Tag: Harvard

Group That Pushed SCOTUS to End Affirmative Action ‘Gravely Concerned’ Elite Colleges Aren’t Complying with Ruling

Daily Caller News Foundation
Supreme Court

The Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) sent letters Tuesday to Yale, Princeton and Duke questioning the universities’ compliance with the Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action and threatening litigation.

The letters said SFFA is “gravely concerned that these schools are not complying” with the June 2023 landmark Supreme Court case, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, in which the Court ruled race-based admission practices to be unconstitutional. Suspicions were raised by many over the admissions policies of the elite universities after the student demographics for the class of 2028 revealed little change compared to the previous year when the schools followed affirmative action policies.

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Elite Universities Ranked Lowest for Free Speech, Report Finds

Daily Caller News Foundation
NYU Students

Some of the most prominent elite universities in the nation have been ranked lowest for freedom of speech, according to a report released Thursday.

Harvard, Columbia, New York University (NYU), the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) and Barnard College make up the bottom five in a free speech ranking of 251 universities, according to a report by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and College Pulse. The report cited several incidents of “suppression of free expression” at the schools, including disruption of events and sanctions on students and staff for expressing their views as the reasoning behind the schools’ low rankings.

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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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Judge in Trump’s Manhattan Trials Reviews Risk Assessment by Anti-Trump Psychiatrist

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Five mental health professionals, some of whom already accused  Donald Trump of being “dangerous,” prepared a risk assessment for New York state Judge Juan Merchan to consider in his July 11 sentencing decision on Trump, according to forensic psychiatrist Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a longtime critic of the former president.

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Commentary: The Destructive Generation Proves America’s Weakest Link

Virginia Star Staff
Burning American Flag draped over fence

Governor Ronald Reagan, in his 1967 inaugural address, famously remarked, “Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction.”

Reagan today might have expanded on his theme by declaring that civilization itself is both fragile and can lost by a generation that recklessly spends its inheritance while neither appreciating nor replenishing it—if not ridiculing those who sacrificed so much to provide it.

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Commentary: The Most Important Trait for Yale’s Next President Is Courage

RealClearWire
Yale University campus

On August 31, 2023, Yale’s 23rd president, Peter Salovey, announced he would be stepping down. Since this announcement, much has transpired in the world of American higher education: the resignation of Harvard and UPenn presidents, the creation of campus encampments nationwide, and the cancelation of commencements at Columbia and USC. These developments point to an American higher education system that is malfunctioning. The breakdown we are witnessing at Yale’s peer institutions will continue until leaders are chosen for their courage to apply wisdom to divisive issues.

America’s Founders understood the importance of higher education. Of all his great accomplishments, only three made it onto Thomas Jefferson’s headstone: Author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statue of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and the father of the University of Virginia. Jefferson knew that America’s ability to be great and good – UVA’s motto – depended on the presence of high-functioning universities. America’s first polymath, Ben Franklin, famously said, “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” Framers like Franklin and Jefferson understood the value of academic pursuits, and their example lit a spark that motivated generations of Americans to pursue higher education.

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Commentary: The World Health Organization’s Pandemic Treaty Ignores COVID Policy Mistakes

RealClearWire
World Health Organization

The World Health Organization is urging the U.S. and 193 other governments to commit next month to a new global treaty to prevent and manage future pandemics. Current estimates suggest over $31 billion per year will be needed to fund its obligations, a cost most lower income countries cannot afford. But that isn’t the only reason to oppose it. Validating this treaty is a vote for the disastrous policies of the Covid years. Rather than taking time for deep reflection and serious reform, those pushing the pandemic treaty are set on ignoring and institutionalizing the WHO’s mistakes.

From the Spring of 2020, many experts warned that the panic begun in Wuhan’s unprecedented lockdown would cause wide-ranging damage—and indeed they did. School closures deprived a generation of children—especially poor children—of access to basic education. Businesses were shuttered. Vaccine and mask mandates made public health an authoritarian exercise of power devoid of science. Border quarantines promulgated the idea that the rest of the world is unclean.  

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Commentary: Taxpayer U

Virginia Star Staff
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

Virginia Star Staff
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

Virginia Star Staff
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

Virginia Star Staff
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

Virginia Star Staff
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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Harvard Students Sue over Alleged Campus Antisemitism

Virginia Star Staff
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

Virginia Star Staff
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

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

Admin

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

Virginia Star Staff

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

Virginia Star Staff

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

Virginia Star Staff

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

Virginia Star Staff

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

Virginia Star Staff

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

Virginia Star Staff
"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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DeSantis and Doctors Accuse Media, Big Tech of Hiding Harm from COVID Restrictions

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Ron DeSantis

The media, academy and Big Tech are suppressing facts about the harms caused by COVID-19 lockdown policies, especially for younger generations, Gov. Ron DeSantis and public health experts said in a “roundtable discussion” on the novel coronavirus Monday.

These powerful American institutions are also misleading their audiences about the public health results from Florida’s open approach, which contrasted sharply with most states, they said.

The potential Republican presidential candidate hammered Google and its YouTube platform in particular for removing his earlier COVID-19 roundtable with the same doctors, branding it “misinformation.” Even some Florida news stations had their coverage removed.

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

Virginia Star Staff

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

Virginia Star Staff

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

Virginia Star Staff

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

Admin

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

Admin

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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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

Virginia Star Staff

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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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…

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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…

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