Tag: universities

Ed Department: Nearly 2,000 Minnesota ‘Ghost Students’ Fraudulently Received $12.5 Million

In Minnesota, home to the largest population of Somali immigrants in the U.S. and the site of numerous fraud investigations, fraudsters received $12.5 million in student loan and education grant money, according to a letter Education Secretary Linda McMahon sent to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.

The letter calls on Walz to resign, and states that a new fraud prevention system at the department has found over $1 billion in “attempted financial aid theft,” including by international fraud rings and artificial intelligence (AI) bots.

“[Y]our careless lack of oversight and abuse of the welfare system has attracted fraudsters from around the world, especially from Somalia, to establish a beachhead of criminality in our country,” McMahon wrote. “As President Trump put it, you have turned Minnesota into a ‘fraudulent hub of money laundering activity.’”

“At the beginning of this year, the U.S. Department of Education became aware that fraudulent college applicants, especially concentrated in Minnesota, were gaming the federal postsecondary education system to collect money that was intended for young Americans to help them afford college,” she said.

McMahon referred to the fraudsters as “‘ghost students’ because they were not ID-verified and often did not live in the United States, or they simply did not exist,” and noted that, “[i]n Minnesota, 1,834 ghost students were found to have received 12.5 million in taxpayer-funded grants and loans.”

They “collected checks from the federal government, shared a small portion of the money with the college, and pocketed the rest–without attending the college at all,” according to the letter.

The letter comes after Somalis in Minnesota, in particular, have been exposed as having massively defrauded American taxpayers. They have even reportedly funded terrorists back in their country.

The news surrounding Somali fraud includes allegations of multiple scams, including claims that an autism “provider” enrolled Somali children who did not have an autism diagnosis in a welfare fraud scheme.

The outrage, among many other cultural problems with Somalis, has resulted in President Donald Trump intending to cancel some Somalis’ temporary protected status.

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Oxford University student, 20, is charged with stirring up racial hatred after allegedly promoting an antisemitic chant at pro-Palestine demonstration

An Oxford University student caught on camera allegedly making antisemitic chants at a pro-Palestine demonstration has been charged with a public order offence.

The Metropolitan Police said Samuel Williams, 20, was charged with stirring up racial hatred at a Palestine Coalition demo in Whitehall, central London, on Saturday, October 11.

He was charged today and will appear before Westminster Magistrates’ Court in the new year.

Williams was identified by the Daily Mail after footage emerged of a man allegedly chanting an antisemitic chant at the pro-Palestine protest.

Williams was arrested at a property in Oxfordshire on suspicion of inciting racial hatred following an investigation launched by Scotland Yard detectives.

The philosophy, politics and economics student at Balliol College was also suspended by Oxford University.

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said there had been an ‘unacceptable increase in anti-Semitism’ at universities and added that many Jewish students did not feel safe on campus.

She called on universities to strengthen protections for Jewish students and said the Government was funding training to help staff and students ‘tackle this poison of antisemitism’.

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MIT professor shot at his Massachusetts home dies

A Massachusetts university professor who was shot at his home has died, campus officials say.

Nuno F Gomes Loureiro, 47, a nuclear science and engineering professor from Portugal, was shot “multiple times” on Monday and died on Tuesday morning in hospital, according to Brookline police and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) officials.

Police said officers responded to a call for gunshots at an apartment at about 8:30pm local time. Loureiro was taken by ambulance to a Boston hospital, where he died on Tuesday morning.

No one is in custody and police are treating the incident as “an active and ongoing homicide investigation”, the Norfolk County District Attorney’s Office said.

CBS News, the BBC’s US media partner, reported that a neighbour said he heard “three loud bangs” Monday evening and thought somebody in the apartment building was kicking in a door.

Long-time resident Anne Greenwald told CBS that the professor had a young family and went to school nearby.

Loureiro majored in Physics at Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon in 2000 and obtained a Phd in physics at Imperial College London in 2005, according to his faculty web page.

Loureiro was known for his research on the dynamics of plasma – the part of blood that carries platelets, red blood cells and white blood cells around the body. He was named director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center in May.

He also studied how to harness clean “fusion power” to combat climate change, CBS said.

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Police Release New Images and Video of ‘Person of Interest’ in Deadly Brown University Shooting

The FBI released new images of the ‘person of interest’ in the deadly Brown University shooting.

A total of two people were killed and nine were injured in Saturday’s mass shooting at Brown University.

Law enforcement took a ‘person of interest’ into custody overnight on Saturday but released him late Sunday.

A manhunt is underway for the ‘armed and dangerous’ Brown University shooter.

The FBI released three new videos of a person of interest and offered a $50,000 reward leading to the ID and arrest of the individual.

“The FBI is offering a reward of up to $50,000 for information leading to the identification, arrest, and conviction of the individual,” FBI Director Kash Patel said.

“Anyone with information please contact the FBI at 1-800-CALL-FBI (225-5324) or the Providence Police Department at 401-272-3121,” Patel said.

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Outrageous: Drexel Medical School Enshrines CRT and ‘Antiracism’ As Part of Doctors Duty

In the latest outrageous virtue signaling in academia, Campus Reform is reporting Drexel University’s College of Medicine is pushing an ‘Antiracism in Healthcare’ module for medical students that a conservative organization accuses of “prioritizing ideological indoctrination over scientific inquiry.”

Medicine was never meant to be a place for social experiments and virtue signaling.

According to Campus Reform, “The module, which appears on the college’s website, promises to teach students to ‘explain how structural, cultural, and individual racism have shaped our common history and have led to vast societal disparities in education, policing, wealth and healthcare, and to “commit to being antiracist in your attitudes and behaviors.’”

This seems to bear little relevance to actually practicing medicine, a field where any sort of politics or ideology should not play a role.

One section of this module even makes the outlandish claim that “structural racism accounts for health disparities.”

In other words, now people getting sick is also a result of racism according to Left-wing ideology.

“Perhaps the great majority of healthcare providers would deny that they are racist or let biases influence their patient care,” the module says.

“Yet there are great disparities in healthcare and health outcomes between racial groups. Certainly, structural racism accounts for many of these disparities.”

Another section of this module is focused on the canon of woke ideology, CRT, or critical race theory.

According to this absurd theory, race is a social construct and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice but has become structural.”

“Do No Harm, a conservative nonprofit organization that advocates for removing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) from medicine, criticized the Drexel module for valuing an identity-based ideology over science.”

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Waste of the Day: Senators Earmarked Cash for Their Former Schools

Topline: Nearly every university relies on donations from its former students, but those with alumni in the Senate can solicit money straight from taxpayers’ wallets.

Twenty-four U.S. senators requested earmarks in the 2026 federal budget for the colleges they attended as students, totaling $614 million, according to Open the Books’ audit of congressional disclosures.

Some of the earmarks have been removed during congressional debate, but others will make their way into the final appropriations bill Congress must pass before Jan. 31 to avoid another government shutdown.

Key facts: The 125 earmarks are spread across 21 states.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) stands out with $165 million in requests, far more than any other senator. McConnell once supported a complete ban on earmarks but has recently become one of the GOP’s most pork-hungry senators, with 60 requests filed this year.

McConnell asked for four earmarks worth $100 million for the University of Louisville, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1964, and three earmarks worth $65 million for the University of Kentucky, where he graduated law school. Some of the money would be used to build “state-of-the art” research facilities and buy “high-end” lab equipment.

Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS) requested the second most money with $60 million for the University of Kansas and its hospital.

Sen. Jim Justice (R-WV) asked for nine separate earmarks totaling $57.5 million for Marshall University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree and Master of Business Administration.

Justice, once the richest man in West Virginia according to Forbes, previously donated $5 million of his own money to Marshall University. Today he has a net worth of “less than zero,” per Forbes, because of crippling debt and liabilities.

He has spent the last few years funneling government funds to Marshall University instead of using his personal wealth. As governor of West Virginia, he gave the school $45 million for a cybersecurity program and $14 million for a baseball stadium.

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Police Release Person of Interest After Questioning in Brown University Shooting

Law enforcement will be releasing the person of interest in the Brown University shooting.

The manhunt for the Brown University shooter is still underway.

Two people are dead and nine are injured after a gunman opened fire at Brown University on Saturday.

Overnight Saturday and into Sunday morning, police took Benjamin Erickson into custody as a person of interest to question him.

Erickson, a Wisconsin native, was not enrolled as a student at Brown.

Later Sunday, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley announced law enforcement would be releasing Erickson from custody.

Officials do not have enough evidence to prosecute Erickson.

Police Chief Oscar Perez said the FBI “followed through with” a tip and located a person of interest.

Law enforcement looked into Erickson’s alleged history of mental health issues.

“We will be releasing the person of interest who had been detained earlier today,” said Providence Mayor Brett Smiley.

“We know that this is likely to cause fresh anxiety for our community. And we want to reiterate what we said earlier, which remains true… we have not received any credible or specific threats to the Providence community,” he added.

“And so the status of safety in our community remains unchanged. And we believe that you remain safe in our community,” he said.

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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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