Tag: universities

Columbia Journalism Review editor fired after insisting on ethics, deadlines: report

The Columbia Journalism Review fired Sewell Chan as its executive editor after he insisted on ethics, deadlines, and showing up in the office for work, the longtime journalist alleges. A journalism expert told The College Fix that it seems Chan acted appropriately and within his bounds as the executive editor.

Chan, who recently started a new job at the University of Southern California as a senior fellow in its Annenberg communications school, alleges the school fired him after “three pointed conversations.”

Chan (pictured) is the former editor of the Texas Tribune and also worked for the Los Angeles Times and New York Times.

“One was with a fellow who is passionately devoted to the cause of the Gaza protests at Columbia and had covered the recent detention of a Palestinian graduate for an online publication he had just written about, positively, for CJR,” Chan wrote in a LinkedIn post.

“I told him there was a significant ethical problem with writing for an outlet he had just covered,” Chan wrote.

This description fits CJR Journalism Fellow Meghnad Bose, who wrote an article about the Substack page Drop Site News for Columbia Journalism Review in February.

In late March, Bose wrote an article for Drop Site about Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate and Palestinian activist, arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on March 8. The article quotes Khalil’s claim that his arrest was a “direct consequence of exercising [his] right to free speech as [he] advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza.”

Bose did not respond to two emails sent in the past week that asked about the accuracy of Chan’s statements on what happened.

While Chan declined to comment further to The Fix, a journalism professor at DePauw University said, “it would seem [Chan] has a good point in trying to reel in the apparent conflict of interest for the one fellow.”

“This kind of management would be expected from an executive editor who values the reputation of his outlet,” Professor Jeffrey McCall told The Fix via email. McCall regularly writes about journalism ethics and the media.

“Normally, an executive editor has wide leeway in making personnel and content decisions, and it appears Chan was perhaps having his role undercut,” McCall said.

“Conflict of interest policies are essential to any media organization in that they protect both the readers and the reporters, and provide transparency for news decisions,” he said.

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Call to charge gamers who carry out virtual rapes in online metaverse as real-life sex attackers

Gamers who carry out virtual rapes in the ‘metaverse‘ should be charged as real-life sex attackers, a legal expert insists.

Assaults are rife on the digital ‘avatars’ used by women and children in the online world, which, it is claimed, can leave them with trauma similar to real ordeals.

Players wearing virtual reality headsets often use interactive gloves and bodysuits to experience physical touch in the 3D games, meaning they will feel an assault on their avatar.

Professor Clare McGlynn, a law expert at Durham University, branded the metaverse a ‘ticking time bomb’ and warned that the number of sex attacks is set to ‘explode’ in the next few years.

Her paper, published in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, found that a rising toll of ‘meta-rapes’ are going unpunished in the unregulated digital spaces. 

It cites a police investigation after a teenager was ‘gang-raped’, with officers concluding that she suffered the same psychological trauma as a real-life victim.

The case last year, revealed by the Mail, was thought to have been the first time in the UK that police had investigated a virtual sex offence.

Professor McGlynn’s study, with Carlotta Rigotti of Leiden University in the Netherlands, proposes that existing laws should be applied to ‘appropriate cases of meta-rape’.

She said the law covers touching with any part of the body, ‘with anything else and through anything’, adding that it could be interpreted to include touching through an avatar.

‘The metaverse is growing rapidly and we see abuse, sexual violence and hate speech,’ she added. 

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Transportation Secretary Cancels $54 Million in University Grants Tied to DEI, Climate Agenda

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on Friday announced the termination of seven federally funded university research grants totaling $54 million, saying the programs are wasteful and ideologically divisive projects that fall outside the scope of the Department of Transportation’s core mission.

“The previous administration turned the Department of Transportation into the Department of Woke,” Duffy said in a May 2 statement. “I’ve focused the Department on what matters; safety, making travel great again, and building big, beautiful infrastructure projects.”

The grants supported research projects that Duffy said were used to advance a “radical DEI and green agenda” that wasted taxpayer resources and were not aligned with the transportation priorities of Americans.

The seven canceled grants had been awarded to research centers at the University of California–Davis, City College of New York, University of Southern California, New York University, San Jose State University, University of New Orleans, and Johns Hopkins University.

He cited specific examples of what he called ideological misuse of funds, including a $12 million grant to UC Davis for research on “accelerating equitable decarbonization,” a $9 million grant to the City College of New York for studying “equitable transportation for the disadvantaged workforce,” and a $6 million grant to San Jose State University that examined infrastructure and safety issues facing women and gender non-conforming individuals.

“We’re taking out all the racist DEI and green new scam and injecting a dose of reality back into our higher education system,” Duffy said in a video statement.

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More Climate Litigation Silliness From Academia

A recent article published in Nature claims that climate liability lawsuits, such as the ones various U.S. states and municipalities continue to pursue, are on rock-solid legal grounds, thanks to the authors’ new research “proving” that the world would be $28 trillion richer today but for carbon emissions from fossil fuels over a 30-year period, 1991 -2020. Ignoring the emissions from developing countries, notably China, which today accounts for one-third of all energy-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the authors focus instead on oil companies, which they call the “carbon majors” – especially Saudi Aramco, Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, and Gasprom.

For example, according to the authors Chevron has caused an estimated $2 trillion in damages, and perhaps as much as $3.6 trillion. Exxon Mobil is right behind at $1.9 trillion. Similarly, Saudi Aramco and Gazprom are each responsible for $2 trillion in damages. BP is the laggard, at just under $1.5 trillion in damages. Levying fines of those amounts, which greatly exceed these companies’ market values, would lead to their immediate bankruptcy. While the authors may consider such an outcome a “win,” bankrupting these companies would not change the physical and economic realities that the world depends on fossil fuels and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. (Moreover, it is not clear who would levy the fines and who would receive the monies received – other than trial lawyers.)

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UC Berkeley Received Six-Figure Donations From CCP Officials, Records Show

The University of California, Berkeley, received donations from a blacklisted Chinese research university, Chinese Communist Party officials, and a Beijing state-owned chemical company, according to records obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The news comes days after the Trump administration launched an investigation into UC Berkeley for allegedly failing to disclose funding from China, including a $220 million government investment in Berkeley’s joint research institution with Tsinghua University.

Donor records obtained through a California public information request provide new details on Berkeley’s financial relationship with China and foreign government-linked donors.

Section 117 of the Higher Education Act requires that American universities disclose the names and locations of foreign donors to the federal government. For four years, the Biden administration failed to strictly enforce the law and withheld donor names from the American public. As the Free Beacon reported, President Donald Trump signed an executive order last month requiring more thorough disclosures.

The Berkeley records demonstrate that the administration’s more aggressive approach to foreign higher education donations appears likely to reveal unsavory financial backers.

One of the university’s donors is the University of Science and Technology of China, which gave Berkeley $60,000 for its chemistry program in 2023. A year after the donation, the U.S. Department of Commerce added USTC to its sanctions list for “acquiring and attempting to acquire U.S.-origin items in support of advancing China’s quantum technology capabilities, which has serious ramifications for U.S. national security given the military applications of quantum technologies.”

Berkeley also received $336,000 for its “research units” in 2023 from Vincent Cheung Sai Sing, a longtime member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference for Shanghai City, an advisory body to the Chinese Communist Party.

The GS Charity Foundation Limited, the charitable arm of the Glorious Sun Group, gave $160,000 to Berkeley for international studies research in 2023. The Glorious Sun Group’s chairman, Charles Yeung, was also a member of the CCP national people’s committee.

Duane Ziping Kuang, the founding managing partner of China-based venture capital firm Qiming Venture Partners, gave $75,000 to Berkeley’s business school. His firm was an early investor in ByteDance.

Several universities have listed gifts from China-linked donors as coming from other countries, as the Free Beacon has previously reported. Berkeley reported numerous donations from PRC-associated individuals as originating elsewhere.

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Harvard Law Review Awards $65k Fellowship to Student Charged in Assault of Israeli Classmate: Report

The Harvard Law Review is awarding a $65,000 fellowship meant to serve “the public interest” to Ibrahim Bharmal, the Harvard Law School student who faced criminal charges for assaulting an Israeli classmate, according to a new report.

Bharmal is one of this year’s recipients of the Harvard Law Review Fellowship, Ira Stoll of The Editors reported. The program supports “recent Harvard Law School graduates”—Bharmal is set to graduate this month—with “a demonstrated interest in serving the public interest through their work and scholarship.” It comes with a $65,000 stipend that funds each fellow’s work “in a public-interest related role at a government agency or nonprofit organization.” For Bharmal, that work will come at the Council on American-Islamic Relations’s Los Angeles office, according to Stoll.

The move comes at a tumultuous time for both the Harvard Law Review and Harvard Law School. The Trump administration is probing both entities over internal documents, first reported in the Washington Free Beacon, that show editors at Harvard Law Review use race to select both editors and articles for publication. At least one private attorney, former Texas solicitor general Jonathan Mitchell, plans to sue the journal over the practice, ordering its editors on Friday to preserve documents that he plans to subpoena.

The law review claims to be separate from the law school, something a spokesman for Harvard, Jeff Neal, emphasized in a statement to the Free Beacon. The fellowship could undercut those claims. A Free Beacon review found that Harvard’s database for grant and fellowship opportunities, known as CARAT, advertises the fellowship. That advertisement states that a “committee of Harvard Law School and Harvard Law Review alumni in public interest careers chooses finalists from the set of applicants, and a faculty committee interviews the finalists to select fellows,” indicating Harvard faculty members signed off on Bharmal as a recipient.

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President Trump Announces He’s Stripping Harvard’s Tax-Exempt Status After Woke College Defied Five Key Demands From Trump and Sued Instead

One of the nation’s premier colleges is about to learn that defying President Trump is a grave mistake.

This morning, Trump posted on Truth Social that he will be taking away far-left Harvard University’s tax-exempt status after the school refused to comply with five key demands from his administration and sued instead.

“We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status,” Trump wrote. “It’s what they deserve!”

As The New York Post notes, Harvard’s tax exemptions have played a key role in helping the school amass the largest university endowment in the entire country. It currently stands at roughly $53 billion, with $2.4 billion ‘earned’ in the 2024 fiscal year.

As ABC notes, Trump had previously demanded Harvard lose its tax-exempt status after the university refused to comply with the administration’s commonsense demands, including actions on antisemitism and the use of DEI on campus.

The Gateway Pundit previously reported that the Department of Health and Human Services on April 11, along with other federal agencies, issued Harvard a letter demanding five key reforms if it wished to continue receiving federal research funding.

The demands were:

  • Shuttering of all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs;
  • A university-wide “viewpoint audit” to eliminate leftist ideological monocultures;
  • Forced hiring and admissions practices to ensure conservative representation;
  • Defunding and disbanding of radical pro-Hamas student groups;
  • And complete transparency on foreign funding sources.

After Harvard refused, the Trump administration on April 15 froze $2.2 billion</> in federal grants to Harvard due to its coddling of antisemitism and bigotry on campus.

Harvard sued the Trump Administration a week later to restore the funding.

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Capitalism fuels ‘racism,’ is ‘difficult to survive’: Iowa State U. lecture

Capitalism is an “oppressive system” that is “incredibly difficult to survive,” a financial coach said during a recent lecture at Iowa State University.

The “Anti-Capitalism Personal Finance Lecture” featured Leo Aquino, a “non-binary Filipinx writer, journalist, and financial coach” known for “their commitment to uplifting BIPOC and LGBTQ+ stories,” according to the event description.

During the lecture, Aquino advocated for an “anti-capitalist” budgeting approach that encourages people to reframe their relationship with money to prioritize well-being over profit, mainly benefiting queer and trans-identifying individuals.

The speaker defined anti-capitalism as “the belief that financial systems do not need to adhere to capitalist values for us to survive.”

An anti-capitalist personal finance perspective supports workers’ abilities to control their labor and decide how profits are invested. It requires people to redefine their “definition of wealth,” Aquino said.

The speaker encouraged students to stop blaming themselves for their financial situations and start questioning the underlying system.

Aquino defined capitalism as “an economic system where workers are required to sell [their] labor for a wage in order to survive.”

The financial coach said this system prioritizes profits over people while causing burnout, depression, and anxiety. “[Capitalism] is an oppressive system profiting from our lack of financial literacy and interpersonal conflicts around money.”

Further, capitalism “necessitates racism, ableism, homophobia, colonialism, and other forms of oppression to perpetuate conflict.” It “has forced people from marginalized communities to do unrealistic things to survive in an oppressive system,” Aquino said.

The speaker contrasted traditional budgeting, defined as a monthly estimate of income and expenses, with anti-capitalist budgeting, described as a “neutral space for us to practice compassionate data analysis.”

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Education Department Finds University of Pennsylvania Violated Title IX Over Transgender Swimmer

The University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) remains in violation of Title IX regulations lingering from a transgender athlete who won an NCAA women’s swimming title for the school in 2022, and will have 10 days to resolve the issue before the matter is referred to the Department of Justice, federal officials said on April 28.

The announcement was made after the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights sent the notice of noncompliance to UPenn President Larry Jameson.

Jameson was informed that complying with current NCAA regulations and President Donald Trump’s February executive order prohibiting males from competing in women’s sports is not enough to satisfy compliance requirements. As a punitive measure, the federal government is requiring UPenn to relinquish that athlete’s 2022 championship title and issue an apology to the female athletes he defeated.

The Ivy League school is also expected to issue a statement noting that all its athletic programs comply with Title IX.

Title IX is a federal regulation implemented in 1972 that prohibits educational institutions receiving federal funding from engaging in sex discrimination and assures fairness for NCAA women’s sports programs. President Joe Biden, whose administration preceded Trump’s current term, amended it to allow transgender participation in sports, and Trump reversed that under his executive order.

UPenn must also restore to female athletes their rightful records, titles, and honors, “or similar recognition for Division I swimming competitions misappropriated by male athletes competing in female categories.”

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US Universities Don’t Like Unmasking Their Foreign Donors. A New Trump Order Aims To Make Them.

For decades, federal law has required U.S. universities to disclose the sources of large foreign donations to the federal government. But the Biden administration sparsely enforced the law, allowing foreign nationals from adversarial countries to funnel cash to top American schools and stay anonymous.

In some cases, it’s unclear whether the schools themselves are keeping close track of the foreign money they accept. In early February, the Washington Free Beacon filed state records requests with 11 public universities for the identities of foreign donors that gave the schools more than $20,000 in the past two years. Some, like the University of California, Los Angeles and University of Michigan, said it would take months of searching or more than $1,500 in fees to provide an answer.

That won’t fly with President Donald Trump, who last week signed an executive order outlining more robust enforcement of the Higher Education Act of 1965’s foreign donor disclosure requirements. In some cases, it already appears to be spurring action. Another recipient of the Free Beacon‘s records requests, the University of California, Berkeley, for weeks did not respond. On Friday, shortly after Trump signed the order and launched a foreign funding investigation into the school, it sent a list of major foreign donors from 2023 and 2024.

Trump’s order calls on Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to “take appropriate steps to reverse or rescind any actions by the prior administration that permit higher education institutions to maintain improper secrecy regarding their foreign funding,” a reference to the Biden administration’s unusual policies that shielded foreign donors. Historically, the Department of Education disclosed foreign donor names in a public database. During the Biden administration, it stopped publishing names, instead only releasing the countries where each donation came from.

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