Tag: universities

Harvard Study: Half of Adult Americans Eligible for Ozempic-Like Drugs

Glucagon-like peptide receptor agonists (GLP-1 RA) are the current financial rainmakers for BIG PHARMA.

Shi et al from Harvard reported recently in JAMA Cardiology.

Rapidly increasing uptake of semaglutide made it the top-selling drug in the US in 2023, with net sales of $13.8 billion. Quantifying the number of US adults eligible for semaglutide may guide future policies for this high-cost therapy and clarify potential implications for pharmaceutical spending.

The authors conclude that approximately 137 million adults or half the of the US population could have a clinical indication for once weekly GLP-1 RA drugs. This budget breaking conclusion no doubt will have to be addressed by the incoming HHS administration led by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

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Geology is racist as it is ‘linked to white supremacy’ claims Queen Mary University of London professor

A geography professor at a leading British university has described the study of rocks and the natural world as racist and linked the academic field to ‘white supremacy’.

Kathryn Yusoff, who lectures at the prestigious Queen Mary University of London, said that the geology as a subject was ‘riven by systematic racism’ and influenced heavily by colonialism.

The study of prehistoric life through fossils was also branded as an enabler for racism, with the professor referring to the field of palaeontology as ‘pale-ontology’.

Arguing that geology began as a ‘colonial practice’, Professor Yusoff stated in her book ‘Geologic Life’ that the extraction of metals such as gold and iron had created hierarchies, pushed materialism, ravaged environments and was the route cause of climate change.

Claiming that ‘geology continues to function within a white supremacist praxis’, the academic referenced the theft of land, mining and other geological practices as having led to the creation of white supremacy and a resulting ‘geotrauma’.

Professor Yusoff’s new book focuses on geology between the 17th and 19th centuries and puts forward the notion that non-white people have a closer relationship to land than white people.

‘Broadly, black, brown, and indigenous subjects… have an intimacy with the earth that is unknown to the structural position of whiteness,’ she wrote. 

Ms Yusoff is described as a professor of ‘inhuman geography’ on the official Queen Mary University website.

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MIT suspends student and bans magazine for article opposing Gaza genocide

Last Friday, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) issued an immediate “interim” suspension of graduate student Prahlad Iyengar for penning an article titled “On Pacifism” in an MIT student magazine, Written Revolution, opposing Israel’s genocide against the people of Gaza. The publication itself has been banned from campus.

Zionist groups and the MIT administration have falsely claimed the article incites violence and have attempted to paint Iyengar as a terrorist. The article, which appeared in the fifth edition of the magazine, which is an American Sociological Association-recognized publication, does nothing of the sort as is obvious from the text of the article itself which is academic in character.

The World Socialist Web Site opposes this flagrant attack on free speech and academic freedom and calls on workers, students and youth to demand the immediate rescinding of all administrative measures against Iyengar.

As Iyengar wrote in a statement opposing the ban, “The administration has also banned Written Revolution outright, meaning students who disseminate or read this publication on campus may face discipline.” Some students reading the magazine were approached by the police. According to a recording of the call made to police, it was to stop the handing out “banned pamphlets.” Students face Orwellian disciplinary actions for distributing or merely reading the article on campus. 

The suspension and ban represent an escalation of the bipartisan campaign led by the Biden administration and Democratic Party against opposition on the campuses to the Gaza genocide. It takes place after over 186,000 people in Gaza have been massacred by Israel, according to an estimate by The Lancet from July. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has warned that everyone in northern Gaza “is at imminent risk of dying,” while there is a massive and unprecedented amount of photographic and video evidence both from the victims and killers themselves on social media documenting the genocide, which could correctly be described as the first live-streamed genocide in history.

Iyengar, a second-year electrical engineering Ph.D. student, was summarily banned from campus under the bogus justification that he presented an immediate risk of violence, with the administration falsely claiming his article supports “terrorism.” This was done solely on the basis of anonymous allegations by Zionist students’ claims that statements in the article “could be interpreted as a call for more violent or destructive forms of protest at MIT.” The rule for interim banning of students is ostensibly aimed only at those who actually present a risk of violence, like those suspected of rape, murder or assault. This is clearly not the case.

Essentially no evidence has been presented beyond a People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine poster being used as an illustration in Iyengar’s article. The administration falsely used this to claim that the article supported terrorism. The banning opens a veritable Pandora’s Box of avenues for censorship, meaning all manner of media from textbooks and dictionaries which have pictures of real or supposed “terrorist” organizations to documentaries and non-fiction books and even news articles in the mainstream press could be banned.

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Losing Their Grip: Why Anti-“Misinformation” Crusaders Are Mourning the End of Control

In the brave new world of the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public (CIP), it seems like “informed” is synonymous with “watched.” Birthed to combat the wildfires of online “misinformation,” CIP and its partners – including the defunct Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) and the short-lived Virality Project – thought they might have been celebrated defenders of truth. Instead, they became poster children for what happens when watchdogs get a little too cozy with power, diving into an experiment that teetered between public good and Orwellian oversight.

Election Integrity Partnership: A Marriage of “Good Intentions” and Government Influence

The Election Integrity Partnership, a coalition that included CIP as a key player, kicked off its operations with a noble-sounding mission: to shield our fragile electoral systems from the scourge of fake news. For the discerning reader, the term “integrity” in their name may raise eyebrows; it’s reminiscent of government programs cloaked in the language of virtue, their real work a little murkier. Partnering with government entities and social media giants like Facebook and then-Twitter, EIP set out to identify and “mitigate” misleading content related to elections. In other words, they assumed the job of selectively filtering out the lies, or as critics would say, the truths that didn’t toe the right political line.

For a while, EIP was in its element, functioning as a digital triage, purging the internet of what they deemed harmful content. But what started as “informational integrity” quickly became a federal hall monitor, policing citizens’ Facebook posts and Twitter threads with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Conservatives, in particular, saw this as more of a censorship scheme than a public service. Their view? EIP wasn’t there to inform – it was there to enforce.

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Democrat Professors Outnumber Republican Professors by 28 to 1 at U. Arizona

As first reported at The College Fix, Democrat professors at University of Arizona outnumber Republicans by 28-1 in 12 academic departments.

Even worse this, report found that there were zero Republican professors in at least five academic departments.

“The Fix conducted its research using voter registration data and identified 237 party-affiliated professors out of 369 in 12 departments. Of those 237, 222 were Democrats, 7 were Republican, and 8 were registered with third parties. Another 76 were unaffiliated while 56 were unidentified.

This means 3.4 percent of identified professors who are registered to vote are Republicans, while 96.6 percent are Democrats when broken down by the two major parties.

The Fix obtained voter registration lists from Pima County through a public records request and only looked at professors, not lecturers, adjuncts, or emeriti faculty.

Out of the 12 departments, communications, classics, sociology, religious studies, and gender and women’s studies did not appear to have any Republican professors. Of these, the gender and women’s studies department had the greatest disparity, with 37 Democrats and zero Republicans.”

This seems to reflect a general trend in US academia, the dominance of the left.

The school responded with a statement to The College Fix, claiming, “The University of Arizona does not inquire about an applicant’s political affiliation, and it adheres to equal employment opportunity laws and non-discrimination policies.”

The school “values diverse perspectives as they help students strengthen their critical thinking skills and respect for views with which they may disagree.”

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Chemists rips ‘feminism’ STEM class proposal

An academic journal article about “feminism” and “dysconscious racism in STEM” never should have been published, according to two chemistry professors.

Professors John Landrum and Joseph Lichter questioned why the Journal of Chemical Education allowed a paper that vaguely touched on “white supremacy” to be published.

“Overlooking the obligation to provide clear definitions and valid evidence for such terms, especially ‘White Supremacy’ which was deemed sufficiently important to include in the abstract, is hard to rationalize for a journal that ascribes to upholding reasonable standards of scientific rigor,” the two Florida International University professors wrote.

They also called the paper a “deeply flawed work of scholarship.” Only two academic publications cited the paper – the Landrum (pictured, left) and Lichter (pictured, right) reply, and a subsequent response from the original author to these criticism.

The 2022 paper argued for “teaching science with a feminist framework.” “This article presents a pedagogical model for implementing a special topic class on science and feminism for chemistry students at East Carolina University,” Professor Michelle Reyes originally wrote. She teaches at ECU.

Landrum and Lichter criticized the proposed topics, saying they “have little to do with chemistry and more to do with medical or STEM-related historical events dealing with racial and gender inequality.”

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Arizona State University Caught in Free Speech Tug-of-War Over Gov-Funded “Disinformation” Battle

Arizona State University (ASU) is a public school and therefore undisputed subject to the US Constitution’s free speech rules. Yet a new Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) demonstrates that it was prominently involved in working with, and on behalf of the US government. To affect free speech.

That would be a blatant example of what Congress is investigating and what the critics are calling Big Tech-(Big) Government collusion, given that the target of the “collaboration” the university was involved in was online “disinformation.”

The thing to remember when talking about this collusion is that the current White House had enough wits about it to never make a “beeline” reaching the end result of censorship. From what is known from the congressional probe and the Twitter Files alone, this was always instead a meandering effort that included many seemingly intermediary and/or legitimate actors.

According to James Rushmore for Racket News, in this case, ASU was the recipient of grants (and, in line with the overall “process” – the purpose of the one given in January 2024 and reported by the Washington Examiner is not clearly stated). The grant though did come from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC).

In and of itself, not ring many alarm bells – until the reason behind it, and the activities of GEC are taken into account. Those activities, in the case of ASU’s involvement, meant working with government agencies to flag what was decided to be disinformation, but also something referred to as “falsified media.”

The obsession with “Russian disinformation” featured here as well, a hallmark of “arguments” of the political party that came to power in 2020 in the US. But also a hallmark that had been introduced into public discourse with the party’s defeat four years earlier. The claims have since, but it seems to no avail, been thoroughly debunked.

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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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