The Wall Street Journal - USA (2020-12-07)

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. ***** Monday, December 7, 2020 |A

U.S. NEWS

A U.S. scientific panel has
concluded that exposure to a
type of directed energy was
the most likely culprit for a
number of medical symptoms,
including dizziness and mem-
ory loss, experienced by dip-
lomats posted in Cuba and
China.
In a new assessment pub-
lished on Saturday by the Na-
tional Academies of Sciences,
Engineering, and Medicine,
scientists identified “di-
rected, pulsed radio fre-
quency (RF) energy” as the
most likely explanation for a
series of symptoms experi-
enced by diplomats who were
posted at U.S. facilities—a
broad category of energy that
can include microwave radia-
tion.
The scientists concluded
that the symptoms experi-
enced by a number of U.S.
and Canadian diplomats,
which included dizziness,
headache, fatigue, nausea,
anxiety, cognitive difficulties
and memory loss, were “un-
like any disorder in the neu-
rological or general medical
literature.”
The panel of 19 scientific
and medical experts had been
tasked by the U.S. State De-
partment to advise the gov-
ernment on the reasons for
the symptoms experienced by
people posted at diplomatic
facilities abroad.
The committee said the
abrupt onset of symptoms
was most consistent with “a
directed radio frequency (RF)
energy attack” rather than in-
advertent or environmental
exposure, but also that more
research was needed. Govern-
ments, including the former
Soviet Union and the U.S.,
have tested using directed en-
ergy as a potential weapon or
a tool for espionage or crowd
control in the past.

“Because the committee
was not able to assess spe-
cific scenarios involving ma-
levolent actors, one strong
suggestion is that follow-up
studies on this topic be un-
dertaken by subject-matter
experts with proper clear-
ance, including those who
work outside the U.S. govern-
ment, with full access to all
relevant information,” wrote
David Relman, professor of
medicine at Stanford Univer-
sity and chairman of the
panel, in a preface to the re-
port.
The symptoms experienced
by U.S. diplomats and intelli-
gence officers posted in Cuba
began in late 2016 and caused
a rupture in relations be-
tween the two countries,
which had begun a delicate
rapprochement under then-
President Barack Obama after
decades of Cold War-era ten-
sions.
President Trump publicly
blamed Cuba for the incident,
a charge that Havana denied.
U.S. diplomats in China later
experienced other symptoms,
and similar symptoms were
reported by intelligence offi-
cials working on Russia-re-
lated operations around the
world.
The scientific panel exam-
ined other possibilities, in-
cluding exposure to chemi-
cals, infectious diseases or
that the symptoms were pri-
marily caused by psychologi-
cal or social factors.
However, it concluded that
radio frequency energy expo-
sure was the most likely cul-
prit.
The paper published Satur-
day validates earlier findings
by a different medical team.
Douglas H. Smith, who pub-
lished a study on the issue in
a medical journal, said in
2018 that exposure to micro-
waves, a type of radio fre-
quency energy, was the most
likely culprit.

BYBYRONTAU

Energy

Attack

Cited in

Diplomat

Illnesses

Diplomats posted in

Cuba and China had

symptoms including

memory loss.

iel Kotzin, a professor of

history and chairman of the

faculty council who is now on a

three-year contract, according

to the new handbook.

Except for an elite tier of top

schools, colleges and universi-

ties have been dogged by fall-

ing enrollment for several

years. Presidents say their ef-

forts to downsize their institu-

tions in light of falling revenue

have been hamstrung by fac-

ulty who refuse to sign off on

cuts to academic programs

with few students and profes-

sors with light course loads.

Faculty say they are trying

to preserve academic excellence

while maintaining the educa-

tional mission and liberal arts

core of their institutions. Fac-

ulty also contend that re-

sources are wasted by adminis-

trators whose ranks have

increased at faster rates than

professors.

Erika Hamann taught Eng-

lish at Medaille for 16 years

when she got an email in June

asking her to attend a Zoom

meeting where she was told her

position was being eliminated.

Ms. Hamann wasn’t tenured.

“My reaction was disbelief,

devastation, absolute surprise,”

Ms. Hamann said. “I hoped I’d

be working at Medaille for the

rest of my career.”

Dr. Macur said the school

won’t have any difficulty at-

tracting talented faculty to

teach—whether or not it offers

tenure. He said he has received

about 30 inquiries from leaders

at other schools who wanted to

better understand his strategy.

Kenneth Macur, above, president of Medaille College, has rescinded tenure and laid off several

professors, among them Erika Hamann, below, who had taught English for 16 years.

LIBBY MARCH FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (2)

College and university

employees

Note: Figures are seasonally adjusted.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

2.

0

0.

1.

1.

2010 ’12 ’14 ’16 ’18 ’

million

March

2020

has final say on how a school is

run but largely delegates aca-

demic issues to administrators

and faculty who share power.

This setup, and the job pro-

tection of tenure, promote a

need for consensus and deliber-

ation that is one reason why

universities often endure for

centuries. But this power struc-

ture can also hamper an insti-

tution’s ability to make tough

personnel decisions or react

quickly to changes in the labor

market or economy.

In recent months, the Ameri-

can Association of University

Professors, which advocates for

faculty and helped establish the

modern concept of tenure in

1940, has received about 100

complaints from professors

around the country alleging

power grabs by college presi-

dents. The organization has la-

beled the changes at colleges a

“national crisis.”

It has launched investiga-

tions into the actions of admin-

istrators at eight schools in-

cluding Medaille, and says it

may add more if it has the re-

sources. The association’s in-

vestigations can result in a cen-

sure or sanction that gets

noticed in academia, but it

doesn’t have the power to pun-

ish or change a university.

At Medaille, which has about

1,600 undergraduate students

and a well-known veterinary

technology program, professors

remain tenured, but the term

no longer carries traditional

protections. Tenured faculty

will work on three-year renew-

able contracts, class loads are

about 20% larger, and even ten-

ured faculty can be laid off with

two months’ notice.

“We feel the administration

believes that the dedication of

faculty, that the hard work of

faculty, that the professional-

ism and high standards of fac-

ulty, means nothing,” said Dan-

When Kenneth Macur be-

came president at Medaille Col-

lege in 2015, the small, private

school in Buffalo, N.Y., was

“surviving paycheck to pay-

check,” he said. Enrollment was

declining and the small endow-

ment was flat.

Then came the coronavirus

pandemic. The campus shut

down and revenue plummeted

15%. Dr. Macur saw what he

considered an opportunity:

With the approval of the board

of trustees, he suspended the

faculty handbook by invoking

an “act of God” clause embed-

ded in it. He laid off several

professors, cut the homeland

security and health information

management programs, re-

scinded the lifelong job security

of tenure and rewrote the fac-

ulty handbook, rules that had

governed the school for de-

cades.

“I believe that this is an op-

portunity to do more than just

tinker around the edges. We

need to be bold and decisive,”

he wrote to faculty on April 15.

“A new model is the future of

higher education.”

Dr. Macur and presidents of

struggling colleges around the

country are reacting to the

pandemic by unilaterally cut-

ting programs, firing professors

and gutting tenure, all once-un-

thinkable changes. Schools em-

ployed about 150,000 fewer

workers in September than

they did a year earlier, before

the pandemic, according to the

Labor Department. That’s a de-

cline of nearly 10%. Along the

way, they are changing the cen-

turies-old higher education

power structure.

The changes upset the

“shared governance” model for

running universities that has

roots in Medieval Europe. It

holds that a board of trustees

BYDOUGLASBELKIN

Professor Tenure

Is Scaled Back at

Hard-Hit Schools

Two months into the cur-

rent cycle for college financial

aid applications, the number of

high-school seniors who have

submitted the forms is down

sharply—and shows no sign of

catching up to year-ago levels.

The steep decline worries

university officials as the

Covid-19 pandemic has pushed

college from a likely next step

after high school to a more dis-

tant dream for many students.

Through Nov. 27, submis-

sions of the Free Application

for Federal Student Aid, or

Fafsa, were down nearly 17%

from the year-ago period, ac-

cording to a National College

Attainment Network analysis

of Education Department data

released Friday.

“To still see double-digit

percent decreases from last

year is alarming to me,” said

Bill DeBaun, director of data

and evaluation at NCAN, a non-

profit aimed at closing equity

gaps in higher education.

Just under one quarter of

the country’s nearly 3.8 million

high-school seniors have filled

out the Fafsa, compared with

29% who applied by this time

last year, according to NCAN’s

estimates.

The Fafsa form opens a

spigot of federal, state and in-

stitutional loans and grants.

Students can still submit their

forms after applying to college,

so there is a chance the num-

bers will recover as the admis-

sions season advances. But col-

lege counselors and some

people running aid programs

are doubtful.

With many parents out of

work, high-school classes held

online and a public-health cri-

sis bearing down across the

country, students’ priorities

and aspirations may have

shifted.

Mr. DeBaun said that in the

hierarchy of needs for many

high-school students, basics

like food, shelter and an inter-

net connection to attend

classes rank far above crafting

a list of target colleges and fig-

uring out how to pay for them.

“Those things are luxuries for

a lot of families right now,” he

said.

Submitted Fafsa forms are

down by 20% at high schools

with large populations of low-

income students as measured

by the federal Title 1 program,

compared with 14% for those

not eligible, NCAN figures

show. They are down by about

22% at high-minority high

schools, versus 12% at schools

without many students of

color. And rural and small-

town schools are reporting

drops of more than 21%.

Virtual instruction and so-

cial distancing have made all

but impossible the traditional

interventions school officials

use to motivate prospective

college applicants, such as in-

person information sessions or

cornering someone in the hall-

way to nag about an incom-

plete form.

College counselors and oth-

ers are scrambling to find al-

ternatives, including virtual

workshops, text-message cam-

paigns and even setting up

tents outside closed high

schools.

“If a student doesn’t want

to answer a call or show up for

a Zoom class, they just don’t

have to. It is so easy to disen-

gage,” said Jeremy Raff, the

coordinator of college and ca-

reer services for the school

district in Lancaster, Pa.

In the past few years, just

under half of the low-income

district’s 700 seniors com-

pleted Fafsa forms.

Schools in Broward County,

Fla., are running virtual work-

shops in English, Spanish and

Haitian Creole, taking families

step by step through the forms

online. Last year, 45% of the

district’s roughly 16,000 se-

niors completed the Fafsa, and

Broward estimated those who

didn’t left $16 million in possi-

ble Pell Grant funds on the ta-

ble.

So far this cycle, the Bro-

ward district is 6% below last

year’s completion rates.

Six states—West Virginia,

Louisiana, Mississippi, Alaska,

Montana and Arkansas—are

reporting application comple-

tion rates more than 25% be-

low last year’s level; no states

are ahead of last year’s tally as

of now. About 1 Alaska senior

out of every 10 has submitted a

Fafsa form, while in Missis-

sippi and California it is about

1in5.

BYMELISSAKORN

College-Aid Submissions Fall Sharply

Oct. Nov.

0

10

20

30 %

20 19- 20

2020 - 21

202 1- 22

Lagging Indicator

Estimated cumulative

percentage of U.S. high

school-seniors who submitted

the Fafsa form for college aid.

Source: National College Attainment Network

analysis of Education Department data

Note: Dates are approximate for 2019-

and 2020-21 cycles

ners in developing a Crispr

gene-editing therapy—Crispr

Therapeutics and Vertex Phar-

maceuticals Inc.—reported that

a patient with sickle-cell dis-

ease and a patient with an-

other inherited blood disorder,

transfusion-dependent beta

thalassemia, each received ed-

ited cells and more than a year

later didn’t require blood

transfusions. They said they

have treated a total of 19 pa-

tients to date with sickle-cell

disease or beta thalassemia

with the Crispr therapy.

Both sickle-cell disease and

beta thalassemia are caused by

errors in the gene for hemo-

globin, the protein in red blood

cells that carries oxygen from

the lungs to other parts of the

body. People with the diseases

inherit two copies of the faulty

gene, one from each parent.

Separately, a team of re-

searchers led by Boston Chil-

dren’s Hospital reported in a

paper in the New England

Journal of Medicine that six

sickle-cell disease patients

who were treated with an ex-

perimental gene therapy and

followed for seven to 29

months experienced less-fre-

quent or none of the severe

health crises that are a hall-

mark of the disease. The re-

searchers plan to expand the

trial to 10 additional sites

around the country, said David

A. Williams, chief scientific of-

ficer of Boston Children’s Hos-

pital and senior author on the

paper.

While the approaches de-

scribed in the New England

Journal of Medicine papers

are different, they both aim to

get patients to return to pro-

ducing fetal hemoglobin, a

form of hemoglobin that isn’t

affected by the sickle-cell mu-

tation and which the human

body normally stops produc-

ing in the months after birth.

Some individuals with

sickle-cell disease have a gene

variant that allows them to

continue producing fetal he-

moglobin, and they tend to

have a milder form of the dis-

ease or no symptoms at all.

Some of the experimental

therapies try to achieve some-

thing similar.

Red blood cells are nor-

mally circular but take on a

sickle, or crescent-moon,

shape in people with sickle-

cell disease. The cells, instead

of flowing through easily in

small blood vessels, are more

likely to get stuck, “causing a

traffic jam in the blood ves-

sels,” according to Titilope Fa-

sipe, a pediatric hematologist-

oncologist at Baylor College of

Medicine and Texas Children’s

Cancer & Hematology Centers,

who treats children with

sickle-cell disease and has the

disease herself.

The cells block the flow of

blood and oxygen to that part

of the body, which can lead to

extreme pain and organ dam-

age. Dr. Fasipe said sickle-cell

patients describe experiencing

pain ranging from the feeling

of being stabbed, hit with a

hammer or having glass run

through their veins. The pain

episodes, called “vaso-occlu-

sive crises,” are often unpre-

dictable.

In the Crispr trial for

sickle-cell disease, a patient

who had an average of seven

severe pain crises a year

hasn’t had any in the 16-plus

months since the infusion of

edited cells, the New England

Journal of Medicine paper re-

ported.

Three Food and Drug Ad-

ministration-approved drugs

currently address symptoms of

sickle-cell disease. And pa-

tients may undergo bone-mar-

row transplantation to try to

cure it, but transplants have

mortality risks and require

chemotherapy beforehand to

make room in the bone marrow

for transplanted cells to grow

and create new blood cells.

The gene therapy and gene-

editing trials described in the

two New England Journal of

Medicine papers also involve

chemotherapy and bone-mar-

row transplants, to deliver the

cells back into the patients’

bodies. These transplants

make use of the patients’ own

stem cells, though, rather than

from a matched donor.

Drug development for

sickle-cell disease, largely over-

looked for decades, is becom-

ing a crowded field: Two pa-

pers published in the New

England Journal of Medicine

report promising results from

studies of experimental thera-

pies, including Crispr gene ed-

iting, for the disease.

In addition, Beam Thera-

peutics Inc. on Saturday pre-

sented lab and mouse data at

the American Society of He-

matology annual meeting to

support the safety of another

approach to using Crispr gene

editing for sickle-cell disease.

The company said it hopes to

open a trial next year.

More than a dozen compa-

nies are competing to develop

experimental treatments for

sickle-cell disease, an inher-

ited form of anemia that af-

fects 100,000 mainly Black

Americans.

In one of the New England

Journal of Medicine papers

published Saturday, two part-

BYAMYDOCKSERMARCUS

Gene Editing Shows Promise in Sickle-Cell Disease

wsj_ 20201207 _a 003 p 2 jw 342000 5 a 00300 1 ____xa 2020 .crop.pdf 1 07 - Dec- 20 07 : 05 : 44