Tag: universities

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.”

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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Laval University Professor Suspended for Questioning Covid Vaccines for Children

A professor at Laval University (Université Laval) in  Quebec City has  been suspended without pay for two months for questioning the benefits of COVID vaccines for children. Microbiology and immunology Professor Patrick Provost sent out an email soliciting a discussion on the issue and raising his concerns. He has now been disciplined for merely raising such issues by a university that has discarded any semblance of academic integrity and free speech. According to The Suburban, the controversy began as a conference of Réinfo COVID, “a collective of nurses, physicians, scientists, and citizens seeking to generate debate about how the pandemic has been handled by the government.”Provost asked his colleagues “to share their views with the public” on these issues. Provost also wrote in a June Quebecor Media piece that the COVID-19 “was very real” but asked “was it as significant as reported?” He argued that there was evidence of only five individuals under age 40 dying of the disease and challenged the need for the Canadian government’s vaccine mandates and passports.

As with the university, Quebecor Media quickly yielded to a mob of critics and removed Provost’s remarks. Journal de Québec Editor-in-Chief Sébastien Ménard said that Provost’s points “were inaccurate or could mislead the public.” Notably, Ménard did not seem compelled to address the alleged inaccuracies in the comments or Provost’s basis for raising his concerns.

Ménard did not seem to entertain the possibility that the media can be a place for the exchange of such ideas, including a rigorous debate challenging Provost’s assertions. Instead, the solution, once again, was censorship.

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New Jersey Bill Would Require College Students to Receive Coronavirus Vaccine

A proposed bill in New Jersey would require college students and staff at higher education institutions to receive the coronavirus vaccine.

Proposed by Democratic Assemblyman Herb Conaway Jr. and co-sponsored by Democratic Assemblyman Ralph Caputo, Bill A4334 would essentially require that all in-person students and staff be fully vaccinated while exempting only those who would work virtually.

“If the bill becomes law, it would go into effect in the 2022-2023 school year,” noted News12.

The bill will now be reviewed by the Assembly Health Committee and will have to pass the state Senate before it becomes law. A similar bill in the New Jersey Senate has not yet received a vote.

Colleges and universities have adopted their own vaccination policies without government mandates up until now. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, no other state in the union has required coronavirus vaccinations for students in higher education.

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University Of California Waives Tuition For Native Americans, Starting Fall 2022

Announced in April, the UC Native American Opportunity Plan allows California residents who are “members of federally recognized Native American, American Indian, and Alaska Native tribes” to get free education on UC campuses. The program applies to undergraduate and graduate students.

“The University of California is committed to recognizing and acknowledging historical wrongs endured by Native Americans,” UC President Michael Drake said in a letter (pdf).

“I am proud of the efforts the University of California has made to support the Native American community, including the creation of the [program].”

The UC system has ten campuses—Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz. About 295,000 students were enrolled in the system in fall 2021.

The program is expected to cost $2.4 million and will be funded mainly by both the state’s and UC’s financial aid programs, according to Drake’s office.

The program was developed to expand “student diversity and make the University of California more affordable and accessible,” Drake said in the letter. The approximate annual tuition for a state resident is $13,104, according to the UC Admissions office.

California has 109 federally recognized tribes and has more Native Americans and those of Alaska Native heritage than any other state in the country, according to the Judicial Council of California.

Native Americans make up 1.7 percent of the state’s population while accounting for 0.5 percent of the UC system’s student body in Fall 2021, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and the university’s enrollment statistics.

Some universities and lawmakers across the country are following UC’s steps.

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Cal State professor: White people shouldn’t ask to come to Juneteenth cookout

White people should not ask Melina Abdullah if they can come to her Juneteenth cookout – she has already made up her mind.

“Attention white people… Please don’t ask if you can come to the cookout…” the California State University Los Angeles professor tweeted on Monday. “#Juneteenth is freedom day for Black folks. It should be #Reparations day for white folks,” the professor of Pan-African Studies told white people.

Juneteenth occurs on June 19, but it is a federal holiday on Monday, June 20. It commemorates the date, two and half years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, that Union troops in Galveston, Texas were informed that “the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free,” according to Juneteenth.com.

Congress and President Joe Biden made Juneteenth a federal holiday in 2021.

Abdullah has a history of sharing her thoughts on racial issues.

She called the trial of actor Jussie Smollett for faking hate crimes in Chicago a “white supremacist charade.” Abdullah, who advocates for an abolition of the police and prison, said in an ideal world Smollett would not have even gone to trial.

She stated:

In an abolitionist society, this trial would not be taking place, and our communities would not have to fight and suffer to prove our worth. Instead, we find ourselves, once again, being forced to put our lives and our value in the hands of judges and juries operating in a system that is designed to oppress us, while continuing to face a corrupt and violent police department, which has proven time and again to have no respect for our lives.

Abdullah has criticized “white saviors” who “swoop in” to help black people. “It assumes that we don’t have our own solutions, our own plans, to disrupt white supremacy because white folks have lived in a world where they are really centered in the universe,” she told Mashable. “They think that every solution should be with them at the front of it.”

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