RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.thecollegefix.com/columbia-med-dei-chief-plagiarized-from-wikipedia-other-scholars-55-page-complaint/

Plagiarized scholar says sections do amount to plagiarism

The chief diversity officer at Columbia University’s medical school plagiarized large chunks of his doctoral thesis from Wikipedia and other sources., a new complaint alleges.

Alade McKen is the latest elite university administrator to face plagiarism charges, following the downfall of Harvard University President Claudine Gay.

Harvard’s DEI chief Sherri Charleston also faces plagiarism allegations as does the school’s Extension School administrator, Shirley Greene.

McKen (pictured) “plagiarized extensively in his doctoral dissertation, lifting entire pages of material, without attribution, from sources that include Wikipedia,” The Washington Free Beacon reported. The complaint has been submitted to the university.

The Free Beacon reported:

The allegations implicate approximately a fifth of McKen’s 163-page dissertation, “‘UBUNTU’ I am because we are: A case study examining the experiences of an African-centered Rites of Passage program within a community-based organization,” submitted to Iowa State University’s School of Education in 2021. More than two of those pages are a near-verbatim facsimile of Wikipedia’s entry on “Afrocentric education,” which is not cited anywhere in the dissertation.

The University of Virginia (UVA) has at least 235 employees under its “diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)” banner — including 82 students — whose total cost of employment is estimated at $20 million. That’s $15 million in cash compensation plus an additional 30-percent for the annual cost of their benefits.

In contrast, last Friday, the University of Florida dismissed its DEI bureaucracy, saving students and taxpayers $5 million per year. The university terminated 13 full-time DEI positions and 15 administrative faculty appointments. Those funds have been re-programmed into a “faculty recruitment fund” to attract better people who actually teach students.

No such luck for learning at Virginia’s flagship university – founded by Thomas Jefferson no less. UVA has a much deeper DEI infrastructure.

Reform or abolition must await this summer’s anticipated changes in the school’s Board of Visitors. At least until then, the very highly compensated, generally non-teaching, DEI staffers are safely embedded throughout the entire university – while costing students and taxpayers a fortune.

Our team of auditors at OpenTheBooks.com reviewed the university payroll file for 2023 to sort out the DEI position head counts, compensation, and then estimated the cost of benefits.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/06/taxpayer-u/

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.

Yet, the conservative Turning Point USA was denied a campus chapter at Cortland, part of the State University of NY. So much for “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.”

As John Ellis, professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz, notes, “Higher education by and for political radicals was foreseen and banned by the American Association of University Professors, which in a celebrated 1915 policy statement warned teachers ‘against taking unfair advantage of the student’s immaturity by indoctrinating him with the teacher’s own opinions.’ The AAUP already understood that political indoctrination would stamp out opposing views, which means the end of rational analysis and debate, the essential core of higher education. The 1915 statement is still a recognized professional standard—except that almost everywhere, it is ignored, at least until the public is looking.”

As the sordid college stories circulate in the media, it is rarely acknowledged that everyday taxpaying Americans of all political bents are subsidizing the insanity. According to Just Facts, colleges and universities received $226 billion in revenue from federal, state, and local funding sources in 2022. Also, from 1959 to 2021, inflation-adjusted government spending on higher education rose from $4,137 per student per year to $13,434. (This amount doesn’t include additional government funding for university research, university hospitals, or student loans.)

https://www.city-journal.org/article/did-scotus-green-light-racial-discrimination

The Supreme Court announced yesterday that it would not hear Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board, a case concerning revised admissions policies at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, an elite magnet school in Alexandria, Virginia. The school has adopted a new admissions policy that, while race-neutral on its face, effectively penalizes Asian American applicants. The Court’s denial of certiorari practically endorses efforts to discriminate against Asian American students and may lead other schools to follow suit.

Before 2020, TJ’s admissions process was strictly merit-based. Any student who had completed or was enrolled in Algebra I and held at least a 3.0 grade point average was eligible to apply. Applicants were required to take a standardized test, similar to the SAT/ACT, and those with the highest scores advanced to the process’s second round, in which they had to submit two teacher recommendations and complete three writing prompts and a problem-solving essay. TJ’s class of 2024 (the last admitted under the old, merit-based system) is 73 percent Asian, 17.7 percent white, 3.3 percent Hispanic, and 1 percent black.

The high number of Asian American students at TJ—and the correspondingly low number of black and Hispanic students—troubled education officials in Fairfax County. TJ principal Ann Bonitatibus, for example, said in October 2020 that she wanted a student body that “more closely aligns with the representation in Fairfax County Public Schools.” One school board member wrote in an email that she was “angry and disappointed” with TJ’s racial makeup. Other education officials in Fairfax County stated that TJ’s entrance exam had led to too many “students who had been in test prep since second grade.”

Apparently in response to these objections, the school board crafted a new admissions policy in December 2020. The new scheme limits how many students each area public middle school can send to TJ (the equivalent of 1.5 percent of its eighth-grade enrollment). It also calls for applicants to be evaluated on several criteria, including GPA; a “portrait sheet” where they must demonstrate “graduate attributes” and “21st century skills”; a problem-solving essay; and “experience factors.” These “experience factors” include whether a student is economically disadvantaged, an English language learner, participating in a special-education program, or attending an underrepresented middle school. Notably, the school board struck the standardized-testing requirement.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/02/16/elite-colleges-reconsidering-sat-score-requirements/

Several elite universities are considering reversing recent decisions to reduce or even eliminate requirements for application that include standardized test scores such as the SAT exams.

According to Axios, multiple colleges used the Chinese Coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to weaken the importance of SAT and ACT test scores in most student applications. But in recent weeks, several schools have reversed course; Yale is considering repealing its prior policy of making SAT/ACT requirements optional, with Dartmouth already reinstating the requirements earlier this month. MIT reversed a similar policy back in 2022.

Other schools that have eliminated SAT/ACT requirements include Harvard and Columbia. Harvard, along with Cornell and Princeton, have extended their policy of making the scores optional, while Columbia’s policy remains permanent.

One of the motivating factors behind the reversal is ongoing research showing a clear correlation between students’ standardized test scores, and their subsequent academic performance and graduation rates in college. Some schools had previously opposed the test requirements for reasons of “diversity,” baselessly accusing the tests of being “racist” and against minority students.

Dartmouth pointed to a study that had been commissioned by the university’s president, which “confirms that standardized testing — when assessed using the local norms at a student’s high school” is crucial in evaluating an applicant’s potential.

In a statement, Yale’s undergraduate office said that they “expect to announce a decision on its long-term testing policy in the next few weeks.” In the meantime, students applying for the Fall of 2024 will still fall under the “not optional” category when it comes to standardized tests.

Brown University is currently awaiting a committee’s recommendations on how to move forward with standardized testing, as well as other practices such as legacy admissions and early decisions. The committee is expected to finish its report in the next few months.

There are still over 2,000 schools in the country which remain either optional or completely free of standardized test requirements ahead of the 2024-2025 academic year. Meanwhile, the National Education Association (NEA) has demanded that all colleges eliminate testing requirements, with NEA president Becky Pringle declaring in a statement that “All students deserve and have the ability to demonstrate knowledge in many ways that are measurable by those who know them best: Their educators.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/harvard-students-try-fasting/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=second

The student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, reports that “more than 30 Harvard students hunger strike for 12 hours in solidarity with Brown protestors.” The 17 students at Brown University refused to eat for eight days “to pressure the Brown Corporation to divest from Israel.”

“To send solidarity to @browndivestcoalition for their incredible hunger strike, 30+ Harvard students committed to a day-long hunger strike to prove to university corporations that we will not back down,” the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Coalition wrote in an Instagram post on Friday.

Hmm. If a hunger strike is “a day-long” commitment, then presumably you’re “backing down” at the end of the day?

Traditionally, for a hunger strike to be effective, it has to pose at least the threat of death or serious injury to the protester who, through striking, is making clear that he or she is willing to die for the cause.

Being willing to skip lunch is rather underwhelming.