All presidents shade the truth, spin, dissemble, over-promise, or outright lie at times. Sometimes they lie to protect national security or to hide embarrassing personal conduct. 

But with just four weeks until Election Day, as President Donald Trump himself faces down the coronavirus that has killed 209,000 Americans, a long-building lack of credibility with a majority of the public may be his biggest weakness. 

Only 34% of American adults believe President Trump has relayed truthful information about the virus, according to a Reuters-Ipsos poll taken after his own diagnosis was revealed last Friday. 

Mixed messages coming from White House officials, including Mr. Trump’s chief of staff and physician, muddied public perceptions about the president’s own health status early in his three-day stay at Walter Reed Medical Center. Dr. Sean Conley, the White House physician, later acknowledged that he withheld certain specifics to lift the president’s spirits.  

By Monday evening, Mr. Trump had made a triumphal return to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, despite an acknowledgment from Dr. Conley that he “may not entirely be out of the woods yet.” The White House has its own medical unit, staffed 24/7, the doctor noted to reporters as he defended the decision to allow the president to go home. 

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump tweeted that he was “looking forward” to debating Democratic nominee Joe Biden in Miami on Oct. 15, the latest sign of a president projecting good health, and that he’s eager to return to the campaign trail.

Nearly four years into the Trump presidency, chronic credibility challenges have made the president’s health situation – and larger public messaging around the pandemic – all the more potentially destabilizing. From misstating the crowd size on Inauguration Day to claims that Mexico will pay for the wall on the U.S. southern border, Mr. Trump has racked up thousands of false statements, some merely comical or obvious exaggeration, others more consequential. 

As a showman and salesman, Mr. Trump can be excused some hyperbole and imprecision, his defenders say. But there can be larger consequences to feeding the American people a steady diet of false or misleading claims, intentionally or not – including potentially leading the public not to believe the president during an emergency such as a 9/11-style attack, communications experts say. 

“In past presidencies, there was a presumption that what you were being told was at least accurate, even if incomplete,” says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “The presumption has now shifted to doubting everything that one is told.”

An atomized media environment already marked by political polarization, disinformation, and freewheeling social media has made efforts to keep the public accurately informed all the more difficult. 

A mutual distrust between the White House and its press corps can also lead to misfires. 

“The messaging around Trump’s health wasn’t as crisp as it could have been because [officials] didn’t know who they could trust,” says a GOP strategist regularly briefed on White House and campaign strategy. “They felt it would be irresponsible to give out too much information, because it could be misinterpreted.” 

Still, in the presidency – the American institution with the biggest megaphone on the planet – perhaps the most precious commodity of all is credibility. 

“There are three keys to credibility,” Republican strategist Whit Ayres says he tells clients. “Never defend the indefensible, never deny the undeniable, and never lie.”

Anyone who violates one of those guidelines, much less two or three, will destroy their credibility, Mr. Ayres says. He points to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top epidemiologist, and Republican Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio as public figures with “enormous credibility and resulting popularity” – both examples of how it’s possible to maintain credibility during a pandemic. 

It’s also essential, Mr. Ayres says, to remain fact-based when making highly consequential decisions, such as whether or how to reopen the economy and schools before a vaccine becomes widely available. 

The vaccine question itself has become politicized as Mr. Trump urges government approval of a vaccine by Election Day. On Tuesday, the Food and Drug Administration released tough new guidelines for the emergency release of a coronavirus vaccine, which are designed to boost public confidence in the vaccine – but will make it unlikely that a vaccine is released before Election Day. The White House had reportedly blocked the new guidelines for two weeks. 

Mr. Trump’s push for a vaccine, under Operation Warp Speed, has met with growing skepticism by the American public. An NBC News/Survey Monkey poll released in mid-September showed only 39% of Americans said they would be willing to get the vaccine, down from 44% the month before. 

“This White House has been challenged from the beginning on its credibility,” says Martha Joynt Kumar, a political scientist who has observed White House operations from inside the building’s press quarters for decades. “It’s a sad situation that people believe they can’t believe a president.” 

“There appears to be little understanding of the difference between President Trump and the presidency as an institution,” adds Ms. Kumar, an emeritus professor at Towson University in Maryland. “The White House staff is responsible to the presidency as an institution, not just to Donald Trump.” 

Mr. Trump’s decades running privately held businesses that don’t answer to shareholders have likely fed his impulse as president to treat White House staff the same way – as employees loyal only to him and not as public servants, she suggests.

That said, among White House staff there’s frustration that some information about infections within the building was not reported in a timely manner. Some staff have become infected themselves, as have some members of the press corps. Mask-wearing is now more common within the White House, but still not universal, staff say. 

Mr. Trump himself still sets the tone on the mask question. Upon his return to the White House on Monday, he pulled his mask away from his face and entered the building, maskless, with staff standing nearby.

Staff writer Story Hinckley contributed to this report. 

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Anti-abortion activists demonstrate at the Supreme Court in Washington, Oct. 5, 2020, as the justices begin a new term without the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. If confirmed by the Senate, Amy Coney Barrett would mark the culmination of efforts by the conservative Christian legal movement to move from the fringe of the legal world to the mainstream.

Before she joined 100 fellow law students at the Blackstone Legal Fellowship, Leah Boyd, now a practicing attorney in Amarillo, Texas, felt discouraged and hopeless in her first year of law school.

These were the people who were going to be shaping the laws and the culture in the United States, she said in a 2015 video promoting the fellowship, “and they have absolutely no moral compass.”

“Just to know that I was not alone was encouraging, and helped me to not give up,” she added.

The Blackstone fellowship, organized for 20 years by the nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom, aims to train Christian lawyers to “foster legal systems that fully protect our God-given rights.” The program’s student and teacher alumni now include dozens of law clerks, a U.S. senator, and at least six federal judges – most notably Judge Amy Coney Barrett, who could soon become the youngest member of the U.S Supreme Court.

The reach of the ADF and other conservative Christian legal organizations is further still. If Judge Barrett is confirmed, it would represent a culmination of decadeslong efforts by the conservative Christian legal movement to move from the periphery of the legal world into the mainstream. And it is coming at the same time that fewer Americans – just 65% – identify themselves as Christian.

The ADF is one of several richly funded conservative Christian legal organizations (CCLOs) that constitute that movement, training lawyers, arguing – and winning – high-profile religious liberty cases in the courts, and increasing their influence on policy and politics. That movement is now reaching maturity, and law in the U.S. is thus poised to shift – starting perhaps as soon as the Supreme Court term that began this week – substantially toward favoring religious liberty over all other rights, legal experts say.

Indeed, among the movement’s stated goals is the protection of free exercise of religion as a fundamental right above all others. Such a shift in the law could prompt the diminishment of other rights, such as abortion access and same-sex marriage. CCLO attorneys, for their part, say that they just want to ensure that courts give religious beliefs the respect and protection they deserve.

“True tolerance, where people of different views and faiths can peacefully coexist ­­– that is ultimately what we’re advocating for,” says Matt Sharp, senior counsel for the ADF.  

Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/Sipa USA/AP/File

John Bursch, of the Alliance Defending Freedom, addresses the press outside the Supreme Court in Washington on Oct. 8, 2019, after oral arguments for R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that it was illegal for businesses to fire employees on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation.

Judge Barrett, a former professor at Notre Dame Law School whom President Donald Trump appointed to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2017, is expected to begin her confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court next week. A devout Roman Catholic, she has no direct affiliations with any CCLOs, and in her brief time on the 7th Circuit she has not developed a deep record on religious liberty or other rights, like abortion and same-sex marriage, with which it has often conflicted.

If confirmed, she would join a conservative high court that has been incrementally expanding free exercise protections along with other rights that conservative Christians see as limiting their religious freedom.

CCLOs began to form around this issue decades ago, says Jordan Sekulow, executive director of another leading Christian legal organization, the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ). The establishment clause in the First Amendment, which prohibits the establishment of religion by Congress, “had basically eaten the free exercise of religion away.”

“It shouldn’t be more important than any other First Amendment right, but it was trampled on,” he adds. “And I wouldn’t say it’s come back.”

Outsiders to insiders

The rise of CCLOs was prompted by, and modeled on, the successes of progressive groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF).

“In the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s, it was very much a story of progressive religious impulses that held political sway,” says Laura Olson, a political scientist at Clemson University who researches religion and politics.

While the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s group successfully lobbied for civil rights legislation like the Voting Rights Act, the NAACP LDF won a series of court cases beginning in the 1930s that led to the high court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling that ended racial segregation in public schools.

The conservative religious movement began in the late 1970s and ’80s as a reaction to what it saw as an erosion of traditional family values and government intrusion on religion – most notably to end racial segregation in Christian schools. But groups like Jerry Falwell Sr.’s Moral Majority still struggled to break into Washington’s elite circles.

“They’ve been outsiders to the mainstream of the conservative legal movement,” says Joshua Wilson, a political scientist at the University of Denver who studies the Christian conservative movement.

So, he adds, “they developed their own institutions and resources to make a parallel conservative Christian movement.”

Conservative legal groups like the ADF, ACLJ, the Becket Fund, the First Liberty Institute, and the Thomas More Society were all formed in the 1990s.

Most of these groups are tax-exempt 501(c)3 nonprofits, and thus not required to publicly identify donors. But they are well funded, with the ADF raising almost $61 million, the ACLJ almost $23 million, and the Becket Fund almost $7 million, according to their most recent 12-month tax-filing period. (For comparison, Lambda Legal, a national nonprofit that advocates for LGBTQ rights, raised just over $17 million in the 12 months of its most recent tax filing.)  

And unlike their common opponents on the left, conservative Christian legal groups have always focused entirely on religious liberty issues.

“They have a longing for what religious liberty protections were before 1990,” says Katherine Franke, a professor at Columbia Law School and founder-director of the school’s Law, Rights and Religion Project.

“They’re trying to have the courts reread the Constitution in a way that elevates religious liberty rights over all other individual rights, as well as the public interest.”

“Positive change”

Some of the Supreme Court’s more conservative justices agree. This week, in a short opinion declining to hear a case related to same-sex marriage, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito criticized Obergefell v. Hodges, the court’s 2015 ruling legalizing same-sex marriage, as having “ruinous consequences for religious liberty” by “choosing to privilege a novel constitutional right.”

The court’s recent grappling with religious liberty claims has focused primarily on two issues: religious institutions’ ability to access state funding, and religious individuals’ ability to exercise their beliefs around sexual norms in public life and in their private business.

For the most part, the court has narrowly favored religious liberty. Religious institutions and businesses have been granted exemptions from contraception mandates. Religious schools have been given access to state funding. A state has been rebuked for punishing a Christian cake shop owner for refusing to make a cake for a same-sex wedding.

Many of these cases have been pushed by CCLOs.

Of the 11 cases it has been lead counsel for at the Supreme Court, the Becket Fund has won nine. The ADF had more Supreme Court wins in First Amendment cases than any other litigant between 2013 and 2017, according to Empirical SCOTUS. In every religious liberty case the court hears, there are usually friend-of-the-court briefs filed by CCLOs.

The hundreds of mostly young, conservative federal judges appointed by President Trump – not least Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh – have certainly helped in that regard, say lawyers for conservative Christian groups.

“We’ve seen a lot of positive change on the courts,” says Michael Berry, general counsel for the First Liberty Institute. “By and large the president [has a strong] record of nominating originalist, constitutionalist judges.”

And among the more than 200 judges the Senate has confirmed are six who are alumni of conservative Christian legal organizations. Those six include Kyle Duncan, a 5th Circuit Court of Appeals judge who was general counsel for the Becket Fund, and  Lawrence VanDyke, a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals judge who was a Blackstone fellow and listed by the ADF as an “allied attorney.”  

Greg Nash/AP

Judge Amy Coney Barrett, President Donald Trump’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, meets with Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana on Capitol Hill in Washington Oct. 1, 2020. Confirmation hearings are scheduled to begin Oct. 12, with the Repubilican-led Senate planning to vote before Election Day.

Judge Barrett’s short tenure on the 7th Circuit hasn’t brought any rulings from her on issues like abortion, marriage equality, or free exercise rights. But she is a popular nominee for social conservatives, and if confirmed would likely align with the court’s most conservative justices. 

Affiliations with nonprofit legal groups are by no means disqualifying for a judge. Justices Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, totemic jurists for progressives, spent much of their careers with the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union. And judges are, regardless, expected to set their personal beliefs aside in deciding cases, unlike lawyers, who are expected to advocate fiercely for their clients. 

But working in a Christian legal organization, or as a Christian lawyer, can mean being “a different kind of lawyer,” as Judge Barrett described in a 2006 commencement speech at Notre Dame Law School – the school where she was voted “professor of the year” three times.

“Your legal career is but a means to an end,” she told the graduates. “That end is building the kingdom of God.”

A landmark term?

If you ask CCLO attorneys what the “end” is, most say it’s for the free exercise of religion to have the protection and deference of a fundamental right.

In a landmark 1990 opinion, the late Justice Antonin Scalia explained why courts have chosen to not do that.

The case, Employment Division v. Smith, concerned whether it was unconstitutional to deny state unemployment benefits to two Native American men for ingesting peyote, a controlled substance, as part of their religious ceremonies.

But obligating someone to obey a law only when it coincides with their religious beliefs, wrote Justice Scalia, “permit[s] him, by virtue of his beliefs, ‘to become a law unto himself.’”

The case this term concerns a Catholic agency being banned from the city of Philadelphia’s foster program because it refuses to license same-sex couples. The court – which by the scheduled Nov. 4 oral argument may include a newly appointed Justice Barrett – could overturn Scalia’s opinion in Smith. As a result, it could be much easier for religious objectors to gain exemptions from laws.

“Some religious exemptions are appropriate and necessary,” says Professor Franke, the Columbia Law School scholar. But “they need to be given sparingly, or else we really undermine democracy itself.”

Special protection for religious liberty is especially needed now “to ensure that those viewed as ‘out of step’ [with social and cultural change] are not effectively expelled from society,” writes Catholic Archbishop Jerome Listecki of Milwaukee in a friend-of-the-court brief filed in the case.

“That anticipated time is already here,” he adds, quoting Justice Alito’s dissent in Obergefell that those with “out of step” views “will risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools.”

Persecution of Christians is a major concern for CCLOs and jurists like Justice Alito. In one concurrence last term, he compared the anti-Catholic animus that motivated 18th-century laws banning public funding for religious schools to the racial animus that motivated Jim Crow laws. He illustrated the point with a political cartoon from the time depicting Catholic priests as crocodiles slithering toward schoolchildren.

The court struck down that state ban, continuing a trend of slowly but steadily strengthening free exercise protections. This term that pace of change could accelerate – especially if Judge Barrett is confirmed.

Justice Ginsburg, in one of her final dissents, criticized the court’s movement in this direction. The majority, she wrote, “casts totally aside countervailing rights and interests in its zeal to secure religious rights to the nth degree,” allowing “the religious beliefs of some to overwhelm the rights and interests of others who do not share those beliefs.”

For their part, attorneys at CCLOs say they are fighting for all faiths, not just Christianity, and that they are just fighting for the freedom to practice their own faiths, not impose them on others.

“If we’re able to protect and advance religious freedoms for minority faith groups, I think that benefits all other faith groups, even those in the perceived majority,” says Mr. Berry, the First Liberty Institute’s general counsel.

He’s been at First Liberty for eight years, and he says each year has been busier than the last.

“I’m not sure it will ever end,” he adds. “So long as there are people who want to silence dissent and silence people with a religious belief they disagree with, we will always have work.”

Christian Hartmann/Reuters

French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel look at U.S. President Donald Trump during a photo opportunity at the 2019 NATO summit in Britain. Neither European leader has succeeded in building a working relationship with Mr. Trump.

The world is watching Washington as never before. And not just for news of the physical well-being of a president hospitalized with COVID-19.

For weeks now – and with a closer focus than at any time since the United States emerged as a world power – political leaders around the globe have been following the U.S. election campaign.

Many traditional allies seem to be rooting for Donald Trump’s Democratic Party challenger, Joe Biden. Yet beyond the obvious imponderable – the election result itself – they have a deeper concern: Is the Trump administration’s “America First” mindset, even if in a less brash and unpredictable form, here to stay even under a President Biden?

Would a Biden victory necessarily signal an end to America’s retreat from the international engagement and leadership that the U.S. assumed after World War II? And would that prove true for the most critical geopolitical challenge the allies share with Washington: navigating the rise of Xi Jinping’s China?

World leaders’ focus on the election has for now been overshadowed by news about President Trump’s illness, and the overwhelming official response worldwide has been to wish him and his wife well.

Still, even the get-well messages betrayed signs in a number of countries of their increasingly tenuous trust in Mr. Trump’s presidency. There were exceptions: early, wholehearted wishes for a recovery from the leaders of Israel, India, Mexico, and Turkey, with all of whom Mr. Trump has forged strong personal and political ties.

But the messages from European allies Germany and France were more formulaic. And remarks from the French government spokesman had a sting in the tail – a message echoed by Asian allies, including Japan and Australia: Mr. Trump’s illness was a reminder of the fact COVID-19 can strike anyone, and that public-health precautions like masking are important to limit its spread.

The close attention that many allies are paying to the run-up to the election is explained by more than the administration’s response to the pandemic or by any specific policy issues. It’s about a trio of qualities that all governments – allies and foes, large countries or small – find essential in charting their own policy course: steadiness, predictability, and trust.

The release last month of the latest annual survey by the Pew Research Center of America’s image abroad was a timely preelection measure of how weak these have become. In the 13 nations surveyed – nine European states, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Canada – “favorable” ratings were the lowest they have been since the aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Yet even starker than the global view of America was the level of international confidence in Mr. Trump himself to “do the right thing regarding world affairs.”

Ahn Young-joon/AP

South Korean citizens in Seoul hold up signs wishing Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump a quick recovery from the coronavirus. Supporters of the U.S. president make up less than 20% of the South Korean population, a recent poll found.

The average was a mere 16%. In South Korea, where support for Mr. Trump briefly shot up after his summits with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, it was now 17%. In Canada, 20%. The country with the strongest public faith in Mr. Trump was Japan, but even there only 25% of respondents expressed trust in the U.S. president.

By contrast, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s average rating was 76%.

Ms. Merkel is among a range of allied leaders – including France’s President Emmanuel Macron and Canada’s Justin Trudeau – who made serious efforts early in Mr. Trump’s term to forge working relationships with the president. None succeeded.

No allied leaders are going so far as to say explicitly they want Mr. Biden to win. They’re not going to do so, if only because he may lose. But widespread reporting of comments by policy experts, and sometimes officials, in these countries has charted a growing exasperation with Mr. Trump.

In Mr. Biden, they see the prospect of restoring at least two of the prerequisites for something nearer to foreign policy as usual before Mr. Trump’s 2016 victory: steadiness and predictability. They’re hopeful of being able to rebuild trust as well, in part because Mr. Biden has long supported the alliances and institutions built by the U.S. in the post-World War II years.

Still, they’re less confident that a Biden administration would comprehensively reengage America as a leading player in world politics.

Mr. Biden’s emphasis on “buying American” in his blueprint for a post-COVID-19 economic recovery, for example, is being seen by some abroad as reflecting the more inward-looking popular mood that has been growing ever since the Iraq War. That mood was critical to Mr. Trump’s 2016 election victory, and has now been reinforced by the pandemic.

Most allies, however, do expect that a President Biden would resume America’s leading role in efforts on climate change. And Washington’s military allies around the globe expect far greater consultation and cohesion within bodies such as NATO.

But would he, for instance, move to revive the international nuclear deal with Iran?

Would he seek to rejoin the Obama-era Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact with Asian allies as an economic and political counterbalance to China’s growing influence?

That’s far less certain, some allies suspect. And not so much because Mr. Biden himself might now regret such initiatives, made when he was Barack Obama’s vice president. Rather, foreign leaders are wondering whether American politics may have changed fundamentally in the intervening years.

When students at Colby College arrived on Mayflower Hill for coronavirus testing in mid-August, they got something in addition to a nasal swab: a blue bracelet with the words “One Colby” on one side and “Hold the Hill” on the other. 

The bracelets, the brainchild of student leaders at the small Waterville, Maine, college, are a visual reminder of what college presidents everywhere are telling students this semester: Staying open depends on every person acting responsibly.

“Whenever you look down at your bracelet, you remember that you need to do your part to preserve this opportunity for the whole community,” says Sam Rosenstein, the vice president of the student government association.

Small colleges have always attracted students seeking small classes and close connections with professors and peers – the “sense of community” the colleges promise. Now, as colleges of all sizes preach accountability to the campus community, the leaders of some small schools are finding their students particularly receptive to that message.

“There’s a feeling of ‘We’re all in this together,’” says Sue Stuebner, president of Colby-Sawyer College in New Hampshire, which has roughly 850 undergrads but only two cases so far. “People are looking out for one another.”

So far, lower caseloads

Seven weeks into the fall semester, Colby College, with roughly 2,000 students on campus, has had only 11 positive cases – seven students and four faculty members and staffers. The fact that it is a small school, in a small town, in a state with a low COVID-19 risk level, has certainly contributed to its success. So has the college’s multimillion-dollar investment in twice-weekly testing – a regimen many poorer colleges can’t afford. 

But small schools with less frequent testing, in states with higher COVID-19 caseloads, aren’t seeing many cases, either. There are exceptions, of course – Providence College, an urban institution on the upper end of “small” (roughly 4,400 undergrads) remains under a stay-at-home order amid an outbreak that has caused at least 236 positive cases at the Rhode Island school. Still, most of the stories of students behaving badly have come from large institutions, where off-campus parties have become superspreader events.

Gabe Souza/Colby College

Justin Masella (left) and Robyn Pirie, both class of 2021, wear One Colby bracelets while working outside the Schair-Swenson-Watson Alumni Center, Sept. 14, 2020.

If small colleges can keep their infection rates low, it could make the institutions more attractive to future students, boosting enrollment at a time when the number of high school graduates is falling and a growing number of institutions face the threat of closure, particularly in the Northeast. In this time of fear and uncertainty, families may gravitate to the safety and familiarity of small schools, college leaders say.

“I honestly think this could be a game-changer,” says Barbara Mistick, president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.

But Robert Kelchen, an associate professor at Seton Hall University who has studied college closures, isn’t convinced. He predicts that the recession, and associated job losses, will only make families more price-sensitive – and less likely to choose a costlier private college.

“The only way they’re going to see an increase in enrollment is by giving out more financial aid, and at that point, they’re not getting more in the way of tuition,” Professor Kelchen says. “I have a hard time seeing anything other than this accelerating the demise of the most at-risk colleges.”

Yearslong struggle

The private-college sector has struggled for years, particularly in the Northeast. Between 2016 and 2019, nearly 40 colleges closed or merged, 17 of them in New England and New York, according to a tally by Inside Higher Ed. For every Colby with a sizable endowment, there’s a Colby-Sawyer that is barely scraping by. That school’s current enrollment of around 850 is roughly half of what it was in the early 2000s.

Even before the pandemic hit, 30% of private colleges tracked by the rating agency Moody’s were running a deficit. The pandemic, which has forced colleges to spend millions on online education and campus safety upgrades, has put many of those colleges into an even deeper hole. Between March and May, the number of institutions at risk of closing within six years climbed by 110, according to Edmit, a Boston-based college advising company. In New England, the number of at-risk colleges doubled in that time period, an analysis by The Boston Globe found.

To survive, struggling small colleges will have to come up with new ways to compete for a shrinking number of prospective students. By 2030, the number of high school graduates in New England is expected to decline by 25% from its peak in 2007, according to the consulting firm EY-Parthenon.

For now, though, small colleges are focused on a more immediate threat: the coronavirus.

Advantages: size, culture

In responding to the pandemic, many small colleges are using their size and culture to their advantage. Some are sequestering their students, closing their campuses to outside visitors. Others are offering students safe ways to socialize, partitioning their quads into grids so students can attend outdoor concerts and open mic nights spaced 6 feet apart.

To get students to buy into their coronavirus response plans, colleges are including them on decision-making panels and asking them to create videos educating their peers about the rules. 

“We’re not dictating down to the students,” says Kristin McAndrew, vice president for enrollment and marketing at Saint Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont. “They are responding well because they are part of the conversation.”

Some colleges with religious affiliations are making appeals to institutional and civic values, reminding students of their responsibility to care for themselves and for one another.

“It’s time for us to walk the talk of our Franciscan Catholic mission,” Dennis DePerro, president of St. Bonaventure University in southwestern New York, says he tells his students.

At Colby-Sawyer College, years of declining enrollment have had one upside: plenty of space to isolate students in single dorm rooms during the pandemic.

Dr. Stuebner, the president, hopes her college’s low caseload will translate into increased enrollment, helping the college recover to around 1,000 students.

“Safety has always been one of the things parents appreciate about us,” she says. “But in the pandemic, safety has taken on a whole new meaning.”

Still, she’s not counting on it. This year, the college launched five new health science majors, aimed at meeting local demand and setting the school apart.

“The importance of distinguishing ourselves is still critical,” she says. “You have to be able to articulate your value.”

Nick Ducoff, co-founder of Edmit, the company that forecasts college closures, agrees. He argues that colleges that will survive the pandemic, and the coming demographic storm, are those that can show a clear “return on investment.”

“Colleges that invest in career outcomes are the ones that will do well,” he says. “If they happen to be small schools, great. But for those schools to do well, community isn’t going to be enough.”

Editor’s note: As a public service, we have removed our paywall for all pandemic-related stories.

On April 15, 2019, the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris caught fire. Eyewitnesses in the streets and viewers around the world waited, shaken and silent, as the spire fell, and were on tenterhooks at the thought that its towers could be next. 

Author Agnès Poirier vividly re-creates the scene in her superb history of the 800-year-old cathedral, “Notre-Dame: The Soul of France.” As the inferno raged, firefighters engaged in “hand-to-hand combat” to avoid a total collapse of the structure. They succeeded, but the fire, which occurred during restoration work, decimated the roof and damaged construction scaffolding. In June of this year, workers returned to the job of removing pieces of scaffolding, after the pandemic had halted reconstruction. President Emmanuel Macron has vowed the cathedral will reopen in 2024.

Simon & Schuster

“Notre-Dame: The Soul of France” by Agnès Poirier, Oneworld Publications, 240 pp.

The determination to see this landmark rebuilt is testament to the regard that the French have for the cathedral. It is more than a historic building: Its history mirrors that of France. “We thought she was immortal, we thought she was made of imperishable matter, we thought she would bury Paris, she would see the end of times, long after we have all turned to ashes,” Poirier writes.

Following the harrowing summary of the fire itself, Poirier backtracks to the 1100s, sketching Paris as a city teeming with promise. The bishop of Paris, Maurice de Sully, hired an architect to prepare plans for a cathedral of rare, yet discreet, beauty. “We will never know where he came from, whether he was the son of peasants ... or a relative of Louis VII,” Poirier writes of the unknown original architect. Unnamed, too, are the bishop’s serfs, who were pressed into service as laborers. 

Poirier details the cathedral’s design innovations, set in motion by the original architect and retained by his successors, including Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in the 13th century. She writes that the intent was to project a spartan, stringent grandeur. “Her serenity was almost austere.” Descriptions abound of everything from the smallest iron door fittings to the immense, airy nave.

The book is filled with a remarkable cast of historic figures. Poirier notes, for example, Napoleon’s meticulous if gaudy handiwork in making the edifice acceptable for his coronation, including the whitewashing of walls and vaults (which wrecked frescoes) and the covering of interior stone with fabrics and marble floors with carpets.

Victor Hugo is given a chapter in Poirier’s book, thanks to “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame,” which still inspires people around the world to care about the cathedral and wish to preserve it. Poirier calls Hugo’s novel “the book that keeps on looking after Notre-Dame.”

Leapfrogging from one historical epoch to another, Poirier describes how the cathedral survived the Hundred Years’ War, the French Revolution (during which time it was temporarily called the “Temple of Reason”), and World War II. Yet Poirier suggests that it endures not simply for the splendor of its design, nor for the backdrop it provided for European history, but for our common attachment to it – a deep-seated connection exemplified in the reaction to the 2019 blaze. 

Despite France’s pride in its secularism, Poirier writes that the fire brought forth signs of faith: “Notre-Dame, a place where the sacred met the secular, reminded us all of where we came from in an unexpected and powerful way.”

Reuters

Rodrigo Londoño, known by his nom de guerre Timochenko and a former commander of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), speaks during a news conference in September.

If truth is the first casualty of war, telling the truth is the first task of ensuring peace. In recent weeks, Colombia has shown this is possible with confessions by a former guerrilla group that had waged the longest war in Latin America.

In mid-September, eight former commanders of the far-left FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) admitted responsibility for thousands of kidnappings during the 52-year conflict that ended with a peace pact in 2016. While most of the kidnappings were already known, the group also apologized, acknowledged the suffering it caused, and renewed its “commitment to being held accountable before the justice system.”

Then on Oct. 3, Colombians experienced an even more emotional tell-all moment. Former FARC leaders claimed responsibility for the 1995 murder of a prominent conservative political leader, Álvaro Gómez Hurtado, as well as the killing of five other public figures. The mystery over who killed the former presidential candidate has perplexed Colombians for a quarter century.

These public admissions are encouraging steps for Colombia’s 4-year-old peace pact. That agreement, which was aimed at breaking a cycle of violence by offering amnesty to rebels and other militia groups in exchange for truth about their atrocities, remains a model for the world’s remaining conflicts. Much of the pact still needs to be implemented, such as land reform. But support for restorative justice – rather than retribution – is still high, especially as former FARC leaders steadily integrate into society.

“The clarification of the truth of the facts of the conflict, however difficult and uncomfortable they may be, is a necessary element for the construction of peace and reconciliation,” former Colombian peace manager Álvaro Leyva Durán wrote on Monday.

While FARC has transformed into a political party, violence in Colombia continues at a high rate – mainly by police and drug traffickers. This only adds pressure to implement the pact’s many moving parts, especially truth-telling of past atrocities. The main demand of the war’s surviving victims was to know what happened to their loved ones.

One premise of the peace pact was that personal admissions about violent acts would help dissipate anger and promote forgiveness and healing. Colombia keeps showing that is possible. Or as Mr. Leyva, the former peace manager, wrote, “We will only save our country if the truth reigns.”