Tag: harvard

Harvard hires drag queen named ‘LaWhore Vagistan’ as visiting professor

Harvard University hired a drag performer as a new professor — who is expected to teach a class on TV show “RuPaul’s Drag Race” in the spring semester, the Ivy League school announced over the summer.

The institution welcomed Kareem Khubchandani in a July message to the college community and revealed that the visiting professor from Tufts University will teach in the Studies of Gender and Sexuality program thanks to the Harvard Gender and Sexuality Caucus. 

Khubchandani is perhaps better known by his stage name, “LaWhore Vagistani” — a persona that the academic has made an integral part of their pedagogy.

The professor will often lecture in the guise of “LaWhore,” which has been a personal project for over a decade, even spawning a music video titled “Sari.”

In an interview with his own drag persona published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2015, Khubchandani spilled the tea on the origin of the off-putting stage name.

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Trump Admin Seeks to Block Harvard From Federal Funding Through HHS

The Trump administration said on Sept. 29 that it was referring Harvard University for proceedings that could end with the university losing federal funding over alleged civil rights violations.

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act generally prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin. According to the Health and Human Services (HHS) Department, Harvard violated Title VI through “deliberate indifference” to anti-Semitic discrimination and harassment on campus after the Hamas-led terrorist attack of Oct. 7, 2023, on Israel.

HHS Office of Civil Rights (OCR) Director Paula Stannard said in the press release that “OCR’s referral of Harvard for formal administrative proceedings reflects OCR’s commitment to safeguard both taxpayer investments and the broader public interest.”

“Congress has empowered Federal agencies to pursue Title VI compliance through formal enforcement mechanisms, including the termination of funding or denial of future Federal financial assistance, when voluntary compliance cannot be achieved,” she continued.

The university is expected to undergo a proceeding where an administrative law judge within HHS determines whether Harvard in fact violated Title VI. It’s also being referred for proceedings under a program that could result in suspension or debarment–both of which entail government-wide blocks on participation in federal procurement for periods of time.

HHS’s announcement comes alongside multiple actions that the Trump administration has taken against Harvard and other universities over alleged civil rights violations, including a separate HHS investigation into suspected race-based discrimination in the Harvard Law Review.

Harvard did not respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comment before publishing time.

Harvard sued the Trump administration earlier this year after the administration announced it would freeze billions of dollars in funding for the university. After months of litigation, a federal judge in Massachusetts ruled that the administration was violating the First Amendment.

“The government-initiated onslaught against Harvard was much more about promoting a governmental orthodoxy in violation of the First Amendment than about anything else, including fighting antisemitism,” U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs said.

The administration made several demands that Burroughs said included changes to activities protected by the First Amendment. These protected rights include a school’s ability to manage its academic community and evaluate teaching without government interference.

Burroughs also said that the university was taking steps to combat anti-Semitism. “Harvard is currently, even if belatedly, taking steps it needs to take to combat antisemitism and seems willing to do even more if need be,” she said.

Harvard President Alan Garber similarly said that the university has implemented a series of campus measures designed to fight anti-Semitism.

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Harvard Astrophysicist Fans Alien Speculation After Detecting Odd Energy Signature on Interstellar Object

Astronomers detected the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS on July 1, 2025, using the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System telescope in Chile.

This marks the third confirmed interstellar visitor to our solar system, following ‘Oumuamua in 2017 and Borisov in 2019. NASA has classified it as a comet, estimating its size at 10 to 24 kilometers in diameter.

Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb has analyzed images showing an unusual glow at the object’s front rather than a trailing tail typical of comets.

He argues this brightness cannot result from reflected sunlight or standard outgassing of volatiles like water or carbon dioxide.

Loeb’s calculations indicate the luminosity reaches gigawatt levels, which he attributes to a possible internal power source.

Loeb has ruled out natural explanations such as a primordial black hole, which would produce negligible energy, or frictional heating from interstellar medium due to insufficient density.

He also dismisses a supernova radioactive fragment as statistically improbable. Instead, he proposes nuclear power as the most feasible compact source for the observed energy output.

In a paper co-authored with Adam Hibberd and Adam Crowl, Loeb suggests 3I/ATLAS could be an artificial spacecraft, potentially accumulating interstellar dust that emits forward under nuclear propulsion.

The object travels at approximately 210,000 kilometers per hour, the fastest recorded for a solar system visitor.

Spectral data show no cometary gases, and some observations lack a clear tail, though image smearing from motion complicates analysis.

The object’s trajectory originates from the Milky Way’s thick disk, possibly making it up to 7 billion years old, older than our solar system.

It follows a retrograde orbit aligned within 5 degrees of the ecliptic plane, passing close to Venus at 0.65 astronomical units, Mars at 0.19 AU, and Jupiter at 0.36 AU. Loeb calculates the probability of such alignments at 0.005 percent for random arrivals.

Loeb notes the perihelion on October 29, 2025, occurs opposite Earth relative to the Sun, at about 130 million miles away, potentially shielding it from detailed Earth-based observation.

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Commerce Department Threatens to Take Ownership of Harvard Patents

The federal government is looking into Harvard University’s patent rights, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in an Aug. 8 letter to Harvard President Alan Garber.

The Department of Commerce is initiating a “march-in” process under the Bayh-Dole Act, a federal patent policy allowing recipients of federal funds to retain patent rights over their inventions made with federal funding.

The Act’s “march-in” rights, however, give the federal government the authority to grant licenses of such patents to third parties under certain conditions where federally funded inventions are not being adequately developed or utilized for the public good.

In the letter, Lutnick said that Harvard has “failed to live up to its obligations to the American taxpayer and is in breach of the statutory, regulatory, and contractual requirements tied to Harvard’s federally funded research programs and intellectual property arising therefrom, including patents.”

As a result, the Department of Commerce is initiating a comprehensive review of the institution’s non-compliance, and will initiate the Bayh-Dole Act “march-in” process through which Harvard’s federally-funded patents could be taken over by the government.

Lutnick said that the federal government intends to license Harvard’s patents to third parties.

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World should draft UFO policy, says professor eyeing strange comet

The Havard University professor who has raised questions about an interstellar object known as 3I/ATLAS — namely, that it may be some sort of alien tech — has some advice for the international community: Figure out a plan on dealing with UFOs.

“I believe that we need an international organization that will make policy decisions about such an object,” theoretical physicist Avi Loeb told “Banfield” on Friday. “We are worried about existential threats from artificial intelligence, from global climate change, from an asteroid impact, but we never discuss alien technology.”

In scientific circles, 3I/ATLAS is thought to be a comet. But Loeb said the object from outside our solar system seems to be unusually large, doesn’t appear to have a typical comet’s tail and has a puzzling trajectory.

“The response has to depend on its properties and its intent — what is it doing as it comes closer to us?” Loeb said. “And it’s just like having a visitor in your back yard. You can’t decide on the policy for all visitors. It really depends on the intent of the visitor, and it’s just next door.”

NASA says 3I/ATLAS is not on a collision course with Earth.

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Harvard ethics professor fired for dishonesty maintains her innocence

A Harvard University professor who lost her tenure due to data fraud maintains she is innocent and said she plans to fight for her reputation in court.

Francesca Gino became the first person since the 1940s to lose tenure at Harvard University after the school investigated allegations she tampered with data. The investigation followed accusations made by a trio of behavioral scientists with the blog Data Colada.

Gino (pictured), a business ethics professor, consistently denied the allegations and is fighting back with a lawsuit against Harvard. A judge previously ruled against her lawsuit against the Data Colada authors. However, the judge ruled Gino’s breach of contract claims can continue. She filed a further response on June 23, while Harvard has filed other motions in the past week.

In an unsigned email to The College Fix, Gino’s team noted several major concerns about the integrity of Harvard’s investigation.

According to Gino’s team, Harvard’s investigation report did not include the underlying data needed to independently verify Harvard’s claims. That is, the school denied the professor a proper forensic evaluation and access to raw datasets.

The response also said the burden of proof was reversed. Harvard’s own policy requires that the university proves misconduct occurred and not place the burden on the accused, but Gino was forced to prove her innocence without the backing of resources. Harvard was also supposed to prove the misconduct was committed “recklessly,” “knowingly,” or “intentionally.”

For example, Gino was reportedly not allowed to question witnesses, including her own co-authors and research assistants. She was also unable to obtain documentation that could potentially show who accessed or edited the data, Gino’s team said.

Gino’s team also noted four of five papers under scrutiny were published more than six years before the investigation, which falls outside the statute of limitations for misconduct investigations set by both Harvard and federal standards.

“The available evidence simply did not allow a thorough audit of the relevant data sets,” the email read.

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HARVARD REPORT: The Hidden Numbers Behind Gaza’s Real Death Toll

A recent report prepared by Garb Yaakov, a Professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, and published on The President & Fellows of Harvard College Dataverse website, has substantiated what critics of Israel’s actions in Gaza have long asserted, regarding the actual number of individuals killed by Israel in the Gaza Strip. The report suggests that the real number significantly surpasses the officially reported death toll, as victims who are buried under debris or dismembered are not included in mainstream reports.

Yaakov Garb’s report [Garb, Yaakov, 2025, “The Israeli/American/GHF ‘aid distribution’ compounds in Gaza: Dataset and initial analysis of location, context, and internal structure”, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/QB75LB. Harvard Dataverse] has analysed the Israeli military’s own data and combined these with careful spatial mapping to reveal a “demographic horror story”. The report presents maps, locational data, and an initial concise analysis of the Israeli/American/GHF aid distribution facilities that were swiftly constructed and commenced operations in Gaza in May 2025. The overall geographic relationship of these facilities to the Gazan population and the infrastructures of Israeli military control over Gaza, along with their consistent internal design, indicates that their architecture is primarily tailored to align with Israeli military strategies and tactics, rather than being focused on a comprehensive humanitarian relief effort. The reports unequivocally demonstrate that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) compounds are strategically placed and built to be inaccessible to most, particularly to the one million residents of Gaza City, cut off by the Netzarim corridor. The current system fails to support the 1.85 million accounted for, let alone the 377,000 missing Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

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Harvard hired a researcher to uncover its ties to slavery. He says the results cost him his job: ‘We found too many slaves’

Jordan Lloyd had been praying for something big to happen. The 35-year-old screenwriter was quarantining in her apartment in North Hollywood in June 2020. Without any work projects to fill her days, she picked up the novel Roots, by Alex Haley, to reread.

The novel tells the story of Kunta Kinte, Haley’s ancestor, who is captured and sold into slavery in the Gambia and then brought to Virginia, where he is forced to labor on a plantation. It was adapted into an Emmy-award winning television series in the 1970s, and while reading it again, Lloyd thought to herself, “Wouldn’t it be nice if they could make another Roots?”

A few days later, out of the blue, she received an email from an undergraduate student at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The email was short. The woman introduced herself as Carissa Chen, a junior at the college studying history. She was working on an independent research project to find descendants of enslaved people connected to the university. By using historical records and modern genealogy tools, she had found Lloyd.

“I have reason to believe through archival research that you could be the descendant of Tony and Cuba Vassall, two slaves taken from Antigua by a founding member connected to Harvard University,” the email read. “Are you available anytime for a call?”

The note linked to a website containing a family tree that Chen had created, tracing the lineage of people enslaved by Isaac Royall Jr, an Antiguan planter and businessman whose endowment would eventually create Harvard Law School.

Chen hadn’t expected to find any living descendants, she told the Guardian, but through dogged research, she managed to uncover 50 names and found Lloyd through an old website she had made when she had first moved to Los Angeles.

“It all felt too specific to be a scam,” Lloyd recounted, so she agreed to a call that would eventually blow open everything she thought she knew about her family history, linking her with one of the nation’s most prestigious institutions and launching a phase in her life that would be colored with equal parts joy and pain.

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Star Harvard business professor stripped of tenure, fired for manipulating data in studies on dishonesty

A renowned Harvard University professor was stripped of her tenure and fired after an investigation found she fabricated data on multiple studies focused on dishonesty. 

Francesca Gino, a celebrated behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School, was let go after the school’s top governing board determined she tweaked observations in four studies so that their findings boosted her hypotheses, GHB reported.

Harvard administrators notified business faculty that Gino was out of a job in a closed-door meeting this past week, the outlet reported.

Harvard did not detail the professor’s firing or tenure being stripped — citing it as a personnel matter — but told GHB that the school had not revoked a professor’s tenure in decades.

No professors have had their tenure revoked at Harvard since the 1940s, when the American Association of University Professors formalized termination rules, according to The Harvard Crimson.

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President Trump Threatens to Take $3 Billion of Grant Money from Harvard and Give It to Trade Schools Across the US

Another brilliant idea from President Trump.

On Memorial Day morning, President Donald Trump posted a warning on TRUTH Social that he may take $3 billion in grant money from Harvard and redistribute it to trade schools across the US.

Trump’s really backing the they/them crowd into a corner!

What a great move that would be! And he wouldn’t be funding the whiny young communists at Harvard.

President Trump then let the country know that Harvard is withholding foreign student lists from the administration so that the government can figure out how many of the radicalized lunatics, troublemakers, should not be let back into the country.

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