Tag: universities

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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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