Tag: universities

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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Court Says UW-Madison Social Media Censorship Illegal

The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s attempt to suppress an animal rights advocate’s comments on its social media pages has been declared unconstitutional by a federal appeals court, reinforcing the limits of government control over public discourse online.

Madeline Krasno, a UW-Madison graduate and former lab worker who spoke out against the school’s animal research practices, brought a lawsuit in 2021 after discovering that her posts were either blocked or hidden from the university’s Facebook and Instagram accounts.

The 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in her favor on August 1, concluding that the university violated her First Amendment rights by silencing her viewpoint.

We obtained a copy of the opinion for you here.

Now faced with the ruling, UW-Madison must decide whether to revise its moderation policies, disable comment functions on its social platforms, or try to escalate the case to the US Supreme Court. University officials have not indicated which direction they plan to take.

Krasno’s criticism comes from her time spent inside the university’s primate lab, where she worked as an undergraduate. She described disturbing conditions, saying she witnessed monkeys kept in isolation, sometimes escaping, and often displaying stress or aggression after being subjected to research. When she later tried to express these concerns publicly through university-run social media, her posts disappeared.

At one point, the university placed an account-level restriction on her Instagram profile, preventing any of her comments from being seen by the public. Even after that restriction was lifted, the school relied on automated filters that blocked posts containing words such as “lab,” “monkeys,” “torture,” “animal testing,” and “primate.”

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‘Whitelash’: Professors say white students get angry, frustrated by ‘anti-racist education’

Two social work scholars argue that their “anti-racist education” efforts in the classroom faced “whitelash” from white students, who became emotionally distraught, pushed back by using “color-blind rhetoric,” or later wrote negative course reviews.

Quinn Hafen from the University of Wyoming and Marie Villescas from Colorado State University recently published an article in the Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research detailing their experience creating a “pedagogy of discomfort” to challenge white supremacy in the classroom.

The method was criticized by two scholars in interviews with The College Fix, who called the experiment somewhat abusive.

“[T]he more I reflect on that paper, the more I find it cruel to shame students based on immutable identities they hold, regardless of identity,” one observer said via email. “For the professors, it appeared that White and male students were their target.”

The College Fix reached out via email to both Hafen and Villescas regarding some of the concerns raised about their teaching methods. Hafen and Villescas did not reply.

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UCLA library user borrowed rare Chinese manuscripts, returned fakes, DOJ says

A UCLA library user who allegedly took home rare Chinese manuscripts and returned fake ones in their place has been charged with stealing items worth $216,000, the Justice Department said Thursday.

Jeffery Ying used a number of aliases to get access to the classics works, some of them over 600 years old, the DOJ said.

Ying, 38, would check the works out and return days later with dummy manuscripts, and would frequently travel to China shortly thereafter, charging documents say.

“The library noticed that several rare Chinese manuscripts were missing, and an initial investigation revealed the books were last viewed by a visitor who identified himself as ‘Alan Fujimori,'” the DOJ said.

When detectives raided the Los Angeles area hotel where Ying was staying, they found blank manuscripts in the style of the books that had been checked out.

“Law enforcement also found pre-made labels known as asset tags associated with the same manuscripts that could be used to create ‘dummy’ books to return to the library in place of the original books,” the department alleged.

Libraries allow rare, one-of-a-kind works to be examined on-site, but they can’t be taken home like regular paperbacks.

Ying, from Fremont, in the San Francisco Bay Area, was also found to have a number of library cards in different names.

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Scholars & Schemers: How The Left Ruined Higher Education

Despite denials from the left, US higher education has been captured by leftist faculty, students, and administrators. This is not a figment of anyone’s imagination, as for most of this century colleges and universities have changed dramatically.

Anyone who has been to college in the past half-century would attest to what then was called the “liberalism” of most of their professors, and, in the post-World War II era, the probability that one’s professor was a registered Democrat has been high. Yet, this is not what we mean by the “radicalizing” of American higher education, for even those professors that classified themselves as “liberals” and faithfully supported the Democratic Party would not have considered themselves to be radicals.

However, there also were demands for academic integrity 50 years ago, and certainly most of my professors at the University of Tennessee (1971-75) would have given at least a good effort to place their academic role above politics. In fact, I cannot recall being subjected to any politicized curricula—and I was a journalism major during the Watergate crisis, which practically invited politics into the classroom.

This does not mean that professors didn’t have political opinions or that the university itself was free of politics. I’m sure that most of my professors were Democrats but I don’t remember any of them attempting to influence my own political views (which, at best, were a mishmash of a lot of nonsense). There were, however, the effects of the cultural revolution that had begun before I went to college were already taking hold on the language, such as calling freshmen “freshpersons” and chairman a “chairperson.” For most of us, these things were eye-rolling but not really harmful. Furthermore, if some of us insisted on using the term “freshman,” there was no attempt to impose a campus-wide shaming campaign.

Today, the situation is very different. Higher education has been thoroughly politicized to a point where even if things were to turn around today, it would take an entire generation before things could be where they were even 30 years ago. There are no academic areas left in higher education that have not been corrupted by leftist thought.

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U. Arizona offers ‘LGBTQ+ liberation’ internship to develop ‘scholar-activist identity’

The University of Arizona is offering a for-credit internship this fall to give students a deeper understanding of “Queer and Trans liberation” and encourage “the development of a scholar-activist identity” for “LGBTQ+2S” students.

One Arizona-based education policy expert raised concerns with The College Fix about the public university granting academic credit for “ideological activism.”

The internship is a student-funded, three-credit and year-long collaboration between the LGBTQ+2S Resource Center and the university’s Pride Alliance student group, according to the program’s description reviewed by The College Fix.

The program’s webpage was removed after a media inquiry about it last week from The College Fix. An archived version from the 2023-24 school year is still available.

“This internship encourages the development of a scholar-activist identity for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, asexual, and two-spirit (LGBTQA+2S) and allied students at The University of Arizona, particularly through the lens of sexual orientation, autonomy and advocacy, gender identity, and gender expression,” according to the program description for the 2025-26 year reviewed by The Fix.

Additionally, interns will discuss “LGBTQ+ Liberation” and attend a weekly class “focusing on identity development and social justice leadership skills,” according to an Instagram post by the Pride Alliance.

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Law schools face pressure to discriminate under ABA accreditation ‘monopoly’: report

The American Bar Association places pressure on top public law schools to implement “unconstitutional” race and sex-based preferences in admissions and hiring, according to a new report by the Pacific Legal Foundation.

The foundation’s report, published in July, says the ABA does this through its “monopoly” accreditation process.

However, a bar association official denied any unlawful discrimination when contacted by The College Fix.

Pacific Legal, a public interest law firm focused on defending individual liberties, based its findings on accreditation reports from 45 of the top 50 public law schools through open records requests from 2014 to 2023.

The report found that 20 of the responding schools were criticized for failing to meet the ABA’s “diversity standards,” thus risking their accreditation status. These criticisms include failing to hire a sufficient amount of faculty from minority groups, having  “limited DEI curriculum integration,” and “not having enough LGBTQ+ support groups.”

According to the report, these standards often require or encourage practices that conflict with the U.S. Constitution and state and federal civil rights laws.

“The ABA has told law schools that they have to implement the ABA’s own problematic diversity standards, even if state or federal law might prohibit them from doing so,” Zack Smith, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told The Fix recently when asked about the report. Smith previously worked as an assistant U.S. attorney in Florida.

The findings center on the bar association’s accreditation Standards 205 and 206, which obligate law schools to demonstrate a commitment to diversity and inclusion regarding students, faculty, and staff in terms of race and sex by the virtue of “non-discrimination,” according to the foundation’s report.

Schools that fail to meet these standards risk punishment and a loss of accreditation, according to the report.

The report documents examples of schools being pushed to adopt racial preferences despite state-level prohibitions. In one case, Charleston School of Law was denied accreditation until it agreed to appoint a diversity director to remediate concerns regarding sufficient racial diversity in the school.

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America First Legal Files Complaint Over Civil Rights Violations At John Hopkins School Of Medicine

According to Campus Reform, “America First Legal has filed a civil rights complaint with the Department of Justice against the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine over ‘discriminatory’ and ‘unconstitutional’ practices.”

This civil rights complaint was filed over Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) by Stephen Miller’s America First Legal (AFL).

AFL announced this development in a press conference on July 17th.

According to Megan Redshaw, counsel at AFL, “This is about restoring equal treatment under the law.”

Redshaw alleged, “Johns Hopkins has received billions in taxpayer dollars, but it is actively segregating opportunities based on race and sex. That is not just wrong—it’s unconstitutional.”

The complaint itself accused Hopkins of embracing DEI principles, including discrimination along both racial and gender lines.

AFL points to Diversity Leadership Council and House Staff Diversity and Inclusion Council as well as Diversity Roadmap as programs by which the school engaged in discriminatory practices.

According to AFL, “Johns Hopkins has constructed a façade of legality around a deeply illegal system. They have replaced explicit race-based admissions with upstream sorting, downstream subsidies, and bureaucratic double-speak designed to preserve racial preferences.”

The complaint also alleges that the discriminatory practices in medicine are not only illegal but also pose challenges to healthcare.

America First Legal has also been active in standing against the onslaught of DEI, having filed civil rights complaints against both Colorado State and Cornell University.

American First Legal is on the front line of real modern-day civil rights on behalf of all Americans.

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Drones, cameras, AI: University of Illinois real time crime center raises privacy concerns

Thousands of cameras. A fleet of drones. Gun shot detection devices. Stationary and vehicle-mounted automatic license plate readers.

A major metropolitan city? No, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Real-Time Information Center furnishes the institution’s Division of Public Safety with a number of technologically sophisticated tools that have some privacy experts alarmed.

The drones, gunshot detection devices, automatic license plate readers, and campus-wide system of roughly 3,000 security cameras are among the tools currently utilized at the campus, which enrolls about 59,000 students.

Social media monitoring programs and “AI-driven video analytics software” are also among the technologies being evaluated for possible future implementation, according to a document sent by Urbana Police Chief Larry Boone.

He sent it to city officials as they deliberate a proposed city ordinance to establish stricter approval, oversight, and transparency requirements for Urbana’s own acquisition and use of the kinds of surveillance tools being used by the university’s Real-Time Information Center.

According to the document, the Real-Time Information Center provides a wide array of services designed to enhance public safety, streamline operations, and support law enforcement agencies.

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