My two previous blog posts have just been rendered mostly irrelevant — and I couldn’t be happier about this turn of events. As reported by Clare Roth, Janelle Lawrence, and Janet Lorin for Bloomberg,

“The U.S. backed down from a high-profile confrontation with Harvard University, MIT and hundreds of other colleges over foreign-student visas, ending a standoff that could have sent thousands of students back to their home countries and left schools scrambling to plan for the fall.U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs on Tuesday announced that the government had agreed to rescind a new policy requiring international students to take at least one in-person class, even amid the resurgent coronavirus pandemic. The hearing followed a separate lawsuit by 17 states and a dozen multi-party “friend of the court” briefs filed in support of the schools from universities, trade groups and some of the country’s biggest tech companies.”

Claire Roth, Janelle Lawrence, & Janet Lorin, for Bloomberg

Here’s hoping that Trump’s accomplices at ICE have no other tricks up their sleeves, and that today’s result represents the end of this particular story. Meanwhile, at the University of Texas at Dallas — and, I imagine, at coronavirus-rocked campuses across all 50 states — today’s news feels like the first good omen we’ve seen in the months since a CDC soothsayer bid us beware the Ides of March, 2020.