Tag: universities

Georgia student expelled for racist social media reinstated, school finds she didn’t post it

Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, said Tuesday a student expelled for racist social media was reinstated after an appeal revealed the woman did not post the content.

“We received new information showing that the student did not post the racist content in early June,” the school said in a statement. “We will ensure she transitions seamlessly back into campus life when the fall semester begins. She has our full support.”

The expulsion was announced by the school June 4 after the college, the first in the world chartered for women, was made aware of the postings that morning, according to Tuesday’s statement as well as one made June 4.

On that day, multiple accounts on social media highlighted Instagram posts by a woman purporting to be a Wesleyan student. One photo features a woman and a statement about Black Americans that uses the n-word.

Two Halloween posts shared that day include a photo of a woman in a green “Border Patrol” t-shirt holding handcuffs and posing with a man in a serape and sombrero, paired with the words, “border?…secured. found him, met him & and just had to get a pic.”

While the institution said it cleared the student because she did not post the content, it did not say if the content in question showed the student using racist language and imagery. It did not reveal the student’s name, nor did it refer directly to the Instagram posts described by critics.

Jan Lawrence, a member of the school’s board of managers, said on Facebook that the student argued convincingly at a “Faculty Student Judicial Board” hearing “she did not make the racist post.”

The imagery examined by the school was from the student’s high school days, Lawrence said, and was created during school activity. The student’s argument “supposedly includes proof that the words were added by someone who downloaded her photo and then reposted it,” she said.

The college did not immediately respond to an NBC News inquiry.

“Even though we erred in judgment in the case of this particular student, that will not deter us from doing our part to denounce racism and hate and build an environment where mutual respect and understanding can flourish,” Fowler said.

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University COVID App Mandates Are The Wrong Call

As students, parents, and schools prepare the new school year, universities are considering ways to make returning to campus safer. Some are considering and even mandating that students install COVID-related technology on their personal devices, but this is the wrong call. Exposure notification apps, quarantine enforcement programs, and similar new technologies are untested and unproven, and mandating them risks exacerbating existing inequalities in access to technology and education. Schools must remove any such mandates from student agreements or commitments, and further should pledge not to mandate installation of any technology.

Even worse, many schools—including Indiana University, UMass Amherst, and University of New Hampshire—are requiring students to make a general blanket commitment to installing an  unspecified tracking app of the university’s choosing in the future. This gives students no opportunity to assess or engage with the privacy practices or other characteristics of this technology. This is important because not all COVID exposure notification and contact tracing apps, for example, are the same. For instance, Utah’s Healthy Together app until recently collected not only Bluetooth proximity data but also GPS location data, an unnecessary privacy intrusion that was later rolled back. Google and Apple’s framework for exposure notification based on Bluetooth is more privacy-protective than a GPS-based solution, but the decision to install it or any other app must still be in the hands of the individuals affected.

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‘Asinine’: Rutgers alters grammar rules for nonwhite students to ‘stand’ with Black Lives Matter movement

Rutgers University’s English department declared that proper grammar is racist.

“This approach challenges the familiar dogma that writing instruction should limit emphasis on grammar [and] sentence-level issues so as to not put students from multilingual, nonstandard, ‘academic’ English backgrounds at a disadvantage,” department chairwoman Rebecca Walkowitz said. “Instead, it encourages students to develop a critical awareness of the variety of choices available to them [with] regard to micro-level issues in order to empower them and equip them to push against biases based on ‘written’ accents.”

The school’s English department will alter its grammar standards to “stand with and respond” to the Black Lives Matter movement, the Washington Free Beacon reported.

The department head said that the program will hold “workshops on social justice and writing,” will increase the “focus on graduate student life,” and incorporate “‘critical grammar’ into our pedagogy” in the wake of George Floyd’s death and the resulting calls to end racism and police brutality.

Walkowitz added that the New Jersey school’s graduate writing program will emphasize “social justice” and “critical grammar” in its courses, which will include more reading on subjects related to racism, sexism, homophobia, and “systemic discrimination.”

Some have denounced the move as “insulting” and racist because it assumes minority students can’t understand correct grammar.

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UNC Wilmington professor Mike Adams found dead in his home

A University of North Carolina Wilmington professor who was set to retire in August after a history of posting controversial social media comments has been found dead in his home, according to reports.

Mike Adams, 55, a tenured criminology professor, was found dead alone in his home when deputies with the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office conducted a welfare check about 2 p.m. Thursday, police spokesman Lt. Jerry Brewer told CNN.

Police are investigating at his house on Windsong Road, but did not release any other details, according to the News & Observer. Adams’ family and the university have been notified, Brewer said.

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Demands mount for racial quotas at elite US universities

Calls have been made at several elite American universities to implement racial quotas in response to the mass, multi-racial protests over the police murder of George Floyd.

An open letter to Stanford University’s president and provost, published June 19 in the Stanford Daily, demanded that by December 2021, 20 percent of all students, postdoctoral researchers, staff and faculty at the university be African American. The letter was signed by a group of professional and student organizations led by the Stanford Black Postdoc Association.

A similar open letter from current and former students at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs demanded that 25 percent of the school’s professors be black by 2022. (The letter also called for the removal of Woodrow Wilson from the school’s name, a demand to which Princeton has agreed and about which the World Socialist Web Site has previously written.)

Meanwhile, the University of California Regents, overseeing one of the top public university systems in the world, has voted to reinstate affirmative action. The decision, which will affect all public higher education in California, will ultimately be decided by a state referendum in November.

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Police Say Texas A&M Student Who Found Racist Notes On His Car Put Them There

A student at Texas A&M University who reported that racist notes had been left on his car windshield is responsible for the act, police say. 

KBTX-TV reported that in June, Texas A&M senior Isaih Martin alerted the university police when he allegedly discovered handwritten messages reading “All lives matter” and “You don’t belong here,” along with a third listing the N-word, on his vehicle, which he had parked at an apartment complex on the school’s property.

Martin posted a photo of the notes to a Twitter account that has since been made private. According to KBTX, the university responded to his post, asking him to report the incident. 

“For them to tell me I don’t belong here, when I have earned my spot like everybody else here, and am working to get a degree like everyone else is, that was just kind of hurtful because if anything I deserve to be here just as much as anybody else,” Martin commented at the time. 

“Acts of racism are irreconcilable with the values we uphold here at Texas A&M University. Those who promote hate, discrimination and disrespect are not welcomed at this institution. We are tired of bigoted members of our community marring the experiences of students of color,” Texas A&M President Michael K. Young said in a statement following the incident. 

He also announced that the university would offer a $1,200 reward to anyone who could provide information to identify the person responsible for the act. 

“Let me be clear: Incidents like the one yesterday have no place at Texas A&M. Anyone who believes that hate is acceptable is not wanted at Texas A&M.” 

Texas A&M police reported Thursday that, based on surveillance video footage, Martin likely placed the notes on his car himself. Footage taken from nearby cameras shows that passers-by may have come close to Martin’s car, but were only near the vehicle for a few seconds. 

The police report, obtained by KBTX, reads that Martin was seen moving around his vehicle, with two different “white specks” held in the area of his chest. The footage also showed him “stepping back and onto the sidewalk in front of his vehicle, most likely taking photos and videos. He then approaches his vehicle again on the passenger side and remains there for a few moments. He is then seen walking around the front of his vehicle. Martin then enters the driver’s door and drives away a few moments later. The total time spent at his vehicle is 1 minute, 15 seconds.”

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How Non-Existent Cancel Culture Works at Princeton and Elsewhere

Last week in Quillette, a Princeton Classics professor, Joshua T. Katz, published an article criticizing a letter signed by some of his institution’s professors “to block the mechanisms that have allowed systemic racism to work, visibly and invisibly, in Princeton’s operations.” The faculty letter insisted that “Anti-Blackness is foundational to America” and that it was “rampant” even at progressive institutions such as the school formerly known as the College of New Jersey. The letter articulated a long list of demands regarding the recruitment and retention of people of color as faculty members and students and even called for the creation of

a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty, following a protocol for grievance and appeal to be spelled out in Rules and Procedures of the Faculty. Guidelines on what counts as racist behavior, incidents, research, and publication will be authored by a faculty committee for incorporation into the same set of rules and procedures.

In the Quillette article, Katz agreed with some of the letter’s action items but said that the above “scares me more than anything else: For colleagues to police one another’s research and publications in this way would be outrageous.” On its face, the call to investigate and discipline research and publications of other faculty is a complete refutation of academic freedom.

But of course, “cancel culture” doesn’t exist, right? So there’s no problem here, only the disenfranchised faculty of an Ivy League institution finally getting to join a conversation from which they’d been excluded. As Nesrine Malik puts it in The Guardian, “what is really unfolding here is a cohort of established influencers grappling with the fact they are losing control over how their work is received.”

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