Dear Commons Community,

Timothy Egan’s has a column in today’s New York Times describing the carnage that Donald Trump is wreaking on national civility and discourse.  He likens Trump to a wounded bear that will try to harm and kill everything in its path.  Here is the entire column:

“A wounded bear is a dangerous thing. Detested and defeated, Donald Trump is now in a tear-the-country-down rage. Day after day, he rips at the last remaining threads of decency holding this nation together. His opponent is the devil, he says — hate her with all your heart. Forget about the rule of law. Lock her up!

He’s made America vile. He’s got angel-voiced children yelling “bitch” and flipping the bird at rallies. He’s got young athletes chanting “build a wall” at Latino kids on the other side. He’s made it O.K. to bully and fat-shame. He’s normalized perversion, bragging about how an aging man with his sense of entitlement can walk in on naked women.

Here’s his lesson for young minds: If you’re rich and boorish enough, you can get away with anything. Get away with sexual assault. Get away with not paying taxes. Get away with never telling the truth. Get away flirting with treason. Get away with stiffing people who work for you, while you take yours. Get away with mocking the disabled, veterans and families of war heroes.

You know this by now — all the sordid details. For much of the last year, the Republican presidential nominee has been a freak show, an oh-my-God spectacle. He opens his mouth, our cellphones blow up. But now, in the final days of a horrid campaign, an unshackled Trump is more national threat than punch line. He’s determined to cause lasting damage.

Is there one sector of society he has yet to maul? Until this week, it was the denial wing of his own party, those “leaders” who looked the other way while their leader walked all over the Constitution.

But those who take pleasure in watching Trump destroy the Republican Party are missing the bigger picture. He’s trying to destroy the country, as well. Civility, always a tenuous thing, cannot be quickly restored in a society that has learned to hate in public, at full throttle.

Trump has made compassion suspect. Don’t reach out to starving refugees — they’re killers in disguise. Don’t give to a charity that won’t reward you in some way. Don’t pay taxes that build roads and offer relief to those washed away in a hurricane. That’s a sucker’s game. We’re not all in this together. Taxes are for stupid people.

Every sexual predator now has a defender at the top of the Republican ticket. The most remarkable thing about last Sunday’s debate was Anderson Cooper having to school a 70-year-old man on workplace taboos that most of us learn on our first job.

“You described kissing women without consent, grabbing their genitals,” said Cooper. “That is sexual assault. You bragged that you have sexually assaulted women. Do you understand that?”

What you heard was the lecture the human resources director gives just before saying, “You’re fired.” Trump could not get hired at the drive-through window at a Jack in the Box. Knowing about his history would make any employer liable. It took decades to get the workplace to that point where Trumpian predators are shunned. Given the biggest pulpit in the world, Trump is trying to bring that consensus down.

He calls it locker room talk. The locker room has pushed back, resoundingly. Let’s call it what it is — the workplace. And as Trump told Howard Stern in 2005, when he bragged about his voyeur intrusions into backstage beauty pageants, “I sort of get away with things like that.” He made a similar comment — the blueprint for his actions — in the 2005 television tape that has blown up in his face. If he can do it, any creep outside of the celebrity bubble should be able to get away with the same thing.

He’s destroyed whatever moral standing leading Christian conservatives had — starting with Mike Pence. Their selective piety is not teachable. Take solace in one of the small acts of courage breaking out in recent days: a group of students at Liberty University telling their Trump-supporting president, Jerry Falwell Jr., to practice what the school preaches.

Trump is “actively promoting the very things that we Christians ought to oppose,” the students wrote. These young people, at least, are smart enough to see what Trump is doing to their world.

It will take many people like those students, and like the first lady, Michelle Obama, a model of decency and class, to repair the awful damage Trump has done.

In a powerful speech Thursday, the nation’s most respected public figure scorned the “hurtful, hateful language” of Trump and its effect on children: “The shameful comments about our bodies. The disrespect of our ambitions and intellect. The belief that you can do anything to a woman. It’s cruel. It’s frightening.”

So it has come to this: The core lessons that bind a civilized society are in play in the last days of this election. We long for family dinners where Trump no longer intrudes, for tailgate parties where football is all that matters, for normalcy. Remember those days? They may be gone forever.”

I hope not.  I want my children and grandchildren to have a happy positive perspective on life.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

It was announced yesterday that Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature.  He is the only singer-song writer to win the award.  Dylan was the voice of (our) 1960s generation.  At rallies and other events, we just waited for someone to play one of Dylan’s songs such as “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” and “Like a Rolling Stone” that captured the moment. Here is an excerpt from a New York Times article on the award:

“Half a century ago, Bob Dylan shocked the music world by plugging in an electric guitar and alienating folk purists. For decades he continued to confound expectations, selling millions of records with dense, enigmatic songwriting.

Now, Mr. Dylan, the poet laureate of the rock era, has been rewarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature, an honor that elevates him into the company of T. S. Eliot, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison and Samuel Beckett.

Mr. Dylan, 75, is the first musician to win the award, and his selection on Thursday is perhaps the most radical choice in a history stretching back to 1901. In choosing a popular musician for the literary world’s highest honor, the Swedish Academy, which awards the prize, dramatically redefined the boundaries of literature, setting off a debate about whether song lyrics have the same artistic value as poetry or novels.

Some prominent writers celebrated Mr. Dylan’s literary achievements, including Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates and Salman Rushdie, who called Mr. Dylan “the brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition,” adding, “Great choice.”

But others called the academy’s decision misguided and questioned whether songwriting, however brilliant, rises to the level of literature.

“Bob Dylan winning a Nobel in Literature is like Mrs Fields being awarded 3 Michelin stars,” the novelist Rabih Alameddine wrote on Twitter. “This is almost as silly as Winston Churchill.”

Jodi Picoult, a best-selling novelist, snarkily asked, “I’m happy for Bob Dylan, #ButDoesThisMeanICanWinAGrammy?”

Many musicians praised the choice with a kind of awe. On Twitter, Rosanne Cash, the songwriter and daughter of Johnny Cash, wrote simply: “Holy mother of god. Bob Dylan wins the Nobel Prize.”

But some commentators bristled. Two youth-oriented websites, Pitchfork and Vice, both ran columns questioning whether Mr. Dylan was an appropriate choice for the Nobel.

As the writer of classics of folk and protest songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” as well as Top 10 hits including “Like a Rolling Stone,” Mr. Dylan is an unusual Nobel winner. The first American to win the prize since Ms. Morrison in 1993, he is studied by Oxford dons and beloved by presidents.

Yet instead of appearing at the standard staid news conference arranged by a publisher,

Mr. Dylan was in Las Vegas on Thursday for a performance at a theater there. By late afternoon, Mr. Dylan had not commented on the honor.

Mr. Dylan has often sprinkled literary allusions into his music and cited the influence of poetry on his lyrics, and has referenced Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine and Ezra Pound. He has also published poetry and prose, including his 1971 collection, “Tarantula,” and “Chronicles: Volume One,” a memoir published in 2004. His collected lyrics from 1961-2012 are due out on Nov. 1 from Simon & Schuster.

Literary scholars have long debated whether Mr. Dylan’s lyrics can stand on their own as poetry, and an astonishing volume of academic work has been devoted to parsing his music. The Oxford Book of American Poetry included his song “Desolation Row,” in its 2006 edition, and Cambridge University Press released “The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan” in 2009, further cementing his reputation as a brilliant literary stylist.

Billy Collins, the former United States poet laureate, argued that Mr. Dylan deserved to be recognized not merely as a songwriter, but as a poet.

“Most song lyrics don’t really hold up without the music, and they aren’t supposed to,” Mr. Collins said in an interview. “Bob Dylan is in the 2 percent club of songwriters whose lyrics are interesting on the page even without the harmonica and the guitar and his very distinctive voice. I think he does qualify as poetry.”

In giving the literature prize to Mr. Dylan, the academy may also be recognizing that the gap has closed between high art and more commercial creative forms.

“It’s literature, but it’s music, it’s performance, it’s art, it’s also highly commercial,” said David Hajdu, a music critic for The Nation who has written extensively about Mr. Dylan and his contemporaries. “The old categories of high and low art, they’ve been collapsing for a long time, but this is it being made official.”

In previous years, writers and publishers have grumbled that the prize often goes to obscure writers with clear political messages over more popular figures. But in choosing someone so well known, and so far outside of established literary traditions, the academy seems to have swung far into the other direction, bestowing prestige on a popular artist who already had plenty of it.

It’s not the first time it has stretched the definition of literature. In 1953, Winston Churchill received the prize, in part as recognition of the literary qualities of his soaring political speeches and “brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values,” according to the academy. And many were surprised last year, when the prize went to the Belarussian journalist Svetlana Alexievich, whose deeply reported narratives draw on oral history.

In its citation, the Swedish Academy credited Mr. Dylan with “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”

Sara Danius, a literary scholar and the permanent secretary of the 18-member academy, which called Mr. Dylan “a great poet in the English-speaking tradition” and compared him to Homer and Sappho, whose work was delivered orally. Asked if the decision to award the prize to a musician signaled a broadening in the definition of literature, Ms. Danius responded, “The times they are a-changing, perhaps.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The U.S. Department of Education released its long-awaited regulations for evaluating teacher preparation programs. The seven-hundred page document directs the states to establish rating systems for teacher preparation programs that take into account their graduates’ performance as teachers.  The regulations stopped short of requiring that the standards be based on standardized test scores.  As reported in The Washington Post:

“The U.S. Education Department published regulations Wednesday governing programs that prepare new K-12 teachers, a long-delayed effort meant to ensure that graduates emerge ready for the nation’s classrooms.

The new regulations, at least five years in the making, require each state to issue annual ratings for teacher-prep programs within their borders. The ratings aim to serve as a snapshot of how novice educators perform after graduation, offering prospective teachers and school district recruiters a more accurate picture of which programs are successful at producing strong educators and which are not.

Obama administration officials and reform-minded advocacy groups also hope the ratings prod training programs — long criticized as cash cows for universities that produce ill-prepared candidates — to improve.

“The system we have for training teachers lacks rigor, is out of step with the times, and is given to extreme grade inflation that leaves teachers unprepared and their future students at risk,” former education secretary Arne Duncan wrote this month in an open letter to U.S. college presidents. Duncan stepped down in 2015, four years after starting the Obama administration’s effort to overhaul teacher-prep regulations.

Consequences for poorly rated training programs are still years away, well into the next president’s administration. Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality — a nonprofit that has led the push for teacher-prep reform — said neither major-party candidate has signaled an interest in teacher preparation, and it’s unclear how much energy the Education Department will devote to the issue in the future.

But Walsh said the new regulations are important: “I see it as a tremendous opportunity because at no other point in the history of teacher education in the United States has the field been forced to ask itself if it is really adding value, and if not, what it needs to do to change.”

The effort proceeded more slowly than the current administration anticipated, in part because of deep divisions about the role of standardized test scores in gauging the effectiveness of a new teacher — and thus the effectiveness of the training program that teacher attended.

The Education Department previously pushed for a “significant part” of ratings to come from the performance of recent graduates’ students, as measured by those students’ standardized test scores and other measures of achievement. In theory, the agency argued, a strong teacher training program should produce new teachers whose students demonstrate progress on standardized tests.

But that proposal generated a storm of criticism. It was released in 2014 amid a growing backlash against overtesting in the nation’s public schools. Teachers unions argued that test scores are often arbitrary and are an unfair metric for judging effectiveness. The American Council on Education, an association of colleges and universities, and others argued that the administration was overreaching its authority.

In the regulations, the Education Department still requires states to judge teacher training programs based on whether students are learning. But the agency pulled back from its emphasis on standardized testing as an essential measure of student achievement: The new regulations leave it up to states to decide how to measure student learning and how much that variable should count toward an overall rating.

The final regulations leave intact other key pieces of the administration’s initial proposal: Ratings must include surveys of graduates and employers as well as data on how many of the program’s alumni get hired into their chosen fields and how long they stay in their jobs.

The new requirements apply to both traditional programs based at universities and alternative-certification routes, such as Teach for America.

The revisions did not mollify critics: Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said they amounted to minor tweaks that didn’t change an underlying “ludicrous” concept that training programs should be evaluated according to the academic performance of their graduates’ students.

“The regulations will punish teacher-prep programs whose graduates go on to teach in our highest-needs schools, most often those with high concentrations of students who live in poverty and English-language learners — the exact opposite strategy of what we need,” Weingarten said in a statement.

Terry Hartle of the American Council on Education said that the Education Department had dramatically underestimated the cost of complying with the rules. In 2014, California estimated that it would cost $230 million to get the system up and running and another $485 million each year to maintain; the department estimated the cost over the next decade to average out to just $27 million per year, for the entire nation.

“Teacher quality is absolutely critical to improving student performance in the classroom. The central question, however, is whether or not these regulations will help — and the answer is no,” Hartle said. “They are costly, complex, burdensome and based on only tenuous evidence that they will work.”

Some education school deans have embraced the new rules, saying they will create a way for them to get information they desperately want from school districts about the performance of their alumni.

“It’s extraordinarily useful to us because we really do want to assess the quality of our graduates’ work,” said Robert Pianta, dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia. “We’ve been seeking this information for a long time, but it’s hard to get.”

These regulations will surely be reviewed when the next president takes office in January.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Jack Greenberg, a member of the legal team for the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) died yesterday from Parkinson’s Disease.  Greenberg was born in Brooklyn, raised in the Bronx, attended Dewitt Clinton High School, and Columbia University.  He received his law degree from Columbia School of Law.   He came to prominence as a civil rights attorney because of his work with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and especially with the Brown case.  As reported in his New York Times obituary:

“Jack Greenberg, a lawyer who became one of the nation’s most effective champions of the civil rights struggle, leading the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. for 23 years and using the law as a weapon in its fight for racial justice before the United States Supreme Court, died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 91.

Mr. Greenberg was the last surviving member of a legendary civil rights legal team assembled by Thurgood Marshall, the founding director-counsel of the legal defense fund and later the first African-American Supreme Court justice.

When Mr. Marshall hired him as an assistant counsel in 1949, Mr. Greenberg was just 24 and the civil rights movement, too, was taking wing. A son of Jewish immigrants and a product of New York City, he had developed an abiding intolerance of injustice — some of it witnessed in the Navy — that propelled him into law and into Mr. Marshall’s sights.

Mr. Greenberg joined a team that, like him, was idealistic yet pragmatic, deliberate yet unafraid. Besides Mr. Marshall there were Robert L. Carter, Constance Baker Motley, Spottswood W. Robinson III and others.

Mr. Greenberg was neither the first white nor the first Jew to work for the civil rights of blacks. But he was one of the most powerful white figures in the movement in the 1960s and ’70s, a distinction that led to friction with both blacks and Jews.

Still, Mr. Greenberg helped achieve through the courts what the political system had denied Southern blacks: voting rights, equal pay for equal work, impartial juries, equal access to medical care, equal access to schools and other benefits of citizenship broadly enjoyed by whites.

The genius of his legal team, Mr. Greenberg told The New York Times in 2014, was “the ability to be creative in matters of legal and social justice.”

At 27, he helped argue two of the five cases that led to the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared an end to the “separate but equal” system of racial segregation in the public schools.

“I was a kid,” Mr. Greenberg said in the interview. “Seven lawyers argued the cases. I was one of them. Now I’m the only one still alive.”

In all, he was involved in more than 40 civil rights cases before the Supreme Court. One was Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, in which the court, ruling in 1969, hastened the integration of schools by declaring that a standard of “all deliberate speed,” established in a second Brown case, had become an excuse for delays in Mississippi and should no longer apply anywhere.”

Mr. Greenberg was awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal in 2001 by President Bill Clinton.

May he rest in peace!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump yesterday attacked House Majority Leader Paul Ryan as “weak and ineffective” and described Arizona Senator John McCain as “very foul mouthed.” In a Fox News interview with Bill O’Reilly, Trump mocked both men as disloyal to him and his candidacy.

“Paul Ryan opened borders and amnesty and bad budgets” Mr. Trump said.

On Twitter:. Trump declared himself a liberated man, “It is so nice that the shackles have been taken off me and I can now fight for America the way I want to.”

Should Mr. Trump continue deriding the leaders of the Republican Party, it could have profound consequences down the ballot, potentially depressing turnout by demoralizing the party or leading Mr. Trump’s ardent supporters to deny their votes to Republicans who abandoned him. But there is little Republicans can do to control Mr. Trump’s behavior: The party’s donors have no leverage over him, he is relying largely on small donors and, at 70, he is not mindful of any future campaign.

A New York Times article commented:

“The emerging dynamic may be especially toxic for Republicans in swing states that are also home to competitive races for the House and Senate, where the party’s candidates must choose between two unpalatable options: alienating much of their party’s base, or standing behind a nominee who is unacceptable to most mainstream voters. The voting bloc that especially concerns Republican officials are the right-of-center, college-educated voters who usually favor Republican candidates but cannot abide Mr. Trump. These voters can make up anywhere between a quarter to a third of the party’s electoral coalition.

“That voter is clearly not going to vote for Donald Trump,” said Josh Holmes, a Republican strategist who is working on several Senate races. “But if they don’t vote at all, it’s catastrophic for us.”

The nightmare possibility for the party is that swing voters punish the party because of Mr. Trump, the anti-Trump Republicans stay at home and Mr. Trump’s base casts a ballot for him and then leaves the polls. Under those conditions, Senate races in places like Pennsylvania and North Carolina could fall to Democrats, while Senate and House races in places like Missouri,

Arizona and Kansas could move to the center of the battlefield.

Already, Republicans view Mr. Trump’s sharp downturn in the presidential race as having jeopardized their majorities in Congress. A poll published on Tuesday by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal found Mr. Trump trailing Mrs. Clinton by nine percentage points nationally and drawing just 37 percent of the vote. No major-party nominee since World War II has received a smaller share of the vote. But in an illustration of the bind Republicans are in, the poll found that three-fourths of Republicans believed their candidates should stay loyal to Mr. Trump.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

My latest book, Online Education Policy and Practice:  The Past, Present, and Future of the Digital University (Routledge/Taylor & Francis), provides an in-depth look at the formation and development of online education in American colleges and universities.  Its basis is that we cannot understand the present or prepare for the future without insights into what has happened in the past. I see online education as part of the evolution of instructional technology in which college faculty and researchers played an integral role.  The book traces the beginnings of online education in the pre-1990s, and before the dawn of the ubiquitous Internet.  Over the past twenty years, we have seen the development and expansion of fully online courses and programs, blended learning, and the rise and fall of the MOOC phenomenon.  I am optimistic about the near future (next fifteen years or so) of the digital university that will see more learning analytics, adaptive learning, gaming, mobile applications, and competency-based education.  The more distant future (2030s and beyond)  is of greater concern as artificial intelligence, massive cloud computing, and brain-machine interfaces become integrated with most aspects of human endeavor including education. I believe policymakers, administrators, government and private funders interested in higher education will find a complete treatment of the past, present, and future of online education in this book. I reserve a particular place for the faculty who more than any other segment of higher education will be most affected by online education in the coming years. 

Tony

P.S:  Online Education Policy and Practice…is available at the following:

Routledge/Taylor & Francis:  https://www.routledge.com/Online-Education-Policy-and-Practice-The-Past-Present-and-Future-of/Picciano/p/book/9781138943636

Amazon.Com: https://www.amazon.com/Online-Education-Policy-Practice-University/dp/1138943630/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1476175681&sr=1-1&keywords=picciano

Barnes and Noble:  http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/online-education-policy-and-practice-anthony-g-picciano/1122554025?ean=978113

Dear Commons Community,

Last night was an ugly evening for Americans as they watched nastiness between the two candidates most of which was instigated by Donald Trump. As the New York Times editorial today stated:  Trump went “low” in his attacks and most of the debate stayed there.  I did not find either candidate inspirational as the person I would look up to as the leader of our country but Hillary at least could put together coherent comments about policy.  Trump proved once again that he cannot and lambasted her even threatened to put her in jail if he is elected.

Hillary Clinton presented herself as calm most of the evening although she appeared a bit ill at ease over Trump’s comments about her deleted emails.  She fumbled over a wikileaks question that she says one thing in public and something else in private.     She also suggested that Trump and the audience go to her website to fact-check a number of points that Trump made – perhaps doing this a few too many times.

Trump paced around the stage, interrupted a lot, criticized the moderators, and had breathing problems again while speaking into the microphone.  However, he did better than in the first debate, appealed to his base, and stopped the bleeding for his campaign which resulted from tapes that emerged on Friday about how he treats women.

For me the winner of the evening was Carl Becker,  a member of the audience,  who asked the last question of the candidates:  Name one thing positive thing that you respect the other candidate for?   Clinton mentioned Trump’s children and how they have grown up.  Trump referred to Clinton as a fighter who doesn’t quit or give up.

And it continues!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

As Donald Trump’s candidacy falls apart with the latest revelations of his misogynist comments, it is looking better and better for Hillary Clinton to be the first woman president of the United States.  Barring some major misstep on her part, the odds are much in her favor of winning the presidency.  But what does this mean for the country. It may mean that the dysfunction that has crippled much of our national political system will continue.  New York Times columnist, Frank Bruni, examines this scenario in his column this morning.

“Perhaps something extraordinary will happen in the second debate, or in the third. Maybe there’s some other surprise in the offing. Barring that, it really does look and feel as if Hillary Clinton is wrapping this thing up. I expect that on Nov. 9, the morning after the vote, we’ll be talking about the election of the first female president of the world’s most powerful nation.

And we’ll be breathing an epic sigh of relief: that Donald Trump isn’t bound for the White House; that the ugliness of the campaign is at last behind us.

But oh, the ugliness still ahead.

Trump isn’t going anywhere, nor are his provocations. It was the birther conspiracy yesterday; it will be something else tomorrow. And Clinton isn’t trading war for peace. Her presidency, should it indeed happen, will be a battle royal. The circumstances surrounding it are as politically daunting and inhospitable to accomplishment as those facing any of her predecessors over the last half-century.

Let’s start with Congress, which can play partner or spoiler in a president’s legislative agenda. As much of a drag as Trump may be on some House Republicans seeking a new term, the G.O.P. is still predicted to retain its majority in the House, because that majority is its largest in more than eight decades.

“Democrats are likely to gain seats, just not the 30 they need for the majority,” said Nathan Gonzales, the editor and publisher of the Rothenberg & Gonzales Political Report, a nonpartisan newsletter that tracks congressional races, among others.

And nearly all of the seats that Republicans are projected to lose, he said, are those of relatively moderate lawmakers. It’s not the hyper-conservative members of the Freedom Caucus who are on the run. They’re from safely Republican districts. They’re fine. They’ll be back — and, proportionally, they’ll be a bigger, more forceful presence among the Republicans remaining in the House.”

Bruni concludes:

“If Election Day saves us from a Trump presidency, it won’t rescue us from the forces that have given him such currency: crippling partisanship, intense polarization, aversion to compromise. Disaster will be averted; dysfunction will carry on.”

Bruni might be right but if Hillary can stake out a compromise course similar to her husband during his presidency, it might not be as bad as it seems.  Bill Clinton was able to compromise with some tough Republicans like Newt Gingrich, and the country was the better for it.  

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Lisa Coico, the president of the City College of New York resigned yesterday, a day after the New York Times contacted officials with questions about her administration’s handling of more than $150,000 of her personal expenses.  As reported by the Times:

“Ms. Coico’s resignation is effective immediately, said James B. Milliken, chancellor of the City University of New York, the college’s parent body, in a statement. She will be replaced temporarily by Mary Driscoll, the college’s new interim provost, pending the appointment of an interim president at the next meeting of the university’s board of trustees, which is set for Oct. 26.

The Times had been investigating whether Ms. Coico’s expenses were accurately recorded, or whether some had been postdated. The Times presented its findings to officials on Thursday, and by late Friday, Ms. Coico had submitted her resignation.

In a statement on Friday, she announced that she was stepping down but did not give an explanation.

Ms. Coico — along with the 21st Century Foundation, a nonprofit affiliated with the college — is currently under investigation as part of a federal inquiry into her finances and the use of federal research grants.

A federal subpoena was issued shortly after The Times reported that the foundation had paid for some of Ms. Coico’s personal expenses, including furniture and fruit baskets, when she took office in 2010. The foundation was then reimbursed not by Ms. Coico, as some college officials had urged, but by the Research Foundation of the City University of New York, which manages research funds for the entire system. That arrangement raised concerns among some experts on government and nonprofit ethics because there are usually strict guidelines for how federal money is used.

Ms. Coico has maintained that there was no “inappropriate use” of college funds and, in letters to faculty and students, has said that she asked all relevant employees to “cooperate fully” with prosecutors.

A spokeswoman for Robert L. Capers, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, which is handling the federal investigation, declined to comment, citing office policy.

The scope of the federal inquiry is unclear. But numerous college officials received a letter in July saying that they “must preserve, and may not alter,” documents related to Ms. Coico, her family, the 21st Century Foundation and the research foundation, such as annual financial statements and annual filings with the Internal Revenue Service and the office of the New York attorney general, dating to when Ms. Coico took office.

Ms. Coico arrived with much fanfare as the first CUNY alumna to serve the president of City College, which was established in 1847. A former provost at Temple University with a background in microbiology and immunology, she was chosen to lead an ambitious expansion of the college’s science programs, and to continue the strong fund-raising that had become the hallmark of one of her predecessors, Gregory H. Williams.

A sad ending to a distinguished career.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

On our last full day in London, we decided to stay close by and went to Exhibition Road and spent several hours at the Museum of Natural History and the Science Museum.  After lunch at the Queens Arms, a favorite pub of college students, we went to the Museum of Natural History.  Originally part of the British Museum,  the Museum’s buildings and grounds are impressive.  It is similar in many ways to New York’s Museum of Natural History with a massive collection and scores of exhibits.  The dinosaur, mammal, and ocean life (blue whale) exhibits were the most popular.   An animatronic T-Rex moves and roars and had the children screaming. A new Charles Darwin Center in an eight-story “Cocoon” focuses on biodiversity.

The Science Museum founded in 1851, has a number of exhibits on energy, space, agriculture, and the information age.  It also has a number of hands-on activities popular with children.  I enjoyed especially the information age exhibits including a model of Charles Babbage’s difference engine which he designed but was never able to build because of the limitations of the technology of the 1820s.  There is also the Pilot ACE (Automatic Computing Engine) designed by Alan Turing, and one of the first computers built in the United Kingdom.

Tomorrow we pack and head back to New York.

Tony

Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2

Alan Turing’s Pilot ACE (Automatic Computing Engine)