Tag: Academia

Despite Billions in Backing, Studies Show Diversity Trainings Just Aren’t Working

Daily Caller News Foundation

A wealth of research suggests that the billions of dollars corporate America, academia and government agencies have spent on diversity training have done little to impact people’s behavior.

What impact diversity trainings do have is often short-lived or purely influences beliefs without impacting actions, according to a review of multiple meta-analyses, a type of research that summarizes the results of hundreds of studies. American businesses alone spend roughly $8 billion a year on the same diversity trainings research suggests are ineffective, according to the Harvard Business Review.

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Commentary: Harvard May Never Have to Face Accountability for Claudine Gay’s Actions

Virginia Star Staff
Claudine Gay

In an ideal world, wrongdoers face swift and exact justice for their misdeeds. In reality, the legal system is costly. Justice comes at a steep price, one that I, and others whose works were allegedly plagiarized by Harvard’s Claudine Gay and others cannot afford.

After months of turmoil and legal back and forth, it is with a heavy heart that I announce that my intended copyright infringement case against former Harvard President Claudine Gay and the Harvard Corporation — a legal complaint that would have requested a jury trial — cannot be filed as planned in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee. The inability to raise sufficient funds for a trial (a steep minimum of $100,000 to $250,000) and the knowledge that the losing party could be ordered to cover the legal expenses of the victors, to which no limits exist under federal copyright law, gave me pause.

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Commentary: Identity Studies in Academia Is the Birthplace of Woke

Virginia Star Staff

In 1983, having spent four years earning a PhD in English, I instantly turned down the reasonably secure entry-level faculty position my alma mater offered me and chose instead to sign up for that most financially insecure of all professions: freelance literary journalist. Why? Partly because it had taken me that long to face the fact that I just wasn’t the academic type. And partly because I saw that the kind of jargon-heavy approaches that were taking over America’s English departments — from politics-driven “feminist criticism” to pretentious postmodern “deconstruction,” straight out of France by way of Yale University — had nothing whatsoever to do with my own reasons for wanting to spend my life reading and writing about books.

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Commentary: Academia’s Woke Groomers

Virginia Star Staff

Exposing woke academia is both infuriating and amusing. Stanley K. Ridgley, a professor of management at Drexel University, has a knack for unearthing the horror of leftist, racialist, feminist, transgenderist grooming of immature minds on university campuses, and for caricaturing the groomers. His sarcasm will leave you rocking with laughter just after you’ve gasped with horror. 

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Commentary: Drain the Academic Swamp

Admin

Recently, a number of medical schools have joined the anti-European, anti-Christian, pro-Marxist woke bandwagon. According to physicist Lawrence Krauss, “the American Association of Medical Colleges has approved a Diversity-Equity-Inclusion based curriculum, which the AAMC Council of Deans Chair says is as important as teaching the latest scientific breakthroughs.”

Meanwhile, our military leadership continues to push incoherent gender ideology upon a captive audience of young soldiers, sailors, and airmen. And justices at the heights of our judiciary system, because of political correctness, dare not even define the word woman.

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Professor Jordan Peterson Surrenders Full Time Status at University of Toronto, Warns of Dangers of Certain ‘Social Justice’ Initiatives

Cooper Moran

Jordan Peterson, a long time professor at the University of Toronto, announced on Wednesday that he will surrender his full time status, largely due to social justice initiatives of the university and higher education in general.

However, Peterson will remain at the school. He will receive the title of professor emeritus, a title normally awarded to a retired professor who wishes to remain involved in academia.

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Healthcare Activists Push for Policies to Hardwire Marxism in Medicine

Admin
Healthcare worker in hair net and mask on

The Biden administration proposed giving bonus payments to physicians who acknowledge systemic racism as the primary cause of health differences between racial groups and incorporate so-called “anti-racism” into their medical practices.

The move to pressure healthcare professionals to repeat the claim that racial health disparities are caused by racism and not lifestyle choices is part of a broader, years-long push to hardwire “race Marxism” into the medical field. The effort stretches from medical schools and research institutions to patient care and medical administration, with potentially devastating effects for patients and the healthcare system as a whole.

“Race Marxism,” analogous to “anti-racism” as popularized by Ibram X. Kendi, seeks to promote equal outcomes across racial groups, as opposed to a “colorblind” approach which favors equal opportunity and does not take race into account.

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Commentary: America’s Universities Are Learning the Legal Costs of Wokeness

RealClearWire

As they reel from revenue losses connected to the pandemic, many colleges and universities are racking up other costs not likely to turn up in their glossy brochures or as line items on staggering tuition bills: untold millions of dollars in legal fees and settlements for allegedly violating the rights of students, professors, and applicants on free speech, admissions and other matters as the schools pursue social justice causes.

Harvard University’s legal costs fighting a continuing 2017 challenge to its racial admissions practices have surpassed $25 million, the cap of its primary insurer, and it is now suing a secondary legal insurer, the Zurich American Insurance Company, over its refusal to pick up the tab going forward.

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Commentary: The Death Spiral of Academia

Virginia Star Staff
Library with several people at library tables, working.

On March 1, Eric Kaufmann published a remarkably detailed and comprehensive study of bias in academia, “Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination, and Self-Censorship.” Kaufmann’s writing is a product of California’s Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, a small think tank set up to do research forbidden in today’s Academy. His research uncovering rampant leftist political bias in publication, employment, and promotion in the academy—and discrimination against anything right-of-center—qualifies as that kind of work.

In the academy, the free interchange of competing ideas creates knowledge through cooperation, disagreement, debate, and dissent. Kaufmann finds that the last three are severely suppressed and punished. This repression’s pervasiveness may be a death sentence for science, free inquiry, and the advancement of knowledge in our universities.

I am led to that dire conclusion because there doesn’t appear to be any way for universities to prevent it. No solution can arise from within the academy, as it self-selects lifetime faculty that are largely left-wing, making promotion of dissidents highly unlikely. Kaufmann demonstrates profoundly systemic discrimination by leftist faculty against their colleagues who disagree with them politically.

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Commentary: Those Who Should Be the Defenders of Civilization Are Determined to End It

Virginia Star Staff

The year 2020 witnessed a long series of writs lodged against an America beset with plague, quarantine, recessions, riot and arson, and the most contested election since 1876.

What was strange was not so much the anarchist Left’s efforts in the present to wipe away the past to recalibrate our Animal Farm future. What was odder were both the absurdities of the complaints against American civilization, and the unwillingness or inability of Americans to rebut them and defend their own culture.

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Commentary: A Retired Professor’s Retrospective on How Academia and Society Have Gone Separate Ways

Virginia Star Staff

I landed in Washington, D.C., in 1965 as a graduate student. For a conservative, the landscape was barren.

There was no conservative administration, no national newspaper that competed with the liberal New York Times and Washington Post, no conservative think tanks that rivaled the Brookings Institution or Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and no conservative majority in Congress.

Over the previous 32 years, the Democrats occupied the White House for 24 years, and both houses of Congress for 28 years. For all practical purposes, Washington and national politics were a Democratic Party monopoly.

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