N.E. responds: B.U. starts experimental COVID-19 treatment; companies give more relief money

The stunning Dana Hall-Integrated Science, Engineering, and Technology Complex at the University of Hartford. The university is offering free housing to first responders.

From our friends at The New England Council: (newenglandcouncil.com):

As our region and our nation continue to grapple with the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) pandemic, The New England Council is using our blog as a platform to highlight some of the incredible work our members have undertaken to respond to the outbreak.  Each day, we’ll post a round-up of updates on some of the initiatives underway among Council members throughout the region.  We are also sharing these updates via our social media, and encourage our members to share with us any information on their efforts so that we can be sure to include them in these daily round-ups.

You can find all the Council’s information and resources related to the crisis in the special COVID-19 section of our website.  This includes our COVID-19 Virtual Events Calendar, which provides information on upcoming COVID-19 Congressional town halls and webinars presented by NEC members, as well as our newly-released Federal Agency COVID-19 Guidance for Businesses page.

Here is the Friday, April 17, roundup:

Medical Response

• Boston Hospitals Begin Using Experimental Treatment on COVID-19 Patients – Doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital (Mass General) and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center have begun using hydroxychloroquine, the now-famous anti-malarial drug, as a potential treatment on COVID-19 patients. Mass General is sponsoring a controlled study with the drug that plans to test patients around the country in order to assess its effectiveness beyond initial, anecdotal reports of success. The Boston Globe has more.

• Brandeis University, Boston University Collaborate on Coronavirus Research – Researchers at Brandeis University and Boston University are working together to study how the coronavirus penetrates cells and causes infection. Labs at the two universities are working to visualize how COVID-19 affects humans at a cellular level to better understand how it operates and to measure the effectiveness of varying antibodies in combating the virus. Read more.

• MilliporeSigma Prepares for Large-Scale Production of Potential Vaccine – MilliporeSigma, in partnership with The Jenner Institute, has announced the foundation for large-scale production of a vaccine candidate. With the potential treatment in clinical trials, the partnership will ensure that the manufacturing and distribution processes—which would normally take up to a year—can be ramped up should the vaccine prove effective. Read the press release here.

Economic/Business Continuity Response

• University of Hartford Providing Free Housing to First Responders – In an effort to support those working on the front lines of the pandemic, the University of Hartford has announced free temporary housing for 200 first responders. The school’s residence halls will be used to house the essential workers who are self-isolating while they work to combat the virus. WTNH has more.

• Tufts Health Plan Offers Healthcare Service Information Hub – To provide its members with information on available resources during the pandemic, Tufts Health Plan has created a resource page outlining what services are available to them from the insurance provider. The page addresses a variety of concerns and questions, such as the cost of testing and treatment, availability of telehealth services, and increased access to prescriptions.

Community Response

• Stanley Black & Decker Launches $10 Million Relief Program – Manufacturer Stanley Black & Decker has launched a charitable outreach program, providing over $10 million to support populations most heavily affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The program will support emergency relief funds for employees and families impacted by the crisis, as well as nonprofit organizations around the world. The company also plans to purchase 3 million face masks and additional protective equipment for essential workers in locations where it operates. The Hartford Business Journal has more.

• Eversource Donates $1.2 Million to United Ways Agencies in New England – Eversource is hastening its annual donation of $1.2 million in New England to s in the region. The energy company will also donate funds to Connecticut’s statewide relief fund. Read more in The Hartford Business Journal.

• UMass Medical School Produces Hand Sanitizer for Local Hospitals – At the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Medical School, students in the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences have begun producing hand sanitizer for hospitals in the area. The students have already produced almost 130 gallons in three days, and plan to make another 100 along with distributing their procedure to expedite production. Read more.

Stay tuned for more updates each day, and follow us on Twitter for more frequent updates on how Council members are contributing to the response to this global health crisis.

John O. Harney: News and random thoughts from the region

“If Wishes Were Horses (For Dad)”, by Timothy Harney, a professor at the Montserrat College of Art, in Beverly, Mass. He’s the brother of John O. Harney.

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

FICE-y conditions. MIT recently alerted its staff that federal immigration officials would be checking the status of foreign postdoctoral students, researchers and visiting scholars in the sciences, and urged them to cooperate. … Meanwhile, an Iranian student, returning to study at Northeastern University, was detained at Boston’s Logan International Airport then deported, despite having a valid student visa and court order permitting him to stay in the U.S. The stories reminded me of Politico’s report on “5 ways universities can support students in a post-DACA world” by Jose Magaña-Salgado, of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration. And of own NEJHE piece by Harvard attorney Jason Corral, whose job is advising undocumented students in the age of the Trump administration.

Caste away. Brandeis University announced it will include “castes” in its non-discrimination policy. Discrimination based on this system of inherited social class will now be expressly prohibited along with more familiar measures such as race, color, religion, gender identity and expression, national or ethnic origin, sex, sexual orientation, pregnancy, age, genetic information, disability, military or veteran status.

Institution news. Massachusetts approved new regulations on how to screen colleges and universities for financial risks and potential closures. … The University of Maine System Board of Trustees adopted a recommendation from Chancellor Dannel Malloy to transition the separate institutional accreditations of Maine’s public universities into a single “unified institutional accreditation” for the 30,000-student University of Maine System through the New England Commission on Higher Education (NECHE). One institution the UMaine System is likely to collaborate with according to Malloy’s office: Northeastern University’s planned Roux Institute for advanced graduate study and research to open in Portland, Maine. … In Connecticut, meanwhile, Goodwin College became Goodwin University. Such rebranding has been something of a trend in recent years. … In other institution news, monks at Saint Anselm College challenged the New Hampshire Catholic college’s board of trustees over a move the monks say could lead to increased secularization. The college’s charter dictated that the monks have the power to amend laws governing the school. Saint Anselm College President Joseph Favazza said in a letter that the board was not trying to change the mission of the college, but rather aiming to meet the standards set by NECHE, the accrediting body.

Cold War chills. Primary Research Group Inc. has published its 2020 edition of Export Controls Compliance Practices Benchmarks for Higher Education with this grim reminder: “Increasingly, U.S. universities and their corporate and government research partners are under pressure to demonstrate compliance with U.S. export control and other technology transfer restriction and control policies. The deterioration of U.S.-relations with China and Russia threatens the return of export control philosophies common during the Cold War. Major universities in the U.K., Australia and Canada, among other countries, are experiencing similar changes.”

Media is not the enemy, but … The free Metro Boston newspaper ended operation after 19 years, following the sale of the New York and Philadelphia Metro papers. One explanation offered by a columnist at The Boston Globe, which is a part-owner of the Boston Metro: more commuters using their phones to catch up on news.

Latest from LearnLaunch. Watch NEJHE for reports from the 2020 Learn Launch Across Boundaries Conference, including an exclusive Q&A with the new LearnLaunch president, former Massachusetts Gov. Jane Swift.

John O. Harney is executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education.

A notably timid, hypocritical Kerry at Yale

  By DON PESCI

VERNON, Conn.

The good news is that Secretary of State John Kerry is not Ayaan Hersi Ali, and therefore his address to Yale graduates on College Class Day this year was not cancelled by a tremulous administration responding to charges that the appointed speaker had needlessly denigrated Islam.

Yale, one may be thankful, is not Brandeis University, which first announced plans that it would bestow an honorary degree on Hersi Ali and later cancelled her invitation to speak at the college when students and Muslim organizations became restive.

Mr. Kerry, assuredly, is no Hersi Ali. His comments concerning the murderous assault on Christians by Muslim Salafists in the Middle East and Africa are so mild and inoffensive as to be barely noticed at all.

Nor is Mr. Kerry Condoleezza Rice, currently a professor of political economy in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University and the first African-American in U.S. history to be appointed Secretary of State. Ms. Rice graciously declined the invitation to speak at Rutgers University when students at the university professed to be agitated by former President George W. Bush’s Iraq War.

Ms. Rice fell victim to academic indignation when leaders of the university’s Islamic organizations, Ahluk Bayt, MuslimGirl and the Muslim Student Organization wrote a letter to Rutgers’s president charging that Ms. Rice, in her official capacity as secretary of state, had been guilty of “grave human rights violations, defrauding the American public” and unequivocally supporting “enhanced torture tactics.”

“During a six-hour ‘occupation’ of a campus office building,” one news outlet reported, “demonstrators labeled Rice a ‘war criminal’ and suggested that her rightful place was not in front of a college commencement crowd but in the docket.”

For a good part of his life, Mr. Kerry said at Yale, hidebound institutions and conventional government had responded laconically to society’s “felt needs.” Mr. Kerry advised the Yale students not to shrink from becoming “disturbers of the peace.” As examples of the incapacity of government to respond quickly and adequately to “felt needs,” Mr. Kerry mentioned  the Civil Rights Movement, the Clean Air Act and, according to a report in a Hartford paper, “ the ending of the war in Vietnam.”

Ah yes – Vietnam. Mr. Kerry is something of an authority on the Vietnam years, a national agony that corresponded neatly with the breakdown of authority in colleges: spitting at returning troops, non-negotiable demands made of college deans by students occupying their offices, and a highly fictionalized view of the role played by soldiers in Vietnam were all characteristics of the age of protest.

The students to whom Mr. Kerry directed his remarks at Yale, unlike the secretary of state, have no personal recollection of the Vietnam War era. They depend for an accurate remembrance of times past upon such as Mr. Kerry, one of the disturbers of the universe during the Vietnam period.

Upon his return from service in Vietnam, Mr. Kerry was not one of the troops spat upon by war protesters, possibly because he eagerly joined their protests as a member of the "Vietnam Veterans Against the War.” Invited to testify before the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs in 1971, Mr. Kerry pulled out all the anti-Vietnam War stops, and then some.

He and other returning soldiers whom he contrasted in his testimony to Thomas Paine’s “sunshine patriots” had just finished conducting in Detroit an investigation into war crimes committed by American troops in Vietnam.

In his congressional testimony, Mr. Kerry reported the findings of the “Winter Soldiers” with which he strongly identified. He wished to emphasize that the details he was providing to the Congress were:

“… not isolated incidents, but crimes committed on a day to day basis, with the full awareness of officers at every level of command. It’s impossible to describe to you what did happen in Detroit, the emotions in the room, the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. But they did. They relieved the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do. They told the stories of times they personally raped, cut off the ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and  turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown (sic) up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, raised villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam, in addition to the normal ravage of war, in addition to the very particular ravaging which is done by the power of this country. We called this investigation the ‘winter solider’ investigation…”

Yale students who may have expected the heroic anti-Vietnam War protester to launch verbal missiles at Islamic terrorists who have only recently cut off the ears and arms and heads of Christians in the Middle East and Northern Africa very likely were disappointed in Mr. Kerry’s College Class Day address, a good part of which was devoted to the ravages to the environment caused by an over-reliance on oil.

China and Vladimir Putin’s Russia have just concluded a multibillio- dollar oil deal, shredding whatever serious sanctions might be imposed by Mr. Kerry on a proto-Stalinist Russia now busily dismembering Ukraine.

Don Pesci (donpesci@att.net) is a political columnist writer who lives in Vernon, Conn.