Tag: universities

Academia’s Leftward March

Universities have leaned left politically since at least the 1960s. In itself, that’s not a problem. Different professions attract different kinds of people. Artists lean liberal. Soldiers lean conservative. Why should academics be any exception?

But there’s a difference between a lean and a monopoly – and American academia is rapidly approaching the latter. According to a recent paper by Nathan Honeycutt, 74% of US faculty identify as liberal, 15% as moderate, and only 11% as conservative. Remarkably, more faculty identify as “far left” or “very liberal” than with any position right of center.

This matters because intellectual progress depends on disagreement. When dissenting voices vanish, institutions don’t become wiser; they become more vulnerable to groupthink, motivated reasoning, and the comforting illusion that everyone sensible already agrees. If universities lose the capacity to challenge their own assumptions, their claim to be society’s truth-seeking institutions starts to look increasingly shaky.

In this post, I’ll outline five key findings about the political makeup and trajectory of academia, captured in five fascinating graphs.

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Nebraska Professor Complains Of End Of Tuition Benefits For Illegal Aliens

After the state of Nebraska finally agreed to end in-state tuition for illegals, according to a report at Campus Reform, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor is unsurprisingly calling out state officials.

“Crystal E. Garcia, an associate professor in UNL’s Department of Educational Administration, wrote in a social media post that Nebraska students were facing “hits to supports” after state officials moved to end tuition benefits for illegal immigrants and the university dissolved its Office of Gender and Sexuality.”

In other words, DEI and pandering to Illegals or else.

“The comments came after the DOJ challenged Nebraska’s tuition policies in federal court. The DOJ argued that the state’s previous system violated federal law by allowing illegal immigrants to receive in-state tuition rates and financial aid benefits unavailable to some American citizens from other states.”

It shouldn’t have taken DOJ involvement to end this illegal and immoral practice in the first place.

“Nebraskans expect that illegal aliens won’t get the benefit of in-state tuition and financial aid, and federal law forbids it,” Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen said in a statement supporting the move. ”

This should hardly be a source of friction, as they are called illegal aliens for a reason; someone breaking federal law is clearly not entitled to special treatment.

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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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UCLA Medical School Accused Of Racial Discrimination In Defiance Of Supreme Court

We previously discussed a disturbing account of how medical students at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) were subjected to a bizarre class where one of the university’s “activists-in-residence” showered them with anti-Semitic postings and racist rhetoric. Now, the Justice Department has found that the university engaged in systemic racial discrimination in the admission of medical students. Given the university’s history, it is hardly surprising, but it remains unclear how the university will respond to the findings.

The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division announced that the medical school violated Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act by giving preferential treatment to black and Hispanic applicants.

The investigation followed the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which barred race-based admissions.

In the DOJ’s “Findings” letter, black and Hispanic admits in some years averaged MCAT scores in the 66th to 72nd percentile, while Asian and white students averaged scores in the mid-to-high 80th percentiles.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon indicated that the Justice Department found that UCLA medical school leadership discussed how to achieve “diversity goals” and other strategies after the Supreme Court ruling.

After the historic ruling in the Harvard and North Carolina cases barring the use of racial criteria in admissions, administrators and academics admitted what they had long denied: that race was having a major role in admissions.

In anticipation of the rulings, many schools, including the California system, eliminated standardized testing. Without objective scores, there is less ability to identify the use of non-scholastic criteria for admissions. By eliminating or devaluing standardized testing, admissions offices can use the more subjective essays to achieve the same race-based results.

I wrote about how administrators were already preparing to use essays as an indirect way to achieve the same identifications and preferences in admissions.

The essay “prompts” encourage students to effectively self-identify by discussing incidents where they faced discrimination.

The shift to the essays would allow the removal of high-scoring students while elevating those with lower scores. That prediction was quickly confirmed, as top candidates were rejected based on their essays, while schools used essays to flag their backgrounds.

Faculty and administrators at UCLA and other schools remain adamant in using race-based admissions. They simply justify discrimination as equity and diversity. 

This is the same school that required medical students to sit through a raving lecture from “a formerly unhoused and incarcerated poverty scholar who prefers to keep their face covered in public.”

In her two-hour lecture, Gray-Garcia dismissed modern medicine as “white science” and told the medical students to engage in a prayer to “mama Earth.” Students were expected to pray and affirm that “Mama Earth was never meant to be bought, sold, pimped or played.”

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Liberal ‘Historian’ Claims Republicans Accuse Other People of What They Are Doing, Just Like the Nazis

Heather Cox Richardson is a historian and academic who teaches at Boston College. In a recent video made for her subscribers, she claimed that Republicans use a ‘propaganda technique’ of accusing other people of what they themselves are doing.

There are MOUNTAINS of evidence that show this is actually, exactly what the left does, but it gets even worse. She goes on to suggest that this makes Republicans just like the Nazis because that’s where she claims this tactic comes from.

Now before you dismiss this woman as the idiot she clearly is, you should know that she holds a tremendous amount of influence on the left. Her Substack site has hundreds of thousands of subscribers and she is reported to earn almost a million dollars a year from that alone.

It’s just amazing that she can say these stupid and untruthful things with a straight face:

“The Republicans have perfected a technique for a long time now which really became obvious in the 2000 presidential election, but it’s an old propaganda technique in which you accuse your opponent of what you yourself are doing.

And we tend to identify that in modern politics with Karl Rove, who’s a Republican operative, but in fact, it’s an old propaganda technique that is often identified with Nazi Germany.

And the idea behind it is that if you accuse your opponent of what you are doing, it’s very difficult then for people to understand when the opponent comes back and says, well wait a minute, you’re doing it too.

And what that does is create confusion so that people tend to throw out both sides of the equation and say, well they’re both corrupt.”

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DOJ Investigation Determines Yale’s Medical School Discriminated Against Whites and Asians

The Justice Department on Thursday, after a years-long investigation, determined that Yale’s School of Medicine discriminated against White and Asian applicants.

Yale selected applicants based on their race rather than their test scores.

According to the Justice Department, Black and Hispanic applicants with lower academic qualifications were admitted to Yale’s medical school over their White and Asian counterparts

The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division said Yale’s race-based program is in violation of federal law.

Via the DOJ:

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has completed a year-long investigation into the admissions policies and practices at the Yale School of Medicine.

Yale’s documents show that its leadership intentionally selected applicants based on their race.

Yale’s documents reveal that they studied how to use racial proxies to circumvent the Supreme Court’s prohibition on using race to select students.

Yale’s admissions data demonstrate that Black and Hispanic students have a much higher chance of admission to Yale than White or Asian students with the same test scores.

“Yale has continued its race-based admissions program despite the Supreme Court and the public’s clear mandate for reform.” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

“This Department will continue to shed light on these illegal practices, and demand that institutions of higher education comply with federal law,” Dhillon said.

The investigation showed that, in general, Black and Hispanic applicants were admitted with consistently lower academic qualifications than their White and Asian counterparts. These facts support the Department’s finding that Yale violated the law by intentionally discriminating based on race in its admissions, in clear violation of federal law.

Medical schools use substantial federal financial assistance to train the next generation of doctors.

The Department is continuing its focus on eradicating illegal race politics from admissions at medical schools, where quality and excellence are vitally important to public safety.

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Detransitioner Chloe Cole cancels UW speech after alleged Antifa threats

Detransitioner Chloe Cole announced Tuesday she is canceling a scheduled University of Washington speech after citing alleged threats from Antifa.

“Antifa has assembled a local militia, in their own words, to shut down this event,” Cole said in a Tuesday video announcement. 

“Their actions, their explicit threats on my life, have raised this event to national attention, a level of attention our security team and our PD are frankly unprepared for,” she added. 

Cole, a detransitioner who went through the process of transitioning from female to male between the ages of 12 and 16, was set to speak Wednesday at the University of Washington in Kane 210 as part of TPUSA’s “Pick Up the Mic” initiative.

At the age of 15, Cole underwent hormones and a double mastectomy.

In a post on Instagram, UW Divest News, a pro-Palestinian group, urged students to protest the Turning Point USA chapter event with Cole, calling her a “transphobic right-wing grifter.”

The post instructed protesters to “bring flags, drums, or anything to make some noise! Email UW admin to cancel the event and ban Turning Point USA from campus! WE WILL NOT TOLERATE HATE GROUPS ON CAMPUS! WE LOVE OUR TRANS SIBLINGS! 🏳️‍⚧️ FREE PALESTINE! 🇵🇸”

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GOP Sen. Tommy Tuberville Urges English Language for Everyone in Schools, Colleges

Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville slammed the U.S. education establishment Tuesday for pushing America’s children into second place by promoting multiple languages used by diverse migrants.

Standing beside a sign reading, “Assimilate Or Go Home,” the Alabama senator blamed some of the problems with American schools on “mass migration,” which he says is “destroying our educational system.”

“Mass migration is destroying our educational system…more and more American kids are entering the classroom, hearing multiple languages being spoken around them every day, and having a difficult time making friends because they are now the minorities in the school,” Tuberville said on the floor of the United States Senate.

“We’re having enough problems with our education system when our kids can’t understand the language that the other people are speaking,” he continued.

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Outrage: According to Liberal NPR, Colleges Flag Black Students For Admission, Continuing Affirmative Action

According to a report at The College Fix, “Admissions offices are sifting through college essays and working to find black students without drawing legal challenges, guests on a recent National Public Radio segment admitted.”

This practice is discrimination, yet some colleges proudly engage in this practice.

There’s even a racial code language, according to this report.

“In college admission, trauma is shorthand for blackness,” National Public Radio reported as part of its “Code Switch” show focused on racial identity issues.”

In this National Public Radio report, “Host Gene Demby interviewed former Georgetown University admissions officer Aya Waller-Bey for the April 25 episode.”

“Waller-Bey recently completed her doctorate in sociology at the University of Michigan, where she studied “how Black students make sense of racialized expectations to narrate trauma in college personal statements,” according to her bio.”

In addition to the coded language used, they admitted to continued affirmative action and racial preference.

“Admissions officers are looking through essays for stories about being “first-gen” or “low-income,” Waller-Bey said. That is because schools are trying to figure out a way around the 2023 Supreme Court ruling that affirmed racial discrimination in higher education is illegal.”

Admissions then “advocates” for particular students based on race.

This is very racist and illegal, but they are boasting about engaging in anti-white and anti-Asian discrimination.

Waller Bey then implied that even that is racist against Black people, asking “black students and other groups to talk about their pain is itself painful.”(As if no other races and ethnic groups have gone through trauma)

She then said this trauma “is often incredibly valuable for organizations and institutions.”

Either way, the Supreme Court has found these racial preference admissions to be unconstitutional. Fairness and colorblind admissions are the opposite of racism.

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New robot ants work like real insects to build and dismantle on their own

It is based on “exbodied intelligence,” where coordination arises from interacting with the environment rather than complex internal programming.

Researchers at Harvard have developed a fleet of robotic ants that mimic the self-organizing behavior of social insects to build and dismantle structures without blueprints or central leadership.

Dubbed “RAnts”, these robotic ants have been designed by researchers from the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). 

These are simple, decentralized robots that can spontaneously organize to build — and just as easily destroy — complex structures.

Instead of chemical pheromones, these robots use light fields (photormones) to communicate.

“Our new study shows how simple, local rules can lead to the emergence of complex task completion that is self-organized and thus robust and adaptive,” said Professor L. Mahadevan, the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and Physics at SEAS and FAS.

“We also introduce the concept of exbodied intelligence, where collective cognition arises not solely from individual agents, but from their ongoing interaction with an evolving environment,” Mahadevan added.

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