The Washington Post National Weekly - October 27, 2019

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2019

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We’ll miss them when they’re gone How liberal arts colleges went from thriving to endangered PAGE PAGE 12 8 Politics Opening up the inquiry 4

World Sea turtles’ gender imbalance 10

5 Myths Vaping 23

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POLITICS

Inquiry set to move onto public stage

BY R ACHAEL B ADE AND K AROUN D EMIRJIAN

H

ouse Democrats are preparing to move their largely private impeachment inquiry onto a more public stage as soon as mid-November and are already grappling with how best to present the complex Ukraine saga to the American people.

Over the past three weeks, a parade of current and former Trump administration officials have testified behind closed doors, providing House investigators with a compelling narrative of President Trump’s campaign to extract political favors from Ukrainian officials. But on Wednesday, after conservative lawmakers stormed the hearing room and delayed the proceedings for five hours, some Democrats were feeling pressure to advance public hearings in hopes of avoiding further disruptions.

Among the witnesses Democrats hope to question in open session are the acting ambassador to Ukraine, William B. Taylor Jr., and his predecessor, former ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. Both are seasoned diplomats who, in earlier House testimony, effectively conveyed outrage over a White House plan to withhold muchneeded military aid from Ukraine, a long-standing ally battling proRussian separatists.

In testimony Tuesday, Taylor also directly contradicted Trump’s account of his interactions with Ukrainian officials, making clear that Trump demanded that President Volodymyr Zelensky order an investigation of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his family in exchange for the release of nearly $400 million in military aid and a meeting with Trump in the Oval Office.

Another top priority for many Democrats is John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, who made known around the White House his visceral opposition to the campaign to pressure Zelensky, a campaign directed in part by Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani.

JIM LO SCALZO/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK

Democrats are preparing to open up hearings by mid-November Testimony from Bolton could be particularly devastating for the White House, though it was unclear whether Democrats would subpoena him or when. After Bolton resigned last month, he told The Washington Post that he would “have my say in due course.”

Democrats have long been expected to shift to public hearings, which offer the opportunity to build the case against Trump while also building support among American voters.

“It’s going to be the difference between reading a dry transcript and actually hearing the story from the people who were in the room,” said Rep. Jim Himes (DConn.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee.

The move toward the public spotlight comes as Trump and his Capitol Hill allies have cast Democrats’ closed-door investigation as a secretive smear campaign against the president.

On Wednesday, House Republicans delayed impeachment proceedings for more than five hours when about two dozen of them, over Democrats’ objections, barged into a secure room where Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary Laura Cooper was set to testify about what happened to the military aid Trump ordered withheld from Ukraine for several weeks this summer.

Some Democrats are concerned that repeated protests by Republicans, similar to Wednesday’s dis-

More than two-dozen House Republicans gather for a news conference before disrupting and delaying the closeddoor hearing of Deputy Assistant Security of Defense Laura Cooper.

ruption, could make it impossible for them to question witnesses and could completely stop the process.

Most of the Republican insurgents are not members of the three investigative committees probing the Ukraine matter. The committee members, including dozens of Republicans, have been taking part in impeachment depositions for weeks, with the chance to cross-examine witnesses. The display was the latest attempt by Republicans to change the narrative from the substance of the allegations against Trump to their displeasure with the process.

Democrats say that past impeachments have also included a closed-door investigative phase

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POLITICS before findings are presented to the public and that the secrecy of the proceedings is necessary to preserve the integrity of the testimony, much like that of witnesses before a grand jury. At some point, Democrats expect to release transcripts of witness interviews and pull together a comprehensive report laying out their findings.

“I think everybody just needs to be patient,” said Rep. Cheri Bustos (Ill.), chairwoman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “This is, in a sense, a grand-jury proceeding, and then whatever comes out of it, you present to the full body.”

In the meantime, however, Democrats are struggling with what to do if Republicans continue to disrupt depositions.

The chief challenges for the Democrats in going public will be finding a compelling roster of witnesses to drive home the case against the president — and making sure they do not mishandle what may be their best opportunity to sell voters on impeachment, with a message that will resonate through the rest of the 2020 election season.

Polls remain in Democrats’ favor, with a majority of Americans backing Trump’s removal from office. But there is also the matter of selling the case in the Republicancontrolled Senate if they hope to successfully oust Trump from office — and to do that, House Democrats are acutely aware they need to make an ironclad case.

Democrats believe that they have at least two smoking guns.

One is the rough transcript of Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in which he pressured the Ukrainian leader to investigate the Bidens and a conspiracy theory about the Democrats and the 2016 election. The second is acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney’s October acknowledgment of a quid pro quo.

Taylor’s testimony this week, many lawmakers believe, further bolstered their case.

“You have to tell the American people the story,” said Rep. David N. Cicilline (D-R.I.). “It’ll be a combination of documents, a report and some live testimony. And the combination of other things will tell the American people the full story about the president of the United States using the power of his office, or abusing the power of

BILL O'LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST

his office, to gin up a bogus investigation against one of his political opponents.”

Several Democrats expressed confidence after Taylor’s testimony Tuesday that he would be an ideal public witness to lay out the narrative of how the Giuliani-led camp of Trump appointees steered Ukraine policy from U.S. national security objectives and toward delivering political favors for the president, noting that his experience and sincerity made him an ideal public voice.

Democrats argue that Yovanovitch would be a compelling witness, both for her substantive knowledge of Ukraine and her personal, emotional story of being victimized by Giuliani’s actions.

Democrats are more divided about the high-ranking witnesses who have not yet been tested behind closed doors. Many are convinced that Bolton has to be part of the process, but while there is palpable excitement among Democrats about having a handpicked Trump appointee deliver potentially scathing testimony against him, that is also coupled with jitters about how to turn Bolton — who up to this point was more reviled than adored — into a star

witness against the president.

Democrats don’t have unlimited time to decide how to move forward. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her leadership team still hope to hold an impeachment vote before the holidays, though increasingly Democrats are privately acknowledging the inquiry could easily drag into December.

First, however, Democrats have to iron out questions of process that could compromise their ability to present a united front and avoid any air of the turf disputes that dogged the House’s Russia-focused investigation earlier this year. Typically, lawmakers are entitled to five minutes each to question a witness — but there are about 100 lawmakers among the three panels running the impeachment probe, far too many to accommodate in a single hearing.

Democrats are also acutely concerned about creating a situation in which GOP members could hijack an all-important public hearing, muddying their case.

That means leaders will all but assuredly have to take the rare step of persuading lawmakers to sideline their egos and defer management of the hearing to skilled

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (DCalif.) on Tuesday before William B. Taylor Jr., the acting ambassador to Ukraine, testified as part of Democrats’ impeachment inquiry.

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staff lawyers, and potentially the members with prosecutorial or relevant administrative experience. That format would largely mirror the regular process for closed-door hearings, where lawyers chiefly run the questioning but members of both parties are allowed to hop in with queries of their own.

Democrats overwhelmingly expect House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (DCalif.), whom Pelosi deputized to run the impeachment probe, to lead the public charge as well.

Schiff staffers, including his investigations director, Daniel Goldman, could also do some of the Democrats’ questioning. Goldman boasts experience in the office of the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York prosecuting Russian organizedcrime networks.

But others are less sure about who else would sit on the dais.

One Democrat suggested it was possible that different committees would take the lead on witnesses, depending on which has jurisdiction over the topic.

There is also a question about whether members should have any opportunity to pose questions in public, with some arguing not only that staff lawyers would stand the best chance of eliciting answers but that it is important to keep the focus on the witnesses.

Some lawmakers pointed to how Judiciary Committee counsel Barry H. Berke was successful in pinning down a combative Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager, during a September hearing that was otherwise widely panned.

“There is an advantage to having counsel take the lead in questioning, because you have an uninterrupted thread of questioning,” said Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.).

But Connolly added, “On the other hand, our folks back home want to see that we’re doing something, and being at a hearing silent is a frustrating experience for us and for our constituents back home.”

Other Democrats were not torn at all. Rep. Gregory W. Meeks (D-N.Y.) said staffers should absolutely take the lead, as they have done in the private depositions.

“That way it is as consistent and serious and no one can say anyone is playing politics,” he said. n

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THE FIX

The GOP and the rule of law BY

A ARON B LAKE

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t’s hardly breaking news that President Trump has an uneasy relationship with the rule of law. He campaigned on putting his unindicted opponent in jail. He has attacked judges individually and the judiciary as an institution. He allegedly asked his FBI director for loyalty and to lay off a top aide. He tried to get his first attorney general to launch politically expedient investigations. Robert S. Mueller III laid out five instances in which there was significant evidence that he obstructed justice. He’s declining to cooperate with his own impeachment inquiry. And he even criticized his Justice Department for indicting two Republican congressman.

What hasn’t been chewed over quite as much is how much this attitude has infected those around him — many of them in the Republican Party, which prides itself as the party of the rule of law.

And one 24-hour period over this past week was full of activity on that front.

It began Tuesday night with Matthew G. Whitaker, Trump’s former acting attorney general, taking to the airwaves of Fox News to declare that a president abusing power not only isn’t a crime, but isn’t even impeachable.

“Abuse of power is not a crime,” Whitaker maintained. “Let’s fundamentally boil it down.

The Constitution’s very clear that this has to be some pretty egregious behavior.”

Even for a team of supporters accustomed to moving the goal posts for Trump, taking “abuse of power” and suggesting it would not clear the bar was something.

Then came Wednesday morning, when a throng of Republican congressmen, led by Rep. Matt Gaetz (Fla.), decided to storm the proceedings of the House impeachment inquiry to

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highlight concerns about its process. They effectively shut it down for five hours and caused the testimony of Defense Department aide Laura Cooper to be postponed.

The situation harked back to 2016, when House Democrats — who were then in the minority — staged a sit-in on gun control. At the time, Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) declared that Democrats had “replaced rule of law with the rules of the mob.” Another House Republican shouted, “Rule of law means order!”

ANDREW HARNIK/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Former acting attorney general Matthew G. Whitaker declared on Tuesday night that abuse of power by the president is not a crime, nor is it impeachable.

The last development on the rule-of-law front was in an actual courtroom on Wednesday. While defending Trump from having to turn over his private financial records, his private attorney William S. Consovoy made an extremely broad assertion of presidential immunity. He said that basically no jurisdiction — whether local or federal — can investigate a sitting president.

And when a judge asked him whether that would also be the case if Trump, as he so

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2019 The Washington Post / Year 6, No. 3

famously intoned, shot someone on Fifth Avenue in New York City, Consovoy responded in the affirmative.

“Local authorities couldn’t investigate? They couldn’t do anything about it?” U.S. Appeals Court Judge Denny Chin asked. “Nothing could be done? That is your position?”

“That is correct,” Consovoy said, noting that any crimes could be handled once the president was out of office.

It is understood that a president can’t be indicted while in office; this is the policy of the Justice Department and has been dating to Richard Nixon. What is much more controversial is the idea that jurisdictions cannot even investigate Trump.

The claim is merely the latest bold one from the Trump legal team and from Consovoy.

Earlier this year, both the White House counsel and Consovoy maintained that Congress also had no right to investigate the president for the sake of oversight.

Congress has since launched impeachment proceedings, which is a power expressly granted in the Constitution and would seem to mitigate questions about whether its members have the authority to do what they are doing.

But Republicans are making all kinds of other process arguments to attack the legitimacy of the investigation and decline to cooperate — even as there is little in the law to guide what impeachment proceedings must look like.

They are complaining about the lack of a due process, even though this isn’t a trial (yet).

And as that situation and Trump’s standing as president become more embattled, it looks as though the “rule of law” party is going to continue making arguments about why Trump holds a unique place in relation to that law — and why perhaps it’s worth breaking the rules on his behalf. n

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS

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ON THE COVER Hampshire College serves as a cautionary tale for liberal arts colleges and how they fund their schools. Illustration by MIGUEL PORLAN for The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Unease rises over 2020 contenders B Y A NNIE L INSKEY AND M ATT V ISER

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hen the 2020 Democratic presidential contest kicked off earlier this year, the massive field was hailed as the most diverse in history, with candidates who spanned the ideological spectrum and offered enough in a broad buffet of options to excite any voter. But after 10 months of campaigning and 15 hours of nationally televised debates, another emotion is rising: anxiety.

Party leaders and activists are citing weakness in all of the leading contenders, including former vice president Joe Biden, who has been forced on the defensive about his family’s ethics, performed haltingly in debates and set off alarms with his poor fundraising. They also fret that the two other top-ranking candidates, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), are too liberal to win a general election. Other candidates have had moments to shine, but none yet have fully transformed that into anything approaching momentum.

Oprah Winfrey, an early backer of Barack Obama who was initially enthusiastic about former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke, has repeatedly begged Disney chief executive Bob Iger to jump into the race. Hillary Clinton, according to two people close to her, has not ruled out jumping in herself, a sign that she is hearing similar dissatisfaction.

“You can imagine much stronger candidates,” said Elaine Kamarck, a Democratic National Committee member. She pines for Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who declined to run, or an outsider such as retired Adm. William H. McRaven, who oversaw the 2011 raid that killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

In conversations with 17 state and national party leaders, nearly all expressed some level of unease with where the field stands and a deepening concern that, even as Trump suffers through one of the darkest phases of his presidency,

MARIO TAMA/GETTY IMAGES

Democrats see weak spots in party’s prospects, raising worries about ability to win against Trump the leading presidential contenders would struggle mightily in a one-on-one contest with him.

The unpredictable nature of the race so far has contributed to Democrats’ unease. Candidates who at first seemed to combine crowd-pleasing star power with center-left appeal, such as O’Rourke and Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), faded quickly. Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., has commanded attention on the debate stage but been unable to appeal to black voters.

Others moderates, such as Sens.

Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) and Michael F. Bennet (Colo.) and Gov. Steve Bullock (Mont.), linger toward the bottom of the polls.

That has helped propel speculation about Hillary Clinton, the 2016 party nominee, although aides say the likelihood of her seeking a rematch with Trump remains slim.

Allies have passed around an op-ed that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, written by

former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, with the headline, “Who should run against Trump?

How about Hillary Clinton?”

Views about Clinton vary widely, however, and in part mirror the ideological and generational schisms that have fed the current anxiety. More seasoned leaders who have seen Democrats lose big have tended to prefer a safer, middle-road candidate more palatable to a wide range of voters.

Those newer to the process are attracted to the vibrant and passionate candidates who can entice the base.

The push for liberal purity is one that raises warning flags for the Rev. Joseph A. Darby Jr., an influential black pastor in South Carolina. He said he fears a repeat of the 1972 presidential election that pitted liberal Sen. George McGovern against incumbent Republican Richard Nixon.

He “was the great white hope,” Darby said. “He was the one that everyone went with because he

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) appears on a screen at the Abbey in West Hollywood during the Oct. 15 debate.

Warren has made recent gains, but she also faces a renewed challenge from the left.

was so wonderfully progressive, and he got his butt beat at the polls.”

But he’s also bothered by Biden’s poor fundraising.

“I don’t know if it’s a lack of hustle or what, but it’s a concern,” Darby said. “Running for office ain’t cheap these days.”

Some of the more moderate and lower-polling candidates, such as former Maryland congressman John Delaney, fault the Democratic National Committee for creating a system in which candidates who are already well known or have base-pleasing views have a massive advantage.

The party set a high threshold for grass-roots donors that candidates had to meet to make it on the debate stages, an incentive system that he said rewards far-left views.

Biden, Delaney said, hasn’t offered enough new ideas for younger Democrats to embrace him.

And Sanders and Warren, he said, are too far to the left to win.

“You need to run on things that half the country agrees with you,” he said.

A key problem with many candidates, particularly the liberal ones, according to nearly all of the party leaders interviewed, is their support for ending the private health insurance industry via a Medicare-for-all plan.

Warren has been criticized for weeks for refusing to say how she’d fund the massive program, eventually saying this past Sunday that she would release a detailed funding plan in the next few weeks. But the next day she remained uncomfortable in discussions — insisting five times that reporters should focus on her education plan.

Warren, whose stock has risen more than any other candidate this year, growing steadily as Biden, Sanders and Harris have faltered, also faces a renewed challenge from the left. Sanders has revived his campaign since suffering a heart attack three weeks ago, posting impressive fundraising numbers and hosting the biggest rally of the election cycle, featuring an endorsement from Rep. Alexandria OcasioCortez (D-N.Y.). n

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Trump tries to rebrand Syria exit B Y A NNE G EARAN

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n President Trump’s telling, his withdrawal of all but a few U.S. forces from Syria makes good on his promise to shake off the sand of faraway Middle East conflicts and to let other countries play policeman for a change.

Trump hopes his decision will please his most loyal political supporters, who tend to love it when he pokes a finger in the eye of the naysayers. Thus, Trump on Wednesday proudly owned what his critics see as a debacle born of willful ignorance.

“Let someone else fight over this long-bloodstained sand,” Trump said at the White House.

He declared a “major breakthrough” as a U.S.-backed ceasefire along the Syrian-Turkish border largely held and claimed that he is saving American and Kurdish lives while pulling the plug on indefinite U.S. military commitments.

Even close political allies of Trump’s have called it a blunder to abandon Syrian Kurdish allies and open the door to Russian and Turkish control of a strategic crossroads between the Middle East and Europe.

But Trump has taken to wearing their scorn as a badge of honor — evidence not that he has made a foolish decision but that he is breaking with foreign policy conventions he has derided as costing too much treasure and lives in pursuit of high-minded internationalist ideals anathema to his nationalist world view.

“As a candidate for president, I made clear that we needed a new approach to American foreign policy, one guided not by ideology, but by experience, history, and a realistic understanding of the world,” he said from a lectern in the White House’s Diplomatic Reception Room.

He claimed that his bold action in yanking forces had been a much-needed change. The ceasefire and longer-term security along the border would not have happened without the brief fighting that followed the U.S. exit and

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

President says decision is a political promise kept, hoping to please his most loyal supporters Turkish invasion, he said.

“This was an outcome created by us, the United States, and nobody else, no other nation. Very simple. And we’re willing to take blame, and we’re also willing to take credit,” Trump said.

Trump is banking on getting the credit come election time, at least from the ardent supporters he is hoping to turn out in droves for his reelection effort. His call to withdraw troops has become an applause line at his recent rallies.

“American combat troops should not be at the center of ancient sectarian conflicts all over the world. Bring our soldiers back home,” he said in Dallas last week to crowd chants of “Bring them back, bring them back, bring them back.”

Foreign-policy experts along with many lawmakers in both parties continue to warn that Trump has made a foolhardy decision, and if the situation in Syria quickly deteriorates, Trump will own it ahead of the election.

“The president might have a

case that this is a rather minor tactical decision on the ground in a small part of the world that doesn’t have a core American interest, but he’s wrong in the assessment that it doesn’t have broader implications,” said Douglas Lute, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO. “That may play well to the president’s base, but it doesn’t play well to anybody who understands America’s role more broadly in the world, which has been founded for 70 years on American credibility.”

Trump did not mention the deal between Turkey and Russia reached Tuesday that pushes Syrian Kurdish fighters from a wide belt of Syrian territory just south of Turkey’s border and seals the Russian dominance in Syria as the United States steps aside.

Trump did not mention Russia by name at all.

“Other countries have stepped forward; they want to help, and we think that’s great,” Trump said.

“The nations in the region must ultimately take on the responsi-

Russian soldiers walk past a military police armored vehicle in the northeastern Syrian city Kobane. Russia and Turkey reached a deal Tuesday to push Syrian Kurdish fighters from a wide swath of territory just south of Turkey’s border.

bility of helping Turkey and Syria police their border. We want other nations to get involved.”

A senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to expand on the president’s remarks in a call with reporters later Wednesday, was asked whether the White House is concerned about Russia’s newly expanded role.

“I think we always watch the Russians warily, wherever they are,” the official said. “And so, the deal between Turkey and the Russians is something that’s between them. We did not have any role to play in that.”

That’s just the problem, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) suggested in a tweet Wednesday.

“Erdogan has NOT agreed to stop all military operations in #Syria,” he wrote, referring to the Turkish president, whom Trump has invited to visit the White House next month. “#Russia is going to: -Remove Kurdish forces from east & west of current Turk controlled areas, including Kurdish cities -Help #Turkey push all SDF forces 30km south from entire border -Take control of 5 oil fields” Trump said a small number of U.S. forces will stay behind in northern Syria to guard oil infrastructure. The administration official who spoke to reporters would not provide additional details about the number or location of those forces. Some troops are also temporarily being stationed in Iraq.

While Trump claims those troops will come home soon, his administration will face a dilemma if tensions in Syria rise: Keep those troops there to help stabilize the region or send them home anyway to fulfill the promise?

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) opposed the withdrawal but gave cautious backing for the “safe zone” Trump says is being created along the border. He made clear he still thinks there is a risk of resurgent Islamic State terrorism that only a U.S. presence can reliably counter. n

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Israelis know little of possible leader B Y S TEVE H ENDRIX in Jerusalem

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sraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s failure to form a governing coalition by this past week’s deadline has turned the spotlight on his political rival, former army chief of staff Benny Gantz, who becomes the only other Israeli authorized to form a government in more than a decade.

Even after many months of campaigning and political intrigue, Israel is still trying to get to know this newcomer.

Gantz campaigned for Israel’s top job with minimal policy pronouncements and vague speeches.

The strategy proved effective in an election that was largely a referendum on the colorful, contentious Netanyahu.

But Gantz’s resulting soft outlines are as much temperament as technique, according to those who know the man his army buddies called “Benny-huta,” a play on his name that translates as “laidback.”

His ascent was rapid. He was the head of the army by age 52 and less than a year after launching his political career has become a top prospect for prime minister, potentially the third army chief of staff to reach that position after Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak.

“Nobody knows what kind of politician he’s going to be,” said Anshel Pfeffer, a columnist for Haaretz and biographer of Netanyahu. “The campaign didn’t tell us, and Gantz has never been in this kind of limelight before.”

For his political team, Gantz’s lack of a political record was an asset, allowing him to be presented as a battle-tested general and a centrist alternative to Netanyahu without tying him to specifics.

Gantz’s path to power is still uncertain. He faces the same closely divided Knesset, Israel’s parliament, that stymied Netanyahu. Gantz will have a month to find 61 lawmakers willing to support his bid to lead the country. If he fails to break the gridlock, Israel could endure its third national election in a year.

CORINNA KERN/REUTERS

Voters are beginning to focus on Benny Gantz, who may become the post-Netanyahu face of Israel If he succeeds, he will crack the grip of the country’s longest-serving leader. With that prospect in view, Israelis are beginning to focus on the tall, blue-eyed former paratrooper who could well become the post-Netanyahu face of the nation.

Gantz, who turned 60 shortly before the election, grew up in a farming village in southern Israel founded by Holocaust survivors.

Among them were his Hungarian and Romanian parents, who met on a ship on their way to Israel.

The only boy amid three sisters, he began his military service at 18 and joined a paratrooper brigade.

Among his first assignments was providing security for Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s groundbreaking visit to Israel in 1977. He was the commander of forces in southern Lebanon when Israel pulled out of the country in 2000, and he rode in the last armored vehicle over the border. The Palestinian uprising in the Gaza

Strip known as the Second Intifada erupted soon after he took charge of the division responsible for security in the region.

Gantz was known to make friends all along the chain of command, said Fuchs, down to the lowliest cooks and mechanics.

But Gantz has his critics. Some of his military peers have told reporters that Gantz’s meetings — known to be long affairs where everyone gets to talk — sometimes smacked of indecision.

Naftali Bennett, a former education minister who served in Netanyahu’s government, went further, blaming Gantz’s slow response as chief of staff during the 2014 Gaza war with the Palestinian militant group Hamas for producing a stalemate.

Gantz’s restraint, however, has also won him plaudits. One night in the 1980s, when Gantz was leading a patrol south of Jerusalem during the Palestinian uprising known as the First Intifada, molo-

Benny Gantz, head of Israel’s Blue and White party, has made few policy pronouncements during his presidential campaign.

tov cocktails exploded beside his jeep. He and his men jumped out, but Gantz stopped them from firing into the dark.

The general has a preference for humanitarian tasks over combat, said a senior officer who rose through the ranks with Gantz and served with him on the general staff. After Gantz left the military in 2015, for instance, he worked on education projects for Jewish and Bedouin groups in the Negev desert.

“It all goes back to his roots, everything that his parents experienced,” said the senior officer, citing in particular Gantz’s mother’s experience at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany.

“He doesn’t hesitate in these operations, but he’s not a guy who wants to hurt human beings.”

But if Gantz does not want to engage in the rough stuff personally, he did not stop his campaign team from doing so. Working to establish the security credibility vital in Israel, the team introduced Gantz in videos that were more blood-and-guts than bread-andhoney, touting the “terrorists killed” and the Gaza neighborhoods bombed when he led the army.

His war record has cost him support from Israel’s Arab population. A slate of Arab parties, which finished third in the parliamentary voting after Gantz and Netanyahu’s factions, broke with decades of precedent to throw their support behind Gantz’s bid to become prime minister. But one faction backed out within hours, saying it could not endorse a “war criminal.”

His measured, deliberate style, however, has already paid dividends in his political career, his backers say. The most recent example, they say, was his ability to wrangle the fractured, squabbling center-left of Israel’s political spectrum into his Blue and White party, which slightly outpolled Netanyahu’s Likud party in the election last month.

“Nine months ago, he was not even involved in politics,” said Tropper. “Only a person with his temperament could do this.” n

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COVER STORY

THE PROMISE AND DOWNFALL OF HAMPSHIRE COLLEGE And what the saga says about the future of liberal arts education

B Y ELIZA GRAY

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wo days before classes started at Hampshire College in September, the school’s incoming first-year students — all 13 of them — attended a welcome reception in the campus’s new R.W. Kern Center. A motley mix of plaids, khakis and combat boots, the group lined up to shake hands with the college president and receive small bells — symbols of the large brass bell they’ll ring upon completing their “Division III,” the epic independent project required to graduate. If, that is, Hampshire survives long enough for them to graduate.

Nine months earlier, the Massachusetts college — mired in financial trouble — had launched a search for a partner to merge with and announced that it might not admit a new freshman class in the fall. Coming after a series of mergers and closures of New England schools, the announcement provoked alarm in the world of higher ed. Eventually, Hampshire offered a place to 70-odd students it had accepted early or who had taken a gap year before enrolling — but warned that there was no guarantee it would stay open.

Among the baker’s dozen who decided to take the risk was Devin Forgue. Despite its strapped budget, Hampshire offered him better financial aid than the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He considered the less expensive Holyoke Community College, but he didn’t want to give up on his dream. Forgue has an unusually specific life ambition: to broker a global compromise to increase

PHOTOS BY SARAH CROSBY FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

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Pages 12-13 clockwise from top left: Secondyear student Rhiannon Larsen, 18, works on a sculpture; the college’s Division Free Bell, which students ring to celebrate the completion of their independent project to graduate; fourthyear student Destinee Wilson, 21, works on creative writing homework in the school’s R.W. Kern Center; fourthyear student Micael Sobel, 22, walks past a mural on campus; third-year student Elías Alejo, 20, left, talks with fourthyear student Emery Powell during a student government meeting; the school’s Johnson Library.

Third-year student Naia Tenerowicz, 22, in front of graphite and ink drawings she created as a “representation of the resolve needed to move forward as an empowered, disabled activist.”

COVER STORY funding for space research. He plans to study a combination of political science, anthropology, international relations and astrophysics.

And he thought that Hampshire, an experimental college that asks students to design their own course of study, was the best place to do that.

After four days of orientation with “the 13,” as his class was known (one student has since dropped out), Forgue felt he’d made the right decision. A slight 19-year-old with longish brown hair, he’d already experienced the kind of bull sessions about politics and philosophy that make college so special. “Every single one of the 13 is the type of person ... I was hoping to meet,” he told me.

Forgue’s classmates sounded equally satisfied. “Hampshire shows people that it’s okay not to learn in this very structured way that everyone has been taught ever since preschool,” said 18-year-old Flynn Caswell.

“When I came here for the first time, it was really cool for me to see that learning can be engaging, instead of sitting in class thinking I’d rather be doing something else.” At the reception, as they rang their bells and posed for a picture, the freshmen offered the weary Hampshire community hope that the college might, somehow, survive.

Poll most top educators about their ideal kind of learning for the 21st century, and they’ll probably sound a lot like a Hampshire student. The virtues of open-ended thinking and project-based learning will be familiar to any parent who has toured a bougie preschool.

But thanks to a slow recovery from the 2008 recession, rising student debt and class anxiety, parents and students are looking at college less as an intellectual experience and more as an insurance policy — and that calls for colleges that offer proven outcomes, measurable skills or exceptional prestige.

All this means that private colleges like Hampshire are struggling to find enough students able or willing to pay their high sticker prices, and the situation is only likely to get worse. Because of low birthrates following the Great Recession, Carleton College economist Nathan Grawe predicts that the four-year-college applicant pool is likely to shrink by almost 280,000 per class, over four years, starting in 2026, a year known in higher ed as “the Apocalypse.” As youth populations decline everywhere but the southern and western United States, colleges in New England and the Midwest will find it increasingly hard to lure students, particularly those able to pay.

The problem is the business model. Colleges have long counted on wealthy students to subsidize the cost of education for those who can’t afford it. But for many institutions, that is becoming untenable. With only a $52million endowment, Hampshire is especially vulnerable to this reality, but enrollment experts say it will affect many schools outside the most elite. Schools like Harvard, Princeton, Yale and MIT will be fine, says Jon Boeckenstedt, Oregon State University’s vice

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COVER STORY provost of enrollment management. “It’s those colleges in the middle of the curve, with good, solid, well-known reputations but not spectacular financial resources or academic reputation, that are feeling the pinch,” he explains.

In May, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that several private colleges would just miss their enrollment targets this fall, including Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, ranked 35th among national liberal arts colleges by U.S. News & World Report. Also in the spring, the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts quietly ended its (increasingly rare) need-blind admissions policy, citing unsustainable spending on financial aid. And after a couple of years of missed enrollment targets and budget shortfalls, Ohio’s Oberlin College will add a business concentration — while trimming 100 students from its prestigious music conservatory and adding more to the college, which draws wealthier applicants.

“For some families, college may be the largest investment in their lives. . . . What they’re expecting from it is the same type of long-term benefit that you might get from your multiyear mortgage,” explains Oberlin President Carmen Twillie Ambar. “People are asking us to demonstrate the value of liberal arts.”

If the economic troubles of elite liberal arts institutions have you mock-playing an air violin, consider the consequences. For one, there’ll be fiercer competition for spots at the most prestigious schools — a sport already so gruesome, actress Felicity Huffman is doing jail time for gaming it. For another, there will be fewer opportunities for low-income students who rely on generous financial aid packages at small liberal arts colleges as one of the few tickets into the upper class. It may also mean the retreat of the only part of higher education that is uniquely American. Residential liberal arts colleges are rare in other parts of the world. For more than 200 years, they’ve made American higher education an exceptional laboratory for fostering empathy, creativity and innovation. We’ve gotten so used to them, we may not notice what we’ve lost until it’s gone.

I

f Hampshire’s story were a “Mission: Impossible” movie, last winter’s decision not to take a full class was the moment that started the bomb-detonation countdown. For a school that relies on tuition and fees for 87 percent of its revenue, choosing to shed a fourth of its students was close to financial suicide. The gravity was not lost on the community. Throughout the spring semester, the Amherst, Mass., campus was awash in theories about what the college’s board of trustees was hiding, about who knew what when, about what the school’s finances really were. Alumni took to Facebook. Students occupied the president’s office. Faculty exhausted themselves talking to media, brainstorming solutions, teaching classes, consoling students — and fretting about their jobs.

When I first visited, in early April, President Miriam Nelson’s office was still filled with the detritus of the protesting students who had been living there for more than 60 days: a half-eaten tray of baklava, unmade airbeds, empty Frappuccino bottles. On one wall hung a mural painted by students, depicting writer James Baldwin’s hand casting a blue shadow over merger-friendly trustee Kim Saal’s house in Northampton — a metaphor for the effort to save a school for differently abled, queer and first-generation students who can’t imagine going anywhere else.

At breakfast one morning, Nelson was struggling to keep it together. “Have you ever gone to the museum and tried putting your hand on that thing and all the electricity goes up to where your hand is?” she asked. “I feel like [that] no matter where I go.” Despite the vitriol she’d received from students, Nelson didn’t blame them. Hampshire had deferred maintenance for years. Faculty salaries were in the bottom 25 percent compared with peer institutions. First-generation students — the first in their families to attend college — and students of color needed more resources. And Hampshire wasn’t the kind of school that wanted to take only rich kids. “We are at a place where fundamentally our business model does not support our core values around equity, diversity, inclusion, around having the supports for students to realize their full potential,” she said. Two days later, she resigned.

After she left, Hampshire charted a different course. The board voted to abandon the possibility of a merger and enlisted noted filmmaker Ken Burns, an alumnus, to help raise $100 million in five years. In July, the college named Edward Wingenbach, president of Ripon College in Wisconsin, its new president. By the end of September, Hampshire had raised more than $9 million, cut the budgets of most of its divisions, and reduced the faculty from 145 to 86. It now has about

Hampshire College President Edward Wingenbach leads a weekly meeting for campus leaders across administrative and academic affairs to share perspectives.

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750 enrolled students, down from about 1,100 last spring, and it will take applications for new students in spring 2020. As this story went to press, the school was finalizing plans for a new model that would organize students’ work around solving the big questions of our time, on topics such as climate change, artificial intelligence or migration. Wingenbach hopes it will allow Hampshire to market itself to new students and donors. Yet despite these measures, Hampshire is far from safe. In November, it must submit a report on its financial sustainability to the New England Commission of Higher Education. The commission will then take a vote that, in the worst case, could result in withdrawal of accreditation and the school’s closing.

Unlike other colleges that have recently closed or merged, Hampshire has a certain cultural cachet. It’s a darling of academe: Two-thirds of its graduates have advanced degrees, and a quarter have started their own ventures. In addition to Burns, its alumni include chef Gabrielle Hamilton, writer Jon Krakauer, theoretical physicist Lee Smolin, actor Lupita Nyong’o, and the entrepreneurs behind yogurt maker Stoneyfield Farm and organic cleaning product company Seventh Generation. With narrative evaluations instead of grades, no defined departments, no faculty tenure and a flexible curriculum, Hampshire offers its students unusual control over their education.

The campus is a Polaroid image of college before gleaming hotel-like dorms and wellness centers. The buildings are severe 1970s concrete. The radio station is in a yurt. And the students’ fashions — Goths in combat boots, nerds in khakis and short-sleeve oxford-cloth shirts — recall a world somewhere between “Animal House” and Kurt Cobain.

There’s an occasional 2019 tell: the naming of preferred pronouns, the service dogs trailing students. But if you’re used to the grassy quads of state flagships or the rich Gothic and brick of the Ivy League, Hampshire’s austerity is striking. On my visit in the spring, tarps covered study carrels in the library to protect them from a leaky roof. (A Hampshire spokesman says the leak has been fixed.)

An Amherst alumnus’s gift of $6 million provided the money to purchase the land and set up Hampshire, which admitted its first students in 1970. The school intended to rely primarily on income from tuition and student fees to finance operations. That was doable at the time, when the seemingly infinite baby boomers were entering college. Hampshire had so many applicants that first year, the New York Times Magazine reported that it “was one of the hardest schools in the country to get into.” But Hampshire was on shaky financial ground. Starting in the late 1970s and the 1980s, it survived by cutting faculty and staff salaries and using its endowment to plug budget holes, according to a PowerPoint presentation about its fiscal situation that Hampshire made public in January.

By the mid-2010s, Hampshire was grap-

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“If you are potentially going to get a student who might be able to contribute $50,000 a year in tuition, that student is worth a lot.”

David Matheson, member of Hampshire’s Board of Trustees

Hampshire freshman Devin Forgue, 19, is one of a dozen in his class. Each of his peers, he says, is “the type of person ... I was hoping to meet.”

COVER STORY pling with the demographic shifts and market pressures bearing down on higher ed. From 2005 to 2010, according to that same PowerPoint, Hampshire accepted a larger percentage of applicants to increase the class size.

And those allowances seemed to affect the graduation rate. For freshmen who entered in 2010, just 65 percent managed to graduate in six years, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. For an intimate liberal arts college, that was low. “Attrition was too high. . . . We were bringing in too many students for whom Hampshire was too hard a school,” says David Matheson, who leads the board’s finance committee. Because Hampshire is a no-grade school, “a good number of folks came in thinking it would be easy and did not end up graduating.”

To boost retention, the admissions office designed a study to determine what predicted success at Hampshire. It found that the most successful students were highly organized and willing to stretch outside their academic comfort zones, qualities reflected in application essays, insight from high school guidance counselors and admissions interviews. A key marker that had nothing to do with success?

Standardized test scores.

So in 2014, Hampshire stopped accepting test scores. That meant losing its place, then 110th, in the U.S. News college rankings, an essential marketing tool. At first, the gamble paid off. From 2014 to 2015, Hampshire’s yield — the number of accepted students who chose to come — jumped from 18 to 26 percent. And, since standardized tests benefit affluent (and often white) applicants, in 2015 Hampshire admitted its most diverse class ever, with 31 percent domestic students of color and 18 percent first-generation students.

The diverse students thrived at Hampshire, but the new admissions criteria came at a financial cost. “We knew when we adopted that strategy that we would be pruning the applicant pool to some degree,” says Matheson. “What we may not have realized is that more of those pruned people may have been higher-income than we anticipated.”

While taking more low-income students, Hampshire was also offering more “merit” aid to academically strong upper-income students to lure them from competitors. “Parents would say, ‘I’ve got an awfully nice offer from Bard. Is there anything you can do?’ ” says Matheson. “If you are potentially going to get a student who might be able to contribute $50,000 a year in tuition, that student is worth a lot. If you can get that student for $35,000, that’s still a very good deal for the college.”

The combination of merit and financial aid cost Hampshire. In 2013, the college’s average first-year student was paying 56 percent of the listed tuition price. By 2018, that was down to 40 percent. That contributed to a real drop in net revenue. In 2013, Hampshire’s net revenue from tuition, room, board and fees was 3.3 percent higher than in the previous year.

Revenue declined every year after that. By 2018, it was 6.8 percent less than in the

previous year, according to the financial PowerPoint presentation.

It’s worth a pause here to explain how college pricing works. Like airline passengers, every student at a given college pays a different price. Colleges list high tuition prices hoping that enough students pay the top price to compensate for those who can pay little or nothing. Depending on the state, needier students will usually pay less at a liberal arts college than they would at a state flagship. It sounds counterintuitive, but choosing a public school to save money is actually a privilege for the affluent. And since the 2008 recession, more well-to-do parents are choosing those schools. To compete, private colleges are then forced to offer merit aid to top students who don’t need the money. Admissions professionals call the tension between giving grants to entice affluent students and using the money to increase diversity with need-based aid the “iron triangle.”

Ironically, wealthier, more prestigious schools don’t have to give out as much merit aid because they’re more likely to get qualified affluent students willing to pay a premium: Four percent of Hampshire’s new students paid full price in 2017-2018, but at nearby Amherst College, U.S. News’s No. 2-ranked liberal arts college, 34 percent of new students paid the list price of $71,300, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Enrollment experts say that difference has a lot to do with high rank. “As college prices exceed now easily $70,000 a year, parents are scratching their heads going, ‘I don’t think it’s going to be worth it unless my kid is going to go to a school that everyone is bragging about,’ ” says Bob Massa, a former enrollment manager at Johns Hopkins University and Dickinson College who teaches at the University of Southern California’s graduate school of education.

This puts even more pressure on schools just below the top. “In the U.S., income disparity is growing, and we have fewer and fewer Americans in the middle,” explains former Hampshire president Nelson. “What we have in higher education is exactly the same thing. Institutions with over a billion in endowment are getting stronger and stronger as they can attract the best students. ... And financially under-resourced institutions are going to get weaker and weaker.”

At the same time, elite colleges aren’t accepting more lower-income students. The share of low-income students receiving federal grants at the most competitive colleges stayed essentially flat between 2000 and 2014, going from 15 to 16 percent, while it grew from 46 to 59 percent at noncompetitive institutions, according to the Washington-based consulting firm EAB. That’s surprising, given the explosion in the number of organizations that help these students access selective colleges.

I

n 2016, as tuition market dynamics were slashing Hampshire’s budget, the culture on campus was approaching a crisis that made things even worse. That spring, as tensions over racial justice and sexual assault were rising on campuses nationwide, Hampshire students say there was a perceived lack of institutional support for students of color.

Anger over the college’s handling of sexual assault sent students marching across campus holding mattresses over their heads. Frustration bubbled over when the administration failed to replace the director of Hampshire’s cultural center, a resource for international students and students of color.

Amid the turmoil, Hampshire opened the Kern Center, a sustainable wood-and-glass building that runs on solar energy. It was the

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COVER STORY Hampshire College third-year student Maria Fitch, 21, relaxes on campus in Amherst, Mass.

In 2016, Hampshire enrolled 1,333 students. By the spring semester of 2019, the student body was down to 1,120.

first new building in years on a campus sorely in need of something beautiful. Most of the money for the center came from donors who wanted to support that project specifically, so it couldn’t have been used to refurbish dorms, increase cultural center support staff or improve counseling services. But students say the administration did a poor job of communicating that. “People were feeling a financial crisis on campus and being told that important things couldn’t happen, and then there was the Kern Center,” says Emmett DuPont, a former member of Hampshire’s student government, who graduated last year. Meanwhile, then-Hampshire President Jonathan Lash became seriously ill, requiring a leave of absence.

Responding to the leadership void, student groups called a community meeting. On April 19, 2016, Hampshire canceled classes and the entire student body packed into the gym. One by one, students took the microphone to share personal and graphic stories of racism and sexual assault they’d experienced on campus; anger erupted between students who felt unheard. “People were laying on the floor, sobbing,” recalls DuPont. “It devastated the community.”

Donald Trump’s election that fall was another blow to campus morale. A civil discussion about whether Hampshire should consider removing an American flag from campus became a national scandal when an unidentified person took it down and burned it overnight. Local veterans protested. Fox News’s Tucker Carlson covered the story, provoking such intense anger from outside campus, DuPont recalls, the admissions office had to remove interns from the phones.

Meanwhile, when DuPont gave admissions tours, students would come over to tell prospective students terrible things about the school. “They would say, ‘Don’t come to

Hampshire. The administration is racist. They don’t deal with sexual assault,’ ” DuPont says.

The combination of bad publicity and sour mood didn’t help enrollment. In 2016, Hampshire enrolled 1,333 students. By the spring semester of 2019, the student body was down to 1,120, and net revenue from tuition and student fees was down 11 percent from 2018, according to the financial analysis Hampshire released.

The sad paradox is that, despite the scandal, many first-generation students of color thrived at Hampshire in ways they might not have at bigger, less personal institutions. Elías Alejo, 20, a first-generation third-year student from Los Angeles, told me they didn’t think a state school would have offered the same support or made it possible to secure and thrive at the internship they had last summer with U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids (D-Kan.). Moreover, first-generation students may be more willing than their wealthier peers to take a flier on a school like Hampshire. Marlon Becerra, a 2019 graduate now at Harvard Law School, could have gone to a more highly ranked school, but Hampshire’s collaborative spirit and lack of requirements fit his ideal college vision. Becerra says he followed the advice of his college counselor at Legal Outreach, an organization that prepares underserved New York City students for college and law school: “You need not to find the best college but the best college for you.”

O

n the day before classes started in September, hundreds of faculty, staff, students, alumni and parents gathered in the gym to discuss how to save the school.

President Wingenbach rose to speak. “That decision not to take a full class has taken that slow-moving challenge ... and turned [it] into a genuine crisis,” he told the crowd. “And it’s

KLMNO WEEKLY

one that we’re going to address and we’re going to solve.”

In seven weeks, Wingenbach told the assembly, Hampshire would have to present its accreditors with a plan to prove its sustainability, cover a budget shortfall, and recruit a freshman class for fall 2020. To do that, he explained, Hampshire would have to “show the world” that it is possible to provide a liberal arts education with faculty mentorship, accessible to anyone who wants it regardless of income — without a massive endowment. Put another way, Hampshire had seven weeks to solve the central challenge to undergraduate liberal arts education.

The next morning, in his office, Wingenbach explained what he thinks Hampshire must do to stay open. His focus was on fundraising and keeping costs down by relying on a tiny faculty. I asked him why he had left a stable job and uprooted his family to take a less certain job across the country. “If Hampshire can’t make it work, then what hope do we have for a student-centered progressive pedagogy? ... What hope is there for higher ed aside from those really well-off students who are going to get this no matter where they go?” he replied. “If we can’t find a model that allows residential liberal arts colleges to survive within the constraints of what students and families can afford to pay ... then [a] reckoning is really going to happen.”

Hampshire isn’t the only college trying to solve this problem. The easiest first step is to aim to be more competitive in a constricting market, adding things like business majors, new gyms and guaranteed paid internships.

Critics of higher ed like to point to its obsession with facilities and fancier buildings — money they say inflates the cost of college at the expense of what’s important. But asking parents to spend a lot of money on an education is easier when you have the facilities those parents expect.

To survive for another hundred years, experts agree, colleges will have to embrace more transformational change. “This is an inflection point in higher ed,” says Twillie Ambar of Oberlin. “We have to stop asking, ‘Does this feel like us?’ . . . and ask, ‘What’s the right thing to do?’ ” She’s talking about exploring things like partnerships with community colleges, one-year certificate programs for nontraditional or returning students, or integrating departments to reduce administrative costs.

In my last hour at Hampshire, I sat with Devin Forgue in the student center above the gym. We talked about his desire to study in Japan and his crazy goal to broker a global deal on space research. He knew there was a chance that Hampshire might not make it. But he really felt the school offered his only path to realizing that dream. “If you have a vision that could be world-changing or even just transformational for your personal journey,” he said, “Hampshire will back you up.” To do that for Forgue, Hampshire may have to help transform higher education first. n

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OPINIONS

Facebook’s founder flounders before Congress HELAINE OLEN is a Washington Post columnist focusing on politics, economics and American life.

To hear Mark Zuckerberg tell it, Facebook’s interest in setting up the digital currency Libra comes from a place of selflessness, of concern for the world’s poor and underserved. “There are more than a billion people around the world who don’t have access to a bank account,” he piously told the House Financial Services Committee early in his Wednesday testimony about the controversial project. “The current system is failing them.” ¶ Unfortunately for Zuckerberg, his supposed concern for the world’s downtrodden wilts quickly under scrutiny. Rep. Gregory W. Meeks (D­N.Y.) quickly pointed out payday loan lenders also claim to be helping people lacking bank accounts. “Words are different than actions, sir,” he told one of the world’s wealthiest men.

If there was any sense of shame in the United States, I would not be writing this column. Zuckerberg would be frantically fixing his company, not testifying in front of a mostly hostile group of elected officials about his half-baked digital currency initiative. The list of Facebook sins is seemingly endless: fake news, data breaches, permitting race and age discrimination in its targeted advertising and so on.

Just this past week, it emerged that 47 states are now looking into anti-competitive business practices by the social media giant. “Facebook has been systemically found at the scene of the crime,” as Meeks put it.

But in a country where accountability is more often faced by the powerless, while wealthy executives go from misadventure to misadventure safe and secure as long as they make a buck for their investors, Zuckerberg is on a nonstop bender. Libra is all too typical.

The digital currency might well help the unbanked — but it

could also turn out to be mighty useful to everyone from money launderers to terrorists.

No surprise, nations around the world are a tad bit concerned that a company this powerful and ethically challenged is attempting to set up something that bears a strong resemblance to an unaccountable currency.

On Wednesday, Zuckerberg was unable to calm these concerns — if anything, he compounded them. He promised to get all necessary regulatory approvals before proceeding with Libra, but after comparing Calibra — the digital wallet that holds the currency — to a bank, he didn’t quite commit to getting a bank charter. He demonstrated an impressive ignorance and lack of curiosity about the goings on at his own company, unable to answer questions on such things as contradictions between his testimony on how he viewed privacy at the social media giant, and positions taken by its lawyers in court

ANDREW HARNIK/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg testified on Oct. 23 in a hearing before the House Financial Services Committee on a proposal for digital currency, Libra.

cases. When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) asked him to weigh in on whether he would permit a political ad containing false information to run — something he recently said he would do, because he didn’t want to censor political speech — he couldn’t give a straight answer. Moreover, he frequently sounded condescending in his exchanges with female representatives. At one point, he seemingly smirked at Waters.

On one hand, Zuckerberg’s audaciousness works.

Facebook’s profits remain strong. Joe Biden is leading in the Democratic presidential polls while others who would break up the company are not.

But Zuckerberg, it is increasingly clear, wants more.

He wants both power and our respect. That’s a tough one, and not just because Libra’s future appears to be uncertain.

Facebook pitches itself as a way to connect with friends and loved ones, as well as a way to get one’s views out in the world. The company enticed people to dish about their most intimate moments on their site, and then made money — lots of money — on it. I’ve always thought no small amount of the rage coming Zuckerberg’s way stems from that original sin.

It’s a foul way to make a buck, and that’s before you count all the damage to the global order the company is responsible for.

Little wonder Zuckerberg warbles on about helping the world. So far, his actions have contributed to making it a much worse place. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

A fair impeachment trial is possible TOM DASCHLE AND TRENT LOTT Tom Daschle, a Democrat, represented South Dakota in the U.S. Senate from 1987 to 2005.

Trent Lott, a Republican, represented Mississippi in the Senate from 1989 to 2007.

Can today’s Senate, consisting of senators holding strongly opposed views and representing a deeply divided nation, put aside those differences and conduct a fair, nonpartisan presidential impeachment trial, if it comes to that? It is a challenge with a high degree of difficulty, but we believe it can and must be done. And we hope senators will look to the Senate’s last presidential impeachment trial as a model.

In December 1998, the House of Representatives approved articles of impeachment against President Bill Clinton, leaving to us, as the then-majority and minority leaders, the task of negotiating procedures for a trial in the Senate. This was not easy; while we were committed to “do impartial justice,” as our impeachment trial oath required, we had very different perspectives on key questions — as did our caucuses — and, indeed, those differences remained throughout the trial and the final vote. But from the outset of our negotiations, we both understood how vitally important it was to rise above those differences in order to conduct a trial that would inspire the confidence of the public and withstand the unsparing scrutiny of history.

The Senate has a set of impeachment rules that date to

1798, and they were last updated in 1986. They provide a helpful framework for a trial, but they are silent on many important issues, such as: How long should the trial be? How much time should each side be allowed to make its case? Should witnesses be called? If so, how many, and which ones? Should witnesses testify on the Senate floor or be deposed elsewhere? When should a motion to dismiss the articles of impeachment be in order, and for how long should the Senate debate it?

In negotiating answers to these questions and putting those agreements in writing, we felt fairness required us to ensure that neither side be given any procedural advantage — in fact or appearance — that might taint the proceedings. We also decided to err on the side of allocating more rather than less time for testimony and debate, so both

sides would be comfortable that their arguments had been fully heard. Given breaks for depositions to be taken and the need to accommodate the chief justice, who would preside over the trial in addition to his duties at the Supreme Court, we understood that the Senate would have to devote a substantial amount of time to the trial.

Before trial procedures were adopted, the entire Senate convened for a closed session in the Old Senate Chamber to mark the constitutional moment and agree in principle that the trial should be conducted fairly and in fidelity to constitutional precedent. Out of the glare of television lights, the Senate truly acted as the great deliberative body it was intended to be.

Senators addressed their responsibility soberly and in a spirit of collegiality. This meeting set the tone for the balance of the trial process.

The Senate then voted on two resolutions implementing our negotiated terms for the trial.

The first and more important of the two, governing time allocations, was adopted by a vote of 100-0. The subject of the second, governing certain details regarding depositions, was more contentious, but the handling of

those depositions was later worked out in a way both sides could live with.

On Jan. 7, 1999, the trial began.

The ensuing five weeks were filled with passionate arguments and extensive debate about whether the Constitution demanded conviction of the president. Lawyers for both sides were given ample time to be heard, and senators were given ample time to ask questions, review evidence and deliberate.

The Senate, and much of the nation, watched with rapt attention. On Feb. 12, the Senate voted on two articles of impeachment, neither of which attained the necessary two-thirds supermajority for conviction. Not everyone was happy with that outcome. But we heard almost no complaints about the trial itself.

We remain proud that the Senate rose to meet its constitutional duty, and did so in a manner that most observers concluded was fair and impartial.

If called upon to hold another presidential impeachment trial, we hope senators of both parties will again put aside partisan considerations and approach the task with the same spirit of fairness that served the institution of the Senate and the country so well two decades ago. n

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