Tag: universities

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.”

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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Ivy League Researchers Scaremonger About GOP Health Policy But Say Nothing About Similar Democrat Plans

Ivy League faculty members have a leftist bias — would you believe it?

That sarcastic conclusion comes from the latest example of rhetorical scaremongering over the budget reconciliation bill being considered by Congress. When Republican lawmakers decide to scale back health care benefits, the professoriate loudly proclaims that people in their legions will die. But when Democrat lawmakers do the same thing, these same commentators decide to join the Witness Protection Program.

Deaths Metric

On June 3, a series of researchers affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics and the Yale School of Public Health released a letter regarding the House-passed budget reconciliation bill. In it, they claimed that several specific provisions in the bill “would result in more than 42,500 deaths annually.” They further claimed that allowing enhanced Obamacare subsidies to expire at year’s end, as they are scheduled to do under current law, “will cause an additional 8,811 deaths,” meaning that “altogether, we project that these changes will result in over 51,000 preventable deaths.”

The letter leaves much to unpack. For starters, the idea that anyone can know with any level of certainty the precise number of deaths attributable to a specific policy — not 8,810 or 8,812, mind you, but exactly 8,811 — is absurd on its face. If the researchers know the specific number of people who will die due to one policy change, then why not tell us the names of said individuals, and where, when, and how those people will die, while they’re at it?

Second, the expiration of the enhanced subsidies at year’s end comes because of Democrats, not Republicans. When they controlled Congress and the presidency, Democrats passed provisions letting these subsidies expire. Democrats fully expected future Congresses to extend them but wanted to try to disguise their true cost, just like they tried to hide the full $5 trillion cost of the failed Build Back Bankrupt legislation. They should neither complain nor blame Republicans for not wanting to fix or extend Democrats’ bad law. (The same applies to Republicans when it comes to tax gimmicks they might include in reconciliation.)

Ideological Bias

But the real “tell” regarding this letter comes in the form of a question the researchers didn’t answer. I emailed the lead authors, Rachel Werner at Penn and Alison Galvani from Yale, with a simple question: “Do you plan on conducting similar analyses on the number of deaths associated with Gov. [Gavin] Newsom’s proposal to freeze enrollment of undocumented immigrants in MediCal, and charge existing undocumented enrollees a $100 monthly premium? Why or why not?”

Astute readers may not be surprised to learn that, even after following up, I received nary an acknowledgement, let alone a reply. The researchers might claim they never received my message or that they only published their letter in response to a request from Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., for an analysis of the effects of the reconciliation bill. (Any Republican lawmakers in California reading this should please — please — ask the researchers for the type of analysis I requested, if only to highlight their hypocrisy.)

But it doesn’t take a Ph.D. in economics to recognize the real reason for the disparate treatment. The letter was a headline — “Republican bill will kill X people per year!” — in search of a story and a justification. That’s why Wyden and Sanders requested it, and that’s why the researchers gladly complied. But when it comes to attacking Newsom, or Democrat Govs. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois or Tim Walz of Minnesota, all of whom have proposed scaling back taxpayer-funded coverage of illegal immigrants — not because they believe such benefits should go only to citizens, mind you, but because of skyrocketing costs — they suddenly become mute.

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Federal Prosecutors Are Starting To Sound Like Campus Activists About Sex and Consent

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is now embracing ideas about coercion and consent that rose to prominence on college campuses during the Barack Obama administration.

That’s the implication of the OneTaste case, in which a jury has returned a guilty verdict against Rachel Cherwitz and Nicole Daedone, who stood accused of a conspiracy to commit forced labor during their time with the sexual and spiritual self-help organization.

I have written many words about this case already, and I’m going to try to refrain from rehashing all of the details in today’s newsletter. (If you’re new to the case and want to dive deep, here you go. If you want a couple of overviews of how the trial played out, see here and here.)

What I want to focus on right now is the larger implications of this case. They’re not pretty.

From College Campuses to #MeToo to the DOJ

If these ideas about coercion and consent didn’t start on the college campuses of the 2010s, that’s at least when they became fully institutionalized —adopted as not just the framework favored by activist students and women’s studies professors but by college administrators and the Title IX offices they were beholden to. There was affirmative consent, sure, but also a broader suspicion of consent as a worthwhile standard, or at least a willingness to dismiss it for more arcane ideas about sexual permissibility.

Suddenly it wasn’t enough to say no and it wasn’t even enough to say yes—one had to consider a complex set of power dynamics, alcohol consumption levels, subtle nonverbal cues, and so on, to determine if consent counted. It stopped just short of taking astrological signs into account.

We went from a reasonable corrective (acknowledging that sexual assault needn’t necessarily involve force or violence) to women getting support for claims of sexual coercion and violation even when they seemed to willingly go along with sexual activity at the time but later said that they weren’t enthusiastic enough about it and a partner should have known that and stopped. Basically, it was only consensual if a woman felt deep down in her heart, during and after, that everything had been OK.

We saw this idea migrate from campus newspapers and Title IX offices to the broader world during the #MeToo movement. It’s perhaps best exemplified by a story about the actor Aziz Ansari. A young woman went to dinner with him, then back to his house, and later excoriated him in Babe magazine for not reading her cues about not wanting to fool around and allegedly pressuring her to do so. The piece called it sexual misconduct and a violation. But when the woman explicitly told Ansari no, he stopped, per her account of things. And when she wanted to go, she left.

The Babe article provoked a huge debate about whether this sort of thing—which in another era we might have just called a bad date or caddish behavior—was a form of sexual assault and where responsibility lies here. Are sexual partners supposed to be mind readers? Do women have any responsibility for explicitly making their wishes known?

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Texas Yanks Major Perk From Illegal Aliens – After Pioneering It 24 Years Ago

Twenty-four years after being the first in the nation to roll it out, a major perk for illegal aliens in Texas has vanished after the Trump administration filed a federal lawsuit to stop it and the Lone Star State’s attorney general quickly agreed with the White House stance. Specifically, illegals will no longer be charged the in-state rate for college tuition.  

The end came quite suddenly. Within hours of the US Department of Justice filing a complaint in the Northern District of Texas, Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a motion asking Judge Reed O’Connor to rule in favor of the DOJ and declare in-state tuition for illegals unconstitutional. On the same day, O’Connor issued an order declaring that discounts favoring illegal aliens over non-Texan American citizens — in contradiction of federal law — violate the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, and permanently blocking Texas from giving such discounts.

Paxton, who’s mounting a 2026 challenge of incumbent Republican John Cornyn to represent Texas in the United States Senate, raced to take credit for the outcome: 

“Today, I entered a joint motion along with the Trump Administration opposing a law that unconstitutionally and unlawfully gave benefits to illegal aliens that were not available to American citizens. Ending this discriminatory and un-American provision is a major victory for Texas.” 

In 2001, Texas became the first state to offer in-state tuition to illegals. Back then, Democrats had a slim majority in the state House, but the “Texas Dream Act” had bipartisan support, with only four of 181 legislators voting against it. Republicans bought into the idea that better-educated illegals would bolster the state’s labor force and its economy, and then-Governor Rick Perry gave full support — a stance he had to defend at a Republican debate during his failed 2012 presidential campaign. While this clip stops short, the audience answered with a mix of vigorous applause and hearty boos.

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Senator John Kennedy Humiliates Far-Left Ivy League Law Professor After Catching Her in a Huge Lie During Fiery Debate on Nationwide Injunctions

Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) is famous in the U.S. Senate for his incisive wit and dry sense of humor. He has displayed these talents during his time as an elected official, whether by stumping unqualified Biden nominees or in interviews with reporters.

He delivered once again on Tuesday as he completely exposed and humiliated a far-left Ivy League law professor during a fiery debate on nationwide injunctions. As TGP readers know, activist judges around the country have subverted the U.S. Constitution for months for the sole purpose of sabotaging President Trump’s agenda.

University of Pennsylvania law professor Kate Shaw, the wife of radical-left MSNBC host Chris Hayes, spoke during a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing titled “The Supposedly ‘Least Dangerous Branch’: District Judges v. Trump” to gaslight the senators on the subject and tried to play dumb at various points when questioned.

But Kennedy refused to let Shaw spin her way through the hearing. Beginning with a question about nationwide injunctions being abused, Kennedy immediately exposed Shaw’s hypocrisy.

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