Tag: universities

The AI Epidemic On College Campuses Exposes How Broken Our Higher Education System Is

It’s no secret that higher education has been a mess for some time now. From DEI initiatives to seemingly never-ending protests to the skyrocketing college debt crisis to the ridiculous ideological imbalance amongst professors, our once hallowed institutions of higher learning are ripe for root-and-stem reform.

But just when it seemed that the American college experience couldn’t become any worse, artificial intelligence came roaring onto the scene. Now, instead of popping Adderall and Ritalin to power through finals like the good old days, college kids are now pawning their assignments off on AI.

This all comes as college professors (many at supposedly prestigious institutions) bemoan that their students either can’t be bothered to read normal college-level assignments or simply can’t because of their limited vocabulary and critical thinking skills. Even professors at notoriously leftist schools have had enough, venting their frustration at any left-of-center outlet that will listen.

These students are supposedly going to college for a particular area of study, meaning they theoretically want to learn about it. Yet they just pass on their assignments on to ChatGPT. How are they supposed to have jobs in STEM, or even subjects like literature, if they can’t even comprehend the material without AI?

If AI is producing all their work in college, isn’t it reasonable to assume that it will continue to be a crutch for them when they become chemists, lawyers, or even teachers themselves? Then the question becomes whether or not the student, given the (non)education he’s received, is worth hiring at all. AI can do it better.

Crib sheets, CliffsNotes, and stimulants are one thing, but relying on a machine to complete even simple assignments, and therefore forgoing any attempt to engage with the material, presents a looming competency crisis. Not only does it pose an existential danger to how our society and economy functions, it poses a threat to the broken diploma pipeline model embodied by today’s higher education system.

The solution to this epidemic seems rather obvious. Students may use AI as a research assistant, no different from Google Scholar, but submission of any assignment or essay that has a single sentence crafted by anything other than the student’s own mind should receive an immediate failing grade as well as a referral for expulsion. Some smaller schools, like my alma mater Washington and Lee University, already have an honor system in place that has the same expectations and penalties.

An even stricter move would be to heavily weight course grades toward in-class tests and essays done with pencil and paper with no devices allowed (besides maybe calculators for STEM classes).

Keep reading

‘New McCarthyism:’ Professors investigated by their own universities speak out

Nearly two dozen professors investigated by their universities are now sounding the alarm on what they say were essentially witch hunts against them for doing something that upset the campus status quo.

The recently published book “Professors Speak Out: The Truth About Campus Investigations” contains 20 personal vignettes authored by professors who argue that the probes were largely unnecessary and unfounded, in some cases malicious, and certainly biased against them.

The topics of the probes centered around three main issues: sex; race and ethnicity; and religion and politics.

Edited by Nicholas Wolfinger, a professor of family and consumer studies at the University of Utah, the book details the experiences of scholars who faced so-called kangaroo courts, and some were fired from their jobs.

“The book features conservatives attacked for their views, and progressives attacked for theirs. Other cases, such as mine, were essentially apolitical,” Wolfinger told The College Fix in an email interview.

Anyone concerned with cancel culture or academic freedom, or who’s been critical of the modern academy, should read the book, he said, adding administrators who want to improve their institutions should also get a copy.

Keep reading

‘There Are Chinese Spies At Stanford’: Bombshell Report Reveals CCP Student Espionage

Astudent newspaper at Stanford University dropped a bombshell report earlier this month revealing “there are Chinese spies at Stanford.”

The report, titled “Uncovering Chinese Academic Espionage at Stanford,” was published by The Stanford Review, an independent student-run newspaper. This alarming investigation is based on “over a dozen interviews conducted between July 2024 and April 2025, involving Stanford faculty members, current and former students, and independent experts specializing in Chinese intelligence operations and technology transfer.”

The report highlights three critical findings. First, it exposes that the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Ministry of State Security (MSS) is actively recruiting or coercing Chinese students and scholars at Stanford to serve as “non-traditional” intelligence assets. The MSS demands these individuals gather information that it deems valuable. Rather than targeting classified documents, the MSS is focused on obtaining “the know-how behind American innovation,” which encompasses “conclusions from Stanford research projects, methodologies, software, lab workflows, collaborative structures, and even communication channels.” The agency is particularly interested in information related to artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics.

Fears of Harassment, Losing Scholarships

The Stanford report underscores a critical nuance: not all Chinese students and scholars on campus are engaged in espionage for China. However, those who are involved often operate under vastly different motivations. While some choose to cooperate with the MSS voluntarily, others are unwitting victims of their government, acting out of fear, as highlighted by the Stanford Review. Reports indicate that some Chinese students feel pressured by MSS handlers in the U.S. who closely monitor their actions. The threat of repercussions, such as harassment of their family members back in China, looms large for these students.

Moreover, a pervasive fear of losing scholarships supplied by the Chinese government plays a significant role in this dynamic. The Stanford Review highlights the China Scholarship Council (CSC), a leading Chinese government agency that funds between 7 and 18 percent of Chinese students studying in the United States. Its sponsorship comes with stringent conditions: Students must align their research with state priorities, particularly those outlined in the government’s “Made-in-China 2025” industrial initiative. Furthermore, scholarship recipients must pass a loyalty test, pledge allegiance to the CCP, and agree to return to China upon completing their studies.

In addition, while studying in the U.S., the CSC mandates that sponsored students submit regular “situation reports” detailing their research to Chinese diplomatic missions, further emphasizing the controlling nature of this scholarship program. These students’ family members in China often serve as guarantors of these scholarships, and these guarantors will face financial penalties should their students “violate” the arrangement or refuse to go back to China.

Keep reading

Priorities at U. Rhode Island include hiring more ‘faculty, staff of color’

A goal in the University of Rhode Island’s “Strategic Plan 2023-2033” to “prioritize” hiring people “of color” is raising concerns about equal protection violations among civil rights experts.

The multi-part plan describes various priorities for the university over the decade-long period. Specifically, “Priority 3: Foster an Inclusive Culture” outlines ways the university intends to advance “anti-racist” and “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” efforts in faculty and leadership positions, according to the university website.

One of the goals of “Priority 3” expresses the university’s intentions to “enhance search and hiring processes to prioritize the recruitment, hiring, and retention of faculty and staff of color.”

Two outside civil rights and legal advocates told The College Fix that this practice could be a violation of the law.

“Prioritizing color over merit and qualifications sets a bad precedent that on its face can be discriminatory,” Linda Lee Tarver said as an ambassador of Project 21, an African-American civil rights initiative at the National Center for Public Policy Research.

Tarver, a former Michigan civil rights commissioner, told The Fix in a recent email that such practices undermine merit-based hiring.

Keep reading

Trump vows to end secrecy of foreign & CCP funding on campus after Biden ‘turned a blind eye’

President Donald Trump has vowed to “end the secrecy” surrounding foreign funding and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) influence at U.S. colleges and universities after the Biden administration “turned a blind eye” to the problem.

Trump said in a late April executive order that “it is the policy of my Administration to end the secrecy surrounding foreign funds in American educational institutions, protect the marketplace of ideas from propaganda sponsored by foreign governments, and safeguard America’s students and research from foreign exploitation.” 

The president ordered Education Secretary Linda McMahon and Attorney General Pam Bondi to enforce the federal laws surrounding the disclosure of foreign funding on U.S. campuses after Biden Education Secretary Miguel Cardona deprioritized the issue over the previous four years.

“During my first term, the Department of Education opened investigations on nineteen campuses from 2019-2021, which led universities to report $6.5 billion in previously undisclosed foreign funds,” Trump said in the April executive order. “Yet the prior administration undid this work, moving the Department of Education’s specialized investigatory work on foreign funds to a unit ill-equipped to perform it, undermining investigations, and hindering public access to information on foreign gifts and contracts.”

Keep reading

Trump Administration Launches Civil Rights Probe of Harvard’s Hiring Practices

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is investigating whether Harvard University unlawfully hires faculty based on race and sex, arguing that the school’s own data provides evidence of discrimination. The probe is the latest federal action against the beleaguered university, which last month sued the Trump administration over its decision to freeze more than $2 billion in aid to the Ivy League school.

In a document initiating the investigation, the EEOC cited materials on Harvard’s website—many of them now deleted—in which the school bragged about increasing the number of “women, non-binary, and/or people of color” on the faculty. The largest increase was in the share of non-white tenure-track faculty, which rose by 37 percent between 2013 and 2023.

The majority of those new hires, Harvard noted in a 2023 report, had been made in the past year.

White men, meanwhile, decreased dramatically as a share of tenure-track faculty, dropping from 46 percent in 2013 to 32 percent in 2023. Every other demographic for which Harvard collects data, including white women, rose over the same period.

Keep reading

Pope Leo Warns Over AI As MIT Researcher Finds 90% Probability Of ‘Existential Threat’

In his first formal audience as the newly elected pontiff, Pope Leo XIV identified artificial intelligence (AI) as one of the most critical matters facing humanity.

“In our own day,” Pope Leo declared, “the church offers everyone the treasury of its social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.” He linked this statement to the legacy of his namesake Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, which addressed workers’ rights and the moral dimensions of capitalism.

His remarks continued the direction charted by the late Pope Francis, who warned in his 2024 annual peace message that AI – lacking human values of compassion, mercy, morality and forgiveness – is too perilous to develop unchecked. Francis, who passed away on April 21, had called for an international treaty to regulate AI and insisted that the technology must remain “human-centric,” particularly in applications involving weapon systems or tools of governance.

Keep reading

UCLA med school allegedly discriminates against white, Asian applicants: Lawsuit

A class action lawsuit from Do No Harm and Students for Fair Admissions alleges that the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA is illegally discriminating against white and Asian applicants by holding some applicants to a much lower admissions standard.

“(Jennifer) Lucero and the Admissions Committee routinely admit black applicants with below-average GPA and MCAT scores — even significantly below-average scores — while requiring whites and Asians to have near-perfect scores to even be seriously considered,” wrote the plaintiffs in their class action complaint.

Jennifer Lucero was appointed associate dean of admissions of David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA in 2020. She also serves as vice chair for inclusive excellence — formerly called diversity, equity and inclusion — for the Geffen Department of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine.

In 2020, UCLA was ranked by U.S. News and World Report as the sixth-best medical school for research.

But UCLA fell to 18th by the time U.S. News and World Report stopped ordinal ranking of medical schools and eliminated reputational ranking of departments within medical schools after numerous former top medical schools boycotted submitting data to USNWR over “equity” concerns.

The number of students failing exams has increased tenfold since 2020 for some subjects, according to reporting from the Free Beacon.

Under Proposition 209, passed by California voters in 1996, it is illegal for state entities to consider race in hiring, contracting and education. In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that race-based affirmative action policies for college admissions violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

The complaint details several notable incidents in which Lucero engaged in unusual behavior during admissions committee meetings.

Keep reading

I’m an Israeli professor. Why is my work in Harvard’s antisemitism report?

When I first saw the Harvard report on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias, I didn’t expect to find myself in it. But I did, albeit without my name, my scholarship, or even my identity as a Jewish Israeli academic being acknowledged.

The report was compiled and published in response to widespread pressure from donors and pro-Israel advocacy groups. It claims to document a crisis of antisemitism on campus. But what it actually reveals is Harvard’s willingness to redefine Jewish identity in narrow, ideological terms: to exclude and erase Jews who dissent from Zionism.

I know this because I am one of them. For several years, I taught in the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative (RCPI) at Harvard Divinity School. Our program approached peacebuilding through deep engagement with histories of structural violence and power, with Palestine/Israel as our central case study. Our students read widely, traveled to the region, and met with a range of voices – including Jewish Israeli veterans from Breaking the Silence, Palestinian artists resisting cultural erasure, and Mizrahi and Ethiopian Jewish activists challenging racism within Israeli society.

It was, by design, intellectually and politically challenging. It exposed students to the complexity of the region and the diverse, often conflicting, ways Jews and Palestinians narrate their pasts and imagine their futures.

But according to the authors of Harvard’s report, this was not legitimate scholarship nor responsible pedagogy; it was, essentially, simply antisemitic ideological indoctrination.

How the report supposedly arrives at and justifies such characterizations of our program illustrates how slanderous distortions are routinely deployed to suppress the arguments and identities of ‘the wrong kind’ of Jews. The report quotes from public events we hosted as part of RCPI, including a webinar on my book about American Jewish activists who engage in Palestinian solidarity work because of—not in spite of—their Jewish identity. Rabbi Brant Rosen, a Reconstructionist rabbi and founder of Tzedek Chicago, and Dr Sara Roy, a distinguished scholar of Palestine and daughter of Holocaust survivors, offered thoughtful responses.

Yet the report reduced that event to a vague description of “one speaker” praising “Jewish pro-Palestinian activists,” ignoring that the speaker was me—a Jewish Israeli professor—and that my interlocutors were also Jewish. Rosen’s reflections on his disillusionment with Zionism were dismissed as a “conversion narrative,” as if spiritual or ethical evolution were evidence of antisemitism.

In another webinar I moderated, Rosen and the Jewish scholar Daniel Boyarin debated the place of Zionism in synagogue liturgy. Boyarin disagreed with Rosen’s liturgical revisions but affirmed their shared ethical commitments. The report cherry-picked Boyarin’s comment—“I am deeply in sympathy with your political and ethical positions”—to suggest the event lacked “viewpoint diversity.” The irony is hard to miss: a conversation between three Jews, from very different traditions, becomes evidence not of diversity, but of its absence.

Keep reading

Trump Administration’s DOGE Cancels University’s Contract To Monitor Marijuana Potency

The Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is touting the cancellation of another marijuana-related federal grant—this time targeting a program that’s long tracked cannabis potency levels in seized illicit products.

The contract has historically been awarded to the University of Mississippi, which for decades was the sole federally authorized cultivator of marijuana for research purposes. But it’s also received funding through the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) to monitor cannabinoid content such as THC and CBD in confiscated cannabis.

That contract has now been ended as part of DOGE’s mission to make significant government spending cuts.

“In the last two days, agencies terminated 148 wasteful contracts with a ceiling value of $420M and savings of $198M, including a $143K HHS contract for the ‘potency monitoring of confiscated marijuana samples,’” DOGE said in an X post on Monday.

Keep reading