Tag: universities

1944–1956: Radioactive nutrition experiments on retarded children by Harvard and MIT

In December of 1993, Scott Allen, a journalist at the Boston Globe, uncovered documents showing years of ethically dubious experiments conducted on Fernald Center youth. The day after Christmas, he published an article, “Radiation Used on Retarded,” noting that “Records at the Fernald State School list them as “morons,” but the researchers from MIT and Harvard University called the retarded teen-age boys who took part in their radiation experiments ‘the Fernald Science Club.’”

Developmentally disabled children at the Fernald State School and a state School in Waltham, Massachusetts were subjected to radioactive nutrition experiments sponsored by the AEC conducted by Harvard University and MIT researchers. The children were fed Quaker Oats breakfast cereal containing radioactive tracers to test absorption of plant minerals and calcium. Parents were never informed that radioactive elements were involved in the tests.

“In the name of science, members of the club would eat cereal mixed with radioactive milk for breakfast or digest a series of iron supplements that gave them the radiation-equivalent of at least 50 chest X-rays. From 1946 to 1956, scores of retarded teen-agers consumed radioactive food to help the researchers better understand the human digestive process.”

“There is absolutely no ground for caution regarding the quantities of radioactive substances which we would use in our experiments,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology biochemist Robert S. Harris assured Fernald’s superintendent in a letter proposing the research in December 1945. At least some consent forms sent home to parents or guardians do not mention radiation.”

“Based on figures in an unpublished report on the project, the children’s spleens were exposed to between 544 and 1,024 millirems of radiation over the course of seven meals. By comparison, the typical American receives about 300 millirems of radiation from natural sources each year.”

“The experiments at the Fernald School, which almost certainly would not be permitted today, are one of the darker corners of Massachusetts’ atomic legacy. Along with pioneering the field of nuclear medicine, some of the state’s leading academic institutions and hospitals also subjected the terminally ill, the elderly and others to radiation doses that are considered unsafe today, often with no possible benefit to the test subjects.”

Though never secret — researchers published the results of the Fernald studies in scholarly journals — details of the research effort, funded partly by Quaker Oats Co. and the US Atomic Energy Commission, have sat in a jumble of boxes in the Fernald School library until now.

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Ex-Northwestern professor sentenced to 53 years for sex-fetish murder

A former Northwestern University professor has been sentenced to more than five decades behind bars for the “cold-blooded” and “calculated” sex-fetish stabbing death of his boyfriend.

Renowned microbiologist Wyndham Lathem, 47, was sentenced Tuesday to 53 years for killing 26-year-old Trenton James Cornell-Duranleau, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

Lathem was convicted in October of first-degree murder and faced a prison sentence of 20 to 60 years.

Cook County Judge Charles Burns said he believed a sentence on the “extreme” end was merited, according to the paper.

“To butcher an individual, Trenton Cornell, the way that he died, in order to fulfill a bizarre, antisocial, perverted fantasy, based on whatever sense of reality, is totally beyond my understanding,” said Burns, who called the murder a “calculated execution.”

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University language guide says ‘grandfather,’ ‘housekeeping,’ ‘spirit animal’ are ‘problematic’ words

A University of Washington language guide is calling everyday words used by Americans “problematic.”

The University of Washington Information Technology department released an “inclusive language guide” that lists a number of “problematic words” that are “racist,” “sexist,” “ageist,” or “homophobic.”

According to the guide, words such as “grandfather,” “housekeeping,” “minority,” “ninja,” and “lame” are considered “problematic words.”

For example, the language guide states that the word “lame” is considered problematic because it’s “ableist.”

“This word is offensive, even when it’s used in slang for uncool because it’s using a disability in a negative way to imply that the opposite, which would be not lame, to be superior,” the guide states.

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Wokery beyond parody as university slaps a TRIGGER warning on George Orwell’s 1984 as it contains ‘explicit material’ which some students may find ‘offensive and upsetting’

As one of the greatest works in Britain’s literary canon, Nineteen Eighty-Four sounds a chilling warning about the dangers of censorship.

Now staff at the University of Northampton have issued a trigger warning for George Orwell’s novel on the grounds that it contains ‘explicit material’ which some students may find ‘offensive and upsetting’.

The advice, revealed following a Freedom of Information request by The Mail on Sunday, has infuriated critics, who say it runs contrary to the themes in the book.

Published in 1949, Orwell’s dystopian story – set in a totalitarian state which persecutes individual thinking – gave the world phrases such as ‘Big Brother’, ‘Newspeak’ and ‘thought police’.

Its plot centres on Winston Smith, a government employee who is arrested and tortured over an illicit love affair, but it also makes powerful points about what can happen to a society that doesn’t cherish academic freedoms or its own history.

Yet it is one of several literary works which have been flagged up to students at Northampton who are studying a module called Identity Under Construction. They are warned that the module ‘addresses challenging issues related to violence, gender, sexuality, class, race, abuses, sexual abuse, political ideas and offensive language’.

In addition to Orwell’s book, academics identify several works in the module that have the potential to be ‘offensive and upsetting’ including the Samuel Beckett play Endgame, the graphic novel V For Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd and Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing The Cherry.

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Wharton Students Reveal the Disconnect Between Elite College Kids and Reality

A professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania inadvertently went viral when she revealed how out of touch some of her Ivy League students are with the reality that those of us who aren’t among the elite experience every day.

Nina Strohminger, a professor of legal studies and business ethics, tweeted, “I asked Wharton students what they thought the average American worker makes per year and 25% of them thought it was over six figures. One of them thought it was $800k. Really not sure what to make of this (The real number is $45k).”

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Penn State professor: Maybe masked drunk drivers should speed through ‘pro-covid’ neighborhoods

A Penn State University professor recently compared those who say mask and vaccine mandates violate their personal liberties to drunk drivers.

“Why is it a parent’s right to endanger the lives of other people’s kids and of teachers?” Professor Edward Fuller tweeted Sunday. “Maybe ppl wearing masks should just drive drunk and speed thru the neighborhoods of pro-covid parents as a way to exercise their freedom and rights.”

Fuller, an associate professor of education and director of the Penn State Center for Evaluation and Education Policy Analysis, has since deleted the tweet and switched his account to private.

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University offers professors $3K to ‘redesign’ courses with social justice, ‘anti-racist’ content

University of Memphis faculty are getting $3,000 stipends to redesign courses that further diversity and “social justice.”

The university is offering stipends to 15-20 faculty in two installments after “syllabi redesign” and course completion are finalized. 

The $45,000 – $60,000 project is part of the university’s “Eradicating Systemic Racism and Promoting Social Justice Initiative,” presents the effort as “an opportunity for interested faculty” to promote the commitment to “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Social Justice.”

Scott Sundvall, assistant professor of English at Memphis, told Campus Reform that the stipends evolved from a discussion during a department meeting about which courses could be applied to a social justice minor. 

Sundvall said that the stipends for redesign “may seem ideological” but is “really not as radical” and a “good idea.”

“It is imperative that no area of the curriculum is excluded,” an Eradicating Systemic Racism and Promoting Social Justice Initiative report stated. “[I]t is the nature of race oppression for it to find ways to operate invisibly, and in turn to produce conceptual spaces that are mistakenly judged to be ‘race neutral.’”

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Law student government rejects free speech group because debate can cause ‘real harm’

For the second time recently, Emory Law School in Atlanta is dealing with a controversy involving a student-run organization seeking to squelch debate in the name of preventing harmful speech.

Its Student Bar Association, the law school equivalent of student government, denied a charter to the Emory Free Speech Forum (EFSF) in part based on the “lack of mechanisms in place to ensure respectful discourse and engagement” at its events, such as a moderator.

This could cause a “precarious environment” and “potential and real harm” on fraught topics such as race and gender, “when these issues directly affect and harm your peers’ lives in demonstrable and quantitative ways,” the rejection letter said.

A charter comes with eligibility for university funding and the use of university resources. Given Emory Law’s “well-established promotion of free speech values” and EFSF’s “overlap” with other chartered groups, the letter said, “we fail to see a need” to fund it.

A week earlier, three law professors pulled their essays from a forthcoming issue of the Emory Law Journal in response to student editors ordering one of them to remove “insensitive language” from a “hurtful and unnecessarily divisive” critique of the concept of systemic racism.

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‘White people should commit suicide as an ethical act,’ Duquesne professor says

He defended a proposition by a fellow professor

Duquesne University Professor Derek Hook said there are merits to the argument proposed by another professor who argued that it would be ethical for white people to kill themselves.

The anti-critical race theory group Mythinformed MKE posted the video recently. “This is part of an ‘anti-racist’ discussion on ‘nice white therapists held by the [American Association for Psychoanalysis in Clinical Social Work],” the group wrote on Facebook. The video appears to be from a summer session hosted by Hook, though the content is not otherwise publicly available.

“White people should commit suicide as an ethical act,” the top of a presentation by Hook said.

He quoted from a South African philosophy professor named Terblanche Delport, who wrote in 2016 about white people killing themselves.

Delport allegedly made similar comments in 2016, in reaction to racial division in the former apartheid state.

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Political science professor claims in Politico essay that Constitution is enemy of Democracy

The day prior to the one-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol breach, Politico magazine ran a guest column by a political science professor who argued the U.S. Constitution has become a threat to democracy.

Corey Robin, a professor at Brooklyn College and the City of New York Graduate Center, wrote a piece titled “Republicans Are Moving Rapidly to Cement Minority Rule. Blame the Constitution.” 

In the piece, he argues the modern Republican Party and the Constitution are preventing the “national majority,” meaning the Democratic Party, from legislating effectively.

“Driving the initiatives of the Republicans and the inertia of the Democrats are two forces,” Robin writes. “The first is the right’s project, decades in the making, to legally limit the scope and reach of democracy. The second is the Constitution, which makes it difficult for the national majority to act and easy for local minorities to rule.” 

In the essay, Robin also criticizes constitutional facets of the American electoral process including the Electoral College and the Senate, all for the purpose of repeatedly leveling anti-Democratic accusations against the GOP.

“Democracy is not just the enemy of the Republican Party. It is also the enemy of the Constitution,” he writes. “Americans associate the Constitution with popular liberties such as due process and freedom of speech. They overlook its architecture of state power, which erects formidable barriers to equal representation and majority rule in all three branches of government.”

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