Tag: universities

Syracuse professor is accused of defending 9/11 with claim it was ‘an attack on heteropatriarchal capitalistic systems’ that ‘many white Americans fight to protect’

A professor at Syracuse University has drawn strong reactions for a tweet calling the attacks on September 11, 2001 a strike against ‘heteropatriarchal capitalistic systems’.

Jenn M. Jackson, an assistant professor of political science, made the remarks in a series of tweets on Friday, a day before the 20th anniversary of the attacks that killed 2,977 people. 

‘We have to be more honest about what 9/11 was and what it wasn’t. It was an attack on the heteropatriarchal capitalistic systems that America relies upon to wrangle other countries into passivity,’ wrote Jackson, who uses they/them pronouns.

‘It was an attack on the systems many white Americans fight to protect,’ they added.

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Portland State University Professor Resigns, Says School Is a ‘Social Justice Factory’

Portland State University professor Peter Boghossian said he’s resigned from his position in an open letter and accused the college administration of creating an environment that imperils dissent.

“I never once believed—nor do I now—that the purpose of instruction was to lead my students to a particular conclusion,” Boghossian, a philosophy professor, wrote in the letter. “Rather, I sought to create the conditions for rigorous thought; to help them gain the tools to hunt and furrow for their own conclusions. This is why I became a teacher and why I love teaching.”

But over time, he argued, Portland State University—a publicly-funded college—made “intellectual exploration impossible” and has transformed itself into a “social justice factory” with a primary focus on race, victimhood, and gender.

“Students at Portland State are not being taught to think. Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues,” said the letter, which was published on Bari Weiss’s Substack page. Weiss herself previously worked for the New York Times until 2020 when she resigned, accusing her Times colleagues of bullying, and argued that the paper capitulated to Twitter-based pressure campaigns.

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Rutgers Uni Student Banned From Taking Online Virtual Classes Because He’s Unvaccinated

A student at Rutgers University was banned from taking online virtual classes because he’s unvaccinated, despite the fact that he was willing to stay off campus completely.

Yes, really.

After transferring to the university last year, psychology major Logan Hollar signed up for all online virtual classes for this school year.

Hollar explained why he chose not to take the coronavirus vaccine.

“I’m not in an at-risk age group. I’m healthy and I work out. I don’t find COVID to be scary,” said the 22-year-old. “If someone wants to be vaccinated, that’s fine with me, but I don’t think they should be pushed.”

However, when he went to pay for his online course late last month, Hollar discovered that he had been locked out of his Rutgers email and related accounts.

When the student asked campus authorities why he had been frozen out, he was told the vaccine was mandatory even for those taking virtual classes.

Apparently, COVID-19 is so potent that it can be transmitted over wi-fi.

Despite the university claiming it offered vaccine waivers and exemptions, Hollar’s attempts to secure one were unsuccessful.

Rutgers spokeswoman Dory Devlin emphasized that students need to comply with the vaccine mandate to take courses, commenting, “We continue to work with students who have not yet uploaded their documentation so they can gain access to university systems and classes.”

Hollar now says that he will probably have to transfer to a different university, having already missed several classes.

“I find it concerning for the vaccine to be pushed by the university rather than my doctor,” he said. “I’ll probably have to transfer to a different university.”

“I don’t care if I have access to campus. I don’t need to be there. They could ban me. I just want to be left alone,” added Hollar.

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Pennsylvania professor teaches White people committing suicide can be an ‘ethical’ act

A professor employed at a Catholic university in Pennsylvania said on camera that there are merits to the claim that it’s ethical for White people to commit suicide. 

“White people should commit suicide as an ethical act,” said a quote in a slide for a presentation hosted by Duquesne University psychology professor Derek Hook. 

In the lecture, which was presented to Baltimore-based American Association for Psychoanalysis in Clinical Social Work in June, Hook quoted a South African philosophy professor, Terblanche Delport, who has written about White people committing suicide in South Africa, before further discussing the comments and arguing “there was something ethical in Delport’s statements.” 

“The reality [in South Africa] is that most white people spend their whole lives only engaging black people in subservient positions …. My question is then how can a person not be racist if that’s the way they live their lives? The only way then for white people to become part of Africa is to not exist as white people anymore,” Hook says, quoting Delport on a slide in the lecture. 

“If the goal is to dismantle white supremacy, and white supremacy is white culture … then the goal has to be to dismantle white culture and ultimately white people themselves. The total integration into Africa by white people will also automatically then mean the death of white people as white as a concept would not exist anymore,” the quote continued. 

After reading the quotes, Hook said, “I want to suggest that psychoanalytically we could even make the argument that there was something ethical in Delport’s statements.”

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University of Virginia disenrolls 238 students for not complying with COVID vaccine mandate

The University of Virginia removed more than 200 students from its rolls for not meeting the school’s coronavirus vaccine requirement.

Of the 238 students disenrolled, only 49 were actually registered for fall semester classes, leading the university to believe that the majority of the students “may not have been planning to return to the University this fall at all,” university spokesman Brian Coy said in an email to The Virginian-Pilot.

The students were removed after “receiving multiple reminders via email, text, phone calls, calls to parents that they were out of compliance and had until yesterday to update their status,” Coy said.

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Weekly fees, Wi-Fi access loss: Quinnipiac lays out penalties for unvaccinated students

As Quinnipiac University requires students to be vaccinated against COVID-19 for the fall 2021 semester, students who did not request an exemption nor submit proof of vaccination will face consequences, according to Associate Vice President for Public Relations John Morgan’s email to The Chronicle.

Students who don’t comply with the mandate will face a weekly fee starting at $100 per week during the first two weeks. It will increase by $25 every two weeks up to a maximum of $200 a week. The fee can reach up to $2,275 for the entire semester.

The university will stop billing when students submit their proof of their first vaccination shot. If students become fully vaccinated by Sept. 14, they will not be charged.

Morgan said the university sent the email to around 600 students who have not yet uploaded any vaccination information.

Junior psychology major Danyella Kaplan said it is important for Quinnipiac to take vaccinations and protection against the virus seriously. While she said consequences for non-compliance are necessary, she questioned this move.

“Financial consequences do not seem to be the right answer that will actually have long-term benefits,” Kaplan said. “If students choose to be unvaccinated, having them take a class on the importance of practicing safety measures would be a more beneficial measure to take.”

The email states that students will lose access to Wi-Fi and the campus network if they fail to complete the vaccination mandate by Sept. 14.

As unvaccinated students are required to participate in weekly COVID-19 testing, there will be a $100 fee each time they miss a week.

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Cambridge University Press Advocates For Bestiality.

The article by Kathy Rudy, titled “LGBTQ. . .Z?” was published on March 25th 2020 by Cambridge University Press and taken from Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Volume 27, Issue 3, Summer 2012.

This issue was a Hypatia “Special Issue: Animal Others,” published in 2020 under Cambridge Core. The Cambridge Core is described on its website as “the home of academic content from Cambridge University Press.”

The article’s abstract claims that bestiality is a “new form of animal advocacy” and relies on “queer theory” to make its argument. The article’s abstract states:

“In this essay, I draw the discourses around bestiality/zoophilia into the realm of queer theory in order to point to a new form of animal advocacy, something that might be called, in shorthand, loving animals. My argument is quite simple: if all interdicts against bestiality depend on a firm notion of exactly what sex is (and they do), and if queer theory disrupts that firm foundation by arguing that sexuality is impossible to define beforehand and pervades many different kinds of relations (and it does), then viewing bestiality in the frame of queer theory can give us another way to conceptualize the limitations of human exceptionalism. By focusing on transformative connections between humans and animals, a new form of animal advocacy emerges through the revolutionary power of love.”

The piece seems to have had comparatively few views on Cambridge Core but was tweeted over 400 times.

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Birmingham Southern College imposes $500 fee on unvaccinated students

If students at Birmingham Southern College want to stay unvaccinated, they’ll have to pay the school $500. 

The Alabama institution is charging every student a $500 fee in order to “Offset continual weekly antigen testing and quarantining.” 

Though fully vaccinated students will “receive an immediate $500 rebate,” unvaccinated students will only get the money back after they become vaccinated. 

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Woke Doctor Apologizes for Using Term ‘Pregnant Women’

A physician teaching a course at a woke University of California system medical school apologized to his class for using the “offensive” term “pregnant women,” Common Sense with Bari Weiss reported Tuesday.

“I said ‘when a woman is pregnant,’ which implies that only women can get pregnant and I most sincerely apologize to all of you,” the doctor said, according to a medical student’s recording obtained by writer Katie Herzog.

The doctor reportedly added:

I don’t want you to think that I am in any way trying to imply anything, and if you can summon some generosity to forgive me, I would really appreciate it. Again, I’m very sorry for that. It was certainly not my intention to offend anyone. The worst thing that I can do as a human being is be offensive.

The medical student explained to Herzog that, at her medical school “acknowledging biological sex can be considered transphobic.”

During a class on transgender health, an instructor reportedly said, “Biological sex, sexual orientation, and gender are all constructs. These are all constructs that we have created.”

But, as Herzog observed, the idea that medical students are being taught biological sex is “a construct” matters when it comes to issues about health since “refusal to acknowledge sex can have devastating effects on patient outcomes.”

For example, the medical student noted that “abdominal aortic aneurysms” are “four times as likely to occur in males than females, but this very significant difference wasn’t emphasized.”

“I had to look it up, and I don’t have the time to look up the sex predominance for the hundreds of diseases I’m expected to know,” she said.

Most medical school instructors, the student continued, “are probably just scared of their students,” likely because of online forums in which students can chastise instructors for saying “breastfeed” instead of “chestfeed,” and petitions that “name and shame” instructors for “wrongspeak” and misuse of preferred pronouns.

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Racial Advocacy Group To White Texas Parents: Sign Our Pledge Not To Send Your Kids To Ivy League Schools Or We’ll Doxx You

A “racial advocacy group” in Dallas issued a press release in which they told whites to pledge that their children would “not apply to or attend any Ivy League School or US News & World Report Top 50 School,” urged the white parents to “encourage friends, neighbors, and family members to do the same” and then threatened, “Please note Dallas Justice Now will be publicly announcing the names of those who have and have not signed the pledge.”

Dallas Justice Now (DJN) wrote to their “White Allies”:

Talk is not enough. Commit yourself towards taking action and making sacrifices to correct centuries of injustice. Open up spaces for Black and LatinX communities by refusing to send your kids to Ivy League and US News & World Report Top 50 schools and encourage friends, neighbors, and family members to do the same. Imagine if those hundreds of thousands of spots at these institutions were occupied only by marginalized communities. Imagine the opportunities. We can achieve true equity within our lifetimes but only if white folks are willing to sacrifice their privileges.

The release continued with the “Dallas Justice Now Pledge”:

As a white person with privilege both from my whiteness and my neighborhood I recognize the need to make sacrifices for the purpose of correcting hundreds of years of murder, slavery, discrimination, and lack of educational and economic opportunities perpetrated upon people of color. I understand that access to top schools is a key component in economic and social advancement. Therefore, I commit that my children will not apply to or attend any Ivy League School or US News & World Report Top 50 School so that position at that school is available for people of color to help correct historical wrongs.  If I do not have children under 18 then I will commit to encouraging my white privileged friends, neighbors, and family members with children to sign the pledge and holding them accountable until they do so. 

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