Tag: universities

Feds funded study proving Thanos couldn’t snap his fingers while wearing Infinity Gauntlet

The U.S. federal government funded a study that determined the Marvel supervillain “Thanos” would not have been able to snap his fingers in the movie Avengers: Infinity War, a new report from Senator Rand Paul, R-Ky., revealed last week.

The study, spearheaded by researchers at Georgia Tech, focused on the speed at which humans can snap their fingers, ultimately reporting a finger snap “produces the highest rotational accelerations observed in humans, even faster than the arm of a professional baseball pitcher.”

For the past few years, I’ve been fascinated with how we can snap our fingers,” Saad Bhamla, one of the researchers involved in the study, said in a press release. “It’s really an extraordinary physics puzzle right at our fingertips that hasn’t been investigated closely.”

Prior to conducting the study, Bhamla and his fellow researchers developed a “framework” to explain “ultrafast motions” in living beings. Seeing Thanos snap his fingers while wearing the Infinity Gauntlet in Avengers: Infinity War inspired the researchers to apply their framework to the massively popular cinematic franchise.

Despite deriving inspiration from Thanos, the study focused more broadly on the human finger snap, raising questions about why humans snap their fingers in the first place and whether other primates have the ability to do so.

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Vast Majority Of Colleges Have At Least One Policy That Violates Free Speech, Watchdog Finds

An overwhelming majority of colleges in the United States have at least one speech code that violates students’ free speech rights, according to watchdog group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).

FIRE’s 2023 “Spotlight on Speech Codes,” obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation, and released Tuesday morning, examined different speech codes and their impact on students’ free speech rights. Of the 486 schools sampled by FIRE, 94 universities enforce a speech policy that “clearly and substantially” restricts speech, 324 enforce “vague regulations” on speech and a mere 60 schools do not enforce serious restrictions on student speech.

Eight schools received a “warning label” which indicates that a private school “holds a certain set of values above a commitment to freedom of speech,” according to the report.

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Cambridge Dictionary Changes Woman Definition to Push Transgenderism

The Cambridge Dictionary appears to have followed Merriam-Webster down the rabbit hole into woke oblivion by changing the definition of “Woman” to appease transgender radicals.

Though it remains inconclusive as to when the Cambridge Dictionary made the switch to include transgenderism, the definition for “Woman” now includes the following as a subset of the actual definition: “An adult who lives and identifies as female though they have been said to have a different sex at birth.”

The definition then includes the two following example sentences:

She was the first trans woman elected to national office.

Mary is a woman who was assigned male at birth.

According to the archives dating back to March 2022, the Cambridge Dictionary only featured the normative definition of the word woman to mean “an adult female human being.”

The related words and phrases in the SMART Vocabulary section of the definition included such charged words like gender reassignment and heteronormative.

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UChicago Announces ‘The Problem With Whiteness’ Course

The University of Chicago (UChicago) is offering a course to students titled “The Problem Of Whiteness” during the Spring 2023 semester, according to the school’s course catalog. 

The course was originally supposed to on start January 3rd but in response to backlash from students it has been moved to March 20, according to The Washington Times. 

The course is being offered under the college’s Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) program and the description names whiteness as “a conspicuous problem within liberal political discourse” that has “worldmaking (and razing) effects.” 

The course will examine material through the lens of critical race theory. 

“Critical race theorists have shown that whiteness has long functioned as an ‘unmarked’ racial category, saturating a default surround against which non-white or ‘not quite’ other appear as aberrant,” the description reads. “This saturation has had wide-ranging effects, coloring everything from the consolidation of wealth, power and property to the distribution of environmental health hazards.”

UChicago administration told Campus Reform, “The University works to foster an inclusive climate on campus, so all may participate fully in the distinctive open and questioning environment that has always defined the University of Chicago.”

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University of Florida Medical School Scrubs Web Pages of Woke Content in Wake of Exposé

The University of Florida College of Medicine is scrubbing “anti-racism” pages from its website in the wake of a report detailing the influence of leftwing ideology on the school’s curriculum.

The report from Do No Harm, a group opposed to identity politics in medical education, was released November 22 and highlighted a slew of activist statements by the public medical school, many of them posted to its official website. A week later—after a flurry of unflattering media coverage—the College of Medicine had taken down at least three of those posts, including a statement on the admissions office homepage declaring that “BLACK LIVES MATTER.”

That statement also condemned “systemic oppression” and touted the admissions office’s commitment to “equity in healthcare.” In addition, the school removed a webpage that offered a list of “resources for combating systemic racism,” including a set of guidelines instructing “white allies” to “assume racism is everywhere, every day,” and a page that described the school’s learning objectives related to “health equity.”

Though the College of Medicine declined to comment on the removal, it did offer an unsolicited defense of its admissions policies.

“We have a holistic admissions process that welcomes students from all backgrounds, including those from underrepresented backgrounds,” the medical school’s director of communications, Cody Hawley, said. “In accordance with state law, our admissions policy does not favor or give priority to any group.”

This is not the first time the medical establishment has backpedaled in the face of public scrutiny. Brigham and Women’s Hospital distanced itself last year from a proposal by two of its doctors, Bram Wispelwey and Michelle Morse, to offer “preferential care” to minority patients through the hospital’s cardiology service. And in January, Minnesota and Utah stopped rationing COVID drugs based on race after a Washington Free Beacon exposé drew attention to the practice.

Such initiatives nonetheless reflect a worldview that is being inculcated at medical schools across the country. Forty-four percent of medical schools now reward scholarship on “diversity, inclusion, and equity” through their promotion policies, according to a report this month by the Association of American Medical Colleges, while 70 percent mandate courses on “diversity, inclusion, or cultural competence.” The report also found that over a third of medical schools offer extra funding to departments that hit diversity goals, with half requiring diversity statements for job applicants.

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Stanford gives black students preference on bus rides and movie tickets, prompting complaint

Stanford University’s Graduate Student Council gave black students preference for tickets and a bus ride to a screening of the second “Black Panther” movie, prompting a federal civil rights complaint by a former senior Trump administration official.

Adam Kissel’s onetime employer, the Department of Education, won’t acknowledge it received a complaint about the incident, however, or commit to investigating it.

Stanford is on the hook under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act because the GSC is part of the student government, which is recognized by the university, Kissel told the department’s Office for Civil Rights San Francisco division in a Nov. 18 complaint shared with Just the News. (Complainants don’t have to be victims themselves.)

The GSC has “discriminated on the basis of race in a program or activity and emailed students about this discrimination,” he wrote, pointing the feds to the email reprinted by The Stanford Review, the independent campus newspaper cofounded by then-student Peter Thiel, the Trump-supporting venture capitalist.

Tasked with supporting graduate student organizations and “providing community events,” the GSC informed students it had organized back-to-back Nov. 10 private off-campus screenings of “Wakanda Forever,” with 450 tickets available.

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UCSB Black Student Union Holds Segregated Movie Screening: White People Not Welcome

The University of California Santa Barbara’s Black Student Union held a private screening of the new Marvel adventure Wakanda Forever on Wednesday night.

In their announcement of the event on Instagram, organizers made it clear that the event was segregated and white people were not welcome.

Organizers shared, “We are lovingly curating this space to support and affirm Black people and Black joy. We ask that our non-Black allies support our intention of creating a Black affinity and celebration space.”

The Daily Mail reports:

The University of Southern California‘s Black Student Union invited students to a free, private screening of the recently released Wakanda Forever, but asked white students not to attend.

The screening of the eagerly-anticipated Black Panther sequel was held at the local Santa Barbara Arlington Theatre.

UCSB Media Relations Manager Kiki Reyes told the College Fix that members of the BSU had not informed the school that the event was going to be segregated.

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‘Anti-racist’ professor calls Herschel Walker ‘subliterate,’ uses racial slur

Georgia Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker is “coonish” and “subliterate,” according to a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professor who is also an “anti-racist” consultant.

Walker is “incompetent, subliterate and coonish,” Professor Sundiata Cha-Jua, a history and African-American studies professor, wrote in The News-Gazette in his regular column on October 23. “Coon” is a racial slur that refers to depictions of black individuals as lazy or dumb.

His column focused on black Republicans and how they are actually “MAGA Black White supremacists.” The black professor started the Policing in a Multiracial Society Program, which “provides systematic anti-racial bias education and training for police recruits attending the University of Illinois’s Police Training Institute” and “researches the racial attitudes of police and the effectiveness of anti-racist training,” according to his faculty bio.

The race for Champaign County Clerk is between a black Democrat named Aaron Ammons and a black Republican named Terence Stuber. Cha-Jua compared Stuber to a slave, because he was recruited to run against another black individual.

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College students turn more liberal, OK speech death penalty

Calls for diversity on campuses and in Main Street businesses and banning hate speech, even that protected by the First Amendment , are no longer issues to fight over for college students.

Now, it’s a reason for the electric chair .

In a remarkable shift showing how students, many lining up for President Joe Biden’s loan forgiveness plan, have turned left since the 2020 election, a new Yale survey suggests that America’s best and brightest are giving up on key constitutional freedoms and even embracing socialism.

In the William F. Buckley, Jr. Program at Yale University national student survey, conducted by McLaughlin & Associates and provided to Secrets, big majorities want companies to require employees to declare support for workplace diversity just to get a job.

And when it comes to speech, nearly half believe the death penalty is OK to shoot down hate speech.

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