Landing Santa Barbara Airport on Jan 30, 2026   

 by Charlie Hale, Dean of Social Sciences and Professor of Anthropology and Global Studies, UC Santa Barbara. This is his response as a scholar, whose writings were called into question by the Report.  The response does not represent the views of the dean's office, or of the university. 

Chris here: I'm posting a set of answers to a reporter’s questions from Charlie Hale, one of the authors cited for criticism in the Vanderbilt-Washington University “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences.”  The reporter, Emma Whitford, wrote a good piece in Inside Higher Ed about the scholars who were cited as examples of the alleged decline of qualitative scholarship. None of the scholars she’d reached had been told that they were cited in it. 

Royce Hall, UCLA on October 29, 2025   

I spent most of October on the road, and one especially happy stop was a UCLA conference, "Academic Freedom and the Crisis of the Democratic University: A Symposium in Honor of Michael Meranze."  Michael is my longtime partner on this blog: the paper I've posted below is about his scholarship on university topics.  I sketch towards the end the elements of his theory of a radically rebuilt university, one that would properly support teaching and research; I also broach the issue of faculty time (lack thereof) for the work of institutional activism.  Other speakers were Wendy Brown, Rana Jaleel, Hank Reichman, and Joan Wallach Scott, and I am hoping Michael will reconstruct and soon post his excellent response to all of us at the end of a truly enjoyable day.

 **

Michael wound up being my partner on the blog, Remaking the University, back in 2009, not because he’d always dreamed of writing every week about universities but because of his commitment to real universities and to their consistent presence in society.  He had a commitment  the University of California, of course, where he first arrived as a doctoral student over 4 decades ago—but beneath that to the practice of the university as an indispensable intellectual agent in the world.

 

We’ve heard today about his research on the university as society’s special, perhaps unique, site of academic and intellectual freedom. It’s true that much of his work on the blog reflected his protective vigilance towards academic freedom.  But this work was also connected to everything else he wrote about, including state budgeting, student protest, weak-minded administration, and faculty governance (or its lack).  All of these issues affected the university’s ability to function as society’s special, place of scholarship, and its ability to underwrite communities of scholars. 

 

My relationship with Michael was shaped by the fact that  he created this community of scholars with me, by enacting it through continuous knowledge exchange and analysis.  This meant in practice his tireless search for evidence instanced in a nonstop flow of links to articles and, equally, to archival material.  He had a set of email colleagues and he sent them overlapping sets of links—only Michael’s devices know the full extent of his daily address to multiple scholarly communities (studying, for example, the perma-crisis of universities, academic freedom, 18^th century history, the history of prisons, Foucault and the theory of history, psychoanalytic theory & society, etc). His presence and daily engagement with materials new and old helped constitute these groups across distance.  Scholarly community in my case also meant his reading and critiquing draft posts, often within an hour or two of my sending them.  These communities were created through Michael’s personal enactment of what such a community should actually do, and do in an ordinary, everyday way. They were constituted by Michael’s remarkable breadth of interests, and especially, by his striking, unending generosity.

 

 

**

The blog took off during the 2009-10 fiscal crisis of the University of California and California State University. In response to the GFC, the State of California subjected UC and CSU to a third round of multi-year double-digit cuts to their state appropriation.  We covered the budget cuts and the budget’s administrative discourse in constant detail. But we also saw the budget crisis as a crisis of faculty governance and a crisis of the university’s social strategy, which was and is controlled by senior managers and governing boards.  By December 2009, Michael was analyzing both budget and governance through the underlying problem of the state’s poor understanding of the purpose of the university as such.

 

One landmark post was “Looking Back and Looking Forward” (December 7, 2009).  Michael noted a “fundamental lack of connection between UCOP and the Regents on the one hand and students and the Campuses on the other.” This lack of interconnection within the university extended to the faculty’s ambivalent relation to students and in particular to the faculty split over student opposition to capped or lowered tuition hikes. Many if not most faculty had decided to give up on the state and wanted big tuition hikes to protect their resources.

 

Michael took a step back and wrote that we should refuse to choose between blaming the state for funding cuts and blaming UC’s senior managers for not fighting cuts even as they hoarded reserves. “The first narrative allows the faculty to avoid accepting responsibility for what UC has become; the second narrative effectively reduces it to its money flows and money management.”  So did some of the statements of the Berkeley student occupation movement: Michael detected overlap between the managerial and the oppositional narratives.

As the “Communiqué from an Absent Future” put it: "The university has no history of its own; its history is the history of capital. Its essential function is the reproduction of the relationship between capital and labor.” But to put things this way is to ignore history and not even correctly understand the present. The university is older than the dominance of capital, and as an institution it retains traditions and practices that cannot be reduced to capital. To reduce the university in the way of the Communiqué is, like the managerial ethos, to reduce it to its utility to capital. It is to ignore the practices of curiosity, of communication, of self-formation, of deepening engagement with thought that, however much they are devalued in the larger world, are essential aspects to any social change or even human life. 

Michael here identified the pervasiveness of a managerial ethos that can capture even its political opponents. He pointed to a vacuum in the thinking about what we do in universities that was shared and mutually reinforced by students, staff, managers, and faculty alike. So Michael was addressing all these groups in writing, “I worry that we are running around like people with fingers in the dike trying to patch up this and that but losing sight of what we think UC should be.”

 

What we think: three key words.  The institution of thinking has to proceed from that.  Michael wrote what he thought.

 

Much of what we do depends on suspending the immediacy of the present—even when it is most problem-centered. It is in the gap between the given and the imagined that insight flourishes.  This aspect of our work is hard to explain and communicate effectively. Humanistic education, at its best, provides students and society with worlds (both past, imaginary, and distant) that are not their own; social scientific education, at its best, provides students and society with ways to conceive of problems that escape from the given logics of the day; scientific education, at its best, allows students and societies ways of bracketing out the everyday in order to better understand the material world that we all inhabit.

 

In all cases, it is the suspension of the immediate and the possibility of the creative and contested communication of ideas that makes knowledge and understanding possible. It cannot be predicted in advance nor confined to a given product or utility.

 

The problem with seeing the University as a business or as a tool of capital is that it misses the day to day work that everyone actually does. Instead of allowing the University to be remade in the terms of narrow utility we need to insist that it deepen its commitment to the democratic exchange of ideas. This means developing solutions to problems in society, developing individuals who seek out further opportunities for public and intellectual engagement with society, and developing individuals whose curiosity and inquiry reshape themselves. . . .

That we all have allowed ourselves to be confined within increasingly narrow intellectual limits and failed to effectively converse across the university about the university and about what we do is one of our major intellectual weaknesses in the face of the serial crises that confront us all.  

 

Michael characteristically stresses the deep purposes of the humanities in the context of a whole university, one where all of the fields of study are together.  The fields should be talking amongst themselves, though that now mainly happens in the academic Senate.  And he was already warning everyone that the university without a narrative of its sheer intellectuality would be under permanent threat of destruction. In these things he was complete right. It’s better to listen to Michael the first time he tells you something.

 

**

That was written at the dismal dawn of the decade of the 2010s. Obama was president; his administration was bailing out Wall Street and abandoning Main Street, and the Tea Party was about to rise in anger. It was a good time for the Democrats to act like they had some sense. More fundamentally, it was the essential time for what Michael called the suspension of the immediate and the possibility of the creative. The university was letting itself get dragged into the crisis as passive collateral damage and Michael wanted it to make a serious collaborative internal effort to write its own destiny.

 

For Michael, the university couldn’t fulfill its social function if it weakened its scholarly function, and “scholarly” was rooted in the humanities.  Michael has always had sympathy and respect for scientists, but in November 2013 he wrote a post about making humanities methods stand out from the sciences.  The piece is called, “Curating the Humanities” (November 28, 2013). It identifies elements of what turns out to be the community of scholars. (Also see “Towards a New Community of Scholars.”)

 

Michael gets at this issue through some work by medievalist and punctum books impresario Eileen Fradenburg-Joy, and her emphasis on curation. “Forms of thinking matter,” Fradenburg-Joy wrote, “and there is no need to discard anything. Every area requires special curators and we should seek to increase the ranks of those, for this is a matter of the care as well as of the increase of knowledge.”   Michael outlines a proto-theory of university study under pressure:

 

First is the connection between the knowledge and the scholar that produces it:

 we tend--despite whatever commitments to method or theory we have--to take our specific research subjects seriously and personally.  To actually curate our fields today, though, means doing more than simply teaching or writing about them. . . .  we cannot succeed by turning away from what drew us to the humanities or interpretive social sciences in the first place. . .  . If we are going to curate both objects and subjects we need to recognize the personal dimension of our commitments.  We teach and write about them because we think that it is important that they be preserved and extended in some way.  We do so because we find them personally engaging and challenging.  Insofar as we claim that our knowledge can be transforming, we might give more thought to how, and if, our knowledge is transforming ourselves.

 

The second element of this theory is bringing in undergraduates.

“Faculty at … research universities will need to assume more responsibility for advising.  . . . At liberal arts colleges faculty are deeply involved with advising undergraduates and at research universities they are involved in advising graduate students.  But there is a large lacuna there: undergraduates at large research institutions.  In these situations students are left to overworked staff advisers.  . . . UC faculty will need to take more responsibility for the intellectual development of their students both undergraduate and graduate.  Disciplines in the humanities and social sciences often claim that their teaching and knowledge is designed for transformation; but without figuring out ways to make [teaching] part of the intellectual process of  education, it rings false.

 

Third, Michael wrote, “I think we might take some lessons from museums and libraries because it is in those latter spaces that curators and librarians aim to develop public knowledge.  For in curating you not only preserve but you present.”  The community of scholars would thus collaborate to produce both traditional peer-reviewed research and also forms of public address that would bring the general public back into scholarly processes and research results. Curating would also, in the midst of our mushrooming knowledge crisis, reduce the alienation between university and non-university populations.

 

Fourth, communities require serious efforts of maintenance by their members.  And one of Michael’s perennial themes is the slowly unfolding disaster of outsourced administration. It seemed like a good idea at the time: the educators hire professional administrators to handle institutional functions. UC had originally split tuition into a “registration fee” and an “education fee,” which were assumed to be distinct, and the ed fee was to be essentially zero while reg fees could go up in keeping with the expansion of administrative needs.  For Michael such a split was a major scholarly mistake. He wrote,

 

 If faculty in the humanities and social sciences do not take more collective responsibility for the institutions that make our scholarship and teaching possible and work in solidarity with other institutions or other departments, then our students will find themselves without a sustainable field to work in.  We need to acknowledge the centrality of the sustainability of the humanities infrastructure and of the crucial task of the university as a place for conserving knowledge as well as producing it. We must take greater responsibility for our conduct as it relates to the larger project that the humanities and social sciences engage in. 

In other words, the community of scholars requires meaningful self-governance, but this couldn’t be simply to set policy and go away. The community of scholars requires a faculty labor of administration—of shared participation in administrative decisions and also practices.  It would mean some meaningful administrative insourcing.  How much and how this would be done, giving research and teaching duties/desires, would have to be decided over time in a process managed by the community. And it would have to be done across departments, so as to avoid the current situation in which they are “pitted against each other.”

 

So Michael’s community of scholars requires four things: affective bonds between scholar and scholarship; involvement of students in thinking as such; curation of the resulting knowledge in public; and active governance of the scholarly infrastructure. It’s a powerful model, it would work!--and it’s also a lot.

 

I lectured (and appeared on The American Vandal podcast) at the University of Pennsylvania last week. Someone in the audience asked me, how would we start to bring about these changes you describe, concretely, in practice? I suggested several things, starting with collective faculty self-education about the institution---budgeting in relation to teaching and research, in particular. “It would involve something like a seminar for interested faculty and students, maybe 10 hours of meetings over the  course of a term,” I added.  At dinner that night, an eminent member of the department said, “Chris, you really had me until you said 10 hours of meetings in a term.  I just don’t have the time for that!”

 

Translated, that also means faculty scholars don’t have the time to constitute Michael’s community of scholars.  We’ve already seen this problem once, when medical expertise lost its independence to health insurance companies who promised cheap and complete administrative support, and it’s pretty far along in large universities. The time grind helped HMOs with doctors and administrative bloat seems to most professors like a help to them.  This has been possibly the heart of the resistance to these ideas about self-governance and to the blog’s calls for action over many years. “I’m just drowning in work,” many faculty can quite accurately say.  “How am I supposed to take on more?”

 

The short answer is always, “not more work, different work.”  In the community of scholars, democracy is less work not more. But this needs to be worked through and made concrete. Otherwise, faculty (or staff, or students) won’t be willing to try.

 

I was recently at a dinner with UC friends, and of the 6 faculty around the table, I was the only one of them who had never spent several years serving on the Senate’s Council for Academic Personnel. (I always volunteered for Planning and Budget instead.)  Academic Personnel (CAP) is important work, since it is the heart of the faculty’s collective self-governance of professional performance and advancement.  Yet CAP exhausts its faculty members--really drains them. They find it very interesting, and yet in my experience they have no thought left over for wider strategy and policy. CAP focuses entirely on individualistic dimensions of scholarship and reward, and not on the community of scholars, its purposes or support.  Our colleagues shudder at the idea of adding policy to their existing workload: it seems to them to be like serving on CAP and Planning and Budget at the same time. 

 

Much of Michael’s writing examined why our current shared governance system exhausted faculty rather than empowered them.   One fix for CAP would be to increase the size of the council, but more fundamentally the fix is to increase trust in the lower layers of review, particularly the department’s, so that the top layer doesn’t essentially duplicate the personnel review that has already been conducted by 3 layers before it. 

 

However, these kinds of practical changes that would make more self-governance less work would require a shift in ethos at UC towards first, reciprocal trust, and second, effort shifted towards collective rather than individual goods. These changes both enable and require the democratization of management.   

 

***

This was indeed one of Michael’s major themes: democratization.  University governance is always bad unless knowledge flows upwards.  One example of the badness—UC’s Office of the President (UCOP) at peak autocracy--was the state audit fiasco of Spring 2017, when the state found UCOP to have scrubbed surveys that it had sent to UC campuses of even the mildest, most balanced campus criticisms of UCOP’s performance.  Then-president Janet Napolitano and her office had managed to turn some routine audit problems and reasonable criticisms into a statewide scandal, leading to the dawn of a new era of legislative distrust of UC and new levels of micromanagement.  On May 7, 2017, Michael wrote:

Amidst all of the heated disagreement, …  there has been one fundamental, and fundamentally wrong, point about which all of the arguing parties appear to agree:  that the answer to the problems the audit revealed can and should be solved from the top down.  Wherever you turn in the discussion, . . . the common element in all of the proposals is that the answer is to be found in a closed loop of decision makers shuttling between Oakland and Sacramento (with the occasional nod to the campus chancellors). 

 

In fact, the most striking aspect of the auditor's report and UCOP's response was the almost total absence of any acknowledgement of faculty or staff knowledge or perspectives.  Where were the formal responses of Senate Committees in the report?  How exactly is the auditor to know if the programs that UCOP oversees are productive if they don't get unfiltered responses from the people who are providing the education and front-line services to students, are engaging in research, and are attempting to convey that research to the public?

 

He noted the Regents’ response to their own management disaster was to hire another set of outside consultants, ignoring the legions of UC faculty in business and public policy schools with precisely that expertise.  The Regents are now paying and outside contractor, he fumed, for the clarity and documentation they never bothered to demand from UCOP in the first place.

 

He concludes, “If the University really wants to think about how to educate and create knowledge more effectively for the twenty-first century,  they would do well to recognize that in universities knowledge flows upward”—when it isn’t actively obstructed.

 

This was the context in which Michael and I continued to write in the later 2010s: bloat, autocracy, declining managerial performance, and deepening resource starvation in the educational core. It was also the context in which we were begging our colleagues to embrace the labor of democratic practice—learning institutional information, sharing and discussing it, struggling to implement the better ideas that result from learning in a march through the institutions.  Michael was particularly aware of faculty sentiment—of how infuriating and pointless arguing with a dean seemed to our ambitious, focused, dedicated, high-output research colleagues compared to the relative lightness of being of their teaching and research.

 

This was awkward.  The one thing that would save the University’s finances—greatly increased public funding—was the one thing managers wouldn’t seek. The one thing that would save the University’s management—a fully informed and engaged faculty—was the one thing the faculty couldn’t do.

 

Or so the faculty might have thought.  Michael persisted on this theme of the community of scholars governing itself.  When a later audit of the earlier doctored audit came out in autumn 2017, Michael posted at length.  He concluded as follows (November 27, 2017):

UC needs new leadership.  But this cannot be limited to finding a replacement for President Napolitano.  The UC Regents, after all, have made the decisions--through their choices of presidents and policies--that have brought us to this point.  The Regents and UC must give up on trying to mimic the failed Michigan model in finance and the failed managerial model in administration.  The new leadership of the university must restore the primacy of academic judgment over the demands of finance, must seek new ways to transfer funds from administration to education, and must be open to ideas from below.  Meanwhile, the Senate must move beyond its current reactivity and begin to act as a producer of vision and not just a commentator on administrative proposals.  In addition, faculty throughout the system need to take ownership of their local budgets and campus futures.

Yes yes yes yes—this is where I should take off my shoe and bang it on the table.

 

**

 

What Michael did then was practice what he preached.  A consultant would call it “leading by example.”  He became increasing active in the Senate, culminating as you have heard with his vice chairship and chairship of the UCLA senate and co-chairship of a campuswide Covid task force. He has also been a stalwart on the AAUP’s Committee A, which analyzes and intervenes in violations of academic freedom and has produced a series of important reports.  These were an enormous existential investment in the well-being of the institution and its grinding processes, in the infrastructure of national higher education, and in acting in such a way that governance itself can function as a scholarly community. 

 

Michael wrote increasingly about some key ingredients of democratization: academic freedom, unionization, and student protest. Writing in support of the UC graduate strike in December 2022, he read the strike as “a sign of how deep the failure of the University has been in (not) providing a sustainable funding model both for students and faculty supporting students.”  Noting that “the Academic Senate has been pointing to this problem for at least two decades,” and citing chapter and verse, he concluded, “the long-term question raised by the strike is whether UC will continue as a research university; if we don’t make it possible for future scholars to attend, we will have forfeited our purpose.”  Michael read the grad strike as a defense of the infrastructure of the community of scholars, and never flinched from saying exactly how bad a problem actually is. The research university’s future depended on the strike’s success.

 

He made a similar argument about the protests against Israel’s annihilation of Gaza after the October 7^th attacks.  Michael wasn’t happy about a lot of the protests, but the attacks on them flipped a switch.  In “The Authoritarian Personality Comes to College,“ he wrote, “the current suppression of divestment encampments and the mobilization of anti-Semitism against them (despite the many Jewish alumni, faculty, and students who participate in and support the divestment movement), must be seen [as part of] the years long right wing attempt to destroy higher education as source of independent thinking.”  “For years,” he continued, “free speech warriors and nattering nabobs of neutrality have been complaining about the heckler's veto.  I share those concerns.  But this week we saw the result of one of the largest heckler's vetoes in recent history, as two universities responded to violence [against] and condemnation of protest by shutting down the protest itself.  No clearer message can be sent to those who disapprove of both dissent and American colleges and universities that their aggression will get them what they want.”  The attack on protesters was an attack on the core purpose of the university—the pursuit and dissemination of the truth of things---and a desecration the community of scholars that the university was supposed to protect.

 

My sense of Michael’s writing, as one title suggests, is that it looks backwards and forward, and that the vision of a community of scholars is not nostalgic but ahead of its time.  It remains to be constructed with the elements Michael has identified: the personal scholar-scholarship bond; undergraduates as scholars; curation; intellectual freedom; self-governance, plus a full embrace of dispute, conflict, protest, and resolutions that comes not from above but from the participants within. 

 

Here’s the main point.  For Michael the university is an enormous, powerful thing.  The university is a wonderful big thing.  Knowledge is great, students are great, study is great, scholarship is great, unionization is great, the community isn’t great but it’s a work in progress.  So Michael, with that gigantic ambition for the university that you always have, welcome to your retirement so you can get back to work on building the community of scholars inside and outside the university.

 

San Francisco Bay on October 20, 2017   

Deadlines collide and last week I wrote three pieces, with a common preoccupation of “Reversing Helplessness,” the title of my ISRF Director’s Note for May. I’ll come back to this issue over the next few days.  

On Friday I was interviewed by email by Kathryn Palmer at Inside Higher Ed. The topic is the title of her ensuing article, Can Scientific Research Survive Without Federal Funding?  She quotes me a couple of times, and also covers the small but possibly growing trend of universities using their institutional funds as “bridge funds” for faculty who have had grants arbitrarily and capriciously frozen while still having staff to pay, cells to keep alive, and the like. 

I’ll discuss bridge funding in my next post: it’s a patch with problems. 

Below I’ve posted my more general answers to her questions about university research. This frames what I expect to be a set of posts on the subject.  In California, the UC Regents are meeting and Governor Gavin Newsom will issue his May revision of his already bad university budget. Meanwhile: 

Kathryn Palmer (KP): Universities are taking from endowments and other reserve funding to fill gaps created by cuts to federal research funding. But are these long-term solutions to continuing research at the same levels as they've been accustomed to?

CN: A few universities could replace federal funds for a few years, but this won’t work for the research ecosystem that is the source of the strength of US research.

KP: Trump and his allies have suggested private industry could take over research. Or perhaps philanthropy (see this article about the Bill Gates Foundation's plan to spend 200 billion before it closes in 2045). Is that plausible? Why or why not? What are the pros and cons of private entities funding scientific research vs. higher education institutions? 

CN: That won’t work. Most corporate research is development, not basic research.  Firms take fundamental concepts, materials, discoveries mostly uncovered in universities and apply them in product lines that they think have high future value in the marketplace. Usually this needs to be a near-term future—a couple of years.  Fundamental research takes place not over years but decades.  

 

Quantum computing is a good example.  People were excited about its commercial potential 20 years ago, and they’re still only somewhat closer.  This is a normal timeframe, which corporations cannot operate on.  Gates philanthropy is also directed at pet topics. The wealthy do the same.  The strength of US research has always been that it is researcher-driven, by the people who know best, not by moguls with special interests or axes to grind.  

 

There are some exceptions, especially in computer-science based tech where firms spend enormous amounts of money in very hot fields (AI is the one now), but only in expectation of near-term enormous (monopoly) profits and under conditions of panic competition.  This is the exception that proves the rule that basic research happens in universities, not companies.  

 

Some of the country’s most lucrative sectors, like pharmaceuticals, have depended on large government research subsidies for decades.  Trump’s model would ask them to take all those costs in house. This would drive up the price of medications to even higher levels, or cut company profits, and probably both at once.  

KP: Could state and local government play a role here? In what capacity? 

 

CN: Over time, states could take on research costs.  But the funding flows would have to change. A share of one's federal income tax would need to be redirected towards the state in which one lives. At the moment, their current tax structures won’t allow it, and states already fund many competing needs (K-12, public health provision, etc.)

 

As a Californian, I wouldn’t mind my state setting up an income tax impound account where I could redirect my federal tax to the state if they’d spend it on teaching, research, etc.—and let them fight it out with the feds in court.  This would be much harder for most states though, and increase inequalities across the country.  And it would happen only gradually, if ever.

KP: How might drastic cuts to research funding at universities reshape how research is done in the United States? Or is too soon to tell?

CN: If the impounding and cuts survive the courts and Congress, then the US will fall behind Europe and East Asia fairly quickly, within around five years. Research moves very quickly, even outside of STEM.  The creation of future researchers will shrink and collapse in some fields in many universities as doctoral programs become unsustainable.  

 

Advanced skills will be harder for businesses to find.  Quite a bit of undergraduate instruction won’t happen, or will be automated, or will be reallocated to academic researchers which will reduce their research.  The knock-on effects are very serious, especially for large, public universities where doctoral students cover a substantial share of teaching. 

 

Since the system’s parts are all interconnected, the general intellectual level of US higher education will deteriorate on a number of fronts at the same time. 

KP: Any other thoughts about this current moment for academic research and scientific discovery? 

CN: The Trump Administration has created the worst crisis in higher education in 100 years, if not in US history. They’ve induced an artificial Great Depression in higher ed.  Every single one of their rationales is wrong. Every one of their actions will make things worse for students, for research, and for the general public. There is no silver lining of reform here, for conservatives or anyone else. 

The people that Trump’s academic policy will disadvantage include residents who didn’t go to college and who don’t like them.  These people also benefit directly from the educated college masses and from the cultural and scientific knowledge universities create, of which they will now have less. People will figure this out when it is too late, as did the British Brexit voter.  

 

To keep this from happening, universities need to form a national bloc and fight this tooth and nail together. Otherwise, it will take them a full decade to recover when Trump is finished, if ever.  

 

Outside Lafayette, La. on October 27, 2018

By Leslie Bary, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

I just wrote a mini-grant for $858, to cover flight and hotel for a speaker. To justify the choice of speaker and the validity of event, I composed a few hundred words, to explain to an audience out of field and possibly outside of academia why one invites speakers from other institutions to share their expertise. My speaker is a full professor and department chair at a major research institution. They are a noted scholar in our field of Latin American Studies. Their appropriateness as a speaker is not in the slightest doubt. 

In the past, the $858 would have come out of a departmental speaker budget. I would not have to spend the afternoon explaining in words of one syllable why the event was being held and who the person was, nor creating documentation to prove I really had looked up and compared flight costs. But that was how I spent a lot of time today that would otherwise have been dedicated to research and teaching. 

I have been a professor for many years and before that, I was a graduate student with a teaching role. I have written many small internal grants. Initially, it was only one every couple of years, for special activities like summer research travel. Now almost every routine activity requires a mini-grant. The five-year vita I recently prepared listed ten in a category I now call “Selected Internal Funding.” A complete list would have crowded the document, since as departmental budgets shrink, funding requests for everyday operations are needed more and more often.

I have never been turned down for a funding request. Never. I suspect the reason is that the institution funds all legitimate proposals. I repeat, these grants are for amounts that in the past department chairs or deans would have controlled and would have simply authorized. They would do this not out of corruption or favoritism, but because they were familiar with the field and could exercise good judgment about it.

When I raise this issue, some faculty say they have given up writing mini-grants and only apply for major external grants. I am also a good writer of these, but major grants, at least in my field, do not fund everyday operations. And by major grants I mean grants from national research organizations like the NEH or ACLS. I do not mean fundraising. I also lobby civic organizations to support campus projects, but such fundraising covers different kinds of activities than do research grants to the Guggenheim Foundation. 

The mini-grants address needs not covered by other mechanisms. That is why I continue to apply. I do have some better paid and wealthier colleagues who dispense with the mini-grants and support university activities with personal funds, but they are few. Others take consulting gigs to substitute for the mini-grants, pointing out that if it takes five hours to write and then administer a mini-grant for $750, and they can raise $750 in three hours’ consulting, they’ll do the consulting. 

My research office suggests that applying for mini-grants helps us to reflect and articulate our research programs to ourselves. The fact is it doesn’t. Writing a book proposal or a major external grant can do that, just as updating and reformatting a vita can help rethink a career trajectory. But explaining basic things like why we go to conferences or, as I did for one mini-grant, why professors read books, does not help me clarify my ideas. At the outside, it might help explain what I am doing to an uninformed auditor. But that kind of explanation to such a person makes a negative contribution to my scholarly life.

The formulae for the mini-grants typically imitate those of major grants in the sciences, as does the idea that everything done should be grant funded. But in these fields, people spend as much as half of their work time applying for the funds they need to do their jobs. Rather than address that impractical situation, universities now replicate it at every level. The exercise seems particularly absurd when we are asked by our university to defend our job positions, or to explain that conducting research is part of our contract with them, and we are complying. 

But what is happening here? Every time there is a new, allegedly competitive, centralized internal funding opportunity, it is presented as new funding intended to help us, yet simultaneously, money disappears from regular departmental budgets and the regular library budget. A central committee reviews all the proposals, and individual units across campus lose autonomy. The university says this reduces “siloing.” In some cases it can be fairer since there are always people involved who do not know the applicants. But overall, it seems to be about a reduction in shared governance.

That is to say that every mini-grant application is a symptom of a department without a budget and, in the case of many of mine, a library without materials. When departments do not have budgets for research and libraries do not have them for materials, and faculty instead apply for funding to a mysterious committee in Academic Affairs, that committee has taken over functions that multiple department chairs, librarians, and others would have shared in the past. This is a concentration of power in a rather faceless group. Even if there were a Senate committee administering such things, the atmosphere would be less corporate. 

I note further that Human Resources nowadays is not a department of my university, but a service we have outsourced to a corporate “partner.” People who have increasing power over us are not colleagues or university employees. I wonder when the same will happen to the committee that judges the mini-grants.

What should be happening instead? Universities should restore department budgets for routine scholarly activities that are central to university education, central for undergraduate students as much as for everyone else. This would increase the use of decentralized academic expertise, lodged in departments, which would in turn increase the efficiency of the overall system. And it would reduce the excessive administrative labor of the many, many scholars in my position.

University of Louisiana, Lafayette on October 25, 2018

The Strike continues with no end in sight.  Although there have been tentative agreements concerning Post-Docs and Academic Researchers, in the Academic Student Employee and Student Researcher units, the parties appear to remain well apart on the fundamental economic issues.  This distance is most easily seen in the ASE category: although the UAW made significant adjustments in its proposal UC responded with little change.  You can see the latest UAW wage proposal here and the latest UC wage proposal here.  

It is impossible from the outside to tell where the negotiations are headed.  But what I want to try to do here is offer some suggestions for how we could think about the gap, how we got here, and what we might do in the future to alter the conditions that have created what is undoubtedly a crisis at the University, and a depressing foreshadowing of the end of UC as a serious research university.  If the latter does happen the responsibility will ultimately lie with UCOP and the Regents with some support from the campus Chancellors.

The first point is that it seems clear that there is a fundamental gap in the way that each side is defining these negotiations.  UC is approaching this as if it were a conventional labor negotiation with a class of workers whose position is fundamentally stable.  The UAW and its supporters on the other hand, start from the position that they have been placed in an untenable economic position.  Given the fact that TA wages have barely kept up with national inflation over the years combined with the extreme cost of housing in California, they cannot continue with relatively minor adjustments in the dollar amount of their monthly pay.  To make matters worse, UC's latest offer has a first year adjustment that is about equal to current inflation.  In this light, UCOP appears completely out of touch with the reality of life on campuses and indifferent to its lack of knowledge.

This image of autocratic disregard was only deepened by Provost Brown's appalling letter to the faculty last week.  Although much of it was standard UCOP pablum, he inspired widespread faculty hostility with his closing flourish threatening faculty members who refused to pick up the work of striking workers with discipline beyond the docking of pay.  For the last three years, faculty and lecturers  have performed an enormous amount of additional labor to keep the university afloat during the pandemic: transforming their courses, spending additional time with students, planning for campus transformations, and putting their research duties on the side to maintain "instructional continuity" as the administration likes to put it.  After all this effort, for the Provost to threaten disciplinary action for those who choose not to pick up the work of striking TAs or to act upon their own convictions about academic integrity, manifests a contempt for the faculty that is hard to ignore.

It's important to grasp UC's budgetary situation correctly.  Most importantly, the usual invocation of the university's 46 billion dollar budget needs to be put aside.  Most of that budget is tied up in the medical centers or in funding for designated purposes.  The real budget that is relevant is the core budget made up of tuition, state funding, and some UC funds.  It comes in closer to $10 billion (Display 1) and is largely tied up in salaries across the campuses.  As Chris and I have been pointing out for nearly 15 years, UC has been subject to core educational austerity surrounded by compartmentalized privatized wealth (although we should notice that the medical centers barely stay in the black).  This crisis will not be overcome by hidden caches of money floating around the university.  The problem is deeper than that:  its roots lie in the combination of state underfunding and the expansion of expensive non-instructional (often non-academic research) activities that have taken up too much of campus's payrolls.

But I want to stress that this reality does not mean that the graduate students are being unreasonable in seeking wages that enable them to perform their employment duties and pursue their studies.  Instead, it is a sign of how deep the failure of the University has been in (not) providing a sustainable funding model both for students and faculty supporting students.  The Academic Senate has been pointing to this problem for at least two decades.  In statements and reports from 2006, 2012, and 2020, the Senate has repeatedly insisted that graduate student support was insufficient and proposed steps to improve it.  Even the administration itself has sometimes recognized its depth.  To take only one example from 2019, UCOP's Academic Planning Council declared that:  

UC must do better at financially supporting its doctoral students, particularly as it seeks to diversify the graduate student body. The University cannot compete with its peers for talented candidates if it does not offer competitive support. In 2017 the gap in average net stipend between UC and its peers was nominally $680.3 In actuality the gap is much greater due to California’s high cost of living - with factored in, the average gap in doctoral support is closer to $3,400.4 This is a huge difference but not insurmountable. The Workgroup urges UC leadership to make every effort to close the gap so that the quality of UC’s doctoral programs is maintained and enhanced.

UC campuses, with planning and prioritization, could guarantee five-year multi-year funding to doctoral students upon admission. According to current data, about 77 percent of doctoral students across UC receive stable or increasing net stipends for five consecutive years.5 (Appendix 1.) With some exceptions, this multi-year funding is relatively consistent across campuses and disciplines. However, this funding is typically not presented as a full five-year multi-year guaranteed package upon admission. Offering five-year funding upon admission would enhance recruitment of high-potential students, offer financial security, and address one of the chief stressors for doctoral students - worry over continued funding while in the program.

In addition to offering guaranteed five-year funding, the University must address the issue of graduate student housing. Graduate students, many of whom have family responsibilities, face enormous challenges in finding affordable housing. Without a targeted effort to address graduate student housing, UC’s capacity to attract and retain qualified candidates is at serious risk.  (4-5)

And yet the problem persists.  The Academic Senate has stressed this issue repeatedly and with great force.  A recent letter from the UCLA Divisional Senate's Executive Board has pointed its finger at the problem--the need for renewed state funding.   It is time for the administration to do something to fix it--and something that doesn't simply damage other parts of the academic endeavor.

UCOP will continue--as they always do--to insist that we cannot get more money out of the state to pay for what needs to be done.  But let's press on that point a little more.  It is certainly possible that we are heading for a recession--the Federal Reserve seems determined to induce one to put labor in its place.  But does that mean that the state doesn't have the capacity to respond to an emergency at the University?  Despite all the talk about a budget shortfall, Dan Mitchell at the UCLA Faculty Association Blog has been pointing out that the situation is far less clear than the Legislative Analyst is insisting (and the University is repeating).  For one thing, revenues have been higher than expected and that even with the possibility of a downturn the state has around 90 billion dollars in usable reserves. If the state won't help it's not because of economic necessity but a matter of political choice.  After all, the Governor had no problem finding $500 million to pay for a private immunology research park at UCLA that provides little, if any, real benefit to the campus academic program.  The Governor and the state can do more for the educational core of the University than they are doing: and if UCOP and the Regents can't show the state how necessary that is, then one wonders again what their purpose is.  

I want to make one final point.  UC is the research university of the state and UC insists that graduate education is at the heart of its purpose.  But if UCOP actually agrees with that then the question must be: what do we need to do to have academic graduate education in a sustainable form?  What resources do we need to enable students to both contribute to the larger functioning of the university and to pursue their studies?  Are we willing to have only graduate programs where students have family money or have already flipped a startup?  Or where they are here to gain an additional credential to take back to their jobs?  Does UCOP remain committed to UC's contributions to disciplines across the spectrum of knowledge?  Or does it only care about graduate students (and others) as cheap and disposable labor?  

I don't expect that these negotiations or this strike can answer or settle these questions.  But UC is at a crossroads and the university--especially its leadership--must face up to that.  The long-term question raised by the strike is whether UC will continue as a research university; if we don’t make it possible for future scholars to attend, we will have forfeited our purpose.  There is an opportunity here to take the first steps towards creating a new sustainable vision of a twenty-first century research university.  Or we can continue as we have in decline.  The choice ultimately is UCOP's and the Regents'.

****

(I've focused here on the ASE unit because the Student Researcher Unit is admittedly a more complicated problem.  The vast majority of GSRs are supported by external grants and those grants have both limits and their own rules.  To some extent UC has been negotiating with someone else's money.  That doesn't mean the situation is impossible but rather that it has to be implemented in such a fashion as to protect Principal Investigators from damaging unintended consequences.)

Shutdowns are now spreading as fast as the coronavirus. On March 19, Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered 40 million Californians to stay home, claiming that the infection rate puts the state on track for 25.5 million infections.  The order has no end date.  New York and other states and counties have since followed suit: by noon on March 21st, 75 million US residents were under some kind of lockdown.

In this post I'm going to talk about what I've learned during a sustained effort to apply analytical expertise to a topic outside of my normal subject areas, as I try to build a base for a series of citizen judgements about health policy, and also the related areas of educational and economic policy that I know more about.

This learning process has changed my mind about a number of Covid-related issues: for example, when I learned March 10th of UCSB's shutdown--at the end of my senior seminar, thanks to Jenna, multitasking on her email again!--I was a skeptic about the benefits of widespread closures. Now I'm a believer: I think that widespread social distancing is our only chance to avoid levels of infection that would overwhelm hospitals and clinics and lead to much excess death.  At the same time, I'm also more optimistic about reducing infections than I was a week ago.

The main part of this post close-reads the one published infection model that I've been able to find-Neil Ferguson et al.'s paper, from Imperial College London.  The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has not released its modeling, though it was discussed in a bootleg version by the New York Times.  My caveat up front is that the SARS-CoV-2 infection model I analyze does not offer any certainty about the future. But I will talk about the powers of the suppression regime we've entered into, and how the disease might be made less deadly than many of us now assume.

An overview:

• The policy of virus suppression does appear to reduce Covid-19's spread. I'll define this and other terms below, since terminology is all over the place in media reports. (The one journalist I've found to have interviewed Neil Ferguson--Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times--conflates mitigation and suppression.)  Suppression has worked well in South Korea, Singapore, and post-lockdown Hubei in China when social distancing is combined with mass testing. 
• The U.S. simply does not have the testing capability to do the most effective form of suppression.  (Santa Barbara County has brilliant and frequently exercised emergency services.  As of March 22nd it has 13 confirmed Covid-19 cases, a shortage of test kits, and 200 tests out whose results won't be in for awhile.) The U.S. has not been able to do contact-tracing, which would have allowed a much more efficient form of isolation than the mass version we're doing now.  In spite of some encouraging reports of new equipment coming on line, the U.S. is in the midst of what statistician John A. Ioannidis calls an "evidence fiasco," and its public health capacities have been downsized (personnel down 20 percent since 2008, according to David Himmelstein) to the point that we're likely stuck with the crudest, most disruptive, and most economically damaging form of suppression. 
• This has implications for rebuilding social and public capabilities that I'll save for a later post on how SARS-CoV-2 is putting neoliberalism out of its misery--and how to keep that from causing further misery for diverse publics.
• A theory point: public officials are using projections of high infection and death rates to install suppression regimes, but these suppression regimes are designed to invalidate the numbers that justify them (by producing much lower rates of infection and death).  Either you infect 81 percent of California by doing nothing, or you lockdown California and get a much lower infection percentage.  You don't do both.  I elaborate on this point because it's important for people not to think lockdown = death (regardless), but to think the opposite.  
• A policy point: public officials must not bullshit the public with exaggerated numbers, withheld models (CDC!), and mashup policies that will encourage cheating. Newsom did the right thing, but he didn't give clear, honest reasons for it.  That has to change.

To take the last point first: Where did Newsom get the number that he used to shut down most of the state economy without an end date? We don't actually know. The LA Times reports, "the governor’s office declined to provide an explanation of the state’s projection that 25.5 million Californians will be infected with this virus. Instead, a spokesman for the governor said the state’s mitigation efforts could lower that estimate."

The last part is true (though "mitigation" is the wrong word, as I'll explain), but the public should be told the source.  In the meantime, I'll guess that Newsom's people got that number from the now-famous pandemic modeling paper I mentioned at the top, Ferguson et al. Their baseline reproduction number (Ro) for the disease is 2.4--meaning each case typically goes on to infect 2.4 other people. You can get to 25.5 million Covid-19 infections by taking California's Covid infection count when Newsom spoke--around 1000--and giving it an exponent of 2.45.  (Updated: See Akos Rona-Tas's correction of this speculation below, under March 23.)

The Ferguson paper derived that Ro in part from from the spread of the virus in Wuhan, China, before the government began its many non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs)--forced quarantining, widespread testing, etc.  (Wuhan's Ro was previously reported as 3.11).  The projection that 56 percent of the California population will become infected appeared as a math error in Newsom's letter to Trump requesting a hospital ship: it's actually 64 percent, or alternately, 39.56 million Californians * 0.56 = 22.15 million inflections.  The point isn't the bad math but the need to offer credible numbers and explain clearly where they come from.  People will take honest, fully disclosed estimates more seriously.  Health policy needs to be open to establish the trust that government now desperately needs, to discourage cheating, and to allow meaningful democratic judgment about overall policy. 

Public officials, including Newsom, seem to be now focused on using big numbers to stampede the masses into social distancing, RTFN. This is understandable, since, in the suppression arsenal, social distancing is pretty much all we've got.  But one major effect of their statements is to muddle the difference between mitigating and suppressing a pandemics: the former allows infection rates like 55 percent. The latter slows growth rates and can put them into reverse.  Suppression also requires a rigor that people won't pursue if they don't understand the massive difference it can make.

To put this in the form of a question, could the U.S. and the European Union (and other regions) achieve suppression and thus decline in the number of new cases?  The current tracking in California is not good.

But look at  the South Korean case pattern.

South Korea had our hockey stick and has now bent it down into slower growth of new cases.  As is now widely discussed, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and now Wuhan have slowed the spread.  This is the effect of suppression strategies.  There's some important news here, which is that Covid-19 infections rates can be reduced, and its case-mortality rate can be kept low (not the 3.4 percent reported by the World Health Organization, but about 1 percent in South Korea, or 0.54 percent for cases under age 60).  Germany currently has a 0.3 percent case-mortality rate. SARS-CoV-2 kills people by doing horrible damage to their lungs (see the images around 0'30" in this Santa Barbara Cottage Health grand rounds lecture).  And yet the virus does so little to so many other victims that 86 percent of cases in China were undocumented prior to travel restrictions. 

On to the model: the Ferguson et al. paper draws on previous work with influenza pandemics to compare three responses-- doing nothing, mitigation, and suppression.  Doing nothing seems to have been the preferred option of the Boris Johnson and Donald Trump governments until about March 15th-16th  (Johnson, Trump), with the Johnson government allegedly working on a trust that infection would create "herd immunity" without disrupting the economy.  At least in the UK, they seem to have taken on board the Ferguson et al. calculations that "doing nothing" will lead to infection in 81 percent of the population (at  2.4 Ro), producing 510,000 deaths in the UK, plus 2.2 million deaths in the United States, both over a 2 year period.

With doing nothing now ruled out, the alternatives that Ferguson et al. modeled are mitigation or suppression. Suppression is China after January 23rd and South Korea, among others; Britain is moving to suppression with one escalating announcement after another (which may defeat the purpose).  Some parts of the U.S. are now doing suppression, including New York and California. The Ferguson paper divides these two strategies into two groups of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs).

 The most effective set of mitigation measures are:

• Case isolation in the home (CI): symptomatic cases stay at home for 7 days.
• Voluntary home quarantine (HQ): all members of a household with a case stay home for 14 days
• Social distancing of those over age 70 (SDO).

Note that this falls short of "lockdown," which includes social distancing for the whole population (SD) and, in most cases, closures of schools and universities.

Mitigation is the famous "flattening the curve." The serious cases that need hospital services are pushed out over time, with the goal of relieving some of the stress on the health care system. Mitigation is "predicted to reduce peak critical care demand by two-thirds and halve the number of deaths" (8).  Assuming the ratio of infections to critical care cases is constant, and that the syntax means mitigation yields 2/3rds of the "do nothing" infection rate, this leads to 54 percent of the population being infected, and to 1.1 million deaths in the U.S.  (When Kristof quotes Ferguson saying his best case is 1.1 million deaths, I think he ran Ferguson et al.'s two regimes together: in my view, the sentence should read, "his best case for mitigation" is 1.1 million deaths.

Clearly mitigation isn't good enough.  A million deaths in the U.S. is unacceptable, and the model suggests that under mitigation health care systems will still be overwhelmed (10). Since something like Italy's hospital crisis and high fatalities are the combination everyone wants to avoid, the UK, the EU, California, and now several other U.S. states have moved into suppression.

A side note: I would normally read the quotation to mean that mitigation reduces peak care demand (and infections) by 2/3rds, down to 1/3rd of their previous level, which is a 27 percent infection rate.  I don't know if that's what Ferguson et al. meant, but it's still more than double this year's seasonal flu rate (so far this season, flu has killed 22,000 Americans). 

Much of the U.S. is now following Italy, France, Spain, and other countries into suppression. The key benefit is that it reduces the reproduction number (Ro) to close to 1 or below, which China has shown is feasible.  Here's a nice stretch goal for the West.

 In the Ferguson et al. model, suppression adds to mitigation's measures:

• school and university closures (PC)
• social distancing expanded to the whole population (SD)

I've reproduced the table that shows the results. I'd recommend starting in column 1 with the baseline Ro of 2.4 (510,000 "do nothing" deaths) and look at the medium case of 200 (which means that the full suppression program is suspended when ICU cases fall below 200 in Great Britain, and are re-engaged when they rise above that number). (The paper does not have a similar table for the U.S.) 

California is now doing the full suppression program.  If you look at the right-hand column under Total Deaths you can see the results.  Deaths in Great Britain drop from 510,000 to 24,000, or by a factor of around 20.  The U.S. equivalent would be 110,000 deaths, not Kristof's 1.1 million.

Note two other features of this model.  The interventions all have finite periods: mitigation is modeled over 3 months (to mid-June 2020) and suppression over 5 months (to mid-August 2020).  They don't extend to the full 18 month "vaccine" period, nor are they open-ended.

Second, they are adjusted according to thresholds of infection and hospitalization that can be selected and monitored.  Governments have a great deal of agency here.  In other words, this new coronavirus is bad, but it is not an irresistible event like a giant asteroid hitting the earth.

A big catch is that the versions of suppression in South Korea, Taiwain, Hong Kong, Singapore, and China include mass testing.  Neither the US nor the UK have done this, nor do we seen to have the capability to ramp this up.  There's been much excoriating commentary on this point.  I had been hoping that UC Health could make a big difference to California public health. A potentially exciting March 14th headline, "UC has a solution to the national shortage of coronavirus testing," didn't, with our weak public sector, mean UC is gearing up mass testing for the public, but that it has a private test for its own patients.  I've heard ambitious UC plans--in this week's board meetings, one UC regent suggested for the installation of MASH hospitals on empty land that UC owns. But because of testing and equipment shortages, UC medical centers have to focus on protecting themselves (see 0'44"-0'49" or so in this very useful UCSF infectious diseases division' grand rounds). I'll end by adding a few items to the summary list above:

• The virus is going to be terrible for public health workers, who deserve not only massive sympathy and support but also personal protective equipment, which they may now have more hope of getting.  Mass testing also depends on cranking out PPE.
• Public health interventions in Asia have had enough success with suppression to give  credibility to the Imperial College model--most interestingly, its suggestion that deaths can be reduced by an order of magnitude. 
• On the other hand, hospital access remains a potential catastrophe.  Full suppression reduces ICU need to 1/3rd of "doing nothing."  In the bootlegged C.D.C.’s scenarios, "2.4 million to 21 million people in the United States could require hospitalization, potentially crushing the nation’s medical system, which has only about 925,000 staffed hospital beds. Fewer than a tenth of those are for people who are critically ill."
• Still, suppression seems to make a big difference even if it is leaky: the Ferguson et al modeling assumed incomplete success and still got major reductions (see Table 2 on page 6).
• The US has a weak health system (or no health "system" at all, as Robert Reich rightly observes). This is a big problem. But the US has some other advantages: a lot of really good, dedicated health personnel, lower population density than Europe's or East Asia's and, ironically, dependency on the self-isolating feature of private cars.  Our version of suppression might be more successful than we now expect.
• Officials should give expiration dates to the current suppression regimes. They can be extended later, depending on conditions.  As I noted, the Ferguson et al. model assumes a kind of regular adjusting depending on infection numbers. (Hong Kong has reimposed quarantine and testing on arrivals after an uptick in cases.) Indefinite lockdowns are bad for both people and the economy.  Once people are scared indoors, and the infection curve is bent like South Korea's, governments should throw the lockdown into partial reverse, lest they create another Great Depression x 2.4.

I'll move on to political, economic, and university dimensions in other posts.  From the Haley Street Bunker: stay well, and keep your distance! 
Monday March 23rd

Statistical chemist Michael Levitt hammers on one of this post's key points: "The virus can grow exponentially only when it is undetected and no one is acting to control it."  The media, he says, should focus not on total number of cumulative cases but on rates of growth of new cases. 
Speaking of which,  South Korea's number dropped again, so the chart looks a bit better today.

The coming U.S. health crisis will owe much to a social system that can't anticipate non-market public needs.   That's not what this WaPo piece says in so many words, but it has all the raw material--shortages of masks, gowns, tests, ventilators.  What aren't we short of Covid-wise?

This piece, by a Mass General physician, specifies how the market power of large hospitals will mal-distribute emergency equipment: "We are currently taking an every-hospital-system-for-themselves approach, in which some hospitals will surely say “we’ll take them all” while others will lack the capital to make such large purchases in advance and therefore will be reliant on FEMA, which will be forced to ration scarce, lifesaving equipment. These already cash-strapped hospitals serving poorer populations will soon be put in even greater jeopardy.

From Akos Ronas-Tas (Prof of Sociology, UC San Diego): How Newsom got his numbers (over half of Californians being infected) is a mystery, but it is surely not by raising 1000 to the power of 2.45. I am no epidemiologist either, but the Ro produces an estimate only if you specify how many generations of infections you count. So if the base (generation 0) is 1000 and Ro is 2.4 (used by Ferguson), the first generation will be 1000*2.4=2400, the second generation 2400*2.40 = 5760 and so on. The total number infected will be by then 1000+2400+5760=9160, adding up generations 0,1 and 2. In the Ferguson paper they use a 6.5 day generation time. The key here is that Newsom made his prediction for 8 weeks out. So he is counting roughly 8 generations. The number of newly infected in the 8th generation will be 1000*2.4^8=1,100,753. You have to add to this those from the earlier generations. That will give you the total number of those infected (roughly, 1.9 million). Some of them will have recovered by then and happily immune, others would have died. I don’t see how this adds up to 25.5 million, either as the number of all people who have ever been infected, let alone all people needing care at a certain date.  You would get to a cumulative 26 million in 11 generations with 15 million new infections. That is 71.5 days, 10 weeks, still only late May.

You can make the model more complicated. Ferguson assumed a variable R in each generation and it should also vary across generation as the number of people getting immunity increases.

Here is a nice calculator that adds a few other considerations.

The real scary numbers come from the healthcare system. There are only 74,000 hospital beds in California, and 6,300 in SD  county, only 32% of which are available. This is probably similar in the state overall. But what you really need is ICU beds (only 800 available in SD county). There are about 50,000 ICU beds in the entire US and about 100,000 respirators. And you also have to add to this that beds, even ICU beds are useless unless you have trained personnel attending to them. So if we suppose only 2 million people being sick at the same time in CA, and only 10%  (100,000) needing hospital beds and only 4% (40,000) ICU beds, we have a major catastrophe. 

Tuesday, March 24

On the duration of the shutdown, Jeffrey Sachs invokes the example of China. Their ironclad version of suppression, including mass testing, suggests the spread of SARS-CoV-2 can be stopped in 60 days.  Sachs says 60-90 days.

This is not what's happening in Italy, where exasperated mayors berate their citizenry.

Buzzfeed does funniest home videos for the Covid quarantine. 

As India's government orders a 3-week "total lockdown,"  nearly 60 percent of the U.S. population is not under stay-at-home orders or being mass-tested.  The U.S. is therefore not, overall, doing suppression, but mitigation of SARS-CoV-2.  Note that this predicts some "flattening of the curve" of infection--reducing but not eliminating the overload on health care-- but not reversing the spread of the disease (Ro stays above 1). Some red state politicians are actively resisting social distancing (Texas, Mississippi), as is POTUS himself.

Speaking of testing, California is way behind New York, working "piecemeal."

This piecemeal approach, said Harvard epidemiologist Michael Mina, is a key problem with testing in California and nationwide.

“We have a decentralized healthcare system and we have no way to scale for government means,” Mina said. “Everything is privatized, everything is individualized in our country and it’s become our Achilles’ heel in this case.”

   
Wednesday, March 25  It's Bailout Day!

NYT summary.  Essential first take by David Dayen. Trigger warning: wow will this analysis not reassure you that any economic reforms are in the offing.

Yes we have no protection: "A very American story about capitalism consuming our national preparedness and resiliency"  Painful contrast between the American scramble for the most basic equipment and Germany's highly successful health system for radically minimizing fatalities.

Half-assed LAT reporting on the coming fiscal crisis of the state of California.  No real info, and other annoying stuff. How do you find the school lobbyist who will say this will be really bad for the schools, and then add, "under current law, it is likely that schools could withstand a total statewide revenue loss of around $5 billion. But more than that and schools will face significant problems."  So your own lobbyist just told the state that a 7 percent cut is fine. 

Where's higher ed in the stimulus bill? Inside Higher Ed's summary:

Six-Month Loan Deferment in Senate Bill
March 25, Noon. Student loan borrowers would be allowed to defer making payments for six months, without interest, through Sept. 30, according to a summary of the $2 trillion stimulus package Senate leaders agreed to at 1 a.m. Wednesday morning. The full bill is still being written and hasn’t yet been released.

But according to summaries of the bill making the rounds among education advocacy groups and obtained by Inside Higher Ed, the measure will also include changes sought by advocates such as not requiring Pell Grant students to repay money to the federal government if their terms are disrupted by the coronavirus emergency.

However, the bill is expected to disappoint advocates who had embraced Democratic proposals in the House and Senate, in which the federal government would have made the payments on behalf of borrowers, reducing their balances by at least $10,000. The summary did not mention any loan cancellation.

A separate summary contains $30.75 billion in grants to “provide emergency support to local school systems and higher education institutions to continue to provide educational services to their students and support.” That amount appears be about $29 billion less than what higher education institutions could potentially get in the bill proposed by House Democrats, but $21 billion more than what Senate Republicans had initially proposed, one higher education lobbyist said.  Associations representing institutions that were disappointed with the previous proposals were still waiting for the full bill before they commented on the level of funding.

The bill requires the secretary to defer student loan payments, principal, and interest for six months, through Sept. 30, 2020.

Thursday, March 26

Covid revealing America's rear guard place in the world 

Zero Hedge's mashup of hostility to the shutdown, mixing vulnerability of SARS-CoV-2 to treatment (it isn’t a superbug) with statistical problems (extensive) with lockdown’s effect on the economy (bad but unavoidable). Playing rural roulette because lockdowns are Democrat.

Suppression works, says none other than Neil Ferguson!!

He said that expected increases in National Health Service capacity and ongoing restrictions to people’s movements make him “reasonably confident” the health service can cope when the predicted peak of the epidemic arrives in two or three weeks. UK deaths from the disease are now unlikely to exceed 20,000, he said, and could be much lower.

But don't go back outside! Because, on the other hand,

This measure of how many other people a carrier usually infects is now believed to be just over three, he said, up from 2.5. “That adds more evidence to support the more intensive social distancing measures,” he said.

Special bonus for modeling fans: Oxford now has a model too. More on this coming soon.

Hope for a UK Covid-19 home test within two weeks.

And We're Number 1 - in Covid-19 cases.