Education Secretary McMahon’s Smart First Move
Plus, Trump stablecoin; more talent flees Harvard
America will probably survive without a secretary of education—eliminating the job, along with the department, is a Trump goal—but so long as the position does still exist, Linda McMahon is off to an impressive start.
It didn’t get a lot of national press attention, but McMahon made her first school visit as Education Secretary earlier of this month to—of all places—Vertex Partnership Academies, a charter school in the Bronx.
That’s the school founded by Ian Rowe. In December 2022 I visited the school myself, met with Rowe, and wrote about it for the Philanthropy Roundtable (“New Bronx School Teaching Students Their Futures Are in Their Control.”) That piece concluded:
Rowe says he’s sometimes accused of denying the reality of systemic racism. “Systemic racism, structural racism, institutional racism — if you’re going to talk about those three kinds of racism, then let’s talk about a fourth kind: surmountable racism,” he says.
He denounces educators trying to convince 12-year-olds that there are all those powerful forces arrayed against them.
“You’ve just got to fight back against all that nonsense. I just reject it,” he says. “There are no victims in our schools. There are only architects of their own lives.”
Anyway, of all the schools in America to choose to make a first visit to, McMahon sent an unmistakable message—and an encouraging one—with the visit to Vertex. One reason to preserve the post of education secretary is the ability it carries to communicate values and priorities. If done carefully and well, that can have real power.
Trump stablecoin: World Liberty Financial, a company affiliated with President Trump and his family and also with the family of Trump administration diplomat Steven Witkoff, “announced its plans to launch USD1, a stablecoin redeemable 1:1 for the US dollar.”
A press release explained that “WLFI’s USD1 will be 100% backed by short-term US government treasuries, US dollar deposits, and other cash equivalents.” The release quotes Zach Witkoff, WLFI co-founder, as saying, “We’re offering a digital dollar stablecoin that sovereign investors and major institutions can confidently integrate into their strategies for seamless, secure cross-border transactions.”
The way the dollar is looking under Trump, “stable” may not be an accurate term to apply. Maybe I am missing something, but what advantage does USD1 have in comparison to an ordinary dollar? If it were genuinely stable, that’d be one thing, but if it’s only as stable as a dollar, then it’s just fiat currency by another name.
Anyway, if Hunter Biden were running around launching a so-called stablecoin while Bidenflation was eroding the purchasing power of actual dollars, Republicans would be all over it faster than you can spell Senator Grassley—and for good reason. No one wants to deprive Zach Witkoff or Eric Trump of careers in cryptocurrency—it’s not their fault who their fathers are. And maybe the dollar will benefit from some private-sector competition. But the whole project appears to reflect a certain level of brazenness about risk, a level that may not be warranted.
More talent flees Harvard: Harvard Magazine has an interview with “Yaron Singer, former McKay professor of computer science and applied mathematics and currently vice president of AI and security at Cisco.” This guy was a full professor at Harvard with tenure and he left for Cisco.
We’ve been covering this trend here (see “Harvard Talent Flees to the Private Sector,” December 20, 2024): “The worse the conditions become in academia—poisonous faculty politics, cancel culture, performative ‘wokeness,’ the decline of meritocracy in favor of other values such as ‘equity’ or bureaucracy—the greater the relative attraction of choosing to make a career instead at Google or some company that will be the next Google….Perhaps the risk of a talent exodus, ‘brain drain,’ from academia to industry, will put some market pressure on higher education to create conditions that are conducive to scholarship.”