Tag: universities

‘It’s unavoidable’: Marc Lamont Hill says all white people are inherently racist

Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill gave an unequivocal answer when asked if he believed that all white people were inherently racist.

“I don’t know if you’re backing me into a corner with that question but yes, I do,” Hill responded.

The former CNN contributor was discussing the controversy over critical race theory when he made the comments to political commentator Liz Wheeler on the “Black News Tonight” show.

“I do believe that all White people are at some level, at the unconscious level, connected to racism, it’s unavoidable,” he explained. “I think all men are sexist at some level. I think that’s absolutely the case.”

Hill went on to quibble with historical accuracy of one of Wheeler’s examples, but he quickly ended the debate after answering her challenge.

Their debate centered on whether critical race theory was Marxist, with Hill challenging Wheeler to identify specific supporters of CRT who were also Marxist.

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Biden’s pick for German ambassador is president of university that paid him nearly $1M

President Biden’s nominee to be the next ambassador to Germany is an Ivy League president whose university paid him nearly $1 million for an honorary professor gig where he was seldom seen, it was revealed Friday.

University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann, who has headed the Philadelphia-based institution since 2004, is the first envoy to a G-7 nation to be nominated by Biden.

If confirmed by the Senate, the 71-year-old Gutmann would be the second woman to serve as America’s chief diplomat in Berlin. (Robin Quinville has served as acting US ambassador to Germany since June of last year.)

Biden accepted an honorary professorship at UPenn after he left office as vice president in 2017. He held the post until April 2019, when he launched his successful presidential campaign.

In July 2019, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Biden was paid $911,643 by Penn. The student newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, counted just nine on-campus appearances by the then-former senator and vice president between February 2017 and February 2019. Five of those events featured cameos by Gutmann.

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‘I hate whiteness:’ Assistant Dean of university horrifies parents, comes out as a racist

In a four-paragraph diatribe posted to Instagram that champions critical race theory, an assistant dean at Massachusetts-based Brandeis University declared that “all white people are racist.”

She goes on to say in the post that “I don’t hate white people — I hate whiteness.”

The essay was authored by Brandeis faculty member Kate Slater, who describes herself on the social media platform as a racial justice scholar and educator. Her Instagram page has just changed to private status.

Slater, who earned a PhD in educational leadership and policy studies, also claimed that so-called systemic racism is a given and that “all white people have been conditioned in a society where ones racial identity determines life experiences/outcomes and whiteness is the norm and the default and that includes me.”

Slater concludes that “CRT does not create oppression; it names oppression that already exists.”

Tuition plus room and board at Brandeis runs to about $77,000, which is going to require a family to pony up about $300,000 (absent any scholarship funding) to enable their son or daughter to obtain a four-year diploma for education of this kind.

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Professors say proper grammar is racist, perpetuates whiteness

Towson University recently hosted a virtual “Antiracist Pedagogy Symposium,” according to Campus Reform, which “criticized university writing curriculum and programs for being racist and perpetuating whiteness.”

What’s the background here?

The program, which featured an array of speakers, was sponsored by the school’s Office of the Provost, the College of Liberal Arts, the Faculty Academic Center of Excellence, Center for Student Diversity, the school’s department of English, and more.

In addition to educating attendees about first-year writing and graduate school writing, the forum also addressed “linguistic justice.”

“As the country begins its long-awaited reckoning with institutional racism, colleges and universities have been engaging deeply in the ethical dilemma of our time: How do our institutional structures and practices contribute to the problem of silencing, marginalizing, minoritizing, and otherwise harming black and indigenous students of color?” the event page reads. “What do we need to change to create not just a passively inclusive atmosphere for student, but an actively anti-racist one?”

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Doctor fired from University of Saskatchewan after posting online statement asking for “informed consent” on vaccines

Dr. Francis Christian was fired from his position at the University of Saskatchewan and is being investigated by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Saskatchewan for an online statement calling for informed consent when it comes to vaccines.

Dr. Christian has been a surgeon for over 20 years. In 2018, he was appointed to the position of Director of Surgical Humanities Program and Director of Quality and Patient Safety at the University of Saskatchewan. He also co-founded the Surgical Humanities Program and is an editor of the Journal of The Surgical Humanities.

On June 23, Dr. Christian was suspended from all teaching responsibilities, and will no longer be an employee of the University of Saskatchewan from September 2021. The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Saskatchewan is also investigating him after receiving a complaint about a statement he released last week.

In a statement to over 200 doctors, released on June 17, Dr. Christian recommended informed consent when administering COVID-19 vaccines to children. The statement made it clear that he is pro-vaccine, does not represent any group, the University of Saskatchewan, or the Saskatchewan Health Authority.

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Now ‘trigger warning’ is banned by Brandeis University along with the ‘offensive’ phrases ‘picnic’, ‘rule of thumb’ and ‘take a shot at it’

A liberal arts college in Massachusetts has warned its students and faculty against using ‘violent language’ – even banning the phrase ‘trigger warning’ for its association with guns.

Brandeis University in Waltham has created an anti-violence resource called the Prevention, Advocacy & Resource Center which provides information and advice to students and staff. 

It lists words and idioms, including ‘picnic’ and ‘rule of thumb,’ which it claims are ‘violent’ and suggests dreary alternatives such as ‘outdoor eating’ for the former and ‘general rule’ for the latter.

The college claims that ‘picnic is often associated with lynchings of black people in the United States, during which white spectators were said to have watched while eating, referring to them as picnics or other terms involving racial slurs against black people.’

Picnic is derived from the French ‘pique-nique,’ originally used to describe the taking of one’s own wine to a meal, which later evolved to encompass the sharing of food outdoors and started being used in England in the 18th century. 

Lynchings were often public spectacles and could be described as taking place in a picnic-like setting. A project by the Equal Justice Initiative entitled ‘Lynching in America’ notes that during the late 1800s and early 1900s, ‘white men, women, and children present watched the horrific murders while enjoying deviled eggs, lemonade, and whiskey in a picnic-like atmosphere.’

However, the word picnic itself is not derogatory and has no intrinsic links to slavery, lynchings or racism.  

Brandeis also disagrees with ‘rule of thumb’ which it claims ‘comes from an old British law allowing men to beat their wives with sticks no wider than their thumb.’

But this is another spurious etymological interpretation which has been wrongly attached to the phrase by myth and rumour.

The precise origins of the phrase are unclear but it is meant in the sense of approximating something using the thumb rather than a specific tool – there is no evidence of a legal application to wife beating.

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New Video Shows University Of Oklahoma Faculty Teaching How To Silence And Punish ‘Problematic’ Conservatives

According to newly released video footage, University of Oklahoma instructors want to punish students who defy campus orthodoxy. Their plan is to “avoid ‘a rhetoric of dysfunctional silence’ that closes ears to marginalized voices,” by — you guessed it — silencing marginalized voices. 

On Tuesday, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a nonprofit focused on protecting campus free speech, publicized video footage of an April 14 workshop on “Anti-Racist Rhetoric & Pedagogies” at the University of Oklahoma (OU). The workshop’s leaders presented slides about “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” and “subverting white institutional defensiveness.” In an attempt to teach so-called antiracism, the workshop’s leaders also promoted censorship and indoctrination.

The event was “one of nine professional development workshops for instructors and grad students” at OU. During the workshop, three faculty members taught their colleagues “how to foster an anti-racist environment in their classrooms,” brainstorming tactics for dissuading, censoring, and penalizing “problematic” speech. 

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Black Holes Are Connected To ‘Racial Blackness,’ Cornell U Course Says

An astronomy course at prestigious Cornell University, concerned about racism in the universe, not just Planet Earth, asked the deathless question: “Is there a connection between the cosmos and the idea of racial blackness?”

As famed author Heather Mac Donald, who has written numerous books, including “The War on Cops,” writes in City Journal, the course, titled “Black Holes: Race and the Cosmos,” notes in the catalog description that “conventional wisdom” asserts that the “‘black’ in black holes has nothing to do with race,” but astronomy professor Nicholas Battaglia and comparative literature professor Parisa Vaziri suggest the truth may be otherwise.

The catalog description reads:

Conventional wisdom would have it that the “black” in black holes has nothing to do with race. Surely there can be no connection between the cosmos and the idea of racial blackness. Can there? Contemporary Black Studies theorists, artists, fiction writers implicitly and explicitly posit just such a connection. Theorists use astronomy concepts like “black holes” and “event horizons” to interpret the history of race in creative ways, while artists and musicians conjure blackness through cosmological themes and images. Co-taught by professors in Comparative Literature and Astronomy, this course will introduce students to the fundamentals of astronomy concepts through readings in Black Studies. Texts may include works by theorists like Michelle Wright and Denise Ferreira da Silva, authors like Octavia Butler and Nalo Hopkinson, music by Sun Ra, Outkast and Janelle Monáe. Astronomy concepts will include the electromagnetic spectrum, stellar evolution, and general relativity.

Mac Donald notes, “Battaglia and Vaziri puncture the ‘conventional wisdom’ by drawing on theorists such as Emory University English professor Michelle Wright. Wright’s book, The Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology, invokes ‘Newton’s laws of motion and gravity’ and ‘theoretical particle physics’ to ‘subvert racist assumptions about Blackness.’ The Cornell course also studies music by Sun Ra and Outkast to “conjure blackness through cosmological themes.”

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Oxford Alumni Warn Woke Mob Wants ‘Sensitivity Readers’ To Vet And Edit University’s Oldest Newspaper

Oxford University alumni have slammed attempts by the Student Union there to employ “sensitivity readers” to vet, edit and place ‘trigger warnings’ on the institution’s oldest newspaper in order to resolve ‘problematic’ articles.

As the London Telegraph reports, ‘Student Consultancy of Sensitivity Readers’ are to be paid by Oxford Student Union to address “high incidences of insensitive material being published” by the Cherwell newspaper.

The SU has received complaints from some offended students that “problematic articles” are being published that contain “implicitly racist or sexist” or “just generally inaccurate and insensitive” opinions.

The newspaper has been in circulation for over 100 years and has always remained independent of the Student Union.

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North Korean defector says ‘even North Korea was not this nuts’ after attending Ivy League school

As American educational institutions continue to be called into question, a North Korean defector fears the United States’ future “is as bleak as North Korea” after she attended one of the country’s most prestigious universities.

Yeonmi Park has experienced plenty of struggle and hardship, but she does not call herself a victim.

One of several hundred North Korean defectors settled in the United States, Park, 27, transferred to Columbia University from a South Korean university in 2016 and was deeply disturbed by what she found.

“I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy, to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think,” Park said in an interview with Fox News. “I realized, wow, this is insane. I thought America was different but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying.”

Those similarities include anti-Western sentiment, collective guilt and suffocating political correctness.

Yeonmi saw red flags immediately upon arriving at the school.

During orientation, she was scolded by a university staff member for admitting she enjoyed classic literature such as Jane Austen.

“I said ‘I love those books.’ I thought it was a good thing,” recalled Park.

“Then she said, ‘Did you know those writers had a colonial mindset? They were racists and bigots and are subconsciously brainwashing you.’”

It only got worse from there as Yeonmi realized that every one of her classes at the Ivy League school was infected with what she saw as anti-American propaganda, reminiscent to the sort she had grown up with.

“’American Bastard’ was one word for North Koreans” Park was taught growing up.

“The math problems would say ‘there are four American bastards, you kill two of them, how many American bastards are left to kill?'”

She was also shocked and confused by issues surrounding gender and language, with every class asking students to announce their preferred pronouns.

“English is my third language. I learned it as an adult. I sometimes still say ‘he’ or ‘she’ by mistake and now they are going to ask me to call them ‘they’? How the heck do I incorporate that into my sentences?”

“It was chaos,” said Yeonmi. “It felt like the regression in civilization.”

“Even North Korea is not this nuts,” she admitted. “North Korea was pretty crazy, but not this crazy.”

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