Tag: universities

UNLV gunman ID’d as Anthony Polito, 67, professor who failed to get job at school

The madman who slaughtered three people in a mass shooting at the University of Nevada Las Vegas on Wednesday was a professor who failed to secure a job at the school and claimed to have solved the mystery of the Zodiac Killer and missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.

Anthony Polito, 67, had unsuccessfully applied for a professorship at UNLV before he unleashed his deadly rampage on the campus just before noon, law enforcement sources told ABC News.

Polito was armed with a handgun during his massacre and was killed following a shootout with two police detectives, the outlet reported.

The shooting began around 11:45 a.m. on the fourth floor of Beam Hall, UNLV’s business school, near the student union building.

Police found three people dead when they arrived.

A fourth person was taken to an area hospital, where they were listed in critical but stable condition.

Four others were hospitalized after suffering panic attacks and two officers were treated for minor injuries suffered while clearing buildings, LVMPD police said.

Polito’s LinkedIn account states he was a “semi-retired university professor” based in Las Vegas and attended undergraduate at Radford University in Virginia, where he graduated with a double major in mathematics and statistics before he earned his master’s degree at Duke University and completed his doctorate of philosophy at the University of Georgia.

He served as an associate professor for 15½ years at East Carolina University from August 2001 to January 2017.

During that time, he also ran a personal website about his life, in which he posted a 15-page theory claiming he decoded the messages left by the Zodiac Killer, who operated in Northern California in the late 1960s.

“Just so you won’t initially write off my solution as that of a total crackpot, let me first say that I have been a member of MENSA for 35 years, I hold a double undergraduate degree in Mathematics & Statistics (two skills closely associated with successful cryptographers) … and I hold a masters degree and a doctoral degree from top-tier universities as well,” Polito wrote in the introduction.

“So I am not a dumb guy!”

He further claimed to have solved the fate of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 and figured out the true meaning of Leonardo DiCaprio’s 2010 film “Inception.”

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Ohio State University health course will require students to address ‘whiteness’ and explain how they ‘navigate race’ in their daily lives

The Ohio State University students who have signed up for a health sciences course are required to address their white, heterosexual or able-bodied privileges, documents have revealed.

The course titled ‘Individual Differences in Patient/Client Populations’ is offered through the university’s School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences.

Do No Harm, a group of physicians, healthcare professionals, medical students, patients and policymakers who aim to ‘protect healthcare from a radical, divisive, and discriminatory ideology’ obtained course details through a Freedom of Information Act request.

In the documents, reviewed by Fox News, one assignment in the course titled ‘Unpack the Invisible Knapsack’ asked students to complete a series of activities about privilege.

Three options were provided to students as per the document obtained by Do No Harm that allowed students to select from the ‘white privilege knapsack,’ the ‘heterosexual privilege knapsack’ and the ‘able-body privilege knapsack.’

The assignment stems from a 1989 essay titled ‘White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack’ in which anti-racist activist Peggy McIntosh addresses her own experiences of race.

McIntosh’s work, which attempts to prove white privilege exists, is scattered through the course document including statements such as: ‘Whiteness protected me from many kinds of hostility, distress and violence, which I was being subtly trained to visit, in turn, upon people of color.’

The course has seen some backlash by online critics who believe The Ohio State University is a ‘sick waste of money.’

One critic said: ‘Health sciences program offered at The Ohio State University requires students to take part in an array of discussions about gender and race, including students to address their ‘privileges if they are White’, heterosexual or able-bodied.

‘It’s time to flush out college DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion).’

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Billionaire graduate accuses Harvard of discriminating against white males

Harvard University has “lost its way” and discriminates against white males as well as (East) Asian and Indian men, who are also perceived to be successful, billionaire alumnus Bill Ackman has said.

Ackman made headlines in October when he called upon Harvard President Claudine Gay to release the names of students who had signed a letter blaming Israel “for all unfolding violence” in the wake of the Hamas attack on the country earlier that month.

The CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management argued that it should be done so that he and other executives can make sure not to ever hire those people.

In a new address to Gay, which he published on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday, Ackman argued that “anti-Semitism is the canary in the coal mine for other discriminatory practices at Harvard.”

“The problems at Harvard are clearly not just about Jews and Israel. It is abundantly clear that straight White males are discriminated against in recruitment and advancement at Harvard. That is also apparently true to a somewhat lesser extent for men who are Asians or of Indian origin,” he wrote.

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US Army Enlists University of Arkansas at Little Rock To Fight Online “Misinformation”

The US Army has announced a “combat” partnership (effective through 2025) with the publicly-funded University of Arkansas at Little Rock – and what they plan to “combat” together is none other than whatever is deemed to be online disinformation, but also, something defined as “cognitive threats.”

And by that, they don’t mean all manner of government and formally or otherwise government-associated entities falling over themselves trying to pass off various forms of speech suppression and censorship as fighting “disinformation.”

But there’s no denying that this, too, could fall under the definition of misinformation and cognitive threats offered here – namely, the goal is “to detect and combat bad actors online who are trying to manipulate how and what populations think.”

But if an actor is perceived as “good” – does manipulating how and what populations (note the plural) think, then magically become a good thing?

Sarcasm aside – the new initiative is backed with a grant worth $5 million. What the deal reveals is that more and more universities in the US are getting “hired” – whether by non-profits, or, again, the government – to work toward this goal via various dedicated research hubs.

In UA Little Rock’s case it’s called the Collaboration for Social Media and Online Behavioral Studies (COSMOS) Research Center. Beside the US Army’s own Research Office, another key player in putting this project together was Senator John Boozman.

“War is on the social media platforms,” is one of the comments cited in reports about this development, but curiously, it doesn’t come from a military representative but a budding academic with the COSMOS Research Center, graduate assistant Mano Har.

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Even Hateful Protests Are Protected, Free Speech Group Reminds Congress

If you know the history of Israel, that the country was created after one-third of the world’s Jewish population was murdered by Nazis (it has yet to fully recover), it’s difficult to stomach protesters who often slip from supporting the Palestinian cause to gloating over Hamas’s terrorism and the prospect of destroying the Jewish state. There’s not a lot of good will in projecting “Glory to Our Martyrs” on buildings or chanting “from the river to the sea“—let alone explicit endorsements of the attack.

But even assholes have speech rights. That’s because all individuals have rights, however they use them, and because free expression only works if it’s available to everybody, not reserved as privilege for the “right” ideas. And, importantly, respecting free speech lets people show us who they are.

Unfortunately, political officials’ natural distaste for dissent can combine with honest revulsion at despicable sentiments to produce a reaction that would violate the right to free expression.

“Today, Congressman Mike Lawler (NY-17) announced that the House passed two amendments he put forward to the House’s appropriations bill for Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education (LHHS) to combat antisemitism on college campuses,” the New York Republican announced November 15. “His second LHHS amendment, rescinding federal funding for college campuses that give a platform to antisemitism hate, was adopted with broad, bipartisan support.”

One reaction to this is that the federal government shouldn’t be funding colleges to begin with. I agree. But so long as it is handing out cash, those funds shouldn’t be used to bypass legal protections for individual rights. And no, just deciding to reject federal money might not be enough; Hillsdale College did that to escape federal regulation and now faces efforts to subject the school to control just because it has tax-exempt status enjoyed by many institutions.

The only way to keep authoritarians from getting a foot in the door is to defend liberty as a principle.

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Thousands of students at Warwick University are ‘forced to go vegan’ after a handful of activists voted for a meat and dairy ban in the institution’s canteens

Thousands of students at one of Britain’s top universities will be forced to ‘go vegan’ after activists won a vote banning meat and dairy products. 

Students at the University of Warwick backed a motion forcing union-run catering outlets to adopt plant-based menus, with three now required to do so by 2027. 

But the move, pushed through by campaign group ‘Plant-Based Universities’, has ignited fury after it emerged that just 774 students – about 2.7 per cent of 28,600-stong campus – were behind the plan, while 516 voted against it. 

Vivek Venkatram, Plant-Based Universities Warwick campaigner and president of Warwick’s Vegetarian and Vegan Society championed the vote and said: ‘We want this change to benefit everyone.’

However, the Countryside Alliance condemned the decision backed by a ‘tiny minority’ and said the vote raised questions about whether the sweeping change was ‘made with the interests of the wider student population in mind’.

‘Students shouldn’t let such a small cohort get away with isolating the wider student population. Vegan campaigners are welcome to present their arguments in favour of plant-based diets, but should not impose a diet in university-affiliated buildings,’ said alliance spokeswoman Sabina Roberts.

‘Students should take on their democratic duty and place forward a counter-motion that keeps meat on the menu.’

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Professors: Free Speech And Intellectual Diversity Are Not Essential To Higher Education

In “The Indispensable Right,” I discuss how academics are now leading an anti-free speech movement on campuses that challenges the centrality (or even the necessity) of free speech protections in higher education. The latest such argument appeared this month in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Two Arizona State University professors — Richard Amesbury and Catherine O’Donnell — wrote that free speech concerns yield too much to the “right wing” and that free speech should not be given the protection currently afforded by universities and colleges. Indeed, they argue that free speech may be harming higher education by fostering “unworthy” ideas.

Amesbury teaches religious studies and O’Donnell teaches history at ASU. They wrote an article titled “Dear Administrators: Enough with the Free Speech Rhetoric! It Concedes Too Much to the Right-Wing Agenda.”

The two academics challenge the long-held view of the centrality of free speech to higher education. Notably, many of us have been alarmed by the erosion of free speech on our campuses, but Amesbury and O’Donnell seem to worry that there is still too much protection for opposing views. Worse yet, they suggest that the free speech objections are often part of a right-wing funded agenda.

In fairness, to the two professors, they do not reject the overall value of free speech, but challenge “the assumptions that free speech is a cardinal virtue of higher education, and that colleges should aspire to a diversity of opinions.” They insist that higher education is about finding truth and that means that false ideas are inimical to our mission as educators. Indeed, they question the need for “intellectual diversity”:

Our contention is that calls for greater freedom of speech on campuses, however well-intentioned, risk undermining colleges’ central purpose, namely, the production of expert knowledge and understanding, in the sense of disciplinarily warranted opinion. Expertise requires freedom of speech, but it is the result of a process of winnowing and refinement that is premised on the understanding that not all opinions are equally valid. Efforts to “democratize” opinion are antithetical to the role colleges play in educating the public and informing democratic debate. We urge administrators toward caution before uncritically endorsing calls for intellectual diversity in place of academic expertise…

A diversity of opinion — “intellectual diversity” — isn’t itself the goal; rather, it is of value only insofar as it serves the goal of producing knowledge. On most unanswered questions, there is, at least initially, a range of plausible opinions, but answering questions requires the vetting of opinions. As some opinions are found wanting, the range of opinion deserving of continued consideration narrows.

As a threshold matter, what is so striking about this argument against intellectual diversity is that it is made at a time with little such diversity in most departments. Seeking a wider range of viewpoints on departments does not “concedes too much to the right-wing agenda.” It acknowledges a growing problem across higher education, It is an educational agenda that has prompted many of us to raise the reduction of intellectual diversity.

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Government Gives Billions in Grants Each Year to Ivy League Universities

A new report from government watchdog organization OpenTheBooks.com tallies up federal money issued to 10 elite private universities: the eight that make up the Ivy League—Harvard, Yale, Brown, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Cornell, and Dartmouth College—plus Northwestern and Stanford.

Between 2018–2022, these 10 universities received $33.1 billion in federal contracts and grants. The largest recipient was Stanford, with just over $7 billion; Dartmouth was the only institution not to receive at least $1 billion, capping out at just over $755 million.

Of the $33 billion total, the report notes, only about $4.18 billion came in the form of contracts, in which work is done on behalf of a federal agency that then owns the results; the remainder, more than $28.9 billion, was distributed as grants, whereby an institution receives government money to fund its own projects.

In some cases, universities receive more money per year from the government than from their students: In the 2021–22 school year, Princeton University took in nearly $145 million in net tuition and fees (tuition paid minus scholarships disbursed), but it received over $362 million in government grants and contracts—more than twice the amount it received in tuition. In the 2022–2023 school year, Yale took in more than $458 million in net tuition and room and board costs, but it brought in a whopping $1.038 billion in government grant and contract income.

As private institutions, the universities in question are nominally meant to be funded by student tuition and donations; most also have generous endowments, assets invested to support the institution over a long period of time. And federal grant programs exist that are intended to fund research into projects that could have larger societal benefits: For example, the first COVID-19 vaccines were developed in part at Emory University and Vanderbilt University, with funding from the National Institutes of Health.

But the endowments themselves cast doubt on whether this money is truly necessary. As the OpenTheBooks.com report notes, in the five years during which the 10 universities in question received over $33 billion in government funds, they also grew their collective endowments by $64.8 billion. Stanford, which took in over $7 billion in government funds, grew its endowment from $26.5 billion to $36.5 billion over the same period.

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Yes, Anti-Israel Protests Are Free Speech

Last Friday, a group of college students penned a guest essay in The New York Times arguing that the wave of anti-Israel, pro-Palestine activity on many college campuses isn’tA New legitimate free expression—and that universities have a “moral responsibility” to combat it.

“Free speech, open debate and heterodox views lie at the core of academic life,” wrote Gabriel Diamond, Talia Dror, and Jillian Lederman, students at Yale, Cornell, and Brown respectively. “They are fundamental to educating future leaders to think and act morally. The reality on some college campuses today is the opposite: open intimidation of Jewish students. Mob harassment must not be confused with free speech.”

The authors point out several examples of clearly unprotected speech that have unfolded in recent weeks, such as online posts made by a Cornell student who threatened to “shoot up” a kosher dining hall, as well as several instances of physical violence against Jewish students.

However, many of the other examples the authors single out are blatantly First Amendment–protected expression.

“Masked students have chanted slogans such as ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,’ which many view as a call for the destruction of Israel. Others have shouted, ‘There is only one solution, intifada revolution,'” they write. Additionally, Diamond, Dror, and Lederman noted several examples of professors who made offensive statements about the terrorist attack, lamenting that “to the best of our knowledge, none of these professors have received meaningful discipline, much less dismissal.”

Despite their claimed commitments, the authors make a plain-faced call for censorship by invoking university speech codes.

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Archaeology’s woke trend: Obtain consent from someone who’s dead to study their bones

There’s an eerie new theory filling academia’s ivied walls – the living and the dead are the same. This latest argument against the use of human skeletal remains in research and teaching, which I’ve come across in person (from students who attended my talk at Brown University, an elite Ivy League college), proposes that the only ethical treatment of skeletal collections is to treat the dead like the living. I’ve seen this same argument, which is applied to prehistoric and historic anthropological collections used to reconstruct past peoples’ lives, in conference programs and on museum websites.

Those researchers interested in examining past populations through the study of human remains, thus, should be required to follow the same ethical guidelines as medical researchers who conduct their work on living people. We need to gather consent forms. The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History took down their Written in Bone website that explored ways anthropologists looked at 17th-century residents of the Chesapeake Bay Area, which included colonists, African slaves, and European immigrants. This was because it had come to their attention that they had no consent forms from these people who died 300-years ago!

Interested in studying the past through bones? Now, you must also provide evidence that there are safeguards in place to avoid harming these long-dead individuals. And, researchers of past populations, regardless of how old these collections are, should be required to incorporate HIPAA (the law that provides living patients with privacy concerning their medical records) regulations into their research methods. Of course, it’s a bit difficult to get consent from someone who’s dead. Yet, the repatriation and reburial activists see this as just the right tool to bury the zombified remains whose, last wishes they assume, were to be reburied.

Could there be other tactics to get around these ethical issues? Maybe universities should start employing spirit mediums to run seances to ensure that we can connect with the dead, ask them questions, and get that much-needed consent form signed; can a ghost sign a paper?

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