Tag: universities

University of Kansas prof placed on leave after telling students men who won’t vote for a woman pres should be ‘lined up’ and ‘shot’

A professor at the University of Kansas has been put on administrative leave after telling students during a recent lecture that men who do not vote for a female president should be lined up and shot. The comments were made by Professor Phil Lowcock, the director of international student-athlete support who works in the university’s Health Sport and Exercise Sciences department, according to KU’s faculty directory.

A video of the incident posted to social media has since gone viral. In the clip, Lowcock can be heard telling his students, “There are going to be some males in our society that will refuse to vote for a potential female president because they don’t think females are smart enough to be president.”

“We can line all those guys up and shoot them,” he continued. “They clearly don’t understand the way the world works.”

He then said in a sarcastic tone, “Did I say that? Scratch that from the recording. I don’t want the deans hearing that I said that.”

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Columbia Law School Told Professors to Call Campus Police on Student Protesters

Administrators at Columbia University braced themselves over the weekend for planned citywide walkouts marking the one-year anniversary of the October 7 attacks in Israel and the start of the war on Gaza. In an email Sunday evening, a Columbia Law school administrator told professors to call campus security officers on protesters who did not heed requests to stop any disruptions in classrooms.    

The administrator’s email instructed professors to give two warnings to “students or others who violate the Rules of University Conduct.” Afterward, professors and teaching assistants were told to call the campus Public Safety department if the students “involved in the disruption refuse to stop despite your request they do so” and “there is no immediate safety concern,” according to the email, which was obtained by The Intercept. The email referred to the instructions as “highly practical tips for addressing and de-escalating classroom disruptions.”

The email also instructed professors to call 911 “if the disruptive behavior is so severe that it poses an immediate threat to your safety or the safety of others.” Campus security officers are unarmed.

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The military showers universities with hundreds of millions of dollars

The divestment campaigns launched last spring by students protesting Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza brought the issue of the militarization of American higher education back into the spotlight.

Of course, financial ties between the Pentagon and American universities are nothing new. As Stuart Leslie has pointed out in his seminal book on the topic, The Cold War and American Science, “In the decade following World War II, the Department of Defense (DOD) became the biggest patron of American science.” Admittedly, as civilian institutions like the National Institutes of Health grew larger, the Pentagon’s share of federal research and development did decline, but it still remained a source of billions of dollars in funding for university research.

And now, Pentagon-funded research is once again on the rise, driven by the DOD’s recent focus on developing new technologies like weapons driven by artificial intelligence (AI). Combine that with an intensifying drive to recruit engineering graduates and the forging of partnerships between professors and weapons firms and you have a situation in which many talented technical types could spend their entire careers serving the needs of the warfare state. The only way to head off such a Brave New World would be greater public pushback against the military conquest (so to speak) of America’s research and security agendas, in part through resistance by scientists and engineers whose skills are so essential to building the next generation of high-tech weaponry.

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The Militarization of Higher Education

The divestment campaigns launched last spring by students protesting Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza brought the issue of the militarization of American higher education back into the spotlight.

Of course, financial ties between the Pentagon and American universities are nothing new. As Stuart Leslie has pointed out in his seminal book on the topic, “The Cold War and American Science,” “In the decade following World War II, the Department of Defense (DOD) became the biggest patron of American science.” Admittedly, as civilian institutions like the National Institutes of Health grew larger, the Pentagon’s share of federal research and development did decline, but it remained a source of billions of dollars in funding for university research.

And now, Pentagon-funded research is once again on the rise, driven by the DOD’s recent focus on developing new technologies like weapons driven by artificial intelligence. Combine that with an intensifying drive to recruit engineering graduates and the forging of partnerships between professors and weapons firms and you have a situation in which many talented technical types could spend their entire careers serving the needs of the warfare state. The only way to head off such a Brave New World would be greater public pushback against the military conquest (so to speak) of America’s research and security agendas, in part through resistance by scientists and engineers whose skills are so essential to building the next generation of high-tech weaponry.

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Meet the First Tenured Professor to Be Fired for Pro-Palestine Speech

Maura Finkelstein never hid her support for Palestinian liberation during her nine years working as a professor of anthropology at Muhlenberg College, a small liberal arts school in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

“I have always had an ethical practice of making sure that I include Palestine in my teaching,” Finkelstein told me. “It was never outside the bounds of what I do.”

For Finkelstein, who is Jewish, this was not always easy. More than 30 percent of Muhlenberg’s 2,200 students are Jewish, many of them vocal supporters of Israel.

Neither her longtime public support of Palestinians, however, nor the courses on Palestine she taught in her early years at the school prevented Finkelstein from earning tenure in 2021. Following the arduous tenure process, professors are supposed to enjoy lifetime job security and robust safeguards of academic freedom. The bar for dismissal from a tenured academic position is by design meant to be extremely high, requiring justifiable cause.

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Homogenous: The Political Affiliations of Elite Liberal Arts College Faculty

In this article I offer new evidence about something readers of Academic Questions already know: The political registration of full-time, Ph.D.-holding professors in top-tier liberal arts colleges is overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, faculty political affiliations at 39 percent of the colleges in my sample are Republican free—having zero Republicans. The political registration in most of the remaining 61 percent, with a few important exceptions, is slightly more than zero percent but nevertheless absurdly skewed against Republican affiliation and in favor of Democratic affiliation. Thus, 78.2 percent of the academic departments in my sample have either zero Republicans, or so few as to make no difference.

My sample of 8,688 tenure track, Ph.D.–holding professors from fifty-one of the sixty-six top ranked liberal arts colleges in the U.S. News 2017 report consists of 5,197, or 59.8 percent, who are registered either Republican or Democrat. The mean Democratic-to-Republican ratio (D:R) across the sample is 10.4:1, but because of an anomaly in the definition of what constitutes a liberal arts college in the U.S. News survey, I include two military colleges, West Point and Annapolis.1 If these are excluded, the D:R ratio is a whopping 12.7:1.

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Policy Shifts Against The mRNA Platform Rapidly Emerged This Past Week

This week a nurse reached out with disturbing descriptions of some major changes she has witnessed inside the Ohio State University Medical Center (OSUMC) system.

OSUMC s a large and comprehensive healthcare organization, with a significant presence in Ohio and a strong focus on research, education, and patient care. It is a massive institution with over 23,000 employees, including:

  • Over 2,000 physicians
  • More than 1,000 residents and fellows
  • Nearly 5,000 nurses

Lets start off with this screenshot of a webpage from OSUMC’s website which provides information to the public as to where they can get Covid-19 vaccines. 

Wait, what? Ohio State is suddenly no longer offering the Covid-19 vaccine to any of their employees but they are happily offering to inject them into the public? How can such a policy be justified? Why was this change in policy done and why was it done so quietly?

Let’s get this straight. Ohio State’s leadership is now making an institutional decision that employees should not be offerred access to any Covid-19 mRNA vaccine. I am (pretending to be) confused. I mean, if the vaccines could protect patients from being infected by staff members and they were safe to give to staff members, why wouldn’t you do everything possible (like a mandate) to ensure they receive them?

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University of California Rolls Out New Free Speech Policies To Curtail Pro-Palestine Protests on Campus

The term ‘Orwellian’ is rapidly losing its gravitas with how often we make recourse to it in trying to explain global society’s piecemeal tumble into neofascism (same as the old fascism), but a recent batch of policy changes at the University of California, Los Angeles, rolling out this fall in retaliation for students and faculty’s pro-Palestine, anti-genocide protests last spring, truly deserves the epithet.

Reeling in the wake of frequent anti-genocide protests, rallies, and marches last year, the occupation of Royce Quad by a pro-Palestine student encampment in April, and three major graduate student strikes since 2019 (this one, which was at UC Santa Cruz but threatened credibly to spread to UCLA, this one, and the most recent one), UCLA administration is scrambling to enact new campus-wide policies aimed at preventing student movements, activism, protests, and other forms of free expression and free association from taking place on campus, which is public land owned by the State of California.

The most desperate change takes the form of sweeping updates to the (also Orwellian-sounding) Time, Place, and Manner Policies, reported on today by the student paper, the Daily Bruin. Under the new regulations, campus administration redefines “​​publicly accessible spaces” (on a publicly-owned campus on public land with no gates or physical barriers to entry from the street) to include just two locations: a thin strip of walkway known as Bruinwalk, colloquially known by some as “the gauntlet” of leafletters, solicitors, canvassers, and undergraduate clubs seeking to boost their membership; and the area outside Murphy Hall, the main administrative building on campus. According to Daily Bruin, “Separate rules exist for events that receive administration approval 10 days in advance,” such as marches, rallies, and using a megaphone. Other heinous acts that students are no longer allowed to commit include ordering food delivery between midnight and 6a.m., walking outside during the same timeframe, and refusing to identify oneself to campus staff.

Next, a new, ironically stupid “Workplace Violence Prevention Plan” that is to be imposed on all campus employees this fall could have been in the works since before the pro-Palestine spring uprising, but the timing of its release is at best pure bureaucratic tone deafness and at worst another mechanism designed to clamp down on freedom of speech and association on campus. This is especially true because in the legal code to which it refers, ‘violence’ is defined broadly to include threats that result in ‘psychological trauma’. No matter what the boomers say, mental trauma is a genuine form of harm, so there is no issue there. The problem here, as with many of the University of California’s reactionary new policies, lies in the potential for – the likelihood of – selective enforcement. Furthermore, the concept of psychological harm was weaponized by Zionist counterprotesters last spring, led by their on-campus posterboy, who actively antagonized peaceful anti-genocide protesters and then was quoted in this Times of Israel article saying the encampment made him feel ‘not safe’.

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Academic Freedom Around the World Declining for First Time Since WWII

The halls of academia have long been regarded as bastions of free thought and scientific inquiry. However, a recent study paints a concerning picture of dwindling academic freedom worldwide. This shift, occurring for the first time since World War II, threatens to undermine global innovation at a time when creative solutions may be needed more than ever.

The research, conducted by a team of international researchers, reveals that after decades of steady improvement, global academic freedom has begun to decline over the past decade. This shift represents the first significant downturn since World War II and raises serious concerns about the future of innovation and scientific advancement.

Academic freedom, the right of scholars to pursue research, teach, and express ideas without undue interference, has long been considered a cornerstone of scientific progress. However, its importance to innovation has never been quantitatively measured on a global scale until now. The study’s findings not only confirm the crucial role of academic freedom in driving innovation but also sound a warning about the potential consequences of its current decline.

To investigate this relationship, the researchers analyzed data from 157 countries over a 115-year period, from 1900 to 2015. They used the Academic Freedom Index (AFI) to measure the level of academic freedom in each country and compared it to innovation output, measured by the number of patent applications and citations.

The results, published in PLOS One, were striking. Countries with higher levels of academic freedom consistently produced more patents and received more citations on those patents. Specifically, when a country’s academic freedom increased by one standard deviation, the number of patent applications rose by 41% two years later, and the number of citations increased by 29% five years later.

However, the most alarming finding was the recent downward trend in academic freedom. After steadily increasing from the 1940s to the 2010s, global academic freedom began to decline in the last decade. This reversal was observed not only globally but also among the 25 leading countries in science.

Based on the study’s findings, the researchers project that the recent decrease in academic freedom could lead to a substantial reduction in innovation output in the coming years. This could manifest as fewer new patents and a decrease in impactful research, potentially slowing technological progress and economic growth.

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Rutgers Prof Who Said She Hoped Trump Shooting Would “Inspire Others” Will Teach This Fall

The Rutgers University professor who was under an internal review after posts she made on Facebook following the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, writing “Let’s hope today’s events inspire others” will teach this coming fall.

A source provided Campus Reform with screenshots of the Facebook posts, which were made by Rutgers University Writing Program Assistant Teaching Professor Tracy Budd in the hours after someone tried to assassinate Trump during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

”Let’s hope today’s events inspire others,” Budd said in one post.

”They shot his wig. Sad,” Budd wrote in another.

Rutgers spokeswoman Megan Schumann told NJ.com that Budd is scheduled to teach in the upcoming fall semester.

Previously, a Rutgers spokesperson told the New York Post that Budd was the subject of an internal review.

“Rutgers University-New Brunswick condemns calls for violence in the strongest possible terms and remains committed to upholding the principles of civil discourse,” the university said.

“The university is reviewing this matter and assures that any appropriate actions will be taken based on our policies.”

“As students, faculty and staff return to campus next month, the university will be communicating the importance of civility in these challenging times,” the school added.

According to the New York Post, Budd makes over $72,000 at Rutgers.

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