World’s Largest Private Rhino Herd Doesn’t Have a Buyer — Or Much of a Future

Controversial rhino breeder John Hume recently put his 1,999 southern white rhinos up for auction as he can no longer afford the $9,800 a day running costs — but no buyers have come forward so far.

August 30, 2023 by Mongabay 

By Jim Tan

• Controversial rhino breeder John Hume recently put his 1,999 southern white rhinos up for auction as he can no longer afford the $9,800 a day running costs — but no buyers have come forward so far.
• Hume’s intensive and high-density approach is undoubtedly effective at breeding rhinos, but with the main issue currently a shortage of safe space for rhino rather than a shortage of rhino, the project’s high running costs and concerns over rewilding captive-bred rhino make its future uncertain.
• Platinum Rhino’s financial issues reflect a broader debate around how to move forward with rhino conservation and the role that private owners have to play when the financial costs of rhino ownership far outweigh the returns.
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On May 1 this year, an online auction for a controversial captive-breeding project that comes with one in eight of all southern white rhinos in the world ended in a whimper — with a grand total of zero bids. According to a press release on the website of the Platinum Rhino project, it received offline offers that are being considered, but no new owner has yet been announced. Mongabay is aware of at least one interested party that is interested predominantly in the potential profits should the rhino horn trade be legalized.

The auction was the culmination of escalating financial woes for Platinum Rhino founder John Hume after he announced five years ago that he was running out of cash to fund the operation. In the intervening years, Hume was unsuccessful in his search for an investor to help share the burden of the project’s daily running costs of $9,800.

“I’m so disappointed that more billionaires have not come up to the table,” he told Mongabay in an interview prior to the auction.

Intact ecosystems, where rhino populations can exist as naturally as possible, are generally considered the main goal by conservationists. As such, large parks and protected areas have long been the cornerstone of rhino conservation. This approach enjoyed success for many years, but a poaching epidemic that began around 2008, combined with limited budgets for many large protected areas, has dramatically changed the rhino conservation landscape. South Africa’s Kruger National Park has lost 75% of its southern white rhinos since 2011 — more than 8,000 rhinos. Smaller protected areas and private operations that are easier to protect are now having the greatest success in weathering the poaching storm.

If number of rhinos protected is the only metric of interest, then Hume is undeniably one of the most successful, with approximately 13% of all the southern white rhinos (Ceratotherium simum simum) left in the world in his private herd. That amounts to 1,999 rhinos, a number Hume achieved by adopting the approaches of South Africa’s $1.5-billion-a-year game-breeding industry in which studbooks, productivity and calf yields are the lingua franca.

While you won’t find it in any of the tourism brochures, the game-breeding industry has always been inextricably linked with conservation in South Africa. A key component of the model is a market in which to sell the end product — for South Africa’s game-ranching industry, more than half of its income comes from trophy hunting.

In Hume’s case, the market he bet on was the legalization of the rhino horn trade — a debate that has been rehashed ad nauseum by conservationists and economists and is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon. If the international trade were to be legalized, Hume stands to make a significant sum of money from his stockpile of horn gathered during regular dehorning operations on his property — a stockpile not included in the sale.

But in the absence of a legal trade, Hume’s approach is financially unsustainable. The lack of bidders to take on one of the most important rhino populations in world highlights an important question that rhino range states now face: with many wild populations being decimated and the sums not adding up for private owners, where does rhino conservation go from here?

Who can own a rhino?

The game-farming industry in South Africa is built on the principle that private landowners can own wildlife, including rhinos. This principle was enshrined into South African law in the Game Theft Act of 1991, a year before Hume began breeding rhinos.

The southern white rhino came perilously close to extinction in the late 1800s, after populations were decimated by colonial hunters. The subspecies was saved by the creation of Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park in KwaZulu-Natal province and the work of Ezemvelo, the government body responsible for managing KwaZulu-Natal’s conservation areas.

By the 1960s, the Natal Parks Board, as it was then known, had enough rhinos to start donating and selling them to other conservation areas, including to Kruger in 1963. By 1986, it began selling to private operations too.

“What was really pivotal in South Africa is that coupled with the ability of private landowners to own rhino, what also happened is that the government allowed them to do very limited trophy hunting,” said Hayley Clements, a researcher at Stellenbosch University. “Because the price that people were willing to pay to hunt a rhino was really high, there was a lot of incentive for landowners to grow the population of rhino.”

The high values paid by trophy hunters kept live prices high, meaning that even for properties that didn’t offer trophy hunting, rhinos could make them money. And so the number of rhinos in private hands began to grow.

“The saving of rhinos was not because private owners could have ownership,” said Sam Ferreira, scientific officer for the African Rhino Specialist Group at the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority. “It was good biological management that created the opportunity for private owners to have ownership. The success of rhino conservation opened other opportunities to utilize other values for rhinos.”

Rhino economics

In the last 15 years, the economics of rhino ownership have dramatically changed due to the surge in poaching, which economists attribute to growing income levels in key rhino horn consumer countries in Asia.

Studies have found that demand for rhino horn is both price inelastic, meaning that consumers don’t substantially reduce their purchases even as the price goes up, and income elastic, suggesting that as consumers’ incomes rise, so does their demand for rhino horn, said Adrian Lopes, a professor of economics at the American University of Sharjah.

“As long as there is demand for rhino horn as an ingredient in traditional Eastern medicine, an incentive to supply that market would continue to exist,” he said.

Rising demand has fueled the poaching epidemic that has seen rhino numbers plummet on state lands.
“Of course, we all want rhinos in places like Kruger, but the reality is it’s not working, and the reality is these private operations are contributing a lot in terms of numbers of rhinos across the continent now,” Clements said. She estimates that more than 50% of Africa’s rhinos are now in private hands.

At the same time, the rapidly escalating costs of tackling poaching have meant that fewer and fewer private landowners can afford to keep rhinos, depressing the live sales market. Essentially, as the costs for private owners go up, their potential revenue is going down. Hume previously paid up to $32,000 for a rhino, but he said the same animal might be worth a tenth of that price today.

Private owners in South Africa exist along a continuum, from large private reserves aiming to get as close as possible to an intact natural ecosystem, to the intensive models of captive breeding operations (CBO) like Platinum Rhino, focused predominantly on breeding and numbers. Around 28% of private owners are now divesting from rhinos, the majority are doing their best to survive as is, and around 15% are doubling down and buying up the rhinos from those who are getting out of the business, as Hume has previously done, Clements said.

“We’re talking money, and of course, many of the landowners in South Africa that have game reserves with rhinos are not primarily driven by money,” she said. “Many of them are highly motivated by conservation but at the end of the day it has to be viable — the money matters even if it’s not the primary objective.”

The Platinum Rhino model

In line with the broader South African game-ranching sector, in which sustainable use is one of the core goals, economic efficiency was one of the key rationales behind the design of Hume’s project.

“Our security is our biggest cost,” he said. “Your security costs you by the hectare, not by the rhino.”

This high cost of securing space was one the main reasons Hume chose to adopt an intensive, high-density approach and keep the project’s footprint as small as possible, thus requiring him to register as a CBO. Hume also chose to locate the project in the flat former agricultural land of South Africa’s North West province to make it easier to secure.

Research shows that smaller reserves have generally fared better against rhino poaching than larger conservation areas across both the private and public sectors; it’s just easier to secure a smaller area. South Africa National Parks implemented an “intensive protection zone” (IPZ) within Kruger National Park in 2016, a measure that the then minister of environment, Edna Molewa, said reduced poaching by 20%.

Aside from security, Hume’s operation is also geared toward productivity, which in the rhino-breeding context means maximizing the number of calves born and raised.

The 8,500-hectare (21,000-acre) property is divided into three sections and 14 camps, with meticulous records kept of all matings, births and deaths. Twice daily, the camp master in each section takes a roll call of every animal in their care and reports any activity to Hume’s full-time veterinarian, Michelle Otto.

During the winter months, the rhinos are given supplementary feed to ensure maximum breeding productivity. The sex ratio of males to females, normally roughly 1:1 in the wild, is adapted to maximize productivity and minimize fighting between bulls in a confined area. And any sick or abandoned calves are taken to the on-site orphanage before being brought back into the breeding herds as subadults.

Platinum Rhino’s intensive management and high-security approach come at a significant cost. Hume estimated that he’s spent $150 million on rhino breeding over the last 30 years.

The mixed response to Hume’s approach and his outspoken stance on legalizing the rhino horn trade reflects the varied and often inconsistent social norms around which animals can be bred and managed, and which ones should remain wild; in 2021, South Africa announced it would ban the lucrative yet controversial captive lion-breeding industry. Yet breeding game such as Cape buffalo for the trophy-hunting industry remains a commonly accepted practice.

In the absence of revenue from rhino horn sales or the recovery of live sale prices, Hume’s model is unsustainable. But with ecosystem-focused approaches often dependent on donor funding to maintain the high costs of antipoaching measures, combined with a high risk of “donor fatigue,” conservationists are left grappling with the difficult problem of how best to conserve rhinos.

The future of rhino conservation

“We’ve got the largest viable and vital breeding population left in the world for the southern white rhino,” Otto. “We might have the same number of rhinos that are left in the Kruger, but they don’t have the breeding potential we have.”

If the number of rhinos is the main measurement of success, then it would be hard to argue with Hume’s model. While wild and free ecosystems are the preferred end goal for most conservationists, where a species faces imminent extinction, a case is often made for a species-specific program outside of its natural ecosystem — such as zoos. The question conservationists are grappling with is whether Hume’s intensive species-focused approach is a step too far — a question that Ferreira said is one that must be tackled at a national level.

In 2020, a government panel proposed phasing out CBOs like Platinum Rhino, citing concerns over the ability of captive-born rhinos to adapt to life in the wild. Within the rhino conservation sphere, there’s tacit acknowledgement of the significance of Hume’s breeding achievements. But the absence of partners stepping forward reflects the fact that no one is quite sure what to do with the project now.

The project is potentially an invaluable source population for rewilding initiatives, although the current challenge is finding safe spaces for rhinos, not having enough rhino, Ferreira said.

“Ideally, everyone likes the idea of these really extensive systems where animals can be wild, but where are those systems and who is paying for those systems?” Clements said. “I think we need to become more comfortable with conservation being a continuum in many different forms.”

Ferreira pointed to alternative solutions like community-led models with rhino guardians.

“The only way we are currently thinking about safe space for rhino is when we have very intensive anti-poaching to create a safe space,” he said. “One of the options with these CBO rhinos is, can I use this opportunity to learn about other ways to create a safe space?”

Innovative approaches such as these take time and resources to develop. But as time and money run low, Hume’s rhinos face an uncertain future.

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This post was previously published on news.mongabay.com and under a Creative Commons license CC BY-ND 4.

What to Watch at the First Africa Climate Summit



August 30, 2023 By Wanjira Mathai and Rebekah Shirley

Cover Image by: Sebastian 

Climate change is already having a significant impact on Africa's ecosystems, economy and society. This year alone, 1.8 million Africans were displaced during a prolonged drought, the Democratic Republic of Congo experienced catastrophic flooding, and Cyclone Freddy left a trail of destruction in Malawi and Mozambique. And these kinds of devastating events are expected to worsen as temperatures rise.

Yet just as Africa is particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, so, too, can the continent be a big part of the solution. Africa’s abundant natural resources, youthful population, critical minerals and arable land offer many opportunities to drive low carbon green growth and spur climate action throughout the continent and the world. Visions of what this green growth could look like are expected to emerge at the Africa Climate Summit in Kenya next week.
What to Expect from the First Africa Climate Summit

The world’s first Africa Climate Summit, hosted by Kenya and co-organized with the African Union, will take place September 4-6, 2023, providing a space for Africa’s multi-faceted voices on climate solutions to convene. It’s a major moment for the future of climate action in Africa — not only because it is the first summit of its kind, but because it is anticipated to yield a roadmap for low-carbon development throughout the continent. By the end of the conference, African governments are expected to sign on to a “Nairobi Declaration on Climate Change,” detailing numerous commitments for renewable energy development, sustainable agriculture, forest conservation and more.

If ambitious, the Nairobi Declaration can help spur momentum for climate action heading into the UN’s Africa Climate Week (September 4th – 8th) and subsequent regional climate weeks, the UN General Assembly and G20 meetings at the end of September, and the UN climate summit (COP28) in November 2023. It will also set the first formal green growth agenda in Africa that can position the continent as a globally powerful climate solutions hub.
A woman tends to her cassava field. Africa's farmers are already feeling the impacts of climate change in the form of drought, crop loss, erratic rainfall and more. Photo by golero/iStock
5 Issues to Watch at the Africa Climate Summit

Both the Africa Climate Summit and UN Africa Climate Week will provide a platform for policymakers, practitioners, businesses and civil society to exchange ideas on climate solutions, overcome barriers and put forward bold new plans. But for the discussions and resulting Nairobi Declaration to be successful, it will be particularly important to make progress on five key issues:
1) Climate finance for adaptation and loss and damage

The African continent is heating up faster than any other place on Earth, with impacts in the form of withering drought, lost crops, famine and more. Research shows that Africa will require $579 billion in funding for adaptation through 2030, yet the world provided only $11.4 billion on average annually for the continent in 2019 and 2020, with most funds coming from the public sector.

Meanwhile, Africa’s share of global debt rose from approximately 19% in 2010 to nearly 29% in 2022. Countries are being forced to direct a greater share of their budgets toward servicing debt at the expense of financing their development and building climate resilience.

The Africa Climate Summit and Africa Climate Week present opportunities for a consolidated push towards finance reforms for climate and sustainable development. African leaders are already calling for a new global finance deal that serves the continent’s growth goals and allows it to effectively mitigate and adapt to climate change. The summit represents the only forum where every African country has an opportunity to have its voice heard on this debate.

We expect civil society and other groups to also push wealthy nations to honor the climate finance commitments they have already made, such as their pledge to provide $100 billion in climate finance annually by 2020, double the amount of finance for adaptation, and establish a dedicated fund for countries grappling with unavoidable losses and damages from climate change.
2) Africa’s energy transition

Access to clean, affordable and reliable power is essential for human health, education and economic prosperity. Yet in 2021, only 50.6% of the population in sub-Saharan Africa had access to electricity, with varying rates per country. What Africa requires is a balance between urgently increasing access to electricity and building out low-carbon energy systems for the future.

Solar mini-grids are a solution offering low-cost access to reliable power and have great potential to reach underserved rural areas. At the same time, Algeria, Egypt, Morocco and South Africa are developing the continent’s largest utility-scale solar power plants, while Namibia launched a mega-hydrogen power project in May 2023.

But scaling up both distributed and larger, centralized clean energy resources — as well as the physical infrastructure, policies, jobs and skills that go with them — will require significant investment. Investment in clean energy technologies globally is now beginning to rival that spent on fossil fuels, but Africa still accounts for less than 1% of the $434 billion invested globally.

Discussions on how to mobilize development finance and private capital for clean energy solutions at scale across the continent will be on the table at the Africa Climate Summit, with announcements of major renewable energy initiatives and investments expected.
People bike and walk near a market in Asmara, Eritrea. The population of Africa's cities is expected to double by 2050, reaching 1.5 billion people. Photo by Dave Primov/iStock
3) Equitable and sustainable cities

Research shows that avoiding some of the worst impacts of climate change requires that all cities be carbon-neutral by mid-century. This goal will be particularly difficult to achieve in Africa, where urban residents face vast inequities and populations are growing rapidly.

The population of Africa’s cities is expected to double by 2050, reaching 1.5 billion people. Three-quarters of the infrastructure that will exist in these cities by mid-century has yet to be built. It’s essential that this development is not only low-carbon and climate-resilient, but also enhances access to essential services such as running water and sanitation, electricity, decent housing, transport, and dignified, healthy urban jobs.

It’s imperative that discussions at the Africa Climate Summit and the Nairobi Declaration lay out actions that will scale up low-carbon initiatives to help cities become more inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. Among other things, we expect announcements on investments in e-mobility as a way to reduce emissions and improve air quality in cities.
4) Critical minerals and other clean energy resources

As countries around the world transition to low-carbon economies, they’ll need increasing amounts of critical minerals like lithium, graphite, cobalt and more to make electric vehicle batteries, wind turbines and solar panels. Africa holds about 30% of the world's mineral resources, alongside abundant clean energy resources that can serve as the foundation for clean industries and commodities. But strong resource governance is essential for ensuring that Africa’s people directly derive the benefits of these resources.

At the African Climate Summit, leaders are expected to call for restrictions on the export of unprocessed critical minerals to help drive investments towards local industries, following in the footsteps of countries like Namibia and Ghana. Discussions should identify incentives for local processing to both decarbonize the critical minerals value chain and spur economic development. We also expect civil society groups to demand that the exploitation of critical minerals be done in ways that are safe for society and the environment.
5) Nature-based approaches to sustainable agriculture, biodiversity and carbon sinks

Africa is home to remarkable biodiversity, by virtue of its remarkably diverse landscapes — tropical forests, savannahs, grasslands, mangroves, deserts, wetlands and more. These ecological systems support both rural and urban life across the continent. The Great Rift Valley’s many lakes, favorable climate, and rich soils, for example, provide food and livelihoods for more than 12 million people in the Horn of Africa.

Africa’s ecosystems also benefit the world. The Congo Basin tropical forest is one of the largest carbon sinks, storing around 29 billion tons of carbon, roughly 3 times the world’s annual greenhouse gas emissions.

However nature and biodiversity in Africa are threatened by the rapid expansion of agriculture, soil depletion, trade of illegal forest commodities, and an insatiable demand for fuelwood for cooking. Investments in solutions to restore and sustain healthy landscapes are crucial for African communities, its ecosystems, its economy, and the world at large. At the Africa Climate Summit, we expect renewed commitments by governments to halt biodiversity loss and landscape degradation.
A woman buys charcoal from a market in Kampala, Uganda. Charcoal is an essential source of fuelwood in many countries, but it comes at a cost to Africa's forests. Photo by vlad_karavaev/iStock
The Africa Climate Summit Is a Starting Point

This inaugural Africa Climate Summit is a crucial moment for the continent’s collective effort towards climate action and a low carbon green growth agenda. We’ll need definitive outcomes, as well as a Nairobi Declaration that places people, climate and nature at its core.

But it’s imperative that the close of the Africa Climate Summit act as a starting point — not a finish line. Creating a roadmap and implementing the Nairobi Declaration will depend on the political goodwill of Africa’s leaders and the ability of the world to mobilize the financing and enabling environment required for its operationalization. It will also require the ongoing engagement of non-state actors, including civil society and the private sector.

Africa has been seen as a victim of climate change for far too long. This Africa Climate Summit is about demonstrating and articulating the investment opportunity that African solutions represent for the continent and for the world. It’s time for leaders to show that Africa is one of Earth’s greatest climate solutions.

 

The Deadly Intersection of Labor Exploitation and Climate Change

As temperatures soar in the United States this summer, some among us are lucky enough to be able to remain in air-conditioned interior spaces, ordering food, groceries, clothing, and other products to be delivered to us.

August 30, 2023 by Resilience 

By Sonali Kolhatkar

Credit Line: This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

As temperatures soar in the United States this summer, some among us are lucky enough to be able to remain in air-conditioned interior spaces, ordering food, groceries, clothing, and other products to be delivered to us. The rest, toiling in the extreme heat to pull products off hot warehouse shelves and drop them off curbside in scorching delivery trucks, are risking health and even life. July 2023 marked the planet’s hottest month on record.

In San Bernardino, California, where retail giant Amazon has a massive warehouse and fulfillment center, daily temperatures reached triple digits for the majority of days in July and have been dangerously hot all summer. Workers with the Inland Empire Amazon Workers United (IEAWU) protested the dangerous conditions and complained to CAL-OSHA, the state’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health. One worker, Daniel Rivera, told Fox11, “Amazon’s main focus is production. Safety is not the priority until it’s too late.”

What we are witnessing with such increasingly common instances is capitalism-induced climate change intersecting with capitalism-induced labor exploitation. It’s a deadly combination and one that is being discussed in ways that obscure its causes and solutions.

Take the corporate media, whose coverage has focused on the pro-business buzzword of “productivity.” CBS worried in an August 1, 2023 story, “How Hot Weather Affects Worker Productivity—and What That Means for the Economy.” The New York Times similarly lamented in a July 31, 2023 headline, that “Heat Is Costing the U.S. Economy Billions in Lost Productivity.” The cost to the economy (a euphemism for stock values and profit margins) is the bottom line—not the safety and health of human beings. Therefore, it matters a great deal that, as per the Times, “more than 2.5 billion hours of labor in the U.S. agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and service sectors were lost to heat exposure.”

The Times story quoted R. Jisung Park, an environmental and labor economist, who was concerned that workers’ “performance declines dramatically when exposed to heat,” and therefore “hotter temperatures appear to muck up the gears of the economy.”

How inconvenient the corporate-induced climate crisis has been to the performance standards of corporate-driven worker exploitation!

We oughtn’t to be surprised that in an economy designed to see workers as units of production for a profit-driven top-down system of exploitation, corporate media coverage would spout such callous narratives based on internalized capitalist values.

President Joe Biden’s administration, on the surface at least, appears to be centering worker safety and well-being. In late July the president asked the Department of Labor to “issue the first-ever Hazard Alert for heat,” and to increase enforcement of heat-related worker protections. “The Hazard Alert will reaffirm that workers have heat-related protections under federal law,” announced the White House. The Biden administration pointed out proudly that it “has continued to deliver on the most ambitious climate agenda in American history,” and that, in contrast, “many Republicans in Congress continue to deny the very existence of climate change.”

Yet, in its first two years, the Biden administration actually approved more oil and gas drilling permits than in the first two years of the previous Republican administration of Donald Trump. A 21-year-old climate activist, Elise Joshi, confronted White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre in late July 2023, saying, “A million young people wrote to the administration pleading [for it] not to approve a disastrous oil-drilling project in Alaska and we were ignored.” The video of Joshi’s brave action has gone viral

If Biden truly cares about the health and safety of working people in a warming climate, and about the future of young people like Joshi, he has the power to do much more than merely enforce safety standards—which is a band-aid solution and won’t do anything to stop global warming.

The Center for Biological Diversity has devoted an entire website, BidensClimatePowers.org, explaining what the president could do immediately, without needing congressional approval. The recommendations include refusing permits for fossil fuel projects, as Joshi pleaded for him to do.

Neither the corporate media nor our politicians who are beholden to corporate lobbyists honestly address the intersection of worker exploitation and climate change. They neither pinpoint the common cause—corporate greed—nor do they identify the common solution—ending corporate greed.

The early months of the COVID-19 pandemic were a practice run for what is currently transpiring with the climate catastrophe enveloping the planet.

Even those who had the luxury of working from home during the lockdowns were measured by their productivity. At first corporate America celebrated because people worked harder from home than from their workplace, freed from time-consuming commutes and the distractions of in-person camaraderie. Now, as many workers are realizing they don’t want to be cogs in someone else’s wheel, Fortune.com blared the headline, “American Worker Productivity Is Declining at the Fastest Rate in 75 Years—and It Could See CEOs Go to War Against WFH [Work From Home].”

Meanwhile, those whose labor our society relies on were labeled “essential” and sent off to work, braving a killer virus, often without adequate safety measures in place. Even working in a grocery store during the lockdowns cost people their lives. A third of all workers in the U.S. were deemed essential. Unsurprisingly, they were disproportionately low-income and people of color. We can expect the same to transpire in a warming climate as people like Daniel Rivera, the Amazon warehouse worker in San Bernardino, toil in the burning heat in order to keep the wheels of productivity turning.

Just as corporations care little for worker lives, the climate crisis is the predictable outcome of an economy designed to maximize shareholder profit, not ensure a viable planet for future generations. Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson connected the dots in his novel New York 2140. “We’ve been paying a fraction of what things really cost to make, but meanwhile the planet, and the workers who make the stuff, take the unpaid costs right in the teeth,” said Robinson. We cannot rely on fiction writers painting dystopian futures to be the only ones identifying the common root causes of climate change and labor abuse.

The current design of our economic system privileges the well-being of only 1 percent of all humans. Whether it’s a deadly virus or the deadly climate, unless we clearly identify the systemic problems and redesign our economic system to center the well-being of all human beings, the future will not be livable, rendering discussions of “productivity” moot in the deadliest possible way.

How Covid Killed Utopia
Ari Gandsman & José López

August 31, 2023

ILLUSTRATION: SCOTT MENCHIN

For much of the past year, Covid has been absent from the news. But lately, the rapid spread of the “Eris” variant, which takes its name from the Greek goddess of discord, has occasioned a new round of anxious coverage as well as a return to pandemic protocols in a few places and calls for more of the same. These responses have generated, in turn, a backlash from those who warn that renewed concern about the virus will once again serve as a Trojan horse for a new global authoritarianism. While such worries about the dystopian potential of pandemic response persist, what is far less visible now than three years ago is their flipside: a paradoxical utopianism that saw in lockdowns a positive vision of the future.

For many on the left, the disruptions of 2020 signaled that another, better world was possible: one in which the cheering on of essential workers heralded the recognition of the centrality of caring labor, and where the shared effort of “stopping the spread” instilled us with a new spirit of collectivism and solidarity. Academic luminaries including Slavoj Žižek, Judith Butler, and Bruno Latour all hailed the supposed transformative possibilities of Covid lockdowns. From their perspective, the pandemic offered the opportunity for a reckoning with everything from the sins of late capitalism to colonialism, racism, and, inevitably, the climate emergency.
“The shock of Covid and the ensuing lockdowns unleashed a new round of utopian thinking.”

The German-Jewish Marxist mystic Walter Benjamin argued a century ago that “the concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe.” It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the shock of Covid and the ensuing lockdowns unleashed a new round of utopian thinking. What’s more, the pandemic landed amid an increasingly apocalyptic turn within critical theory. Precisely because we were “living in the end times,” Žižek proclaimed before the pandemic, “the future will be utopian, or there will be none.”

The dream of a dramatically different post-pandemic life has crashed hard into a more banal reality. As Michel Houellebecq predicted in 2020, the world today is “the same, just a bit worse.” Traffic, tourism, and other scourges lamented during the early days of lockdown have rebounded to pre-pandemic levels or beyond, and none of the supposed socially transformational benefits of Covid—compassion, solidarity, a renewed respect for care work—are much in evidence. Meanwhile, we look around and see war, inflation, instability, and rising inequality.

Despite the dead end it has reached, the pandemic-era utopian turn marked a significant shift in left-wing thinking, the broad consequences of which remain to be seen. Specifically, the left’s embrace of public-health authoritarianism, while justified by appeals to the humanitarian ideals of human-rights advocacy—saving lives, protecting the most vulnerable—entailed a dismissal of the foundational assumption that rights pertain to individuals. As a result, the Covid-era revival of utopianism had as its casualty “the last utopia”: the dream of universal human rights.

Utopianism was central to left-wing thought in the 19th and 20th centuries, but this tendency was on the wane by the dawn of the 21st century. At the turn of the millennium, historian Russell Jacoby declared “the end of utopia,” lamenting the demise of alternatives in a world increasingly dominated by a global neoliberal consensus. Around the same time, cultural critic Tom Moylan noted the dominance of dystopias in literary spaces previously occupied by utopian figurations. During the first decade of the new century, the adage that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” attributed to the Marxist literary scholar Fredric Jameson, was widely repeated on the left. The British cultural critic Mark Fisher later captured this mood in the titular phrase of his 2009 book, Capitalist Realism.

“Human rights aimed for a morality beyond politics.”

But if we are to believe the historian Samuel Moyn, one form of utopianism survived this end-of-history moment. This was the human-rights movement, which Moyn dubbed “the last utopia” in his 2010 book of that title. Against the background of the failures of communism and postcolonial independence, Moyn argues, human rights emerged out of leftist disenchantment. Organized around a universal, homogenized, and abstract humanity, human-rights activism focused on a minimal politics of negative freedoms, rather than broader social transformation. Indeed, human rights were initially conceived as a prophylactic against the excesses of fascism and communism. If the sort of fundamental societal overhaul envisioned by earlier utopian projects was no longer feasible, people could at least be free from arbitrary imprisonment, torture, and extrajudicial murder at the hands of the state. Limited in scope, this new hybrid of idealism and realism attempted to ensure that innocent victims didn’t suffer the worst forms of human cruelty. Human rights aimed for a morality beyond politics structured by an unassailable moral ledger, in which victims and perpetrators were the primary categories.

The bland, inoffensive minimalism of the human-rights ethic was the point. Because of the modesty of its moral vision, human-rights advocacy hardly registered as utopian, and, indeed, was often underwritten by an anti-utopian animus. But all this changed, as Moyn has explained, when human-rights globalism, intoxicated by the millenarian consciousness of the last decade of the 20th century and the post-Cold War “peace dividend,” became the new utopian dream. The results of this shift were anything but utopian. The architects of the post-9/11 wars justified their interventions, cynically or not, on humanitarian grounds. The abject failure of their efforts to impose democratic regimes around the world led critics to see human rights as a new, albeit softer, pretext for imperial hubris. The tensions between local and grassroot support for human rights and their top-down imposition by Western states and NGOs were the foundational cracks in human-rights utopianism that ended in disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and elsewhere.

The advent of nationalist and soft-authoritarian regimes around the globe formed one half of the backlash. On the other side, the liberal left came to see both the universalism and the limited scope of human rights as increasingly problematic. The “not enough” in the title of Moyn’s follow-up work spoke to the inadequacy of human rights for addressing more concrete questions of economic and social rights, structural inequalities, or historical injustices. The real-world limits of human-rights moral minimalism became difficult to ignore. Around the same time, many on the left were becoming more suspicious of, if not outright hostile to, political rights like freedom of speech. The idealized and abstract universality of a global human family fragmented into identity-based historical grievances on the left and aggressive nationalism on the right. The human-rights utopia, like all prior utopias, failed to materialize.

The maximalist public-health response to the novel coronavirus was predicated on a human-rights utopian logic but also incorporated elements of the varied backlash to it. Once more, the categories of victim and perpetrator offered a simplified moral accountancy. Only now, the victims were no longer Mideast dissidents, but anyone vulnerable to the disease, while the Arab autocrat was supplanted by the superspreader—any neighbor or fellow shopper who failed to follow the rules. The mantle of the human-rights activist or humanitarian worker, meanwhile, was taken up by epidemiologists, public-health officials, and health workers, who were empowered to speak on behalf of all medically vulnerable populations.

The logic of mass quarantine likewise deployed a human-rights vocabulary of victimhood, vulnerability, marginalization, and protection. Confining the entire population to protect the most vulnerable was presented not only as the best option but the only moral option. Anyone opposed to this was likened to a supporter of or apologist for genocide—a “denier.” The maximalist logic of protection, the flipside of maximal vulnerability, meant children should be kept in virtual schooling or wearing KN95 masks even when engaging in outdoor sports. The utopian fantasy underlying these demands was a denial of death. All Covid deaths were considered failures of political will or the result of moral turpitude, rather than consequences of a highly transmissible airborne virus.

There was a key difference, however: While the earlier human-rights-ism had consistently demanded freedom from unjust imprisonment, the new lockdown utopia required indefinite detention as a condition of moral life. If human rights were premised on a borderless world of indefinite mobility and the erosion of national sovereignty, Covid containment policies led to an unprecedented global sealing of borders, the resurgence of state authority, and expansion of police and military power. Suddenly, the aspiration of xenophobic isolationists from Donald Trump to Viktor Orbán—securing the border—could be embraced by an avatar of enlightened liberalism like Jacinda Ardern.

It follows from all this that the same contradiction between the aspirational solidarity of universal human rights and its normative imposition by governments, often at gunpoint, resurfaced in the new public-health humanitarianism. Public-health measures were presented as public goods necessary to save lives; adhering to them was tantamount to simply being a decent, caring person adhering to a minimal universal morality. At the same time, these measures were obligations imposed by the state and backed up with the threat of force.


Perhaps nowhere is this contradiction more apparent than in one of the major utopian manifestos to come out of left academia in the wake of Covid: Judith Butler’s What World Is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology. Butler’s main target is the notion of individual freedom that supposedly underlies objections to public-health measures. Fault lies with “personal liberty,” equated by Butler with a “death drive,” ostensibly because resistance to public-health measures is equated with killing people, either oneself or others.

While drawing upon a human-rights tradition driven by concern for vulnerability and suffering, Butler’s vision departs dramatically from the idea of human rights by rejecting the underlying philosophical premise from which it emerges, namely that an individual possesses, or should possess, certain rights and freedoms. The short preamble of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights uses the word “freedom” seven times, often interchangeably or synonymously with “rights.” The utopian potential of pandemic lockdowns, for Butler, is that they can help demolish this foundational set of assumptions and replace it with a new conception of the subject defined by interdependence.

Notwithstanding Butler’s hopes, lockdowns haven’t made us a more caring society; among other things, sharp declines in charitable giving and surges in violence and homelessness suggest otherwise. Academic studies also point to the opposite effect. The cumulative impact of lockdowns on young people, for example, is that they have become less empathetic and crueler. In the end, Butler’s vision reveals one of the dystopian endpoints of the utopian human-rights dream: the forced imposition of isolation in the humanitarian name of caring for others.

Concerns about the dangers of autonomy also animate the lockdown manifesto of the late philosopher Bruno Latour, After Lockdown: a Metamorphosis. As in Gregor Samsa’s case, according to Latour, our Covid metamorphosis is irreversible: “It seems that we’re not about to turn back by waking up out of this nightmare. Once locked down, always locked down.” By metamorphosing our daily conditions of living into a lockdown, according to Latour, Covid and the public response to it revealed the true nature of our reality. We are vulnerable because of our dependence on our fellow human and non-human inhabitants, which, in turn, are being assailed by the destructive forces of the new climate regime. Those who resist lockdown, he claimed, erroneously fancy themselves “autotrophs” capable of autonomously producing the conditions of their own existence, but our terrestrial reality is, as in Butler’s vision, one of interdependence: we are heterotrophs! Sure, we might feel discomfort and limited, suffocated even, but if we want to continue to live and mitigate our vulnerability, we have no other choice.
“The underside of the warm embrace of interdependence is a harsh authoritarian imposition.”

Latour’s vision accords with what many believed was the utopian potential at the heart of the Covid dystopia. Where others saw the unsustainability of lockdowns, Latour glimpsed in lockdowns a model of sustainability, in the form of future “climate lockdowns” legitimated by the same logic of emergency. However, as in the case of Butler’s pandemic intervention, the underside of the warm embrace of interdependence is a harsh authoritarian imposition.

The first wave of human-rights activism was predicated on a simple moral logic: We all have an ethical responsibility to care about, and to work to relieve, the suffering of prisoners of conscience locked up in authoritarian nations. Whatever the limitations of this moralistic attempt to supersede politics by focusing on victimhood, human rights have nurtured a moral reflex that engenders a shared sense of humanity. The hope that caring for the suffering of distant others might become part of a shared moral intuition in future societies was utopian in the best sense of the term. But it was utopian in the worst possible sense to think that this moral vision, grounded as it was in the simplistic opposition between victim and perpetrator, would supersede politics and become the glue holding societies together in a community of global human rights.

It is sobering to realize that the success of human-rights advocates at inscribing victimhood and vulnerability as dominant political and ethical idioms helped facilitate broad compliance with pandemic measures that placed human lives in the abstract over human rights in the concrete. In true dystopian doublethink, progressive intellectuals claimed that we could only be free by being locked down and only care for the other by breaking fundamental social bonds. Seen thus, a retrograde return to normal is preferable to the fantasies of those who saw in lockdown an opportunity to reimagine and remake the world.

Let their utopias be lost forever.

Ari Gandsman is a medical anthropologist at the University of Ottawa.

José López is a political sociologist at the University of Ottawa.

Pushing back against the pressure to conform

Religious schools help higher education navigate against conformity.

NOTRE DAME VS LIBERTY UNIVERSITY

Aug 30, 2023


Michelle Budge, Deseret News

For decades, higher education institutions have endured various pressures to conform to a narrow conceptualization of an ideal college or university. We worry about this pressure to conform and what it means for colleges with special missions. Many religious colleges and universities have successfully navigated aspects of the conformity crisis and we think there are lessons for the rest of higher education in their experience.

In January 1918, amid numerous domestic and global challenges including the First World War, the American Council on Education (ACE) was established to help coordinate the considerable power of American higher education for the benefit of learners from all corners of the country and for the general welfare of the nation.

Established first as the Emergency Council on Education, ACE quickly grew to include dozens of colleges and universities. More than a hundred years later, after having coordinated or shaped countless national initiatives including the creation of the General Education Development test (GED), the GI Bill and the Higher Education Act, ACE is home to more than 1,700 colleges, universities and higher education associations. 

Restoring the broken promise of American education

A crisis of meaning

While the specific challenges America’s colleges and universities have been asked to address may have changed in the century since ACE was established, a central principle of the ACE theory of change is that the power of American higher education rests in the diversity of its colleges and universities. This is true of their participants and of the institutions themselves. There are many different types of learners participating in higher education. And there are many different types of colleges and universities. This diversity of learners and institutions leads to collective works that ultimately facilitate progress for individuals, families, communities and our nation as a whole.

The reality of this promise drew both of us to ACE after our respective careers in the field. One of us, Davis, joined ACE after serving for years as a campus student services leader. The other, Mitchell, served as dean, college president, and, for a time, the senior higher education officer in the United States Department of Education.

Increasingly, we are worried that the evolution of higher education, as an industry, is less welcoming of new, more diverse models and less supportive of the continued evolution of even existing models. We are worried about the increasing pressures to conform to a single model or a few models that are not representative of the diversity of learner needs and institution missions that exist. This means that over time, rather than seeing growth in the diversity and the variety of colleges and universities, we could start seeing more and more colleges that look identical to one another. While scholars and experts may disagree about how widespread pressures to conform are and whether they are bad for the sector, few disagree that they are real.

We believe that the pressures of conformity that afflict higher education broadly were experienced by religious colleges and universities much earlier than many other institutions. An example of an early pressure to conform is found in Andrew Carnegie’s insistence that only secular institutions could participate in an innovative professors’ pension fund he established. That fund grew to become TIAA and now earnestly serves all types of institutions, irrespective of their religious, public or private status. However, before this inclusive pivot was adopted, a significant number of small religiously affiliated institutions severed ties with the churches who founded them so that they could participate in the fund.

Higher education, as an industry, is less welcoming of new, more diverse models and less supportive of the continued evolution of even existing models.

While the early decades of the 20th century saw a reduction in the number of religious colleges and universities, a critical mass remained. Today, there are about 900 religious colleges and universities distributed across the country, many of which are members of ACE or members of associations who are represented within ACE. All of them contribute to the institutional diversity that empowers American higher education.

What remains of religious colleges and universities is anything but a monolith. This subset of American higher education is comprised of very small liberal arts colleges, very large research universities, and everything in between. Some are online intensive. Others are work colleges. Many focus on serving underrepresented and minority communities. There are religious institutions that focus on performing arts and religious colleges that focus on theology. Sometimes these diverse commitments are found at the same institution.

From Rose Bowls to rowing regattas, religious colleges and universities show up in almost every corner of American higher education. At their best, they show up in ways that represent their authentic identities. This is where a lesson for the whole of higher education can be found. Despite pressures to conform, including decades of pressure to secularize, many religious colleges and universities have remained committed to their founding identities. Many have modernized around those identities. The result is a heterogeneous mixture of institutions linked by a common design attribute — a formal tie to a church or a religious community.

Not surprisingly, the beneficiaries are often students themselves. In a world where more than half of those who start college never complete, religious colleges and universities stand out in their ability to engage students. According to the 2020 Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings, 7 of the top 10 institutions recognized nationally for student engagement were religious. Separately, other reports demonstrate that religious colleges and universities often have higher than average graduation rates and lower than average costs of attendance.

With this background, ACE is pleased to see, and in some instances formally support, religious universities collaborating to help each other embrace the unique value their identities stand to offer students and the sector as a whole. The message within these collaborations seems to be that religious schools should look to their identities as a source of inspiration for charting new paths and the creation of new value propositions in the face of strong pressures to conform. We believe that this presents a powerful statement to the rest of the sector.

We actively recognize that conformity is just one of many challenges facing higher education. There are many other challenges that, like conformity, were experienced early by religious colleges and universities before being experienced by the sector as a whole. These include financial pressures, erosion of public trust and confidence, tendencies towards elitism, confusion and tension around the complexities of academic freedom, and assorted matters relating to diversity, equity and inclusion.

In each instance, religious institutions have or can look to their distinctive missions to find unique and meaningful solutions to these challenges. In this regard, the promise that religious colleges and universities can help the whole of higher education by adhering to the best versions of their authentic identity is not to be dismissed.

It is possible, and indeed likely, that the whole of higher education can look to the best of religious higher education for inspiration in charting new and meaningful paths. We even call upon religious universities, some of whom are gifted with considerable resources, to help less wealthy special mission colleges and universities, especially those that serve vulnerable and underserved learners, in their own efforts to resist pressures to conform. In this way, religious universities can not only serve as clear examples of what it means to be mission driven but can also empower more institutions to do the same.

Ted Mitchell is the president of the American Council of Education (ACE). 

Galida Davis is the assistant vice president and executive director of ACE Connect.

Ex-British intelligence worker admits attempted murder of US NSA employee




PUBLISHED ONAUGUST 30, 2023

LONDON - An ex-British intelligence worker has pleaded guilty in a London court to the attempted murder of a US National Security Agency employee, police and the Crown Prosecution Service said on Wednesday (Aug 30).

Joshua Bowles, 29, stabbed the unnamed woman, who was working at British intelligence agency GCHQ at the time, multiple times during the attack in March near GCHQ's base at Cheltenham, in western England.

Bowles had previously worked at GCHQ but was no longer working there when the attack occurred, Counter Terrorism Policing South East (CTPSE) said in a statement, adding that the woman's work there was cited by Bowles as a motive.

"This was a violent and unprovoked attack on two innocent victims," Detective Chief Superintendent Olly Wright, head of CTPSE, said in a statement.

"Through our extensive and thorough investigation, it is clear that Bowles had selected his victim because of where she worked."

Prosecutor Emma Gargitter told London's Old Bailey on Wednesday that Bowles also researched two other US government employees and should be sentenced as someone convicted of a terrorist offence, the BBC reported.

Bowles pleaded guilty to one count of attempted murder and one of assaulting a man who tried to stop the attack. He will be sentenced at a later date.

Opinion: Why the Spanish soccer chief’s puerile showdown is so toxic

Opinion by Holly Thomas
 Wed August 30, 2023

A girl holds a sign reading, "It's over ('se acabo'), Vallecas with you Jenni" before the Spanish Liga football match between Rayo Vallecano de Madrid and Club Atletico de Madrid at the Vallecas stadium in Madrid on August 28, 2023. A growing number of voices have denounced Spain's football federation president Luis Rubiales after his forced kiss on Spain's midfielder Jenni Hermoso's lips at the Women's World Cup final.

Thomas Coex/AFP/Getty Images

CNN —

It’s been more than a week since Spain’s historic victory over England in the Women’s World Cup final, and the woman now on everyone’s lips was nowhere near the pitch that day.

The spotlight is on Ángeles Béjar, the mother of Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) president Luis Rubiales. Rubiales has been suspended by FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, after giving an unwanted kiss on the mouth to star player Jennifer Hermoso at the medal ceremony.

Rubiales has described the kiss as “mutual,” whereas Hermoso said on social media she was the “victim of an impulse-driven, sexist, out of place act without any consent on my part.” Spain’s winners are refusing to play for the team until the current leadership is gone, Spanish prosecutors have opened an investigation into the incident and Spain’s football federation had at one point accused Hermoso of lying (regional soccer chiefs have since held an emergency meeting and called for Rubiales to step down).

Outraged by what she’s called an “inhumane, bloodthirsty hunt” of her son, Béjar has locked herself in a church in the Spanish city of Motril near Granada, where she’s promised to stay “indefinitely, day and night” until justice is served. Her protest marks the strangest escalation in a row that’s seen a man’s decision to impose himself on a woman supersede the high point of that woman’s career. His failure to offer a meaningful apology confirms the suspicions of everyone who believed that, for all the goodwill it’s received lately, women’s soccer remains the poor sister of the men’s game — and it’ll take more than a superficial cultural makeover to change that.

Rubiales gave Jennifer Hermoso of Spain an unwanted kiss during the medal ceremony of the FIFA Women's World Cup on August 20, 2023.

Noemi Llamas/Eurasia Sport Images/Getty Images

Rubiales’ retrograde behavior and subsequent primacy in the news cycle are especially gutting considering how well things appeared to have been going for the sport. As a ’90s kid lacking any particular interest in sports, my first impressions of soccer were informed by the glut of super-highly paid male players who ruled the scene at the time. My earliest memories concern the then-legendary British player Paul Gascoigne, known as “Gazza.”

Gazza, literally intoxicated by his miraculous success, was notorious for his disturbing and often aggressive behavior on and off the pitch, which he has written about publicly in a memoir and spoken about in a documentary. His dominance on tabloid covers affirmed my preconceptions of his profession as equally brutish: one best suited to the baying men who overtook the stands on match day and drunkenly flooded the streets afterward. Britain’s football hooligans and their racist and often violent tendencies were infamous at home and abroad, but they were also an intrinsic part of the game. I knew I wasn’t welcome.

Opinion: This is about far more than an unwanted kiss on the lips

The fans’ willingness to forgive Gazza, coupled with the rise of the acronym “WAGs” to describe the players’ wives and girlfriends solidified my impression of soccer as a game for men played, if necessary, at women’s expense. Where I grew up in southern England, women’s soccer was a (usually homophobic) punchline. FIFA finally got around to instituting the first Women’s World Cup in 1991 (the first men’s tournament was in 1930) — but while classes were paused to watch the men’s England team take on Brazil in the 2002 quarterfinals, women’s contests passed by unnoticed. Girls did not play soccer at my school, and it would never have occurred to me to seek out a women’s match on my own time.

Fast forward a few decades. In 2015, the US women’s soccer team became the first group of female athletes to receive a ticker tape parade in New York City following their World Cup victory over Japan — an honor awarded to them again after their victory over the Netherlands in 2019. Women’s transfer fees, albeit still a fraction of the men’s, are at an all-time high, and this year’s World Cup showdown between Spain and England drew record viewing figures. For her 10th birthday this summer, my boyfriend’s niece’s number one wish was to watch a soccer match.

He bought her and half the family (plus me) tickets to the Women’s Champions League semifinal second leg for Arsenal vs. Wolfsburg. Even a few years ago, it wouldn’t have been worth opening the stadium for the game as the turnout was typically woeful, but on that evening, the 60,700-capacity venue was sold out. In the row in front of us, a man sat with his two young sons cheering Arsenal on, a delightful scene that would’ve been unthinkable when I was a child. The players took checks from the referee on the chin and the temperance on the pitch was mirrored in the stands; there was no abuse thrown at the opposition, no crush as we exited.

All of this was undeniably lovely. However, our rose-tinted day out was only possible because the total cost of our tickets came to a little more than $100. For comparison, tickets to an equivalent men’s game would’ve set us back closer to $1,000. Men’s football may be becoming more inclusive and the players less loutish, but there’s no doubt which sport is the main event.

Women’s football may have won the hearts of the public to an unprecedented degree in the last few years, but evidently, popularity alone doesn’t ensure equal standing in the eyes of those who run the show. Béjar’s bizarre demonstration over her son and the RFEF’s initial disgraceful knee-jerk assertions in his defense have nothing to do with justice, and everything to do with ego. If Rubiales had simply apologized for what he’d done right away, it would still have been wrong, but at the very least, he might have ceded the limelight to the Spanish women’s team where it belongs. In digging his heels in, he’s revealed the misogynist heart still beating beneath football’s skin.

Holly ThomasHolly Thomas
Editor’s Note: Holly Thomas is a writer and editor based in London. She is morning editor at Katie Couric Media. She tweets @HolstaT. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author. View more opinion on CNN.

Nebraska volleyball event draws 92,003 fans to set women's sports attendance record

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History made at University of Nebraska's Memorial Stadium in Lincoln

Eric Olson · The Associated Press · Posted: Aug 30, 2023 

Fans watch Nebraska take on Omaha in a women's college volleyball match on Wednesday night at the University of Nebraska's Memorial Stadium. The stadium's official capacity is just over 85,000 for football, but that number was higher for this event with seats and standing room on the field. (Chris Machian/Omaha World-Herald via The Associated Press)

Nebraska's fight song begins, "There is no place like Nebraska." When it comes to volleyball, those words never rang more true than Wednesday night.

The Cornhuskers laid claim to the world record for largest attendance at a women's sporting event with 92,003 filling Memorial Stadium in Lincoln for their volleyball match against Omaha.

The university took aim at the record last spring when it announced it would hold a daylong celebration of a sport that enjoys immense popularity in this state of fewer than 2 million.

The event began with an exhibition between in-state Division II powers Nebraska-Kearney and Wayne State and was followed by the Huskers' three-set sweep of Omaha in a regular-season match. Country artist Scotty McCreery performed afterward.

The previous attendance record was 91,648, set during a Champions League soccer match when Barcelona defeated Real Madrid 5-2 at the Camp Nou Stadium in 2022.

• Barcelona's Camp Nou breaks own record with 91,648 fans at women's soccer match

Memorial Stadium's official capacity is just over 85,000 for football, but that number was higher for this event because there were seats and standing room on the field.

Fans in red and white started their tailgate parties outside the stadium hours before first serve of an exhibition Wayne State won in three sets. The stadium was one-quarter full at the start of that match and gradually filled to capacity as players for Omaha and Nebraska were warming up.

There was a flyover during the national anthem and, minutes before first serve, coach John Cook led his Huskers into the stadium to the Tunnel Walk, the longtime tradition of the football team. Synchronized chants of "Go Big Red!" were heard all around.

Conditions were near perfect: 83 degrees, clear skies and a south wind listed at 4-mph at court level with gusts.

Though 91,648 was widely acknowledged as the women's sports attendance record, at least one match at the unofficial 1971 Women's World Cup in Mexico City reportedly drew 110,000 people.

The American record attendance for a women's sporting event had been 90,185 for the 1999 World Cup soccer final between the United States and China at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California — the game where Brandi Chastain ripped off her shirt after scoring the decisive penalty shot for the U.S. win.

The NCAA does not track attendance across all sports, but associate director of media coordination and statistics Jeff Williams said a crowd of 90,000-plus was easily among the largest for a non-football game. A 2010 outdoor hockey game between Michigan and Michigan State at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor drew more than 113,000 fans.

A message seeking comment from officials of Guinness World Records was not immediately returned.

Nebraska has sold out 306 consecutive regular-season matches (Wednesday's event won't count toward the streak because it is not being held on the team's Devaney Center court). The Huskers have led the nation in attendance every season since 2013, and eight of the top nine crowds in NCAA volleyball history are matches that have involved Nebraska.

State-wide affair

Nebraska has won five national championships in volleyball, and its program is one of the few in Division I women's sports that turns a profit — $1 million US last year, according to athletic department CFO Doug Ewald.

"This is a statement on Title IX, and having two daughters of my own, what Title IX has done for women's sports is huge," fan Troy Pfannenstiel of Omaha said before the matches.

Chancellor Rodney Bennett canceled classes for the day. Big Ten Commissioner Tony Petitti was on hand, as was Gov. Jim Pillen. So were Husker volleyball players who were part of iconic coach Terry Pettit's teams over four decades. High school teams from across a state stretching 430 miles border to border were excused from classes to attend.

There are 75 women from the state of Nebraska who are on Division I volleyball rosters this season. At 44 players per million in population, the state trails only Hawaii (67 per million) in Division I players produced per capita, according to volleyball statistician and historian Rich Kern of RichKern.com.

Volleyball has surpassed basketball as the No. 1 girls high school team sport in the United States. It's long been No. 1 in Nebraska.

Inspiration

About 7,000 girls play high school volleyball in the state. Volleyball has been played in varying forms in Nebraska since the early 1900s. For many years, girls volleyball matches were warmup acts for boys basketball games. Volleyball became a sanctioned sport in 1972 and took off in the late 1970s when Pettit invited many of the state's high school coaches to work at his camps in Lincoln.

Pettit also conducted so-called "satellite" clinics in small towns across the state. In a place where boys grow up dreaming of becoming Cornhusker football players, many girls are equally passionate about some day playing volleyball for a Nebraska team that annually ranks among the nation's elite.

Ella Beck, 10, came with a group from tiny Pierce to see her first college volleyball match and root for her favourite player, setter Lexi Rodriguez.

Neveah Kehr, 10, came with her mom, Nicki, from Bismarck, North Dakota, to be part of the event. Nicki graduated from Nebraska, and she brought up her daughter watching the Huskers on television.

Neveah wore the No. 5 jersey of middle blocker Bekka Allick at a pep rally before the matches and, with more than 1,000 fans cheering, was invited to walk to where the players stood and was introduced to the woman she called her idol.

Neveah teared up, and Bekka gave her a hug.