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Tag: universities
The University of Massachusetts Lowell Bans Students From Sending or Viewing “offensive” Material Online
Most of the internet is apparently off-limits for students at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
The school’s Acceptable Use Policy, which governs the use of computing and networking resources, prohibits students from intentionally transmitting, communicating or accessing “offensive” material. Every month, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression highlights a university policy that hinders students’ free expression. Since most online content could be called offensive by someone, the policy has earned the dubious honor of FIRE’s August Speech Code of the Month.
The Supreme Court has explicitly held, time and time again, that speech cannot be restricted by the government merely because it offends others. In Texas v. Johnson (1989), the Court held that burning the American flag was protected speech, explaining: “If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.”
In spite of such clear precedent, colleges and universities routinely ban offensive speech in campus speech codes, especially in IT policies. Whether a person is burning a flag at a protest or advocating for (or against) flag burning on Twitter, a ban on “offensive” speech calls for impermissible viewpoint discrimination.
UMass Lowell couldn’t possibly take action every time someone views or retweets something subjectively offensive over university wifi — every single student, and probably every professor, would be on trial. But a policy like this makes it all too easy for the university to crack down on select, disfavored speech.
Berkeley co-op bans WHITE PEOPLE from common areas to ‘avoid white violence and presence’ and all students trying to sign in are asked to declare their race
An off-campus co-op for students at the University of California, Berkeley named the ‘Person of Color Theme House’ has banned white guests from entering common areas of the house.
A list of house rules revealed that occupants were told ‘many POC moved here to be able to avoid white violence and presence, so respect their decision of avoidance if you bring white guests.’
While the student house aims to have an ‘inclusive’ environment, the rules specifically state ‘white guests are not allowed in common spaces,’ according to the list, which was posted on Reddit.
The accommodation, which is located close to Berkeley’s campus, is a five-story, 30-room home that can house up to 56 students. The house is owned by a private landlord.
But the ‘rules’ which were leaked on social media have caused outrage – with many people slamming the restrictions as ‘racist’ as others came forward and revealed their experience living in the co-op.
One mixed-race Reddit user, who claimed to have lived at the house, said that their ‘presence as a light skinned person was not received well.’
They said house members called them slurs and they were even ‘not allowed to let my dad enter the house because he’s white.’
Doctoral student masturbates to fantasy child porn for PhD ‘research’
A PhD researcher at the University of Manchester published an academic article about his experience masturbating to fantasy child sexual abuse material. Swedish-born Karl Andersson is currently attending the University of Manchester and describes his research as a focus on “fans of subcultural comics in Japan experience desire and think about sexual identities.”
Andersson published a paper in the Journal of Qualitative Research titled “I am not alone — we are all alone: Using masturbation as an ethnographic method in research on shota subculture in Japan” that describes his experimental method of masturbating to “shota” pornography.
Shota refers to japanese anime depicting young, prepubescent boys in sexual situations, most often with adult men. Lolicon is the female equivalent to shota, which is Japanese anime depicting a young girl or preteen in sexual situations, often with adult males.
Anna Slatz thoroughly researched the topic in a report for Reduxx Magazine, “The medium is largely regarded as a form of fantasy child pornography, and is illegal in many countries including Canada and Australia as a result. It is also considered illegal in the United Kingdom, where Andersson may reside.”
“I wanted to understand how my research participants experience sexual pleasure when reading shota, a Japanese genre of self-published erotic comics that features young boy characters,” Andersson said of his research paper, “I therefore started reading the comics in the same way as my research participants had told me that they did it: while masturbating.”
Andersson described his research method as masturbating exclusively to shota media for three months and logging his masturbation sessions in a diary, which he published in his paper.
Big Tech, Pharma, Finance Urge SCOTUS to Uphold Race-Based Discrimination in College Admissions
A large cross-section of corporate America filed briefs with the Supreme Court on Aug. 1 urging the court to allow colleges to continue using race as a factor in student admissions.
The court is poised to hear challenges to these racially discriminatory policies in its new term that begins in October. The challengers say so-called affirmative action not only hurts white applicants, but works out to be an “anti-Asian penalty” as well. Asian American applicants generally have higher academic scores and higher extracurricular scores, they say.
Some legal observers speculate that the nine-member court—whose six-member conservative majority broke new ground in June by curbing environmental regulatory powers, declaring that the court was wrong to recognize a constitutional right to abortion 49 years ago, and declaring that there is a constitutional right to carry firearms in public for self-defense—wouldn’t have agreed to hear challenges to race-based college admissions unless it intended to curb them.
The use of race-based criteria by institutions of higher learning in the admissions process isn’t popular in the United States.
Surveys from both Pew Research Center and Gallup have indicated that nearly 75 percent of Americans of all races “do not believe race or ethnicity should be a factor in college admissions.”
Professor: ‘Unbearable’ that white people dominate discussions about ‘climate anxiety’
There’s a new concern in the relatively new field of so-called “climate anxiety”: Those interested in it are very white.
Wired reports this “unbearable whiteness” caused a “growing discomfort” in California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt Professor Sarah Ray (who’s white, by the way) early in 2021, so much so that she wrote an op-ed about it.
“[A] year into the pandemic, after the murder of George Floyd and the protests that followed, and the attack on the U.S. Capitol, I am deeply concerned about the racial implications of climate anxiety,” Ray (pictured) wrote.
“If people of color are more concerned about climate change than white people, why is the interest in climate anxiety so white? Is climate anxiety a form of white fragility or even racial anxiety?”
Ray says wealthy white people act they’re “experiencing an existential threat for the very first time” and “can take up all the oxygen in the room.”
In fact, “climate anxiety” itself is a “very privileged” term as affluent whites apparently have a bigger vocabulary to express how it affects them. By contrast, a climate activist had asked Filipinos how they felt after two typhoons had hit the country. Not many talked about it because mental health issues aren’t usually a topic of discussion. Thus, “people don’t even have the words for it because it’s not correlated in people’s minds.”
Professor Insists Anti-Cheating Rules Aren’t Fair to ‘Black and Latinx’ Students
University of Cincinnati instructor Antar A. Tichavakunda has strong views on regulations regarding particularly pigmented pupils.
The professor has penned a piece for Inside Higher Ed insisting darker individuals don’t deserve the same rules as whites.
In “Let’s Talk About Race and Academic Integrity,” he serves up stats:
[In a study], Black and Asian…students reported being accused of plagiarism [twice that of] any other group… Further, Black students were the most likely to report being accused of cheating in college (9 percent of Black students reported being accused of cheating in a college course, compared to 6 percent of all students).
Hence, we need to take a serious look at race related to “academic integrity.”
For those of you who are unfamiliar:
Academic integrity is already about race. From the assumptions behind who looks like they are cheating to the punishments given for cheating to the technology that monitors cheating to what counts as cheating, the idea of academic integrity is racialized through and through.
It appears Antar’s positions hold that only white people can be racist; and white people are indeed racist. He gives the example of a black woman to whom he spoke while doing book research. She explained she was the only black female in her major and she never cheated. Once, she caught someone trying to copy her during a test. She moved across the room, fearing she’d be the one accused.
According to Antar, that proved a point:
The measures she took…are telling. … Racist and sexist beliefs shape assumptions about who looks like they are cheating and who is likely to be believed in front of a non-Black instructor.
He assails anti-cheating software, which “does not always accurately assess people who have darker skin.”
[A]s scholars such as Ruha Benjamin and Safiya Noble have shown, the algorithms and codes structuring such technologies can perpetuate racial biases and stereotypes.
Amid our ideas on academic integrity, he poses, “we can be too punitive.”
He wouldn’t destructively ding a student solely for lifting lines:
I won’t be failing a student for one copy and paste too many when the option of a redirection and a resetting of expectations is right there. Often, the problem lies in pedagogy — not the student. A zero-tolerance policy around plagiarism or academic integrity can do more harm than good.
Intolerance = inequity = iniquity:
If zero-tolerance educational policies have taught us anything, it is that they tend to disproportionately harm Black and Latinx students. The same goes for academic integrity policies.
It sounds as if whitey makes the rules; and he’s boldly bigoted:
The people who make the decisions about which transgressions are forgivable and which transgressions are necessary to report and punish do not exist in a race-neutral vacuum.
Interrogation’s on order:
Decision makers, from faculty members to student conduct officers, hold beliefs about identity that — if uninterrogated — could potentially be racist and discriminatory.
The instructor also asserts — “from experience” — that white fraternities and sororities “sometimes have test banks that members can use.”
His takeaway:
Some students take exams and do homework with unfair advantages.
And:
Collaborating or cheating on exams can adversely impact Black students at schools where they are in the extreme minority.
It seems everyone cheats. But blacks have fewer chances; Re: racism.
UCSD med school trains doctors to use critical race theory in health care
The University of California San Diego’s top-rated medical school integrates progressive social justice and racial politics into its curriculum in an effort to “expand medicine’s role as a mechanism of social engineering,” argues a new report written by critics of critical race theory.
The 14-page report, released June 21 and titled “The Woke Invasion of Racial Politics into UCSD Medical Education,” was published by Do No Harm and details guest lectures, curricula, protests, events and academic programming that appear to prioritize politics over science.
Some of it originates with administration, the report stated, “while other aspects of it are fostered by student pressure and activism, primarily in the wake of George Floyd.”
“Dismantling racism” is a stated goal of the UC San Diego Health Strategic Framework. The medical school’s “Family Medicine Diversity and Anti-Racism Committee” has hosted talks on microaggressions, implicit bias, border health and “race in medicine,” the report noted.
The UCSD-SDSU General Preventive Medicine Residency put out a statement supporting Black Lives Matter in which the group called for physicians to “move beyond race neutrality to actively embracing anti-racist policies.”
A School of Medicine program called “Transforming Indigenous Doctor Education” that trains future doctors on “social, environmental, economic and political issues related to providing healthcare to tribal communities” is cited in the report. Coursework includes classes called “Environmental Racism” and “Medicine, Race, and the Global Politics of Inequality.”
Medical trainees are encouraged to read Ibram X. Kendi’s book “How to Be an Anti-Racist.” The report also flags UCSD’s Department of Psychiatry’s anti-racism and diversity committee.
“Courses built around social justice narratives of injustice are increasingly offered and fused into existing medical education. Perhaps most disturbing is the growth of multiple internal institutes devoted to scientifically analyzing ‘empathy’ as a socially fungible metric,” the report stated.
University Of Delaware Continues Fight To Shield Biden Documents From Public Review
After a setback before the Delaware Supreme Court, the University of Delaware is continuing its dogged effort to prevent the public from seeing the senatorial papers of President Joe Biden. The continued litigation, at public cost, has been criticized as an effort to shield President Biden from potentially embarrassing material from being accessed by the media or public interest groups.
For a research institution, it is a curious role to prevent access to documents but clearly a role supported by President Biden and his family.
What is particularly troubling is the reason being claimed by the university.
We have previously discussed these documents and their potential significance to inquiries ranging from sexual harassment complaints to foreign dealings. The university insists that, so long as it does not use public funds for the maintenance of the Biden documents, it is immune from the Freedom of Information Act. By using private funds, it is arguing that it can keep the material locked away from public review.
A Superior Court decision held that the papers were not subject to FOIA based on dismissive and clearly inadequate filings by the university. The Delaware Supreme Court has now sent the matter back to the lower court for additional review. It has held that the university must still show that it is immune from public disclosure laws and must potentially conduct searches of its records requested by Judicial Watch and the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Supreme Court specifically found the earlier representations of Jennifer M. Becnel-Guzzo, Esq., University FOIA Coordinator to be insufficient to carry the burden under the law. It also noted that it was not made under oath. Accordingly, Delaware Superior Court Judge Mary Johnston ordered the university to submit evidence that archives Biden gave the school in 2012 are not subject to a public records request and consequently public access.
Delaware’s Freedom of Information Act states that “’Public body,’ ‘public record’ and ‘meeting’ shall not include activities of the University of Delaware and Delaware State University, except that the Board of Trustees of both universities shall be ‘public bodies,’ university documents relating to the expenditure of public funds shall be “public records.”
Ted Kaczynski on intellectuals…
Hellbound and Down 
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