Collaborators from across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts came together in December for a daylong summit of the Massachusetts Prison Education Consortium (MPEC), hosted by the Educational Justice Institute (TEJI) at MIT. Held at MIT's Walker Memorial, the summit aimed to expand access to high-quality education for incarcerated learners and featured presentations by leaders alongside strategy sessions designed to turn ideas into concrete plans to improve equitable access to higher education and reduce recidivism in local communities. In addition to a keynote address by author and resilience expert Shaka Senghor, speakers such as Molly Lasagna, senior strategy officer in the Ascendium Education Group, and Stefan LoBuglio, former director of the National Institute of Corrections, discussed the roles of learning, healing, and community support in building a more just system for justice-impacted individuals. The MPEC summit, 'Building Integrated Systems Together: Massachusetts Community Colleges and County Corrections 2.0,' addressed three key issues surrounding equitable education: the integration of Massachusetts community college education with county corrections to provide incarcerated individuals with access to higher education; the integration of carceral education with industry to expand work and credentialing opportunities; and the goal of better serving women who experience unique challenges within the criminal legal system....

Joan Brugge has worked for nearly 50 years as a cancer scientist, studying the earliest signs that someone might become sick. Then the Trump administration canceled her lab's funding. The administration's attacks on medicine, culture, and education'which include verbal threats and funding cuts'are about more than just budgeting and bravado. Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University and the author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. She argues that this effort is part of a larger autocratic project to maintain power. Joan Brugge: I was actually at a breast-cancer retreat. And during the coffee break, I looked at my emails to see, you know, if there's anything that I had to deal with. And I got this email from the university, and it was a real gut punch. My knees basically buckled, and I had to sit down. Brugge: I never imagined that it would be possible that funding for lifesaving research would be terminated for issues that were totally unrelated to the quality of the work or the progress that we had made in the work....

On October 9, 2023'two days after the Hamas attacks on Israeli villages adjacent to Gaza'protesters gathered in front of the Sydney Opera House to chant angrily about the Jews. The chant sounded to many like Gas the Jews. But Australian authorities reviewed footage, and at a surreal press conference, they announced that while some members of the crowd were shouting 'Fuck the Jews,' the crowd's unison chant was 'Where's the Jews'' Australia has strict rules about hate speech, but merely inquiring about where to find Jews is not a crime, so the police closed the case. Australian Jews, needless to say, were not reassured. In Sydney, the answer to Where's the Jews' is Bondi, the area known simultaneously as a center of bikini culture and sun worship, and as a hub of Australian Orthodox Jewry. Yesterday two men, a father and son, emerged from their hatchback with rifles and fired at a crowd of Jews celebrating Hanukkah there. Some 15 are dead, and dozens have been hospitalized. The death toll could have been even worse. A fruit vendor abbreviated the massacre by tackling the younger killer and wresting away his gun. The father (also a fruiterer) was killed by police, and the son (an out-of-work bricklayer) was critically injured. Reports say that the two carried an Islamic State banner in their car, and that the son had been investigated for ties to an Islamic State cell in 2019. The father has owned guns legally for about a decade....

MIT has long bolstered U.S. manufacturing by developing key innovations and production technologies, and training entrepreneurs. This fall, the Institute introduced a new tool for U.S. manufacturing: an education program for workers, held at collaborating institutions, which teaches core principles of production, helping employees and firms alike. The new effort, the Technologist Advanced Manufacturing Program, or TechAMP, developed with U.S. Department of Defense funding, features a mix of in-person lab instruction at participating institutions, online lectures by MIT faculty and staff, and interactive simulations. There are also capstone projects, in which employees study manufacturing issues with the aim of saving their firms money. Ultimately, TechAMP is a 12-month certificate program aimed at making the concept of the accredited 'technologist' a vital part of the manufacturing enterprise. That could help workers advance in their careers. And it could help firms develop a more skilled workforce....