Tag: universities

UC Berkeley Math Professor Makes a Startling Revelation About Her Students as She Blasts School’s Woke Admissions Policy, Which an Obama Admin. Official Implemented

One of the nation’s supposedly most rigorous colleges is completely infested with unqualified students, forcing a calculus teacher to come forward with a stunning revelation.

Zvezdelina Stankova, a professor of mathematics at UC Berkeley, wrote a damning op-ed in the San Francisco Standard last week excoriating the university’s woke admissions standards, which Then-President Janet Napolitano implemented.

Back in 2020, Napolitano, who served as Homeland Security Secretary under former President Barack Obama, overruled a task force that urged the school to phase out the SAT and ACT.

She argued that doing so was proper due to pandemic disruptions and ‘equity’ concerns.

The Regents voted later that year to make testing optional. Then, a court ruling focused on access for students with disabilities required UC to become test-blind through 2025.

Due to this policy, Stankova noted that because the kids are so far behind on mathematics, she has to spend her time teaching middle-school math to them.

Not high school. Middle school.

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They’re Getting Revenge, Starting Today…

I absolutely insist to you: I really am trying to stop writing about this topic. But too much insanity keeps breaking out, and I have no choice but to comment on it.

You know the story: a Cambridge academic, Jason Arday, was found to have plagiarized his dissertation, borrowed heavily from others in his published articles, produced essentially worthless research, called the police on a reporter and on a professor who asked questions about his resume, invented wild tales of athletic and academic achievement as well as philanthropic work, and (of course) accused his critics of “racism.” And then, late last week, he was found dead at his home in an apparent suicide.

That would have been it, but the left – instead of the embarrassment it should feel at having promoted the greatest academic charlatan of the past ten years (and that’s saying something) – is trying to play the victim here: mean right-wingers in the media shouldn’t have pushed so hard on the Arday story.

This is coming from people who call their enemies Nazis 24 hours a day without thinking there might be a problem with that.

Anyway, here’s the latest: the university that employs Nathan Cofnas, the academic who first broke the story about Jason Arday’s plagiarism and worthless “research,” is now being investigated by his own university for breaking the story.

Just when you think academia can’t be a bigger joke, it always finds some way to outdo itself.

Ghent University rector Petra de Sutter, former leader of the Green Party, issued a statement to the effect that while Ghent attaches “great importance to academic freedom and to open academic debate, even when views are controversial,” it wants the world to know that of course it doesn’t really mean that:

“That freedom is not unlimited. It goes hand in hand with responsibility and may be restricted in order to protect the rights of others.

“For this reason, the university takes the recent public statements made by a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University regarding this matter very seriously. Ghent University has decided to take appropriate action within its powers and the applicable framework.”

Well, we just found out what that means.

They just suspended Nathan Cofnas, and he will almost surely be fired.

Cofnas wrote the original report on Jason Arday that forced academia to take notice. What he found was too embarrassing not to elicit a response. And his point is: Arday is not an isolated case. For that he cannot be forgiven.

As Cofnas put it on August 11:

In 2023, the Guardian itself (!) published a breathless article titled “Jason Arday: he learned to talk at 11 and read at 18 – then became Cambridge’s youngest Black professor.”

More than a dozen academic journals gave the imprimatur of “peer review” to Arday’s plagiarized wokebabble.

The prestigious New York publisher Simon & Schuster is still going ahead with his memoirs.

Now the Guardian wants us to think this is just about “one academic and his bosses at Cambridge”?

There are thousands of Jason Ardays in universities all over the Western world. The only thing special about Arday is that he took the plagiarism and lies about his personal life too far, so there was a hook for a news story. But even that wasn’t enough to get him removed from academia. Until last Wednesday Cambridge was still smearing his critics as waging a “vile campaign.” He crossed the line not by being an incompetent fraud, but by claiming prestigious affiliations that he didn’t have, creating conflict between Cambridge and other universities.

“DEI” means achieving representation by doing away with elementary standards for certain people based on race. Just take a look at the content of “peer-reviewed” journals like Whiteness in Education and Educational Philosophy and Theory. The other papers in these journals are just like those written by Arday—someone who is now widely recognized to be mentally disabled.

The people trying to write this off as a fluke or an isolated case of “research misconduct” are at best delusional. The ideology of elite institutions is DEI, and DEI is Jason Arday.

This was the most embarrassing academic episode of my lifetime. Everyone just witnessed a clear-cut case of academic fraud, a man who literally called the police on people who questioned his resume, and the overwhelming response from academia was to scream “racism” and sign a petition in his defense.

After they did that, the really embarrassing stuff came out, and they persisted.

So the mask is off, in case there’s still anyone out there who didn’t know what was behind it. The whole edifice of academia nowadays is held together with Scotch tape and piano wire, and slogans.

The institutions will survive as shells of their former selves, but what was once inside will disappear. Adrian Vermeule, the one sane person at Harvard Law School, just wrote: “The elite universities are of course going to survive. They’ve been around forever and will continue on in some form. What will not survive, however, is a certain idea of the scholarly mission and life. It died of its own weakness, an inability to resist invading barbarians.”

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Insanity: Amherst Professor’s Book Argues Asian American Success Is Tied To “White Supremacy”

In the latest example of leftist race-baiting professor bias Campus Reform is reporting “An Amherst College professor’s forthcoming book will argue that the same conditions that allow Asian Americans to prosper also lead to “xenophobic attacks” against them.”

The absurd book is titled “Success Won’t Save Us: How Asian Americans Can Fight White Supremacy”.

Among the radical and race-baiting claims this professor makes is “in the United States: they are both celebrated for their achievements and subjected to racialized violence.”

Another race-baiting and unfair claim this Amherst professor makes is “Asian American experience must be understood within a system of white supremacy and racial capitalism.”

This whole divisive and Marxist rhetoric dividing Americans by race and blaming “White Supremacy” for all woes is typical of the average liberal professor.

“Pawan Dhingra, the book’s author, is a professor of U.S. Immigration Studies, the chair of the Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies department, and the Vice President for Equity and Inclusion at Amherst College in Massachusetts. His research interests include “Asian America,” “race/gender/class intersectionality,” “white supremacy,” “sociology of immigration,” “education,” “work,” and “culture.”

The typical leftist professor continues to view America and the world through these lenses and, as such, is guilty of anti-White racism themselves.

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Oregon State Mentors Face Social Justice Criteria After Ending Official DEI Program

Woke has not yet been destroyed in Oregon, where, according to a Campus Reform report, “Oregon State University requires applicants for its 2026–27 Academic Learning Assistant positions to demonstrate an ability to learn “social justice principles and concepts,” even after the university ended two diversity programs.”

In other words, its DEI is just not called by name.

Oregon State wants its Mentors trained in political correctness and Social Justice, even if not called DEI.

“Another residence-life position now makes a commitment to diversity or social-justice education, initiatives, and programs a minimum qualification rather than a preferred one.”

These requirements are absurd and unfair, but that’s come to be expected at this point at left-leaning universities.

“The university’s Academic Learning Assistant page says the live-in mentors serve one per residential community and work an average of 15 hours per week. Applicants must hold at least a 3.0 GPA. Oregon State also prefers applicants who demonstrate engagement with diversity and social-justice education, initiatives, or programs.”

“Academic Learning Assistants meet individually with residents, hold weekly office hours, conduct hall rounds, and lead two or three academic-success workshops per term. They also contact students experiencing academic difficulty, make referrals, and staff residence-hall front desks.”

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US Academic Who Exposed Plagiarist Jason Arday Is Suspended After Arday Commits Suicide

American academic Nathan Cofnas has been suspended by Belgium’s Ghent University after he helped expose explosive plagiarism allegations involving the late Cambridge professor Jason Arday.

Cofnas announced the suspension on X on Thursday.

“I was just suspended by Ghent University. They will almost certainly fire me,” Cofnas wrote.

“The decision was made by rector Petra De Sutter, a former leader of the Green Party.”

Hours earlier, Cofnas said the university was investigating him for allegedly “discriminating against Arday.”

Ghent University confirmed that Cofnas had been suspended “as a precautionary measure” while officials conduct a preliminary disciplinary investigation.

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After Cambridge Academic Commits Suicide Over Being Exposed as Fraud, Activists Call for ‘Arday’s Law’ to Limit Free Speech and Honest Reporting

The passing of Jason Arday is a tragedy, but it is a tragedy of his own making.

This is true in both a literal sense, in that his death was apparently a suicide, and figuratively, in that the events that drove the former Cambridge sociology professor to suicide were fabulism and fabrication in the service of a career of academic stardom.

He made a Faustian bargain with the truth to achieve academic stardom — one that was so absurd that anyone who bothered to fact-check it would discover it to be a farrago of lies — and could not bring himself to face the consequences of his prevarications when they were brought to light, quite belatedly.

Now that he has killed himself because someone finally reported on his misdoings, some in the United Kingdom want to change the law so that you can’t tell the truth about someone who isn’t telling the truth, or who is doing other things they shouldn’t be doing.

In other words, your free speech should end where a famous person’s feelings might theoretically begin.

A petition on Change.org to enact something called “Arday’s Law” — which would limit the amount of coverage the media could devote to a person over a certain period of time in the United Kingdom — had garnered over 4,300 verified signatures as of Wednesday afternoon.

This comes amid a similar petition from the Good Law Project, which calls for an inquiry into Arday’s death, albeit without proposing concrete limits on speech. However, it does call his death “the direct, foreseeable and foreseen result of press harassment,” which leads to obvious conclusions about what they might want that inquiry to recommend. That petition had 121,649 signatures as of Wednesday afternoon.

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‘Ghoulish’: Harvard paying $53 million for selling ‘heads, faces, brains and hands’ from corpses on black market

A court settlement has been reached in a “ghoulish class-action” lawsuit over the sale of body parts – from bodies donated for medical research – by a former morgue manager at Harvard.

And it has the school paying out $53 million to the families of the deceased.

A report from the New York Post explains a state court judge in Boston has preliminarily approved the deal in the legal action that resulted from the schemes of Cedric Lodge, the disgraced former Harvard morgue manager.

He was arrested back in 2023 and later was sentenced to eight years in prison for stealing and selling organs and body parts of cadavers donated to the school.

“As far back as 2018, Lodge had been stealing body parts — including ‘heads, faces, brains, skin and hands’ — which he’d then bring to his home in New Hampshire and sell with his wife, prosecutors said, shipping them to buyers in Pennsylvania and elsewhere,” the report explained.

His wife, Denise, was given a year in jail for her role.

School officials called Lodge’s actions “despicable abhorrent, and a flagrant betrayal of our values as a medical community.”

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OF COURSE: Abdul El-Sayed’s Half-Sister is a Radical Professor at the University of Chicago Who Allegedly Assaulted a Police Officer

Being a radical, leftist lunatic apparently runs in Abdul El-Sayed’s family. The half-sister of the Michigan senate candidate is a professor at the University of Chicago who has participated in anti-ICE protests and even allegedly assaulted a police officer.

What a charming family they must be. Don’t you want to elevate them to the United States Senate after hearing this?

This is just another warning sign about El-Sayed as a candidate.

FOX News reported:

Controversial socialist Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is facing fresh scrutiny after it was revealed that his close relative is a far-left professor who was arrested on a felony charge last year for her role in an anti-ICE riot.

Eman Abdelhadi is a polarizing figure. She works as an associate professor at the University of Chicago’s Department of Comparative Human Development, and has a years-long history of landing in the national spotlight for radical activism and inflammatory statements.

She’s also El-Sayed’s half sister.

Last fall, as leftist zealots spent months protesting, sometimes violently, outside an ICE detention facility in suburban Chicago, Abdelhadi was booked after allegedly spitting on an Illinois state trooper. She was charged on Oct. 3 with two counts of aggravated battery to a government employee, a Class 3 felony, and two counts of resisting/obstructing peace, a Class A misdemeanor.

A day before her arrest, she appeared on a podcast called “Movement Memos,” which is affiliated with the far-left publication Truthout. During that interview, she recalled her previous experiences at the riots at the Broadview facility.

She seems nice.

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The Decline Of Higher Education Continues

During my second career teaching high school English, I noticed several darkly funny but disturbing trends in “higher” education.  They were fueled by three primary drivers: abandoning merit, the federal government taking over the student loan industry, and DEI hysteria.

It was Barack Obama who federalized the student loan industry, pushing the idea that everyone should go to college.

To make that idea a reality, it was necessary for the government to guarantee student loans.

That had plenty of unfortunate and foreseeable effects. Because Colleges no longer had any financial skin in the game, they went on a mad administrator-hiring binge, which required enormous amounts of money, which required unprecedented numbers of students. 

Combined with a faux-religious devotion to DEI, colleges admitted all manner of people who in past years would have reasonably been found to be poorly suited to do college-level work. To cover this, it was necessary to do away with any sort of predictive testing like the SAT. All that was required for college admission was a student loan, unless one was a white male applying at an Ivy League school. Those guys, regardless of academic qualification, were often denied.

Enormous DEI departments with all manner of administrators and functionaries were established, and hundreds of millions were wasted on DEI gurus imported to inspire them.

So unprepared were so many, colleges were forced to establish remedial high schools on campus. It was a great scam. Full tuition for no credit, and blame students’ lack of ability on high school teachers like me, who could have told them who wasn’t academically capable if anyone had bothered to ask.

Grade inflation was a direct result of these disasters. It was necessary to hide the scams, so professors were required not only to dumb down the content of their classes and to require far less work, but to award unearned grades. An entire generation of college students was conditioned to expect maximum grades for minimum and poor work. And God help any professor who gave a minority student the grade their lack of work deserved.

As a result, innumerable students took 6-7 years to get a 4-year degree at enormous cost, but many simply dropped out without a degree, bearing enormous debt they had no credentials or ability to pay off.

I’m certainly not arguing college should be denied to anyone. I’ve known many people who struggled greatly but managed to earn a degree and were better and more productive people for it. I am arguing for rational decision-making and fiscally sound, ethical colleges.

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Outrage! UMich offers 15-credit LGBT credentials amid grade-covering plan

In the latest manifestation of Woke Inc Campus Reform is reporting “The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor will begin covering first-semester letter grades for first-year students in its College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) in fall 2027, while the college continues to offer 15-credit undergraduate and graduate credentials in LGBTQ studies.”

This is both unfair to other students academically, as well as unfairly and immorally promoting “alternative lifestyles”.

LGBT students should not be given an advantage in academia.

The emphasis in school should be on reading, math, and history, not on left-wing agendas.

“Under the university’s First-Semester Grade Covering Pilot Program, all first-year LSA students will have their first-semester grades displayed on transcripts as pass (P) or no credit (NC). The pilot does not apply to first-year students enrolled in the university’s other colleges.”

This is outrageous and is unfair to students who earn higher scores.

“Dean Rosario Ceballo, who proposed grade covering during her 2025 State of the College address, said the change would encourage students “to try a course in a field they know nothing about” and “to embrace the joy of learning.”

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