RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.thecollegefix.com/columbia-universitys-facing-
THE COST OF ATTENDING COLUMBIA IS $74, 173.00 PER YEAR…. THE CHE GUEVARA T-SHIRTS COST AN ADDITIONAL $33.50…..RSK

Survey features overwhelmingly liberal respondents

Researchers at Columbia University recently conducted a study on white people exploring “how Americans who identify as white or partially white think about their racial identities.”

The project, called “Facing Whiteness,” surveyed over 800 white people in three communities across the country. Researchers asked participants many questions including if they have received any benefits from being white and if they would change their race given the opportunity.

The project took place in Richmond, Virginia, Battle Creek, Michigan, and Cheyenne, Wyoming. Researchers lived in these communities for a month, during which time they “participated in and observed local life,” attending church services, visiting local businesses, going to political meetings and interviewing white residents.”

In an email to The College Fix, Samuel Lutzker, project coordinator at Columbia University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics, said that the project “explores race through filming candid conversations with white people in which they discuss their racial identity.”

Data on the project’s website shows that upwards of 50 percent of respondents identified as liberal, with less than 20 percent identifying as conservative. Lutzker said researchers made an effort to reach out to people from across the political spectrum, though ultimately most of the participants were left-leaning.

Lutzker said that there were “two primary reasons for the underrepresentation of conservative participants in our sample.”

“The first reason is a lack of trust in academic institutions, particularly universities that are sometimes labeled as liberal. This lack of trust is exacerbated by the current adversarial political climate. As such, we had to build trust over time with our conservative participants in a way that we generally didn’t need to with liberal participants,” Lutzker said.

“The second reason is that conservatives often had a different understanding of our project than liberals. Whereas liberals tended to see a project asking white people to discuss their own race as a means to improve their own self-understanding and race relations, conservatives often thought that race wasn’t important to talk about or even that our project was further perpetuating racism.”

“If we had had more time in each location, we would have liked to build more trust with conservatives,” he added.

https://www.thecollegefix.com/harvard-med-school-

The medical school claims defining sex as an ‘immutable condition determined at birth’ is ‘medically inaccurate,’ but won’t say how.

Earlier this month, Harvard Medical School released a statement condemning the Trump Health and Human Services Department’s move to explicitly define sex “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.” Yet since releasing the statement, the medical school has refused to clarify why specifically it opposes the proposed rule, and the school has also refused to divulge what it teaches its medical students about biological sex.

The College Fix acquired a copy of Harvard’s full statement via email wherein the school claims that defining sex as an immutable characteristic is, among other things, “medically inaccurate.”

“Harvard Medical School is staunchly opposed to any efforts by federal agencies to limit the definition of sex as an immutable condition determined at birth. This definition would be overly simplistic, medically inaccurate and antithetical to our values as healthcare providers.”

“Moreover, it demonstrates blatant disregard for federal civil law protections of transgender people,” the statement continues. It promises that the medical school “will be unwavering in safeguarding the rights of individuals regardless of sex, gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation.”

Despite the strong stance taken in this statement, Harvard Medical School has been outright unwilling to answer any questions about its position on biological sex. Repeated emails asking if the medical school equates gender with sex and whether they instruct their obstetricians to not identify babies as male or female for fear of being “medically inaccurate” were ignored outright.

Gina Vild, a spokeswoman for the school, initially provided The Fix with the full statement, but she stopped responding to further emails seeking clarification on the school’s position.

The Fix proceeded to reach out to the medical school for a comment with further emails, phone calls, and online form submissions. Nobody from the school responded.

https://quillette.com/2018/11/29/academias-case-of-stockholm

Earlier this year, we launched Researchers.One, a scholarly publication platform open to all researchers in all fields of study. Founded on the principles of academic freedom, researcher autonomy, and scholarly quality, Researchers.One features an innovative author-driven peer review model, which ensures the quality of published work through a self-organized process of public and non-anonymous pre- and post-publication peer review. Believing firmly that researchers can and do uphold the principles of good scholarship on their own, Researchers.One has no editorial boards, gatekeepers, or other barriers to interfere with scholarly discourse.

In its first few months, Researchers.One has garnered an overwhelmingly positive reception, both for its emphasis on core principles and its ability to attract high quality publications from a wide range of disciplines, including mathematics, physics, philosophy, probability, and statistics. Despite its promise, many academics worry that leaving peer review up to authors will grind the academic juggernaut to a halt. With nothing to stop authors from recruiting their friends as peer reviewers or from publishing a bunch of nonsense just to pad their CV, how should academic researchers be judged for hiring, tenure, or promotion? Without the signal of impact factor or journal prestige, how should readers assess the quality of published research? On their own, such questions are quite revealing of the predominant attitude toward academic publishing, which treats peer review as a means to an administrative end rather than an integral part of truth-seeking.

When done right, peer review is a rigorous process that fosters honest critique, lively discussion, and continual refinement of ideas for the mutual benefit of researchers and society. When done wrong, peer review plays to the worst instincts of human nature, devolving the pursuit of knowledge into a spectator sport in which the credibility of individual researchers, prestige of institutions, and legitimacy of scholarship as a whole are staked on the appearance of quality, objectivity, and novelty that the “peer review” label brings. As the above questions indicate, the prevailing mindset focuses on all that is wrong, and very little of what is right, with peer review.