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EDUCATION

Middle East Studies Profs Gone Bad By Cinnamon Stillwell see note please

Middle East professors all belong to MESA (Middle East Studies Association) which is a cartel funded by Arab nations. The catch is that one cannot get a job in academia teaching Mideast studies without belonging to MESA…..rsk
‘m a professor!” So cried Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) professor Anila Daulatzai as she was forcibly removed from a Southwest Airlines flight for lying about having a life-threatening allergy to the two dogs in the cabin. Unable to provide the required medical certificate, Daulatzai, who had demanded that the dogs be removed, then refused to leave the plane. Daulatzai’s Muslim faith was the likely cause of her aversion to dogs, but it was her dishonesty and unwillingness to cooperate that ended in her arrest.

A former visiting assistant professor of Islamic studies at Harvard Divinity School, Daulatzai has joined the growing ranks of Middle East studies academics who run afoul of the law. Their misdeeds, which range from sexual harassment to domestic abuse and murder to terrorism, demonstrate that being “a professor” is no barrier to criminality.

Just last month, a professor in McGill University’s Institute of Islamic Studies whose name has not been released to the public was accused of “sexual violence” by way of stickers left in women’s restrooms on campus. The professor, who is up for tenure this semester, denies the charges, despite former students testifying to his “predatory” behavior. An open letter to Robert Wisnovsky, director of the Institute of Islamic Studies, from the World Islamic and Middle East Studies Student Association reiterated the allegations, recommending against tenure and concluding that “women are at a disadvantage within the Islamic Studies department.”

Likewise, it emerged in 2016 that two prominent professors, U.C. Berkeley’s Nezar AlSayyad and UCLA’s Gabriel Piterberg, had been sexually harassing female graduate students for years. AlSayyad, former chair of U.C. Berkeley’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and Piterberg, former director of UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies, exploited their positions of power to take advantage of the young women entrusted to their care. Both universities’ perceived negligence and leniency in handling the cases led to student protests and loss of faith of the system.

Another kind of relationship between student and teacher underpinned a controversy earlier this year involving Rollins College professor Areeje Zufari. Zufari, a Muslim, resigned in April following a conflict with Christian student Marshall Polston, whom she had falsely accused of stalking after he challenged her anti-Christian, Islamist assertions. After a wrongful suspension and a disciplinary hearing, Polston was reinstated, while Zufari now teaches at Valencia College. Even more sordid is Zufari’s past, including numerous ties to Islamist associations and an affair with a married man under FBI investigation for terrorist activity.

The False ‘Science’ of Implicit Bias A test purports to reveal hidden prejudice, but there’s little evidence its findings are meaningful.By Heather Mac Donald

Few academic ideas have been as eagerly absorbed into public discourse lately as “implicit bias.” Embraced by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and most of the press, implicit bias has spawned a multimillion-dollar consulting industry, along with a movement to remove the concept of individual agency from the law. Yet its scientific basis is crumbling.

Implicit-bias theory burst onto the academic scene in 1998 with the rollout of an instrument called the implicit association test, the brainchild of social psychologists Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji. A press release trumpeted the IAT as a breakthrough in prejudice studies: “The pervasiveness of prejudice, affecting 90 to 95 percent of people, was demonstrated today . . . by psychologists who developed a new tool that measures the unconscious roots of prejudice.”

In the race IAT (there also versions for everything from gender to disability to weight), test-takers at a computer are asked to press two keys to sort a series of black and white faces and a set of “good” and “bad” words. For part of the exercise, the test-taker presses one key for white faces and words like “happy,” and the other key for black faces and words like “death.” Then the protocol is reversed, pairing white faces with “bad” words and black faces with “good” words. (The order is randomized, so some test-takers sort black faces with “good” words first.)

A majority of test-takers—including about 50% of blacks, according to some accounts—are faster at the sorting game when white faces are paired with good words. This difference is said to represent an “implicit bias” in favor of whites that can explain racial disparities in society.

Mr. Greenwald and Ms. Banaji did not pioneer response-time studies; psychologists already used the methodology to measure how closely concepts are associated in memory. And it’s widely accepted in psychology that automatic cognitive processes and associations help people navigate daily life. But Mr. Greenwald and Ms. Banaji, now at the University of Washington and Harvard, respectively, pushed the technique into charged political territory. Not only did they confidently assert that any differences in sorting times for black and white faces flowed from unconscious prejudice, they claimed that the implicit bias allegedly measured by the IAT could predict discriminatory behavior. In the final link of their causal chain, they argued that this unconscious and pervasive predilection to discriminate is a powerful cause of racial disparities.

As they wrote in “Blindspot,” their 2013 best seller: “Given the relatively small proportion of people who are overtly prejudiced and how clearly it is established that automatic race preference predicts discrimination, it is reasonable to conclude not only that implicit bias is a cause of Black disadvantage but also that it plausibly plays a greater role than does explicit bias.”

If these sweeping claims were correct, every personnel decision could be challenged as the product of implicit bias. The pressure to guarantee equality of outcome through quotas would grow stronger. But the politics of the IAT had leapfrogged the science behind it. Core aspects of implicit-bias doctrine are now under methodological challenge.

A person’s IAT score can vary significantly each time he takes the test, undercutting its reliability as a psychological instrument. Test scores have almost no connection to what IAT research ludicrously counts as “discriminatory behavior”—trivial nuances of body language during a mock interview, say, or a hypothetical choice to donate to children in Colombian slums rather than South African ones.

Mr. Greenwald and Ms. Banaji now admit that the IAT does not predict “biased behavior” in the lab. (No one has even begun to test its connection to real-world behavior.) The psychometric problems associated with the race IAT make it “problematic to use to classify persons as likely to engage in discrimination,” they wrote, along with a third co-author, in 2015.

Even ‘diversity educators’ can’t take the snowflakes complaining about ‘microaggressions’ By Thomas Lifson

The mentality of grievance obsession, now widely held throughout the academic world, is a path toward madness. Once a hunt for invisible “microaggressions” begins, there is no end point, only a spiral into angry obsession or despair.

Ian Miles Cheong of the Daily Caller brings us news of the ultimate expression of the self-destructiveness of political correctness.

So-called “Diversity Educators” are suffering from burnout due to the “emotional weight” of their jobs, according to a recent academic journal article published this week in the Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice.

The study, written by University of North Carolina-Charlotte professor Ryan Miller and six colleagues from the University of North Texas, interviewed seven interviewed diversity educators from a “predominantly white research institution” who claim that they suffer from “compassion fatigue,” “burnout,” and “racial battle fatigue” in their efforts to combat microaggressions on campus.

According to Miller, the burnout is caused by the diversity educators’ “consistent exposure to various microaggressions” from students who don’t see things their way. He notes that these microaggressions have been conceptualized by some scholars “as forms of assault and torture.”

The article, which was highlighted Friday by Campus Reform, describes the burnout as a “gradual wearing down of individuals entrenched in the work of helping others as diversity educators.”

“Team members described the emotional toll of facilitating diversity education, which sometimes led to fatigue, burnout, and disengagement,” Miller states. He adds that they “found it difficult to separate their identities and experiences from the topics at hand in a facilitation.”

This last point is a characteristic instance of self-obsession, which is required for a hunt for microaggression to even be conceptualized. The following point, however, is entirely rational in a limited way (i.e., if you are self-obsessed)

The diversity educators struggle with feeling underqualified for their jobs and suffer from a desire to “prove their legitimacy to others,” according to Miller, who proposed paying them higher salaries and giving them more recognition for their efforts.

Panic Ensues at Michigan State after Students Mistake Shoelace for Noose By Rick Moran

Today’s universities, with notable exceptions, are bastions of extreme political correctness. The problem is so bad, you wonder how anyone can learn anything useful.

In fact, they don’t. Students are so indoctrinated into an alternate reality of white supremacists hiding under the bed and fascists sitting next to them in class that fear becomes the norm. Anything and everything — even unrelated and unremarkable occurrences — can set off a wave of hysteria.

In the case of Michigan State University, the hysteria becomes a parody.

A student living in a dorm room reported a “noose” hung outside her door. The armies of righteous indignation were activated and the “incident” became a cause on social media.

The president issued a condemnation, students decried racism on campus, and black people reported being in fear for their lives.

In the immortal words of Emily Litella: “Never mind.”

Fox News:

A lost shoelace at Michigan State University caused a racial uproar Wednesday after someone mistook it for a noose.

MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon released a statement Wednesday morning saying she was “distressed” after finding out “a student reported a noose was hung outside of her room.” Simon commended the student’s “courage” for reporting the “racial incident” and put out a clear message.

“This type of behavior is not tolerated on our campus,” Simon said. “No Spartan should ever feel targeted based on their race, or other ways in which they identify.”

But by Wednesday afternoon, the investigation by MSU Police revealed there was no noose.

Instead, they found “the object was a packaged leather shoelace and not a noose,” MSU spokesman Jason Cody said in a news release, adding that the shoelaces “are packaged in a way that someone could perceive them to look similar to a noose.”

Officers tracked down and interviewed the student who lost both of the shoelaces. That student happens to live on the same floor as the one who made the report.

“Also, the original shoelace found inside the residence hall was not directed at any individual,” Cody said, adding that police believe someone found the shoelace and put it on a stairwell door handle after picking it up off the floor. CONTINUE AT SITE

Only 7 Percent of Yale Instructors Lean Conservative By Tom Knighton

While colleges talk a lot about diversity, conservatives hammer these same schools for focusing only on skin-deep matters like…well…skin. Rarely is there any concerted effort to make sure there is any kind of ideological diversity on their campuses. At least, that’s what folks on the right keep saying. But colleges keep acting like Kevin Bacon in Animal House, waving their hands and saying, “All is well!”

Only, it isn’t.

From The College Fix:

A new survey conducted by a student newspaper has revealed a staggering political divide among the faculty members of one of the nation’s most elite universities.

The Yale Daily Newsput a startling number on liberal predominance in a survey of the prestigious university’s faculty. Of the 314 respondents, a mere 7 percent identified as conservative, with only 2 percent saying they were “very conservative.” In contrast, nearly three-quarters identified as liberal or very liberal.

Speaking with with The News, Yale President Peter Salovey said the results were “neither positive nor negative.”

“It’s in the educational interest of students to be exposed to a diversity of political viewpoints… Having said that, in most fields, the political point of view of a faculty member is not relevant to the substance of their teaching, and so we would need to be very careful about making it a part of the hiring process for faculty,” Salovey told The News.

Salovey has, however, declared that Yale’s largely white faculty represents the “single biggest problem” the university faces; and in 2015 the school pledged to spend more than $50 million to increase the racial makeup of the faculty, according to The News.

Really? Their ideological viewpoint is completely irrelevant, but their skin color is?

If the issue was latent racism in the hiring process, I could see why Salovey would express concern. That can ultimately hurt the school, so it makes sense.

Yet that doesn’t seem to be the worry here. No, only the skin tone of the faculty is important.

All this while dismissing any concerns over ideological diversity at all. Nice. CONTINUE AT SITE

Farewell, Valedictorian: High Schools Drop Tradition of Naming Top Student More institutions are naming multiple valedictorians—or none at all By Tawnell D. Hobbs

Ryan Walters has loaded up on advanced classes, studied until the wee hours and composed possible graduation speeches in his head as the high-school junior worked to be valedictorian at Heritage High School in Wake Forest, N.C.

But neither he nor any of his classmates will hold the title.

The Wake County Public School System, the 15th-largest in the nation, won’t have valedictorians after this school year, joining other districts that have moved away from lauding a single-highest performer.

“I think it’s pretty stupid, and I don’t think it’s fair,” says Mr. Walters, 16 years old. “Wake County is instilling in us that we shouldn’t try to be the best.”

It’s getting lonely at the top of the class in high school—or very crowded—as more schools alter or do away with the traditional role of valedictorian. While some schools no longer hail a single student with the best grade-point average, others are granting the distinction to anyone who gets at least a 4.0 GPA. And that is increasingly common as certain honors, or advanced-level classes, tend to grant higher than a 4.0 for an A.

At least half of U.S. states have schools that have stopped naming valedictorians, or now name multiple, to head off what school officials say has become unhealthy competition among students.

In recent weeks, Brown County Schools in Nashville, Ind., and Mehlville School District in St. Louis, decided to phase out naming valedictorians. Other districts around the country are discussing similar moves.

Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, Va., had 178 valedictorians last school year, or 1 in every 3 graduates. Valedictorians are those who achieved at least a 4.0 grade-point average. Every valedictorian is ranked No. 1 in the class.

Murfreesboro, Tenn.’s Central Magnet School had a record-breaking 48 valedictorians last school year, a quarter of its graduating class. Awardees achieve the highest grade point average, take a minimum of 12 higher-level courses and meet state requirements to graduate with honors and distinction.

James Evans, spokesman in Rutherford County Schools, where Central Magnet is located, said the school has a lot of high achievers. “We’re pretty proud,” he said.
Ryan Walters, a junior at Heritage High School in Wake Forest, N.C. Photo: Jessica Cannon

More schools also no longer calculate numerical rankings for students—information still used by some colleges—out of fear that students missing higher rankings by a few points could be hurt in the college-acceptance process, or passed over for scholarships.

“We found that it’s shutting our students out from some really positive opportunities,” said Scott Martzloff, superintendent of the Williamsville Central School District in western New York, where the school board in September approved the elimination of class ranking. “I think it causes a lot of stress and unhealthy competition.”

But backlash is growing in some areas of the country, with students at the top of their class as well as their parents saying that high performance is being cast aside or diluted in the name of fairness.

“If everybody is called valedictorian, it doesn’t mean anything,” said Deborah Morley, whose daughter attends Exeter Union High School in Exeter, Calif., where all students with at least a 4.0 GPA can be valedictorian starting this school year.

At least one school, Melrose High School, outside of Boston, recently bucked the trend by going back to naming valedictorians after hearing from students. The new rule, approved in April after a school year without a valedictorian, awards the title to the student with the highest GPA.

“That was really important to people, especially the kids,” said Principal Jason Merrill.

Why Georgetown University Students Want More Conservative Professors on Campus The student newspaper’s simple request that the school introduce more diverse thought is one many universities should heed. By Mark Judge —

Editor’s Note: This piece originally appeared at Acculturated and is reprinted here with permission.

In a recent editorial in the Hoya, the official student newspaper of Georgetown University, students called for more conservative professors on campus.

The editorial is a refreshingly reasonable voice in the ongoing culture and free speech wars that are roiling America’s college campuses. The editors of the Hoya do not demand that a circus act like Milo Yiannopolous be allowed to come and disrupt the campus, or that the left continue its dominance of the country’s universities.

Instead, they make a straightforward case that the dearth of conservative professors at Georgetown is leaving students unprepared for the genuine diversity – that is, the diversity of thought – that is part of the real world. Georgetown’s homogeneity, they argue, is leading to an atrophying of their skills for debate and reasoned argument. In other words, without conservatives, they have no one to test their ideas against.

“One of the hallmarks of higher education is the opportunity to understand and grapple with a wide range of ideas,” the editorial notes. It goes on:

Yet, Georgetown falls short on its commitment to this ideological diversity in the makeup of its instructional corps. The university must work to remedy its lack of politically conservative professors by considering a diversity of viewpoints when hiring instructors, from assistant professors to those with tenure, and by ensuring that no bias exists against conservative educators in the hiring process.

The editorial cites a 2016 article in the Wall Street Journal by John Hasnas, who wrote that Georgetown faculty search committees often blackball conservative candidates. The Hoya editors also cite the Higher Education Research Institute, whose research has shown what even the Washington Post called “a dramatic shift” in recent years toward hiring faculty that leans left. In 1990, 42 percent of college professors identified as liberal or far-left, according to the HERI survey data; by 2014, that figure had risen to nearly 60 percent, while only 12 percent of professors identified as conservative.

The Zionists are Coming! Panic at San Francisco State U. By Cinnamon Stillwell

In the fevered imagination of the academic left, these are dark days at San Francisco State University (SFSU). Speakers at a two-day conference, “Rights and Wrongs: A Constitution and Citizenship Day Conference at San Francisco State University,” described a campus where a “corporatist” administration is at war with its faculty; Arab-American professors are afraid to walk alone on campus; ethnic student organizations are consigned to the dank student center basement; “Zionists” lie in wait to pounce on innocent, beleaguered proponents of “Palestine”; and “white supremacy” rules. All at one of the most radical universities in the nation.

Leading these lamentations was the director of SFSU’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative (AMED), Rabab Abdulhadi, whose anti-Israel activism is coming back to haunt her. In addition to being named in a Lawfare Project (L.P.) lawsuit against SFSU alleging “anti-Semitism and overt discrimination against Jewish students,” she is at the heart of a Middle East Forum and Campus Watch campaign to end the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) she brokered between SFSU and An-Najah University, a hotbed of anti-Semitism and radicalism in the West Bank.

The conference was held on the top floor of the bustling Cesar Chávez Student Center – adorned with murals of Malcolm X and Edward Said – in spacious, light-filled Jack Adams Hall. A bulletin board near the entrance displayed a flyer calling for the removal of San Francisco’s Pioneer Monument, which it dubbed a “monument to white supremacy!” Conference programs featured a graphic of President Donald Trump’s silhouette balanced with a white fist on a scale of justice.

The audience of mostly students and small clusters of faculty ranged from a sparse fifty to sixty for the panel “Academic Freedom for Whom? Islamophobia, Palestine, and Campus Politics” to around 250 – many sitting on the floor after the seats quickly filled up – for “Muslims, Mexicans, and the Politics of Exclusion.”

Abdulhadi chaired both panels, while Hatem Bazian, director of U.C. Berkeley’s Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project, participated in the second. Both, she noted, hail from Nablus in the West Bank. The co-panelists were graduate student instructors (one nicknamed “Che”), local leftist activists, and “veterans” of SFSU’s 1968 Third World Liberation Front strike.

Abdulhadi – who assured the audience she is a woman, lest anyone fear that a man heads AMED – was persistently on the defensive. Harried and angry, her rapid-fire speech rendered many words unintelligible. She complained about Campus Watch tweets “attacking her” and marveled at the “four articles” (two pieces, in fact) about the MOU-facilitated “Prisoner, Labor, and Academic Delegation,” which sent Americans who served prison time for Weather Underground-affiliated domestic terrorism to meet fellow self-described “political prisoners” at Najah.

She blamed these concerns – and the well documented history of terrorism and anti-Semitism at Najah – on her opponents’ “muddying the waters” with spurious claims of anti-Semitism and falsely conflating Arabs and Muslims with terrorism. In Abdulhadi’s world, evidently, Palestinian terrorism and the cultural indoctrination underpinning it simply do not exist.

The bulk of her ire was directed at SFSU’s administration and her onetime ally, President Leslie Wong, with whom she had collaborated to create the MOU. She noted repeatedly that she had left a superior position as director of the Center for Arab American Studies at the University of Michigan, Dearborn at SFSU’s invitation, only to find herself relegated to a “token,” subjected to “new McCarthyism,” with AMED starved of funds and slated for termination.

Abdulhadi blamed Wong’s supposed abandonment of her on “Zionist pressure,” while accusing the administration of “Islamophobia”; “anti-Palestinian racism”; and the bigotry du jour, “white supremacy.” She and her supporters fault Wong for not reacting quickly or stridently enough to the ongoing David Horowitz Freedom Center poster campaign at SFSU, U.C. Berkeley, and elsewhere, despite evidence to the contrary. As with the grievances she reportedly filed earlier this year against the university “for the hostile and unsafe work and study environment for Palestinians, Muslims and Arabs on campus,” there is little proof to back up her assertions.

Paranoia may better explain her worries, for she then declared, “I do not walk by myself on campus anymore. I am actually very afraid for my life.” Because, you see, “the very people who are intimidating and harassing us, including people who have served in the Israeli military – and I grew up under Israeli occupation – are walking around on campus.” Who knew that IDF soldiers are menacing SFSU’s faculty?!

Georgetown University Stumps for the Muslim Brotherhood : Andrew Harrod

The Muslim “Brotherhood [MB] is traditionally a reformist, gradualist movement [which] is working on social change,” stated the Egyptian MB member Amr Darrag at a Georgetown University panel last month. With that, Darrag and his fellow speaker, the British-Iraqi MB operative Anas Altikriti, added to Georgetown’s longstanding history of enabling the MB’s deceitful use of liberal language to mask totalitarian goals. Georgetown’s Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU) hosted the event, which was titled: “Post-Arab Spring Middle East: Political Islam and Democracy.” A pro-Islamist bent was inevitable given that the moderator was ACMCU director Jonathan Brown.

he Muslim “Brotherhood [MB] is traditionally a reformist, gradualist movement [which] is working on social change,” stated the Egyptian MB member Amr Darrag at a Georgetown University panellast month. With that, Darrag and his fellow speaker, the British-Iraqi MB operative Anas Altikriti, added to Georgetown’s longstanding history of enabling the MB’s deceitful use of liberal language to mask totalitarian goals.

Georgetown’s Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU) hosted the event, which was titled: “Post-Arab Spring Middle East: Political Islam and Democracy.” A pro-Islamist bent was inevitable given that the moderator was ACMCU director Jonathan Brown. This professor has his own professional links to MB groups and is the son-in-law of convicted terrorist Sami Al Arian. In February, Brown was widely criticized after he gave a speech at a MB think tank justifying the practice of slavery within Islam.

Before the event, MB expert Eric Trager warned against Darrag’s visit to America: “The Muslim Brotherhood is an international hate group that seeks” to establish a “global Islamic state or neo-caliphate.” Speaking at the event, Altikriti, whom the Hudson Institute describes as “one of the shrewdest UK-based Brotherhood activists and the son of the leader of Iraq’s Muslim Brotherhood,” dismissed Trager’s article as “hilarious.”

Despite Altikriti’s insistence elsewhere that he has no connection to the Muslim Brotherhood, he describesthe movement as “the most important democratic voice that espouses multiculturalism, human rights and basic freedoms.” He also maintains that, while indeed part of the “spectrum” of “political Islam”, groups such as Al-Qaeda and Islamic State are “abnormal phenomena” and not ideologically related to the Brotherhood. By contrast, Lebanese-American Middle East expert Walid Phares has identified the MB as the “mothership for the jihadi ideologies.”

Notwithstanding Altikriti’s support and apologetics for Hamas, an MB affiliate and the totalitarian ruler of the Gaza Strip, he expressed a desire for “far more political players and actors throughout society than political Islam.” He added that if the “only alternative to authoritarian regimes is political Islam, that’s a choice that I would loathe.”

Altikriti’s suspect celebration of pluralism echoes his previous descriptions of his own organization, the UK-based Cordoba Foundation. Altikriti has told Al Jazeera that his foundation “rehashes positive memories” of an ostensible period of multicultural coexistence in medieval Islamic Spain. Prime Minister David Cameron, however, describes the Cordoba Foundation as a “political front for the Muslim Brotherhood,” while the United Arab Emirates has designated the foundation a terrorist organization.

Darrag, meanwhile, was a former minister in Egypt’s MB-led government under Mohamed Morsi, until its 2013 overthrow. Darrag argued that under Morsi the MB wanted “to go back quickly to stability, to establish institutions, elections, get a parliament, constitution, a president, all the institutions that would be perfectly fit for an established democratic system.” He denied Islamist involvement in the “Arab Spring,” arguing that protestors “didn’t go out to ask for the application of sharia.” Trager has noted in fact that Darrag played a central role in creating under Morsi a new, sharia-focused Egyptian constitution.

Darrag also claimed that the MB rejects violence in its pursuit of political reform. He described the work of his Istanbul-based Egyptian Institute for Political and Strategic Studies (EIPSS) as the promotion of liberal, democratic issues, such as “transitional justice” and “civil-military relations.” Once again, however, Trager has noted that EIPSS “presents itself as a scholarly think tank, but it often promotes violent interpretations of Islamic texts” in Arabic-language articles — yet another example of the MB feigning nonviolence.

U of Michigan president trash-talked Trump before, after election, emails reveal By Caleb Parke, Fox News

The head of the University of Michigan disparaged President Donald Trump and his supporters, both before and after the 2016 election, in numerous emails sent to faculty and staff, court documents show.

The emails were released this week as a result of a lawsuit settlement with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which sued UM for failing to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request surrounding President Mark Schlissel’s Trump-related emails.

The FOIA request was filed a few days after the November election by Mackinac Center’s Derek Draplin, who was looking into the university’s decision to host events for students who were upset about the election. The center noted that the University of Michigan receives over $1 billion in taxpayer funds each year and Schlissel is a public employee.

The earliest of the emails released is from Aug. 12, 2016, and it includes a Washington Post article written by a college president explaining how he will “teach Trump” to his students, “calling out the candidate’s bigotry.”

In the next email, Schlissel explains to a UM colleague why he didn’t go for the “typical light feel good” summer convocation speech, noting that he had a room full of “first-time voters” before him.

“I realize that some may interpret this as anti-Trump although there is nothing explicit in the remarks,” Schlissel wrote. “That’s just the way it will have to be. I would feel awful if Trump won the election and I was too afraid of appearing political to make any effort to encourage our students to thoughtfully participate. I am willing to accept the criticism since I think it’s very important.”

Weeks later, on election night, Schlissel responded to an email from Andrea Fischer Newman, a Republican member of the university’s board of regents, about an article by The College Fix with video of a Michigan professor’s lengthy rant against voting for Trump.

The professor warned students they would lose civil liberties, Roe v Wade would be reversed and said they could kiss goodbye affirmative action and equal pay, among other things, if Trump was elected.

“It’s not inherently wrong for a faculty member to take a position on any issue, including an election,” Schlissel wrote to Newman. “The key is that they are solicitous and tolerant of the views of students that disagree and that those students don’t feel persecuted in any way.”

The University of Michigan president changed his tune after Hillary Clinton lost, speaking at an anti-Trump rally, then writing in an email two days after the election that it’s the public university’s job to aid in “pushing back against the idea that facts don’t matter, that science isn’t relevant to decision making and that people with white skin don’t belong here.”

Schlissel added that he was “torn on recommendations for appointees” since he couldn’t “imagine lending one’s name to a Trump administration.”

In another email following his anti-Trump remarks, Schlissel called it “ironic” that a “minority of Trump supporters” at UM “now feel marginalized and ostracized in our campus milieu and post-election activity.”

The Mackinac Center said the emails were being withheld in violation of the Freedom of Information Act by claiming the email were protected conversation under law when none of those emails met that standard.