The “Last Week Tonight” host introduced a segment featuring nothing but the Fox News personality boasting that he went to the Ivy League university.
“You’ll never guess where Fox’s Pete Hegseth went to college,” a narrator says, and by the time you’re done watching you’ll never want to hear about it again.
Props to the laughter in the clip that turns sinister because blowing one’s horn can sound like a lot of hot air.
Oliver took jabs at another Fox News host the previous week, highlighting how often Rachel Campos-Duffy brings up that her husband, former Rep. Sean Duffy (R-Wis.), was a member of Congress. Duffy resigned in 2019.
U.S. News & World Report’s 2024 college rankings features many of the usual prestigious institutions at the top of the list, but also vaults some schools much higher after the publisher revised its grading system to reward different criteria.
U.S News’ ranking algorithm now based more than 50% of an institution’s score on what it describes as “success in enrolling and graduating students from all backgrounds with manageable debt and post-graduate success.” The system also places greater emphasis on “social mobility,” which generally refers to an individual making gains in education, income and other markers of socioeconomic status.
Overall, more than a dozen public universities shot up 50 spots on the annual list of the U.S.’ best colleges, while several elite private schools largely held their ground, the new report shows.
“The significant changes in this year’s methodology are part of the ongoing evolution to make sure our rankings capture what is most important for students as they compare colleges and select the school that is right for them,” U.S. News CEO Eric Gertler said in a statement.
The change comes after a chorus of critics complained that the publication’s rankings reinforce elitism and do little to help students find schools that suit their academic needs and financial circumstances. A growing number of schools, including elite institutions such as Columbia University and the Harvard and Yale law schools, also have stopped participating in the ranking and publicly criticized U.S. News’ methodology.
Public schools score better
Public institutions notched some of the biggest gains on U.S. News’ ranking, which many students and families use to help guide their choice of where to matriculate. For example, the University of Texas at San Antonio and California State University, East Bay, jumped 92 and 88 spots up the list, respectively. Other well-known public universities, like Rutgers University in New Jersey, saw its three campuses rise at least 15 places each.
Meanwhile, private Christian institutions such as Gwynedd Mercy University and the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, rose 71 and 106 spots in the ranking, respectively.
Despite the new ranking system, the top 10 universities on U.S. News’ list barely budged. Princeton notched the No. 1 spot for the new academic year, followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, Stanford and Yale — the same positions as last year. Among schools focused on liberal arts, Massachusetts’ Williams College was ranked No. 1, with Amherst, the U.S. Naval Academy, California’s Pomona College and Swarthmore in Pennsylvania rounded out the top 5.
U.S. News’ overhauled ranking formula uses 19 measures of academic quality to asses schools. It also dropped five factors that affected a college’s ranking: class size; faculty with terminal degrees; alumni giving; high school class standing; and the proportion of graduates who borrow federal loans.
Perhaps not surprisingly, some universities are now objecting to the latest ranking. Tennessee’s Vanderbilt University, which fell to No. 18 from No. 13 the previous year, attacked U.S. News’ revised approach as flawed, Bloomberg reported.
“U.S. News’s change in methodology has led to dramatic movement in the rankings overall, disadvantaging many private research universities while privileging large public institutions,” Chancellor Daniel Diermeier and Provost C. Cybele Raver wrote in an email to alumni, according to the news service.
The most recent data was collected through surveys sent to schools in the spring and summer of 2023. Roughly 44% of colleges that received the surveys completed them, according to U.S. News.
U.S. News’ previous college rankings did not give enough weight to whether colleges provide students with the tools they need to climb the socioeconomic ladder after graduation, experts have told CBS MoneyWatch. The media company’s system also factored in more intangible metrics like “reputation” and considered such factors as “faculty compensation” — criteria that critics say have little to do with the quality of education a school provides.
Concentrating in large lecture halls has always been a challenge for Harper Chambers, a rising senior studying neuroscience at Princeton University. That’s because Chambers has autism, which he said makes him extra sensitive to light and noise. But when Chambers got a concussion last fall, his “acute” sensitivity temporarily became even more severe.
Side conversations and the clicking of keyboards drowned out his professor’s lecture and soon became indistinguishable white noise. Lights from peers’ laptop screens and overhead lamps were distracting and gave him a headache. Sunglasses and noise-canceling headphones didn’t help much.
“I couldn’t be in the room and be able to fully focus on the lecture,” Chambers said.
He went to the university’s disability office to ask for permission to attend class on Zoom — a policy he remembered from the year before, when Covid exposures and infections would often force students into quarantine or isolation.
Then Chambers learned that Princeton no longer required faculty to provide Zoom accommodations for any reason.
After the 2021-22 academic year, when faculty across the country reported “stunning” levels of student disengagement, Princeton and other colleges with a lot of residential undergraduates sought to reestablish the norms and atmosphere of college from before the pandemic. At the University of Oregon, a senior administrator was direct in an email to the campus: “Students need to hear that attendance is important to their learning.”
For some faculty, the need to accommodate students — some of whom kept attending their mostly in-person classes online, Covid or no Covid — was ballooning their workloads. Instructors had to figure out how to record lectures, measure participation, and facilitate small-group activities simultaneously in-person and online. And instructors feared that academic rigor was suffering.
This eagerness to return to “normal” coincided with a growing demand from many students for virtual learning.
While adult learners have long preferred such flexibility, students and others told The Chronicle that more 18- to 24-year-olds also want online courses — as well as hybrid courses, where they can attend a class in-person one day and virtually the next. Some, like Chambers, are disabled students; others are students with jobs or caretaking responsibilities.
The share of students enrolled only in online courses nearly doubled between 2019 and 2021, according to a recent analysis by The Chronicle. Some college officials told The Chronicle this spring that they are continuing to expand remote and hybrid options.
It’s clear that the conversation about flexibility in learning, and how to help faculty offer it, will persist even as the pandemic era recedes into the distance.
‘The World Opening Up’
Last fall, Princeton officially ended hybrid learning and began requiring all students to attend all classes in person. (The university doesn’t offer fully online degree programs.)
“Those who miss more than two weeks of instruction — for any reason — are encouraged to take a leave of absence,” Jill S. Dolan, dean of the college at Princeton, wrote in a September 2022 essay. Asked for further comment, a Princeton spokesperson referred The Chronicle to the essay.
Disability-rights student groups had urged Princeton to preserve Covid-era accommodations. But Dolan said those adaptations just weren’t working for students or faculty.
Learning happens best during “present-time interactions with faculty and other students,” Dolan said, where students have “the chance to see, in real time, our collective minds transform.”
“Virtual learning makes taking a meaningful stand more difficult, because we’re not breathing the same air and we can’t see the nuances of one another’s expressions and reactions as we can when we’re present, live, together,” Dolan wrote.
Hybrid teaching in particular was a burden for Princeton’s faculty, who reported “stress and disruption,” Dolan said. In addition to creating “technical and administrative burdens,” simultaneously teaching two audiences — the in-person students and those online — was difficult for some lecturers, she said.
Some instructors reported learning loss among their students, while others noted constant requests for Zoom attendance for different reasons, as well as growing disengagement in class.
“In other words, once that Zoom window opened, faculty found their courses suddenly defenestrated,” Dolan wrote.
For Ellen Li, though, virtual learning was an opportunity to actually participate in class.
“I think it’s important to recognize that for a lot of people, quarantine was the daily state of our lives, and then having everything transitioned to Zoom was actually the world opening up and not closing down,” said Li, a comparative literature student and a co-founder of Princeton’s Disability Collective.
Li started to struggle with chronic illness during her second year at Princeton. Her chronic-fatigue syndrome and dysautonomia affected her mobility, energy, and ability to sit upright in the classroom. In in-person classes, “taking a meaningful stand,” as Dolan described, became difficult for Li.
During the fall of 2019, Li’s illnesses caused her to miss about a quarter of required lectures, she said. When Princeton went online the following spring due to the pandemic, she said she finally felt like she could “meaningfully engage” with peers again. Remote options had been part of the reason she remained enrolled at Princeton after getting sick, she said.
For some disabled students, remote learning “opens up learning possibilities that simply did not exist before, or were very, very burdensome on the student,” said Paul Grossman, a former board member at the Association on Higher Education and Disability, or Ahead, and an adjunct professor of disability law at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco.
I think it’s great to open up options so that people can make their own individual choices about what works well for them.
Jamie Axelrod, the former president of Ahead and the director of disability resources at Northern Arizona University, said that it is “hard to make generalizations” about which student populations benefit from online learning. While some disabled students thrive in a remote environment, others — such as those with attention-deficit or executive-functioning issues — struggle, Axelrod said.
Still, for students who find it complicated to get to and spend time in public settings, remote learning can be a big help, Axelrod said. That group includes students with chronic illnesses, mobility issues, gastrointestinal issues, and certain mental-health conditions.
“I think it’s great to open up options so that people can make their own individual choices about what works well for them,” Axelrod said.
Li, who helped advocate for the university to preserve remote options last spring with Princeton’s disability collective, said she understands why many of her classmates prefer in-person learning. For some disabled students, though, Li said the options are “online or nothing.”
“Providing no online option is equivalent to denying disabled students, and teachers, any place in the university,” Li said.
Meeting Demand
While some colleges aim to put Zoom classes in the past, others are taking advantage of the rising demand among students for remote and hybrid learning — in part as an enrollment strategy.
Vermont State University, the soon-to-be-formed institution unifying three public colleges that were losing students, is making a bet on flexibility. Sylvia Plumb, a spokesperson, wrote in an email that “remote/hybrid learning plays a vital role in our mission to provide high-quality, accessible education that is affordable and tailored to the needs of our diverse student population.”
At the University of Maine at Orono, the share of remote-course offerings doubled between 2019 and this spring, from 14 to 28 percent, officials said. The share of students learning fully online increased 14 percentage points, to 20 percent, between 2017 and 2021, according to The Chronicle‘s recent analysis.
Richard Roberts, executive director of academic-program support and online learning at Maine, said the decision to expand was based on demand from students who inceasingly want a combination of in-person, hybrid, and fully remote courses.
“When we offer remote versions of our on-campus courses, or fully online versions of our existing degrees, they often reach capacity well before the on-campus sections,” Roberts said.
Roberts said the university has been able to expand remote options “without sacrificing academic rigor or credential value.”
“We have a robust infrastructure to support fully remote students and in-person students seeking a variety of hybrid and remote options,” Roberts said. “Most importantly, our online degrees and courses are not separate from the on-campus offerings, and so our fully remote students take the same classes, learn from the same prestigious research-intensive faculty, and earn the same degrees as our on-campus students.”
Roberts said Maine also has a dedicated advising team for supporting online students so they feel less “like a number.”
He said the university is committed to meeting the needs of the state. “Maine is a predominantly rural state, and many students are geographically place-bound, yet they still deserve the option to earn a quality education,” Roberts said.
You’re able to take your classes and not have to worry about that commute, and therefore having to fill up your tank.
Remote options don’t only benefit students with disabilities, some learning experts said. They also expand access for commuter students, students with jobs, and students who care for family members, said Antija M. Allen, an assistant professor of psychology at Pellissippi State Community College, in Tennessee. Allen, an expert in education technology, also serves as director of the Pellissippi Academic Center for Excellence.
“We’ve seen quite a few prices go up, including gas prices,” Allen said, referring to the barriers for commuters who live far away. Remote classes offer an affordable and time-saving way to continue learning, she said: “You’re able to take your classes and not have to worry about that commute, and therefore having to fill up your tank.”
Jasmine Whaley, a 20-year-old sophomore at Ozark Technical Community College, in Missouri, lives an hour away from her college by car and works full-time at a restaurant near her home.
Whaley, who’s studying biological science, said she strongly prefers remote classes because they save her gas money and time, and allow her to learn at times that are convenient, when she isn’t working. Whaley responded to a Chronicle callout this spring for students who opt for remote learning.
Whaley, who has anxiety, said she also prefers remote classes for her mental health; her “grades are always better online.” In person, Whaley said, “I can’t even concentrate because I’m anxious the whole entire class period.”
A Balancing Act
Going forward, learning experts said, colleges must understand that teaching effectively in online and hybrid environments takes resources: training, technology, and help from teaching assistants, among other things.
Managing in-person classes with some students on Zoom is what faculty most often cite as a burden. In those settings, colleges and instructors have to grapple with when — and for whom — online-learning options are necessary, said Grossman, the disability-law expert.
There are students with suppressed immunity or mobility issues who might prefer to Zoom in to their class for a week if they’ve had a chronic illness flare up. And then there are able-bodied students who might want to sleep in and tune in to the lecture when they want. Drawing distinctions between required accommodations and convenience isn’t easy.
Allen, who leads faculty development at Pellissippi State, has heard from faculty members who want to accommodate students’ remote requests for in-person courses but are unsure how to properly do so.
“Some people struggle with engaging the people on Zoom at the same time as engaging the people who are sitting here in the room,” Allen said. “Again, that’s a skill that has to be developed.”
Online teaching can be just as productive as in-person instruction when done well, said Karen Costa, a faculty-development consultant and online teaching expert.
“In an on-site class, we often only hear from the most-confident extroverted learners,” said Costa, who’s an adjunct faculty member at Southern New Hampshire University and the University of Maryland Global Campus, and has been teaching online for over a decade. But in remote classes, she said she can hear from all of her students.
Additionally, Costa said the chat function on platforms like Zoom provides an opportunity for extroverts to participate in the lesson without causing disruptions. “We can have students sharing resources as we’re teaching in a way that would be kind of disruptive and chaotic in an on-site class,” she said.
When teaching online, Costa said, it is important for faculty to actively reach out to students and create opportunities for them to engage with the course content and with one another.
But instructors need support to do that, she said. College leaders, she said, need to answer to “how they are supporting their faculty not only in developing their online pedagogy, but also in these questions of burnout, trauma, and stress.”
While many universities are proud to talk about how they fight climate change, some also invest in and accept donations from the same oil companies that drive global warming. Experts and students are calling those schools hypocritical and are demanding change.
CBS News’ “On the Dot” environmental series investigates the scope of the problem, starting with the University of Texas System, which collected $2.2 billion in oil and gas royalties last year.
Drill ‘Em Horns
When it comes to sustainability, the UT Austin campus promotes itself as a leader among universities by reducing emissions and waste, conserving energy and water resources and building green buildings.
“I still want to give credit to the university for taking action on reducing emissions on campus. But that’s only a small part of the picture,” said Ella Hammersly, a student and climate activist at the university.
The bigger picture comes into focus hundreds of miles from the Austin campus, in the Permian Basinoil fields of West Texas, where 30% of the America’s oil is drilled. That’s where the UT System owns 3,000 square miles of property.
On the property energy companies lease land, extract oil and gas and pay royalties to the university system, which includes Austin and 12 other locations.
Oil revenue has helped make the University of Texas the richest public university system in America, with an endowment of $42.7 billion, according to a report by The National Association of College and University Business Officers. Number two is the Texas A&M System, with $18.2 billion, which also gets a cut of oil royalties from university properties in West Texas.
The scope of the emissions that come from burning the oil and gas drilled on university land has never been calculated before.
Oil wells dot the landscape on a plot of land owned by the University of Texas system in West Texas.
For this story, CBS News asked the McGuire Energy Institute at Southern Methodist University to run those numbers for the first time and found those emissions are 20 times higher than they are on campus.
“UT has a sustainability symposium every year. We have a sustainability master plan. All of these things are going on while at the same time billions of dollars are being invested into oil and gas,” Hammersly said.
Under Texas law, the money generated from oil and gas royalties is primarily used for campus construction projects across the state. Less than 1% goes toward financial aid.
UT student activist Anya Gandavadi says it’s time to update the law and its emphasis on oil profits.
“I think that investing in the future of the country, in the world, involves taking into account what science says, what people say, what communities say are hurting them and rewriting those laws,” she said.
For the world to limit the worst effects of climate change, nations will have to drastically reduce their carbon emissions. The International Energy Agency, a global group with a mandate of ensuring energy security, in 2021 called for an end to investment in new oil and rapid transition to renewable energy sources.
That’s not happening on university property in the West Texas oil fields where new lands are being leased and new wells are being drilled.
Dr. Michael Mann, climatologist at the University of Pennsylvania and a critic of the fossil fuel industry, is calling for change, even in Texas.
“What more influential message would it send if the flagship university of one of our most fossil fuel-driven states, Texas, were to take true leadership when it comes to the clean energy transition? It would impact the entire conversation here in the United States and around the world,” Mann said.
The University of Texas system declined to be interviewed for this story and provided this statement:
“The oil and gas production in the Permian Basin is responsible in large part for the United States’ remarkable energy independence, and it is a strategic national resource that would be tapped regardless of ownership.
Through ownership of the University Lands, beginning with the Texas Constitution of 1876, royalties received by the University of Texas System and the Texas A&M System have positively impacted millions of people who have benefitted from historic investments in financial aid, faculty support, teaching, research, medical buildings and more.”
While the university does lease some land for wind and solar farms, those projects account for 0.2% of its 2022 revenue from university property. Mann believes that the state of Texas, blessed with wind, sun and wealth, can and should lead on America’s energy transition.
“So that little sliver has to become the full thing. It has to become 100% and they need to move dramatically away from using that land to worsen the climate crisis, to using that land to make a profit in helping lead us down this path of clean energy,” he said.
University research and fossil fuel donations
A university doesn’t have to own its own oil fields to benefit from the fossil fuel money. Many schools, including Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, accept donations from oil and gas companies to support climate change research.
Between 2010 and 2020, Stanford accepted $56.6 million in donations from oil and gas companies, according to research by the progressive think tank Data for Progress. That puts Stanford in the Top 10 of universities accepting fossil fuel donations.
June Choi is a PhD student who came to Stanford to study at the new, $1.7 billion Doerr School of Sustainability. She was angry to learn the school would accept funding from fossil fuel industry partners.
“A total contradiction,” she called it.
In response, Choi and other students and faculty created a group called the Coalition for a True School of Sustainability and protested last year’s ribbon-cutting celebration at Stanford’s Doerr School.
“We were kind of crashing the party, really. And there was just so much energy. So, it created a lot of excitement,” she said.
Mann, at Penn, says when universities accept fossil fuel company donations for climate change research, it can cast a positive light on the very industry that’s at the root of the problem.
“[The fossil fuel companies] are purchasing the name Stanford University, and that is worth a lot to a fossil fuel industry that’s trying to purchase credibility. ‘Hey look, we’re trying to solve the problem and we’re working with the greatest universities around to do so,’” he said.
Protesters at Stanford believe their efforts have led to a more open dialogue with the university about the funding of research through donations from fossil fuel companies.
Philippe Roberge
What the Stanford activists want is a university ban on those donations, like the policy Princeton University in New Jersey was the first and only university to implement in 2022. Princeton created a list of 90 fossil fuel companies from which it will not accept donations.
In a process called dissociation, Princeton targeted companies involved in the “most-polluting segments of the industry” and a history of spreading “corporate disinformation” about climate change.
The biggest corporation on the list is ExxonMobil, which says it had donated $12 million to Princeton. In a statement to CBS, ExxonMobil wrote: “Close collaboration between industry and academia is essential to finding practical solutions to climate change.”
Princeton’s policy allows for companies to re-associate with the university in the future if they can meet the school’s criteria.
“And that’s great because then the university is really in a position to say, look like we are really constructively engaging with these companies and contributing to shifting the needle on their actions, Choi said.
The work of student organizers at Stanford is beginning to pay off. The university, which declined to be interviewed for this story, recently formed a committee to “review fossil fuel funding of research.”
“It’s a very positive sign, because that is exactly the beginning of a transparent process that we’ve been asking for,” Choi added.
Exiting fossil fuel investments
Many large institutional investors, including universities, buy stock in fossil fuel companies. In a nationwide movement, 50 universities or university systems have exited those investments. It’s a process called divestment.
Rutgers University is the largest state university system in New Jersey. After years of pressure from students and faculty, Rutgers announced in 2021 that it would permanently sell off those investments.
“I think you’re seeing increasingly universities becoming uncomfortable trying to pursue revenue streams in these industries that they know are punishing the earth,” Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway said.
Six universities have fully exited their investments: Harvard University, Yale University, Stanford University, Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Michigan.
One has partially exited: University of Pennsylvania.
Three maintain their fossil fuel investments: Notre Dame University, University of Texas and Texas A&M University.
At Rutgers, a committee of faculty, students and staff helped create a divestment policy that put an end to all investments in fossil fuels, moved those investments to environmentally friendly index funds which actively seek investments in renewable energy.
“If we don’t do this work for the future that we’re not going to see, the one thing we know is the future will be worse. We know that. So, if we know that, don’t we have an obligation to do something about it? I think we do,” Holloway said.
Blake Peters made five 3-pointers in the second half and the No. 15 seeded Princeton shocked another power conference team to reach the NCAA Tournament regional semifinals for the first time in 56 years by beating No. 7 seed Missouri 78-63 on Saturday.
As the final minute ticked off the clock, the Princeton fans started chanting “Sweet 16! Sweet 16!” and coach Mitch Henderson cleared the bench with the victory easily in hand.
This upset was no small-school fluke against a more heralded team. It was a thoroughly dominating performance that sent Princeton to a place it hadn’t been in more than a half-century.
Tosan Evbuomwan #20, Ryan Langborg #3, and Caden Pierce #12, and Keeshawn Kellman #32 of the Princeton Tigers react against the Missouri Tigers in the second round of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament at Golden 1 Center on March 18, 2023 in Sacramento, California.
Ezra Shaw / Getty Images
“The world looks at us as two upsets,” forward Tosan Evbuomwan said. “But I feel like we’re supposed to be here. We have a lot of confidence in one another, what we’re doing. There’s definitely no letup with this group.”
Princeton (23-8) followed up a first-round win over Pac-12 tournament champion Arizona by overwhelming Missouri (25-10) of the Southeastern Conference from the start.
The Ivy League school known for giving powerhouses scares and occasionally pulling off upsets a generation ago has reached the round of 16 for the first time since 1967, when only 23 teams even made the tournament.
“I have no words for you,” Peters said. “We have such an unbelievable section (of fans) here. I have the best teammates in the world. I love each and every one of them. when we go out and believe in each other, anything is possible. I know it’s cliche, but anything is possible.”
Princeton will play the winner of Sunday’s game between Baylor and Creighton in the Sweet 16 in Louisville, Kentucky, on Friday night.
The Tigers will be the second Ivy League school to make the Sweet 16 in the past 43 tournaments, joining Cornell in 2010. No team from the academically prestigious league that doesn’t give athletic scholarships has gone further since Penn made the Final Four in 1979.
“I’ve always dreamed of playing deep into the tournament,” said Henderson, a player on Princeton’s teams in 1996 and ’98 that won first-round games. “As a player, got to the second round a couple times. Never got beyond it.”
This marks the third straight year a team seeded 15th made it to the Sweet 16, following Oral Roberts in 2021 and fellow New Jersey school Saint Peter’s last year. The only other time a 15 seed made it this far came in 2013 when Florida Gulf Coast did it.
Ryan Langborg led Princeton with 22 points and Peters added 17.
DeAndre Gholston scored 19 points and Noah Carter added 14 for Missouri, which was seeking its first berth in the Sweet 16 since 2009.
“We were able to get the lead one time,” coach Dennis Gates said. “We held the lead for 30 seconds in the entire game. Every time we got the lead or when they had the lead, we cut it to six, they came back down and did what a good team would do: Make a shot or make a play.”
Princeton showed no signs of being outclassed against another power conference team, controlling the play from the start. Keeshawn Kellman had two dunks and a blocked shot in a span of 16 seconds midway through the half.
Princeton built the lead to 10 points on a corner 3 by Zach Martini and went up 33-19 on a drive by Evbuomwan.
Missouri responded by scoring the final seven points of the half to go into the break down seven.
Every time Missouri threatened early in the second half, Princeton had an answer with Peters hitting five 3-pointers. The fourth gave Princeton a 62-43 lead and Missouri never threatened after that.
“Blake Peters has been making shots coming off the bench for us for weeks,” Henderson said. “This is a very, very confident group. We are so thrilled to be going to the Sweet 16. It is an absolute pleasure being around these guys. They just grit their teeth and they do it.”
Nearly three decades after his famous photo, Princeton basketball coach Mitch Henderson was still jumping ― but not quite as high ― after the No. 15 seed Tigers stunned No. 2 Arizona in the NCAA Tournament on Thursday for the biggest upset of the day. (Watch the video below.)
Henderson was featured in a 1996 photo leaping for joy as a point guard on Princeton’s 13th-seeded team after defeating No. 4 UCLA, the defending champion, in the first round of March Madness. The picture is on display at Princeton’s practice facility.
But the circumstances for Henderson getting off the ground on Thursday were a tad different.
Watch the coach join his players in a mosh pit of sorts in a delirious locker room celebration after their 59-55 win.
Reminded of the victory over UCLA in a postgame interview, Henderson said: “That was a long time ago.”
Radomir Ray Mitic spent part of the summer and fall of 2019 studying civic awareness and engagement among students at a Russian university. As part of his research, which was funded by the Higher School of Economics, in Moscow, he interviewed students, administrators, and faculty members and even lived in a residence hall so he could make first-hand observations.
But by the time Mitic, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of North Dakota, published a paper on his findings, last fall, such fieldwork was no longer feasible. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, nearly a year ago, slammed the door on scholarship, severing international academic partnerships and making the country effectively off limits to American and other western researchers.
“It’s sort of a cautionary tale,” Mitic said. “I just don’t see that line of research continuing.”
Russia is not the only place where on-the-ground fieldwork has become difficult, if not impossible, for outside researchers. In China, President Xi Jinping’s tightening grip on power has extended to academe. Archives have been closed to the public. Once-innocuous topics of inquiry, like trade policy or migration, have become politicized. Wariness of the West has made it more difficult for researchers to interview officials or average citizens. And Sino-American tensions, including policies put in place by the U.S. government, have further chilled scholarly exchange.
If the door has been slammed shut for researchers of Russia, it has been pulling closed, bit by bit, for those who study China. After the relative openness of recent decades, many worry that this could be a return to a time when both countries were largely closed off and academics were forced to do their work from afar.
“We’re back to being Cold War scholars,” said Jeremy S. Friedman, an associate professor at Harvard Business School who studies the history of communism and socialism in Russia, China, and the developing world.
Technology, of course, has made working with colleagues around the globe much easier than in the past, and Covid-19 put remote collaboration successfully to the test. Some even see a silver lining: If research in China and Russia is restricted, it could force academics to look for alternative sources, highlighting new perspectives and driving scholarship in fresh and potentially promising directions.
But while some work can be done at a distance, for other areas, like archival or public-opinion research, there’s no substitute for being on the ground. Without fieldwork, study of certain questions or topics could be diminished or dry up altogether.
Even with email and video conferencing, academic collaboration is rooted in personal relationships. Spending time in a location builds trust with future subjects and possible collaborators. The impact could be especially acute for graduate students and early-career scholars who haven’t had time to build professional networks. A new generation may not want to study Russia or China if it is difficult, or impossible, to go there. And an academic Cold War could isolate scholars in those countries.
The irony of the moment is not lost on scholars of China and Russia: Understanding both places is more crucial now than ever. But just as their expertise is more valued, gaining first-hand insight could become much more difficult.
“A point that’s often missed when politics get tense is that people-to-people communication is more important at these times, not less,” said James A. Millward, a professor of Chinese history at Georgetown University. “If the door is closed, we can’t hear what’s going on.”
Few foreign researchers have gone to China over the past three years, hindered not by politics but by the pandemic. The country’s tight border restrictions kept most visitors, academic and otherwise, out; the Chinese government dropped a lengthy quarantine requirement for international travelers only last month.
Still, the climate for outside researchers had grown less hospitable before Covid. A 2018 survey of 500 China-focused social scientists based outside of the country asked the scholars about “repressive research experiences” they encountered in China and found that a quarter of them had been denied archival access. Five percent reported difficulty getting a visa, and nine percent said they had been “invited to tea,” that is, they had been questioned by police or other local authorities.
China has long placed restrictions on foreign scholars whose research is focused on politically sensitive issues like Taiwan or pro-democracy movements. Millward, for example, has previously been denied visas to go to China because of his work on Xinjiang, where the Chinese government has sought to repress its Uyghur Muslim minority.
We’re back to being Cold War scholars.
But China scholars said the red lines have shifted in recent years, with a widening group of subjects now likely to trip political sensitivities. Rory Truex, who conducted the 2018 survey with Sheena Chestnut Greitens, an associate professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, has seen the changes firsthand. Truex, an assistant professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, first went to China in 2004 as a 19-year-old Princeton undergraduate on an immersion program. He returned over the summers to teach English and learn Mandarin, and spent nearly a year on the ground conducting research for his doctoral dissertation and first book, on the Chinese legislative system. Such research “is probably not replicable today,” he said.
It used to be possible for researchers to “run around and talk to everyone,” Truex said. “I realize now that it was a relative golden era.”
Hokyoung Kim for The Chronicle
Much of the tightening coincides with the rise of Xi Jinping, who has been China’s leader since 2013. Xi, who was recently confirmed to an unprecedented third term, has sought to centralize power and silence dissent across Chinese society. But he also singled out higher education, mandating new curricula, barring the discussion of certain controversial topics in the classroom, and installing political allies as university leaders. During the pandemic, government officials put in place new regulations requiring Chinese professors to get permission before delivering academic papers at international conferences, even online.
For foreign academics, the restrictions on archival research have been one of the most visible constraints on scholarship. Without direct access, they have to rely on Chinese-published excerpts, which are often heavily redacted, said Friedman of Harvard Business School. Some individual Chinese scholars had maintained “shadow libraries” of historical materials, but doing so has become increasingly risky, with some facing house arrest.
Increasingly, foreign academics worry that they could be caught up in events not directly related to their own scholarship. In 2018, the Chinese government detained and tried for espionage two Canadians, a businessman and a former diplomat who worked for a think tank, an action seen as retaliation for the arrest of a Chinese businesswoman on fraud charges by Canadian and American authorities. Although the men were not academics, their three-year imprisonment spooked researchers who feared that they could end up in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In the wake of the incident, ChinaFile, an online magazine published by the Asia Society, surveyed contributors about whether they would travel to China once Covid restrictions were lifted. Forty percent of the respondents — who included journalists, civil-society workers, and former diplomats as well as scholars — said they probably or definitely would not.
“You can’t help but think, if it happened to him, why not me?” Meg Rithmire, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, said of the arrests. Still, Rithmire, who has two young children, said she felt safe traveling to China and hoped to do so this summer.
Indeed, the presence of foreign academics could be more problematic for their Chinese colleagues. Rithmire was one of several scholars who said if they returned to China, they would likely do so under the auspices of a foreign organization, such as the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, rather than ask Chinese professors or universities to write invitation letters to sponsor their visits. In the current environment, hosting an American researcher could bring unwanted scrutiny to local academics, they said.
The scrutiny is not one-sided. Over the last few years, the United States government has also become more skeptical of academic collaboration with China, seeing college campuses as vulnerable to Chinese efforts to poach academic expertise and intellectual property. The Trump administration investigated and sought to prosecute American researchers who do work in China for what it characterized as academic espionage. Although the Biden administration ended the inquiry, known as the China Initiative, last year, government agencies and the U.S. Congress have continued to comb through researchers’ China ties.
Lin Zhang, an assistant professor of communications and media studies at the University of New Hampshire, said an American colleague who conducts research on China’s biotechnology industry was contacted by FBI agents who asked her, after she returned from a research trip, to share her contacts and a list of everyone she had interviewed. Though the colleague refused, some academics could pull back from working in China lest they get caught in the geopolitical crossfire. A 2021 survey of Chinese and Chinese American scientists by researchers at the University of Arizona found that a quarter would limit their connections with China, including joint research projects, speaking engagements, and visiting appointments.
While a number of policies enacted under President Donald J. Trump put restrictions on Chinese students and scholars coming to the United States, he also canceled the Fulbright program to mainland China and Hong Kong. Relatively small numbers of students and scholars study on the flagship U.S. government exchange program, but its revocation, which has not been reversed by President Biden, sends a signal about the value the U.S. government places on gaining expertise on China, scholars said.
Indeed, the number of American college students studying in China fell more than 20 percent between 2011, when President Barack Obama made a big push to send more Americans to China, and the start of the pandemic. If it becomes more difficult to spend time on the ground studying Mandarin or doing research, the pipeline of future scholars could be further depressed.
There are already efforts underway to help younger scholars if China becomes off limits. A group of China scholars, for example, has organized seminars for graduate students and early-career academics to develop strategies to research China from outside the country.
Zhang, the New Hampshire professor, had just finished up the fieldwork for her first book, on entrepreneurship and the Chinese digital economy, before Covid struck. During the pandemic, she tried to continue her research remotely, but the time differences made that difficult, and “people get tired of Zoom,” she said.
Zhang, who was born in China, plans to return this summer to see her parents and conduct some research. While she said her subject matter isn’t particularly sensitive, she expects challenges in getting people to talk with her. In the midst of a trade war, government officials and even business executives may be less open with a researcher from America.
“As someone born in China and an immigrant, I see myself as a bridge, helping explain both sides to each other,” Zhang said. “But that role is easier to play when relations are good.”
As a young academic, Zhang has to publish. So she has made a pragmatic decision: to shift the focus of her research away from China to immigrant knowledge-workers in the United States, particularly in Boston’s biomedical hub. She sees commonalities between this group and the young Chinese entrepreneurs who were her previous subjects: Both were educated overseas and must straddle two cultures.
“I’m trying to find agency. I’m trying to find value in my work,” Zhang said. “It feels natural. And it’s a decision that I made.”
While China-focused academics are testing the waters to see if it is possible to wade back in, for scholars of Russia, the break is at once more abrupt and more definitive.
“It’s a significant rupture,” said Theodore P. Gerber, a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and director of its Wisconsin Russia Project. “It seems like there’s not going to be a happy ending any time soon.”
People-to-people communication is more important at these times, not less.
Still, the Association for Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies, of which Johnson is president, issued a statement that it would not discriminate against individual researchers because of their nationality. “That was extraordinary for us because we as a rule don’t make political statements,” she said. “But we wanted to be clear about the difference between institutions and individuals.”
Even so, fieldwork in Russia has been halted. Russian flights are banned from airspace in Europe and North America, and the U.S. government has warned American citizens not to travel there. Sanctions make it nearly impossible to use credit cards or to electronically transfer money from western countries to Russian banks.
Before the war, the climate for foreign researchers in Russia had, in some ways, been moving toward greater openness, said Harvard Business School’s Friedman, who studies both China and Russia. Unlike China, Russia had been opening up its archives and declassifying more historical and government files in recent years. “On the eve of the pandemic,” Friedman said, “Russia was more accessible to researchers than it had been for 20 years.”
During the pandemic, in fact, it was possible for outside academics to do research in Russian archives. While Covid restrictions made travel difficult, archives remained open, and scholars could hire local graduate students as assistants to hunt down and copy documents. That remote-research option no longer works because of U.S. sanctions.
In other ways, however, the space for international academic collaboration was growing more restrictive in Russia. A higher-education law that took effect in April 2021 required that all joint research projects between Russian scholars and foreign colleagues get Russian government approval. Two months later, Bard College, which had longstanding Russian partnerships, was blacklisted by the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office, banned from all activity and operations in the country.
When Gerber interviewed Russian professors that summer, they spoke, although circumspectly, about concerns that government policy could further limit their work with western peers. “All the people in the academia, at least in the social sciences, have been expecting that at some point [U.S./Russia tensions are] going to hit academia and the relationship between Russian universities, scholars, and their Western counterparts,” one told Gerber.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has viewed Russian academics, particularly those with connections to the West, as potential political opponents, Gerber said.
In a paper he co-authored with Margarita Zavadskaya, a researcher at the University of Helsinki, in Finland, Gerber argues that the war could be the end of independent social science in Russia, which really only emerged after the fall of the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, the Soviet government invested in the sciences, but disciplines like political science largely didn’t exist in universities there. Collaboration with foreign academics, along with government funding, helped jumpstart these fields and raise the quality of Russian scholarship to international levels.
The disappearance of foreign research partnerships, and an exodus of professors and scientists, could hurt Russian higher education, Gerber said. “A lot of Russian scholarship will be scholarship in exile.”
Even before Russia attacked Ukraine, some Russia scholars had already begun to move the focus of their work away from Russia, motivated by limitations on academic freedom and other government policies under Putin. Johnson, for one, decided to shift her research, on financial nationalism and post-Soviet monuments, to have a broader regional focus after Russia’s invasion of Crimea, in 2014.
Johnson acknowledges that the nature of her scholarship made the transition possible, but for others it may not be so smooth. One of Johnson’s graduate students has had to completely rethink his doctoral project, which rested on focus-group research in Russia. And research that involves the discussion of sensitive political issues cannot happen over Zoom.
For Friedman, who has used archives to shed light on policy decisions, it may be possible to do research outside of Russia, mining documents in former Soviet satellites or other countries that came under Moscow’s orbit. But while those materials can provide new insights, especially about how policy-making affects such outposts, they are often one-sided. For historians and political scientists, they may shed little light on internal deliberations, he said. “It would be as if you were forced to tell the history of the United States from El Paso, Milwaukee, or Jacksonville, rather than D.C.”
The loss of on-the-ground access may be felt acutely today as academic experts try to understand Putin’s actions and motivations as he seeks to reassert Russian power. “We’ll be back to Kremlinology,” Johnson said.
Rithmire, the China scholar, notes that in-person research exposes scholars to diverse voices, challenges their assumptions, and frequently takes their work down unexpected paths. Without it, “you lose nuance,” she said.
Like Johnson, Gerber, who studies migration, has shifted his research focus away from Russia. While the work is fruitful, some collaborations may not be as deep because other countries don’t have the same expertise or research infrastructure as Russia does in the social sciences, thanks to the burst of post-Soviet investment.
There’s also the matter of language. Like other scholars of the region, Gerber speaks Russian, but doing so can be a delicate issue these days. People in Ukraine and neighboring countries have embraced their native languages as a way to assert their opposition to Moscow. Gerber is considering learning Ukrainian.
Some scholars see the current moment as an opportunity to consider what Russian studies could look like with a little less Russia. Vitaly Chernetsky, a professor of Slavic and Eurasian languages and literatures at the University of Kansas, grew up in Odessa, Ukraine, and was an exchange student in the United States when the Berlin Wall fell.
More than three decades later, Chernetsky, whose father remains in Ukraine, said scholarship of the region is still Russia-centric. Russian authors, composers, and poets are firmly established in the western canon, but those from his home country, less so. Studies of politics tend to be centered in Moscow and radiate out.
Chernetsky and others said there needs to be what they call a “decolonization” of the field. “It’s terrible it took a war to wake us up to the need for structural change,” said Chernetsky, who is the current vice president for the Association for Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies. “We need a paradigm shift, to realize that not everything important happened in St. Petersburg or Moscow.”
Ukraine in particular has good archives, Chernetsky said, although they are now physically off limits because of the war. Efforts are underway to digitize their contents and make them more broadly available, and researchers could also work with refugee communities.
It’s time for self-examination, Chernetsky said. “How do we emerge critically richer?”
That reflection could extend to how courses on the region are taught. In a course on post-communist transformation, Johnson has assigned readings with a comparative lens, rather than a Russia focus.
Another of Johnson’s courses, on Russian politics, has 160 students this semester — and enrollment would have been higher had she not capped it. Studying Russia, and doing so in Russia, may become harder for the next generation of scholars, but the hunger for it may be growing.
For Johnson and others, the potential academic isolation of Russia and China has personal as well as professional consequences, cutting them off from a network of colleagues and friends. “I don’t anticipate being able to go back,” she said. “Maybe not ever.”
Newswise — Physicists are increasingly using ultracold molecules to study quantum states of matter. Many researchers contend that molecules have advantages over other alternatives, such as trapped ions, atoms or photons. These advantages suggest that molecular systems will play important roles in emerging quantum technologies. But, for a while now, research into molecular systems has advanced only so far because of long-standing challenges in preparing, controlling and observing molecules in a quantum regime.
Now, as chronicled in a study published this week in Nature, Princeton researchers have achieved a major breakthrough by microscopically studying molecular gases at a level never before achieved by previous research. The Princeton team, led by Waseem Bakr, associate professor of physics, was able to cool molecules down to ultracold temperatures, load them into an artificial crystal of light known as an optical lattice, and study their collective quantum behavior with high spatial resolution such that each individual molecule could be observed.
“We prepared the molecules in the gas in a well-defined internal and motional quantum state. The strong interactions between the molecules gave rise to subtle quantum correlations which we were able to detect for the first time,” said Bakr.
This experiment has profound implications for fundamental physics research, such as the study of many-body physics, which looks at the emergent behavior of ensembles of interacting quantum particles. The research also might accelerate the development of large-scale quantum computer systems.
In the quest to build large-scale quantum systems, both for quantum computing and for more general scientific applications, researchers have used a variety of different alternatives—everything from trapped ions and atoms to electrons confined in “quantum dots.” The goal is to transform these various alternatives into what are called qubits, which are the building blocks of a quantum computer system. Quantum computers have much greater computing power and capacity—exponentially greater—than classical computer systems, and can solve problems classical computers have difficulty solving.
Although so far no single type of qubit has emerged as the front-runner, Bakr and his team believe that molecular systems, while less explored than other platforms, hold particular promise.
One important advantage of using molecules in experimental settings—and especially as potential qubits—is the fact that molecules can store quantum information in an abundance of new ways not available to single atoms. For example, even for a simple molecule made of just two atoms, which can be visualized as a tiny dumbbell, quantum information can be stored in the rotational motion of the dumbbell or the shaking of its constituent atoms relative to each other. Another advantage of molecules is that they often have long-range interactions; they can interact with other molecules many sites away in an optical lattice, whereas atoms, for example, can only interact if they occupy the same site.
When using molecules to study many-body physics, these advantages are expected to enable researchers to explore fascinating new quantum phases of matter in these synthetic systems. However, a major problem, which Bakr and his team have been able to overcome in this experiment, is the microscopic characterization of these quantum states.
“The ability to probe the gas at the level of individual molecules is the novel aspect of our research,” said Bakr. “When you’re able to look at individual molecules, you can extract a lot more information about the many-body system.”
What Bakr means by extracting more information is the ability to observe and document the subtle correlations that characterize molecules in a quantum state—for example, correlations of their positions in the lattice or their rotational states.
“Researchers had prepared molecules in the ultracold regime before, but they couldn’t measure their correlations because they couldn’t see the single molecules,” said Jason Rosenberg, a graduate student in Princeton’s Department of Physics and the co-lead author of the paper. “By seeing each individual molecule, we can really characterize and explore the different quantum phases that are expected to emerge.”
While researchers have been studying many-body physics with atomic quantum gases for over two decades, molecular quantum gases have been much harder to tame. Unlike atoms, molecules can store energy by vibrating and rotating in many different ways. These various excitations are known as “degrees of freedom”—and their abundance is the characteristic that makes molecules difficult to control and manipulate experimentally.
“In order to study molecules in a quantum regime, we need to control all their degrees of freedom and place them in a well-defined quantum mechanical state,” said Bakr.
The researchers accomplished this precise level of control by first cooling two atomic gases of sodium and rubidium down to incredibly low temperatures that are measured in nanokelvins, or temperatures one-billionth of a degree Kelvin. At these ultracold temperatures, each of the two gases transition into a state of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate. In this ultracold environment, the researchers coax the atoms into pairing up into sodium-rubidium molecules in a well-defined internal quantum state. Then they use lasers to transfer the molecules into their absolute ground state where all rotations and vibrations of the molecules are frozen.
To maintain the quantum behavior of the molecules, they are isolated in a vacuum chamber and held in an optical lattice made of standing waves of light.
“We interfere a set of laser beams together and, from this, we create a corrugated landscape resembling an ‘egg carton’ in which the molecules sit,” said Rosenberg.
In the experiment, the researchers captured about one hundred molecules in this “egg carton” lattice. Then the researchers pushed the system out of equilibrium—and tracked what happened in the strongly interacting system.
“We gave the system a sudden ‘nudge,’” said Lysander Christakis, a graduate student and co-lead author of the paper. “We allowed the molecules to interact and build up quantum entanglement. This entanglement is reflected in subtle correlations, and the ability to probe the system at this microscopic level allows us to reveal these correlations—and learn about them.”
Entanglement is one of the most fascinating—and perplexing— properties of many-body quantum states. It describes a property of the subatomic world in which quantum elements—whether molecules, electrons, photons, or whatever—become inextricably linked with each other no matter the distance separating them. Entanglement is especially significant in quantum computing because it acts as a sort of computational multiplier. It is the crucial ingredient underlying the exponential speedup in solving problems with quantum computers.
The unparalleled control the researchers achieved in preparing and detecting the molecules has clear implications for quantum computing. But the researchers emphasize that, ultimately, the experiment is not necessarily about creating the most advanced qubits. Rather, it is, most importantly, a huge step forward in fundamental physics research.
“This research opens up a lot of possibilities to study really interesting problems in many-body physics,” said Christakis. “What we’ve demonstrated here is a complete platform for using ultracold molecules as a system to study complex quantum phenomena.”
Rosenberg concurred. “In this experiment, the molecules were frozen into individual sites on the lattice and quantum information was only stored in the rotational states of the molecules. Moving forward, it will be exciting to explore a whole other realm of interesting phenomena that appear when you allow the molecules to ‘hop’ from site to site. Our research has opened the door to investigating ever more exotic states of matter that can be prepared with these molecules, and now we can characterize them very well,” he concluded.
Other members of the Princeton team are graduate student Ravin Raj; postdoctoral research associate Zoe Yan; undergraduate Sungjae Chi; and theorists Alan Morningstar, postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, and David Huse, Princeton’s Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.
The study, “Probing site-resolved correlations in a spin system of ultracold molecules,” by Lysander Christakis, Jason S. Rosenberg, Ravin Raj, Sungjae Chi, Alan Morningstar, David A. Huse, Zoe Z. Yan, and Waseem S. Bakr was published online in Nature, on February 1, 2023. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05558-4.
Newswise — A new study shows that the Bering Land Bridge, the strip of land that once connected Asia to Alaska, emerged far later during the last ice age than previously thought.
The unexpected findings shorten the window of time that humans could have first migrated from Asia to the Americas across the Bering Land Bridge.
The findings also indicate that there may be a less direct relationship between climate and global ice volume than scientists had thought, casting into doubt some explanations for the chain of events that causes ice age cycles. The study was published on December 27 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“This result came totally out of left field,” said Jesse Farmer, postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University and co-lead author on the study. “As it turns out, our research into sediments from the bottom of the Arctic Ocean told us not only about past climate change but also one of the great migrations in human history.”
Insight into ice age cycles
During the periodic ice ages over Earth’s history, global sea levels drop as more and more of Earth’s water becomes locked up in massive ice sheets. At the end of each ice age, as temperatures increase, ice sheets melt and sea levels rise. These ice age cycles repeat throughout the last 3 million years of Earth’s history, but their causes have been hard to pin down.
By reconstructing the history of the Arctic Ocean over the last 50,000 years, the researchers revealed that the growth of the ice sheets — and the resulting drop in sea level — occurred surprisingly quickly and much later in the last glacial cycle than previous studies had suggested.
“One implication is that ice sheets can change more rapidly than previously thought,” Farmer said.
During the last ice age’s peak of the last ice age, known as the Last Glacial Maximum, the low sea levels exposed a vast land area that extended between Siberia and Alaska known as Beringia, which included the Bering Land Bridge. In its place today is a passage of water known as the Bering Strait, which connects the Pacific and Arctic Oceans.
Based on records of estimated global temperature and sea level, scientists thought the Bering Land Bridge emerged around 70,000 years ago, long before the Last Glacial Maximum.
But the new data show that sea levels became low enough for the land bridge to appear only 35,700 years ago. This finding was particularly surprising because global temperatures were relatively stable at the time of the fall in sea level, raising questions about the correlation between temperature, sea level and ice volume.
“Remarkably, the data suggest that the ice sheets can change in response to more than just global climate,” Farmer said. For example, the change in ice volume may have been the direct result of changes in the intensity of sunlight that struck the ice surface over the summer.
“These findings appear to poke a hole in our current understanding of how past ice sheets interacted with the rest of the climate system, including the greenhouse effect,” said Daniel Sigman, Dusenbury Professor of Geological and Geophysical Sciences at Princeton University and Farmer’s postdoctoral advisor. “Our next goal is to extend this record further back in time to see if the same tendencies apply to other major ice sheet changes. The scientific community will be hungry for confirmation.”
New context for human migration
The timing of human migration into North America from Asia remains unresolved, but genetic studies tell us that ancestral Native American populations diverged from Asian populations about 36,000 years ago, the same time that Farmer and colleagues found that the Bering Land Bridge emerged.
“It’s generally believed that the land bridge was open for a while, and then humans crossed it at some point,” Sigman said. “But our new data suggest that the land bridge was not open, and as soon as it opened up, human populations made their way into North America.”
The finding raises questions about why humans decided to migrate as soon as the land bridge opened, and how humans made their way across the land bridge with no previous knowledge of the landscape.
The researchers noted that they need to be cautious when considering these implications, as the interpretation requires combining very different types of information, including the new data and the information of human geneticists and paleoanthropologists. They look forward to seeing how their results are built upon by these other scientific communities.
A window to the past
To reconstruct the history of the Bering Strait, Farmer and Sigman sought an ocean chemical fingerprint.
Pacific waters carry high concentrations of nitrogen molecules that have a distinct chemical composition, known as an isotope ratio. Today, waters from the Pacific Ocean travel northwards across the Bering Strait into the Arctic Ocean, carrying a traceable nitrogen isotope ratio.
By measuring nitrogen isotopes in sediments at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, Farmer found that the fingerprint of Pacific Ocean nitrogen disappeared when the Bering Strait was closed during the peak of the last ice age, as expected.
But when Farmer continued his analyses further back in time – to about 50,000 years ago – he found that the Pacific nitrogen fingerprint returned far more recently than researchers had thought possible.
“When Jesse showed me his data, he didn’t need to explain to me what had happened,” Sigman said. “It was too large of a change to be anything other than a previous opening of the Bering Strait.”
To understand the implications for global sea level, Farmer and Sigman collaborated with Tamara Pico, a sea level expert and professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UC Santa Cruz, Princeton undergraduate Class of 2014, and co-lead author on the paper. Pico compared Farmer’s results with sea level models based on different scenarios for the growth of the ice sheets.
“When Jesse contacted me I was so excited,” Pico said. “A large part of my PhD thesis was focused on how fast global ice sheets grew leading into the Last Glacial Maximum, and much of my work suggests that they might have grown faster than previously thought.”
Farmer’s nitrogen analyses provided a new set of evidence to back up Pico’s research about sea levels during the last ice age.
“The exciting thing to me is that this provides a completely independent constraint on global sea level during this time period,” Pico said. “Some of the ice sheet histories that have been proposed differ by quite a lot, and we were able to look at what the predicted sea level would be at the Bering Strait and see which ones are consistent with the nitrogen data.”
“This study brought together experts in the Arctic Ocean, nitrogen cycling and global sea level. And the outcome has consequences not only for climate and sea level but also for human prehistory,” Farmer said. “One of the thrilling aspects of paleoclimate research is the opportunity to collaborate across such a broad range of subjects.”
“The Bering Strait was flooded 10,000 years before the Last Glacial Maximum,” by Jesse R. Farmer, Tamara Pico, Ona M. Underwood, Rebecca Cleveland Stout, Julie Granger, Thomas M. Cronin, François Fripiat, Alfredo Martínez-García, Gerald H. Haug, and Daniel M. Sigman appears in the current issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2206742119). The research was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (OCE-2054780 and OCE-2054757), the Tuttle and Phillips Funds of the Department of Geosciences, the Max Planck Society, and the USGS Climate Research and Development Program.
PRINCETON, N.J. — A Princeton University student from Ohio who went missing near campus roughly a week ago was found dead Thursday, Mercer County Prosecutor Angelo Onofri said.
Misrach Ewunetie, 20, was found by an employee at about 1 p.m. behind tennis courts on the campus facilities grounds, Onofri said. There were no obvious signs of injury “her death does not appear suspicious or criminal in nature,” but an official cause of death will be determined after a medical examiner’s review, he said.
“Misrach’s death is an unthinkable tragedy. Our hearts go out to her family, her friends and the many others who knew and loved her,” University Vice President W. Rochelle Calhoun said in a statement.
An extensive search was launched for Ewunetie after she was reported missing. A large law enforcement presence remained on campus and in nearby areas Thursday.
Ewunetie was last seen heading into her dorm room at the Ivy League school in the early morning hours of Oct. 14, school officials said. But when her roommate returned to the dorm about 90 minutes later, Ewunetie was not there.
Family and friends said they had not heard from Ewunetie. Appearing Thursday on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” her brother, Universe Ewunetie, said his sister’s phone last pinged sometime after 3 a.m. Friday at a housing complex that’s about a 30-minute walk from her dorm, which he said was out of character for her to be in such a location.
According to her LinkedIn profile, Ewunetie was a junior pursuing a sociology degree with a computer applications certificate. She was valedictorian at Villa Angela-St. Joseph high school in Cleveland, Ohio, before accepting a full scholarship to Princeton.
