This year, for the first time ever, Latinos are expected to become the largest racial or ethnic minority eligible to vote in a presidential election. How many of them will do so – and whether they will tip things one way or the other – remains unknown, but Saturday’s presidential caucus in Nevada will provide some early clues. 

Unlike the overwhelmingly white states of Iowa and New Hampshire, minorities make up the majority of Nevada’s population, with Latinos accounting for nearly 30%. Right on the heels of Saturday’s vote will come Super Tuesday on March 3, when giants like California and Texas – where Latinos make up nearly a third of eligible voters – will weigh in.

In past presidential cycles, Hispanics have tended to lag behind other groups in turnout. But if the Democratic campaign playing out here in Las Vegas is any indication, Latino voters’ interest in this election is high. Lines for early voting were long, including in the heavily Hispanic area of east Las Vegas. Several campaigns have been working on Latino outreach here since at least last summer – setting up local field offices and hiring Latinos for senior leadership positions.

“When [campaigns] engage Latinos ... we turn out,” says Sindy Benavides, chief executive officer of the League for United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, the oldest civil rights Latino organization in the country. While her organization does not endorse candidates, she singles out the Sanders campaign as a model.

“Bernie Sanders is doing the investment, making sure to reach the Latino community where they are,” she says in an interview before a recent town hall in Las Vegas sponsored by LULAC. The town hall featured Democratic candidates Tom Steyer, Pete Buttigieg, and Amy Klobuchar, as well as a video appearance by Senator Sanders, who boomed into the auditorium from a movie-theater-sized screen.

Senator Sanders’ grassroots organizing in the Latino community helps explain why the self-proclaimed democratic socialist is leading among likely Democratic voters in Nevada – and the nation. The RealClearPolitics polling average shows him at 30% in Nevada, with his closest rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, at 16%. 

A new survey by the Spanish-language television network Univision shows similar levels of support for Senator Sanders among Latinos, with 33% backing him in Nevada and 30% nationally. Mr. Biden trails him by about 10 points in both cases.

Francine Kiefer/The Christian Science Monitor

Clarissa Perez (left) and Shaun Navarro stand outside the Democratic presidential town hall sponsored by the League for United Latin American Citizens in Las Vegas on Feb. 13, 2020. They both are huge fans of Sen. Bernie Sanders and see him as a candidate with consistent progressive values. Ms. Perez refers to him affectionately as uncle, or tío in Spanish. "I love Tío Bernie," she says.

“I love Tío Bernie”

It is an achievement that worries moderate Democrats, but excites his supporters.

They include Latinos such as Shaun Navarro, who is hanging around a Sanders table outside the entrance to the LULAC town hall at the College of Southern Nevada here. It’s the only candidate table set up, featuring a well-worn cutout of the candidate that keeps flopping over. As students stop by for free pizza, they can learn a bit about Senator Sanders, as well as how to register to vote.

“It’s not so much his policies; it’s his values,” says Mr. Navarro, who, as local co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, is certainly in sync with the Vermont senator’s policy agenda. The American dream is no longer achievable just through hard work, he says, and the country needs someone like Senator Sanders to take the nation in a new direction. He also praises the senator’s authenticity and consistency: “He’s been a progressive since college.” 

Clarissa Perez, who is working during her pre-college “gap year” as an intern in Las Vegas, pipes up with the observation that the senator talks with the Latino community, not to it. The mariachi bands at his events show his appreciation for her culture, she says, adding that she thinks of the avuncular white-haired candidate as an uncle, or tío. “I love Tío Bernie,” she says with a big smile.

Often, campaigns focus on the Latino community toward the end of their efforts. The Sanders campaign decided to focus on it at the beginning. In Nevada, it started targeting the Latino community last June, and its first communication to voters was bilingual. In California, the campaign has opened at least 15 field offices, many in Latino areas. In recent weeks, he’s been outspending all but Mr. Steyer in Spanish-language advertising in Nevada, according to data from Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group.

“He’s using a lot of Latino youth to connect with other Latino youth, and across generations,” says Mindy Romero, an expert on the Latino vote at the University of Southern California. Still, that cross-generational reach has been limited so far – his support among Latinos, as with voters in general, skews young. Neither are Latino political leaders flocking to him (or to any candidate, for that matter).

“Anybody but Bernie,” says Margarita Rebollayal, a spirited octogenarian as she exits the town hall. She minces no words: “He’s lying to young people,” filling their heads with unrealistic ideas. She says she’s leaning toward Senator Klobuchar as someone who can “get things done.” 

Outreach by other campaigns

Senator Sanders is not the only Democratic candidate making a major effort to connect with Latinos in Nevada. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s campaign has been on the ground since January 2019, and has 12 field offices in the state, including in east Las Vegas, where most people on her staff are Spanish-speaking. She ranks third in the state among voters overall, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average.

Mr. Steyer, the billionaire turned climate change crusader, has also invested heavily in the community. His senior leadership team in Nevada is mostly Latinas, and he praised the mujeres on his staff at a recent event with Latino attorneys, small-business owners, and other professionals. 

Walking into the second-floor offices of immigrant lawyers Rudolfo Gonzalez and Edgar Flores, and trailed by a mariachi band singing “the immigrant song,” Mr. Steyer last week detailed his work that directly benefited Hispanics – biographical details unknown to many people there and met with approving nods and applause.

He touts his mission-driven bank that provides loans to people not served by big banks, his church that is a sanctuary for immigrants, and his success in blocking a proposed power plant in the Latino community of Oxnard, California. Mr. Steyer’s electronic billboards tower over Las Vegas as rush-hour traffic inches along Interstate 15 and his campaign claims its internal polling shows him statistically tied with Mr. Biden for second place in Nevada.

Always looking to shift the media spotlight away from Democrats, President Donald Trump is on a Western tour that will culminate with a Las Vegas rally Friday night – hours before the Democratic caucus. About a third of registered Latinos self-identify as Republicans or lean Republican, according to the Pew Research Center, and 30% of Hispanic voters approve of President Trump’s job performance – 23% very strongly.

This presents a challenge for Democrats, writes Kristian Ramos, former spokesman for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, in The Atlantic. Democrats lost in 2016 with about 66% of the Latino vote, Mr. Ramos notes. They will need about 70% to win this time, he says.

But that is not an impossibility if Latinos who support Democrats show up in large numbers. In the Nevada midterm elections of 2018, Latino voter turnout in Nevada was 74% – a 22-point increase over the midterms of 2014, according to Mr. Ramos, a consultant for Mi Familia Vota, the Latino voter registration and participation organization.

“That is an indication of the scope and urgency in this cycle,” says Mr. Ramos, who expects heavy Latino turnout in Nevada. In California, the Democratic polling firm Latino Decisions also detects high intensity among Latino voters – with Senator Sanders leading.

The difference between 2016 and this time is that Latinos have actually experienced the Trump presidency, and not just been warned about it, many Latinos say.

Back at the law firm of Gonzelez & Flores, Mr. Gonzalez says he has not yet made up his mind about whom he will vote for. He needs to consult with his family and his law partner. But he will definitely vote. And will Latinos, generally, show up?

“On this one, yes,” he says. “I think people are fed up with what’s been going on for the last four years.”

There is still no shortage of True Believers in Iran’s revolution ready to cast ballots for hard-line and conservative candidates in Friday’s parliamentary election.

But there are also a growing number of Iranians whose disappointment, apathy, and anger at the ruling system – and its repeated inability to improve their lives through the ballot box – have led to one of the most lackluster election campaigns in recent memory.

Turnout in the one-sided contest – the candidates’ ranks have been purged of thousands of moderate and reformist voices – is expected to be at record lows.

Officials from the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on down, have all but begged citizens to show up so they can equate – as in the past – high voter turnout with continued popular support for Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution and its rulers.

“The polls will defuse America’s evil intentions,” Ayatollah Khamenei said Tuesday, adding that voting was a religious duty. “A weak parliament will adversely change the course of Iran’s fight against the enemies.”

But Iran is reeling from an annus horribilis marked by violent street protests over fuel price hikes last November amid a biting “maximum pressure” campaign of U.S. sanctions. The protests were halted only by a brutal crackdown that left several hundred dead.

Other blows include the assassination by the United States of Iran’s most powerful general in January, and in the aftermath, the brief cover-up of the Revolutionary Guard’s accidental downing of a Ukrainian jetliner, which killed all 176 people aboard and sparked more anti-regime protests.

The rejection of 7,296 candidates (including 80 sitting lawmakers) out of 15,000 who applied to contest 290 seats in parliament indicates a high level of anxiety by Iran’s rulers, analysts say, and reflects a determination to leave no chance of a last-minute reformist surge.

Tools of change

It also shows the extent, as the Islamic Republic evolves after four decades, to which elected institutions like parliament and even the presidency have been eviscerated as tools of change.

One result may be unified rule by hard-liners, which in every previous configuration – under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for example – not only failed to solve Iran’s problems, but often made them worse.

“I did vote in the past, but not anymore. How can I give a seal of approval on this regime’s performance?” asks Yaser, a married taxi driver in his 40s who has worked for Iran’s version of Uber in Tehran since his cellphone business went bust amid currency fluctuations.

“The sanctions have crippled us. Yes, the U.S. is blamed, but how about domestic corruption?” says Yaser. “I have no doubt [the regime] will collapse sooner or later. Let’s not forget the victims of the November protests. They were out for us, we can’t go out [to support] the regime, which killed them in broad daylight.”

That view is echoed by Shirin, a student of applied linguistics in her 20s, who sits in a cafe in central Tehran where, as in other Iranian cities, turnout is expected to be as low as 20% to 30%. Nationwide, Iran’s leaders hope for a 50% show of support.

“I can’t see any bright future, but I can’t see this regime’s [exit] any time soon either,” says Shirin, who plans to emigrate to Canada. “So, I won’t waste my life anymore here.”

“Hopelessness” cited

Such sentiments have only become more widespread as Iranians use the word “hopelessness” more and more about their economic plight and disdain for politics.

“At any juncture, where there was a possibility to decide on a more inclusive system, the decision was made in the direction of exclusion – explicitly – [which] makes the base of the regime even smaller,” says Farideh Farhi, an Iran expert recently retired from the University of Hawaii.

Nazanin Tabatabaee/WANA/Reuters

Iranian parliamentary candidates take part in an election campaign event in Tehran, Iran, Feb. 18, 2020.

“The hopelessness comes from the question of what to aspire to,” says Ms. Farhi. Many Iranians “want the regime to reform itself, but they are realizing that it cannot, and it constantly shows that it cannot.”

“They ask, ‘If it cannot reform itself, what else can we do?’ And they realize that anything they want to do might lead to further violence and instability,” she says. “So, hopelessness is precisely the right word, because you are stuck in a system you don’t know how to impact in a positive direction.”

President Hassan Rouhani noted as much when he warned the Guardian Council, the 12-member body that vets candidates, that it had gone too far in barring so many less-hard-line voices.

“The biggest danger to democracy and the rule of the nation comes on the day when elections turn into a formality, when choices are made somewhere else,” Mr. Rouhani said Jan. 27.

Loss of control?

The president was rebuked by Ayatollah Khamenei, who days later said: “When you say that the elections have been engineered, the people become naturally discouraged.”

The supreme leader, calling upon Iranians to vote for their nation and for “security” – even if they do not personally like him – said Iran’s enemies, “although they are afraid of our missiles, they are more intimidated by the Islamic Republic’s popular support.”

But past gambits to boost voter turnout are not being used. Previous Iranian elections have been notable for how the political space for criticism opened up and social restrictions were eased in the weeks before election day, to help reassure voters.

Not this time.

“I expected a bit of loosening ... to open the atmosphere, but it is exactly the opposite,” says a veteran political analyst in Tehran who asked not to be named. “They are tightening it up, they are showing very little tolerance for any dissent. They are arresting students, they are searching and raiding some of the journalists’ homes.

“I think they are worried very much, judging by this security getting tighter. They don’t feel relaxed, that they are in complete control,” says the analyst.

“The regime knows, the decision-makers know, that the people are not enthusiastic about the elections. ... They are suffering,” he says. “This disappointment, confusion, and hopelessness about the future is not limited to the middle class and lower class, it has extended to the loyalists – the people who have always been ready to vote.”

He notes that the term mostaza’fin, “the oppressed,” who have long been lionized in Iran’s revolutionary discourse, has rarely been used officially since that very category of people rose up in protest at poor economic conditions in early 2018.

The believers

Still, there is no shortage of believers who answer the leader’s call. Among them is Roghayyeh, a primary school teacher in her 20s who wears a chador and can’t wait to contribute to a victory of hard-liners and conservatives. She wants to further weaken – or even impeach – Mr. Rouhani, whom she blames for naively agreeing to a doomed nuclear deal, and for crippling U.S. sanctions.

“Am I going to vote? No doubt, but let’s not mix things up. We have economic woes. Life has become really hard. But that has nothing to do with the basics of the revolution,” says Roghayyeh, as she pushes her daughter’s stroller during a recent pro-regime march.

“It’s only because of the mismanagement of the reformists,” she asserts. “People made a real mistake by voting for Rouhani. Look at the nuclear deal. Never trust Americans, that’s one of the basics of the revolution. But Rouhani did so and pushed us to where we are. I’m sure a revolutionary parliament will change course.”

Saman – a clean-shaven, jeans-wearing student of nursing – will also vote, though he says the Guardian Council “mistreated” reformists by rejecting so many, which “just gives an excuse to enemies to turn on their loudspeakers and say, ‘Look at Iran, there is no democracy there.’”

“Our leader recently said if we become strong, no enemy can defeat us,” says Saman, speaking during the march last week to mark the 41st anniversary of the revolution. “There is no doubt we are at a moment of crisis. So, the only solution is the vote.”

Down a muddy path in Europe’s most notorious refugee camp, there is a tiny shack in which a man behind a makeshift counter sells packets of cookies and crackers.

Next in the row of huts, built from plywood and plastic sheeting, is a small barbershop. Beside that is a bakery where a man crouches in the mud, feeding scraps of wood into a fire for Arabic bread.

These micro-businesses are a testament to how long people have been stuck in Moria camp, on the Aegean island of Lesbos. Some refugees spend a year or more here, where the overcrowding is so severe in the camp itself that families are living in the old olive groves. 

All that may be about to change. The new conservative government in Athens, elected last July, has a plan to dramatically speed up the processing of asylum requests, deport failed asylum-seekers back to Turkey, build new camps, and transfer tens of thousands of refugees to the Greek mainland.  

Those plans hit a snag this week, however, in the face of opposition from the islanders. The government said it was open to compromise and called on local authorities to propose alternative sites. Mainland protesters themselves have objected to relocations that would move refugees off the islands.  

At the very least, the speeding up of asylum applications will benefit people who are judged to be genuine refugees fleeing conflict, rather than those deemed to be economic migrants who are trying to reach Europe in search of a better life. 

Among them is Khairullah Sabri, who says he fled fighting and Taliban repression in his native Kunduz province in Afghanistan. Like many of the Afghans in Moria camp, he is from the persecuted Hazara minority. Traveling through Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey, he reached Lesbos with his wife and two small children.

Nick Squires

Reshede Sifalha, a refugee from Afghanistan, built his shelter out of plastic sheeting and wood outside the Moria camp in Lesbos, Greece, one of five islands receiving the majority of migrants via Turkey. The camp itself is so crowded that thousands are living in the olive groves.

That was six months ago. Like thousands of others, the Sabri family lives in a box-shaped shack covered with plastic sheeting, in the huge overflow area that sprawls across former olive groves.

The original Moria facility, which is enclosed by a wire fence, was designed to hold 2,800 people. There are now close to 20,000; about a third are children. And the United Nations says nearly 2,000 unaccompanied youths are spread across facilities on five Aegean islands.  

“It’s very hard for the children,” Mr. Sabri says, as his 2-year-old stomps around in the mud and blows kisses. “They are sick all the time. If you go to the doctor, there is a queue of 300 people.”

Ahmad Samir is from Badakhshan province in Afghanistan. Wearing a red beanie and a gray Nike sweatshirt, he stands outside the wooden hut that he built amid the muddy paths and piles of uncollected garbage. “The situation is really bad here. There’s no help. It’s impossible to live like this,” he says.

Early in February, the U.N. Refugee Agency urged Greece to take emergency measures to alleviate worsening conditions. While the number of refugees leaving their homes and attempting to reach Europe has not approached the peak of 2015 and 2016, nearly 60,000 arrived in Greece in 2019. Most still transit through Turkey, just a few miles across the water. 

On Lesbos and the other islands, which host nearly 40,000 migrants and refugees in limbo, the proposed holding facilities are intended to be more hygienic and less crowded. They will be “closed” centers, meaning residents will not be permitted to leave at night.

The rate of transfers is, for the moment, painfully slow. Government promises, made in November, to move 20,000 people from the islands to the mainland have so far come to nothing.

“Hardly anyone has been moved in the last six months,” says Tasos Balis, special adviser to Stratis Kytelis, the mayor of Mytilene, an attractive port town and capital of Lesbos. “The plan is there but there is no implementation. We supported this government but it looks like they can’t keep their promises.”

He is equally unimpressed with a government proposal, announced last month, to install a floating barrier off the coast of Lesbos to deter boats crossing from Turkey. “If people have been through wars and bombardments, a floating barrier is not going to hold them back. They will just cut through it. It’s a joke,” he says.

Deportations of failed asylum-seekers are also moving very slowly. So far this year, just 85 people have been deported back to Turkey – a tiny number, given that smugglers are sending new boatloads across the water every week.

“But it’s a significant number compared to previous months,” says Nickolas Panagiotopoulos of the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian organization run by a British former foreign secretary, David Miliband. “I think it’s too early to say whether the new fast-track procedure will bear the fruits that the government hopes for,” says Mr. Panagiotopoulos, the IRC’s senior area manager for the islands of Lesbos, Samos, and Chios.

The present government has inherited a backlog of around 90,000 asylum applications.

In the village of Moria, just a few hundred yards from the camp that bears its name, people’s patience has all but run out.

“When the first refugees arrived, we welcomed them with love, especially the Syrian families. But now things have changed,” says Afroditi Deligianni, who says her grocery shop has been broken into six times by refugees.

“Some of them kill our sheep and chickens for food. They take the fruit and chop down trees for firewood. They create a lot of problems for us.”

Tensions on Lesbos are running high. Earlier this month, riot police fired tear gas at a protest march involving 2,000 asylum-seekers, who were calling for better conditions and a faster asylum process.

For the people of Lesbos and the four other islands that host crowded, filthy centers for refugees – Chios, Leros, Samos, and Kos – change cannot come fast enough.

“We’ve become a warehouse for souls. We’ve done our bit for five years. Now we want our lives back,” says Mr. Balis, the mayor’s special adviser. 

Patrick Semansky/AP

People walk across a quad at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore Feb. 26, 2019. The school recently announced that since 2014 it has been admitting students without giving weight to family alumni ties.

For nearly a year, the “Varsity Blues” college admissions scandal has sparked a public backlash against perks for the wealthy and well connected. One main target: legacy preferences. But until January, Johns Hopkins University had been staying mum about a major shift in its policy: Since 2014, it has admitted applicants without regard to any family alumni ties.

President Ronald Daniels set the higher education world abuzz when he went public with the change. Legacy students have fallen to 3.5% in the 2019 freshman class, from 12.5% in 2009, just before a phaseout of legacy admissions began. The number of Pell Grant-eligible students grew in the same period from 9% to 19.1%.

“It makes me proud of my alma matter. ... It makes the process a little bit more fair,” says Priya Sarin Gupta, a 2002 graduate and chair of the Massachusetts alumni group. “Hopkins has always prided itself on picking students in the admissions process through merit ... and this shows that by example.”

Johns Hopkins’ announcement revitalizes the debate over legacy policies. It comes amid a growing call for elite institutions to regain the trust of a skeptical public by prioritizing equity and transparency. With lower-income and less-educated families representing the fastest-growing supply of students, many campuses are starting to rethink long-standing practices. And as the public gains more insight into how admissions have typically worked at elite institutions – through the Harvard admissions trial, for instance – selective colleges are facing more scrutiny about legacy and other special admissions categories that have tended to favor the wealthy.  

“The real questions are a) Is it fair? and b) Can we afford it as a nation when it means we are doing less than we could be to make college realistic, accessible, and affordable?” says Jerome Lucido, executive director of the Center for Enrollment Research, Policy, and Practice at the University of Southern California (USC).

A 2019 national survey found that about three-quarters of the most selective institutions consider legacy. A cluster of notable exceptions includes the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California system.

Each college understandably takes pride in its individuality and wants to encourage alumni children to attend, Professor Lucido acknowledges. At the same time, he says, “admission deans across the country have been saying quietly, ‘We have to do things differently,’ but they often feel like they can’t, because the structure is all in place to admit alumni [relatives], to give donor preferences. ...”

Backed by research – and money

The Harvard admissions trial also stirred up concerns about legacy preferences, and student groups from the Ivy League and other elite universities have urged their campuses to ditch them. They point to a 2010 study by then-Harvard doctoral student Michael Hurwitz, which analyzed 30 institutions and concluded that students with a parent who attended the school were about three times more likely to be admitted. 

Dropping legacy admissions isn’t the only explanation for Johns Hopkins becoming more socioeconomically diverse. A record-breaking $1.8 billion gift in 2018 has helped the school offer debt-free financial aid packages, for instance. But the admissions change “has accelerated our work of recruiting and matriculating students from all walks of life who demonstrate the academic rigor and exceptional talent we expect … ,” spokeswoman Karen Lancaster wrote in an email to the Monitor.

Among Hopkins alumni, “I’m sure there are those that say, ‘Wait a minute, my kid’s a [high school] junior; now I lose this benefit?’” says Emmi Harward, executive director of the Association of College Counselors in Independent Schools. But she adds that “even those who may benefit from unearned privilege can often still understand why that privilege needs to go away.”

Any potential domino effect from Hopkins’ move may hinge on whether more research challenges the long-held notion that legacy preferences boost colleges’ bottom line. One analysis of 1998 to 2008 data found no statistical evidence of legacy preferences affecting total alumni giving. The study appeared in the book “Affirmative Action for the Rich,” published by The Century Foundation, a think tank that promotes progressive policies.

Dr. Gupta, the Hopkins alumna, says universities shouldn’t worry about leaving legacy preferences behind, because “people donate for more noble reasons, such as wanting to give back … and give other students the same opportunities that we had.”

Diversity and legacy? 

But legacy benefits aren’t just about money, and at least one selective college makes the case that depending on how such policies are crafted, they can actually fit harmoniously with the goal of broadening access to higher education.

“We’ve been able to diversify socioeconomically while maintaining a legacy policy,” says Swarthmore College Dean of Admissions Jim Bock. The liberal arts campus in Pennsylvania has about 20% Pell-eligible students, and about 20% who are the first generation in their family to attend college. Both categories have grown 5 percentage points in recent years.

“You can be a first-generation legacy at our institution, which I think may surprise people,” Mr. Bock says. The school considers both parents and siblings, so “you can have an older sibling and a younger sibling who are both still within the first generation to attend college. And that person may or may not receive preference, but that’s something we would note in the application.”

It’s important to understand that published rates of legacy enrollment on a campus – about 16% at Swarthmore – usually include everyone who reports any family tie to alumni, but not all of those students are eligible for an admissions boost, Mr. Bock says. Those whose grandparents or cousins attended Swarthmore, for instance, get no extra consideration, but they may apply and enroll.

Still, the word “legacy” tends to carry a connotation of privilege. “It’s a tremendously creative and socially sensitive way of doing things,” USC’s Professor Lucido says of Swarthmore’s approach, but it should maybe be adjusted and renamed, rather than used as a reason to keep a wider legacy policy.

Effective and sustainable, but secret

Johns Hopkins delayed its public announcement partly so it could “watch the impact of this change, and ensure we could make this practice effective and sustainable,” Ms. Lancaster says in her email.

That explanation didn’t satisfy Felicia Petterway, a first-generation low-income (FLI) senior who told the student-run Johns Hopkins News-Letter that she thought more FLI students might have applied in recent years if they had known. “I thought that no matter how good my grades were, or how moving my essays were, my spot could easily be taken by a legacy student, and this prevented me from even applying to several top ranked institutions,” she said in an email to the News-Letter.

But by waiting until they could release information on the impact of the changes, Hopkins leaders made a strong case that they didn’t have to use legacy preferences “to still meet all the goals that they needed to meet,” says Stacey Kostell, who manages enrollment at the University of Vermont and is the incoming CEO of The Coalition for College (a group of more than 150 institutions, including Johns Hopkins, that aims to improve college access for historically underrepresented students). 

More admissions professionals are grappling with how to pull back the curtain on what they do, including by attending conferences like the recent “Reclaiming Public Trust in Admissions and Higher Education” at USC. “Nothing we do in admission and recruitment should be a secret,” Professor Lucido says. “Every admissions space should be available to all without influence. ... If you’re going to have any kind of special admission categories, they should be open and transparent.”

Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct a transcription error in a quote from Emmi Harward. She said, “Even those who may benefit from unearned privilege can often still understand why that privilege needs to go away.”

Amanda Paulson/The Christian Science Monitor

Jennifer Macalady, a geomicrobiologist and biogeochemist at Pennsylvania State University, looks for clues to the origins of life on Earth, as well as to potential life on other planets. She points out self-sustaining microbial ecosystems known as Winogradsky columns in her office on Oct. 28, 2019.

Some people decorate their offices with flowers, family photos, or art. Jennifer Macalady prefers bottles of sludge.

“They’re super cool,” she says, peering at what, at a glance, looks like someone’s smoothie that’s been left out for several days. 

The jars actually contain self-sustaining microbial ecosystems known as Winogradsky columns. In the light, layered colors emerge. There’s a purple layer from a sulfur-eating phototroph, a black shade from pyrite, and a green tint from cyanobacteria. A closer inspection reveals a weird and sinuous beauty.

The bottles are fitting decorations for a slime-obsessed scientist who delves into the most-overlooked environments on Earth. As a researcher at Pennsylvania State University, Dr. Macalady studies the underground, out-of-sight, and microscopic world of life in cave slime. Through these subterranean life-forms, she probes the biggest mysteries of biology. Her work is helping to broaden our view of where life can be found both on Earth and beyond.

“Because we don’t see [microbes], we don’t have this gut feeling for how much a part of Earth’s life they are,” says Dr. Macalady, noting that we’ve barely begun to know even the tip of the iceberg of microbial species. “There is an enormous amount of potential to learn new and useful things about Earth life by continuing to pick away at this iceberg.”

The biology below

Dr. Macalady is a tough scientist to pigeonhole. She’s a geomicrobiologist, a biogeochemist, and an astrobiologist. Her fieldwork takes her to the depths of caves in Italy, Mexico, the Bahamas, and the United States. Her research shifts between the nanoscale and the ecosystem scale.

“Jenn has a great balance of combining the pursuit of something that just interests her with asking really big transcending questions, and having fun along the way,” says Jan Amend, a geobiologist at the University of Southern California who is currently working on a paper with Dr. Macalady. 

It’s that curiosity – and her love of slime – that led Dr. Macalady to perhaps the most pivotal moment of her career: a visit to Frasassi, an Italian cave system perfect for studying the sulfur cycle in subsurface environments. There, she fell in love with caves. 

Tourists exclaim over the stalactites and stalagmites in the upper caverns of Frasassi, but Dr. Macalady went lower, through slippery mud and a strong smell of sulfide until she found a different kind of beauty.

“I was absolutely smitten, just starry-eyed,” Dr. Macalady recalls of her first visit in 2002. “There was so much slime of so many different kinds, on every surface.” She lost track of time and stayed below for eight hours. “It was a completely transformative experience.”

Some cave environments come closest to replicating what the Earth was like billions of years ago, as life was just beginning. In caves, Dr. Macalady looks for microbial communities and biofilms that rely on chemical reactions, rather than light. Scientists think some of the first life-forms evolved away from light and with little oxygen. 

“We don’t know how life emerged on Earth, but we know it did,” says Dr. Amend. “We don’t know if there’s life on another planetary system, but it seems like there might be conditions out there somewhere where life would persist. These are fundamentally exciting questions – the kind of questions children ask from day one.”

Unearthing a whole new world

In a field where so much is still unknown – biologists estimate we’ve identified less than 1% of microbial species on Earth – there’s plenty to explore. And the terrestrial subsurface, Dr. Macalady says, is arguably the least-explored habitat on the planet.

“There’s a tremendous amount of potential for humanity, for understanding life on a planet, just picking away at this blackness that is microbial life on Earth,” she says.

That can mean regularly finding new species of microbes, many of which Dr. Macalady and her colleagues sequence genetically. Using an electron microscope, they make “micrographs,” visual renderings that help scientists see patterns and understand how various microbes and minerals work together.

Dr. Macalady is fascinated by individual microbes and how their communities appear. In her office, she points to photos of white feathery specimens in hot sulfuric caves, to fuzzy brown microbial masses in Frasassi that “are like being on the inside of a teddy bear,” and to a stretchy white substance in a hot cave that she calls “silk,” which seems to stabilize the normally unstable elemental sulfur. 

One new species of cyanobacteria grew with such distinctive purple tufts and Muppet-like hair that Dr. Macalady and her colleagues decided to name it after Jim Henson. 

Primarily, she’s interested in understanding the rules that govern these microbes: why multiple species that seem to have the same function coexist in the same niche; how microbes make pyrite, a mineral key to the Earth’s past; and whether we can learn enough about these microbial communities to successfully predict, in a previously unexplored place, what life might be there.

Out of the box biology

Despite science fiction imaginings, most scientists believe that if extraterrestrial life is discovered, it will look a lot like simple, microbial life on Earth. But such a discovery requires understanding the origins and bounds of life as we know it. 

That’s where cave slime comes in. Subsurface microbiology underpins some of astrobiologists’ thinking about where they might find life on other worlds – particularly in places where sunlight might not reach. 

“You can have a really exciting biosphere underground,” says Dr. Macalady. “You don’t need light; you don’t need oxygen. You just need chemical energy.”

On Earth, it’s those lightless, least-explored places that entice Dr. Macalady. She’s enlisted cave divers to reach the most extreme environments, and she’s learned to navigate complex vertical and horizontal ropes – “nylon highways” – that guide her deep below the surface.  

While she loves the adventure of caving, it’s the single-celled organisms, and the communities they create, that are the real exploration for her.

“We’re walking around with our microbial biomes in a sea of microbes in the soil and the microbiomes of plants,” says Dr. Macalady. With her research, she says, “we’re trying to bring Earth life into focus.”

Reuters

Chen Hui poses for a selfie in a protective suit with another volunteer as they deliver food to workers building a hospital in Hubei province, China, Feb. 11.

The magnitude of the coronavirus outbreak in China, measured by the millions of people still under quarantine, has triggered a remarkable magnanimity. In January, after doctors in Hubei province made urgent pleas on social media for protective gear and medical supplies, Chinese citizens poured in massive donations. Many Chinese volunteered to aid sick people.

In fact, the level of charity has been so overwhelming that the Communist Party has tried to put a stop to it, or at least redirect it. On Jan. 26, it required all donations to go through only five government-controlled charities. The private generosity had become an embarrassing sign of a rising distrust in the ruling party and its response to the health crisis. The party fears a crisis over its long-held authoritarian leadership.

The distrust burst onto social media platforms like Weibo and WeChat with stories of official cover-ups of the outbreak and the inefficient distribution of medical supplies. People were angry that donations to the party-controlled charities were simply handed over to the government and not given directly to hospitals. Three officials from the Hubei Red Cross were punished for “mishandling donations for the coronavirus.”

Ge Yunsong, a Peking University law professor, posted an article asking the government to end its monopoly on philanthropy. Hospitals and individuals, he wrote, “also enjoy the right to receive donations.”

As in nature, love abhors a vacuum of love. The Chinese people have risen up with loving hearts to fill an absence of trust in their leaders. One way or another, the high level of charity in China will reach those laid low by the coronavirus.