Tag: harvard

Obama Judge Tanya Chutkan Blocks Trump Education Department From Naming Foreign Donors Who Dumped Billions Into Harvard, Columbia, and Other Elite Campuses

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from publicly releasing the names of foreign donors and contract counterparties tied to some of America’s most prominent universities.

DC US District Judge Tanya Chutkan, the Obama appointee who presided over the federal election case against President Trump, issued a temporary restraining order barring the Department of Education from releasing a list of foreign donors tied to as much as $5.2 billion in gifts and contracts reported by the schools since 2020.

The Department of Education announced in February that universities disclosed more than $5.2 billion in reportable foreign gifts and contracts during 2025 alone, involving more than 8,300 transactions. The agency said universities have reported a cumulative $67.6 billion in foreign funding since Section 117 was added to federal law in 1986.

Section 117 of the Higher Education Act already requires schools that take federal money to report foreign gifts and contracts of $250,000 or more.

The department began collecting individual donor names in 2020, during President Trump’s first term, while telling the schools the names would stay confidential.

In June 2026, the department reversed course. It has already published 92 “counterparties of concern.” Friday was supposed to be the day the rest of the list went public.

According to the New York Post, Chutkan ruled that disclosure of the information could “constitute irreparable harm.”

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PETA Appears to Run Cover for Brutal Monkey Torturer After Obama-Appointed Judge Reverses Trump’s Harvard Funding Freeze

PETA has spent three years telling its donors that the “lights are out” on Harvard neurobiologist Margaret Livingstone’s cruel infant-monkey lab, but federal records say otherwise.

A new notice of funding, thanks at least in part to an Obama-appointed judge reversing President Donald Trump’s Harvard funding freeze, came just sixteen months after PETA toasted “the end of Margaret Livingstone’s career as tormenter of baby monkeys.”

NIH RePORTER still lists Livingstone as the contact principal investigator on a National Eye Institute award at Harvard Medical School with an award notice dated September 11, 2026, fiscal year 2026 funding of $850,148; a budget period running September 1, 2026, through August 31, 2027; and a project end date of August 31, 2028.

Livingstone was also awarded a new grant on April 17, 2025, with fiscal year 2025 funding of $576,474; a project start date of May 1, 2025; a subsequent award notice dated June 1, 2026, for fiscal year 2026 funding of $576,201; and a project end date of April 30, 2029.

PETA’s May 27, 2025, release claimed a “massive victory” and said funding for the baby-monkey experiments “has been terminated.”

A PETA news post updated May 28, 2025, said “the lights have finally gone out on Margaret Livingstone’s dark experiments on baby monkeys” and that the work was on Harvard’s list of canceled federal grants.

PETA2 told younger readers the same week, “the lights are finally out” and “NIH just pulled the plug.

NIH itself posted on May 29, 2025, that it had “terminated funding at Harvard University for studies that included sewing the eyes of young monkeys shut.”

Then, a Boston judge gave the money back.

On September 3, 2025, U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs, an Obama appointee, granted Harvard summary judgment, vacated the administration’s freeze orders and termination letters, and barred the government from giving those letters any force.

The NIH termination letter dated May 6, 2025, was among the letters she set aside. The judgment vacated “all freezes and terminations of funding to Harvard made pursuant to the Freeze Orders and Termination Letters on or after April 14, 2025.”

The Daily Caller reported this week that taxpayer money is still moving through multiple Livingstone grants, including the new $850,000 award posted this month and a multi-year grant running through 2029.

PETA’s own description of the “maternal deprivation” horrors in Livingstone’s lab includes infant macaques taken from their mothers, some raised with only a cloth surrogate, some fitted with vision-distorting goggles or strobe-like conditions for months, some with eyelids sewn shut, some implanted with electrode arrays, and many later killed and dissected.

Former NIH Director Francis Collins privately called related maternal-deprivation work “third-rate,” according to the Daily Caller.

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Boston Globe Praised Harvard for Suppressing Free Speech to Save It

The Boston Globe (9/13/26) ran an article contrasting two Boston-area universities’ approaches to campus free speech. Penned by higher education reporter Mike Damiano, the piece reads like an installment of Highlights for Children‘s didactic “Goofus and Gallant” feature, with one school clearly doing it right while the other is letting down the cause of free speech.

Northeastern University plays the role of the loathsome Goofus, with critics remarking that the “school’s leaders have taken a hands-off approach to speech issues since cracking down on a pro-Palestinian protest encampment more than two years ago.”

Meanwhile Harvard, in Gallant fashion,

undertook a multi-year experiment in remaking campus speech norms with top-down reforms, resulting in what students and professors describe as a kind of thaw on a campus where tensions over politics, ideology and speech had thrust it into an acrimonious national debate.

That certainly makes it sound better than Northeastern’s “hands-off approach.” But you have to ask: What did Harvard’s leadership actually do for speech when they put their hands on it?

Well, for one thing, “they have nudged teaching fellows and professors to keep their personal politics out of the classroom.” Huh—telling faculty not to talk about their politics does not actually sound like promoting free speech.

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SAFE SPACE: Harvard Law School Offers Students ‘Low Sensory Rooms’ and Fidget Toys

Anyone who tells you that the ‘woke’ era is over is not paying attention to what is happening on America’s college campuses. Woke insanity is alive and well in higher education.

Harvard Law School is offering students ‘low sensory rooms’ and fidget toys to help deal with stress. What’s next? Coloring books?

These are people who will be offered jobs as judges and district attorneys in the future.

The College Fix reports:

Harvard Law offers students fidget toys, ‘low sensory rooms’

As that nation’s future Supreme Court justices, solicitors general, and elite law firm attorneys start school at Harvard University, the Ivy League is ensuring they have everything they need to take a “break from the noise.”

The freshman orientation for new Harvard law students reportedly promoted “low sensory rooms,” according to National Review.

The rooms include “weighted blankets, dim lighting, fidget toys, and more,” according to reporter Abigail Anthony.

Anthony opined: “Of course, the people being trained to work 80 hours a week at a Big Law Firm cannot be expected to manage a couple hours of orientation events without palliative care.”

Students can also relax in wellness lounges with “massage chairs” and “lowkey crafts and activities.”

The school reportedly informed students of the dozens of “gender-inclusive bathrooms” on campus as well.

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Harvard Professor Warns That AI Execs Are Pushing World Toward Factory Farming of Humans

We’re racing towards a future where AI enables the “factory farming of humans,” a Harvard professor warns — if tech elites get their way, at least.

In a new episode of The New York Time’s “Hard Fork” podcast, the historian Jill Lepore discusses her idea of an “artificial state” that’s supplanting the traditional nation state, and particular constitutional democracy, with one that erases human autonomy.

In this emerging world order, government is conducted “not by the consent of people but by machines that are making decisions,” she explained on the podcast. And those machines, of course, are owned by corporations.

We aren’t living in the artificial state quite yet, Lepore stresses, but it’s something that’s being built and realized around us. And crucially, it’s also a fantasy held by certain influential elites who believe their power should supersede the actual government and the voters who decide how it’s run.

“The rhetoric that comes out of this particular historical moment is really about the evanescence of modern liberal democracy, constitutional democracy,” she said. The elites pushing this rhetoric aren’t “interested in what the people want,” she added. “Because actually, what the people want is not to have AI and not to have data centers. So that’s the crisis.”

Lepore explores the idea in depth in her upcoming book “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.” She was inspired by a simple question: in our current world where you’re forced to talk to an AI to get answers, ranging from when you call in to ask about an appointment or talk to a company’s support chatbot on its website, “who decided this is a way we should be living?”

The artificial state is a sort of backsliding, in which more and more of the state’s functions are now being replaced by corporations that own and control our digital communications infrastructure. How we get our news, and information on elections and who to vote for, is all being mediated by these powerful groups — through technologies like the TV and radio, once, and now social media being the increasingly dominant medium.

The digital communication our lives are now structured around have a powerful isolating effect. In her 2024 piece for The New Yorker where she initially explored the idea that would later become her book, Lepore described the artificial state as the “factory farming of public life, the sorting and segmenting, the isolation and alienation, the destruction of human community.” 

The artificial state isn’t purely driven by AI, but it’s certainly being accelerated by it. People are asking ChatGPT about who to vote for, rather than talking to their neighbors, local officials, or experts. The political messages they’re seeing, meanwhile, are probably in part being written with AI. Decisions at every level are being made with the assistance of thinking machines. AI is also entrenching surveillance, processing the mountains of data that is being gathered on all of us.

One nefarious aspect of the pro-AI rhetoric coming out of Silicon Valley is that it frames AI as an inevitability. But Lepore argued that this brand of fatalism is a “bogus premise,” itself nestled on top of several more dubious propositions. One we hear endlessly is that regulation stifles innovation, so the government should take the handbrake off AI development. The other is that technology always advances democracy, which assures us that all of the very real threats to democracy AI poses in the present will magically sort themselves out.

Neither of those are true, Lepore says, and you have to look no further than how similar promises were made for technologies in the recent past. 

“So now, the AI people come back with the same argument that was made about the internet — the personal computer, the internet, and social media,” she said in the interview.

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‘Ghoulish’: Harvard paying $53 million for selling ‘heads, faces, brains and hands’ from corpses on black market

A court settlement has been reached in a “ghoulish class-action” lawsuit over the sale of body parts – from bodies donated for medical research – by a former morgue manager at Harvard.

And it has the school paying out $53 million to the families of the deceased.

A report from the New York Post explains a state court judge in Boston has preliminarily approved the deal in the legal action that resulted from the schemes of Cedric Lodge, the disgraced former Harvard morgue manager.

He was arrested back in 2023 and later was sentenced to eight years in prison for stealing and selling organs and body parts of cadavers donated to the school.

“As far back as 2018, Lodge had been stealing body parts — including ‘heads, faces, brains, skin and hands’ — which he’d then bring to his home in New Hampshire and sell with his wife, prosecutors said, shipping them to buyers in Pennsylvania and elsewhere,” the report explained.

His wife, Denise, was given a year in jail for her role.

School officials called Lodge’s actions “despicable abhorrent, and a flagrant betrayal of our values as a medical community.”

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House Committees Detail Harvard Ties With Chinese Entities In New Report

A report released by House committees on Aug. 13 alleged that Harvard University prioritized financial ties over American national security and received more than $600 million from China, the most of any U.S. university.

The report, released by the House Select Committee on China and the House Education and Workforce Committee, alleged that Harvard created a nonprofit called Harvard Global to circumvent federal requirements for disclosing foreign donations to higher education.

According to the report, Harvard Global initially stated on its website that it could serve as a “proposal applicant and awardee” for awards the university was unable to accept for legal or financial reasons. The nonprofit later removed the language after the committees sent Harvard a draft of the report.

“Harvard created an entity in a blatant attempt to get around federal foreign funding disclosure laws. That’s unacceptable, especially given Harvard’s history of failing to comply with these requirements,” Education and Workforce Committee chairman Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) said in a statement.

The committees identified 140 publications co-authored by Harvard-affiliated researchers and researchers affiliated with Chinese universities, including a “Seven Sons” university, the report stated.

The “Seven Sons of National Defense” is a group of elite Chinese universities directly subordinate to the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which regulates China’s defense sector.

The House committees alleged that Harvard-affiliated researchers have worked with “Chinese universities that, as a matter of policy, conduct extensive weapons research and development and hold top-secret security clearances with the PLA [People’s Liberation Army].”

The report cited a 2023 research paper on magnetic materials co-authored by a Harvard-affiliated researcher and a researcher at China’s National University of Defense Technology – which the U.S. government has placed on its entity list as a threat to American national security.

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REPORT: Harvard Tops List of American Universities Taking Money From Foreign Countries – Including China

When it comes to accepting cash from foreign countries, including China, Harvard tops the list of American universities.

This is a major concern. Some might even call it a national security issue. China steals millions in intellectual property from the United States every year and higher education gives them direct access.

At the end of Trump’s first term, Senate Republicans began to focus heavily on this issue. Now they are looking at it again and Senator Tom Cotton is leading the charge.

FOX News reports:

Harvard tops nation in foreign cash haul as Cotton demands probe into China funding

One Ivy League institution has taken in more money from foreign countries, including China, than any other university in the country.

The U.S. Department of Education has, for years, compiled a list of federally funded universities that have taken in funding from abroad. The Trump administration sought to revamp the agency’s online reporting portal, and, in doing so, it has shown that one institution, Harvard University, has scored more foreign funding than any other college in the country.

Harvard is in the crosshairs of Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., for its ties to China and other foreign nations because of the reams of outside cash the university has taken in. And the Senate Republican, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, wants Education Secretary Linda McMahon to open an investigation into China’s cash flow into higher education.

“I remain concerned that millions in additional transactions with sanctioned Chinese entities may not have been reported,” Cotton wrote. “Therefore, I encourage additional scrutiny of financial ties between American universities and Communist China.”…

Cotton noted that since the portal was relaunched in January, reporting data has shown that federally funded universities accepted more than $6.8 billion from “Communist China — including more than $300 million from sanctioned entities.”

Cotton is right to go after them for this.

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Trump admin taps fearless Harvard scientist to lead new Pentagon-probing UFO Council

A Harvard astronomer known for challenging the scientific establishment has been chosen by the Trump administration to lead a team of handpicked scientists that will analyze potential national security risks posed by unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs).

Avi Loeb, a highly respected cosmologist who served as head of Harvard’s astronomy for nearly a decade, was appointed to helm the newly formed UAP Science Advisory Council. The panel will investigate origins of unidentified orbs and other mysterious objects reported by military officials in recent years.

Established to evaluate national security risks, the council will report to a higher-level UAP Governance Board overseen by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The initiative is part of a broader push by the Trump administration to increase transparency and declassify information regarding the highly debated issue.

Also selected for the council is Timothy Gallaudet, an oceanographer and retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral who has previously advocated for disclosure regarding recovered craft, and Ben Lamm, a billionaire tech entrepreneur.

The establishment of the council comes amidst bipartisan congressional pressure on the White House for further disclosure, fueled by arguments from Republican lawmakers that elements of the federal government have historically suppressed evidence of extraterrestrial encounters. Nonetheless, the Pentagon office tasked with investigating UAPs has asserted that no definitive evidence of alien life has been discovered.

Loeb says he approaches the matter from a practical perspective rather than buying into sweeping cover-up theories.

“My impression is the government is baffled by not being able to infer the nature of some of these objects,” he stated.

The Israeli-American researcher has long theorized that extraterrestrial technology could already be on Earth, first capturing widespread public attention in 2017. At the time, he proposed that ‘Oumuamua — an interstellar cookie-shaped object passing through our solar system — showed signs of being an artificial alien artifact rather than a standard space rock.

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Harvard Weighs Major Crackdown On “Grade Inflation”

Harvard faculty begin voting Tuesday on what may be the most aggressive effort in decades to curb grade inflation, a long-running issue that has also drawn attention from the White House as it pushes broader higher-ed reforms, according to Bloomberg.

The proposal would cap A grades in undergraduate classes at 20% of students, plus four additional students. The move comes after A grades surged at Harvard: about 60% of grades were A’s in the 2024–25 academic year, more than double the rate in 2006. After administrators pushed for stricter grading last fall, that number dropped to 53%. Faculty have one week to vote, with results expected May 20.

Supporters say grade inflation has made academic distinctions less meaningful. Last year, Harvard seniors needed a 3.989 GPA to earn summa cum laude, and an award traditionally given to one student ended in a 54-way tie. As professor Jason Furman said, “It’s fundamentally dishonest to give the best students in the class the same grade as someone in the bottom half.”

Bloomberg writes that students have strongly opposed the plan, arguing it would increase stress, discourage academic risk-taking, and push students toward easier courses. Nearly 85% of undergraduates surveyed by The Harvard Crimson opposed the proposal. Student leader Caleb Thompson said “people really are against this,” while senior Summer Tan said students are already seeking easier classes instead of more challenging ones.

Some faculty members agree. Scott Duke Kominers warned the policy could discourage ambitious students and make Harvard less attractive to top applicants.

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