Kevin Lamarque/Reuters/File

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is embraced by U.S. President Joe Biden in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Sept. 21, 2023.

After more than a year of lobbying by Ukraine, President Joe Biden in the final weeks of his term has approved Kyiv’s use of U.S. long-range missiles to hit inside Russia.

Ukraine reportedly began using the U.S. Army Tactical Missile System, known as ATACMS, Tuesday in a strike against a military facility on Russian soil, about 80 miles from the border.

It’s an effort to blunt a large-scale attack being prepared by Moscow, reportedly to eject Ukrainian forces from the Russian region of Kursk.

Some 11,000 North Korean troops have been moved into the area, Pentagon officials said Monday. They could be joined by an estimated 40,000 Russian forces.

Analysts are now debating what, exactly, long-range missiles launched into Russia will be able to accomplish at this point in the war, and whether it’s a dangerous escalation that could usher in “drastic consequences,” as Russia has warned.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said in September that a U.S. green light for cross-border strikes “will mean that NATO countries – the United States and European countries – are at war with Russia.” On Tuesday, the Kremlin changed its official doctrine to permit the use of nuclear weapons following a conventional attack, if the attacking country is backed by nuclear powers.

Yet it was Russia’s decision to bring North Korean forces into the war that represented a red-line escalation to which the Biden administration felt compelled to respond, U.S. officials have said.

It’s clear, too, that as President-elect Donald Trump’s victory portends stepped-up pressure on Ukraine to negotiate an end to the war, the move is also one last effort to give Kyiv more bargaining leverage when it comes to the table.

It is a move that Mr. Trump could use to his strategic advantage, as Russia, with an eye on positioning itself ahead of the U.S.’s Inauguration Day, is intensifying its own punishing attacks on Ukraine.

“For a Trump administration, this is actually a gift from the Biden administration,” says retired Lt. Gen. Frederick “Ben” Hodges, former commander of U.S. Army forces in Europe. “The Biden administration has made the hard decision, finally, to do this. Trump could just leave it in place as leverage.”

Vyacheslav Prokofyev/Sputnik/Reuters

Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with Yevgeny Balitsky, Moscow-installed governor of the Russian-controlled parts of Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia region, at the Kremlin in Moscow, Nov.18, 2024.

How Ukraine can use ATACMS

Long-range ATACMS (pronounced “attack-’ems”) can travel up to 190 miles. The strikes Tuesday were reportedly launched against a military facility near the city of Karachev in the Bryansk region.

The facility, which has come under Ukrainian drone attack in the past, was an arsenal for, among other weapons, North Korean artillery shells, anti-aircraft missiles, and ammunition for multiple launch rocket systems, according to a member of Ukraine’s defense council.

Russia’s big advantage in the war has been the number of its forces, which amounts to the tens of thousands of troops that it deploys in human attack waves. Some 1,200 Russian soldiers are killed or injured in the war each day, according to the Pentagon.

But these waves of largely untrained troops also represent an Achilles’ heel. They require Russia to use lots of artillery to wear down Ukrainian defenses before sending in the forces. These troops also need an engaged headquarters to direct and coordinate the artillery and the timing of attacks.

“There’s not a lot of decision-making going on at the lowest tactical level,” Mr. Hodges says. Destroying headquarters and artillery supplies helps “neuter the advantage of mass” that Moscow has, particularly now that it appears to have access to North Korean troops to send into its human waves.

And so the key is using ATACMS to help destroy strategic sites – “in other words, where the Russians bring up artillery munitions and dump it in big piles by the side of a railroad somewhere, then it gets moved forward by truck,” Mr. Hodges says. “OK, well when you find these kind of sites, that’s what you want to hit.”

Though Russia has moved its airfields out of air range for the ATACMS, hundreds of artillery depots and headquarters remain reachable, the Institute for the Study of War think tank notes in an interactive map.

8th United States Army/Reuters/File

United States’ and South Korean troops using the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) and South Korea’s Hyunmoo 2 missile, fire missiles into the waters of the East Sea, off South Korea, in 2017.

“We need to double down,” Ukraine ally says

More broadly, Mr. Biden’s permission to use long-range missiles appears to provide political cover, too, for France and the United Kingdom to follow suit by officially authorizing Kyiv to use their own long-range Storm Shadow missiles in Russia.

“I’ve been really clear for a long time now, we need to double down,” British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said at the G20 summit this week.

“We need to make sure Ukraine has what is necessary for as long as necessary, because we cannot allow Putin to win this war.”

France’s foreign minister Jean-Noël Barrot added that it was something his country “would consider if it was to allow Ukraine to strike targets from where Russians are currently aggressing Ukrainian territory.”

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has said he will still not allow Ukraine to use his country’s long-range Taurus missiles, but with national elections scheduled for February, Mr. Biden’s green light could allow the next chancellor to follow France and Britain’s lead.

Analysts have downplayed Russian threats, in part because the Kremlin has been complaining since June that the U.S. was allowing Ukraine to use the U.S. High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, inside Russia. Despite many veiled threats, including the change of doctrine this week, Mr. Putin is unlikely to use a tactical nuclear weapon, since that could jeopardize his hope for a good deal in any Ukraine negotiation once Mr. Trump takes office.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for his part, has acknowledged the growing pressure to bring the war to an end.

His country “must do everything to ensure that the war ends next year through diplomatic means,” he said Friday.

The mass sentencing Tuesday of 45 Hong Kong pro-democracy figures on subversion charges marks the government’s heaviest strike yet aimed at crushing prominent voices of dissent in the once-freewheeling Asian financial center.

The young Joshua Wong, who as a teenager led demonstrations to oppose China’s push to impose its curriculum on schools in Hong Kong, received a sentence of four years and eight months. “I love Hong Kong,” he shouted before leaving the dock.

Benny Tai, a legal scholar in his 60s who organized the 2014 Umbrella Movement to press for universal suffrage, was given the longest prison term – 10 years. Judges labeled Mr. Tai the “mastermind” of what they called an effort to bring down Hong Kong’s government.

The landmark trial of the Hong Kong 47, as the case is known, is the largest under the national security law that Beijing imposed in 2020 as part of a sweeping crackdown on Hong Kong’s 2019 pro-democracy movement. Two of the original 47 defendants were acquitted.

The defendants were charged with conspiring to subvert the city’s government after they organized an unofficial primary election in 2020, to select candidates to put forth in upcoming legislative elections. Hong Kongers supported the idea – more than 600,000 people took part in the informal, peaceful poll.

But the panel of three High Court judges ruled that the poll was part of a plot to “undermine, destroy, or overthrow” the Hong Kong government.

By handing down heavy prison terms on the 45 defendants – who include former elected politicians, union leaders, scholars, journalists, and student leaders – the national security court is effectively locking up a generation of Hong Kong’s political opposition, experts say.

“There is a general campaign, of which this trial is a part, to rid Hong Kong of the pandemocratic opposition,” says John Burns, emeritus professor of politics and public administration at the University of Hong Kong. “Authorities are sending a strong message to people ... that opposition is futile.”

Ann Scott Tyson/The Christian Science Monitor/File

Fergus Leung (right), who was a newly elected Hong Kong district councilor in this file photo from 2019, is one of 45 Hong Kong pro-democracy figures sentenced Tuesday on subversion charges.

A young district councilor

One of those sentenced on Tuesday – to nearly five years in prison – is Fergus Leung. Five years ago, Mr. Leung was a 22-year-old university student and an enthusiastic, newly elected Hong Kong district councilor – a first-time candidate who had just defeated a pro-Beijing incumbent in Hong Kong’s local elections.

Sporting a white button-down shirt and spectacles, Mr. Leung was rolling up his sleeves, eager to help his downtown Hong Kong constituents resolve problems ranging from missing rubbish bins to illegal parking and rent hikes. “I have a lot of work to do,” he said at the time.

Mr. Leung’s victory was part of a landslide win for pro-democracy candidates in Hong Kong’s November 2019 district council elections, as a record voter turnout ousted pro-Beijing candidates across Hong Kong and gave pro-democracy and independent candidates control over 17 of 18 district councils.

That election, coming amid months of massive pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, underscored a popular desire among voters for expanded political freedoms.

Beginning in the spring of 2019, as many as a million of Hong Kong’s 7 million residents had turned out to support self-determination and oppose an unpopular extradition law – seen as part of an effort by Beijing to tighten its grip on the former British colony, which reverted to China in 1997.

Under the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, China had agreed that after its 1997 takeover it would uphold Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy and its rights and freedoms, including freedom of speech and of the press.

For its part, Beijing called the protesters “rioters” and said they represented a minority of Hong Kong people supported by “black hands” from overseas. The pro-democracy candidates’ election victory undermined this narrative.

Alarmed by the election and concerned about unrest spreading into mainland China, Beijing launched a major crackdown. In mid-2020, it imposed a draconian new national security law that authorities are now using to eliminate any political dissent – and to arrest and imprison scores of people like Mr. Leung.

Hong Kong authorities have also forced independent media to shut down, intimidated civil society organizations, and banned once-frequent demonstrations over a variety of issues in the city.

In 2021, Beijing began a sweeping overhaul of Hong Kong’s electoral systems, restricting the number of popularly elected positions and imposing a vetting system to ensure that only “patriots” can run for office. Since then, voter turnout in Hong Kong elections has plummeted.

With “patriots” firmly in charge, Hong Kong passed its own tough security law in March, increasing the maximum penalty for sedition and broadening the definition of state secrets.

Kin Cheung/AP/File

Protesters lift yellow umbrellas, the symbol of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, in this 2014 file photo. Benny Tai, who organized the 2014 Umbrella Movement, was sentenced to 10 years in prison Nov. 19, 2024.

Beijing dashes the hopes of a generation

Tuesday’s sentencing drew strong condemnation from foreign governments, including the United States and Australia. “The defendants were aggressively prosecuted and jailed for peacefully participating in normal political activity protected under Hong Kong’s Basic Law,” said a spokesperson for the U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong.

Beijing rejected the criticism as “unwarranted.” “No one should be allowed to use ‘democracy’ as a pretext to engage in unlawful activities and escape justice,” said Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian.

Hong Kong democracy activists overseas say Tuesday’s sentencing is a blow not only to the city’s pro-democracy movement, but also to the hopes of the many thousands of young people who joined the 2019 protests.

“These pro-democracy leaders – now mostly detained and facing lengthy prison sentences – embodied the hopes and dreams of Hong Kongers yearning for political freedom,” says Carmen Lau, senior international advocacy associate for the Hong Kong Democracy Council in Washington. “They are not just political figures; they are our friends, colleagues, and inspiration.”

Indeed, disheartened young people in Hong Kong may seek to leave the city, says Dr. Burns. “There is no room for reconciliation,” he says. “It appears they have written off an entire generation in Hong Kong.”

While seeking to eliminate dissent and activism, Hong Kong authorities encourage young people to focus instead on material things – “a job, home mortgage, and the freedom to eat sushi or Korean food,” he says.

Yet this, he predicts, is unlikely to succeed. “It’s impossible to tell people in Hong Kong what to think.”

Cameron Pugh /The Christian Science Monitor

Unlike in many small communities, almost every house in Otis, Massachusetts, now has access to high-speed internet.

Otis, Massachusetts, isn’t the sort of place you expect to spend a lot of time online. A few two-lane mountain roads snake through dense woods and around placid ponds. Quaint houses peek out from the thickets. Main Road is dotted by a few small businesses, a modest town hall, and a diner or two. It’s the sort of place you might go to escape the hustle and bustle.

For Kirsten Paulson, who lives part time in Otis, that’s all a selling point. Another major one: Her internet service is better here than at her home outside Washington, D.C.

That’s because the town of 1,500 people built its own network to fill in the gaps left by private providers, which don’t offer high-speed internet in Otis. Now, after decades of slow and unreliable service, nearly every house in town is connected to a state-of-the-art fiber-optic network.

Versions of that story repeat themselves across western Massachusetts, where dozens of rural communities have used state, federal, and municipal funds to get their residents online. Some, like Otis, have built their own networks, treating internet access like a public utility. Others, like neighboring Sandisfield, have formed public-private partnerships to entice companies to provide service. 

The Massachusetts Broadband Institute, a state agency tasked with making affordable internet widely available, says that 99% of the commonwealth now has high-speed internet. 

It’s a success story that is already pointing a way forward for rural municipalities nationwide. Last week, Maine announced it would offer free Starlink dishes to about 9,000 residents living in the state’s most remote areas who currently have no access to reliable broadband. The technology from SpaceX works by delivering internet service via satellites rather than ground-based cables or cell towers, making it well-suited for users in rural and remote areas.

The Federal Communications Commission estimated that in 2019, some 17% of Americans living in rural areas lacked high-speed internet, compared with 1% in urban areas. Other studies estimate that as much as 50% of rural America doesn’t have access. 

Cameron Pugh/The Christian Science Monitor

Kirsten Paulson is pictured in her home in Otis, Massachusetts. She and her family have lived part time in Otis for decades. Her internet is better now here than at her home outside Washington, D.C.

Reliable broadband, or high-speed internet that’s always on, brings benefits beyond streaming the latest Netflix hit or conveniently filing taxes. It can generate economic growth, boost school performance, and improve emergency services.

“It touches upon all of these elements,” says Christopher Ali, a professor of telecommunications at Penn State. “Everything from economic prosperity to housing value to ‘What am I going to binge on a Friday night?’ It connects everything.” 

Why so much of rural America lacks internet

Cost is a major pain point. Americans pay more on average for broadband than residents in other developed nations. Dr. Ali also points to the country’s dependence on the private market. In areas with low population density, it can be hard for a private company to turn a profit. 

Before fiber was widely available, residents of both towns were limited to using internet transmitted via copper telephone wires – commonly known as digital subscriber lines, or DSL – and satellites. Neither option offers much speed or reliability, residents say. You could use a phone to access the internet, but “smartphones are not replacements for a broadband connection,” Dr. Ali says. “There are just things you can’t do.” 

When the pandemic shuttered schools and moved learning online, Sandisfield parents parked outside the local public library so their kids could use the building’s Wi-Fi to do schoolwork from the car. “It was a little bit of a heartbreak to watch what was going on with kids that were trying to work remotely,” says Craig Storms, a Sandisfield resident. 

But there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to such a complex problem, says Michael Baldino, director of the Massachusetts Broadband Institute. Different communities have different needs. 

Nowhere is this demonstrated more clearly than in Otis and Sandisfield. Though local grassroots efforts drove both projects, they took vastly different approaches to solving their connectivity problems. 

Otis opted to build and operate its own network. That model lets the community decide how the network runs. Because the town doesn’t seek to profit, municipal networks can often set lower prices than private providers. Any excess money the network makes can be funneled back into the community.

Cameron Pugh /The Christian Science Monitor

Flags fly near the town hall in Otis, Massachusetts, a rural town that has built its own broadband network by treating internet access like a public utility.

The idea wasn’t new. Glasgow, Kentucky, became the first municipality in the United States to build a network in 1989. In Massachusetts, the city of Westfield had already taken the plunge.

That precedent proved invaluable. Eventually, Whip City Fiber, the subsidiary Westfield created to operate its network, built Otis’s system. While Otis owns the network, Whip City Fiber provides the internet access and maintains the infrastructure. It’s a mutually beneficial deal: Otis gets connected, and Westfield gets paid for its services. 

For Tom Flaherty, general manager of Whip City Fiber, the partnership was about more than just good business sense. 

“We weren’t looking at it from the point of view of starting a business. We were looking at it from the point of view of really helping one of our neighbors,” he says. “For a municipal utility, that’s what we do, right? We strive to help our community.” 

High-speed internet: from luxury to necessity

The project has been enormous for Otis, where residents’ enthusiasm underscores broadband’s impact on rural communities. “It’s been one of the best things that’s ever happened,” says Larry Gould, who worked on the project. 

The new network has attracted homebuyers like Hilary Harley, who says she moved to Otis partly because of its strong internet. It has also meant existing residents have an easier time building community and feeling more connected to the broader world.

“It lets us be connected here, where really before you were kind of remote,” Mrs. Paulson says, emphasizing the benefits for school-age children and their parents as well. “It’s made community-organizing things better.” 

But it wasn’t a cheap undertaking. Otis financed the plan with a nearly $4 million municipal bond and a $1.8 million state grant. Such grant funding is a major driver of broadband expansion in the Bay State. An influx of federal funds from the American Rescue Plan Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law has also been instrumental.

But Sandisfield wasn’t able to finance its own network, says Jeff Bye, a retired rocket scientist who chaired the town’s broadband committee. Instead, the town partnered with Charter Communications, one of the nation’s biggest broadband providers. With state funding to offset construction costs, the company agreed to build a fiber-optic network to connect the town.

Unlike Otis, Sandisfield doesn’t reap the benefits of owning its internet infrastructure. But there are benefits to having a major telecommunications company manage the network, Mr. Bye says.

“[Charter has] the people who know how to design something like that, how to build something like that, how to operate it, maintain it,” he says. 

Since the network was installed, Sandisfield has seen an influx in the number of people applying to build and buy homes, says Steven Seddon Sr., chair of the town’s Select Board. It also recently installed CodeRED, an internet-based public safety program. 

For Stewart Goossens, who works from Sandisfield when he visits his parents, the new network means he spends less time struggling to get a stable connection – and more time in the community he cherishes. “It allows me to really live my life and be with the people I want to be with,” he says.

The projects haven’t been entirely successful, however. In Otis, Mr. Gould says there are still pockets where people aren’t serviced. A few houses in Sandisfield can’t access the new network because of contractual issues, according to one resident. Although both towns’ prices are lower than many private market rates, some residents say the cost is still steep.

Still, the fiber networks have been a boon for both communities, who no longer lack what many consider to be a service as essential as running water or electricity. “[Broadband] is not a luxury,” Mr. Bye says. “It’s a necessity.” 

The Tal Al Zohoor olive press hums with the sounds of grinding olives and buzzing Israeli drones overhead.

Zakirya Dalloul, the owner, moves deftly among the machines while asking the few war-weary farmers who were able to harvest sacks full of olives to reserve their turn using the press for the next day.

Mr. Dalloul hails from Al-Zaytoun, or “the Olives,” a popular neighborhood in this central Gaza city rich in olive trees. Now he oversees one of the last functioning olive presses in the entire Gaza Strip, where the few farmers who can afford it and can make the journey are pressing olive oil in an act of defiance, tradition, and hope for the future.

“In previous years, the harvest was a time of abundance,” he says. “Now, it symbolizes survival.”

The press, established in Deir al-Balah by Mr. Dalloul’s grandfather in the 1950s, has evolved over the years from an animal-drawn mill to a modern mechanical press. It is operating in its eighth war, though unlike any Gaza has witnessed before.

“Pressing olives is not just a job; it’s our heritage,” he says, as a farmer waits to turn his crop into oil. “We are blessed by the olive tree season; it is truly special.”

More than 13 months into the devastating Israel-Hamas war, the fact that some Palestinians in Gaza are able to harvest olives at all is fairly miraculous.

According to a recent report released by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization and the U.N. Satellite Centre, “The war had caused damage to 67.6% of agricultural land,” more than 24,700 acres.

The destruction, along with a shortage of power and water, means that the Tal Al Zohoor press is operating at 20% capacity.

Dwindling supplies and the soaring prices of such items as diesel fuel to power the presses have pushed the cost of olive oil production beyond what many Gaza farmers can afford.

At the same time, olive oil has become a main food source for Palestinians facing acute hunger, with bread and oil at times acting as their lone daily meal.

“We are doing our best to adapt,” notes Mr. Dalloul. “We work under great fear.”

Ghada Abdulfattah

A worker at the Tal Al Zohoor olive press watches olives as they are processed, in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, Oct. 16, 2024. The poor wartime harvest is only a fraction of the 35,000 to 40,000 tons of olives that Palestinians in Gaza normally harvest and consume each year.

Israel frequently strikes areas where people crowd, and farmers normally would form large lines waiting their turn outside olive presses.

Mr. Dalloul’s press has been struck twice this year: an Israeli airstrike in June and artillery shelling in late August.

“Whenever there is anything that helps or solves a crisis for people [in Gaza], Israeli aircraft bomb it,” Mr. Dalloul says.

Now, he urges farmers to take a number and come only when their olives are ready to press to prevent any lines or crowds.

An emotional harvest

A mile away from the press, Abdul-Moati Rabie kneels beneath gnarled branches on his 1-acre farm, carefully picking ripe green olives.

He frequently calls out to the young workers and children around him, reminding them to focus on the task at hand.

“This is no ordinary year,” he says, his voice heavy.

For Mr. Rabie, this harvest is marked by those who are not here. His brother Khaled, who normally would be up in the tree branches picking olives, was killed last December by an Israeli airstrike.

“He used to join me and the rest of the family for this family mission,” says Mr. Rabie, who now looks after Khaled’s children.

Moving between the groves, which are adjacent to a tent camp for people who have been displaced, he says the olive trees reflect the emotions around them.

“If you look at them, you can feel that they are sad,” he says. “They are sad because of what we’ve seen, because we are not happy. Happy trees are happy when their owners are happy.”

The wartime harvest is expected to be a fraction of the 35,000 to 40,000 tons of olives that Palestinians normally harvest and consume each year in Gaza.

The challenges facing farmers are immense: family members killed or displaced, restricted access to fields, lack of irrigation, and damaged trees being cut up for cooking and heating fires.

“We literally produced nothing last year,” Mr. Rabie laments.

Israeli military forces are preventing him from accessing his other 3.75 acres of olive groves in eastern and southern Deir al-Balah, adjacent to Khan Yunis, he says.

Ghada Abdulfattah

Farmers wait their turn to press their olives at the Tal Al Zohoor olive press.

Ties to a battered land

The harvest is not just a farm task; it is also a celebration of unity and Palestinian identity, which is why those who are able are determined to carry on the harvest this year.

“The olive harvest is like wedding season for us,” Mr. Rabie exclaims. “We enjoy it more than anything. It’s about our food, our work, our source of income. It’s everything.”

“I feel deep pity for the farmers who used to come to press their olives here but no longer can,” says Mr. Dalloul, the press owner. With the high number of olive groves damaged, demolished, or turned into restricted zones by Israeli forces, he says, “It seems as if the land is deliberately targeted during the olive harvest.”

“We face numerous challenges,” he adds. Shortages and a nearly tenfold increase in the price of diesel fuel, for powering the presses, have “made the whole harvest season an expensive one.”

Pressing olives into oil cost 7.9 cents per kilogram before the war; it now costs 40 cents per kilo.

The cost of premium olive oil has more than doubled, from $132 to $317 per 20-liter (5.3-gallon) tank.

But for Mr. Rabie and other olive farmers, harvesting and pressing olives is worth more than money or food security. It is one of their last ties to a battered and disappearing land.

“The first thing I do every morning is wake up and come to this land. I love this land. It is my soul. The land is our dignity; it’s our honor; it is our ancestors,” Mr. Rabie says, reflecting the request passed down from his grandfather to his father and then to him: Care for the land and never sell it.

“Now, I tell my children the same thing: ‘We won’t give it up.’”

Kamala Harris’ visit to Howard University had the makings of a celebration.

The presidential candidate had come to her alma mater the night of the election, hoping to share a moment of history. There are few places that carry the name mecca, but this campus, as perhaps the most recognizable Black university in the United States, wears it well.

Then the results came, and what had seemed a homecoming became a homegoing of sorts. Yet the shift underlined Howard’s importance for other reasons. After a campaign that often brought racial issues to the surface, how did this American mecca feel?

Disappointment found voice in frustration and disbelief but also a renewed conviction.

Cameron Pugh /The Christian Science Monitor

Student Alex Blocker poses outside of The Yard at Howard University on Nov. 8, 2024. “For a lot of people, we’re trying to figure out: Where do we go from here?” he says.

“To be on Howard’s campus is in many ways, I think, a testament to the good in America, and to see one of your own come through, you feel like she has your best interests in mind,” says Alex Blocker, standing outside of The Yard, flanked by grand brick buildings and a towering American flag, as workers disassemble the setup the vice president used.

“Then to have her lose in front of you, right – it is devastating,” he says. “So there’s somberness, but I think there’s also a resilience and a renewed fight … beyond the ballot. For a lot of people, we’re trying to figure out: Where do we go from here?”

Perhaps not surprisingly at one of the nation’s most prestigious universities, that reckoning has started with considering this moment in history. Some still struggle with the history that didn’t happen here on election night, particularly given the juxtaposition of the candidates.

“I was very excited to see history being made,” says student Athina Graham, decked in a hoodie and headphones and pausing to consider the way the election unfolded. “But at the end of the day, knowing that the stereotypes put upon us, especially Black women, as you can see, America would rather have somebody who’s … a convicted felon over a Black, educated woman.”

As an associate professor of Africana studies at Howard, Joshua Myers looks at history through a longer lens. He remembers the jubilation on campus when Barack Obama was elected president in 2008. But he felt a certain paradox.

“We had a watch party on campus, and it was weird for me,” he says. “It was weird for me to hear Young Jeezy rapping about this president being Black, [juxtaposed with] the long history of Black radicalism that represents the Howard that I was a part of.

Jacquelyn Martin/AP/File

Students at Howard University, a historically black college, react as President Barack Obama collects the necessary electoral college votes to win the presidential election against Mitt Romney, in Washington, Nov. 6, 2012.

“And then it started raining,” Professor Myers adds. “People screamed out of the building, ‘The ancestors are weeping!’ I’m like, which ancestors? And why are they crying?”

For different reasons, this election, too, felt like one in which the walls of the classroom broadened beyond the campus.

“This is probably one of those turning points for many of them,” Professor Myers says. “This idea that Trump’s first term was an aberration from the norm is exploding in their consciousness now, and it’s painful. But for these students, it’s probably going to deepen their sense of understanding that this is the ground for what the United States is like.”

The fact that openly racist elements endure and are an enthusiastic part of Mr. Trump’s base is sobering, he adds. “White supremacy is the ground; white nationalism is the ground.”

Yet among students and alums here, a common theme emerges: a desire to heal and build anew. And central to that, for many, is resilience – a frustrating and fulfilling part of the Black experience.

“I know that Trump in office isn’t the best thing for us as people of color and for queer people. But you know we’re going to keep fighting,” says student Jordan Reese as she relaxes on a tree-shaded bench in a quieter section of campus. “Sometimes before you see light, you got to see the dark side.”

For Ebony Bush, a Howard alum and instructional designer, that has meant a deeper faith.

Cameron Pugh/The Christian Science Monitor

Howard facilities worker Walter Plummer poses near one of the university’s athletic fields on Nov. 8, 2024. “We’ve got a lot of issues inside our own country that we need to fix,” he says. “Families, communities, homelessness, damage from the storms. We need to help our own people.”

“A few months before the election, one of my best friends that I met at Howard reminded me that God is sovereign. I’m grateful she put that in my spirit to meditate upon,” she says.

She said she felt a “heaviness” as the results came in. But Walter Plummer, who manages the facilities for the campus’ dorms, puts aside the question of who won and speaks of the need for a restoration that embraces all.

“Both candidates pushed on the wrong reasons for running. They made it more about a race and a color and not the country itself and what we needed as a whole,” says Mr. Plummer, dressed in work boots and a collared shirt. “We’ve got a lot of issues inside our own country that we need to fix. Families, communities, homelessness, damage from the storms. We need to help our own people.”

Reuters

AI (artificial intelligence) letters are placed on computer motherboard in this illustration.

Sometimes advanced intelligence pops up in those deemed in need of intelligence. A survey earlier this year found 59% of students in American higher education routinely use generative artificial intelligence. Only about 40% of their instructors are using it.

Educators have taken note. Schools across the United States are actively deciding how to adapt the new technology. Potential uses range from creating personalized lesson plans for each student to helping them figure out financial aid for college. In some classrooms, it is being used to augment critical thinking by allowing students to see an inherent flaw in AI and then correcting it. That looks like creative problem-solving.

According to a Rand Corp. survey in early 2024, a small but growing number (18%) of K-12 teachers use AI regularly to teach. Another 15% said that they have used it once. Almost 30% said that they have policies in development on the use of AI, which is a great start.

It might be too early to assess whether AI-enhanced teaching can produce better educational outcomes and, if so, at what financial cost. But one thing is certain. Many schools are eager to use it to help ensure no student is left behind, especially underprivileged students. The Rand survey showed that schools most likely to have teachers using AI were mainly in white, affluent communities.

By the end of the 2023-24 school year, 60% of school districts had planned to train teachers on AI, according to Rand. The training includes deciding on guidelines for AI use as well as for how to deal with ethical issues, such as students using AI to generate content and submitting it as original work.

There will always be a need for human intelligence to give nuanced, thoughtful interpretations of information. AI can’t do this – at least not yet. Still, educators seem ready to follow students in adapting the technology. Some decision-makers are thinking big. In August, Yale University announced it would invest $150 million over the next five years in AI initiatives. That is worth noting. One of the world’s leading educational institutions realizes AI is something not to shy away from, but to embrace.