Aug 30-Sept 5, 2025 - facing the strange
Hello friends,
This week, I said to one of my teams, “One of the most important things we can do is recognize when our situation is changing, and be honest with ourselves about that.” It was off the cuff, but the more I think about it, the more strongly I believe it. In the literature about sensemaking, this effort is called noticing and bracketing. In the genius of David Bowie, it’s more about the need to, “turn and face the strange.”
It’s September now. Classes are starting, the planet is tilting, and things just keep getting stranger. This was Week 33. Let’s face it.
What’s happening now
- Two small doses of good news to start, both of which seem to direct results of active reporting:
- Disasters don’t respect jurisdictions in public health either. I felt inspired by the announcement of the West Coast Health Alliance on Wednesday. The states of Washington, Oregon, California, and now Hawaii are joining forces to provide coordinated, evidence-based health guidance and immunization recommendations. Which reminds me to mention that Florida’s surgeon general is generating a lot of headlines with his remarks about ending all vaccine mandates in the state. Please keep firmly in mind that his (disastrous) intention is not within his power, and will be the subject of heated legal and procedural challenge, and not just from Democrats.
- All of this speaks to why robust, reliable federal policy and agencies like NIH and CDC must be allowed to conduct their work unimpeded. Today, new details are emerging from high-ranking whistleblower reports about the ways political appointees have interfered with vaccine-related science at NIH. This follows a news cycle that feels like the tide is finally turning, at least specifically around vaccines. Ahead of this week’s senate hearings, congressional staff were briefed by administration pollsters about broad support for childhood vaccines among this president’s voting base. Calls for RFK Jr’s resignation are flooding in, including: a letter from more than 1,000 current and former members of HHS; a joint statement by 21 groups of health experts including the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the American Public Health Association, the American Association of Immunologists; and finally… more members of his own family. I find it personally helpful to ground the spectacle around this in an indelible fact. In this unimaginably wealthy country, the flu killed a record number of children this season - 266 kids. We could have saved so many of them, and so easily, with what we already have. We still can save many more. When we look ahead to the coming months, the forecast for all respiratory illnesses is not looking particularly hopeful in general, and COVID hospitalizations are expected to be higher in particular. Get your shots, take preventative measures, and take up the fight for everyone who will suffer if we don’t.
- One more bit of good news: District Judge Allison Burroughs ruled that the administration has broken the law by freezing funding to Harvard. There are important caveats, but the ruling feels like an important win for academic freedom and freedom of speech. We’ll be watching for the appeal and further action to restore funding.
- Finally, a late-breaking and grim development. A new decision by the Board of Immigration Appeals means millions of additional immigrants now risk mandatory detention. At the heart of this is a reinterpretation of immigration law to deny people bond hearings. It upends decades of practice and due process, and exposes people to confinement in atrocious conditions for months or even years. The specifics matter and immigration law is complicated - but this is not hard. I can’t stop thinking about people like Will Tae Kim, a PhD student from Texas A&M working on Lyme disease, who was detained at SFO for more than a week in July and has been held by ICE for more than a month. No one should be forced to sleep in an airport chair for a week and denied access to their lawyers. Amplifying this suffering by dumping hundreds of thousands of additional cases into the system horrifies me.
What’s next & what to do
September is an important month for actions focused on Congress, and it’s an important month in our academic calendars. I worry about layering even more urgency on top of everything we are all doing to keep our families, our neighbors, our labs, our students, our departments, and all the other parts of our lives afloat.
So I will keep this week’s wrap up very simple: we can’t fix everything all at once. It’s just not possible. But the alternative cannot be “so fix nothing” or worse “so ignore everything.”
Instead, choose one thing and go deep. Maybe it’s disruptive campaign work with Stand Up For Science. Maybe it’s following The Science and Freedom Alliance to build your analytical skills. Maybe it’s organizing a chapter of Stand Together for Higher Education. Or maybe it’s simply joining AAUP or whatever labor organization makes sense for you.
If you finished that paragraph and realized none of those are right for you, one thing I know you can do is name the changes upon us and face the reality of them. In your own words, in whatever conversations you’re in, insist on confronting what all this actually means for you, your family, your institution, your life. It’s not just other people who are or will suffer.
And I know this will be clumsy at first. As Jamar Montez says, “The process of building new worlds through new ways of being will surely be messy.” But for as strange as it feels to begin, remember “you’ll never feel right unless you’re doing what you can to stop them. You’re coming home to yourself.”
I’ll write more about concrete actions next week. In the meantime, may that home be your peace amidst the chaos.
Liz
PS - I am seeing quite a few university addresses marked as ‘undeliverable’ in my Buttondown subscribers dashboard. If you see this on the web but not your inbox, I’ll be reaching out to see if we can sort that out!