Tag: universities

Trial set to begin over UCLA prof suspended after refusing lenient grading for black students

A professor who sued UCLA after he was suspended in the wake of the George Floyd-Black Lives Matter riots after refusing a request to grade black students leniently is about to get his day in court.

UCLA accounting lecturer Gordon Klein is demanding $22 million in damages in a trial scheduled to begin July 1 in a Santa Monica courthouse.

The two sides have engaged in legal wrangling since September 2021, when Klein first filed suit, and the trial date has been delayed several times over the last year.

Klein argues UCLA’s knee-jerk reaction to publicly suspend him and excoriate his reputation effectively destroyed his lucrative litigation expert practice.

Klein states in court documents he made about $1 million annually as an expert witness in many high-profile corporate cases.

“By this moment, as a direct and immediate result of [his] public suspension and excoriation, Professor Klein’s expert witness practice had been permanently destroyed,” states Klein’s written opening argument, a copy of which was obtained by The College Fix.

The statement was submitted in writing as both parties have agreed to a bench trial to be decided by a judge.

Keep reading

DOJ Probes University Of California Over Alleged Race And Sex Hiring Quotas

The Justice Department has opened a civil rights investigation into the University of California (UC) system to determine whether its efforts to boost faculty diversity run afoul of federal anti-discrimination laws.

In a June 26 announcement, the Department of Justice (DOJ) stated that it is probing whether the university’s “UC 2030 Capacity Plan” and related campus-level programs constitute a pattern or practice of unlawful employment discrimination based on race and sex, in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

“Public employers are bound by federal laws that prohibit racial and other employment discrimination,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, who leads the department’s Civil Rights Division. “Institutional directives that use race- and sex-based hiring practices expose employers to legal risk under federal law.”

According to the Justice Department, the UC system’s strategic hiring plan explicitly encourages campuses to measure and increase the number of new hires by race and sex to meet internal diversity targets. Officials described the framework as potentially unlawful, citing provisions in the plan that direct campuses to recruit “diverse” faculty in line with demographic benchmarks.

The UC 2030 Capacity Plan outlines several such goals, including the recruitment of at least 40 percent of its graduate students from its own undergraduate programs and from other minority-serving institutions, including Hispanic-serving institutions, historically black colleges and universities, and tribal colleges and universities. The plan also outlines a goal to hire more than 1,100 new ladder-rank faculty members by 2030—an effort the university says will help diversify its academic workforce, noting that new hires tend to be more diverse than the existing faculty.

“Identity-based hiring is not only wrong—it is illegal,” Dhillon wrote in a post on social media. “Public employers ignore our civil rights laws at their peril.”

A request for comment sent to the University of California by The Epoch Times was not immediately returned.

A university spokesperson told The Hill that the university “is committed to fair and lawful processes in all of our programs and activities, consistent with federal and state anti-discrimination laws.”

“The University also aims to foster a campus environment where everyone is welcomed and supported. We will work in good faith with the Department of Justice as it conducts its investigation,” the spokesperson said.

Keep reading

Trump DOJ Sues Tampon Tim Walz and Minnesota for Providing Free and Discounted Tuition for Illegal Aliens

The Trump Administration is taking the 2024 Democratic vice-presidential nominee, Tim Walz, and his state to court for prioritizing foreign nationals above Americans.

The Department of Justice issued a press release a short time ago announcing that they had filed a complaint seeking to overturn Minnesota laws that provide free and discounted in-state tuition for illegal aliens.

This violates federal law, specifically 8 U.S.C. § 1623(a), which explicitly prohibits states from granting in-state tuition to illegal aliens unless all U.S. citizens—regardless of residency—are given the same benefit.

“Today, the United States is challenging laws in Minnesota that provide reduced in-state tuition — and in some cases, free tuition — for illegal aliens. These laws unconstitutionally discriminate against U.S. citizens, who are not afforded the same privileges, in direct conflict with federal law,” the press release reads.

“The Department of Justice has filed the complaint in the District of Minnesota. This challenge builds upon a recently successful lawsuit against the state of Texas on a similar law.”

Keep reading

FBI silent seven months later on nationwide racist texts sent to college students, others

The FBI will not comment on the status of its investigation into racist texts reportedly sent across the country soon after the 2024 presidential election.

“The FBI’s policy is to neither confirm nor deny if we are conducting an investigation,” a media representative told The College Fix via email.

The law enforcement agency said it has “no further information” and referenced their public statement released in November immediately following the messages.

“The FBI is aware of the offensive and racist text messages sent to individuals around the country and is in contact with the Justice Department and other federal authorities on the matter,” the original statement read. “As always, we encourage members of the public to report threats of physical violence to local law enforcement authorities.”

Soon after President Donald Trump’s election last November, Americans, including high school and college students, reported they had received texts targeting them on the basis of their race. Black Americans reportedly received texts saying they needed to go pick cotton, while Hispanic students reportedly were told they would be deported.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was quick to blame it on Trump.

Keep reading

CU Boulder class teaches ‘queering literacy’ methods for high school teachers

Aspiring high school English and social studies teachers can learn “queering literacy” methods at the University of Colorado at Boulder this upcoming fall semester.

“Queering Literacy in Secondary Classrooms” teaches students using “theories and practices of literacy teaching and learning that challenge multiple forms of oppression,” according to the course description.

“Using the tools of queer pedagogy,” this course will prepare education majors to “develop, and enact strategies for planning and implementing literacy instruction that moves beyond inclusion of differences in the English/language arts and social studies curriculum,” the course description states.

A professor who regularly teaches the course provided further insights on the content in a phone interview with The College Fix.

Professor Sara Staley described education as facing a “highly polarized political moment right now, especially around topics like DEI.” The current listed professor for the fall 2025 semester is Ashley Cartun.

Staley said she wants to support “teachers and students” who are “trying to create spaces of belonging in every classroom.” She said Colorado “laws and policies” require teachers to “create a safe, respectful, inclusive learning environment for a diverse population of students.”

She said, “a lot of research” shows teachers are not trained enough in “gender and sexual diversity.” Staley also co-runs the Queer Endeavor, a CU-Boulder program that works in “close collaboration with district and school leaders, K-12 teachers, and counselors” for LGBTQ education.

There is also “a lot of research that shows that school can be a pretty unwelcoming place for students who are different” especially for “queer and trans youths,” Staley said.

The class she teaches helps students learn about “diverse identities” and “what it looks like to read a book with a queer character in it” without reinforcing “negative stereotypes.”

Staley said, “queer pedagogy” is about “supporting students to think critically by asking questions of what they read.”

Keep reading

Women’s College Hit With Civil Rights Complaint For Admitting Men Claiming To Be Women

One of the largest all-women’s colleges in the U.S., Smith College, has been hit with a federal civil rights complaint because it admits men claiming to be women and allows them in the private women’s spaces like restrooms.

The Title IX complaint, filed by Defending Education with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, brought the complaint against the 150-year-old Massachusetts women’s college “for discrimination on the basis of sex in programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance in violation of” federal law.

The college’s Equal Education Opportunity Policy “indicates that it will follow Title IX and prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex in its federally funded programs,” the complaint, written by Defending Education Vice President Sarah Parshall Perry, states. However, she continues, “The very same policy … indicates that Smith interprets Title IX to prohibit ‘gender identity’ discrimination, despite federal case law and this [Education] Department’s guidance to the contrary.”

“Discrimination based on gender identity is not the same as discrimination based on sex under Title IX, as this Department well knows, and the Supreme Court has never held it is,” the complaint reads. “In other words, to the extent Smith’s accommodations for so-called gender identity encroach upon sex-specific programs and spaces, it is in violation of Title IX. The college’s admission policy appears to violate Title IX for the same reason.”

The complaint further cites executive orders signed by President Donald Trump and guidance from the Education Department that Title IX protections shall be based on sex rather than “gender identity.” The college confirms it allows males who claim to be female to take admissions spots from actual women, the complaint says. Smith’s website explicitly states that “people who identify as women—cis, trans and nonbinary women—are eligible to apply to Smith.” It also says that male applicants can simply claim to be women to be considered for admission because “Smith’s policy is one of self-identification. The applicant’s affirmation of identity is sufficient.”

“Ironically, in what appears to be yet another exercise in sex discrimination, Smith admits natal men who identify as women but does not admit natal women who identify as men,” the complaint states, citing a 2023 CNN article.

The complaint goes on to cite “Smith’s policies on ‘Gender Identity and Expression,’” which “indicate that ‘[e]very single-occupancy restroom on campus is designated all-gender” and show how the college “advertises ‘[a]n all-gender locker room in the athletic facilities,’” the complaint reads. Smith College’s website also says that “more and more” multi-stall bathrooms on campus will be designated “all-gender,” allowing men to access them, and that the health & wellness center “provides trans-affirming primary care, including hormone therapy.”

The school made the change to allow men in 2015, when it told itself, faculty, staff, parents, and alumnae that allowing men in the school actually “affirms Smith’s unwavering mission and identity as a women’s college, our commitment to representing the diversity of women’s lived experiences, and the college’s exceptional role in the advancement of women worldwide.”

Keep reading

Whistleblower exposes forced sexual rituals at Catholic university

Naomi Epps Best is a Christian graduate student at Santa Clara University studying family and marriage counseling — and what she was forced to partake in was so inappropriate that she wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed sounding the alarm about her experience.

“One of the final classes I have to do to graduate is called human sexuality, and that is a requirement for marriage and family therapists in California,” Best tells BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey on “Relatable.”

“But when I first enrolled in this course in summer of 2024, I dug into the syllabus, and I was shocked by the sexual ethic that was being not just presented but promoted. I immediately discovered sadomasochistic erotica,” she explains.

Sadomasochism is when people derive pleasure from inflicting pain on another person, or when people derive pleasure from being hurt.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

Federal Judge Orders UO to Pay $191K to PSU Professor Blocked for “All Men Are Created Equal” Comment

The University of Oregon is facing the financial consequences of an unconstitutional attempt to suppress speech after a federal judge ordered it to pay $191,000 in legal fees to Portland State University professor Bruce Gilley.

The order, issued by US District Judge John V. Acosta, follows a settlement reached in March 2025 in which the university acknowledged Gilley’s comments should not have been censored and agreed to implement major policy reforms.

The legal fees, which will be covered by UO’s insurer United Educators, include $147,070 awarded to the Institute for Free Speech (IFS) and $43,930 to the Angus Lee Law Firm.

These payments, combined with more than $533,000 that the university had already spent on its own legal representation by late 2024, push the cost of defending its actions to at least $724,000.

That figure excludes further expenses accrued since November.

These high costs are directly tied to UO’s decision to support its DEI officials after they blocked Gilley for replying “all men are created equal” to a university post on X.

This fee award reflects the substantial resources required to vindicate fundamental constitutional rights in the digital age, as well as the vigor with which the University of Oregon chose to defend unconstitutional policies,” said Del Kolde, IFS Senior Attorney.

“The university made a costly decision to prioritize DEI principles over constitutional principles, aggressively litigating this case for nearly three years rather than acknowledging the obvious, that blocking someone for quoting the Declaration of Independence violates the First Amendment.”

Keep reading

Trump Closes Notorious EPA Lab that Conducted Illegal Human Experiments

President Trump is trying to save money by terminating leases on facilities used by federal agencies. One of these is EPA’s Human Studies Facility located at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. “Scientists are trying to save it,” reports Nature magazine. But being a waste of money is the least interesting aspect of the infamous lab.

In 2011, through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), I exposed the lab’s illegal experimentation on humans with air pollutants that EPA considers to be deadly. The lab’s central feature is an actual gas chamber into which EPA pumped exhaust from a diesel truck idling outside in a parking lot. You can see a photo of the twisted arrangement here.

After filtering out the carbon monoxide, EPA concentrated the exhaust’s fine particulate matter (soot, called “PM2.5” by EPA) to unrealistically high levels and pumped it into the chamber in which human guinea pigs inhaled it for periods of two hours. The purpose of the experiments was to observe the effects, if any, of inhaling PM2.5. For these experiments, EPA had recruited: asthmatics; people with heart disease and diabetes; and elderly persons up to 80 years of age. EPA paid its human guinea pigs as much as a couple thousand dollars for their participation in the experiments.

All this may seem harmless enough. But was it? EPA had previously concluded that PM2.5 was, essentially, the most toxic substance known to man. Any inhalation could cause death within hours, the agency had determined.  It had also stated that the people most at risk from inhaling PM2.5 were: asthmatics; people with heart disease and diabetes; and the elderly. Those at risk from PM2.5 were the very sort of people upon whom it had been experimenting.

But EPA had not disclosed any of this to, and so did not obtain legally required “informed consent” from its human guinea pigs. Instead of informing its human guinea pigs in writing that the agency believed the experiments could kill them, as was required by federal regulations, state law and the Nuremberg Code on human experimentation, the agency’s consent forms only disclosed that some temporary coughing or wheezing may result from the experiments.

Keep reading