Tag: universities

Top ‘antiracist’ accidentally undermines ‘white privilege’ view with single tweet

One of the leading intellectuals in the movement promoting the claim that American society is based on “white privilege” unintentionally undermined his worldview, retweeting a report on a survey of white people regarding college admissions.

Ibram X. Kendi, a Boston University professor and the author of New York Times No. 1 bestseller “How to Be and Antiracist,” deleted the tweet after many Twitter users pointed out that he seemed to be unaware of the survey results’ broader implications.

Kendi spotlighted a report by The Hill on the survey by Intelligent.com of white people who applied to colleges and universities. It found more than a third of the students lied about their race on college applications. About half of the applicants falsely claimed being Native American. More than three-fourths who lied about their race were accepted.

Apparently, Kendi was focused on evidence that white people cheat at the expense of minorities. He didn’t see the obvious implication: The fact that white people would pose as a minority on their applications suggests it’s minorities who have privilege in college admissions, not white people.

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Harvard Theater Admitting Only ‘Black-Identifying Audience Members’ for Performance of ‘Black Female Power’ Take on Shakespeare’s Macbeth

Harvard’s American Repertory Theater is putting on a segregated for Black people only performance Friday night of Macbeth in Stride, a ‘Black female power’ take on William Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

A notice at the the theater’s website states, “We have designated this performance to be an exclusive space for Black-identifying audience members. For our non-Black allies, we appreciate your support in making this a completely Black-identifying evening. We invite you to join us at another performance during the run. Proof of vaccination or negative test results required to attend. Please enter promo code BLACKOUT or another promo code to access this performance.”

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34% OF WHITE COLLEGE STUDENTS LIED ABOUT THEIR RACE TO IMPROVE CHANCES OF ADMISSION, FINANCIAL AID BENEFITS

Every year, aspiring college students complete admissions applications, with the hopes that their grades, extracurriculars, and recommendations will lift them above the pack, and earn them acceptance at the school of their choice.

However, some college applicants are misrepresenting their race in an effort to use their desired school’s diversity efforts to gain admission, or obtain more financial aid.

Intelligent.com asked 1,250 white college applicants ages 16 and older if they lied on their application by indicating they were a racial minority.

The survey found that 34% of white Americans who’ve applied to college falsely claimed on their applications they’re a racial minority.

The number one reason why applicants faked minority status is to improve their chances of getting accepted (81%). Fifty percent also lied to benefit from minority-focused financial aid.

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Rutgers professor slams white people as ‘villains’ while defending critical race theory: ‘Take these motherf***ers out’

Rutgers University professor Brittney Cooper, an outspoken advocate for feminism and critical race theory, defended the controversial teaching and said that white people need to get out of the way of its teaching.

Cooper — who made headlines in 2020 for blaming COVID-19 deaths on Trump voters — added that white people “kind of deserve” a declining white birth rate and said that they were “villains.”

What are the details?

During a recent talk, titled “Unpacking the Attacks on Critical Race Theory,” Cooper told writer Michael Harriot that when she attempts to teach critical race theory to college students, she asks if it’s possible to “legislate [racism] and march it away,” or if they think that “white people just always gonna be like this, and our job is to hold back their ability to do the most harm.”

She also pointed out that white people and conservatives are so opposed to critical race theory because they do not want to admit the truth.

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College students lash out at draconian COVID-19 measures: Schools enforce ‘bio buttons,’ GPS tracking, restrict off-campus travel and threaten to ARREST kids who don’t declare their vaccine status

College students at schools across America are lashing out against ongoing COVID-19 rules that include tracking them with apps, restricting their travel, threatening them with arrest unless they disclose their vaccination status, and making them leave the classroom if they want to take a sip of water. 

The messy new era of the pandemic has some students and millions of Americans increasingly frustrated, with one student calling it ‘the growth of the surveillance state’ and that it ‘feels like the school is blackmailing me.’ 

The rules vary by school. In some, they apply only to unvaccinated students, with those who have received the shots able to come and go as they please once they prove they are vaccinated. 

But in some, even vaccinated students are being told they must undergo weekly testing and continue to wear masks in classrooms. 

Colorado State University, where tuition is $31,712 a year for out-of-state students, is going further and threatening any student who doesn’t register their vaccine status with arrest for trespassing. 

The University of Southern California, where fees are $60,446 a year, will not allow students to even take sips of water in class because it means they would have to slip their masks down to their chins. They must leave the room if they want to have a drink. 

Harvard is mandating vaccines for all students and staff, and Yale is enforcing it among students. Other Ivy Leagues, like Princeton, are forcing unvaccinated students to continue wearing masks. 

Many students say the rules are an ‘overreach’ by college staff and a violation of their privacy. 

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Universities Deputize Students As Mask Police To Snitch On Peers For Money

How much would you have to be paid to commit social suicide? What if a paycheck wasn’t the only perk, but it also entitled you to a sickening sense of self-righteousness and an air of superiority? 

This appears to be the tradeoff many college students have made this semester as universities’ “Student Health Ambassadors,” paid adult hall monitors whose job is to patrol their campuses and enforce mask policies and distancing regulations. Several different institutions have opened this position, each one slightly different but all giving students authority over their peers in the name of public health. 

One of the most egregious examples comes from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), where student Covid commissars have been given the authority to “break up social gatherings” and to check students’ “clearance certificates.” Students who violate COVID policies can face suspension and expulsion. The enforcers, who are paid $15 an hour, even don vests and T-shirts emblazoned with the health ambassador logo. 

Other universities have taken similar approaches. The school that I attend, Pepperdine University, has launched a program to “train and deploy” students to “monitor” their peers for “COVID-19 policy compliance,” a gig that conveniently comes with a high visibility bright blue T-shirt. Pepperdine has also decided to use the carrot instead of just the stick, now giving out raffle tickets to those who are wearing masks. 

Similar “health ambassador” positions have opened up at various universities, including at the University of Rochester, the University of California at Davis, New York University, Penn State, and the Washington University in St. Louis, where the student workers wear yellow shirts bearing the phrase “If you can read this, you’re too close” and an elite division has been dispatched to be “cubby monitors” who monitor private study rooms.

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Transracialism: UK Teachers Union Members Allowed to Self-Identify as Black

A leading higher education trade union in Britain has drawn criticism after supporting so-called trans-racialism, in which people can self-identify as another race.

Last week, the Edinburgh branch of the University and College Union (UCU) wrote on social media to reassert its position in favour of “trans inclusion”, saying that “liberation cannot be built on exclusion”.

The post linked to a 2019 document entitled “UCU position on trans inclusion”, in which the union argued for its members to be able to self-identify as “being black, disabled, LGBT+ or women”.

A staff member at Edinburgh University, who declined to be named out of fear of drawing the ire of the union, told The Times that the issue of trans rights was being “weaponised” in order to force out academics who fail to follow the party line.

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Professor from Soviet Union warns anti-racism agenda in U.S. is ‘rehashing of Marxism’

A professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of Pittsburgh who came to America 30 years ago as a refugee from the Soviet Union is sounding the alarm on the growing anti-racism movement in the U.S., saying it’s basically a rehashing of Marxism and socialism.

Professor Michael Vanyukov, a professor of pharmaceutical sciences, psychiatry and human genetics at the University of Pittsburgh, warns that essentially race has taken the place of class warfare in the narrative.

“Like the Soviet communists, who used class-based hate and rhetoric to control the ‘masses’ and build the society of ideological slaves, the ‘Diversity’ departments use race. In a way, that is worse, because one can change one’s class, but race is forever,” Vanyukov told The College Fix in an email.

Vanyukov recently took a stand against the University of Pittsburgh’s Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion’s push for anti-racism on campus and its reliance on Ibram X. Kendi’s work.

“[Kendi’s] demagoguery is no different than what the Soviet propaganda taught about the West and capitalism,” Vanyukov wrote in a letter to the editor in UPitt’s University Times.

He called out the diversity office’s effort “for an open-ended ‘ongoing, corrective action […] to foster fair and desirable societal outcomes,’ rather than for fostering equal opportunities and meritocracy,” as a “rehashing of Marxism and socialism.”

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Bates College eyes revamping calculus, other math courses to focus on ‘colonialism and privilege’

A working group of professors and students at Bates College has recommended the school require all majors to offer two courses on “race, colonialism, white supremacy, power, and privilege,” according to a copy of the plan obtained by The College Fix.

In doing so, according to the group’s recommendations, each department could alter existing classes to fit the racial education requirements.

Bates College is a private liberal arts college in Lewiston, Maine. It hosts about 2,000 undergraduate students, and the school estimates tuition and fees to be nearly $78,000 per year.

For instance, the group suggests courses like Math 105 (Calculus I) could “situate race, white supremacy, colonialism, power, and privilege centrally and attend to them throughout the course.”

If the plan is implemented, students would be required to take one introductory course and one advanced course centered on race. For example, STEM majors could satisfy the advanced requirement by taking “Math 233: Mathematics for Social Justice.”

The report recommends that in order to fulfill the racial education requirements, a math class must include “understanding how mathematical methods can expose racial and other injustices, and the role of mathematics as a gatekeeper and driver of injustice.”

In biology, a course must include “the context of a genetics course to understand the social construction of race, and the fact that there is nothing biological supporting these hierarchies and historical injustices.”

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UCLA Suspends Professor for Refusing to Assign Grades Based on Skin Color

This is the state of American academia today: Gordon Klein has taught courses in business law, tax law, and financial analysis at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management for no fewer than forty years. He is a respected academic who has been on CNBC and quoted in the Wall Street Journal for his economic expertise. But now, after being suspended, he has filed suit in California Superior Court against the university regents over his suspension. Klein has a good case: He was suspended from teaching at UCLA for the crime of refusing to discriminate and treat his black students differently from how he treated others.

“I was suspended from my job,” Klein explained, “for refusing to treat my black students as lesser than their non-black peers.” His ordeal began on June 2, 2020, when “a non-black student in my class on tax principles and law emailed me to ask that I grade his black classmates with greater ‘leniency’ than others in the class.”

In a sane society, a “non-black student” who demanded that black students be graded with greater “leniency” than others would be castigated as a racist. But in the Left’s funhouse mirror ethics, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, and treating students differently based on race is racial justice.

The student wrote to Klein: “We are writing to express our tremendous concern about the impact that this final exam and project will have on the mental and physical health of our Black classmates.” Klein believes that the student was using an online racial justice form letter: “There was no project in this class, and it was unclear to me who the ‘we’ in this case was. I suspected the student simply used a form letter he found online and neglected to change the subject.”

The letter went on to claim that black students were too traumatized by racism to do well on the final exam: “The unjust murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, the life-threatening actions of Amy Cooper and the violent conduct of the [University of California Police Department] have led to fear and anxiety which is further compounded by the disproportionate effect of COVID-19 on the Black community. As we approach finals week, we recognize that these conditions place Black students at an unfair academic disadvantage due to traumatic circumstances out of their control.” It concluded: “This is not a joint effort to get finals canceled for non-Black students, but rather an ask that you exercise compassion and leniency with Black students in our major.”

Klein notes that “in a subsequent conversation with a university investigator,” the student who wrote the letter made it clear that he “intended that the requested adjustments apply to Black students and not the class generally.” To strengthen the case, the student invoked the Anderson School of Management’s “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion” agenda, which stresses that a “commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion as fundamental to achieving Anderson’s mission.”

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