On April 12, Provost Michael Lewis, Ph.D sent an email update regarding the ongoing Academic Portfolio Review (APR), which announced that 40 programs are to be closed, including 29 undergraduate and 11 postgraduate programs.

The total number of students currently enrolled in the affected programs is 260. Of these 260 students, 222 are undergraduates and 38 are graduate students. These program closures will not affect current undergraduate and graduate students who are currently participants in the affected programs, nor will it affect 2021 recruits planning on participating in the affected programs. 

The review formally began in 2019, when the then-interim provost, Chet Gillis, Ph.D formed an Academic Portfolio Review committee to evaluate SLU’s degree-granting programs to “assess the value and effectiveness of academic degree programs based on metrics and university priorities.” This committee was tasked with identifying programs which were “undersubscribed” or “unviable.” After Gillis announced that he would step down as provost in April 2020, Michael Lewis, who was then serving as the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, took over as interim provost, and by extension, began to oversee the APR process. 

The fact that the APR process, an action with potentially far reaching consequences including program closures and termination of faculty, was initiated by an interim provost, Chet Gillis, and then continued under interim provost Michael Lewis (who was named permanent provost in Feb. 2021), was the subject of some controversy. Before Lewis was named permanent provost in February, the position had been filled with interim appointments for nearly two years, after Provost Nancy Brickhouse stepped down in August 2018. In a memo sent in July 2020, a number of professors voiced the opinion that a full scale academic portfolio review should take place under a permanent provost who had been chosen by a national search committee, per the Faculty Manual and the principles of proper shared governance between faculty and administration. However, no permanent decisions on program closures were made by an interim provost, either Gillis or Lewis. 

The effects of these program closures will be felt by both students and faculty, and less than half of the closed programs indicated support for the closure during the APR process. The closed programs can be divided into those slated for reallocation and those slated for reorganization. According to Provost Lewis: “reallocation is the discontinuance of a program that may result in the termination of tenured faculty” while  “reorganization is the structural realignment of programs or departments, and usually results in the consolidation of academic units but not in the termination of tenured faculty.” 

In his letter to students affected by the program closures, Lewis wrote that: “The faculty affected by this decision will have the opportunity to propose to me alternative options to closing the programs and given adequate time to prepare those proposals.” 

Lewis also reiterated that the announced program closures were not connected to budget shortfalls resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, but were rather part of a wider review process that began prior to the pandemic fifteen undergraduate majors are slated to be cut, the majority of which are housed in the College of Arts and Sciences. Some of the majors selected for closure include American Studies, Latin American Studies and, Russian Studies. Language study was also severely affected, with closures in German Studies, Italian Studies, and Classical Humanities/Greek and Latin Language and Literature. The University will still offer courses in these language areas, but it will no longer be possible to choose these areas as a major area of study and course variety will likely decrease.

In addition to the major programs slated for closure, ten minor programs were recommended for closure, with a total of 57 students currently pursuing these minors. The program closures also include six masters programs, which have a combined current enrollment of 26 students, and four doctoral programs, which have a combined current enrollment of 12 students, all of whom are pursuing a Ph.D in Special Education. 

With this announcement, the full APR is nearing its conclusion, and Lewis detailed the next stage of the process in his announcement. Faculty who offer courses within the program will be given the chance to propose alternatives to the proposed closure, and these proposals will be decided either by the Board of Trustees, if it is a program for reallocation, or directly to the Provost, if it is considered reorganization. 

On Friday, April 16, the Rev. Nontombi Naomi Tutu capped off Atlas Week with her keynote address at the Twenty-First Annual Atlas Week Signature Symposium. Throughout the week of April 12-16, the Atlas week coordinators brought together panelists virtually to discuss problems related to racial justice, with the guiding theme of “The House that Racism Built.” 

Tutu was born in 1960 in Krugersdorp, South Africa, the third daughter of Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Nomalizo Tutu. She was educated in Swaziland and the United Kingdom, and later continued her education in the United States, graduating from Berea College in Kentucky and the University of Kentucky. After obtaining a master’s degree from the University of Kentucky, Tutu began work as a consultant, activist and public speaker. Among other roles and accolades, Tutu was a delegate at the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa and has received four honorary doctorates from universities in the U.S. and Africa. She is an ordained Episcopal minister and has served as Missioner for Racial and Economic Equity at the Cathedral of All Souls, in Asheville, NC. 

Tutu opened her keynote remarks on Friday with an extended reflection on Toni Morisson’s acclaimed essay “Home,” part of  a wider collection of essays about racism in America from which the Atlas week “The House that Racism Built” took its name. She mediated in particular on a line from Morisson’s essay about the desire to live in a place where “where race both matters and is rendered impotent.” Reflecting on this line, Tutu offered a vision of a more just future where there is a simultaneous embrace of the common humanity of all and a celebration of the diversity that makes up our world.

Tutu also discussed her experiences growing up in apartheid South Africa, especially as the daughter of the apartheid regime’s staunchest opponents, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his anti-apartheid activism. Her mother, who in addition to raising four children, was also actively engaged as a labor organizer and activist, was another formative influence. She spoke about the racism and sexism she faced as a young girl both in South Africa and later in England, which inspired and continues to inspire her education activism, particularly for young girls. In fact, her name means “mother of girls,” and in a separate interview, Tutu said: “I thought that that meant that I would only give birth to girls, but when my son was born, I realized that it meant that I’d work with the young women of the world.”

In her experience leading Truth and Reconciliation workshops with groups in conflict, she has drawn heavily from her experiences living in apartheid South Africa and the South African Truth and Reconciliation process that took place during the late 1990s.  She told The University News: “there has never been an issue that has gone away simply by ignoring it. You can’t pick and choose the history you are going to pay attention to,” adding, “The biggest lesson for me from the Truth and Reconciliation process is that you have to have an honest look at your story. What did you do? What didn’t you do? If we want to start a process of healing and reconciliation, we have to set up places where the story of how we got to where we are can be told.” 

Tutu also offered advice to young SLU students: “Whoever you are, there is something you can do…it’s not always something dramatic. Once you recognize that you have some power to affect what happens in the world, you can start looking at the opportunity to do so, even if those opportunities are simply about your friend circle, your family circle, your church community, and your university community.”

Since SLU first transitioned to virtual learning last March, the COVID-19 pandemic has upended almost every traditional method of teaching and learning across all majors and colleges. And while it is widely recognized that virtual learning is no substitute for face-to-face interaction, tools like Zoom and other creative means of content delivery have allowed learning at SLU to persist and even to thrive during the pandemic. 

As the pandemic has stretched on, there have been opportunities, across all colleges and disciplines, to incorporate the COVID-19 pandemic into course content and material and to draw on insights reached in the classroom to better understand the current moment. Predictably, courses with a STEM basis have had ample opportunity to study COVID-19, in classes on virology and epidemiology, for example. But disciplines in the humanities in a diverse range of fields have also studied aspects of the pandemic in the classroom and the insights reached are indispensable towards understanding the pandemic and the world it has made. 

If the pandemic has reaffirmed one thing, it is that the sharp divisions between academic disciplines that are often most accentuated within a university setting are less useful outside of it, especially in times of crisis. For instance, questions early in the pandemic about the most effective way to stop the spread of COVID-19 from an epidemiological standpoint couldn’t be separated from questions relating to the economic or social impact of lockdowns or political questions about the responsibilities the government has to its citizens and their welfare. The rapid development of vaccines, including the cutting edge mRNA technology, were rightly hailed as extraordinary scientific achievements. But there remain other vaccine related questions, about inequalities in access, or the morality of patent laws on life-saving technology, that science cannot answer alone. To address these complex questions, an interdisciplinary approach is necessary, and as a Jesuit university, SLU is well attuned to the importance of this type of interdisciplinary collaboration. 

The University News spoke to three professors representing three different disciplines—Anthropology, English and History—in the humanities, all of whom have integrated the COVID-19 pandemic into their class material in some capacity. They shared insights that they and their students have reached so far this semester and the interdisciplinary approaches they have taken to do so. 

Amy Cooper, Ph.D., a professor of anthropology and sociology, teaches an introduction to Medical Anthropology course this semester. While she stopped short of including a specific module about COVID-19 to the syllabus, Cooper emphasized that nearly all of the course themes could be readily used to understand our current circumstances, and she encourages her students to make these connections whenever possible. 

Listing some of the topics covered in her Medical Anthropology course that offer parallels for our current moment,  Cooper, said: “We study how involuntary migration and poverty shape experiences of medical treatment for Hmong refugees in the U.S., how racism and class inequalities affect people’s attempts to build families through high-tech medical interventions in Ecuador, and how government policies meant to promote health actually dehumanize and traumatize generations of indigenous communities in the Canadian Arctic.”

As Cooper elaborated, one of the central insights she hopes to communicate in her course  is that illness is not strictly the result of a biological process, rather “health and illness are shaped by social, political, and economic inequalities, adding: “The way we organize society has created vast inequalities and hugely differential health outcomes, and a pandemic can exacerbate these inequalities when institutions don’t intervene to stop it.”  

Ellen Crowell, Ph.D., a professor of English, teaches a unique senior English seminar called “Reading AIDS in the Time of COVID.” Through weekly engagement with literature, film and music produced during the height of the AIDs crisis, students in Crowell’s class ask themselves each week: “When we explore how and why artists addressed the horrors of AIDS (institutionalized hatred, racism, homophobia, healthcare inequity, politicized medical treatment, the restructuring of human intimacy, etc.) what do we see about our own pandemic moment?” 

The idea for the class came, Crowell said, as she was running on the SLU track. While running, Crowell began listening closely to a song from the 1980s and thought: “This song was about AIDS and I didn’t notice that then.” Another thought quickly followed:  “The only reason I am noticing this now, is because we are again living in a pandemic.”

Midway through the semester, Crowell said, she and her students have thought about how “pandemics affect our collective sense of both the individual body,” including “how we deal with connection, community, intimacy while navigating biological threat” as well as “the national body, how fear of biological threat impacts issues of equity, xenophobia, and exclusionary nationalism.” 

A phenomenon that most people are no doubt familiar with is that as the pandemic has gone on, things which were once incredibly bizarre—extended isolation from friends and family, conducting meetings and ceremonies over Zoom, for example—have started to feel somewhat normal. But, Crowell said, “this is not normal—and in order to feel the strangeness, we need to get some distance; we need to attune ourselves to the atmosphere of now by immersing ourselves in another atmosphere.” 

Another class, taught by George Ndege, Ph.D., a professor of African history, also seeks to provide insight into our current pandemic moment through the study of the past. In his class “Peoples and Pandemics in History,” Ndgege explores various responses to pandemics in the past, drawing parallels between the challenges and complexities faced by those societies and our own. Ndege and his students have examined pandemics in the context of the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, Imperialism and the modern era, focusing on the ways that different societies have dealt with disease, ranging from discoveries of new scientific treatments for disease to the creation and implementation of public health policies.

Naming just a few of the many projects his students are working on, Ndege said: “students are working on comparing public health responses to cholera epidemics in different world regions” as well as analyzing the “logistical response of the Red Cross to various pandemics across the globe.” Other subjects of study include “the psychological impact of polio on American children in the 1950s, the evolution of dentistry, midwifery and nursing across in specific periods and regions, and the cultural and economic impacts of the cholera outbreak in 1854 London.” 

Ndege added: “The current global pandemic of Covid-19 has brought to the forefront the complexities that scientists, the medical community, pharmaceutical companies and public health officials face when dealing with catastrophic outbreaks of disease” and he affirmed the importance of the study of the past for recognizing and addressing these complexities. 

Today the polls officially opened for the 2021 SGA elections to decide candidates for the 2021-2022 term, and the results were announced Thursday night. 

At the top of the ballot, SGA president, were three candidates, Nandini Fonseca, Helena Cooper, and Justice Hill, vying for the opportunity to take over from current SGA president Joseph Reznikov. All three presidential candidates had extensive SGA experience.

Students chose Nandini Fonseca, a junior studying International Business, as the 2021-2022 SGA President. Fonseca has previous experience in the Diversity Leadership Cabinet, the Finance Committee, and the Assembly for Sexual Assault Prevention Committee.  

Fonseca writes that: “As President of SGA, I hope to advocate for our minority students and groups to ensure they feel important and cared for through my actions. I want to serve with and for you to provide a community where we can all be proud to be Billikens.” 

Other parts of Fonseca’s platform include increasing transparency between SLU students and SGA by providing “easy and accessible resources for information…through frequently updated social media outreach” and further strengthening community bonds: “Students should be supported and encouraged to engage with our community. As President of SGA, I will advocate for stronger community awareness, student discounts with campus partners, and more transportation options to promote a greater sense of shared community.”

Vice-President of Academic Affairs was next on the ballot, with two candidates, Sophia Izar and Vanessa Sarmiento, putting their names forward. The position takes on an especially  heightened importance in the coming months as SLU looks to implement the university-wide common core curriculum beginning in Fall 2022 and concludes a full scale academic portfolio review, which could potentially result in elimination of programs and faculty positions. 

The winner, Sophia Izar, currently serves as the current VP of Academic Affairs and pointed to her prior experience in the role as a major point in her favor. As VP of Academic Affairs, she has “served as a liaison between students and administration in capacities ranging from the Provost Search Committee to UUCC meetings.” She also has experience serving as a Senator for the College of Arts and Sciences and has served on multiple college-wide committees. 

Junior Dan O’Connell, a psychology major, ran unopposed for Vice-President of Finance. He is set to take over for the current VP of Finance, Armina Osmanovic. O’Connell served on the SGA finance committee for three years as well as the funding directives equity task force. 

Junior Elizabeth Potterf ran for and won the position of Vice-President for Student Organizations. She has previously served three years as a representative on the Committee for Student Organization, and as such understands the “wants and needs of all different types of student organizations across campus.” She hopes to be “a voice and a resource for all student organizations by encouraging inclusivity and building a better network of resources for our student leaders.” 

Sophomore Joshua Parney was elected unopposed for the Vice-President of Communications and Internal Affairs position. With two years of SGA experience, Parney hopes to use his position as VP of Communications and Internal Affairs to “Make SGA more transparent and accessible to the SLU community as a whole, as well as ensuring that SGA always prioritizes the needs of the student body and is listening to their feedback.”

Karen Hoshino, a junior, also ran unopposed for Vice-President of International Affairs

Hoshino will represent the diverse international student body at SLU. She hails originally from Japan but grew up in Brazil, and writes that she is “passionate about learning about different countries, cultures, and people.” With her election, she will begin to work towards her campaign promise to “ensure the voices of international students are heard and appreciated at SLU.” 

Another critical position up for election was the Vice-President of Diversity and Inclusion. Aric Wallace Hamilton, a sophomore political science student, was selected for this position. As VP of Diversity and Inclusion, Hamilton will transition from his current SGA role as a senator from the School of Education. His campaign goals included “pursuing alignment with the demands made by students in response to the defacement of the Breonna Taylor Memorial at the Clocktower in September” as well as working towards “the success of students of oppressed, marginalized, and disenfranchised backgrounds.” He will take over the role from current VP of Diversity and Inclusion, Eshu Senthil. 

The SGA elections also decided on Senate candidates that represent each school, along with representatives for commuter students and the College of Philosophy and Letters. The 2021-2022 elected senators are listed below.

College of Arts & Sciences

College for Public Health & Social Justice

Aastha Garg

One vacancy

Doisy College of Health Sciences

Paige Allen

Jake Fennell*

Krista Waldron*

Parks College of Engineering

Brooke Kenworthy

Riley Tovornik*

Richard A. Chaifetz School of Business 

Darren Manion

Joseph Pollnow*

School of Education

Katherine Llanes-Smith*

Katie Wiseman*

School of Professional Studies

No winner, two vacancies

Senator for Commuter Students

Ben Varghese*

Trudy Busch Valentine School of Nursing

Katie Jones

Emily Junker

On Feb. 18, it was announced that SLU is expecting to receive a new round of Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund (HEERF) aid, part of the larger Coronavirus Relief and Economic Security (CARES) stimulus bill that was passed in March 2020. 

With a price tag of just over $2 trillion, the CARES Act was the largest economic stimulus bill in U.S. history, and of that money, $14 billion was given to the Office of Postsecondary Education in order to create the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund (HEERF). 

The new round of funding comes after an announcement by the U.S. Department of Education in January that an additional $21 billion would be made available to institutions of higher education through HEERF II, the second iteration of the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund. 

The announcement was made by the acting U.S. Secretary of Education, Mitchell Zais, who encouraged institutions to use the funds to “support students who are struggling financially in the wake of this pandemic and to build IT and distance learning capacity for now and in preparation for the future.” 

According to the U.S. Department of Education, the amount allocated to each institution is based on a formula which accounts to institutions based on a formula that includes the relative shares of  Pell Grant recipients and non-Pell Grant recipients, as well as the number of students exclusively enrolled in distance education prior to the start of the pandemic.

In the announcement to the SLU community regarding the new round of funding, the Vice President for Enrollment and Retention Management, Kathleen Davis, wrote that an additional $2.5 million would be provided to students demonstrating “exceptional financial need.” This portion of the relief fund is meant to address direct student financial aid, and SLU will be distributing the aid through immediate, need based grants, and “unexpected expenses” grants. 

The need based grants are automatically distributed to Pell grant recipients, while the unexpected expenses grants, which are capped at $800, are awarded on a first come, first serve basis through the COVID-19 Relief Request application, which can be accessed through the Saint Louis University website. 

Though the exact size of SLU’s HEERF II grant has not yet been announced, it is likely to be similar to the size of the first grant, awarded back in April 2020, of $5.14 million. During the first round of HEERF funding, $2.57 million went to direct aid for students, while the remaining half went to replacing revenue lost to housing refunds, which amounted to nearly $10 million. 

The second round of HEERF funding comes at a time when SLU, like many colleges across the U.S., are struggling financially. Entering the pandemic after a record setting year for enrollment and projecting a budget surplus of several million, SLU projected a total budget deficit of $20 million for the 2020 fiscal year, entirely attributable to the impact of COVID-19. In an interview given to St. Louis Public Radio, SLU President Pestello estimated that the budget shortfall for fiscal year 2021 would range between $4-$8 million dollars. 

President Pestello outlined some of the deficit reduction measures taken in an email to SLU students, faculty and staff last year, which included suspension of retirement matching, faculty travel and merit increases. In addition, SLU is in the midst of an academic portfolio review, which could potentially result in elimination of programs and faculty positions. As was the case for the first round of aid, the new round of CARES Act funding helps offset some of SLUs deficit issues, and extends assistance to students who need immediate relief, but it is only the start of SLU’s path to recovery.

For more than fifty years, St. Louis University Library Associates has had the honor of conferring the annual St. Louis Literary Award on a distinguished living writer. Since its inception in 1967, the award has been given to playwrights, novelists, historians and many of the most important writers of the 20th and 21st centuries, including authors as renowned as W.H Auden, Joan Didion and Don Delillo. Though the pandemic has forced the Library Associates to reschedule and rethink how the award program is conducted, the tradition will continue. To make up for last year, 2021 will feature two separate award ceremonies; the first, scheduled for April, will honor the 2020 recipient Michael Chabon, and the second ceremony will follow in November and will honor 2021 award winner, Zadie Smith. 

Chabon was initially named the 2020 recipient of the St. Louis Literary award last fall, but his award ceremony was postponed until April of this year and converted to a virtual format in light of the pandemic. Though the ceremony is typically hosted here in St. Louis and in normal times affords the opportunity for the local St. Louis community to gather in an unusually intimate setting with the author, the switch to a virtual ceremony is not without its perks. Edward Ebur, the executive director of the award and host of the St. Louis University “Craft Talks” series, revealed earlier this month that the virtual ceremony would be hosted by St. Louis native and “Mad Men” star John Hamm, with Ebur writing that it “was important to do something a little more out of the box for this year’s virtual ceremony” to make up for the virtual format. Hamm is well suited for his role as moderator, having received his BA in English from the University of Missouri-Columbia, and already has experience with the format, including moderating a discussion on the musician John Tweedy’s memoir at The Pageant. 

Chabon was born in Washington D.C in 1963 and drew critical acclaim for his debut novel “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh,” which grew out of a master’s thesis on UC Irvine and was later adapted into a movie. His second novel, “Wonder Boys,” was equally well received and also adapted into a movie starring Michael Douglas. Chabon won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for his novel “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,” and it is this work of Chabon’s that has been selected for the 2021 Campus Read at SLU. 

The second award ceremony of the year, which is scheduled for November and is expected to be held in person, will honor the English novelist Zadie Smith. Like Chabon, Smith’s debut launched her literary career, publishing “White Teeth” in 2000 when she was just 24 and finishing her final year at Cambridge University. It was ranked by The Guardian as one of the top 100 most important books of the 21st century. She went on to publish three more novels, “The Autograph Man,” “On Beauty,” and “NW,” which were all well received. 

Smith’s most recent publication, “Intimations,” is a collection of six essays written from New York during the lockdown. Smith began writing the essays soon after the lockdown was announced, and her probing essays meditate on the devastation caused by the pandemic and the death of George Floyd, among other themes. She has donated all proceeds from the book to charity. Announcing Smith as the 2021 recipient, executive director Ibur praised her work as dynamic and influential and said: “Ms. Smith’s novels, essay collections, and short stories reveal a master storyteller whose works are thought-provoking, often humorous, and always unpredictable.”

Over the last four years, the loudest critics of President Trump have repeatedly named his contempt for a free and independent press as one of the most dangerous aspects of his presidency. And this criticism is well founded; while Trump is certainly not the first U.S. president to harbor ill will towards the press, his brand of increasingly violent rhetoric towards journalists is entirely unprecedented. 

However, a lack of consistency on the part of many of Trump’s most vehement critics leaves their critiques feeling somewhat hollow.  Pundits on both sides of the aisle have denounced Trump’s attacks on the press, and yet, despite an ongoing and quite blatant attack on the most basic principles of a free press there has been nearly unanimous bipartisan silence occurring in the extradition hearing of Julian Assange, an Australian editor, publisher, and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. 

Just last month, Assange’s United Kingdom extradition hearings concluded, with a final decision by Judge Baraitser expected in early January. Assange faces seventeen counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917, which, until now, has never been invoked against a journalist or publisher. If Assange is allowed to be extradited to the U.S. for a trial, he will, without a shadow of a doubt, be convicted and spend the rest of his life in solitary confinement in some maximum security hellhole, all while the criminals whose misdeeds he exposed live out their days in luxury. 

Assange has become a bipartisan pariah, despised equally by both the liberal and the conservative establishments. The nearly total media blackout on the hearings in the mainstream U.S. press has been almost as troubling as the hearings themselves. The Washington Post (for whom, supposedly, democracy dies in darkness) and the New York Times, both publications which are no strangers to highlighting the threat Donald Trump poses to a free and independent press, have been noticeably silent about Assange’s treatment and the blatant attack on the freedom of the press that it represents, and other mainstream outlets have not been much better. This news blackout is especially absurd given that both the Times and the Post, along with every single other major news organization, actively solicit leaks and classified information from anonymous sources (as they well should). Even more importantly, Assange involved these very same outlets in the dissemination of the Afghan and Iraq War logs, alongside The Guardian and Der Spiegel. Jeremy Corbyn remarked of this cynical duplicity: “The media that made so much of Wikileaks disclosures is now absent when it comes time to defend the journalist who was their source.”

It is largely thanks to the efforts of a few independent journalists that we know the true nature of the Assange show trial. It was a farce from beginning to end, lacking even the faintest veneer of legitimacy. Every morning, Assange was shaken awake at 5 a.m. and taken to the court, where he spent the rest of the day in a glass cage at the back of the courtroom, completely isolated from the proceedings deciding his fate. As if that wasn’t humiliating enough, Assange had to get on his knees to communicate with his lawyers through a slit in the box, their discussions audible to the entire court, including the prosecution (which is a violation of due process, if you were wondering). The violation of his rights to privacy and liberty did not begin with his extradition hearing, however. While Assange was trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, he was spied on by the private security firm Undercover Global SL, which worked on behalf of the U.S. government to install cameras and microphones throughout the embassy and feed audio and video feeds directly to the CIA, including audio and video of Assange’s legal consultations. At one point, officials even discussed the possibility of poisoning Assange. 

While criminality has no bearing whatsoever on the principle of due process, it must be said that Julian Assange is not a criminal. Julian Assange’s work with Wikileaks has been an unmitigated good for democracy and transparency. The real reason, of course, that Assange is facing such concerted persecution is because his journalism has presented incontrovertible proof, to the U.S. public and to the world, of the moral depravity of the U.S. government. For the powerful, this is a crime that cannot go unpunished.

We should take a moment to remind ourselves of the immense good Julian Assange has done, for which his reward is persecution and psychological torture. 

Thanks to Julian Assange, we have the Afghan and Iraq War logs, which provided further proof of innumerable war crimes committed by the U.S. and its allies in Iraq and Afghanistan. John Sloboda, co-founder of the Iraq Body count, testified during Assange’s extradition hearing that the Iraq War Logs make up the “greatest contribution of public knowledge about civilian casualties in Iraq,” with nearly 15,000 deaths reported that had previously been unreported. In one of the more infamous leaks, a blood-chilling video known as “Collateral Murder,” we see the crew of an Apache helicopter firing on a crowd of civilians on the streets of Baghdad, laughing gleefully at the deaths of eighteen people, including two Reuters journalists. Dean Yates, chief of the Reuters’ Baghdad bureau at the time, said that it was only through the Wikileaks revelations that the truth about the deaths of his colleagues came to light. 

We also know about the case of Khalid El-Masri, a German citizen, who was kidnapped and renditioned to a CIA black site, where he was brutally tortured for half a year (his torture ranging from extended periods of total sensory deprivation to sodomy), only to be abandoned on a remote road in Albania, blindfolded, once the CIA realized he wasn’t even the individual they were looking for. Documents leaked by Wikileaks revealed that the German government did not pursue accountability against the CIA operatives because the U.S. government pressured them into dropping the matter. 

More recently, in 2017, Wikileaks published a cache of documents known as Vault 7, which details various CIA surveillance and cyber-warfare projects, including their ability to compromise smartphones, smart TVs, cars and web browsers. 

And this list could continue, page after page. There is an entire decade’s worth of high profile leaks published by Wikileaks, all of which have contributed immeasurably to the public’s knowledge of the U.S. government and its conduct at home and abroad. As Noam Chomsky put it in his written testimony, “Assange performed an enormous service to all the people in the world who treasure the values of freedom and democracy and who therefore demand the right to know what their elected representatives are doing.” The bottom line is that if you have criticized President Trump anytime over the past four years for his attacks on journalists or the freedom of the press, you should care about the fate of Julian Assange. If he is extradited, his trial and inevitable conviction will signal the evisceration of even the pretense of a free press in this country. The imprisonment of Julian Assange will be yet another blow to the ability of journalists to hold the U.S. government accountable for its crimes, past, present and future.