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      D.E.I. in College, Attacked and Defended

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      More from our inbox:Why Trump Doesn’t Want Another DebateTrump’s Mental FitnessCancel the Sentinel Missile ProgramA Walker in Manhattan Eli DurstTo the Editor:Re “D.E.I. Is Not Working in Colleges. We Need a New Approach,” by Paul Brest and Emily J. Levine (Opinion guest essay, Sept. 5):Mr. Brest and Dr. Levine underscore the importance of inclusion for all students’ academic success. I agree: For students to succeed, they must have access to a rigorous learning environment in which they also feel they matter.But I disagree with the professors on the history and roles of diversity offices that are responsible for fostering such a sense of belonging. Diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in higher education are mission-driven, evidence-backed, research-informed and tailored to meet the particular needs of each campus.These practices seek to bring people together and collaboratively eliminate barriers to success, and they have evolved with legislative and judicial efforts to address decades of discrimination against protected categories under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.Given the complexities of differing institutional types, historical legacies and current contexts, the solution includes acknowledging that we live in a pluralist society, that we can value differences as a community of learners, and that doing so is not contrary to academic freedom and critical thinking.There is work ahead to ensure we can continue to meet the needs of our ever-evolving communities. There always will be work ahead; the pursuit of progress is, by definition, unending.Paulette Granberry RussellWashingtonThe writer is the president and C.E.O. of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At a Key Moment in Trump’s Campaign, a Social-Media Instigator Is at His Side

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      The former president’s decision to elevate Laura Loomer, a far-right activist known for racist and homophobic posts online, has stunned even some Trump allies.Before Donald J. Trump traveled to Philadelphia for this week’s debate, he invited one of the internet’s most polarizing figures along for the ride.Laura Loomer was backstage with the Trump entourage while Mr. Trump squared off against Vice President Kamala Harris. She was in the spin room with the former president immediately afterward. And the next day, she flew with him to New York City and Shanksville, Pa., to commemorate the anniversary of Sept. 11.A far-right activist known for her endless stream of sexist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-Muslim and occasionally antisemitic social media posts and public stunts, Ms. Loomer has made a name for herself over the past decade by unabashedly claiming 9/11 was “an inside job,” calling Islam “a cancer,” accusing Ron DeSantis’s wife of exaggerating breast cancer and claiming that President Biden was behind the attempt to assassinate Mr. Trump in July.Just two days before the debate, Ms. Loomer, 31, posted a racist joke about the vice president, whose mother was Indian American. Ms. Loomer wrote on X that if Ms. Harris won the election, the White House would “smell like curry.”For many observers, including some of Mr. Trump’s most important allies, the Republican presidential nominee’s choice at a critical moment of the campaign to platform a social-media instigator, albeit one with 1.3 million followers on X, was stunning.“The history of this person is just really toxic,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Trump ally, told a reporter for HuffPost on Thursday. “I don’t think it’s helpful at all.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why House Republicans Are Targeting China Weeks Before the Election

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      The G.O.P. pushed through an array of legislation to get tough on China, seeking to persuade voters that they are the party that will protect Americans from economic and military threats from Beijing.The House this week tackled a long-promised package of bills to get tough on China, but few if any have a chance of becoming law after Republicans opted to prioritize a handful of politically divisive measures that Democrats oppose.For months, House leaders had promised a bipartisan show of force against the United States’ biggest economic and military adversary, including curtailing investments in sensitive Chinese industries, clamping down on data theft and espionage, and ensuring more Chinese imports were subject to taxes and forced labor standards.But only some of those proposals made it to the floor this week. Instead, Republican leaders added a handful of partisan measures that appear to be aimed at portraying their party as stronger on countering China and Democrats, including the Biden administration, as weak.It comes weeks before the elections in which the White House and control of Congress are up for grabs.“Because the White House has chosen not to confront China and protect America’s interests, House Republicans will,” Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, told reporters on Tuesday.Here’s a look at what the House did, and why.Subjecting international pandemic agreements to Senate treaty approval.Republicans, who have castigated the World Health Organization for its response to the coronavirus pandemic, pushed through a bill that would require Senate ratification of any W.H.O. agreement on pandemic preparedness. The organization is exploring ways to streamline the international response to the next pandemic.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      If Harris Wins North Carolina, This County Will Be the Tipping Point

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      For 16 years, the state has been a heartbreaker for Democrats, and so has Mecklenburg County — a reliably blue area that just hasn’t been blue enough.Ask any Democrat knocking doors, hosting debate watch parties or making phone calls in the blue pockets of North Carolina over the last several weeks, and they’ll say 2024 feels a lot like 2008.That was the year Barack Obama became the first Democrat to win the state in more than three decades. No presidential candidate for the Democrats has managed it since, but an outpouring of excitement for Vice President Kamala Harris has gotten their hopes up.Democrats eager to avoid another disappointment point to the state’s biggest metropolitan area — and the source of the party’s biggest recent heartbreaks — as the key.Mecklenburg County, home to Charlotte and its suburbs, is a reliably blue region that, in the 16 years since Mr. Obama’s first and only victory there, just hasn’t been blue enough. In 2020, Joseph R. Biden Jr. lost the state by under two percentage points, his narrowest losing margin that year, and a key culprit was low voter enthusiasm and an underfunded county party operation. Two years later, when Cheri Beasley fell short in her Senate bid, her Democratic allies pointed to Mecklenburg’s record low turnout.Ms. Harris will visit Charlotte and Greensboro on Thursday in a trip that underlines both her campaign’s increased confidence in their North Carolina prospects and serves as a soft endorsement of her party’s strategy there: run up the score on friendly turf.“To impact the state, Mecklenburg has to overperform,” said Aimy Steele, a veteran organizer who leads the New North Carolina Project aimed at mobilizing voters of color across the state. Democratic candidates in the past, she said, “have not nurtured their voters as much as they probably should or could over time and over time, some of those voters have fallen off and not voted regularly.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Citing Gaza Help, Blinken Waives Human Rights Conditions on Aid to Egypt

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      Cairo will receive its full military aid allotment of $1.3 billion after the secretary of state also said it had made progress on releasing political prisoners and protecting Americans.For the first time under the Biden administration, the United States will send Egypt its full allotment of $1.3 billion in annual military aid, waiving human rights requirements on the spending mainly in recognition of Cairo’s efforts to reach a cease-fire deal in Gaza, U.S. officials said.The decision, which the State Department notified Congress of on Wednesday, marks a striking shift for the administration. President Biden came into office promising “no blank checks” that would enable Egypt’s rights abuses, and in each of the past three years, his administration had withheld at least some of the congressionally mandated aid to Cairo, a close American ally.But the decision shows how the administration’s calculus has changed as Mr. Biden prioritizes trying to halt the violence in Gaza, one of the key goals he has set for himself in his final months in office.In response to longtime concerns about human rights abuses in Egypt, U.S. law places conditions on about a quarter of the military aid to Egypt each year. To release it, the secretary of state must certify that Cairo has complied with a range of human rights requirements.A State Department spokesman said the secretary, Antony J. Blinken, had found that Egypt had only partly met the human rights requirements but had overridden them, employing a legally permitted waiver “in the U.S. national security interest.”Mr. Blinken’s decision was based on Egypt’s monthslong role as an intermediary between Hamas and Israel as the two sides try to negotiate a cease-fire deal that would free Israeli hostages in Gaza and allow more humanitarian aid into the territory, which borders Egypt’s Sinai Desert, the spokesman said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Harris and Trump Bet on Their Own Sharply Contrasting Views of America

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      Former President Donald J. Trump is gambling that Americans are as angry as he is, while Vice President Kamala Harris hopes voters are exhausted by the Trump era and ready to move on.Donald J. Trump’s America is a grim place, a nation awash in marauding immigrants stealing American jobs and eating American cats and dogs, a country devastated economically, humiliated internationally and perched on the cliff’s edge of an apocalyptic World War III.Kamala Harris’s America is a weary but hopeful place, a nation fed up with the chaos of the Trump years and sick of all the drama and divisiveness, a country embarrassed by a crooked stuck-in-the-past former president facing prison time and eager for a new generation of leadership.These two visions of America on display during the first and possibly only presidential debate between Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump on Tuesday night encapsulated the gambles that each candidate is taking in this hotly contested campaign. Mr. Trump is betting on anger and Ms. Harris on exhaustion. Mr. Trump is trying to repackage and resell his “American carnage” theme eight years later, while Ms. Harris is appealing to those ready to leave that in the past.The question is who has a better read on the American psyche eight weeks before the final ballots are cast. For the past two decades, most Americans have told pollsters that they believe the country is on the wrong track, a prolonged period of national disenchantment that Mr. Trump has successfully channeled throughout his tumultuous political career. But Ms. Harris argues that Mr. Trump is the one who wants to take the nation back down a path to nowhere.“She’s destroying this country,” Mr. Trump declared at one point during the debate. It was a line he recycled in one form or another 13 times in all — she or the Democrats destroying the country, the economy, the energy industry.“Let’s turn the page and move forward,” Ms. Harris said for her part. She turned pages or moved forward at least five other times. “Frankly,” she added, “the American people are exhausted with this same old tired playbook.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Taylor Swift Endorses Kamala Harris

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      Taylor Swift, one of America’s most celebrated pop-culture icons with a giant following across the world, endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris in the immediate aftermath of the presidential debate on Tuesday.The endorsement by Ms. Swift, delivered mere minutes after Ms. Harris and former President Donald J. Trump stepped off the debate stage in Philadelphia, offers Ms. Harris an unrivaled validator in the world of celebrity.“Like many of you, I watched the debate tonight,” Ms. Swift wrote on Instagram to her 283 million followers. “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election. I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them.” More