Tag: Harvard

Commentary: Taxpayer U

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College Students

The college horror stories are endless. A mandatory Title IX training session at Harvard instructs students that “fatphobia” and “cis-heterosexism” perpetuate violence and that using the wrong pronouns constitutes abuse. Yet, hatred against Jews is tolerated at the school.

In California, community colleges teach that if someone claims they are not a racist, they are in denial and that colorblindness “perpetuates existing racial inequities and denies systematic racism.” A Michigan college held a “queer” abortion stories event earlier this year. The once-venerable University of Chicago is planning to host a “kink and consent” workshop for students, in which the practice of sex play with ropes will be taught.

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Commentary: The Cancelled Black Harvard Professor Who Found No Racial Bias in Police Shootings

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Roland Fryer Junior

Unless you have lived under a rock for the last four years, you will be very familiar with the claim that black Americans are disproportionately victims of police shootings compared with their white counterparts.

But a nearly eight-year-old study challenging this narrative is enjoying renewed attention thanks to a recent high-profile interview of the study’s author, African American economist Roland Fryer, by journalist Bari Weiss of The Free Press.

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Harvard’s ‘Diversity’ Chief Accused of over 40 Instances of Plagiarism

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Sherri Charleston

Harvard University’s chief diversity and inclusion officer allegedly plagiarized some of her academic works, according to a complaint filed Monday with the university.

The complaint alleged that Sherri Charleston plagiarized 40 passages throughout her works, including in her 2009 dissertation and her single peer-reviewed paper, The Washington Free Beacon first reported. Charleston allegedly did not properly cite almost a dozen scholars when quoting or paraphrasing in her dissertation, and she is accused of re-using a portion of a 2012 study published by her husband, LaVar Charleston, in the peer-reviewed article, which was coauthored by LaVar, according to the complaint.

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Commentary: Ruling Class Disturbance

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WEF

The last few months have been interesting. We have started to see some very public disagreements among the world’s ruling classes. The gathering of elites at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, has long fascinated observers and become a lightning rod for criticism, becoming a bogeyman of the right, as well as the hardcore, anticapitalist left. It is a front-row seat to the thinking and priorities of the world’s most powerful people.

In Davos, the world’s media, academic, political, and financial elites spend a few days in luxurious surroundings, praising themselves and forming a consensus on solutions to what they deem to be the problems of the world. This includes everything from facilitating mass migration, tackling global warming by moving away from fossil fuel energy, and the need for economic redistribution to the poor and the third world, all through the corporatist idea of “stakeholder capitalism.”

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Harvard Details Handling of Claudine Gay Plagiarism Controversy in New Congressional Report

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Claudine Gay

Harvard University detailed its handling of the controversy surrounding former President Claudine Gay’s alleged plagiarism in a new report submitted to Congress on Friday.

Harvard’s report, which was submitted to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, details how a university subcommittee appointed an independent panel of “three of the country’s most prominent political scientists” that found “virtually no evidence of intentional claiming of findings that are not President Gay’s.” The independent panel did not review all accusations of plagiarism against Gay, only the 25 allegations flagged by the New York Post, 16 of which the panel said were “trivial,” used “commonly used language” or regarded a previous publication that “they devoted ‘less attention.’”

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Bill Ackman Slams Business Insider’s German Parent Company for Double Down on ‘False Reporting’

Peter D'Abrosca
Bill Ackman

Billionaire investor Bill Ackman’s spat with Business Insider escalated Thursday morning when he accused Business Insider’s German parent company Axel Springer of spreading what he says are false allegations printed by its subsidiary. 

“Yesterday, Axel Springer doubled down on Business Insider’s false reporting. The result is that Axel Springer has now become a directly responsible party for this exposure in addition to BI,” Ackman said on X.

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Harvard Students Sue over Alleged Campus Antisemitism

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Harvard University

Harvard University students sued the university Wednesday over alleged antisemitism on campus.

Harvard University has come under fire for alleged antisemitic incidents on campus, including pro-Palestinian protests that use anti-Israel slogans and the reported mobbing of a Jewish student. The students filed the lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts and accused the university of selectively applying its policies on discrimination and allowing Jews to be discriminated against on campus, according to court filings.

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Commentary: Claudine Gay’s Resignation Is Not the End of the University of Harvard’s Dilemma

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Claudine Gay

Harvard may assume the forced resignation of its president, Claudine Gay, has finally ended its month-long scandal over her tenure.

Gay stepped down, remember, amid serious allegations of serial plagiarism—without refuting the charges. She proved either unable or unwilling to discipline those on her campus who were defiantly anti-Semitic in speech and action.

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Commentary: The Battle for Higher Education

RealClearWire
College Student

Higher education is making news these days.  In Congressional testimony, the Presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn couldn’t tell whether calling for the genocide of the Jews constituted harassment without knowing the context.  The effects of their testimony reverberate.

Days later, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) issued a lengthy report condemning “Political Interference and Academic Freedom in Florida’s Public Higher Education System.”  Prominently featured was a detailed complaint about New College of Florida, where I serve as admissions director.

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Harvard President Requests Even More Corrections to Her Academic Work as Plagiarism Accusations Mount

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Claudine Gay

Harvard President Claudine Gay will request three new corrections to her Ph.D. dissertation following multiple plagiarism allegations, according to The Harvard Crimson.

Gay submitted two corrections to academic articles Friday involving “quotation marks and citations” but was the subject of fresh plagiarism allegations on Tuesday. Now, Gay is submitting additional corrections following a review undertaken by the Harvard Corporation, the university’s highest governing board; however, the Corporation said Gay’s actions did not constitute serious wrongdoing, according to the Crimson.

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Commentary: New Hampshire U.S. Rep. Annie Kuster’s Very Un-American Fourth of July

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by Michael Graham   If you’re at one of the many Fourth of July celebrations across New Hampshire this week and happen to spot Congresswoman Annie Kuster in the crowd, please loan her your copy of the Declaration of Independence. In particular, this part: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Kuster does not concur. Instead, Kuster declared on the eve of Independence Day weekend that she believes some people are more equal than others. Kuster made the statement in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling that racial preferences violate the “all men are created equal” principles of the Constitution. Rather than celebrate equal treatment, Kuster attacked the Court and defended the race-based policies Harvard and the University of North Carolina used to reject qualified applicants based on their skin color. In particular, Kuster supports the policy of turning away qualified Asian students in the name of “diversity.” Why does Annie Kuster support anti-Asian discrimination? You’ll have to ask her. (Kuster will not respond to questions on the topic from NHJournal.) It’s…

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Analysis: Michigan Students’ Estimated Lifetime Earnings Losses Exceed $19 Billion

The Center Square

Learning losses for Michigan students during the COVID-19 pandemic could result in a combined lifetime income loss exceeding $19 billion, according to research from Harvard and Stanford universities.

The Education Recovery Scorecard was released this week by Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research and the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford. The scorecard measures learning loss in 40 states between 2019 and 2022, and estimates how much earnings will be subtracted from students’ lifetime earnings.

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Conservative Commentator Fires Back at Deirdre Nansen McCloskey for Cancelling University of Pittsburgh Debate

Bradley Vasoli

Daily Wire commentator Michael Knowles on Wednesday responded to Deirdre Nansen McCloskey’s withdrawal from their scheduled University of Pittsburgh debate, calling the libertarian economist “scared” and “not honest.” 

The event, sponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), was to take place next Tuesday and Knowles said he and ISI are looking for a replacement for McCloskey. Knowles, a traditionalist Catholic, and McCloskey, a transgendered woman and professor emerita at the University of Illinois-Chicago, planned to argue over the nature of womanhood and current gender-policy issues. 

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Pennsylvania Democrats Base Their Pay Equity Bill on Dubious Data

Bradley Vasoli

With Equal Pay Day occurring this Tuesday, Pennsylvania Democrats renewed a push to strengthen state and federal pay equity laws, citing workplace discrimination statistics that scholars often find questionable. 

State Senators Maria Collett (D-North Wales) and Steve Santarsiero (D-Doylestown) proposed a bill that would apply the commonwealth’s Equal Pay Law to a broader universe of workers and a greater scope of fringe benefits. The measure introduced unsuccessfully last session, would also bolster employees’ rights to inquire about the wages a company pays and permit workers to collect back wages from employers who courts find in breach of the law. The senators said these changes are necessary because women in Pennsylvania earn 79 cents for every dollar men receive, a disparity of over $10,000 per year.

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‘Absurd’: Harvard Medical Course Teaches Students About LGBTQ+ Infants

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A course being offered at Harvard Medical School claims that there are infants within the LGBTQ+ community. 

“Caring for Patients with Diverse Sexual Orientations, Gender Identities, and Sex Development,” the course in question, is a four-week class that aims to teach students how to “provide high-quality, culturally responsive care for patients with diverse sexual orientations, gender identities, and sex development.”

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Harvard Orders Students to Use Correct Pronouns, Says Wrong Pronouns Constitute ‘Abuse’

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One of the nation’s most prestigious universities is ordering students to attend mandatory training on using “correct” pronouns for their fellow students, warning that using their real pronouns may constitute “abuse” and could lead to disciplinary action.

According to the Washington Free Beacon, the Ivy League school Harvard University now requires all students to attend mandatory Title IX training sessions. At these sessions, they are told, among other things, that “using the wrong pronouns” for students who believe they are a different gender constitutes “abuse,” and that “any words used to lower a person’s self-worth” are “verbal abuse.”

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Democrats Ask SCOTUS to Allow Harvard to Continue Race-Based Admissions

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The chairman of a top House education committee along with 64 Democrats are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to maintain “race-conscious admission policies” at Harvard University and University of North Carolina, according to a brief.

Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), a non-profit that fights race-based policies, petitioned the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit to overturn Grutter v. Bollinger, a ruling that kept race-conscious admissions polices in place at higher education institutions. U.S. House Education and Labor Committee Chairman Bobby Scott of Virginia filed an amicus brief asking SCOTUS to uphold affirmative action and dismiss the cases next term.

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Ivy League Study: Boosters, COVID-19 ‘Rebounds’ Fuel Skepticism of Federal Narratives

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As the nation’s most powerful and twice-boosted infectious disease doctor battles a COVID-19 “rebound” two weeks after testing positive, new research from the public health schools at Harvard and Yale suggests the boosted fared worse against the first Omicron subvariant than the non-boosted.

The FDA is so alarmed by the “waning effectiveness” of boosters, whose formulation is still based on the ancestral Wuhan strain, that it asked manufacturers Thursday to add a “spike protein component” from the fourth and fifth Omicron subvariants to this fall’s boosters.

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Commentary: Harvard Won’t Say If It Supports Diversity of Thought

RealClearWire

In the summer of 2020, after the sensationalized killing of George Floyd burned the words “Black Lives Matter” onto America’s streets and television screens, American institutions of higher learning turned to their offices of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion to pledge loyalty to the African American community with cookie-cutter press releases and affirmations. Harvard University, known as the beacon of American higher education, led the way.

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Federal Judge Rules Fairfax County School Officials Discriminated Against Students by Lowering Admissions Requirements

Peter D'Abrosca

A federal judge Friday ruled that Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) officials discriminated against Asian students by lowering the bar for admission to Thomas Jefferson High School (TJHS) in a push for “diversity.”

“This is a monumental win for parents and students here in Fairfax County, but also for equal treatment in education across the country,” Erin Wilcox an attorney for the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) said in a press release. “We hope this ruling sends the message that government cannot choose who receives the opportunity to attend public schools based on race or ethnicity.”

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In Email to Fauci, National Institutes of Health Director Collins Asked for Media Hit Piece to Smear ‘Fringe’ Harvard, Stanford, Oxford Epidemiologists

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Last fall, outgoing National Institutes of Health Director (NIH) Francis Collins asked Dr. Anthony Fauci in an email to pursue a “quick and devastating” media hit piece to discredit the Great Barrington Declaration, recently released emails show.

More than 60,000 infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists signed the declaration to express their “grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies.”

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Commentary: Ground Zero of Woke

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Many of our once revered and most hallowed institutions are failing us. To mention only the most significant ones: our top-ranking military echelon, the leadership of our federal investigatory and intelligence agencies, the government medical establishment—and of course the universities.

For too long American higher education’s reputation of global academic superiority has rested mostly on the sciences, mathematics, physics, technology, medicine, and engineering—in other words, not because of the humanities and social sciences, but despite them. The humanities have become too often anti-humanistic. And the social sciences are deductively anti-scientific. Both quasi-religious woke disciplines have eroded confidence in colleges and universities, infected even the STEM disciplines and professional schools, and torn apart the civic unity of the United States. Indeed, much of the current Jacobin revolution was birthed and fueled by American universities, despite their manifest hypocrisies and derelictions.

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Two Corporate Executive Parents Found Guilty in First College Admissions Scandal Trial

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Two corporate executive parents whose children attend prestigious universities were found guilty in federal court Friday for bribing university staff to rig the admissions process, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Gamal Abdelaziz, former chief operations officer of Wynn Resorts Development and John Wilson, a private-equity financier and former chief financial officer of Staples, who were tried together in federal court, each spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to falsify their childrens’ academic and athletic records to gain admission to the University of Southern California (USC), Stanford and Harvard as athletic recruits with the help of scandal ringleader and admissions consultant Rick Singer.

The two men were found guilty of conspiracy to commit fraud and conspiracy to commit bribery involving a school that receives federal funds, the WSJ reported. The jury also found Wilson guilty of aiding and abetting in fraud and bribery and filing a false tax return.

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Commentary: U.S. COVID Deaths Are at Lowest Level Since March 2020, Ivy League Professors Explain

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If you judged the US’s current COVID-19 situation only by the headlines, you’d come away thinking that we’re spiraling back into pandemic disaster. Localities like Los Angeles County and St. Louis have reimposed mask mandates on their citizens, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention just revised its “guidance” to say that, actually, fully vaccinated individuals should still wear masks in certain situations. Meanwhile, mainstream media coverage of the rise of the “Delta variant” is soaked in alarmism.

Yet at the same time that all this alarm is mounting, the actual number of COVID-19 deaths is at a nadir. Harvard Medical School Professor Martin Kulldorff pointed this out on Twitter, writing that “In [the] USA, COVID mortality is now the lowest since the start of the pandemic in March 2020.”

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25-Year-Old East Lansing Mayor Resigns to Go Back to School

Peter D'Abrosca
Aaron Stephens - Mayor of East Lansing

The 25-year-old mayor of East Lansing, appointed to the position in 2020 during a year of turmoil for the city, is resigning in August in order to further his education.

“My program begins in late August, so I will be stepping down from my position as mayor, and as a member of the city council, because I will be unable to attend four regular and two discussion-only meetings before my term is over,” Mayor Aaron Stephens said in a Facebook post. 

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Commentary: New Harvard Data (Accidentally) Reveal How Lockdowns Crushed the Working Class While Leaving Elites Unscathed

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"Closed until further notice" sign

Founding father and the second president of the United States John Adams once said that “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” What he meant was that objective, raw numbers don’t lie—and this remains true hundreds of years later.

We just got yet another example. A new data analysis from Harvard University, Brown University, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation calculates how different employment levels have been impacted during the pandemic to date. The findings reveal that government lockdown orders devastated workers at the bottom of the financial food chain but left the upper-tier actually better off.

The analysis examined employment levels in January 2020, before the coronavirus spread widely and before lockdown orders and other restrictions on the economy were implemented. It compared them to employment figures from March 31, 2021.

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Harvard-Affiliated Researcher Admits He Tried to Smuggle U.S. Cancer Research to China

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Zaosong Zheng, who worked in research at Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, pleaded guilty to lying to customs officials about his attempt to take biomaterial to China.

According to a Department of Justice press release, Zheng was arrested in December 2019 at Boston’s Logan International Airport, where he had attempted to board a flight to China. Federal officers found 21 vials of biological research material stuffed into a sock in one of his bags.

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Court of Appeals Sides with Harvard in Race Discrimination Lawsuit

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Two First Circuit Court of Appeals judges ruled Thursday that Harvard University’s admissions process did not violate civil rights of Asian-Americans, Reuters reported.

The decision comes after the court heard arguments less than two months ago and upholds a decision from District Court Judge Allison D. Burroughs which favored Harvard after the case was heard in October 2018, Reuters reported.

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Harvard Center Hosts Virtual Seminar on How to Inject Race Issues Into Course Syllabi

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The Harvard Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies hosted a webinar last Friday on “integrating critical pedagogies of race” into professors’ course syllabi.

Titled “Teaching Race and Racism: Your Syllabus 2.0” and sponsored by the Association for Slavic, Eurasian, and Eastern European Studies, it was part of the “Race in Focus” virtual series the goal of which is to show faculty how to utilize new course materials, “shar[e] resources,” and “connect with scholars of color.”

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Anti-Homeschooling Harvard Professor Elizabeth Bartholet: Public Schools Not So Great After All

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In the wake of many schools around the country participating in remote learning, one Harvard University professor has admitted that parents are finding public schools to be “worse than they thought.”

The Harvard law professor gained national attention earlier in 2020, calling for a homeschooling ban. According to The Harvard Gazette, Elizabeth Bartholet said in May, “when it comes to homeschooling, the victims are all children so it’s harder to mount a political movement.”

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Harvard, Yale Enrollments Down 20 Percent After Moving Online

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Amid the coronavirus pandemic, about 20 percent of Harvard and Yale University students will not re-enroll at the Ivy League schools this fall.

An email sent to Harvard students from Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Claudine Gay iterated the same fate for Harvard, the Harvard Crimson reported. A similar, if not identical announcement,  was posted on Harvard’s website, confirming that 5,231 students intend to enroll for the fall semester. As the Harvard Crimson noted, data from the previous year show that 6,755 enrolled at Harvard in 2019. 

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Academics’ Campaign to Remove Harvard Professor for Tweets Backfires

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by Maria Copeland   Hundreds of academics signed a letter written by members of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), calling for a Harvard professor’s removal from the LSA list of “distinguished fellows,” as well as their list of media experts. The LSA did not accept their demands; and the the target of the demands says he has received hundreds of letters of support. The letter accused Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard Steven Pinker of behavior that does not live up to the society’s standards and does not merit the “honor, credibility, and visibility” its fellows receive. Specifically, the academics accused Pinker of acting in a way contrary to the society’s stance on racial justice, saying he has “a history of speaking over genuine grievances and downplaying injustices.” “We aim to show here Dr. Pinker as a public figure has a pattern of drowning out the voices of people suffering from racist and sexist violence, in particular in the immediate aftermath of violent acts and/or protests against the systems that created them,” the letter states. Their evidence was in the form of six messages the professor posted on Twitter, which they say indicate that “Dr. Pinker is untenable as an LSA fellow and…

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Harvard, MIT Sue to Block ICE Rule on International Students

The Associated Press

Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday challenging the Trump administration’s decision to bar international students from staying in the U.S. if they take classes entirely online this fall.

The lawsuit, filed in Boston’s federal court, seeks to prevent federal immigration authorities from enforcing the rule. The universities contend that the directive violates the Administrative Procedures Act because officials failed to offer a reasonable basis justifying the policy and because the public was not given notice to comment on it.

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Students Sue Harvard Citing ‘Subpar Online Learning Options’ During Coronavirus Pandemic

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On Wednesday, students sued Harvard University for not refunding tuition and fees after the coronavirus pandemic forced classes online.

This makes Harvard at least the fourth Ivy League school to be targeted for failing to reimburse educational costs, following Brown, Columbia, and Cornell. The school is facing a $5 million federal class-action lawsuit.  Students chose to pursue legal action as a result of not having “received the benefit of in-person instruction or equivalent access to university facilities and services.” 

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University of Michigan and Harvard Professor Says #MeToo Wouldn’t Have Happened if Hillary Won

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by John Hasson   A University of Michigan professor and Harvard University visiting professor recently claimed that the #MeToo movement would not have occurred if Hillary Clinton were president. Catharine MacKinnon, a UMich law professor and Harvard visiting professor, made the remark at the University of California, Berkeley’s annual #MeToo conference during the spring semester. In her keynote speech, MacKinnon compared accusations of sexual abuse made against President Bill Clinton with those made against President Donald Trump, calling claims made against Clinton “a morality crusade” and suggesting that many people were only concerned with the “right use of it [the allegations] for political gain.” But MacKinnon asserted that the election of Trump fundamentally changed the way that reports of sexual assault were viewed. In her speech, she also contrasted Clinton with Trump by referring to the former president as someone Americans “actually elected.” “Instead of interfering with a respected president…somebody…the American people actually elected, exposing these violations in one’s own life became a means of resisting the forces of darkness,” MacKinnon stated. “Misogyny, racism, fascism, lies, stupidity, you name it.” The professor also stated that “indifference to reports of sexual abuse, that was part of what got [Trump] elected right?…

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Harvard Moves To Dismiss Legal Challenges To Single-Gender Social Group Restrictions

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by Neetu Chandak   Harvard University announced Friday that it would move to dismiss complaints about a rule that punishes students in single-gender clubs from holding leadership positions on sports teams and campus groups. The single-gender policy, announced May 6, 2016, would give a certain set of extracurricular opportunities “to students whose decisions reflect the University’s aspirations for inclusivity,” Harvard said in its dismissal filings, obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation over email. The rule went into effect for students entering the school in the Fall 2017 semester. Delta Gamma Fraternity Management Corporation, Alpha Phi, and Cambridge’s Alpha Phi chapter sued Harvard at the state level while Kappa Alpha Theta sorority, Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, Sigma Chi fraternity, Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter in Cambridge and three Harvard male students were plaintiffs in the federal suit. The lawsuits were filed on Dec. 3, 2018, according to a press statement from the North American Interfraternity Conference (NAIC). The state level lawsuit focused on “right to free association and equal treatment based on sex” and the federal suit questioned the policy’s commitment to “freedom from sex discrimination,” The Boston Globe reported. Harvard said in its federal filing on Friday that the rule…

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Elizabeth Warren Compares Scrutiny of Native American Heritage Claim to Obama Birtherism

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by Peter Hasson   Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s website for her presidential exploratory committee attempts to link questions about her claims of Native American heritage to people who questioned whether former President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Warren launched the committee Monday, including a website with a “fact squad” meant to push back against criticisms of the senator. Warren’s website blames “the right-wing machine” for scrutiny of her heritage claims. “They have called Elizabeth ‘Pocahontas’ and used racist depictions of Native American history, culture, and people to make Elizabeth the butt of a joke,” the website states. “These actions not only dishonor Native people and their many contributions to this country, but perpetuate harmful stereotypes that Native communities continue to fight against.” “Show us your papers. Release your birth certificate. It’s all part of the right’s disgusting effort to use race-baiting and fear-mongering to distract our country and divide our people while they rig the system for the rich and powerful,” Warren’s site claims. It also displays a photoshopped image of Obama behind Warren that reads: “Don’t worry Liz, I think we fooled them.” Warren’s campaign didn’t return a request for comment on the comparison between…

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Harvard Faces Another Race Discrimination Lawsuit

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by Kevin Daley   An anti-affirmative action coalition has filed a pair of lawsuits against Harvard and New York University, accusing both institutions of unlawful race and sex discrimination in the operation of their respective law review journals. The complaints allege Harvard and NYU use unlawful identity criteria when selecting editors for their law reviews. In turn, plaintiffs say, those editors use similar factors when reviewing prospective articles for publication. “Law-review membership at Harvard and New York University is part of a politicized spoils system and no longer acts as a reliable signaling device for academic ability or achievement,” the lawsuits read. Faculty, Alumni, and Students Opposed To Racial Preferences (FASORP), which self-describes as “a voluntary membership organization that litigates against race and sex preferences in academia,” organized both lawsuits. FASORP, which is based in Texas, is also the plaintiff in both cases. In court filings, the plaintiffs accuse NYU of using quotas to fill positions on its prestigious law review. By FASORP’s telling, the law review selects 50 new members each year: 15 on the basis of first year grades, another 15 on the strength of their writing, and eight through a combination of grades and writing scores. The…

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Harvard Bias Trial to Spotlight Use of Race in College Admissions

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A lawsuit challenging the use of race as a factor in U.S. college admissions will go to trial in Boston on Monday, when Harvard University will face accusations that it discriminates against Asian-American applicants. The lawsuit, backed by the Trump administration, could eventually reach the Supreme Court, giving the newly cemented five-member conservative majority a chance to bar the use of affirmative action to help minority applicants get into college. “The case is critically important as it’s really about diversity at colleges all across the country,” said Nicole Gon Ochi, an attorney at Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Los Angeles who supports Harvard in the case. Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), founded by anti-affirmative action activist Edward Blum, sued Harvard in 2014, contending it illegally engages in “racial balancing” that artificially limits the number of Asian-American students at the Ivy League school. The U.S. Justice Department, which launched a related probe of Harvard after Republican President Donald Trump’s election, has backed the group, saying the Cambridge, Massachusetts, university has not seriously considered alternative, race-neutral approaches to admissions. Conservatives argue that affirmative action, which aims to offset historic patterns of racial discrimination, can hurt white people and Asian-Americans while helping black…

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DOJ Civil Rights Investigation Expands From Harvard to Include Yale, Brown and Dartmouth Affirmative Action Policy

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by  Natalia Castro   The Department of Justice took a stand against prejudice last month when the department filed a complaint against Harvard College for discriminated against Asian American students. Now, the DOJ has taken this a step further by expanding their complaint to include three other universities known for discrimination in their admissions process. By expanding the scope of their complaint, the DOJ is reaffirming their commitment to justice and equality for all. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that the DOJ is investigating Yale, Brown, and Dartmouth colleges for holding Asian-American students to a higher standard than students of other races and use an illegal quota to cap the number of admitted Asian American students. The Asian American Coalition for Education continued in a Sept. 2018, “Compelling evidence indicates that Yale University and many other selective colleges in the U.S. fail to comply with [antidiscrimination] laws. On the contrary, they have applied de facto racial quotas, racial stereotypes and higher admissions standards to discriminate against Asian American applicants. After extracurricular activities and other factors are adjusted, an Asian-American applicant has to score on average 140, 270 and 450 points higher than a white student, a Hispanic student and a black…

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First Harvard Sorority Shuts Its Doors Because Of Single-Gender Penalties

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by Rob Shimshock   Delta Gamma became the first single-gender Harvard University group to shut its doors, citing penalties the school has introduced for groups that only admit members belonging to one gender. The national Delta Gamma chapter announced the Harvard chapter’s decision to disband in a Thursday press release published Sunday in The Harvard Crimson. “We respect the chapter’s decision and understand that the University’s sanctions resulted in an environment in which Delta Gamma could not thrive,” Delta Gamma national President Wilma Johnson Wilbanks said in the release. “We sincerely hope this changes in the future.” Harvard students belonging to classes beginning with the class of 2021 cannot hold office in recognized student organizations, captain Harvard varsity athletic teams, or receive school endorsement for scholarships like the Rhodes Scholarship. Delta Gamma is the first single-gender group at Harvard to close because of the new policy, but other groups have modified their membership to conform to the administration’s will. The school’s Kappa Alpha Theta sorority announced in July that it would cut ties from its national chapter and rebrand as a gender-neutral Theta Zeta Xi chapter. Former fraternities Alpha Epsilon Phi and Kappa Sigma became co-ed in fall 2017. The number of Harvard students…

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Commentary: Is Culture Still Relevant?

JC Bowman

The United States is a diverse country, racially and ethnically, as well as in how people choose to organize themselves socially and politically. It can be argued that our public schools are integrally situated to communicate society’s values, such as individual responsibility, patriotism, integrity, objectivity, justice, respect for others, being on time, doing a good job, working well with others, being a good citizen, and exercising democracy in government and other interactions. Americans have thus far kept our republic, and created it to be resilient and strong. However, the United States will remain free only with relentless vigilance and public engagement, which must be transmitted in our culture.

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