Vox clamantis in deserto
Essence of vistas
“White Cloud” (oil on canvas), by Nancy M. Vignola, in her show “Wanderings,” at the Providence Art Club through Sept. 10.
She says:
“My artistic journey frequently embarks from the landscapes of my voyages, harnessing the essence of my chosen hues. These pigments become the very heartbeat of my work. Guided by these evolving palettes, I embark on sketches that capture the essence of these enchanting vistas, distilling them into refined forms. With each successive layer of color, the piece evolves, transforming in density and depth, until its dynamic spirit is unleashed.’’
New center is established to take on rare diseases
Quite a setting for research! The Jackson Laboratory campus in Bar Harbor, Maine
— Jackson Laboratory photo
Edited from a report by The New England Council
“Augusta, Maine-based Jackson Laboratory and Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) have joined Cambridge, Mass.-based Broad Institute in launching the Center for Therapeutic Genetics (CTG), a collaboration focused on developing precision genetic medicines for patients with rare and ultra-rare diseases. The center aims to make patient-tailored treatments more precise, reliable, and repeatable by sharing methods, data, and training.
“An estimated 350 million-400 million people worldwide live with one of about 8,000 rare diseases, yet fewer one than in 20 has an approved treatment. The center will apply tools, models, processes, data, and protocols developed for one treatment program to others. Jackson Laboratory contributes expertise in rare-disease models and translational science, while BCH contributes expertise in individualized genetic therapies and the clinical implementation of genomic medicine.
“‘We’re at a moment in genomic medicine where, for many rare diseases, the question is no longer whether we can treat them, but whether we will build the systems to do it,’ said Cat Lutz, vice president of the Rare Disease Translational Center at Jackson Laboratory. Timothy Yu, a physician in the Division of Genetics and Genomics at BCH, said, ‘We used to see precisely tailored therapies for children with genetic diseases as remarkable exceptions. CTG is built on the conviction that they don’t have to be.”’
Memory as reconstruction
“A Piece of Pie” (oil on canvas), by Debra Samdperil, in her show “All Is Not Lost,’’ at Kingston Gallery, Boston, Oct. 1-Nov. 1.
She says:
“For me, painting is not a means of illustrating an idea but a way of discovering one. I approach abstraction not as the absence of representation but as a means of expanding it—allowing emotion, memory, and imagination to exist simultaneously.
“Images only emerge through a process of accumulation, erasure, and response, where each mark suggests the next. I am very interested in the way memory functions as fragmented, layered, and constantly reconstructed. Familiar shapes appear like half-remembered forms or fleeting thoughts that dissolve into gestures and color. Color functions as both structure and emotion. Black lines alternately define, interrupt, and destabilize, creating tension between containment and release.
“The finished work remains open-ended: a visual conversation between order and improvisation, memory and invention, structure and chance.’’
William Morgan: Seeds of its own destruction?
Portsmouth, New Hampshire
— Photo by Quintin Soloviev
(All photos below by William Morgan)
Two buildings in the downtown historic district of Portsmouth, N.H., suggest the problems of history and growth in what has become a “destination.” The delicate Federal-style customs house of 1817 speaks of New England’s glorious maritime past. The recent Buckley’s Market, a franchise dining and food emporium, represents an awkward attempt at being contemporary.
Penhallow Street, Portsmouth. Customs House to left; Buckley’s to right; Temple Israel at end of block
The Customs House served as the harborside city’s post office until 1858, when it was replaced by a granite Italianate pile designed by Ammi B. Young, the New Hampshire native who served as the first Supervising Architect of the United States Treasury. Despite the grandeur of Young’s imposing civic palace, the 1817 Customs House (no doubt by a local housewright) is typical of Portsmouth’s remarkably cohesive townscape composed of somewhat utilitarian two-and three-story brick structures.
What a lovely way to turn a corner: a small structure achieves monumentality through graceful proportions, offset by exquisite fanned Palladian windows.
Right across the street from this appropriately gentle neighbor is the market-restaurant-office-block, clearly a bully who gives the architectural finger to one of the most attractive historic downtowns in New England. No plaque alerts us to the architect’s name, presumably a corporate hack, who through ignorance or just meanness, wanted to inflict urbanicide. Yet, a sensitive modern design could enhance the street, contributing to its evolution. Instead, we have a combination giant football and aquarium, along with a mélange of silly aqua-colored details.
A nautical take on the Pro Football Hall of Fame, in Canton, Ohio?
Despite the promise of an impressive entrance, the way into the marketplace is a cramped, silo-like funnel, decorated with kitschy floating fish. Perfect for Miami Beach, perhaps, but it is difficult to ascertain how this is related to New Hampshire’s colonial capital. On the other hand, this tacky intrusion may be the future of this once handsome small city. Portsmouth, like Nantucket, Newport and Salem, are seeing themselves over-developed–literally destroyed by the very thing that made them so appealing. The cultivation of beauty planted the seeds of their own destruction.
On summer days, especially, and on weekends during the entire year, crowds of tourists jam the streets, in search of what? History, or T-shirts and ice cream, beer and margaritas? Several behemoth luxury hotels–all in brick, in developers’ pathetic attempt to blend in with the city’s early fabric–have recently been built and more are under construction. One wonders who their patrons are. Meanwhile, working folk in the Portsmouth area have to commute farther and farther in search of affordable housing.
In the 1960s I had my first job, as a researcher, at Portsmouth’s Strawbery Banke, a Williamsburg-like village composed of endangered 18th-Century houses brought to the site. Such historic preservation was something of a novelty to the tawdry Navy town. A friend from nearby Wells, Maine, then described Portsmouth as the sort of town where on Sunday mornings hung-over men saddled up to the drugstore soda counter and ordered Bromo-Seltzers. A Baltimore friend to whom I introduced Portsmouth, declared it was “Annapolis without money.”
A Japanese tanker moored in the Piscataqua River, just a few hundred yards from downtown
That gritty dockland vibration is still preserved by the working waterfront (huge mounds of salt for New Hampshire’s icy roads, for example, are stockpiled on the edge of the tourist district), the presence of the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard (which is actually in neighboring Kittery, Maine) and a few frayed edges. But how long can Portsmouth protect its rich physical history from the curse of gentrification?
William Morgan is a Providence-based architectual historian and critic and photographer. The author of many books, he also writes essays on American popular culture. His books include Academia: Collegiate Gothic Architecture in the United States, Monadnock Summer, The Cape Cod Cottage, American Country Churches, among others.
Don Morrison: We need protection from tech bros and their gigantic data centers
Cervalis' Norwalk facility, Connecticut's largest data center.
The Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center, in Holyoke.
So, I’m driving down the interstate and need to make a pit stop. As I approach the exit, my steering wheel freezes up. I hit the brakes, to no effect. Panic rising, I tell the car’s voice assistant to pull over. It responds in a soft and friendly tone: “I’m sorry, Don, but I’m afraid I can’t do that. It’s not part of the mission.”
That’s when I wake up. Ever since I saw an HBO rerun of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, featuring a polite but frighteningly stubborn computer named HAL, I’ve been having variations of this dream. I now realize it’s not about a car. It’s about how we’re losing control of artificial intelligence, even as it reshapes our lives.
To many of us, that development might seem too distant to worry about, and maybe even something to cheer. After all, Siri, Alexa, ChatGPT, Claude, Waymo and “smart” household appliances have already made life easier in so many ways. Yet I’m not alone in worrying about AI and its potentially disastrous effects — on our jobs and, ultimately, our democracy.
In a new study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Australia’s University of Queensland, 272 experts examined two dozen potential types of AI-related disaster and found that 18 of them have at least a 10 percent chance of happening in the next five years. Among those potential catastrophes: a new cyber-weapon will cause at least 1 million deaths or $100 million in losses; also, AI-generated misinformation will wreak emotional harm on multitudes or affects the outcome of an election.
AI mishaps are already with us. News reports — and a few lawsuits — indicate that prolonged interactions with chat bots may have contributed to delusions, emotional crises and in some cases, suicides. Criminals are using “deepfake” photos and even voices to facilitate identity theft and extortion. The internet is filled with AI-generated “slop,” annoying but largely harmless, though some of it is aimed at changing our political views.
The problem isn’t so much that such fantasies are convincing. It’s that every year it gets easier to manufacture more plausible ones. Eventually, the public might not know what to believe. Even President Trump now posts AI-generated images, nearly all of them obvious confections and mildly amusing — like last week’s “photo” of him showing his controversial White House ballroom project to George Washington.
Not so amusing is news that the federal government and both houses of Congress now allow the use of AI in official business, often without much supervision. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida was embarrassed last week when her staff posted a summary of a proposed defense bill amendment that retained the words “Claude responded,” a sign they had used the AI chatbot.
More troubling still was last month’s disclosure that an autonomous OpenAI agent escaped its testing environment and hacked into Hugging Face, an AI-development platform. No serious harm was done, but the fact that intrusion occurred at all — and went undetected for days — have raised fears that we might be losing control of AI and that our personal data is in danger.
So, it appears, are our communities. Artificial intelligence systems require enormous computing power, which is supplied mostly by data centers: shopping-mall-sized complexes filled with computer servers. The centers consume vast amounts of land, water (for cooling) and electricity. They strain local power grids, drive up retail electricity prices, create noise and otherwise degrade the quality of life in thousands of localities.
Though polls show that as many as 70 percent of Americans oppose them, data centers are popping up all over the place. The U.S. now has around 4,000, with at least 2,000 more planned or under construction.
Of course, data centers provide jobs and property-tax revenues for localities, just as the growth of AI generally is expected to boost U.S. economic growth. Yet the toll on American society and democracy could be high. What’s truly worrying is that the decisions about what risks can be acceptable in pursuing AI’s future are being taken by a group of people who stand to profit from its unfettered growth.
The industry is dominated by a handful of tech-firm founders, nearly all of them men, who — along with their major investors — have become multibillionaires. These and other wealthy “tech bros” have put vast sums into political action committees (PACs). Elon Musk spent $243 million to help elect Donald Trump in 2024 and plans a $100 million effort for Republicans in this year’s midterm elections. Leading the Future, a network of super-PACS, has amassed $100 million to support candidates who share the AI industry’s opposition to regulation and taxation.
A major battle is shaping up. Many Americans are worried about the growing disparity of wealth in the U.S. between AI winners and victims. Many also worry about the possibility of losing their own jobs — and not just the manufacturing and clerical positions currently affected. AI can now generate movie scenes, prepare tax returns, develop new drugs, even write news stories and opinion columns. A college degree may no longer offer the protection it once did.
Amid such anxiety, people see the enormous wealth generated by AI and think they deserve a share. A few states have responded with higher taxes on data centers. A new Virginia levy on data-center power consumption is expected to raise $600 million in the coming year. Some members of Congress want to impose stronger safety rules and more rigorous anti-trust regulation on artificial intelligence giants. Let’s hope it’s not too late.
Despite the industry’s public-relations efforts, the current wave of anxiety over the rise of the AI is unlikely to subside anytime soon, nor should it. Only if people get worried enough to take action can we wrest control of this ground-shaking technological revolution from the self-serving handful who profit from it.
As someone who must endure HAL’s occasional efforts to take control of his dreams, I’ll be pulling for the triumph of real — not artificial — sanity.
Don Morrison is a veteran editor, reporter, columnist and media executive. A part-time resident of The Berkshires, he’s a member of the editorial advisory board of The Berkshire Eagle.
Good morning in Maine
Oil painting by Geoffrey Teale Chalmers, in his show at the Copley Society of Art, Boston, through Aug. 30.
What would Adams think now?
“The Father and Mother,’’ by Boardman Robinson (1867-1952), depicting war as the offspring of greed and pride.
"There is so much rascality, so much venality and corruption, so much avarice and ambition such a rage for profit and commerce among all ranks and degrees of men even in America, that I sometimes doubt whether there is public virtue enough to support a republic."
Founding Father John Adams (1735-1826), in a 1776 letter to Mercy Otis Warren
‘Primary colors and sinister motifs’
Work by Dan Baldwin, at Samuel Owen Gallery, Greenwich, Conn.
The gallery says:
“Dan Baldwin is a contemporary British artist born in 1972, recognized for his kaleidoscopic paintings and ceramic vases. He juxtaposes rich acrylic paints and primary colors with sinister motifs that evoke themes existing in the natural world such as life, death, and decay, creating simultaneously morbid yet playful works.
“Baldwin received a degree in Illustration from the Kent Institute in England, an art school that boasts notable alumni including Tracey Emin and Billy Childish. Since then, he has been thought of as a key figure in the Young British Artists Movement and has exhibited with the likes of Damien Hirst, Banksy, and Sir Peter Blake. His work has also been appreciated on a global scale, including critically-acclaimed sell-out solo shows in London, Los Angeles, and New York, as well as art fairs in Basel, Miami, and Tokyo. Additionally, his work has been published in leading magazines including Vogue, Elle, The New Order, Art of England, Aesthetica, Dazed and Confused, Modern Painters, and I.D.’’
The crisis that led to the creation of the Back Bay neighborhood
1858 view from the Massachusetts State House along the Mill Dam (now Beacon Street), which separated Back Bay (left) from the Charles River.
From The Boston Guardian, article by Mannie Lewis
(Robert Whitcomb, New England Diary’s editor, is chairman of The Boston Guardian.)
Walking past Newbury Street’s quaint shops or strolling Commonwealth Avenue’s boulevards, it may seem bizarre that Back Bay could be a recent creation. But until the mid-nineteenth century, the now opulent neighborhood was nothing more than a low tidal marsh.
The conception of Back Bay as a neighborhood first came to Boston as a geographic crisis. By the 1840’s, Irish immigrants made up a substantial portion of the downtown population, which was previously contained on the undersized Shawmut Peninsula, and the need for expansion became undeniable.
The problem was exacerbated by the flight of Brahmin elites. Unable to cope with the practical and cultural demands of immigration, many of Boston’s old families put pressure on the government to find a solution. Smaller areas around the peninsula had already been filled in, but city officials needed something grander, not only to accommodate the immigrants, but also to keep traditional elites downtown.
But ultimately, it took a more concrete crisis to fill Back Bay. In 1814, the Massachusetts Legislature had authorized the Boston and Roxbury Mill Corporation (BRMC) to build a dam across the Back Bay. On the promise of factories and jobs, the dam isolated the Bay from the Charles and further divided it into two basins, deriving energy from the ebb and flow of tides.
Though the dam was never popular, its propinquity to the city would be its undoing. At the time, local sewers were designed to dump their contents at the nearest shoreline, meaning that the isolated basins received a constant stream of garbage and excrement.
Over the following decades, the situation deteriorated to such an extent that an 1849 city committee described Back Bay as “nothing less than a great cesspool, into which is daily deposited all the filth of a large and constantly increasing population.”
To address the health crisis as well as the housing demand, the the city established the Commissioners on Boston Harbor and the Back Bay, tasked to fill in the basin and cover the exposed sewage. Soon after, a series of agreements allocated work and land rights between the city, Commonwealth and BRMC.
Money, however, proved to be an enduring obstacle. Because the state legislature barred the project from receiving taxpayer money in 1856, the state was forced to sell land as they progressed. Instead of working west to east, which would have saved time and energy, the state began its work east to west, putting the newest parcels of land on display for wealthy Beacon Hill residents.
As the work dragged on, innovative technology soon came on full display. Shovels, handcarts, and gravity railroads of earlier decades were quickly replaced by the steam evacuator, a massive mechanical shovel that contractors George Goss and Norman C. Munson utilized. When a train arrived on site, which happened around-the-clock until 1863, two steam evacuators would dig out a chunk of land and dump it in the car. According to reports, a 35-car train could be filled in 10 minutes, replacing the work of nearly 200 men.
It took several decades, but the neighborhood slowly emerged.
By 1876, the state had finished the majority of its role and replaced $1.6 million in expenditures with a $5 million profit, nearly $90 million today, largely due to their focus on building upper middle class residences and preserving the value of Commonwealth Avenue.
Miscellaneous work continued for decades, but the old marsh quickly became a downtown staple. Thousands of residents now call Back Bay home and millions more walk its streets yearly, perhaps the reason many take the old marsh, larger than the Shawmut Peninsula itself, for granted.
Mainely kitsch, or terror
— Photo by William Morgan, in Woolwich, Maine.
The real ones are moving to Canada.
Interwoven east and west
“Untitled” (acrylic and mixed media on canvas mounted board), by Jung Hur, at the Corey Daniels Gallery, Wells, Maine.
The artist says:
“Over the past few years, my paintings have begun with my own personal symbol, a pair of shapes based on an old-fashioned lock and key. This symbol is based in Yin-Yang philosophy, an ever-swirling way of thinking about complements and opposites, as well as the history of Western painting: A keyhole is a symbol for single-point perspective. Consequently, many keyholes refer to multiple perspectives. This is why the grid is a model for modernist painting: No one perspective is privileged. It is also a direct path for understanding how my work is about diversity and identity.
“My complementary key and keyhole forms echo my now completely interwoven Eastern and Western experience with art. What unfolds in these paintings is the step-by-step process by which a thing like a pig becomes an image, a personal symbol (I recently became a pig farmer), and a broader symbol that others can see (like a piggie bank) that can stand for ideas like prosperity, frugality, or even wealth and financial transactions.’’
Chris Powell: Conn. casinos are economic parasites that take money from the poorer and give to the richer
The Foxwoods casino complex, in Ledyard, Conn. The term “gaming” is used by casinos in place of “gambling’’ to make it sound more benign.
— Photo by Elfenbeinturm
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Back in the 1990s several rationales were offered when Connecticut approved its two Indian tribal casinos following enactment of the federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act.
First was that since neighboring states had no casinos and did not seem to want any, Connecticut’s casinos might draw far more customers from out of state than from in state and thus collect more gambling tax revenue from them than from the state’s own residents.
Second was that the casinos, opened on tribal land in the relatively sparsely populated eastern part of the state, would boost the area economically.
And third was social justice. The casinos were portrayed as mechanisms of reparations for the mistreatment of the ancient Pequot and Mohegan people by the European culture that nearly destroyed them.
The third rationale was bogus. The last Pequots and Mohegans who had been mistreated by the Connecticut colony and its successor state died a century or more before Indian casino gambling was established. While members of Indian tribes in Western states were still suffering segregation and poverty, people of Indian descent in Connecticut had long been integrated into society and were living like everyone else.
But that didn’t matter, for the social-justice rationale corresponded with the advent of political correctness and gave people the impression that casinos were good if their owners were distant descendants of people who had been treated badly. Political correctness also gave the impression that anyone who objected to government's basing patronage on ethnicity was racist. This was intimidating and effective.
Now the first and second rationales for casino gambling in Connecticut have collapsed as well.
There are 20 other casinos in New England -- two in Maine, 13 in New Hampshire, three in Massachusetts, and two in Rhode Island. There are five in New York State. Connecticut’s two casinos increasingly draw their patrons from within the state’s own borders.
As a result, they have started taking more out of the state’s economy than they add to it. The two casinos still have thousands of employees, but they are sustained mainly by tens of thousands of customers who are Connecticut residents, people who, but for casino gambling in the state, might spend their entertainment money elsewhere in the state or at out-of-state casinos -- or even save it.
Casino gambling always has been a mechanism of taking money from the many and giving it to the few -- casino owners and their employees, with government skimming some in taxes. Connecticut got around that at the outset with its regional monopoly on casinos. But no more. Economically Connecticut’s casinos now redistribute money from the bottom to the top of the income scale in the state as most forms of gambling do -- and the other day the Hearst Connecticut newspapers calculated that the money being redistributed is in the many billions of dollars.
According to the Hearst report, legal gamblers in Connecticut have lost at least $56 billion since 1993, an amount that doesn’t include casino table games. Now that Connecticut has authorized Internet gambling -- from which the Indian casinos are paid a tribute for sharing their duopoly -- Hearst calculates that in the last five years gamblers in Connecticut have lost $922 million via FanDuel, Draft Kings, and Fanatics.
Since politics in Connecticut is so left-wing and sanctimonious, it might be expected to ask a few questions here, what with billions being transferred from the many to the few in an undertaking that produces so little value, and with gambling addiction exploding, destroying lives and families and causing ever-more bankruptcies.
But no questions are asked, perhaps because, as the Hearst report notes, state government’s total take from gambling -- from the state lottery, started in 1972, to the slot machine tax -- has reached $22 billion, and gambling revenue is now 2.5% of the state budget.
That much money for government seems able to salve most liberal consciences, no matter how it's obtained. It's now the only rationale for casino gambling in Connecticut.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Abigail Boggs: New rules to make it even tougher for foreign students (of whom N.E. famously has many)
Harvard Square, in Cambridge, Mass. The Greater Boston area hosts thousands of foreign students at its universities and colleges, of which Harvard, MIT, Boston University and Tufts are internationally famous. Harvard Square is sort of the psychic center of this higher-education capital.
From The Conversation (except for image above)
Middletown, Conn.
The Trump administration is revising a visa rule for international students that in part determines how long, and under what conditions, they can stay in the country. The change sounds technical. Its effects are not.
Beginning Sept. 15, 2026, most students entering the U.S. on F-1 and J-1 visas – meaning visas for international students and exchange visitors, including students and scholars – will no longer be admitted for “duration of status.” Duration of status means they can remain in the U.S. as long they are enrolled in their academic program, or shortly thereafter.
Now, academic visa holders will instead be able to stay in the country for a predetermined period of time, generally four years.
Those who need more time to complete a degree will have to reapply to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for permission to stay.
The change could also complicate international travel: Students returning to the U.S. will have to make sure their fixed period of admission has not expired, in addition to having the valid visa and school documents normally required for reentry.
The rule also lets full-time international students stay 30 days in the country after they complete their program, as opposed to the 60 days they currently have to remain in the U.S.
I study the history of international students in U.S. higher education. Universities rely on international students for tuition, teaching, research and other kinds of skilled work.
These new rules will make it harder for some international students to visit and stay in the country, a result that will likely have negative consequences for universities and colleges, too.
Harvard students rally in support of international students in May 2025. Rick Friedman/AFP via Getty Images
A look at international students
U.S. colleges and universities hosted 1,177,766 international students in the 2024-25 school year, an all-time high that made up approximately 6% of all higher education students.
Most of them were working toward degrees in in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
Nearly 488,500 of those international students were seeking graduate degrees. More than 294,000 of them participated in a federal program called Optional Practical Training, which helps some international students work in jobs related to their field of study before or after they graduate.
International enrollment grew steadily at U.S. colleges and universities, from about 565,000 students in the 2004-05 school year to more than 1 million by the 2015-16 academic year.
Growth then slowed during the first Trump administration but began rising again after 2021.
The concentration is much higher in some programs and institutions. At Purdue, for example, international students make up 63% of graduate students in mechanical engineering. At Columbia University, non-U.S. residents made up 53% of graduate students in the fall of 2024.
Since 2024, the greatest number of international students has come from India. The next largest group is students from China. For more than a decade, students from China made up the largest group of international students in the U.S. But the number of Chinese students has dropped over the past several years.
International students are important for university finances, too.
Most of these students are not eligible for U.S. federal student aid or loans.
More than half of international students report “personal or family funds” as their primary source of financial support to help pay for their education. These students contributed nearly US$55 billion to the U.S. economy in 2024, according to the international student exchange nonprofit Institute of International Education.
International graduate students also frequently teach undergraduate courses, conduct experiments and staff research laboratories.
What the rule changes
Until now, most international students did not have to reapply to maintain or extend their standard F-1 student visa midway through their course of study.
And if a student remained enrolled and complied with immigration rules, a university could extend the student’s expected completion date of their program when more time was needed.
The new rule introduces a separate federal immigration review for every student whose course of study goes beyond four years. This, according to the Department of Homeland Security, will add 393,500 new visa reviews to the U.S. government workload each year.
Not a strict timeline
Academic work does not always proceed on schedule. Research changes direction. Funding gets delayed. A dissertation needs another semester.
If a student reaches the end of their visa’s limits before they finish their degree, a university can still say that the student is making appropriate progress and needs more time – but now the U.S. government will also have to agree that the student can remain enrolled and stay in the country.
The Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration is among the higher education groups that has warned the change could disrupt teaching and research, as well as discourage students from choosing a U.S. school altogether.
The Department of Homeland Security has acknowledged that the change may be disruptive. But the agency argues that fixed student visa time periods will give immigration officials more opportunities to check whether students are following visa requirements and to conduct national security screening.
A broader campaign
The first Trump administration proposed a similar policy in 2020. The Biden administration withdrew this visa proposal in 2021. Trump then revived the proposal after returning to office.
This policy change comes alongside other immigration changes that make it harder for international students to attend U.S. schools.
In 2025, the Trump White House tried unsuccessfully to stop Harvard from enrolling any international students. Federal courts blocked that measure in June 2025.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio also announced in May 2025 that the State Department was beginning to revoke visas of some Chinese students and increasing the scrutiny of prospective international students from China and Hong Kong.
The administration said in January 2026 that it had revoked 8,000 student visas since the start of Trump’s second term.
A graduate stands up alongside fellow classmates and country flags during the commencement at Brown University in Providence, R.I., in May 2025. Joseph Prezioso/Anadolu via Getty Images
Why it matters
The new rule does not end international education or impose a four-year maximum on all students’ degrees. It does mean, however, that more international students will need to get additional levels of federal approval so they can complete their education in the U.S.
A student in a six-year doctoral program can still finish their degree, but they will generally need federal approval to remain in the country beyond four years. A student in a two-year master’s program who finishes on schedule may never need an extension.
The four-year limit can also affect students whose programs are designed to take longer. The University of Cincinnati’s engineering degree generally takes five years to complete, for example. Some medical residency and fellowship pathways for J-1 physicians routinely extend five to seven years.
These new roadblocks can determine whether students finish degrees, or remain with their partners and children. They can also determine whether laboratories keep researchers and employers retain graduates trained in the U.S.
On Aug. 18, a coalition of higher education groups and unions sued to block the rule, arguing that requiring students to repeatedly seek federal permission to continue their studies will disrupt degree programs and make it harder for universities to recruit and retain students.
International students are woven into the everyday work of U.S. higher education. Making their ability to stay more dependent on repeated federal decisions will inevitably affect the institutions that rely on them.
Abigail Boggs is assistant professor of sociology and education studies at Wesleyan University.
She does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
‘Transnationalism in American art’
“Deer Woman’s New Medicine” (textiles, wood, cowhide and paint), by Natalie Ball, in the group show “Encounters With the Collection: Reframing America at 250,’’ at the William Benton Museum of Art. at the University of Connecticut’s main campus, at Storrs, Sept. 1, 2026-Sept. 1, 2026.
The museum says:
“Inspired by visitor feedback from our previous exhibition ‘Exploring America at 250,’ this show looks at transnationalism in American art from the 18th Century to the present. By showing case studies from the Benton's own collection alongside key loans from Art Bridges, the exhibition explores migration, cultural exchange, expatriate experience, and Indigenous sovereignty.’’
Bates College will self-correct
Hathorn Hall at Bates College in 2015, featuring respective classes' Ivy stones, in celebration of the college's Ivy Day.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
We need small rigorous liberal arts colleges that promote critical thinking and encourage their people to take the long view. The best ones, when they sometimes get carried away by practices and even fads that turn out not work well, self-correct — because of their fundamental respect for critical thinking.
Anyway, the public-relations and admissions people at Bates College, a small, well respected liberal-arts institution in the old factory town of Lewiston, Maine, must be very anxious now as they deal with Tyler Austin Harper’s piece “Confessions of a Token Black Professor,” in the September issue of The Atlantic magazine. He was an assistant professor of “environmental studies’’ (a murky-sounding discipline) at Bates before becoming a writer at The Atlantic.
In his essay, he reports on the college’s past, sometimes stultifying, hypocritical and even hilariously crazy climate of identity politics, DEI and political correctness, even as it has often ignored what might be a bigger issue – class and ever-widening income inequality, including at such “elite” schools as Bates. (The college, whose students come from households with a median household income of around $226,500, fought efforts to unionize faculty and staff.)
It should be noted that the college has since backed off from a bit of its DEI obsessions, largely for fear of being punished by the Trump regime. Will it overreact? Like other anxious colleges and universities, it might now try to ignore the socio-economic harms of past racial discrimination as it weakens or eliminates affirmative-action efforts to help marginalized groups -- enlightened self-interest efforts to ensure that it remains a national institution with students from widely different family backgrounds.
I was struck by Bates’s very self-conscious drive to uncover racial bias and “white privilege’’ in a setting where no one would openly express those things these days. The Orwellian attempt to discover those pathologies ignores the fact that no one can truly know what’s going on in someone else’s head. Judge people by their actions. A physics professor may harbor racist opinions but keep them to himself and be a superb teacher and researcher. Let the professor alone.
Anyway, Bates, founded in 1855 by Abolitionists, will self-correct from its current crisis.
Hit this link to read the article.
xxx
Meanwhile, the University of Michigan will drop first-semester grades to address students’ “mental-health crisis’’. Sounds very humane, but how will students learn how to deal with life’s challenges if given such passes in college?
Wistful memory
“New England {late) Summer,’’ by Mabel May Woodward (1877-1945), prominent Impressionist painter. She\favored scenes in Rhode Island and Maine,
‘Dead and living coexist there’
The Duxbury Pier Light, built in 1871 and widely nicknamed "Bug Light" or "The Bug," marks the channel for the harbors of Plymouth, Kingston, and Duxbury.
“Out in the distance, along the horizon of the steel-colored water, a whale-watching boat slowly made its way into the harbor. It imperceptibly moved in a straight-line past Bug Light. Nicknamed ‘America's Hometown,’ Plymouth was unique. It was a place where the old and new, the dead and the living, the ancient and the modern seamlessly coexisted. Its shores were a haven - an opportunity - for any who were willing to come and make it their home.”
― Juliette Rose Kerr, Christian spiritual director and author of the novel To Fill a Jar With Water
And give us this day some evil
From the “Vermont Vice” show at the Bennington Museum through Nov. 2
The museum explains:
“Vermont is seen in the public imagination as an idyllic rural paradise, largely free from the darker elements of humanity. However, anyone who has lived here or studied our state’s history knows that this is not true. Vermont has always been home to many of the same issues that plague any other place settled by humans, ranging from counterfeiters, rum runners, and drug abuse to girlie shows, illicit gambling, and murder. This exhibition explores these issues and more from the 18th- through the 20th-Century, featuring art by Ray Materson and Susan Meiselas and archival materials from the museum’s collection, including a recently acquired collection of material from the Green Mountain Racetrack, in Pownal.
‘Wholesome restraint’
Daniel Webster in 1847.
“Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint; the more restraint on others to keep off from us, the more liberty we have."
— Daniel Webster (1782-1852), a famed lawyer who served as U.S. senator from Massachusetts, congressman representing New Hampshire and then Massachusetts, and secretary of state. He was considered the leading orator of his time but had what many considered too flexible moral principles, especially when it came to the slavery issue. He called slavery evil but was willing to compromise with the South on the issue to try to keep the country from splitting up.
