Tag: universities

Northwestern students face criminal charges for pro-Palestinian newspaper parody

Students at Northwestern University, in the Chicago suburbs, woke up on October 25 to face an unexpected allegation. “Northwestern complicit in genocide of Palestinians,” declared the school’s venerable student newspaper, the Daily Northwestern, in a front-page story.

The students, however, weren’t really looking at the Daily Northwestern. Instead, they had found the Northwestern Daily, a parody newspaper attacking the school’s stance on Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip.

The mock front page featured fake quotes from school officials, accusations of Israeli war crimes, and a fake ad for Birthright Israel — the travel abroad program that sends young American Jews to Israel — with the tagline “One man’s home is another man’s former home!” Overnight, someone had pinned the mock papers on bulletin boards, spread them on desks in lecture halls, and even wrapped the false front pages around roughly 300 copies of the Daily Northwestern itself.

The stunt quickly sparked a furor among Israel’s supporters online. One writer, at the conservative National Review, said the fake newspaper included an antisemitic “blood libel.” The university itself said the spoof “included images and language about Israel that many in our community found offensive.”

The parent company of the school paper, Students Publishing Company, or SPC, announced that it had “engaged law enforcement to investigate and find those responsible.” The results of the inquiry are just now coming to light.

Following the investigation, local prosecutors brought charges against two students for theft of advertising services. The little-known statute appears to only exist in Illinois and California, where it was originally passed to prevent the Ku Klux Klan from distributing recruitment materials in newspapers. The statute makes it illegal to insert an “unauthorized advertisement in a newspaper or periodical.” The students, both of whom are Black, now face up to a year in jail and a $2,500 fine.

“I have never seen anyone charged with theft of advertising,” said Elaine Odeh, a lawyer who formerly supervised public defenders in Cook County, Illinois, which includes Evanston, where Northwestern is based.

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Revealed: The vindictive academics blasted by judge for hounding lesbian professor out of the Open University in a harassment campaign over her gender critical beliefs

These are the academics who were blasted in a stinging judgment by an employment tribunal after they hounded a lesbian lecturer out of her job.

Criminology expert Prof Jo Phoenix, 59, saw her name dragged through the mud at the Open University once her views on the importance of biological sex became known.

Despite assuring colleagues she was not transphobic, a small group of trans activist lecturers refused to set aside their personal politics to allow freedom of opinion.

Instead, ringleader Dr Leigh Downes, a female who identifies as non-binary, led a campaign against Prof Phoenix – publishing an open letter ‘in order to create a pile-on’, which amassed 368 staff signatures

Last week, in an extraordinary judgment, the participants were criticised for their vindictive motives; as well as their evidence, which a judge described as ‘evasive’ and ‘not credible’.

Employment Judge Jennifer Young said: ‘On multiple occasions, whenever gender critical views were expressed at the Open University, Dr Downes complained or tried to get the view suppressed. 

‘The claimant’s gender critical beliefs made Dr Downes feel palpably uncomfortable.’

The judge went on: ‘The purpose of signing the open letter was to create an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment for Prof Phoenix. 

‘We conclude that having 368 of your colleagues sign a public letter saying that you are part of a group that is fundamentally transphobic, is stigmatising and damaging.’

Besides Dr Downes, other signatories in the open letter – Dr Helen Bowes-Catton, Dr Nicola Snarey, Prof Peter Keogh, Natalie Starkey and Dr Chris Williams – were found to have contributed to the hostility, despite their claims that they were expressing academic freedom.

The judge dismissed this reasoning and wrote: ‘[It] was not an exercise in academic freedom. There is nothing scholastic about the open letter, it stigmatised the claimant and damaged her reputation.’

Rather than stamp out the febrile atmosphere on campus, departmental leaders at the university left Prof Phoenix to face the onslaught alone and even blamed her for having spoken out in the first place.

Prof Louise Westmarland, a former friend who had unsuccessfully competed for the same job, likened the under-fire professor to ‘a racist uncle at a dinner party’.

The head of the department, Dr Deborah Drake, caused huge distress by comparing Prof Phoenix to controversial US political scientist Charles Murray, whose views have been likened to a racist.  

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Oregon University Will No Longer Give ‘D-‘ Or ‘F’ Grades

Citing a wrongheaded “GPA fixation,” Western Oregon University leaders have announced plans to abolish D- and F grades for students…

They will replace them with “no credit” in an effort to support student success and encourage struggling undergrads to continue their education despite obstacles, they said.

The public university announced in a news release this month the changes would start in the fall.

“Students not earning a passing grade will be required to repeat the course and demonstrate proficiency. Our goal is to ensure that students who have met the core competencies and learning objectives graduate and provide every student an opportunity to be successful at Western Oregon University,” Vice President of Academic Affairs Jose Coll said in an email to The College Fix.

Coll, who took the job as provost in June 2023, said in the news release that “GPAs will now be a true reflection of student success and course mastery; failures will no longer mask the demonstrated abilities of our students when they pass courses.”

The news release stated that “the institutional academic grading regulation will reflect a grade range of A through D; the letter grades of D- and F will be replaced with No Credit (NC) for undergraduate students.”

“The difference is that the grade of NC will not negatively impact student GPAs.”

The move comes as data from the school shows that 65 percent of freshmen who drop out of WOU have earned at least one “F,” Inside Higher Ed reported.

Western Oregon University acknowledged students receiving “no credit” are significantly more likely to continue with their education than those who fail classes, leading some to accuse the school of allowing “grade inflation” to occur, according to Inside Higher Ed.

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College Vaccine Mandates: Here to Stay?

It is January 2024, and Covid vaccine mandates persist at 70 of the top 800 colleges in the US, and who knows if they will ever let them go. If you are a healthcare major, nearly every clinical partner site still mandates that healthcare students take the most updated Covid vaccine (often no exemptions accepted) even if those sites are affiliated with colleges and universities that do not currently mandate Covid vaccines.

It is truly remarkable with all that we have learned about these novel medical treatments that colleges can still coerce students into taking them. In fact, it is truly remarkable that any college ever announced Covid vaccine mandates in the spring of 2021 given that by this time the CDC (upon which the colleges dutifully and explicitly relied) knew they were ineffective at preventing infection and transmission. So, while we have all come to understand that mandating students to take Covid vaccines does very little if anything to protect the vulnerable members of the community, this remains the single biggest reason colleges put forth to explain why they mandate(d) them.

When colleges began preparing to return to in-person learning in the Fall of 2021, they built Covid dashboards to keep track of infection rates on campus. At that time, there were both large college systems and small colleges that never mandated Covid vaccines and that fared better week-to-week with Covid infection rates than other large and small colleges that mandated Covid vaccines.

I analyzed colleges in New Hampshire over several months only to find that the University of New Hampshire, which never mandated Covid vaccines and has triple the undergraduate enrollment of Dartmouth College, consistently had less Covid infections on their dashboard than Dartmouth, which announced a Covid vaccine mandate in April of 2021. I wrote to Dartmouth administrators countless times to point this out, but I either got no reply or no acknowledgement of my observations. Dartmouth ended their Covid vaccine mandate on April 11, 2023, two years after they implemented it, and after over 98% of their campus community had taken the initial series and at least one booster.

Prior to fall 2021, to help ensure a high uptake of Covid vaccines, Jerome Adams, the Surgeon General at the time, wrote an “Open Letter to Leaders in Higher Education” urging them to mandate Covid vaccines on college campuses. If colleges choose not to mandate Covid vaccines “we are asking leaders to take strong steps to get as close as possible to 100 percent of their students, faculty and staff vaccinated early in the academic year.” 

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Colleges In States That Legalize Marijuana See Spike In Applications From Higher Achieving Students, Study Finds

Colleges in states where recreational marijuana became legal over the past decade saw a significant but short-term boost in applications from top-notch students. They also got more applications overall. Those were the key findings of a new study our team published recently in the peer-reviewed journal Contemporary Economic Policy.

In the year that a particular state legalized recreational marijuana, the number of applications for that state’s colleges grew by about 5.5 percent more than colleges in states that did not legalize. This means that colleges in legal-marijuana states received a temporary boost in applications. We didn’t detect any increase beyond the initial spike. Our results control for school quality, tuition prices and labor market conditions that may affect student application decisions.

At a more detailed level, the gains were strongest for the largest schools, which observed a nearly 54 percent increase in applications compared with similarly sized schools in nonlegal states. Public colleges and universities benefited more than private ones, though applications for private schools rose in states where recreational marijuana became legal as well.

In addition, schools got more applications from high-achieving students. Standardized test scores for the top 25 percent of applicants spiked along with the quantity of applications.

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October 7: A Turning Point for Free Speech?

Two hundred and forty-seven years ago last week, General George Washington rallied his beleaguered troops at Valley Forge with a public reading of Thomas Paine’s The American Crisis, which reminded them, “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country.” Where is Paine now when we need him?

Freedom of speech on American college campuses is now facing great challenges in the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel and Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. According to some, the outpouring of ugly, inexplicable, and vituperative speech unleashed by these events means that now is the time to abandon the concept of free speech at our universities. Apparently, to these “sunshine constitutional scholars,” speech can only be free if it is polite and unchallenging.

Without a doubt, the past two and a half months have been a complete shitshow: clueless students excusing butchery and war crimes; feckless university presidents whose past records exhibit little concern for First Amendment limits now invoking the need to protect free expression; and opportunistic politicians who seemingly lack any understanding of constitutional constraints grandstanding their way through the misery and trying to impose plainly unconstitutional restrictions on student speech.

The campus reactions were kicked off with an October open letter from the Harvard Graduate Students for Palestine and the Palestine Solidarity Committee, which began: “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” That opening salvo presaged a tsunami of impassioned rhetoric from all sides of the conflict, with some pro-Palestinian groups praising the October 7 invaders as “martyrs” and chanting slogans like “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free” and “by any means necessary.” Others, justifiably horrified at the hostage taking and the atrocities committed in the October attack, responded with harsh rhetoric of their own, sometimes blurring the distinction between condemning the terrorist organization Hamas and attacking all Palestinians. 

In this toxic atmosphere, clashes on campus and in the streets have brought to the surface many repulsive ideas, and some actions that go beyond the “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open” debate which “may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks” that the First Amendment protects. For example, police arrested a Cornell University student for allegedly authoring online posts threatening Jewish students that included the claim he would “bring an assault rifle to campus and shoot all you pig jews.” Some pro-Palestinian activists ripped down posters with pictures of hostages held by Hamas. In November, three young Palestinian men were shot and injured near the University of Vermont, an incident federal authorities are investigating as a possible hate crime.

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Racist teachings from academic leaders on American college campuses

Below is a guide provided to students at one US college. To those who haven’t attended college in some years, the content is likely shocking and offensive in its racist nature. The academic leaders who write and promote the information present it as the antidote to racism when it is, instead, the very definition of promulgating racism. They do so with impunity because of who they target with their racism and hatred. It is nothing short of dangerous indoctrination. But students and faculty are afraid to call it what it is for fear of putting their jobs or education in jeopardy.

It is the job of the Dept. of Education and Congress to prevent these sort of sentiments from being taught at public institutions or private institutions that have tax benefits such as nonprofit status. Yet nobody seems to be on task.

You can read the “Quick Guide to the -isms and -phobias” provided to students below. You can see that the harmful content is written in a way that is designed to be accepted, as is, without question. There is no room left for discussion, or for students to raise the obvious racism and discrimination being promoted.

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For the Safety of Jews and Palestinians, Stop Weaponizing Antisemitism

For eighteen years I had the great privilege of working as Executive Director of Harvard Hillel.

As a leader of Jewish communities on campus, in New England, and around the nation, I have helped cultivate a new generation of Jewish leaders and citizens. I navigated moments of tension and war: the tumultuous 1990s, as the Oslo Accords began to crumble; the Second Intifada; 9/11 and its fallout; the Iraq War; Israel’s Second Lebanon War and its war on Gaza in late 2008.

During my long career as a Jewish educator and leader — including thirteen years living in Jerusalem — I have seen and lived through my community’s struggles. Now, as an elder leader, with the benefit of hindsight, I feel compelled to speak to what I see as a disturbing trend gripping our campus, and many others: The cynical weaponization of antisemitism by powerful forces who seek to intimidate and ultimately silence legitimate criticism of Israel and of American policy on Israel.

In most cases, it takes the form of bullying pro-Palestine organizers. In others, these campaigns persecute anyone who simply doesn’t show due deference to the bullies.

The recent effort to smear our new University President, Claudine Gay, is a case in point. I applaud the decision by the Harvard Corporation to stand by Dr. Gay amid the ludicrous charges that she somehow supports genocide against Jews, and I hope Harvard will continue to take a clear and strong stance against any further efforts by these powerful parties to meddle in university affairs, especially over personnel decisions.

The toppling of the president of the University of Pennsylvania is a sobering example of what can happen when we empower these unscrupulous forces to dictate our path as university leaders. The stakes are as high as they’ve ever been. Our vigilance must be up to the task.

As a leader in the Jewish community, I am particularly alarmed by today’s McCarthyist tactic of manufacturing an antisemitism scare, which, in effect, turns the very real issue of Jewish safety into a pawn in a cynical political game to cover for Israel’s deeply unpopular policies with regard to Palestine. (A recent poll found that 66 percent of all U.S. voters and 80 percent of Democratic voters desire an end to Israel’s current war, for instance.)

What makes this trend particularly disturbing is the power differential: Billionaire donors and the politically-connected, non-Jews and Jews alike on one side, targeting disproportionately people of vulnerable populations on the other, including students, untenured faculty, persons of color, Muslims, and, especially, Palestinian activists.

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Harvard’s president Claudine Gay faces 40 new allegations of plagiarism: Latest claims refer to seven publications she’s written and include ‘entire paragraphs lifted from other sources’

Embattled Harvard president Claudine Gay has been hit with fresh allegations of plagiarism, with claims that she lifted ‘entire paragraphs’ in her academic writing – but the Ivy League says it’s still backing her. 

The new allegations were first published in a shocking report from the Washington Free Beacon and span seven publications authored by Gay over 30 years, ranging from missing quotation marks around a few phrases or sentences to entire paragraphs lifted verbatim. Gay is now accused of plagiarizing about half of the 11 journal articles on her resume.

The academic initially submitted two corrections to papers from 2001 and 2017 after she was accused of plagiarism, adding ‘quotation marks and citations,’ a Harvard spokesman said.  However, after additional claims of plagiarism, the Ivy League then said on Wednesday that Gay would also update three spots in her Ph.D. dissertation to add attributions.

It comes as the House Committee on Education and the Workforce announced that it’s widening the scope of it’ probe into Gay’s work, and demanded the school hand over all documentation related to the plagiarism allegations. The committee had already opened a probe into antisemitism at the Harvard campus following Gay’s testimony that was heavily criticized. 

‘Our concern is that standards are not being applied consistently, resulting in different rules for different members of the academic community,’ said Republican rep. Virginia Foxx, the committee’s chair.

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The High Costs Of Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion At Illinois Universities

Several Ivy League schools have been put under a national microscope recently for applying the right to free speech inconsistently. These universities are giving some groups unwavering protection to protest, while shutting down other groups altogether. These inconsistencies have one common denominator: Higher education’s unwavering devotion to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

DEI’s focus on race, gender and is credited for much of the divisiveness on college campuses these days and Illinois’ university system is not immune. Look no further than the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) where Communication 9 goes as far as to tie faculty performance evaluations to professors’ commitment to DEI. We outlined problems with the university’s initiative here.

But what also deserves attention are the growing DEI bureaucracies and the significant financial costs associated with them. Illinois’ universities are building out big teams led by executives with big pay, the highest among them Sean Garrick, Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). His total compensation in 2023 is reported at $352,000, according to the Illinois Board of Higher Education.

But he’s just the tip of the DEIceberg.

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