Abraham Lincoln Running Out of Gas as Navy Oiler Runs Aground
Plus, Trump Is winning Hispanics; latest on Northeastern; Brandeis, and more
The only U.S. Navy oiler—a ship used to carry fuel for carrier-borne fighters—in the Middle East is damaged after reportedly running aground and taking on water.
GCaptain, a site that covers the Navy, published a photo of what it described as a “flooded mechanical space” inside the oiler, the USNS Big Horn. The site said the ship had run aground of the coast of Oman while supporting the Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group.
Senator Wicker, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, issued a statement today raising an alarm about the issue.
“I am troubled about reports that the Navy’s sole fleet oiler in the CENTCOM region has been rendered temporarily inoperable. If we cannot fuel our ships, our capabilities will be greatly diminished,” Wicker said. “The Big Horn’s problems also speak to a larger challenge – we are woefully in need of a larger logistics fleet, which is the lifeline for our global military presence. I hope this incident serves as a wake-up call that it is high time to fix our shipbuilding industrial base and support our merchant mariners.”
Wicker asked a series of questions, including what caused the damage and when another vessel would arrive in the area “to fill the capability gap.”
The former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, a retired admiral, James Stavridis, also expressed concern. “Combat capability is based on sustained reliable logistics. If these reports are true, this is a potential serious challenge to navy firepower in the Middle East,” Stavridis, who is now vice chair of the Carlyle Group, said in a social media post. “We have other options and other ships, but this shows that war is logistics in the end.”
GCaptain says the Navy has launched five new John Lewis class oilers, with double hulls unlike the older Big Horn. But “none of the new oilers have been cleared to leave the continental United States,” the GCaptain article says.
The lack of U.S. military readiness has become a bipartisan political issue in Washington, with a recent report of the Commission on National Defense Strategy warning that America “is not prepared,” and recommending a sharp increase in defense spending.
The USS Abraham Lincoln is a nuclear-powered carrier but the planes aboard the ship burn jet fuel.
On Northeastern, Bloomberg Gets It Half-Right: Northeastern University’s rise to becoming “the ‘it’ girl of schools” is the subject of a long Bloomberg News article. “Enrollment is up more than 15% since 2019 and applications are approaching 100,000 a year, pushing the school’s acceptance rate below 6%, which rivals some Ivy League schools,” Bloomberg reports.
It’s nice to see Bloomberg waddle in on a story that I flagged back in September of 2023, in an article for Education Next headlined, “Higher Education Could Help Heal America.” The first of the “visionary higher education leaders of today” mentioned in that article is Joseph Aoun:
The president of Northeastern University in Boston, Joseph Aoun, is so ahead of the curve that he published a book, Robot-Proof, about “higher education in the age of artificial intelligence” in 2017, years before the ChatGPT breakthrough. After taking office in 2006, Aoun shut down the school’s football team and opened more than a dozen satellite campuses, including in London, Toronto, Vancouver, California, Virginia, Seattle, Charlotte, and Portland, Maine (and opening in fall 2023: Miami). Families appreciate that the co-op work experience, part of a Northeastern education, puts students on a path to a paying job. Speaking to graduates this year, Aoun emphasized humane qualities: “For the foreseeable future computational power cannot express empathy. Microprocessors cannot comfort the afflicted.”
What the Bloomberg article misses, and what my mention of Aoun didn’t get into, is how much of Northeastern’s success isn’t just about real estate, admissions, and enrollment management but about faculty quality. There are a lot of professors at Northeastern—Costas Panagopoulos and Max Abrahms in political science, Tovah Day in biology, Laurel Leff in journalism, Simon Rabinovitch in history, Aliza Hochman Bloom in law—that a student would be super-lucky to learn from.
Ron and Jessica Leibowitz are out at Brandeis: Brandeis University President Ron Leibowitz, who has run the university in close partnership with his wife Jessica, has resigned effective November 1, he and Brandeis Board chair Lisa Kranc announced today. Bloomberg and Jewish Insider note that the resignation came a day following a faculty “no confidence” vote in his leadership.
Brandeis has announced as its interim president Arthur Levine. Levine was responsible for one of my most traumatic moments as a student at Harvard, when I fell asleep in a class he was teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Education on the history of higher education. Rather than being self-deprecating about his soporific pedagogy, or just ignoring me, he enlisted the other students in the class to humiliate me by waking me up all together in a startling manner. It was a cruel thing for a teacher to do, especially at an education school. I had a second unpleasant interaction with him when I was managing editor of the New York Sun and he was president of Columbia Teachers College and he had a complaint about the Sun’s coverage.
Brandeis was, with Yeshiva University and Notre Dame, an early signer of the “we stand together with Israel against Hamas” letter. Brandeis also arrested seven anti-Israel protesters on campus and withdrew official recognition for the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter.
It’s not clear that Jewish and pro-Israel prospective students and donors responded with appreciation sufficient to offset the dismay of some of the hard-left Brandeis faculty. Perhaps the Leibowitzes, or the institution itself, weren’t set up quite well enough to capitalize on the moment. Not everything is zero sum, but if some of the money that went to Bari Weiss University or Ben Sasse’s University of Florida had flowed instead to Brandeis maybe the board and faculty would be happier and the departure of the Leibowitzes would have been with a year’s advance notice rather than abruptly in the manner of Baroness Shafik.
Anyway, in the world of higher education, Brandeis is a special place, as my friend the late Frank Brandeis Gilbert deeply appreciated. There’s a vibrant Jewish student life, there are some seriously special professors like Jonathan Sarna and Barry Shrage, there’s a university press that brings out small gems like Charles Dellheim’s Belonging and Betrayal: How Jews Made the Art World Modern. It’d be nice to see it find its way toward a stable and upward trajectory.
Recent work: The Wall Street Journal has published a letter to the editor I sent in about Trump’s tariffs: “The best U.S. policy would be to help China’s workers form genuinely free unions, as the American government, the AFL-CIO and the American Federation of Teachers did with Solidarity in Poland in the 1980s.”
Trump is winning Hispanics: “Trump Is Winning the Hispanic Vote” was the headline of an item I wrote back in January 2024 about a Suffolk University/USA Today poll showing Trump beating Biden among Hispanic voters. Now a Quinnipiac University Poll fielded September 19 to 22 of 1,728 likely voters nationwide finds 52 percent of the Hispanics backing Trump, and 44 percent for Harris.
All the usual caveats about larger sampling error with a subgroup apply. But AP found Biden won the 2020 Latino vote 63 percent to 35 percent, so if Trump wins or even ties among Hispanics in 2024, it could help him improve his overall showing enough that it tips the outcome to an electoral vote win for the Republican candidate. It’s difficult for the faculty members at elite northeastern universities to grasp this, but Trump’s call for “mass deportation” isn’t necessarily a disqualifier for Hispanic voters who are here legally and whose wages and social standing are are undercut by competition from illegals. Hispanics are small business people, they are immigrants from Communist or crime-ridden countries, they are frequently family-oriented Catholics, and while they have a range of politics depending on where they are from (Cuba or Puerto Rico?) and other factors beyond their ethnic origin, it’s not entirely surprising to see that they’d find failed-border-czar Harris a less compelling candidate than the 2016 Catholic Biden. They haven’t been insulated from the effects of Bidenflation, either. I’m not cheering on this development or telling Hispanics or anyone else who they should vote for, I’m just trying to call attention to some newsworthy polling numbers and explain them to anyone who might find them puzzling.
Cotton, McConnell condemn Biden delay of arms to Israel: Senator Cotton and Senator McConnell have written a letter to President Biden “to strongly condemn your administration’s continued delay in providing critical military equipment and weapons to our ally Israel in the midst of an existential war.”
“Delays of equipment that Israel requires to win its multi-front war against Iranian-terrorist proxies, compounded by statements by Administration officials blaming Israel for escalation, undercut Israel’s efforts to restore deterrence by emboldening the Iranian-backed terrorists,” the September 25 letter says, saying that the administration is holding up the shipment of MK-84 bombs, Apache attack helicopters, and Caterpillar D9 tractors to Israel.
“Further delays will endanger Israeli lives, increase the likelihood that the conflict will escalate further, and harm American national security interests,” the letter says.
Reader comments: Yesterday’s post about Trump’s praise of the Emir of Qatar, and about a communist student group at Harvard, attracted five lively reader comments. Check them out, and if you have something to add, please keep them coming, as they provide value.
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If someone reads a speech instead of talking like a normal person, I typically fall asleep within minutes. I suspect that part of the appeal of leaders such as Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders is that they typically speak extemporaneously. Some may see their remarks as rambling, but their style not only conveys that they believe what they are saying, but the animated delivery keeps people engaged.
Once I went to a conference at which I thought I would not know anyone. The first speaker at the opening session read a speech, and I quickly fell asleep. The second speaker was Zak Kohane, whom I knew. Zak began by saying "My talk is going to be so interesting that even Mickey Segal will stay awake". Zak was right, and I felt I'd been introduced in a way that was good-humored.
In analyzing polls one must take into account more than "the usual caveats about larger sampling error". The biggest uncertainty about polls comes from low response rate, which is often in the mid single digits. People who respond to polls are different from those who don't, and pollsters do all sorts of massaging to get data that seems representative of the >90% who don't respond. It is remarkable how well the polls do despite low response rates.
Low response rates are the dirty little secret of polling. If a poll does not disclose its response rate, the most important caveat to mention is the lack of such disclosure. If a poll discloses a low response rate, the most important caveat to mention is the low response rate.