Tag: universities

Ending the Woke Monopoly: White House Takes Aim at Higher Ed’s Ideological Capture

Last week, the White House convened an education roundtable with U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon titled, “Biased Professors, Woke Administrators, and the End of Free Inquiry on U.S. Campuses.”

Secretary McMahon opened the event by stating, “It was an honor to be at the White House today with this dedicated coalition of students, faculty, institutional leaders, and policy advocates to highlight the issue of woke ideology and the capture of our institutions of higher education. DEI policies have turned universities from free marketplaces of ideas to purveyors of manufactured ideological conformity, chilling free speech and undermining academic rigor.”

She explained, “We are committed to working with higher education leaders to reverse course from these decades of decline.”

The Secretary highlighted actions taken by the Trump Administration, including dissolving DEI programs, enforcing merit-based practices, and guiding universities to comply with federal law, noting that over 400 institutions have made substantive changes. The U.S. Department of Education is working to incentivize universities to operate with fairness, academic rigor, and civil discourse.

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Conservative Cornell Law Prof Busts Harvard for Scholarship Program That Discriminates Against White Students

Conservative Law Professor William Jacobson of Cornell University is the creator and publisher of the Legal Insurrection blog. As an outshoot of the website, he also runs an organization called the Equal Protection Project which goes after colleges and universities for various forms of discrimination.

Jacobson recently appeared on Real America’s Voice with Amanda Head to talk about one of the EPP’s latest projects. They exposed a Harvard scholarship program that was using language that made it clear that they were discriminating against white students.

This sort of thing is far more prevalent in higher education than most Americans even realize.

Transcript via Legal Insurrection:

Head (00:49):

You know, we as a society typically applaud rebranding. Madonna reinvented herself at least a half a dozen times, and everybody was a congratulating her. But when you rebrand your anti-whiteness, your racism, it’s definitely not something to be applauded. And it still is just racism, isn’t it?

WAJ (01:07):

Yes. And sometimes they say the quiet part out loud. And that’s what we found with the Harvard Union Scholars Program.

It’s a scholarship, an internship program that’s quite lucrative for students, a summer program that nets them over $10,000 that they run with AFSCME, the Municipal Workers Union. And it’s a joint program between Harvard and the Union. And they talk about historically marginalized communities. But that’s something of a defined term. We all know what that means. That means non-whites.

And they actually admitted it on the website because in a very prominent place, they said, this is for students of color. They said the quiet part out loud, they said the euphemism of historically marginalized communities, they said out loud what we all know it really means.

And of course, after we filed a complaint with the Department of Justice and asked for an investigation, and after the New York Post ran an article about our complaint, what did they do? They changed the language again, but it’s a little too late because they’ve been discriminating, it’s right on their website.

We caught them, and changing it after the fact doesn’t really change anything.

[unrelated discussion removed]

Solomon (02:17):

So I want to go back to where we started this great conversation, and that is with the Harvard case and the new complaint that your great group has filed. It could have some more significant repercussions than even the issue at hand. Obviously, Harvard sued the Trump administration saying, Trump has no right to punish our university, take funding from us, because we’re just a good ally here. But if it’s shown in this case that they’ve just gone back and done discrimination again, could that strengthen the Trump administration’s hand that Harvard should be penalized the way it has been?

WAJ (02:45):

Well, it could.

Certainly the Department of Justice we hope will take our complaints seriously. It’s thoroughly documented.

The fact that they changed the language after the New York Post ran an article about it and after our complaint to me is a sign of consciousness of guilt. If they thought they were good, they wouldn’t have to change the language.

And what they’re doing is they’re changing the language to hide what they’ve been doing. But it’s too late because it’s all documented. It’s screenshotted, it’s archived. We do all those sort of things before we file a complaint so they can’t go back and change the record.

And I think the Department of Justice needs to seriously consider whether this blatant act, this open act of discrimination, is something that will factor into any deal they may strike with Harvard. Maybe they will take a tougher line or maybe they will prosecute this case. So I think it has potentially huge implications.

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Survey: 91 Percent of College Students Think ‘Words Can Be Violence.’ That Could Feed Real Violence.

Of all the stupid ideas that have emerged in recent years, there may be none worse than the insistence that unwelcome words are the same as violence. This false perception equates physical acts that can injure or kill people with disagreements and insults that might cause hurt feelings and potentially justifies responding to the latter with the former. After all, if words are violence, why not rebut a verbal sparring partner with an actual punch? Unfortunately, the idea is embedded on college campuses where a majority of undergraduate students agree that words and violence can be the same thing.

“Ninety one percent of undergraduate students believe that words can be violence, according to a new poll by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression [FIRE] and College Pulse,” FIRE announced last week. “The survey’s findings are especially startling coming in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination—an extreme and tragic example of the sharp difference between words and violence.”

The survey posed questions about speech and political violence to undergraduate students at Utah Valley University, where Kirk was murdered, and at colleges elsewhere—2,028 students overall. FIRE and College Pulse compared the student responses to those of members of the general public who were separately polled.

Specifically, one question asked how much “words can be violence” described respondents’ thoughts. Twenty-two percent of college undergraduates answered that the sentiment “describes my thoughts completely,” 25 percent said it “mostly” described their thoughts, 28 percent put it at “somewhat,” and 15 percent answered “slightly.” Only 9 percent answered that the “words can be violence” sentiment “does not describe my thoughts at all.”

It’s difficult to get too worked up about those who “slightly” believe words can be violence, but that still leaves us at 75 percent of the student population. And almost half of students “completely” or “mostly” see words and violence as essentially the same thing. That’s a lot of young people who struggle to distinguish between an unwelcome expression and a punch to the nose.

Depressingly, 34 percent of the general public “completely” or “mostly” agree. Fifty-nine percent at least “somewhat” believe words can be violence.

In 2017, when the conflation of words and violence was relatively new, Jonathan Haidt, a New York University psychology professor, worried that the false equivalence fed into the simmering mental health crisis among young people. He and FIRE President Greg Lukianoff wrote in The Atlantic that “growing numbers of college students have become less able to cope with the challenges of campus life, including offensive ideas, insensitive professors, and rude or even racist and sexist peers” and that the rise in mental health issues “is better understood as a crisis of resilience.”

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Cleaning the Augean Stable of University-Based Scientific Research

Science’s reputation has taken a pretty strong hit in recent years – and it’s not undeserved. 

All throughout Covid, a class of people who should have known better revealed themselves as Quislings to their field as they publicly embraced politically and socially fashionable positions on supposed mitigation measures incongruent with long–held scientific consensuses despite often finding such measures risible at the pandemic’s start. Then, not having embarrassed themselves enough with Vonnegutesque absurdity, many went on to position once rudimentary components of mammalian reproductive biology as questions more complex than the development of multicellular life or the rise of human consciousness and best outsourced to the wisdom of gender theorists, confused teenagers, and the aptly named clownfish.

Consequently, many normal people stopped trusting “The Science” and became more skeptical of science as a whole. They started questioning what they had been told about psychotropic drugs. Worrying about the safety of vaccines went mainstream. Concerns about our diet partly gave rise to a movement and a Presidential commission.

Furthermore, many aspects of the scientific enterprise came under increased scrutiny, the most prominent perhaps being the US government’s role in funding scientific research, large portions of which seemed ideologically motivated.

A 2024 report from Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) highlighted $2.05 billion from the National Science Foundation that appeared to go to STEM-based DEI projects. Later, NSF grants for such projects, along with those examining the effects of alleged misinformation, were targeted by efforts aimed at reducing government waste, as were payments for indirect costs to the institutions of those receiving grants from the National Institutes of Health.

The function, utility, and integrity of the peer-review process and peer-reviewed journals likewise came under scrutiny. At the start of the year, Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist and biostatistician best known now as one of the primary co-signers of the Great Barrington Declaration, wrote of how publication in a peer-reviewed journal became a stamp of approval that even shoddy research can enjoy if dragged across the right finish line, how publication in a prestigious peer-reviewed journal became a surrogate for article quality, and how the desire to get published in the right journal can motivate all sorts of questionable behaviors on the part of researchers. In October, Anna Krylov, a University of Southern California chemistry professor and prominent critic of DEI’s infiltration of STEM, lambasted the prestigious Nature Publishing Group for using its publications to further DEI-related goals through its publication policies and the threat of censorship. 

Similarly, the competence and basic integrity of researchers, perhaps especially those in academia, came into question with some critics, such as the authors of a recent report from the National Association of Scholars, blaming the replication crisis plaguing modern science on ineptitude, irresponsibility, and statistical tomfoolery.

Subsequently, it seems that some have come to question whether we should have academic science at all.

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Outrage: University of Utah Student Suspended For Exposing Anti-White Professor’s Rhetoric

According to a report at Campus Reform, “A student is facing discipline after exposing a university professor’s extensive history of racist, anti-white social media posts.”

A student named Craig Jones was suspended from campus for two whole years simply for posting flyers exposing the anti White, hateful tweets of Professor Ashton Avila, according to Libs of TikTok.

A letter sent to Jones accused him of “intimidating and threatening behavior by repeatedly targeting and calling out a University of Utah Asia Campus faculty member.”

In other words, at the University of Utah, it’s forbidden to call out race-baiting and anti-White hate if a professor is engaging in this type of bigotry.

Jones was given a choice between accepting the sanctions or taking his case to a hearing with a neutral decision-maker.

The professor accused of racist tweets teaches in the Department of Film and Media Arts.

Among the professors outrageous tweets are “The only thing stronger than white fear is white guilt, “Yes, I want to walk into every room with the confidence of an average white man”, But I’d also like average white men to walk into every room feeling like none of their qualifications will ever be enough but they still need to find a way to prove they deserve to be there.”

She also made positive posts about the alleged killer of the United Healthcare CEO, the alleged killer being Luigi Mangione.

“She reposted one tweet that read, “Luigi Mangione is going to win Dancing with the Stars,” wrote another that said, “Y’all, this is it. Luigi is going to announce Reputation,” and asked in another, “Ok, but can Biden add Luigi to the pardon list?”

Avila calls herself a “queer Mexican-American writer-director” and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Film Media and Gender & Women’s Studies.

This professor’s most recent work includes directing a season of the “LGBTQIA+ series Guys Like You.

She also played a part in anti-Christian films, including “Have a Little Faith”.

Have a Little Faith is about “A rebellious teenager is determined to get kicked out of her new Christian High School and teach the new boy she meets there what it really means to ‘have a little Faith.’

In addition to her work their its clear this professor is left wing  “She teaches a “Diversity in Film” class, which “will focus on topics including but not limited to: feminism, gender, sexuality, race and economic class systems.”

In addition to this course, Prof. Avila put together a “Queer Representation with Cinematographer Savannah Bloch” event during Pride Week.

It should be clear at this point that the student in question did nothing wrong and, on the contrary, exposed the hate being espoused by a person tasked with education at the University of Utah.

Clearly, things are backwards in academia.

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Insanity: Loyola University Maryland’s Department of English Claims Literature Promotes “White Supremacy”

In the latest insanity from liberal education, according to The College Fix, “Loyola University Maryland’s Department of English recently announced its commitment to ‘anti-racism,’ claiming literature promotes ‘white supremacy.”

The department of English proclaims on its website, “Literature and the literary canons have been used to validate “white supremacy.”

It’s clear that DEI and Woke ideology remain the dominant ideology at Loyola.

The department is even considering renaming the website.

The department also echoes Woke slogans like “black lives matter,” “racism is based in white supremacy,” and “confronting racism requires that we actively facilitate conversations about it in the classroom.”

This department is biased and has an anti-Western civilization bent in that it views Western and English literature as inherently bad.

The English department even made the absurd promise to “acknowledge the centrality of whiteness in the history and evolution of literary canons.”

The department pledges to “hire a professor of African American literature and include more authors of color in their curriculum. It will examine all classes and commit to “making anti-racist teaching central in each one.”

This sounds more like a struggle session than anything else.

They went even further than that, absurdly saying they would “avoid centering the experiences of white students” in the classroom by “interrogating the presumed invisibility of whiteness in the classroom and the concept of the ‘universal reader’ as always being white and male.”

Loyola University in Maryland was founded by the Jesuits, a Catholic order.

According to The College Fix, “The school’s English department sees that Jesuit mission as a “commitment to serving an urban, majority-Black city with a history of racial injustice.”

Even a Professor at Emory called out this Woke direction the school’s English department is headed in.

Prof. Bauerlein rightly argued, “The position of the Loyola department gives neat evidence for why English has become such a marginal discipline.”

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Colorado Medical School Will Pay $10.3 Million After Denying Religious Exemptions for COVID Vaccine

The University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine will pay more than $10.3 million to 18 faculty and students whose religious exemptions to the school’s mandatory COVID-19 vaccine policy were denied, a group representing the plaintiffs announced Monday.

The lawsuit challenged the university’s refusal to accommodate sincerely held religious objections to the COVID-19 vaccine. The plaintiffs, who sued anonymously, included physicians, medical students, nurses and administrative staff.

The Thomas More Society, which filed the lawsuit and represents clients in religious liberty cases nationwide, stated that the settlement is a rare instance in which plaintiffs recovered monetary damages under the First Amendment for a government COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

Michael McHale, senior counsel at the Thomas More Society, said the resolution cannot undo the harm inflicted on the plaintiffs.

“No amount of compensation or course-correction” can make up for the damage caused by the university’s vaccine mandate, McHale said. “At great, and sometimes career-ending, costs, our heroic clients fought for the First Amendment freedoms of all Americans who were put to the unconscionable choice of their livelihoods or their faith.”

Details of the settlement, which followed more than a year of negotiations, were not released. According to the Thomas More Society, the school agreed to cover damages, tuition and attorneys’ fees.

The settlement ends nearly five years of related litigation in state and federal courts.

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9 In 10 College Students Think ‘Words Can Be Violence’; Survey

Nine out of ten undergraduate students think that “words can be violence” at least “somewhat,” according to a new Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression survey. 

The poll also showed that ideological gaps between left-leaning and right-leaning students are widening.

When respondents were asked how much the statement “words can be violence” describes their thoughts, 47 percent answered with “completely” or “mostly.” Twenty-eight percent said it describes their thoughts “somewhat,” and 15 percent said “slightly.”

Additionally, around 59 percent of students said “silence is violence” describes their views at least “somewhat,” though only 28 percent said it describes their thoughts “completely” or “mostly.” 

“When people start thinking that words can be violence, violence becomes an acceptable response to words,” FIRE Chief Research Advisor Sean Stevens said in a news release following the poll. 

“Even after the murder of Charlie Kirk at a speaking event, college students think that someone’s words can be a threat. This is antithetical to a free and open society, where words are the best alternative to political violence,” Stevens said. 

The poll also showed that moderate and conservative students have grown less supportive of disruptive or violent tactics to stop campus speakers, while liberal students’ support for those tactics has stayed the same or risen slightly compared to the spring. 

At the same time, moderate and conservative students have become more open to allowing controversial speakers, while liberal students have maintained or increased their opposition to those speakers.

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University of Delaware Student Arrested with Guns and Manifesto Referencing ‘Martyrdom’

On November 24, 2025, Wilmington, Delaware, resident and University of Delaware student Luqmaan Khan, 25,  was stopped by police during an after-hours property check in Canby Park West. Khan is a legal immigrant from Pakistan.

Court documents reveal that Khan was asked, and subsequently refused, to exit the vehicle. He was taken into custody and, during a search of his vehicle, officers found a .357 caliber Glock handgun loaded with 27 rounds.

The United States District Attorney’s Office, District of Delaware shares, “The handgun had been inserted into a microplastic conversion firearm brace kit.  Within the vehicle, officers also found all the following: (i) three more loaded, 27-round magazines (one in the storage slot of the conversion kit); (ii) a loaded Glock 9mm magazine; (iii) an armored ballistic plate; and (iv) a marble composition notebook.”

“In the handwritten notebook, Khan discussed additional weapons and firearms, how they could be used in an attack, and how law enforcement detection could be avoided once an attack was carried out. The notebook referenced a member of the University of Delaware’s Police Department by name, and included a layout of a building with entry and exit points under which the words ‘UD Police Station’ were printed.”

According to The Daily News, in addition to mentioning  a UDPD officer by name, investigators shared that the notebook included writings about “martyrdom.”

The following day, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and NCCPD executed a search warrant at Khan’s Wilmington residence and discovered a Glock 19 9mm handgun equipped with an illegal machinegun conversion device.

A .556 rifle with a scope and a red dot sight, eleven more extended magazines, hollow point rounds of ammunition, and a two-plate tactical vest equipped with a single ballistic plate were also recovered.

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Politically Correct ‘Dignity Index’ Would Inject Social Credit Scores Into Public Education

The University of Utah recently opened the first official office for the Dignity Index, a program based on an eight-point scale that rates how statements sound during political or social disagreement. Project UNITE, the Index’s creator, is marketing the speech-classification framework to politicians, business leaders, and educators across the country, and several school districts and universities have already adopted the tool.

The Dignity Index was created by the nonprofit Project UNITE and piloted in Utah through a partnership with researchers at the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, David Eccles School of Business, and Hinckley Institute of Politics. As detailed in the Utah Pilot Project Technical Summary, the demonstration phase relied on Eccles School and Gardner Policy Institute leadership and a team of 22 trained student coders who scored political statements each week on the Index’s eight-point scale. The Dignity Index categorizes speech from Level 1 — described as the most contemptuous — to Level 8, which reflects language focused on connection and cooperation (“we’re bound together”). According to the Dignity Project’s public materials, the model is intended to help students and adults recognize how their tone affects political dialogue.

In 2022, the project expanded nationally with the involvement of Tim Shriver, co-founder of CASEL — which stands for Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning — and the CEO of the nonprofit UNITE, which focuses on depolarization efforts. Shriver, who helped coordinate the rollout, has described the scale as part of a strategy to reduce “contempt” in American public life.

How the Index Works

The Index was initially used in public-policy settings and in analyzing statements made by political candidates during the 2022 Utah congressional races. Since then, its use has widened. The Irvine Unified School District in California recently piloted the model in a classroom setting, describing it as a tool for “strengthening understanding and connection” during discussions. Program materials encourage students to examine statements, identify where they fall on the scale, and reflect on ways to de-escalate disagreements.

Proponents of the Index argue that it helps teach civil discourse at a time when classrooms face rising tensions around political and social issues. In a local news outlet, Salt Lake City School District Superintendent Elizabeth Grant made the district’s intent clear: “We want to reduce contempt in our community, broadly and more specifically, in our district. Our emphasis is on dignity.” To that end, the district is now turning to the Dignity Index.

The project promotes what it calls three primary “effects”: the Electrifying Effect, where individuals request coaching or workshops; the Mirror Effect, where participants reflect on their own tone; and the Agency Effect, where users feel empowered to reduce contempt in their communities.

Because the Dignity Index focuses on tone, perception, and emotional communication, it has found an audience within the broader SEL (social-emotional learning) landscape. The school district in Salt Lake City has already used CASEL’s SEL competencies — self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making — and is preparing to integrate the Index into its existing lessons on communication and conflict resolution.

Technology companies have also shown interest in frameworks that classify speech based on tone. Google’s Perspective API, for example, uses machine learning to rate online comments for “toxicity,” while Microsoft’s Responsible AI guidelines include similar tone-classification categories. The Dignity Index’s numeric structure is compatible with many of these systems, which are already used in some digital-citizenship programs.

While the Index is currently working with pilot programs, its expansion has also prompted questions from parents and education-policy commentators about how the tool might function in a school setting. Parent organizations that have previously opposed SEL programs have said they worry that classroom tools focused on tone may pressure children to adjust how they speak about controversial issues. Although concerns about indoctrination and viewpoint discrimination have been documented in reporting on SEL generally, my research finds no major published studies have yet evaluated parent response to the Dignity Index specifically.

Privacy and civil-liberties advocates such as the Future of Privacy Forum and several digital-rights groups have warned that tone-classification technology used in school settings must be closely monitored to prevent unintentional data collection or algorithmic bias. Ethics and free-speech commentators have echoed these worries. Jack Marshall, writing at Ethics Alarms, has expressed concern that tone-scoring frameworks could constrain students’ ability to speak openly on moral and political issues.

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