In their first days at Johns Hopkins, students start to develop connections and the ideas that can lead to world-changing discussions. To foster that, the First-Year Orientation Committee swapped the single book “common read” for a Common Question that sparks intellectual discussions and builds stronger ties between students and faculty. This year’s question, “What is the common good?,” is linked to the COVID-19 pandemic, political uprisings, Black Lives Matter, and each student’s journey.
“New students have spent much of their lives being rewarded for the right answer,” says Anne-Elizabeth Brodsky, a senior lecturer in the Expository Writing Program and faculty director of the Common Question. “This helps them structure a process of inquiry when there is no right answer.”
The question is being examined across the Krieger School, the Whiting School of Engineering, and Peabody. Several hundred students joined the first virtual seminar with Rigoberto Hernandez, the Gompf Family Professor in the Department of Chemistry, and Linda DeLibero from the Film and Media Studies Program, that kicked off with Bloomberg Distinguished Associate Professor Vesla Weaver’s police brutality research and Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” song.
“This question is involved in the kind of issues our students are wrestling with,” says Hernandez. “I want them to have an experience that will be transformative, even if they’re not here in person.”
The dialogue continues all year. More than 120 professors and instructors will host Common Question Conversations with small groups of students. The diverse sessions range from government funding for the National Science Foundation to the atomic origins of climate science to the zombie movie Shaun of the Dead. In spring, the Alumni Association will host small conversations between several Hopkins graduates and current students. All to one goal: helping first-year students see their education as a lived, intellectual experience.
Some were disappointed but certainly no one was surprised when university leadership announced that all undergraduate classes and activities would be online for the fall semester due to concerns about the spread of COVID-19.
After hoping for a hybrid semester, where some courses would be offered online and others in person, following safety protocol from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, faculty members had to pivot to making their courses remote, yet maintain the same level of student engagement.
“Even as we talked extensively about how to make limited in-person instruction and other activities possible this fall, we knew there were aspects of those plans and decisions that were far beyond our control,” says Stephen Gange, executive vice provost for academic affairs and one of the leaders of the university’s operational responses to COVID-19.
John Toscano, interim dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, worked with faculty, staff, and school administrators to begin building out technologically wired studios on and off campus, enabling faculty members to teach in new ways. The Krieger School established 30 wired studios, including 16 that are located off campus.
“It’s obviously true that this semester did not begin as we had hoped,” says Toscano. “But our experts worked around the clock to implement innovative technologies to give faculty and students effective platforms to meet in virtual spaces.”
The semester kicked off on August 23 with the university’s first-ever digital convocation ceremony for first-year and transfer students. It featured musical performances by student groups, speeches from faculty members and university leaders, and a virtual journey around the world as students were welcomed to the Hopkins family.
Classes started on August 31, and by mid-September online courses were up and running with no more than a few hiccups.
Doug Barrick, professor and chair of the Department of Biophysics, said he wasn’t sure at first what to expect with teaching from one of the new studios, which allow instructors to broadcast class sessions using state-of-the-art equipment rather than relying on ad hoc home studios.
“Standing in front of a large screen that shows 25 students in gallery mode lets me interact with them much better than I would have guessed and much better than I can do with my laptop,” says Barrick. “I can read their facial expressions, tell when they are confused, and also tell when they have gotten it. And students are more engaged and interactive than I expected. Surprisingly, after class I have at least 25 students—a full screen, there are 53 students total—hanging around for five to 10 minutes to ask questions and discuss answers. That level of discussion doesn’t usually happen in my in-person classes.”
Aliza Watters, a lecturer in the Expository Writing Program, says she, too, was unsure of how the remote studios would work.
“I am not tech-savvy by any stretch, and yet it was straightforward to make happen, and also awesome to see my students on a big screen,” says Watters. “My students loved seeing me in an actual classroom, on campus. I’d suspected as much, because they are first-years, but the whole exchange felt at once more intimate and more professional.”
“People believe that American democracy is always moving forward,” says Robert Lieberman. “They have a sense the trajectory has always been forward. It turns out that’s not true.”
In fact, challenges to the “four pillars” of American democracy by those in power and those wanting that power have sometimes moved our political system backward, says Lieberman, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in the Department of Political Science.
Spurred by the results of the 2016 presidential election, Lieberman and Suzanne Mettler, of Cornell University, detail when those challenges most seriously put America’s system of government at risk in Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy.
The book suggests that the four pillars upon which an effective democratic government rests are: free and fair elections; obedience to the rule of law; a legitimate opposition that provides a healthy challenge to the party in power; and a government that protects important rights. These include the freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of the press; civil liberties such as equal opportunities for education, housing, and jobs; and voting rights.
The four serious threats to these pillars, according to the book, are: political polarization; conflict over who belongs in the political community; high and rising levels of economic inequality; and “executive aggrandizement,” the growing unchecked power of the nation’s chief executive. The book details how America faced combinations of these threats five times in its 244-year history.
The first time, in the late 1790s, featured an extreme level of political polarization fueled by bitter animosity between the country’s two major political parties. The fracture was so bad, for example, that Republicans and Federalists held competing Fourth of July parades, with one celebrating the Declaration of Independence and the other focusing on the Constitution.
In the 1930s (with Franklin Roosevelt) and again in the 1970s (with Richard Nixon), a president who sought to greatly expand his power and use it unchecked by Congress put the American democracy at risk, the authors write.
While those incidents were marked by a single threat, three threats were present in the 1850s and again in the 1890s. The 1850s were marked by a political divide so extreme that a member of the House of Representatives physically attacked a member of the U.S. Senate in the Senate chamber. During this period, a growing disparity between rich and poor and the ongoing conflict over whether Blacks should be counted as part of a state’s population and if Black men could vote combined to threaten democracy.
Following Reconstruction, a time when more than 2,000 Blacks were elected to public office, including 16 in the Congress, growing political polarization, racism, and economic inequality rose to the forefront.
Lieberman says both he and Mettler have written extensively about 20th-century American history. But during their research, they came across facts they had not known or had forgotten, he says.
“Like the Whiskey Rebellion,” he says, pointing to the uprising in southwestern Pennsylvania against the 1791 federal excise tax on distilled spirits that was brutally quelled by the U.S. Army. “Can you imagine, the president of the United States (George Washington) on horseback leading troops against American citizens?”
There was also the November day in 1898 when whites in North Carolina “would turn back decades of progress in the city (of Wilmington),” according to Lieberman. An armed mob burned down the offices of the city’s Black-owned newspaper, killed hundreds of residents of Black neighborhoods, and forced members of the biracial city government to resign, replaced by white men they had chosen beforehand.
“That is an amazing story,” Lieberman says. “The coup in Wilmington was just that, a coup.”
The book contends that unlike those past five instances, today for the first time in its history, all four threats to American democracy are present. “Decades of the ascendance of the four threats gave rise to the candidacy of Donald Trump, a political neophyte seemingly ignorant of and uninterested in public policy and the process of governance,” the authors write.
“It’s not a Trump book. It’s a book about the conditions that gave rise to the Trump presidency. Donald Trump and the Trump presidency are symptoms of a deeper challenge to American democracy.”
—Robert Lieberman
Following Trump’s election, Lieberman and Mettler, long-time friends, joined two faculty members at Cornell University and another at Swarthmore College to form the American Democracy Collaborative. Ideas for the book grew out of this collaborative.
In addition to input from the collaborative and his Hopkins colleagues, Lieberman credits feedback from the students in his 2019 seminar on “The Future of American Democracy” and those in the Program on Social Policy. “Supersmart, energetic, talented undergrads. They were incredibly helpful,” he says.
He says feedback from faculty, students, and others often included the question, “How do we get out of this?” It is a difficult one to answer, he says. America survived its five earlier crises at a cost of reinforcing or restoring racial hierarchies and imposing limits on the political community. That cannot be acceptable this time, the authors note.
“Something that gives me optimism is the Black Lives Matter marches,” Lieberman says, pointing to the numerous protests around the country last summer at locations often not directly associated with recent racial injustice. “There’s a glimmer of hope, a possibility of something changing.”
In this video, part of SNF Agora Conversations: Election 2020, authors Suzanne Mettler and Robert C. Lieberman map out five times in U.S. history that our democracy was in serious crisis, and they identify four characteristics of democratic disruption.
Jessica Marie Johnson’s research stretches across the Atlantic, travels back and forth in time, and traverses analog and digital space.
An assistant professor of history at the Krieger School, Johnson maintains a sprawling range of ongoing research into the history of slavery and the nature of Black lives. Since coming to Hopkins in 2016, Johnson’s innovations in digital humanities have girded her understanding of how African American women have lived and envisioned what freedom might look like.
Johnson’s methods have also fully engaged her students in research that attempts to answer questions of race and rebellion. Foremost among her works in progress is Life x Code: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure, which she says is a research project designed to get Hopkins history students comfortable with using new technologies to mine historical data.
Started last fall, Life x Code (“We pronounce it ‘life code,’ but throw the ‘x’ in there,” Johnson says with a laugh) has already sent a quartet of budding Hopkins historians out into the field to explore matters regarding race and society.
It’s a way to bring graduate students into the field of digital humanities. And it represents one aspect of social justice work.”
—Jessica Marie Johnson
As they explore a range of Black historical subjects, students learn how to use platforms such as StoryMaps, which helps them turn images, narration, and a timeline into a compelling visual story; Omeka, a free and open-source platform that makes it easy to turn online digital collections into exhibits; and Twine, which allows for interactive storytelling.
Christina Thomas, a Hopkins doctoral student who also manages the Life x Code program, is currently at work on several projects, including one involving a nearly 200-year-old Methodist congregation in West Baltimore. Her goal is to put analog church records online, and then create a historical documentary from interviews with church leaders and parishioners. Eventually, the video will be shown on YouTube, she hopes.
“Church elders are looking for ways to share their stories and to broadcast them,” adds Johnson. “We really need to preserve these community perspectives.”
Johnson’s efforts expand beyond campus. Hopkins and several other universities have put digital tech to work on transcribing and digitizing 19th-century ads offering bounties for runaway slaves. Students then add in other digital content to give a fuller picture of slave life.
Johnson’s schedule has been chock-full lately. Besides winning a Johns Hopkins Diversity Award earlier this year, her book—Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World—was published this summer by the University of Pennsylvania Press.
Yet, Life x Code represents her research focus most compellingly.
“In a broad sense, it’s about filling gaps and making space for populations that have been overlooked and marginalized,” Johnson says. “It’s a way to bring graduate students into the field of digital humanities. And it represents one aspect of social justice work. It ties in with my goal of using digital-humanities teaching to inspire research into how we can overthrow racist systems.”
Bust of Tethys on a marine background, 3rd century; one of the mosaics students researched. [Image: Baltimore Museum of Art]
Life was good in the ancient city of Antioch. People prospered in this cosmopolitan corner of what is now southeastern Turkey on the Syrian border, enjoying a lively mix of languages, religions, and cultures. Art flourished—most notably the large mosaics that covered the floors of homes and public institutions.
But those were the good old days of the fifth century. By the early 500s, a fire and two earthquakes set off a long period of decline. The mosaics sat buried under layers of silt.
In the 1930s, an international team of archaeologists began excavating the old city, uncovering more than 300 mosaics. As allowed by international law, institutions sponsoring the excavations—including the Baltimore Museum of Art near Johns Hopkins’ Homewood campus—took possession of the art.
In 2000, an ambitious exhibit brought many of the mosaics back together for the first time, recreating some of the original context of the pieces and sparking renewed interest in the city and its time period. It also gave Jennifer Stager, assistant professor in the Department of History of Art, the idea for a course, held for the first time in spring 2020.
Titled The Antioch Recovery Project, the course was part of the Krieger School’s Classics Research Lab, an experimental pedagogical model marked by collaboration and the opportunity for students to contribute to a long-term stream of research. Students take on segments of a faculty member’s research as their own, sharing their findings with peers and bringing new discoveries to light.
Stager’s original plan was to focus on digitally reconstructing some of the houses. But the course quickly took a much broader turn as students brought specialized knowledge from their majors to the table: A Peabody student studied the mosaics’ acoustic properties, for example, while a math major looked at the mathematics and recurring patterns within the designs of the nonfigural mosaics. Stager invited guest lecturers to share their expertise by Zoom, and colleagues such as Jennifer Kingsley, associate teaching professor and director of the Program in Museums and Society, provided context.
Together, students Ella Gonzalez and Maya Kahane tackled the creation of an online map showing where each of the mosaics is located now. Using the ArcGIS mapping software recently made world-famous by Johns Hopkins’ interactive map of the coronavirus spread, the students tracked every piece to its current institution, along with the path it took to get there.
“We wanted to explore more about where the mosaics are and why did they get there, and the object journey. They each have a story to tell,” says Gonzalez, a second-year history of art doctoral student.
The map is available to anyone, can be edited and updated, and is intended to evolve. It adds an important set of data to existing knowledge about the mosaics, which play an underappreciated role in our understanding of both history and art, says Kahane ’20 BA/MA, History of Art. Falling outside the more familiar categories of painting and sculpture, she says they offer information that is sometimes overlooked.
“One intent was investigating how one should see these mosaics,” she says. “Categorizing them, and showing they’re also a really important facet to understand the history of Antioch, and therefore the art history of that time period.”
The course’s format was a vital part of the learning process. “We had a lab space, and everybody gets a key. That in itself creates a different sense of a space that you’re using to work on a project together and that has goals that are iterative, and as a student, your intellectual expertise contributes to those goals,” Stager says.
“We have long felt that it was important for young people, really across the board, but especially for Black people to be able to find not just affirming representations of themselves in literature, but also really to just up their broad historical literacy about the Black experience in the United States.”
“If we don’t take drastic measures soon, many, many more millions of people are going to be in dire straits. If we don’t act fast, if we don’t pass legislation to put money in people’s pockets so they can pay their bills, society is really going to suffer. And I would want to emphasize that it’s not even about helping individual people that drives this. It’s that society doesn’t function when people are so impoverished and desperate.”
“The choice is between dying quietly without the world noticing, or dying with dignity with the world noticing, and at the same time creating the chance of causing some damage to the people who kill Hong Kong.”
Explores the relationships between science and industry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, illustrated by the career of the “father of plastics.”
Kali-Ahset Amen, Assistant Research Professor, Sociology, Associate Director, Billie Holiday Project for Liberation Arts
I just turned the last page on Toni Morrison’s beautiful and concise novel Home. A Homeric story of a hero’s return to the small town that reared him, Home is like blues music with binding and a spine. I knew that Morrison’s lush storytelling, celebrating ordinary Black families, would grant me comfort for these uncertain times. Her characters always feel like family to me. I find their courage and humble triumphs uplifting. I have felt beleaguered lately by the loss of so many precious lives to COVID-19 and police-involved killing. But as I do every few years, I made my way back to Morrison because I knew she would have the right treatment to soothe my soul: a dose of simple beauty and a blunt reminder to stay the loving course. For life and loss are one. This, too, shall pass.
Hanna Pickard, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, Philosophy
Sometimes you read a book that changes how you think about something entirely and irrevocably. Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights did that for me. It is a raw and brilliant book, written by Juno Mac and Molly Smith, two sex workers and feminist theorists. I had grown up on feminist theory that argues for the criminalization of the buying of sex—if not the selling of it. While not flinching from exposing the wrongs of a world where men buy sex and women live in conditions that push them to sell it, Mac and Smith show why this orthodoxy is not just theoretically flawed but totally fails sex workers themselves, who—like all workers—are owed labor rights, plain and simple. This is a revolutionary book.
Marc Kamionkowski, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor, Physics and Astronomy
I just finished reading Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America by John M. Barry, the author who wrote The Great Influenza, which everybody is reading now. I read The Great Influenza in2011,when I came to Hopkins, as a friend told me it began with a history of the early years of Johns Hopkins University. The current pandemic reminded me of that book, and I learned about this other book by Barry. Rising Tide, about a major historical event that I knew nothing about, weaves together an array of stories about the Mississippi River and the flood. It deals with natural forces and engineering, race relations, politics, and the South. The flood displaced millions of Americans from their homes, accelerated the migration of African Americans to the North, and helped Herbert Hoover win the White House.
For the past eight-plus months, since the coronavirus arrived in the United States, various words and phrases have become a regular part of our lexicon: flattening the curve, unprecedented times, the new normal, social distancing, and of course—the ubiquitous Zoom meeting. One word that I have not heard quite as much but that I have witnessed a great deal of at Johns Hopkins is resilience.
I was named interim dean of the Krieger School in February, when we were just starting to hear about the coronavirus. Once the decision was made to move undergraduate courses online in the middle of the spring semester, we all had to make a major pivot. Students had to move out of their dorms, professors had to implement new teaching modalities, and staff members had to arrange to work from home—all so that we could continue our critical missions of teaching, discovery, and creating new knowledge in a safe manner.
It wasn’t easy, and I was continuously impressed by the patience, hard work, dedication, and yes, resilience of the Hopkins community. The uncertainty of COVID-19 combined with family and professional obligations left many feeling anxious and worried about the future. Individually and collectively we had no choice but to find our way forward. Krieger School faculty and staff worked tirelessly to achieve as seamless a transition as possible, and our undergraduate and graduate students resolutely rose to the challenge.
Although we spent the early days of summer beginning to plan for a hybrid model of learning for the fall 2020 semester (part online and part in person), the scientific evidence made it clear by early August that the safest path was to keep all undergraduate education online again. And so we set forth with the aim to employ innovative technologies to deliver an engaging and challenging Hopkins educational experience. You can read about some of our efforts in this issue.
Research, discovery, and evidence-based science—these have always been the foundation of Johns Hopkins. We will continue to pursue them during this time of uncertainty. We will continue to persevere. And we will continue to be resilient.
It might seem difficult to recall now, as we endure the era of COVID-19 and other crises, that during the 2014 midterm elections another virus played a pivotal role in national politics.
Ebola had made its way to the U.S. via an infected Liberian man who had traveled to Texas, something reported and amplified with gusto by the news media. Though Ebola posed a small threat to the U.S.—one that would ultimately result in only four stateside cases—the virus achieved heavy rotation in the 24/7 news cycle, exciting the public and enticing some political candidates to transmogrify its weak presence into a strong threat in the U.S.
Last year, that scenario drew the attention of a scientist at Johns Hopkins.
What impact, wondered Filipe Campante, the Bloomberg Distinguished Associate Professor of International Economics at the Krieger School and at SAIS, did the stoking of emotions during Ebola’s brief history in the U.S. have on the elections?
Campante, a political economist, and two co-authors offered an answer in a working paper published in March called “The Virus of Fear: The Political Impact of Ebola in the U.S.” The trio explored how Republican politicians tied a fear of Ebola to other anxieties of the electorate, such as immigration and terrorism, and accused Democrats, particularly President Barack Obama, of responding weakly to the virus.
The gambit seems to have worked: An increase of one standard deviation in voter concern about Ebola, the researchers found, was enough to reduce votes for as many as 40 Democrats running for Congressional seats, including 15 won by Republicans.
“It’s clear, anecdotally, that politicians were using Ebola to create fear,” says Campante, a native of Rio de Janeiro who came to Johns Hopkins from Harvard in 2018. “The challenge for us was to find data that supported that hypothesis. In the past, economists have developed evidence in the lab showing the strong role emotions can play in voting behavior, such as making voters more conservative. We decided to pick through survey and voter data to measure the effects Ebola had on the actual election and to learn whether Republicans had used it strategically in their campaigns.”
Campante and partners say that Ebola and the 2014 elections were good targets for scientific inquiry. They represented a “pure fear shock”—one relatively untainted by other factors, such as an economic downturn—that GOP candidates used to tap into voter anxiety. “Some candidates tied that fear to other perceived threats from outside, like immigrants.”
Fear works as a campaign strategy when it is tied to something that is meaningful to voters.”
—Filipe Campante
Though published, the paper is still being honed for a second publication, with the three researchers retesting their data and conclusions, as well as investigating whether Democrats used Ebola to call for stronger national health policies.
So, is there any connection, politically speaking, to make between Ebola and COVID-19, during yet another election year?
“There are too many other variables and effects—the economy, cultural issues—with COVID-19 that we’d have to sort out,” Campante says. “But that doesn’t mean pols aren’t putting some fearmongering to work now.”
