I will take advantage of the vacuum to explain why my fraternity brought out the worst in its members. The fundamental problem is that most college-age men lack the judgment and life-experience to live together in a self-governing group. Inevitably, the most aggressive, extroverted risk takers will come to dominate the organization. Their best teenage thinking is what gives birth to the worst ideas and greatest excesses of the insular frat life. What else contributes to fraternities' bad reputations? The college administrations, which long ago renounced their in-loco-parentis responsibilities. There was a time when fraternities had seasoned adult house fathers who could keep the guys in line. No more.

"Powerful alumni." That's all that really needs to be said. As we've reduced public funding for higher education, universities are more and more dependent on the deep pockets of alumni who are going to place a phone call to any campus administrator who tries to seriously address all the "fun." Drinking, sexual assault, racism. Fraternities are good at breeding loyalty, loyalty to their chapters, loyalty to their campuses. Few universities can afford to toy with that. Note this Atlantic Monthly article, "The Dark Power of Fraternities." http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/02/the-dark-power-of-fr...

As a student, it seemed to me that the purpose of fraternities was to reaffirm that education didn't really matter -- a big poke in the eye at anyone who believed that they could advance by excelling academically. What really mattered was how much you could drink and debase yourself in tribute to the bastions of current privilege and wealth

for the quality of life in the house, it certainly was not apparent to me. When I came to them with proof positive that a "brother" had stolen a check payable to me, forged my signature and cashed it, they did nothing to sanction him.The dominant group in my fraternity had no apparent thirst for knowledge, just an unquenchable thirst for daily alcohol-fueled parties that lasted into the wee hours with loud music and drugs. We outsiders subsidized their party life and all we got in return was the privilege of living in their zoo.

Why do some Greek-letter organizations seem to bring out the worst in people? Historically white fraternal groups can be key mechanisms in the intergenerational transmission of white wealth, power and status. The stakes for belonging are high, and the culture must legitimate its own existence, forcing out those who fail to conform.

According to one study, enrollment fell by one-fifth, and students were 30 percent less likely to major in one of these subjects. Yale and Harvard, while making noises about grade inflation, have never instituted tough rules to stem it.

Overall, graded students are less interested in the topic at hand and — and, for obvious, common-sense reasons — more inclined to pick the easiest possible task when given the chance.

Grades should motivate certain students: those afraid of the stigma of a bad grade or those ambitious, by temperament or conditioning, to succeed in measurable ways.

Although recent research on the effects of grades is limited, several studies in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s measured how students related to a task or a class when it was graded compared to when it was ungraded.

Our goal should be ending the centrality of grades altogether. For years, I feared that a world of only A’s would mean the end of meaningful grades; today, I’m certain of it. But what’s so bad about that?

Yes, the student who gets a 100 on a calculus exam probably grasps the material better than the student with a 60 — but only if she retains the knowledge, which grades can’t show.

We need to move to a post-grading world. Maybe that means a world where there are no grades — or one where, if they remain, we rely more on better kinds of evaluation.

According to a 2012 study by the Chronicle of Higher Education, GPA was seventh out of eight factors employers considered in hiring, behind internships, extracurricular activities and previous employment.

To top humanities PhD programs, letters of reference and writing samples matter more than overall GPA (although students are surely expected to have received good grades in their intended areas of study).

Right now, students end up being evaluated twice: once with an inflated and meaningless letter grade, then again by teachers asked to write letters of recommendation.

They said employers want a GPA of 3.0 or even 3.5. But again, that standard would include almost every Harvard student — which suggests that GPAs serve not to validate students from elite schools but to keep out those from less-prestigious schools and large public universities, where grades are less inflated. Grades at community colleges “have actually dropped” over the years, according to Stuart Rojstaczer, a co-author of the 2012 grade-inflation study.

That means we have two systems: one for students at elite schools, who get jobs based on references, prestige and connections, and another for students everywhere else, who had better maintain a 3.0.

Students can compare evaluations from different classes, too, “read across all of them, see what they need improvement on.” And when they graduate, they — and employers or grad-school admission offices — get far more than a printed page of grades.

The trouble is that, while it’s relatively easy for smaller colleges to go grade-free, with their low student-to-teacher ratios, it’s tough for professors at larger schools, who must evaluate more students, more quickly, with fewer resources.

teaching five classes for poverty wages can’t write substantial term-end comments, so grades are a necessity if they want to give any feedback at all.

perhaps the small, progressive colleges can inspire other schools to follow, as they have in, say, abolishing the SAT as an admissions requirement

It would mean hiring more teachers and paying them better (which schools should do anyway). And if transcripts become more textured, graduate-school admission offices and employers will have to devote more resources to reading them, and to getting to know applicants through interviews and letters of reference

When I think about getting rid of grades, I think of happier students, with whom I have more open, democratic relationships.

Even in my Yale classrooms filled with overachievers, most of whom want to learn for the sake of learning, some respond well to the clarity of a grade.

A famous example involves Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor whose father, then a wealthy real-estate developer, in 1998 pledged $2.5 million to Harvard University. Kushner—who, the investigative reporter Daniel Golden notes in his 2006 book The Price of Admission, was described by administrators at his high school as a mediocre student—was admitted to the school shortly after that

fraud and bribery’s lawful cousins—legacy preferences, athletic recruitment, and other admissions practices that lower the bar for progeny of the rich and famous—are ubiquitous.

Today, legacy students account for an estimated 14 percent of Harvard’s undergraduate population, and applicants who enjoy such alumni connections are accepted at five times the rate of their non-legacy peers (a nearly 34 percent acceptance rate, versus just under 6 percent for those lacking those coveted alumni connections)

as 40 percent of Harvard’s white students are legacies or recruited athletes.

At elite colleges, athletic recruitment is arguably another form of affirmative action for the wealthy. As my colleague Saahil Desai has written, Harvard’s admissions office, for instance, gives a major boost to athletes with middling academic qualifications. Athletes who score a four (out of six) on the academic scale Harvard uses to score applicants were accepted at a rate of about 70 percent, Desai reported; the admit rate for nonathletes with the same score, on the other hand, was 0.076 percent.

the U.S. attorney perhaps unintentionally emphasized this irony when he said: “We’re not talking about donating a building … We’re talking about fraud.”

His comment highlighted the mundanity of admissions favors for upper-crust children—when executed legally

Huffman’s “Housewives” character spent one episode trying to bribe her twins’ way into a private school, BuzzFeed points out (for $15,000 — is that how Huffman knew it was the going rate?), and so, the story goes, of course Huffman would do the same in real life.

The most vomitous line in the whole indictment comes from a dad — New York attorney Gordon Caplan — who tells a witness on the phone, “To be honest, I’m not worried about the moral issue.”

Radar ran an anonymously sourced article in which a family friend says Macy “didn’t know the details, but he knew she was trying to do something. . . He wasn’t fully aware of what she was planning.” Truly, I’m not sure which is a worse scenario for Macy: that he blithely participated in an alleged illegal plot, or that he blithely participated in an entire phone call in which the alleged illegal plot was hatched and apparently didn’t know what anyone, including himself, was talking about.

in terms of moral dissonance, Felicity Huffman is the most surprising villain, and the one whose motives I keep trying to unpack.

Huffman created the website What the Flicka, dedicated to parenting. Specifically, to being a mom. Even more specifically, to being a real, relatable, imperfect mom.

WhatTheFlicka.com is a land of sardonic coffee mugs and wine-o’clock-Wednesdays, and scented candles with names such as “Juice Cleanse” that purport to smell like “greens, mint, and regret.” The articles about parenting have headlines such as “10 ways I’m totally screwing up my kids” and “10 reasons to dread summer with kids” and “9 ways parenthood is like ‘Game of Thrones.’ ”

In other words, the site buys into a children-are-a-battlefield theory of parenting. Parenthood is impossible, and making it to bedtime without becoming an alcoholic is an excellent reason to reward yourself with a martini. We are all a hot mess!

In Felicity’s mind, did she do something at odds with her theory of motherhood, or was the alleged scamming an extension of it? Was allegedly buying her kids’ way into school a twisted, privileged version of, Ladies, amiright, sometimes we serve frosting for dinner and sometimes we bribe Georgetown?

“Ruh Ro!” she chirpily wrote in an email to her contact in the scam. “Looks like [my daughter’s high school] wants to provide own proctor.” It was a problem to be solved, practically and without much fuss.

They worried that a vaccine would initially elude scientists, that weary citizens would abandon restrictions despite the risks, that the virus would be with us from now on.

Most experts believed that once the crisis was over, the nation and its economy would revive quickly. But there would be no escaping a period of intense pain.

Exactly how the pandemic will end depends in part on medical advances still to come. It will also depend on how individual Americans behave in the interim. If we scrupulously protect ourselves and our loved ones, more of us will live. If we underestimate the virus, it will find us.

More Americans may die than the White House admits.

The epidemiological model often cited by the White House, which was produced by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, originally predicted 100,000 to 240,000 deaths by midsummer. Now that figure is 60,000.

The institute’s projection runs through Aug. 4, describing only the first wave of this epidemic. Without a vaccine, the virus is expected to circulate for years, and the death tally will rise over time.

Fatality rates depend heavily on how overwhelmed hospitals get and what percentage of cases are tested. China’s estimated death rate was 17 percent in the first week of January, when Wuhan was in chaos, according to a Center for Evidence-Based Medicine report, but only 0.7 percent by late February.

Various experts consulted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in March predicted that the virus eventually could reach 48 percent to 65 percent of all Americans, with a fatality rate just under 1 percent, and would kill up to 1.7 million of them if nothing were done to stop the spread.

A model by researchers at Imperial College London cited by the president on March 30 predicted 2.2 million deaths in the United States by September under the same circumstances.

China has officially reported about 83,000 cases and 4,632 deaths, which is a fatality rate of over 5 percent. The Trump administration has questioned the figures but has not produced more accurate ones.

The tighter the restrictions, experts say, the fewer the deaths and the longer the periods between lockdowns. Most models assume states will eventually do widespread temperature checks, rapid testing and contact tracing, as is routine in Asia.

In this country, hospitals in several cities, including New York, came to the brink of chaos.

Only when tens of thousands of antibody tests are done will we know how many silent carriers there may be in the United States. The C.D.C. has suggested it might be 25 percent of those who test positive. Researchers in Iceland said it might be double that.

China is also revising its own estimates. In February, a major study concluded that only 1 percent of cases in Wuhan were asymptomatic. New research says perhaps 60 percent were.

The virus may also be mutating to cause fewer symptoms. In the movies, viruses become more deadly. In reality, they usually become less so, because asymptomatic strains reach more hosts. Even the 1918 Spanish flu virus eventually faded into the seasonal H1N1 flu.

The lockdowns will end, but haltingly.

it is likely a safe bet that at least 300 million of us are still vulnerable.

Until a vaccine or another protective measure emerges, there is no scenario, epidemiologists agreed, in which it is safe for that many people to suddenly come out of hiding. If Americans pour back out in force, all will appear quiet for perhaps three weeks.

The gains to date were achieved only by shutting down the country, a situation that cannot continue indefinitely. The White House’s “phased” plan for reopening will surely raise the death toll no matter how carefully it is executed.

Every epidemiological model envisions something like the dance

On the models, the curves of rising and falling deaths resemble a row of shark teeth.

Surges are inevitable, the models predict, even when stadiums, churches, theaters, bars and restaurants remain closed, all travelers from abroad are quarantined for 14 days, and domestic travel is tightly restricted to prevent high-intensity areas from reinfecting low-intensity ones.

In his wildly popular March 19 article in Medium, “Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance,” Tomas Pueyo correctly predicted the national lockdown, which he called the hammer, and said it would lead to a new phase, which he called the dance, in which essential parts of the economy could reopen, including some schools and some factories with skeleton crews.

Even the “Opening Up America Again” guidelines Mr. Trump issued on Thursday have three levels of social distancing, and recommend that vulnerable Americans stay hidden. The plan endorses testing, isolation and contact tracing — but does not specify how these measures will be paid for, or how long it will take to put them in place.

On Friday, none of that stopped the president from contradicting his own message by sending out tweets encouraging protesters in Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia to fight their states’ shutdowns.

China did not allow Wuhan, Nanjing or other cities to reopen until intensive surveillance found zero new cases for 14 straight days, the virus’s incubation period.

Compared with China or Italy, the United States is still a playground.Americans can take domestic flights, drive where they want, and roam streets and parks. Despite restrictions, everyone seems to know someone discreetly arranging play dates for children, holding backyard barbecues or meeting people on dating apps.

Even with rigorous measures, Asian countries have had trouble keeping the virus under control

But if too many people get infected at once, new lockdowns will become inevitable. To avoid that, widespread testing will be imperative.

Reopening requires declining cases for 14 days, the tracing of 90 percent of contacts, an end to health care worker infections, recuperation places for mild cases and many other hard-to-reach goals.

Immunity will become a societal advantage.

Imagine an America divided into two classes: those who have recovered from infection with the coronavirus and presumably have some immunity to it; and those who are still vulnerable.

“It will be a frightening schism,” Dr. David Nabarro, a World Health Organization special envoy on Covid-19, predicted. “Those with antibodies will be able to travel and work, and the rest will be discriminated against.”

Soon the government will have to invent a way to certify who is truly immune. A test for IgG antibodies, which are produced once immunity is established, would make sense

Dr. Fauci has said the White House was discussing certificates like those proposed in Germany. China uses cellphone QR codes linked to the owner’s personal details so others cannot borrow them.

As Americans stuck in lockdown see their immune neighbors resuming their lives and perhaps even taking the jobs they lost, it is not hard to imagine the enormous temptation to join them through self-infection

My daughter, who is a Harvard economist, keeps telling me her age group needs to have Covid-19 parties to develop immunity and keep the economy going,”

It would be a gamble for American youth, too. The obese and immunocompromised are clearly at risk, but even slim, healthy young Americans have died of Covid-19.

The virus can be kept in check, but only with expanded resources.

Resolve to Save Lives, a public health advocacy group run by Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the former director of the C.D.C., has published detailed and strict criteria for when the economy can reopen and when it must be closed.

once a national baseline of hundreds of thousands of daily tests is established across the nation, any viral spread can be spotted when the percentage of positive results rises.

To keep the virus in check, several experts insisted, the country also must start isolating all the ill — including mild cases.

“If I was forced to select only one intervention, it would be the rapid isolation of all cases,”

In China, anyone testing positive, no matter how mild their symptoms, was required to immediately enter an infirmary-style hospital — often set up in a gymnasium or community center outfitted with oxygen tanks and CT scanners.

There, they recuperated under the eyes of nurses. That reduced the risk to families, and being with other victims relieved some patients’ fears.

Still, experts were divided on the idea of such wards

Ultimately, suppressing a virus requires testing all the contacts of every known case. But the United States is far short of that goal.

In China’s Sichuan Province, for example, each known case had an average of 45 contacts.

The C.D.C. has about 600 contact tracers and, until recently, state and local health departments employed about 1,600, mostly for tracing syphilis and tuberculosis cases.

China hired and trained 9,000 in Wuhan alone. Dr. Frieden recently estimated that the United States will need at least 300,000.

There will not be a vaccine soon.

any effort to make a vaccine will take at least a year to 18 months.

the record is four years, for the mumps vaccine.

for unclear reasons, some previous vaccine candidates against coronaviruses like SARS have triggered “antibody-dependent enhancement,” which makes recipients more susceptible to infection, rather than less. In the past, vaccines against H.I.V. and dengue have unexpectedly done the same.

A new vaccine is usually first tested in fewer than 100 young, healthy volunteers. If it appears safe and produces antibodies, thousands more volunteers — in this case, probably front-line workers at the highest risk — will get either it or a placebo in what is called a Phase 3 trial.

It is possible to speed up that process with “challenge trials.” Scientists vaccinate small numbers of volunteers, wait until they develop antibodies, and then “challenge” them with a deliberate infection to see if the vaccine protects them.

Normally, it is ethically unthinkable to challenge subjects with a disease with no cure, such as Covid-19.

“Fewer get harmed if you do a challenge trial in a few people than if you do a Phase 3 trial in thousands,” said Dr. Lipsitch, who recently published a paper advocating challenge trials in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. Almost immediately, he said, he heard from volunteers.

The hidden danger of challenge trials, vaccinologists explained, is that they recruit too few volunteers to show whether a vaccine creates enhancement, since it may be a rare but dangerous problem.

if a vaccine is invented, the United States could need 300 million doses — or 600 million if two shots are required. And just as many syringes.

“People have to start thinking big,” Dr. Douglas said. “With that volume, you’ve got to start cranking it out pretty soon.”

Treatments are likely to arrive first.

The modern alternative is monoclonal antibodies. These treatment regimens, which recently came very close to conquering the Ebola epidemic in eastern Congo, are the most likely short-term game changer, experts said.

as with vaccines, growing and purifying monoclonal antibodies takes time. In theory, with enough production, they could be used not just to save lives but to protect front-line workers.

Having a daily preventive pill would be an even better solution, because pills can be synthesized in factories far faster than vaccines or antibodies can be grown and purified.

Goodbye, ‘America First.’

A public health crisis of this magnitude requires international cooperation on a scale not seen in decades. Yet Mr. Trump is moving to defund the W.H.O., the only organization capable of coordinating such a response.

And he spent most of this year antagonizing China, which now has the world’s most powerful functioning economy and may become the dominant supplier of drugs and vaccines. China has used the pandemic to extend its global influence, and says it has sent medical gear and equipment to nearly 120 countries.

This is not a world in which “America First” is a viable strategy, several experts noted.

“If President Trump cares about stepping up the public health efforts here, he should look for avenues to collaborate with China and stop the insults,”

If we alienate the Chinese with our rhetoric, I think it will come back to bite us,” he said.“What if they come up with the first vaccine? They have a choice about who they sell it to. Are we top of the list? Why would we be?”

Once the pandemic has passed, the national recovery may be swift. The economy rebounded after both world wars, Dr. Mulder noted.

In one of the most provocative analyses in his follow-up article, “Coronavirus: Out of Many, One,” Mr. Pueyo analyzed Medicare and census data on age and obesity in states that recently resisted shutdowns and counties that voted Republican in 2016.

He calculated that those voters could be 30 percent more likely to die of the virus.

In the periods after both wars, Dr. Mulder noted, society and incomes became more equal. Funds created for veterans’ and widows’ pensions led to social safety nets, measures like the G.I. Bill and V.A. home loans were adopted, unions grew stronger, and tax benefits for the wealthy withered.

If a vaccine saves lives, many Americans may become less suspicious of conventional medicine and more accepting of science in general — including climate change

, to take an obvious example, politics has helped transform the environment for gay people.

And yet: Gay people are still, depending on the study, between two and ten times more likely than straight people to take their own lives. We’re twice as likely to have a major depressive episode.

The extraordinary suffering gay men once lived with — and still do in the vast majority of the world — is no longer. We can thank politics and culture for that.

But the struggle of being a small minority, of being male, and of being human endures. Growing up gay and different, especially in our teens, will always be traumatic to a greater or lesser degree.

Some more thoughts about intersectionality as a religion. The first is that I’m not the only person noticing the evolution of elite private colleges into de facto religious institutions. Jonathan Haidt decries a modern auto-da-fe here. Michael Rectenwald argues for re-secularizing the university here. William Deresiewicz in the American Scholar homes in on one key thinker in the entire matrix of “social constructionism”:

The presiding presence is Michel Foucault, with his theories of power, discourse, and the social construction of the self, who plays the same role on the left as Marx once did.

But an individual is so much more than a compounding sum of group identities. We don’t just vary in racial or gender demographics. We have different individual genetics, upbringings, religions, levels of attractiveness, interests, ambitions, dumb luck, and on and on

(How about we substitute the now tired term political correctness with the less euphemistic repressive tolerance?)

Analytically, it makes sense to see how various inequalities are related — such as race and wealth.

The assumption, on elite college campuses, is that we are already in full possession of the moral truth. This is a religious attitude. It is certainly not a scholarly or intellectual attitude.

Aspects of our personal identities that liberate us can be just as potent and revealing as those that oppress us.

What’s also revealing is where the intolerance is strongest. Brookings’s Richard Reeves and Dimitrios Halikias have crunched the numbers. The answer is: the most expensive colleges. Specifically:

The average enrollee at a college where students have attempted to restrict free speech comes from a family with an annual income $32,000 higher than that of the average student in America.

Worse, as Deresiewicz explains: [L]ower-income whites belong disproportionately to precisely those groups whom it is acceptable and even desirable, in the religion of the colleges, to demonize: conservatives, Christians, people from red states.

In the psychic economy of the liberal elite, the white working class plays the role of the repressed. The recent presidential campaign may be understood as the return of that repressed—and the repressed, when it returns, is always monstrous.

All of which is presciently foretold in Coming Apart, a book about soaring inequality and elite isolation … by the man, Charles Murray, the students refused to hear.

one ordering the new education secretary to review those policies, and the other establishing a gender-focused White House policy council — Mr. Biden, an author of the Violence Against Women Act, waded into an area that has been important to him but has been politically charged for more than a decade.

“We’re looking for a process that does not turn us into courts, that allows us to treat both sides fairly and equally, and does not attempt to micromanage campus proceedings,” said Terry W. Hartle

The Trump administration’s rules have been in effect since August, and lawsuits that sought to overturn them — including one to delay them as colleges grappled with the coronavirus pandemic — have failed

Victims’ rights groups hailed the Obama-era rules for reversing longstanding practices on college campuses of sweeping sexual assault claims under the rug, and for extending wide-ranging protections from obstacles that had long stymied reporting of sexual assault. The guidance instituted a broad definition for what qualified as sexual harassment, discouraged cross-examination and required schools to use the lowest evidentiary standard in adjudicating claims.

The guidance, however, was also criticized by school administrators and due-process activists, who said it amounted to an illegal edict that incentivized schools to often err on the side of complainants. Hundreds of federal and state lawsuits have been filed by students accused of sexual misconduct since 2011, when the Obama administration issued its guidance, and dozens of students have won court cases against their colleges for violating their rights under those rules.

Civil liberties groups that endorsed those rules said they were concerned about how the Biden administration’s efforts would shake out for survivors and accused students alike.The Trump administration took into account more than 120,000 comments and several changes that victims’ rights groups pressed for, such as a dating violence definition, “rape shield” protections and mandating “supportive measures” for victims, even if they did not file a formal complaint.

“There are students who are raped on college campuses, and there are students who are wrongly accused, and we should not be choosing between which of those groups we wish to give justice,” Mr. Cohn said. “The one-sided rhetoric doesn’t lead us to have confidence at this point that the rights of the accused will seriously be taken into account.”

Ms. DeVos strongly criticized Mr. Biden’s objections to the rule last spring, when he was the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, telling The Washington Examiner that she was “disgusted” by his position.

The Biden administration’s decision to review Title IX policies also comes as states around the country introduce their own legislation to bar transgender female athletes from competing on sports teams that do not match their biological sex at birth.

“We have the tools that we have,” Ms. Klein said, “which are federal laws and the bully pulpit and clarity about our policy and values.”

The Obama administration issued guidance to schools, colleges and universities that critics in and out of academia said leaned too heavily toward accusers and offered scant protections or due process for students and faculty accused of sexual harassment, assault or other misconduct. The Trump administration swept those aside and delivered the first-ever regulations on sexual misconduct, which many saw as swinging too far the other way, offering the accused too much power through guaranteed courtlike tribunals and cross-examination of accusers.

“The policy of this administration is that every individual, every student, is entitled to a free — a fair education free of sexual violence, and that people — all involved — have access to a fair process,” said Ms. Klein, a former senior adviser to Hillary Clinton when she was the first lady.

When the Trump administration’s rules were proposed, Mr. Biden said they would “return us to the days when schools swept rape and assault under the rug, and survivors were shamed into silence.”Ms. DeVos strongly criticized Mr. Biden’s objections to the rule last spring, when he was the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, telling The Washington Examiner that she was “disgusted” by his position.

As vice president, Mr. Biden was integral to President Barack Obama’s efforts to overhaul Title IX, in part by issuing guidance that led to aggressive investigations of schools that had mishandled sexual assault complaints and threatened them with funding cuts. Rules proposed in 2018 by Betsy DeVos, the education secretary under President Donald J. Trump, wiped those out and cemented procedures that bolstered the due process rights of accused students.

“We’re really seeing it used as a way for schools to confuse and manipulate survivors, which is really what we’ve seen for decades,” Ms. Carson said of the DeVos rules. “Now it’s this really scary process on the books, and it gives the schools a way to say, ‘Do you really want to go through this?’”

“We have the tools that we have,” Ms. Klein said, “which are federal laws and the bully pulpit and clarity about our policy and values.”

And almost as suddenly, Republican politicians around the country are throwing up roadblocks between students and voting booths.

45 percent of college students ages 18-24 identified as Democrats, compared to 29 percent who called themselves independents and 24 percent Republicans.

the politicians enacting the roadblocks often say they are raising barriers to election fraud, not ballots. “The threat to election integrity in Texas is real, and the need to provide additional safeguards is increasing,”

But evidence of widespread fraud is nonexistent, and the restrictions fit an increasingly unabashed pattern of Republican politicians’ efforts to discourage voters likely to oppose them.

The headline example is in New Hampshire. There, a Republican-backed law took effect this fall requiring newly registered voters who drive to establish “domicile” in the state by securing New Hampshire driver’s licenses and auto registrations, which can cost hundreds of dollars annually.

According to the Tufts study, six in 10 New Hampshire college students come from outside the state, a rate among the nation’s highest. As early as 2011, the state’s Republican House speaker at the time, William O’Brien, promised to clamp down on unrestricted voting by students, calling them “kids voting liberal, voting their feelings, with no life experience.”

Florida’s Republican secretary of state outlawed early-voting sites at state universities in 2014, only to see 60,000 voters cast on-campus ballots in 2018 after a federal court overturned the ban. This year, the State Legislature effectively reinstated it, slipping a clause into a new elections law that requires all early-voting sites to offer “sufficient non-permitted parking” — an amenity in short supply on densely packed campuses.

North Carolina Republicans enacted a voter ID law last year that recognized student identification cards as valid — but its requirements proved so cumbersome that major state universities were unable to comply. A later revision relaxed the rules, but much confusion remains, and fewer than half the state’s 180-plus accredited schools have sought to certify their IDs for voting.

Wisconsin Republicans also have imposed tough restrictions on using student IDs for voting purposes. The state requires poll workers to check signatures only on student IDs, although some schools issuing modern IDs that serve as debit cards and dorm room keys have removed signatures, which they consider a security risk.

The law also requires that IDs used for voting expire within two years, while most college ID cards have four-year expiration dates. And even students with acceptable IDs must show proof of enrollment before being allowed to vote

While legislators call the rules anti-fraud measures, Wisconsin has not recorded a case of intentional student voter fraud in memory, Mr. Burden said. But a healthy turnout of legitimate student voters could easily tip the political balance in many closely divided states

Some critics suggest that opposition to campus-voting restrictions is overblown — that students can find other IDs to establish their identities, that campus polling sites are a luxury not afforded other voters. But local election officials generally put polls where they are needed most, in packed places like universities and apartment complexes or locations like nursing homes where access is difficult.

Nationwide, student turnout in the 2016 presidential election exceeded that of the 2012 presidential vote — but according to the Tufts institute, it fell sharply in Wisconsin, where the state’s voter ID law first applied to students that year.

And cities like Nashville and Knoxville, with large concentrations of college students, have no campus early voting polling places, she said.Tennessee ranks 50th in voter turnout among the states and the District of Columbia. “We’re terrible at voting,” Ms. Quigley said. “And it’s intentional.”

the objection from President Donald Trump's Republican allies has virtually zero chance of changing the election outcome, only to delay for a few hours the inevitable affirmation of Biden's victory as the Electoral College winner and the next president.

On Wednesday, Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley became the first senator to announce plans to object to the results -- a significant move since both a House member and senator are required to mount an objection when Congress counts the electoral votes. CNN previously reported that at least 140 House Republicans are expected to vote against counting the electoral votes in Congress, according to two GOP House members.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell -- who has said the vote would mark one of the most significant, perhaps the most significant, he'd ever cast

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, seemingly dismissed the announcement Saturday from the handful of Republicans, tweeting: "Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be President and Vice President of the United States in 18 days."

On Friday, a federal judge threw out a lawsuit from GOP Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas and several Arizona Republicans seeking to force Vice President Mike Pence to help throw the election to Trump.