Tag: universities

University of Cincinnati has removed the TPUSA chapter from campus suddenly with no explanation

University of Cincinnati removes TPUSA chapter from campus suddenly with no explanation

Controversy is once again shaking the American university system. This time, the University of Cincinnati has abruptly removed the student chapter of Turning Point USA (TPUSA) from its campus, offering no official explanation. The decision has sparked outrage among conservative students, who argue this is nothing more than ideological retaliation against those who dare to think differently in an environment dominated by progressive policies.

The chapter’s president confirmed that they received an email notifying them of their immediate removal as an officially recognized student organization. But the blow didn’t stop there: in addition to losing their status on campus, the students are now being forced to pay for the rental of spaces they had already reserved for future events. A double penalty that, according to TPUSA members, illustrates the systematic hostility they face as conservatives within academia.

Being a conservative student at a public university is already difficult, but decisions like this make the situation unbearable. TPUSA members say every step they take is hindered by bureaucracy, ideological pressure, and now financial punishment. The message they receive is clear: conservative ideas are not welcome.

This is not the first time the University of Cincinnati has faced accusations of censorship and retaliation. Just a few years ago, a student was formally charged for using the term “biological woman” in a mandatory Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) course. For many, that case set a dangerous precedent that is now being repeated with the suppression of TPUSA’s chapter.

The decision has sparked criticism beyond the campus. National conservative voices warn that similar cases are multiplying across the country, as universities push a cancel culture that punishes those who defend principles like free speech, personal responsibility, and traditional values. According to these critics, the academic left seeks to mold students into a single line of thought while eliminating any real space for debate.

What troubles students most is the lack of transparency. No clear reason has been given for the removal, and no appeals process has been offered. For the affected students, this is an abuse of institutional power and clear evidence of political bias at the university. On top of that, imposing extra costs for pre-reserved spaces amounts to financial punishment against a group that had followed all the rules.

Keep reading

Fired women’s coach saw male player ‘wink’ at opponent after endangering female teammate: lawsuit

San Jose State University committed employment and sex discrimination and retaliation by firing women’s volleyball associate head coach Melissa Batie-Smoose for exposing a secretly recruited male on the team, according to a new lawsuit by the Child and Parental Rights Campaign on her behalf against the California State University system.

“Punishing coaches for raising concerns about the fairness and integrity of women’s sports not only harms the individual advocate but also undermines the enforcement of Title IX’s mandate and has a chilling effect on those who seek to protect sex equality in collegiate athletics,” the suit says.

Batie-Smoose was suspended, then fired “not based on her job performance” – the suit includes her Feb. 28, 2024, reappointment letter – but “in direct retaliation for her opposition to sex discrimination and her advocacy for the fairness and equal access to programs, services, and activities for female athletes.”

She has “suffered and continues to suffer lost wages, loss of professional reputation and opportunities, emotional distress, and other damages,” and seeks reinstatement, back pay, compensatory and punitive damages.

Batie-Smoose also wants an injunction against CSU to stop future, possible Title VII and Title IX violations and implement policies, training and monitoring to “protect advocacy for the statutory rights of female athletes” and prevent retaliation against employees for raising concerns about sex-based discrimination.

The university declined to comment other than acknowledging the lawsuit.

It’s been a long and winding journey for the ex-coach, whose home was shot at days before she spoke at a state Capitol rally in February for legislation pitched as protecting girls, women and parental rights, shortly after her firing. CPRC’s Vernadette Broyles told Just the News at the time “the wheels are spinning rapidly in this process” of litigation preparation.

Keep reading

Catholic university tells employees to add preferred pronouns to email signatures

A private Catholic institution in Wisconsin has told its employees to add their preferred pronouns to their email signatures, according to an internal memo obtained by The College Fix.

Viterbo University in La Crosse, Wisc., recently sent an email to its employees announcing “a few small but important changes” to its email signature guidelines “to improve consistency, professionalism, and alignment with our updated university brand.”

The guidelines include telling employees not to include image files in email signatures, noting they can not only cause many technical issues but also that “most image files are not correctly labeled to meet ADA compliance requirements.”

The email, which used the subject line “ACTION REQUESTED: Updating email signatures and profile photos,” also asked employees to upload a professional photo to their profile or use a Viterbo logo for hospitality and branding purposes.

The Sept. 2 memo, sent by Viterbo’s Vice President for Marketing, Communications, and Enrollment, Erin Edlund, also gave employees an email signature template to follow that asked them to use either the Helvetica or Georgia font and included a prompt for pronouns.

Keep reading

Left-wing gun group posts flyers in D.C. with same anti-fascist message from Kirk assassination

A left-wing gun club plastered recruitment flyers around Georgetown University that include the message “Hey Fascist! Catch!” — the same phrase written on ammunition linked to the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

The message was found on dark red flyers from the John Brown Gun Club, a gun-rights group that was founded to militarize the white working class and spur it toward a social-justice revolution.

“The only political group that celebrates when Nazis die,” the club flyer says, which includes a QR code that links to a web page that says, “We’re building a community that’s done with ceremonial resistance and strongly worded letters. If you want to make a real change in your community, let us know below.”

Georgetown University said the flyers had been removed.

“The university is investigating this incident and working to ensure the safety of our community,” the school said.

John Brown Gun Club members can sometimes be spotted carrying firearms at liberal oriented events. They say they provide security against conservative counter-protesters.

Recently, the group has been involved in violent clashes with federal ICE officers who are attempting to arrest illegal immigrants.

Keep reading

Syracuse students accused of hate crime after pork was thrown into Jewish frat house

Two Syracuse University students have been charged with burglary as a hate crime after one of them was alleged to have thrown a bag of pork into a Jewish fraternity house as people gathered to observe Rosh Hashanah, police said Wednesday.

The two 18-year-olds were also charged with one count each of criminal nuisance in the incident at the Zeta Beta Tau house about 5:45 p.m. Tuesday, police in Syracuse, New York, said.

Allen Groves, the university’s chief student experience officer, called it a “deeply troubling incident” in a message to the campus community Tuesday night.

“Tonight’s incident as reported to us is abhorrent, shocking to the conscience and violates our core value of being a place that is truly welcoming to all,” he said. “It will not be tolerated at Syracuse University.”

One of the accused students entered the frat house and threw the bag of pork inside while the second drove the vehicle that they then used to flee, Groves said. Police arrested both soon afterward, he said.

Police said the two students were detained and charged after consultation with the Onondaga County District Attorney’s Office.

Keep reading

Clinton Judge Orders Reinstatement of University of South Dakota Professor Suspended For Celebrating Assassination of Charlie Kirk and Calling Him a “Nazi”

A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the reinstatement of a University of South Dakota professor who was suspended for celebrating the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Shortly after Charlie Kirk was assassinated during an event at Utah Valley University earlier this month, Phillip Michael Hook took to social media to celebrate the murder.

Hook also called Charlie Kirk, a Christian husband and father who spread the Gospel on college campuses across the country, a “hate spreading Nazi.”

“Okay. I don’t give a flying f*ck about this Kirk person. Apparently he was a hate spreading Nazi. I wasn’t paying close enough attention to the idiotic right fringe to even know who he was. I’m sorry for his family that he was a hate spreading Nazi and got killed. I’m sure they deserved better. Maybe good people could now enter their lives. But geez, where was all this concern when the politicians in Minnesota were shot? And the school shootings? And Capitol Police? I have no thoughts or prayers for this hate spreading Nazi. A shrug, maybe,” Phillip Hook wrote.

In a follow-up social media post, Hook wrote: “Apparently my frustration with the sudden onslaught of coverage concerning a guy shot today led to a post I mow [sic] regret posting. I’m sure many folks fully understood my premise but the simple fact that some were offended, led me to remove the post. I extend this public apology to those who were offended. Om Shanti.”

Keep reading

Report: Club Flyer Celebrating Charlie Kirk’s Assassination Found At Georgetown University Campus

club flyer reportedly posted at Georgetown University celebrates the assassination of Charlie Kirk and invites individuals to join its threatening efforts to forgo “ceremonial resistance and strongly worded letters.”

On Wednesday, The Charlie Kirk Show executive producer Andrew Kolvet posted a photograph of what appears to be a flyer from the John Brown Club on a bulletin board at the Washington, D.C.-based university. The sign reads, “Hey, Fascist! Catch! The only political group that celebrates when Nazis die.”

The phrase “Hey, Fascist! Catch!” is a reference to an engraving on one of the bullet casings that Kirk’s alleged killer had planned to use in his attack on the conservative thinker during his Sept. 10 speaking event at Utah Valley University. As witnessed throughout the past several years, left-wing propagandists have often used such harmful smears (“Nazis” and “fascists”) against mainstream conservatives for the purpose of incitement to violence.

Also included on the flyer is a QR code, which, when scanned, takes users to a Google Forms page with a note that reads, “We’re building a community that’s done with ceremonial resistance and strongly worded letters. If you want to make a real change in your community, let us now [sic] below.”

Keep reading

Large-scale syllabi study finds professors only teach left-wing side of controversial issues

Contentious topics are often taught in college classrooms from a uniformly one-sided perspective, according to newly published research that used the Open Syllabus Project, which hosts over 27 million syllabi, to develop its findings. 

The research focused on three topics — “racial bias in the American criminal justice system, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the ethics of abortion”  — to determine how controversial issues are presented.

The research primarily looked at assigned reading materials to conclude that “professors generally insulate their students from the wider intellectual disagreement that shape these important controversies.”

“Personally, I thought we’d find some imbalance, some activist teaching,” co-author Jon  Shields, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, told The College Fix. “I just didn’t expect it to be the norm in the cases we studied. That was genuinely surprising to me.”

The 66-page working paper, “Closed Classrooms? An Analysis of College Syllabi on Contentious Issues,” was also co-authored by Claremont McKenna College Professor of Government Stephanie Muravchik and Scripps College Professor of Philosophy Yuval Avnur.

“We were concerned about the health of liberal education, especially in an age when our democracy needs it so desperately,” Shields said. “One way liberal education supports democracy is by shaping the next generation of citizens. And citizens need to acquire both a fluency with the issues that shape our public life as well as an ability to critically assess them.”

“So, we wondered: How well are we in the university fulfilling this fundamental mission?”

The trio looked at how prominent works pertaining to select issues are taught alongside equally influential or authoritative works that present opposing views. Turns out, not often.

And that’s a problem, the scholars wrote.

“[S]tudents need to acquire some fluency in the intellectual controversies that shape our nation and world,” they wrote. “If all we expose them to are disagreements within cramped intellectual spaces, then we are not preparing them to think seriously about contentious public issues, much less exercise power over them one day.”

‘Distorted sense of social reality’

The Open Syllabus Project contains 27 million syllabi scraped from the websites of universities, mostly located in English-speaking countries. 

According to the research, influential works such as Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” and Edward Said’s “Orientalism” are taught more often than John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.”

The former argues the American criminal justice system perpetuates racial oppression. The latter is highly critical of Israel. Yet neither, the scholars found, are regularly presented with critics of those works. Instead, such works, they noted, are generally assigned with “fellow travelers.”

Conversely, they also found, when critics of Alexander’s or Said’s works are taught, they are typically taught in addition to the more left-leaning works of Alexander and Said, indicating that there does not appear to be a comparable bias by presumably more right-leaning scholars when assigning texts.

With regard to the issue of abortion, the scholars found that although a similar left-leaning bias was present, it was considerably less prominent than that which was identified for classes dealing with the other two issues.

Nonetheless, the scholars argued that their work still reveals a strong bias in the materials selected to introduce students to important controversies in our society and that this has serious implications. 

Students, they wrote, are not being prepared “to think seriously about contentious public issues, much less exercise power over them one day” or acquiring “the civic skills they will need to become citizens in a pluralistic nation.”

Additionally, the scholars noted, “insofar as we’re educating tomorrow’s leaders, they probably won’t lead us anywhere we want to go if they have a distorted sense of social reality.”

Universities should be cultivating “intellectual virtues, like curiosity, critical thinking skills, and intellectual humility,” they stated.  Yet, instead, they noted, universities are cultivating adherence to orthodoxy and presenting false intellectual consensuses.

Looking forward, the trio wrote in their report, “universities must recommit themselves to teaching our disagreements.” 

Keep reading

‘Sounding bodies:’ NEH spends $12,600 on professor’s ‘musical erotics’ book

The National Endowment for the Humanities underwrote a digital access book about sexuality in Victorian literature by a Siena College Professor.

The State University of New York received $6,600 to create an open access edition of Professor Shannon Draucker’s book, titled “Sounding Bodies: Acoustical Science and Musical Erotics in Victorian Literature.” The NEH’s Open Book Program “supports the conversion of recently published books funded by NEH into eBooks that are freely available online.” 

This is on the top of the $6,000 Draucker herself previously received for the book.

The book compares listening to music to orgasms, according to an NEH description.

“Can the concert hall be as erotic as the bedroom? Many Victorian writers believed so,” the description states.

The book reports how 19th-century “acoustical scientists” “described music as a set of physical vibrations that tickled the ear, excited the nerves, and precipitated muscular convulsions.”

“In turn, writers—from canonical figures such as George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, to New Women novelists like Sarah Grand and Bertha Thomas, to anonymous authors of underground pornography—depicted bodily sensations and experiences in unusually explicit ways,” the book states.

The Fix reached out to Draucker and asked via email if she believed she may have a harder time receiving grants from the NEH under the Trump Administration. She did not respond to emails and phone calls in the past month and a half.

The Fix also emailed Rebecca Colesworthy, the recipient of the open access grant, and asked what the money goes to and if she had any concerns about the funds being taken back by the Trump administration. She did not respond to an email on Sept. 19.

Keep reading

Texas A&M University President Resigns After Radical Gender Ideology Pushed in Classroom

Texas A&M University President Mark Welsh has resigned amid fallout over a viral classroom video that resulted in a professor kicking a student out of class after an argument about gender identity.

Chancellor Glenn Hegar and the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents announced that University President Mark Welsh will step down from his role on Friday.

Welsh’s resignation arrives at the heels of Texas A&M removing two officials after a student and professor were heard arguing about radical gender ideology in a viral video, which ended with the student getting kicked out of the classroom by the professor.

“WE DID IT! TEXAS A&M PRESIDENT IS OUT!” Texas State Rep. Brian Harrison (R-District 10) said in a Thursday X post. “Another MASSIVE victory for the LIBERTY BOTS against the Austin Swamp Rats!”

Keep reading