WGBH News legal analyst and Northeastern University law professor Daniel Medwed sees the couple’s legal agreement with federal prosecutors as “a plea discount.”

At an online forum Wednesday, Northeastern University President Joseph Aoun said his school would also conduct its own testing.

“If I don’t think the government is telling the truth about Covid-19, I’m going to ignore even the most strongly worded evacuation orders,” says Daniel Aldrich, director of the security and resilience studies program and a professor of political science, public policy, and urban affairs at Northeastern University. “And that might mean some people will […]

“It’s not going to be a snap-back V-shaped recovery, at least for Main Street,” said Alicia Sasser Modestino, an associate professor of public policy and economics at Northeastern University.

These inequities will likely widen. Even before the pandemic, inequalities in poverty and access to health care “were concentrated in southern parts of the country, and in states that are politically red,” says Tiffany Joseph, a sociologist at Northeastern University. Not coincidentally, she says, those same states have tended to take social-distancing measures less seriously […]

Northeastern has “the goal of a full reopening in the fall,” Aoun said. “But in order to do that it will not be business as usual.” He pointed to planning now underway to bring reduced density to every aspect of university life from classrooms to dormitories. 

“They can withstand a lot of negativity. Things that wouldn’t fly in a friendship. You would lose a friendship, but your sibling is there the next day,” said Laurie Kramer, a professor of applied psychology at Northeastern University.

Northeastern University professor Alan Clayton-Matthews, one of the economists who presented to legislators last month, said he has not yet updated his revenue projections as MTF had, but Michlewitz said it was likely that lawmakers would go back to people like Clayton-Matthews to have another discussion.

Samuel Scarpino, an epidemiologist at Northeastern University, said he felt the guidelines were appropriate, but their emphasis on screening for fevers and coughs could be misleading, given the high percentage of transmission among people with no symptoms.

Daniel T. O’Brien is the director of the Boston Area Research Initiative and an associate professor of public policy and urban affairs at Northeastern University. Alicia Sasser Modestino is an associate professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern and the associate director of the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy.

Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, a book by Northeastern University president Joseph E. Aoun, discusses how the universities and higher education institutions will have to adapt as “any predictable work—including many jobs considered ‘knowledge economy’ jobs” come within “the purview of machines.”

“At this point, there is uncertainty,” said Alessandro Vespignani, director of the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University, who has been modeling the path of the virus. “Probably the next week will be one of the crucial ones because if we see more decrease of cases we are still on a ‘good’ trajectory — if […]