Tag: universities

After Removing Statue Of American Hero, UVA Plans To Replace It With Massive Land Acknowledgement

After removing the statue of a famed Revolutionary War hero in 2021, the University of Virginia (UVA) plans to replace it with a park that will serve as a de facto land acknowledgement to an Indian tribe, The Federalist has learned.

The Federalist obtained the school’s plans for the site that once held the statue of Brigadier General George Rogers Clark, which indicate that the new park will celebrate “the Virginia landscape and Indigenous stewardship practices.”

“The politicization of the university has reached a level of absurdity as it has gleefully destroyed statues of Virginians,” Ann H. McLean, a lifelong Virginia resident who received her doctorate in art and architectural history from the University of Virginia, told The Federalist. “Rather than celebrating the courage and problem-solving of exploration represented by the George Rogers Clark sculpture, cultural Marxist city leaders and academics are choosing to celebrate those who had no written language, no concept of private property, no trial by jury, or many other improvements brought here by western civic life and Biblical practice.”

Charlottesville, Virginia, became ground zero for the left-wing drive to destroy American culture and history when the city decided to remove the statues of Confederate Civil War generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson from their respective places in the historic downtown.

Clark was not a Confederate general, not that it should matter, but these leftists wanted to remove his statue anyway. Like President Donald Trump said in 2020, noting that the leftist movement wants to tear down our Founding Fathers as well, “They’re tearing down statues, desecrating monuments, and purging dissenters. It’s not the behavior of a peaceful political movement; it’s the behavior of totalitarians and tyrants and people that don’t love our country.”

It is a crime against Americans, and the people behind the removals — school leadership, city leadership, and everyone else — belong in prison for those crimes.

For most Americans, statue removal and the related Unite the Right rally are basically the only thing the city is known for at this point. That the city is also home to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello or the university he founded is an afterthought.

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UC-San Diego Report Indicates Shocking Number of Students Entering College in California Lack 8th Grade Math Skills

A new report from the University of California San Diego indicates that a shocking number of students entering the University of California system lack the math skills one would expect from a middle school student.

Some of this can be blamed on school closures during Covid, but not all of it. At the end of the day, this is a failure of the schools and teachers that failed to impart these basic skills.

It’s also an excellent reminder that not everyone needs to go to college. If you can’t do high school level math, why should you even be considered?

Newsweek reported:

Students at California University Without 8th Grade Math Skills Skyrockets

A sharp rise in students entering the University of California system without middle school-level math skills is raising alarms among educators.

A new internal report from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) reveals that the percentage of incoming students scoring below Algebra 1 on placement exams—a math course typically completed by the end of eighth grade—has tripled over the past five years.

Why It Matters

In 2020, just 6 percent of first-year students at UCSD placed below Algebra 1. By 2025, that number had surged to 18 percent, according to the UCSD Senate Admissions Working Group (SAWG) report.

The findings reflect a growing disconnect between high school transcripts and actual college readiness. The SAWG report links the increase to pandemic-era learning disruptions, long-standing inequities in California’s K–12 system, and the elimination of standardized testing requirements in UC admissions.

What To Know

The number of UCSD students requiring Math 2, a course originally designed for less than 1 percent of the incoming class, surged from under 100 students annually to over 900 by fall 2024.

This example of an easy question failed by many students is just stunning.

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One in FIVE students entering UC San Diego can’t write properly, new data reveals

Roughly one in five Americans entering UC San Diego cannot write at an entry level standard, a new report revealed. 

About 20 percent of incoming students to the California university had to be placed in analytical writing courses after failing to meet the requirements of a writing placement exam, which forced them into specialized courses called ‘AWP’.

The report published by a UC San Diego admissions committee added that writing skills and literacy are in decline across the entire US. 

According to the university’s faculty, freshmen students’ vocabulary was ‘increasingly’ limiting their ability to engage with longer and harder texts. 

As a whole, the school had seen a ‘steep decline in the academic preparation’ of its domestic freshmen students.

The November 6 report read: ‘Admitting large numbers of students who are profoundly underprepared risks harming the very students we hope to support, by setting them up for failure.’

One possible solution offered was ‘moving beyond GPA and course titles’ in high school to evaluate how ready students actually are for writing at a college level.

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DOJ Launches Investigation into UC Berkeley over Antifa ‘Mob Violence’ at TPUSA Event

The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that it is investigating the University of California, Berkeley, a day after “mob violence” from Antifa protesters occurred outside of a Turning Point USA (TPUSA) event.

In a post on X, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon shared a letter that was addressed to UC Berkeley Police Chief Yogananda Pittman. In the letter, Pittman was asked to “preserve all records” in her possession that are “relevant to the agency’s preparation, execution, and response to the Turning Point event held” at the campus on Monday, along with related protests.

“The @CivilRights Division, under @AGPamBondi’s leadership, has asked UC Berkeley Police to preserve all records regarding their response to the mob violence at UC Berkeley’s TPUSA event,” Dhillon said in her post. “Every American has the right to speak at and attend events without fear.”

The letter stated, in part, that the situation at TPUSA’s event “may implicate the University of California’s commitment to provide adequate security”:

The U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division has recently become aware of concerning incidents occurring on your campus at the University of California (UC), Berkeley on or about November 10, 2026. These events may implicate the University of California’s commitment to provide adequate security pursuant to a 2018 settlement agreement in Young America’s Foundation, et al. v Napolitano et al., U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, No. 17-02255. Our office previously opened investigations of the University of California System for potential violations of Title VI and Title VII based on other events. We will determine whether the events of November 10 should also be included in those investigations. We are also determining whether recent events provide a basis for additional investigation of violations of federal rights, including, without limitation, violations of the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution.

Dhillon’s letter also explained that the request to preserve all records related to the response to the violence at the TPUSA event, included but was “not limited to” all written or electronic communications from UC Berkeley Campus Police regarding the incident or TPUSA, “generally in the last year,” along with “minutes and communications of any pre-event planning either internal or with outside groups” relating to the event, among others.

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They Did It Again! CBS Affiliate Gets Scorched for Calling TPUSA Event Violently Disrupted by Antifa “Mostly Peaceful” Before Showing Footage of What Actually Happened

The corporate media literally copied their playbook from the BLM riots back in 2020 and applied it to last night’s TPUSA event in Berkeley, California, which Antifa terrorists invaded.

As The Gateway Pundit reported, a bloody fight broke out at a TPUSA event at UC Berkeley after Antifa terrorists crashed the gathering on Monday night. Antifa terrorists and other far-left protestors turned the TPUSA event into a war zone.

The confrontation erupted at around 4:30 PST. During one brawl, two men were seen fighting each other, one of whom had blood gushing from his face.

Local police had difficulty containing the agitators and were seen putting on shield masks and gathering batons.

In another fight, Antifa terrorists ripped the shirt off pardoned J6 protester Jon Mellis and burned his MAGA Hat while cops stood by and did NOTHING.

CBS News Bay Area reporter Amanda Hari, though, had a different take on what occurred last night.

She remarked on how “lively” agitators were while assuring viewers that the protest was “mostly peaceful.”

If this rings familiar, it should. While covering a BLM riot in Kenosha, Wisconsin, CNN’s Omar Jimenez called </> the incident “fiery, but mostly peaceful” while standing in front of burning cars set ablaze by the rioters.

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LSAT Suspends Online-Testing In China After Alleged Data-Theft Tied To Chinese Prep Companies

Chinese companies preparing students for the American Law School Admission Test (LSAT) have gained unauthorized access to U.S.-based LSAT preparation companies and stolen information, according to the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC), the organization that administers the American LSAT.

After the COVID-19 pandemic, LSAC began permitting remote LSAT administration. In China, that shift fueled a lucrative market of firms exploiting loopholes in LSAC’s online security—enabling hired test-takers, armed with fake identification, to impersonate students and complete the exam from abroad.

LSAC announced in August that it had suspended online testing from mainland China. The suspension came amid concerns that Chinese actors compromised and penetrated remote testing systems and services.

New reports, including one by Dave Killoran, the CEO of PowerScore, an American LSAT prep company, reveal just how these Chinese companies are scamming the LSAT. 

Killoran said that a Chinese whistleblower, told him last May that he had access to what appeared to be stolen LSAT questions. The whistleblower was frustrated how easy it was to gain access to cheat materials. 

Killoran told The Washington Free Beacon that screenshots of the test questions are “compiled into PDFs and sold to students who can’t pay the high fees for a proxy test taker.”

Chinese companies have been charging up to $8,000 for the stolen information. These firms advertise “guaranteed results” through encrypted social media channels and claim to have access to upcoming LSAT questions weeks before the exam.

Actors reportedly stole this information through a variety of means, one of the most prominent being hiding high-definition cameras to photograph in-person and remote exam questions.

This is not the first time that Chinese influence has penetrated American higher education. The Hudson Institute conducted a report on Harvard University published in June, that highlighted how Harvard was training Chinese government officials.

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Outrage At Harvard Grade Inflation Report Reveals The Rot In Higher Education

The recent reactions by students of arguably the nation’s most prominent university to a report about grade inflation read like they came from the pages of The Babylon Bee, a satirical website. That they came instead from the Harvard Crimson speaks to the crises plaguing higher education.

The melodramatic wailing by Harvard students regarding the school’s grading policies does more than represent a parody of Ivy League education and woke “snowflakes.” It reinforces that taxpayers are propping up a sclerotic, dysfunctional educational system that has problems extending far beyond rampant antisemitism and radical leftist politics.

Everyone Above Average?

Unfortunately, the Harvard report that drew such harsh student condemnation remains hidden on the university’s intranet, but a Crimson article gives the gist. The study “found that more than 60 percent of grades awarded to Harvard undergraduates are A’s, compared to only a quarter of grades two decades ago. It concluded that Harvard’s current grading system is ‘damaging the academic culture of the College.’”

Cue the outrage from students, as documented in a separate Crimson story. One said the faculty’s desire to ensure consistently high academic standards undermined her struggles, saying:

The whole entire day, I was crying. … I skipped classes on Monday, and I was just sobbing in bed because I felt like I try so hard in my classes, and my grades aren’t even the best. … It just felt soul-crushing.

A glib commenter might point out that skipping an entire day’s worth of classes due to the report’s release appears slightly inconsistent with “try[ing] so hard” academically. 

But from a more substantive and sympathetic viewpoint, these types of comments demonstrate the mental health challenges facing our nation’s youth. Another student made comments in a similar vein: “I killed myself all throughout high school to try and get into this school. I was looking forward to being fulfilled by my studies now, rather than being killed by them.”

Both sets of comments imply students’ belief that effort will necessarily equal results — that everyone who puts in X number of hours will automatically get A’s. But the world does not work that way, and neither should Harvard. That these students truly believe in this type of “bargain,” and react so harshly when someone questions it, speaks to how our culture has coddled many students into expecting that excellence will come easily, leaving them emotionally unprepared for any setbacks that arise.

Students wanting to be “fulfilled by my studies” seem not to understand the purpose of higher education. Most notably, the act of learning itself — of absorbing and applying knowledge — should serve as its own source of fulfillment and enjoyment, notwithstanding society’s bottom-line focus on grades. 

Skewed Priorities

Another student made a similar complaint, telling the Crimson, “What makes a Harvard student a Harvard student is their engagement in extracurriculars. … Now we have to throw all that away and pursue just academics. I believe that attacks the very notion of what Harvard is.”

At the risk of sounding like Ronald Reagan circa 1980, as a federal taxpayer, I am paying for the education of students like this, even if this particular student doesn’t receive federal student aid. And I have zero interest in subsidizing such students to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars per year just to see them spend most of their time playing Quidditch or joining Students for Justice in Palestine.

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The Government Gives Too Much Authority To Leftist Academics, And That Needs To Stop

When the International Association of Genocide Scholars jumped on the “Israel is committing genocide in Gaza” bandwagon, it revealed to many the extent to which one can’t “trust the experts.” But an ongoing spat between the Trump administration and numerous other professional academic groups shows how much excessive deference, and even statutory authority, has been given to such groups.

In May, President Trump fired all nine members of the State Department’s Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation. HAC, as the body is known, was composed of academics from various fields. Its mission was to assist in producing an authoritative reference work, Foreign Affairs of the United States (FAUS), which collects and publishes primary documents in U.S. foreign policy, and is widely relied on by scholars, including myself.

All seats on the committee, which makes the declassification decisions necessary to put the volumes together, remain unfilled, and the last quarterly meeting was cancelled. The administration offered no explanation, but a look at the Historical Advisory Committee’s anomalous structure shows that removing the members is not enough. Congress must revise the entire process of staffing the committee.

Washington is rife with expert advisory committees, which allow agencies like the EPA and FDA to get structured input from people outside the government with particular technical expertise. HAC advises the Historian of the State Department on what documents to declassify for inclusion in FAUS, which has been published since the Civil War, with volumes published now covering events 30 years prior.

Six members of HAC are chosen by six professional associations, such as the American Historical Association, with each group controlling one seat. The actual selection is made by the Secretary, who for each seat can only pick the candidate suggested by the respective association.

This structure is unique among such expert committees. Numerous advisory boards involve industry associations or academic groups making suggestions to the government, but ultimately, the political officials can select whoever they want. HAC looks more like a medieval guild council than a modern administrative entity.

This outsourcing of governmental authority to private bodies is compounded by significant politicization of these associations, which makes their statutory role wholly inappropriate.

Take the Society of American Archivists, whose political interventions are uniformly left-wing. In 2020, it issued a Statement on Black Lives and Archives: “As archivists, we learn from history that this country was founded on genocide and slavery.” So the 1619 Project owns a seat on a State Department board. Their March 2024 statement on the Israel-Hamas War laments “cultural heritage sites” damaged in Israeli airstrikes, “including archival records documenting the histories of Palestine and the Palestinian people.” Apart from adopting its own foreign policy of recognition of a Palestinian state, the archivists had nothing to say about Hamas’s use of cultural institutions for military purposes.

The American Political Society is equally steeped in progressive pieties. Its “Theme Statement” for its latest annual conference is a “crisis” posed by a “resurgence of nativism and authoritarianism,” echoing last year’s conference theme, which lamented the rise of “authoritarian populists who leverage electoral victories to undermine legislatures and judiciaries.” And yes, they are talking about President Trump, among other populist leaders.

The American Society for International Law wisely avoids making statements on current events, given its desire to be a home for neutral debate on issues that are by nature one degree removed from politics. That all changed in February, when it issued a “Statement on the United States and the International Rule of Law,” which condemned President Trump’s quitting of WHO and UNESCO, his sanctions on ICC officials, and his proposed “forcible transfer of two million Palestinians out of Gaza.” This is pure politics, and in the case of “forcible transfer,” fiction.

There are countless other examples. Some of these associations may be more politicized, some less. But while all are nonpartisan in the technical sense of not endorsing candidates, they are far from apolitical. Most of their activities are nakedly and irredeemably intertwined with the far-left political views commonly held by such academics — views regarded not as opinions, but rather facts.

These highly politicized private groups are given fiefdoms within a government body. Doubtless, these associations were originally empowered for their apolitical expertise. Whatever naïve views may have been harbored in 1991 — before the publication of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind — today these organizations are not apolitical or neutral in any sense. And their political bias all skews one way: a body appointed by such organizations cannot legitimately make decisions or suggestions that will affect the historical record available for all Americans.

Thus far, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has not moved to fill any of the vacancies. It may be that the Historian does not need the advice of academics. Certainly, FAUS was published successfully before 1991. But the statute deputizing these associations remains on the books, and limits the administration’s ability to staff the board, while ensuring a restoration by a Democratic president.

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University to remove World War II murals because they show too many white people

The University of Rhode Island recently announced plans to remove two murals depicting World War II veterans because it lacks “diversity and a sensitivity to today’s complex and painful problems,” according to the university.

Kathy Collins, vice president of student affairs, told CBS 12 she received complaints because the two folk-art murals portraying life in the GI Bill era of the 1950s “portray a very homogeneous population” and that most of the people depicted in the murals are “predominantly white.”

Collins also told the CBS news affiliate that some students told the school they “didn’t feel comfortable sitting in that space.”

She cited the controversial deaths and shootings of black Americans such as George Floyd and Jacob Blake as part of her decision:

I think we have to recognize the horrible incidents and the tragic murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and most recently Jacob Blake in Kenosha Wisconsin during this is heightened time and we as an institution have to look at the systems in place across this institution that maybe are not representing who we are today and representing the true diversity of URI today.

The public university announced the plans to cover up and replace the murals in the school’s Memorial Union in a September 3 news release. The murals are currently covered up and the school said it wants the paintings replaced before classes start. The student union is currently undergoing renovations.

At the request of the university, Arthur Sherman, a World War II veteran and alumnus of the university, painted the murals depicting students socializing and traveling to campus in 1953.

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‘Ghost students’ continue to steal millions in financial aid from California community colleges, report says

“Ghost students” continue to steal millions in financial aid from the California Community College System despite efforts to stop them, a new report finds.

While Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said there is $1 billion in fraudulent financial aid paid out to the scammers, who might use bots to enroll and participate in class, the number is likely much larger according to a professor interviewed by Open the Books and The College Fix.

Kim Rich, a criminal justice professor at Pierce College, said she determined half of the students in her classes are fake.

Rich told The Fix that she has tried “to stop this fraud in its tracks for the past four years,” but she doesn’t “feel like [she’s] anywhere closer.” She previously spoke to The Fix in 2022 after determining about 36 percent of the students of newly-issued student ids were fake just from one week period at her college. She regularly comments on the problem of fake students.

In the spring 2025 semester, according to the Open the Books report, 24 students in Rich’s 40-student class were fake. Rich estimated that if just one ‘ghost student’ were enrolled in each of the 4,000 online classes offered in Los Angeles community colleges per semester, the nine schools in the county would lose a combined $20 million per semester.

Referencing the expected ID verification mandate the chancellor’s office planned to implement on Oct. 30 Rich told The Fix that she is “not very confident it will solve the problem or even reduce the instances of financial aid fraud, mainly because none of the other efforts or millions of dollars they have spent to remedy this issue have.”

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