The university told Fox News on Friday that "parents of all backgrounds" could attend the seminar,  "From Integration to Antiracism," even though it was "principally intended for white parents of public school children."

However, the university went on, "the program's materials and content were not clear enough about it being open to all."

The statement came the same day that NYU was hit with a federal civil rights complaint over the seminar, which a few days before its first meeting had sent participants an email explaining "why we are meeting as white folks." During the program, which took place from February to June, facilitators argued that the racially exclusive workshop would spare minorities the "harm" of "hear[ing] our racist thoughts."

"People of color are dealing with racism all the time," Barbara Gross, the associate director of NYU’s Education Justice Research and Organizing Collaborative, said in response to a question from one parent, who argued that a whites-only anti-racism training seemed "a little counterintuitive." "The purpose is to create space where we can talk about our racism with each other … without burdening the people of color in our lives."

Every seminar attendee appears to have been white. One parent even said she was "grateful that there weren’t people of color in this space," according to audio and video obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, since their presence would have made it uncomfortable for her to speak openly about racism.

"NYU is working with program leadership to ensure that the program conforms with University’s standards and applicable law," the university’s Friday statement said.

NYU general counsel Aisha Oliver-Staley did not respond to a request for comment.

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Assistant professor Charles H.F. Davis III in 2020 founded the University of Michigan's Campus Abolition Research Lab, which aims to "disrupt and dismantle the carceral university" and create "police-free futures." As part of that effort, the lab publishes a "#PoliceFreeCampus Podcast" and hosts campus events that teach students how to become "campus abolitionists." Davis in recent weeks has also reiterated the need to abolish police "now." Davis and his lab have not, however, commented on the recent crime wave that has plagued his university's campus.

In late May, a man approached a female student from behind and groped her before carrying on throughout campus and exposing his genitals to other female students, the school's public safety department said in a crime alert. Just days later, on June 4, a man approached a small group walking a block from campus and shot one of the group's members following an argument. The next night, a woman attacked a man with a folding knife inside of student housing and fired shots through the man's window before fleeing. And in the first week of July, two women were sexually assaulted near a dorm and inside of the school's robotics building, respectively.

So far, the university has not adopted its Abolition Research Lab's suggestions and has instead used the Ann Arbor Police Department and its own armed campus security force to respond to the crimes. Still, many cities and universities alike have pursued plans to defund police—only to renew their relationships with law enforcement thereafter. A majority of Minneapolis's city council, for example, pledged to defund police in the summer of 2020, but members later said the pledge "created confusion" and was made merely "in spirit." The state's flagship school, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, in 2020 also said it would no longer contract with the Minneapolis Police Department to provide additional security at football games and other events. The school reversed course last year.

It's unclear how Davis, who did not return a request for comment, would aim to combat shootings and sex crimes should the campus become "police free." Davis has in some cases acknowledged that his abolitionist ideas are more theoretical than practical. During a recent episode of his lab's "#PoliceFreeCampus Podcast," Davis said that while abolition skeptics may ask for "solutions," he doesn't "have all of them."

"People often are going to ask for solutions," Davis said. "That’s always a looming question: ‘Well, what about x?’ And, admittedly, we don’t have all of them." Davis later called his work an "exercise of imagining."

A group affiliated with the University of Michigan's Campus Abolition Research Lab, #PoliceFreeCampus, has echoed Davis's uncertain rhetoric. An FAQ document on the group's resource page addresses a central concern with police abolition: In a "police-free future," who should a citizen call when a violent crime occurs? The document admits that "in this long transition process, we may need a small, specialized class of public servants whose job it is to respond to violent crimes," adding that such a proposal is "one option, and it’s an option that brings up as many questions as it answers."

The University of Michigan distanced itself from its Campus Abolition Research Lab, telling the Washington Free Beacon that the lab "isn't funded by the university." But the lab's affiliate group, #PoliceFreeCampus, says on its website that it has produced studies thanks to "funding from the National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan." The university did not answer questions about that funding.

The school is no stranger to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. It has the largest number of DEI staffers of any university in the country and in 2021 launched a Center for Racial Justice, which aims to expand "knowledge about the complex intersections between race and public policy" and engage students and scholars "in social justice work focused on racial equity." But the school's own data indicate that those efforts have not helped matters—as the number of DEI officials ballooned, nearly all measures of student satisfaction plummeted.

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The complaint, filed with the U.S. Department of Education by the Equal Protection Project, alleges that the five-month-long seminar violated four civil rights laws: Titles II and VI of the Civil Rights Act, New York State’s Human Rights Law, and 42 U.S.C. § 1981, which bans racial discrimination in contracting.

It comes as the university is already under a consent agreement with the Education Department over several anti-Semitic incidents on campus, including a violent anti-Israel protest that resulted in two arrests.

The workshop, which cost $360 to attend, argued that white people need to "unlearn racism" without "burdening the people of color in our lives." Facilitators and attendees repeatedly made clear that no minorities were allowed, with one parent stating that she was "grateful" for the seminar’s racial homogeneity. Other parents fretted about the "white supremacy culture" inherent in their jobs as lawyers and editors, according to audio of the seminar obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

While many schools have been hit with discrimination complaints over minority-only fellowships, the NYU workshop, "From Integration to Antiracism," marks the first time in recent memory that a university has faced blowback for excluding people of color. The seminar concluded a few weeks before the Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action in college admissions, a ruling expected to upend race-conscious programs on campus and beyond.

"Eliminating racial discrimination," the Court’s decision read, "means eliminating all of it."

Though the workshop began four years ago, it did not explicitly bar minorities until 2020, according to archived webpages included in the complaint.

The Education Department "should investigate this blatantly discriminatory program and the circumstances under which the creation and promotion of it was approved," the complaint states. "NYU’s deliberate racial segregation in its FIAR workshop series constitutes invidious discrimination for which there is no legal justification."

New York University did not respond to a request for comment.

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California’s State Board of Education last week approved its "2023 Mathematics Framework for California Public Schools," a move that reimagines how the subject is taught in the state. Rather than traditional computational fluency involving speed and accuracy, the new math teaching guidelines provide a vague framework of "teaching around big ideas" through student-led "inquiry." The guidelines also approach math concepts, such as algebra, "visually and through words" and abandon "student tracking" practices, which provide learners access to more advanced instruction. California hopes those policies will eliminate differences in "school experiences," such as accelerated versus non-accelerated course pathways, in pursuit of more "equitable student mathematics success."

The guideline changes come as California students struggle. Only a third of the state's students and 23 percent of its eighth graders are proficient in math, according to data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. California is nonetheless abandoning a traditional framework that once brought growth in student math achievement, particularly among minorities and low-income students.

Williamson Evers, a senior fellow at the Independent Institute who shaped education policy in Republican presidential administrations, told the Washington Free Beacon that California educators’ "obsession" with race is hurting students. Those educators, Evers argued, should help "individual kids succeed through hard work and talent" but are instead holding accelerated learners back from taking more advanced instruction.

In addition to abandoning student performance tracking—which assesses whether a student should take more, or less, rigorous coursework—California's new math guidelines also reject the traditional pathway of preparing students to take Algebra I by eighth grade. That pathway "undermines" student success, according to the guidelines.

Instead of preparing students for Algebra I in eighth grade, the new guidelines recommend that most students wait until ninth grade to take it, effectively limiting students from reaching Calculus before graduating high school. Students who are highly proficient in math and wish to attend more selective colleges or universities typically need to pass Calculus in high school, which in most cases requires taking Algebra I in eighth grade. Under California’s new guidelines, however, a high-achieving student must enroll in summer school—or complete two years of math in a single academic calendar year—to reach Calculus before graduation. The guidelines also allow schools the possibility to compress Algebra I, Algebra II, and Pre-calculus to eliminate "redundancies," though the new math framework admits that "repetition" adds "value."

Between 1999 and 2013, when 67 percent of California students took Algebra I in the eighth grade, black and Latino students saw their rates of success jump five- and six-fold, respectively, according to research from Evers and the late Ze'ev Wurman, another Independent Institute fellow. Low-income students saw their achievement double. Evers and Wurman credited high expectations, as well as quality teaching methods and curriculum materials, for the increase. "It wasn’t perfection, every kid wasn’t getting an ‘A,'" Evers told the Free Beacon. "But they were doing very well."

The California Department of Education said its newly approved framework "does not limit Algebra I to ninth grade." But to discourage widespread enrollment in eighth-grade algebra, the framework’s diagram that lays out eighth grade course pathways omits algebra as an option. When the Free Beacon pressed the department about this, it admitted that it retroactively adopted "amendments" after the California State Board of Education approved the framework on July 12.

Besides amending the traditional Algebra I pathway, California’s math framework also promotes taking math-lite data science courses rather than the more rigorous Algebra II in high school, something hundreds of California university professors have argued will fail to adequately prepare students for college.

In addition to holding back higher-performing students, California’s new math curriculum guidelines push "teaching towards social justice," which the policy says begins with educator awareness that "mathematics plays a role in the power structures and privileges that exist within our society." The math curriculum guidelines argue that educators who are "committed to social justice work" will "equip students with a toolkit and mindset to identify and combat inequities with mathematics."

Evers argued in a memo last week that parents and taxpayers "want math to be taught sensibly," adding that it’s "a scientific reality that children need to learn math facts and standard algorithms." California’s massive student population, comprising of close to six million students, will influence practices around the rest of the country, Evers concluded.

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"It was extraordinary," said Paul Moore, who served as the agency's chief investigative counsel during the Trump administration, in congressional testimony on Thursday. UPenn raked in over $100 million from China-based contributors between 2017 and 2022, the Washington Free Beacon reported earlier this year. This was a substantial increase from the four years prior to 2017, when the school received a total of $19 million.

Moore's testimony comes as UPenn and the Penn Biden Center face scrutiny over the surge in foreign donations, many of them anonymous, that coincided with the think tank's opening and President Joe Biden's election. Watchdog groups have said the funding raises concerns about foreign influence-buying.

UPenn has said that no foreign donations were earmarked for the Penn Biden Center and that the think tank is supported by the school's general budget. But Moore said that foreign contributions to UPenn's general fund could have made their way to the Penn Biden Center indirectly.

"Those funds were co-mingled, and certainly went to the general operations, and may have gone to the Biden Center," he said.

Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.) asked Moore if other universities saw similar increases in Chinese funding. Under federal law, schools that receive government support are required to disclose their overseas donations to the Department of Education.

"Not in that time frame. Absolutely not," said Moore, adding that while other schools saw an uptick in China donations, none saw an increase to the same extent as UPenn.

"It was particularly startling to see with UPenn what they had received. That was very notable," he said.

The former Education Department official told the committee that his office declined to investigate the donations because there was no evidence that UPenn was violating any of the agency's laws by accepting the funding.

"Members of Congress wrote to us, urging us to open an investigation," he said. "It would have been a very political thing, inappropriate, frankly, for the office of general counsel."

Several high-profile Biden officials worked at the think tank before joining the administration, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who served as the Penn Biden Center's director.

The National Legal and Policy Center, a government watchdog group, has said the donations raise concerns about foreign influence-buying and called on the Department of Education to release the names of the anonymous funders.

"The Department of Education's policy of hiding the identities of foreign entities showering our universities with billions of dollars is promoting a toxic brew of dark money and corruption," Tom Anderson, the director of the center's Government Integrity Project, told the Free Beacon in January.

The post 'It Was Extraordinary': Government Officials Were Stunned by 'Startling' Spike in Chinese Donations to UPenn After Biden Think Tank Opened appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Both Meany Middle School and Nova High School's medical centers list "gender-affirming care" as one of its services offered "conveniently at the school," though they do not specify what that "care" entails. Both clinics are operated by Country Doctor Community Health Centers, which includes in its "gender-affirming care" services referrals for sex-change surgeries, "hormone therapy for adolescents," and "assistance obtaining mental health letters of support for gender-affirming procedures."

Staff at these schools are also instructed, per Seattle Public School District policy, to hide students' gender identity from their parents, according to documents obtained by Parents Defending Education. It is unclear if the schools inform parents when a child seeks "gender-affirming care" at these clinics.

"It's bad enough that medical professionals are prescribing cross-sex hormones and cutting off breasts and genitals of minors," Erika Sanzi, director of outreach at Parents Defending Education, told the Daily Mail. "It is a whole new level of awful and terrifying for schools to be involved."

While these Seattle schools promote "gender-affirming care," lawmakers and medical professionals across the country are concerned about the long-term health risks of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormone treatments for children. Over 20 states have banned the procedures for minors. Yet, blue states like Washington continue to support the treatments. In April, the Washington Senate passed a bill that would allow youth shelters "to hide minors who run away from home in order to obtain an abortion or sex change operations without parental consent," the Washington Free Beacon reported.

"Access to these services enables the early intervention, prevention, and treatment of health-related barriers to learning with the goal of promoting school attendance and improved academic performance," Seattle Public Schools said in a statement to Fox News.

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Twenty-two percent of those surveyed expressed "very little" confidence in higher education, representing the second-largest group of respondents. This reflects a marked change from both 2015 and 2018, in which those reporting "very little" confidence were the smallest share of responses.

A plurality of respondents stated they have "some" confidence in higher education.

Confidence fell across the board, with only Democrats and those with postgraduate degrees retaining confidence at 50 percent or higher.

Only 19 percent of Republicans stated they had confidence in higher education, a decline of 20 points since 2018.

The shift in public opinion follows several recent high-profile incidents where left-wing campus activists have shut down conservative speakers.

In March, student protesters at Stanford Law School shouted down Judge Kyle Duncan at a Federalist Society event over his supposed animosity toward African Americans and transgender people, the Washington Free Beacon reported. In 2022, more than 100 students at Yale Law School disrupted a panel on civil liberties that featured conservative lawyer Kristen Waggoner, forcing campus police to escort the speakers to safety. Yale later barred the Free Beacon from covering a subsequent event with Waggoner on free speech.

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The all-white seminar, "From Integration to Anti-Racism," cost $360 to attend and met six times between February and June, according to a description of the program that has since been scrubbed from the university’s website without explanation. Organized by NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education, the workshop was "designed specifically for white public school parents" committed to "becoming anti-racist" and building "multiracial parent communities."

But to promote solidarity with all races, participants were told, it was necessary that the seminar include only one.

A few days before the first session, facilitators circulated a short handout, "Why a White Space," to explain "why we are meeting as white folks for these six months." The handout, produced by the nonprofit Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere, argued that white people need spaces where they can "unlearn racism" without subjecting minorities to "undue trauma or pain."

Facilitators reiterated this argument on day one of the seminar, audio and video of which was obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. When a parent questioned the premise of the workshop—saying it seemed "a little counterintuitive" to exclude minorities from an anti-racism seminar—Barbara Gross, the associate director of Steinhardt’s Education Justice Research group, assured her that it was for their own good.

"People of color are dealing with racism all the time," Gross said. "Like every minute of every day. It’s a harm on top of a harm for them to hear our racist thoughts."

Even before the Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action in college admissions, it was illegal for universities to practice other forms of race discrimination. The whites-only workshop, five lawyers said, almost certainly violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which applies to the recipients of federal funds, and—since NYU charged parents for the seminars—also ran afoul of laws banning discrimination in contracting, according to Dan Morenoff, the executive director of the American Civil Rights Project.

"It’s quintessentially illegal," said Ilya Shapiro, the director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. "This episode illustrates the horseshoe theory whereby left- and right-wing radicals end up agreeing on race-based societal balkanization. It’s like that social media meme: ‘woke or KKK?’"

The program took place while NYU was under an ongoing consent agreement with the U.S. Department of Education over a string of anti-Semitic incidents on campus. As race-based programs of all stripes face added scrutiny in the wake of the High Court’s affirmative action ban, the seminar is a stark signal that "anti-racism" doesn’t just mean minority-only fellowships or workforce diversity targets; at one of the top universities in the country, it now includes programs that bear an eerie similarity to Jim Crow.

"They are literally running a ‘whites only’ program in the interest of so-called social justice," said Samantha Harris, an attorney who litigates campus speech and civil rights issues. "I find it inconceivable that the people putting these programs together don’t see the irony."

NYU told the Free Beacon that it would be "reviewing these matters to determine whether they conform to our standards." Gross did not respond to a request for comment.

The seminar is a fascinating study of how one group of white liberals guilt-tripped and self-flagellated their way into segregation.

Participants seemed petrified by the possibility that they could "harm" a person of color with a misplaced comment or anecdote, a fear that made the whites-only training a kind of therapeutic refuge.

Asked when they first "learned about race," one parent recalled how, while she was in kindergarten, a black classmate had been expelled for bringing a knife to school. Later in the session, she expressed relief that there had been no minorities around to hear such a traumatizing tale.

"I was so grateful that there weren’t, you know, people of color in this space to hear me say [that] my first experience learning about what my race was was a black boy with a knife," she said. "That can be harming."

The first session of the workshop, which included approximately a dozen parents and ran for two hours, encouraged that sort of hypersensitivity. As participants filed into the meeting, they were greeted by a rendition of Woody Guthrie’s "All You Fascists Bound to Lose" performed by the "Resistance Revival Chorus," a group of women and "non-binary singers" that "centers women in music."

After participants shared their pronouns—most of which were "she/her"—facilitators performed a brief land acknowledgment and laid out the ground rules for the session.

"Resist the urge to intellectualize," Gross said. "We’re not going to get through this without welcoming the feelings."

In what seemed like an effort at self-awareness, another facilitator, Courtney Epton, told participants to avoid virtue-signaling. "Trying to compete with each other to be the ‘good white person,’" she said, is itself a "part of white supremacy."

Epton—a "senior equity associate" at NYU Steinhardt and a board member of the nonprofit Integrated Schools—did not respond to a request for comment.

At least one parent in attendance, Jordan Feigenbaum, had direct say over the governance of local schools. Feigenbaum serves on the Community Education Council for New York City’s District 13, an elected policy body that reviews school curricula and approves district zoning lines. He touted his participation in the program when he ran for office, saying the whites-only workshop would "enhance" his ability to serve the district.

Feigenbaum—who described himself as an "ally" in his candidate statement—did not respond to a request for comment.

Gross indicated that the workshop began four years ago when she heard from white parents with kids in majority-black schools that they felt like "everyone hates me." Since then, she said, the Black Lives Matter movement and the death of George Floyd had made those parents more concerned about systemic racism—and more guilty about their assumed role in it.

She spoke of anti-black bigotry as though it were a genetic condition, passed down biologically as well as socially. "What we know intellectually is very different from what’s in our bones and in our nervous systems," Gross said. "What we have internalized. What we have inherited."

As a result, she added, "young African-American girls face 23 microaggressions every single day."

Instead of just wallowing in shame, however, Gross promised participants they would learn to "love [other] white people" in spite of their collective guilt.

The seminar also included a discussion of Tema Okun’s "Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture," which include "perfectionism," "a sense of urgency," and "worship of the written word." Many parents struggled to reconcile these teachings with the day-to-day demands of their careers, taking the already thin line between parody and reality and smashing it altogether.

"I’ve been correcting grammar a lot and typos," one self-identified editor said, "and reading this I was thinking, ‘Wow, I had no idea.’"

Another parent fretted that the characteristics of white supremacy culture were nearly identical with the values of her law firm. That wasn’t surprising, Gross said, given that American law "was built on racism and white supremacy."

Even Gross admitted that she was not immune to bigotry. One time, she said, several "women of color" in her office were laughing and playing games while they were supposed to be planning an event.

"I was thinking, ‘How can they get anything done,’" Gross said. "I had to catch myself."

At the end of the session, participants were assigned readings for their next meeting, including "Why It’s So Hard to Talk to White People about Racism" by Robin DiAngelo and "Qallunology 101: A Lesson Plan for the Non-Indigenous" by Derek Rasmussen. Readings for later sessions included "Internalized White Superiority," "Toward a Radical White Identity," and "4 Ways White People Can Process Their Emotions Without Bringing White Tears," according to slides from the workshop obtained by the Free Beacon.

Participants were also asked to share what they learned with someone outside the seminar. But there was a catch.

"Share what you learn today with another white person," the slides for each session said, "not a BIPOC."

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The National Parents Union joined forces with the Youth Communist League, ACT Up Philadelphia, and other organizations to protest Moms for Liberty’s summit in Philadelphia. The union and its partners claim that Moms For Liberty, which was formed to oppose coronavirus-related school lockdowns, is stoking a "culture war" through its opposition to left-wing classroom curricula related to critical race theory and transgender issues.

Tax filings show the National Parents Union was formed in 2020 with significant financial support from Koch and his network of philanthropies. That year, the Charles Koch Institute and Walton Family Foundation contributed $1 million to the VELA Education Fund to provide grants to parents and educators to deal with "Covid learning disruptions." The National Parents Union was one of four organizations to receive the grants, which were for between $5,000 and $25,000 to support "student learning" during the coronavirus pandemic.

According to tax filings, VELA Education Fund gave $700,000 to the National Parents Union in 2020, making up half of the union’s $1.4 million in revenue for that year. And VELA received roughly two-thirds of its funding that year from the Seminar Network, an organization formed by Charles Koch in 2002. According to tax records, the Seminar Network contributed $3,064,867 to the VELA Education Fund in 2020. Its revenues that year were $4,566,567.

Moms for Liberty has emerged as a leading critic of what it calls a left-wing agenda in America’s public schools. The group’s Philadelphia summit featured Republican presidential hopefuls Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, and Vivek Ramaswamy.

The National Parents Union and its partners denounced Moms for Liberty as "radical right-wing extremists," and blamed the group for supporting bans on books at schools across the country. One union member praised a sign at the rally that read "Fuck Christo-Fascism."

Moms for Liberty has landed in the crosshairs of other progressive groups over its activism. The Southern Poverty Law Center placed Moms for Liberty on its "hate map" last month, alongside neo-Nazi and white supremacist organizations. Republican Sen. J.D. Vance (Ohio) blasted the Southern Poverty Law Center as a "garbage organization now dedicated to harassing groups that advocate for parents."

Charles Koch has in recent years funded causes aligned with the far-left. Koch and progressive billionaire George Soros fund the Quincy Institute, an isolationist think tank. Koch has also poured millions of dollars into the criminal justice reform movement.

A spokesman for the National Parents Union said the organization distributed all of the money received from the Charles Koch Institute to "organizations and families that supported student learning."

"National Parents Union has not received any other funding from the Charles Koch Institute," the spokesman said.

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The law school's office of student services, which coordinates applications to all journals including the flagship Columbia Law Review, said Sunday that journal acceptances had been postponed until the school could verify that they comport with the new, race-blind standard articulated in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

"In light of the Supreme Court decision on Thursday, we are working with university leadership to better understand any implications for the journal ranking process," the office told students in an email. "Because of this, journal acceptances will be delayed until we receive further clarity."

"We have an obligation," the office added, "to … ensure that our decision processes are consistent with the law."

Law journals have long used affirmative action to select student editors as well as articles for publication. The delay suggests that this widespread practice could be on the chopping block as a result of the High Court's sweeping ruling, which experts say has laid the groundwork for invalidating a host of race-based policies across academia and corporate America.

"It's almost impossible to avoid the implication that all recipients of federal funds are now subject to the same rule announced in Students for Fair Admissions," said Dan Morenoff, the executive director of the American Civil Rights Project, which filed an amicus brief in support of the group that sued Harvard. As long as a law review is part of a federally funded university, it faces "the same constraints that the 14th Amendment applies to state entities."

That could spell trouble for Columbia's journals in the event of a legal challenge. Though the Columbia Law Review is technically an independent nonprofit, students apply to it through the university's online portal, and those with questions about the review are referred to the law school's associate director of academic advising, Jordan Carr. Other journals at the law school are published "in partnership" with the university, according to their websites.

Neither Columbia Law School nor the Columbia Law Review responded to requests for comment.

Legal academia is already feeling the heat from the Supreme Court's decision. Within 24 hours of the ruling, the conservative public interest firm America First Legal sent letters to 200 law schools demanding that they scrap racial preferences not just in student admissions but also in faculty hiring and law reviews.

"We will represent victims of these policies and sue any law school that allows these illegal and discriminatory practices to continue," the letters read.

The pause at Columbia indicates that the school's journals have similar programs, as do the demographic data solicited by the Columbia Law Review. Applicants are asked about their race, gender, and sexual orientation, according to segments of application form reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, and can also submit "other relevant information" about their "personal identity."

Even before the Supreme Court's ruling, law reviews were dealing with legal headaches over their use of racial preferences. In 2018, a Texas-based group sued the Harvard Law Review and the New York University Law Review for allegedly discriminating in the admissions process. While both lawsuits were eventually dismissed—largely on the grounds that the plaintiffs lacked standing—law reviews may struggle to fend off similar complaints going forward, Morenoff said.

The Supreme Court's new standard could pose a particular problem for the Yale Law Journal, which in 2021 released admissions data following accusations of racism from minority students. It turned out the top-ranked law review accepted white and Asian applicants at much lower rates than their black counterparts, numbers that parallel the disparities cited by the Supreme Court in its judgment against Harvard.

"It certainly sounds like the whole set of elite law journals will need to change their MO or face consequences," Morenoff said.

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Pittsburgh Public Schools, the state's second-largest district, hosts on its website an array of "racial equity learning resources" that train educators on topics such as "whiteness" and how to be "culturally responsive as a white teacher." One resource includes curriculum materials developed from critical race theorist Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, which argues that "racist ideas have been stamped" into the nation's "Constitution, laws, policies, practices, and beliefs of segregationists and assimilationists." Lessons inspired by the book ask students to explain how America's government is "emblematic" of the statement, "Racism is the bedrock of the USA." They also state that "meritocracy and the American dream narrative are rooted in whiteness."

The district's push to provide teachers with training centered on critical race theory comes as Pennsylvania Democrats make sweeping changes to state standards for teachers. Democratic governor Josh Shapiro's administration last year released "Culturally-Relevant and Sustaining Education" guidelines, which require educators to recognize schools' "inequities and institutional biases" before they can become licensed to teach in the state. For Pennsylvania lawmaker Barbara Gleim (R.), those guidelines are part of a years-long push to support "race theory teaching" through "multi-level educational training webinars and embedded class indoctrination."

"The entrance of race theory into Pittsburgh Public Schools is not surprising," Gleim told the Washington Free Beacon, "as parents have been attending school board meetings across the state with evidence that school assignments are riddled with questions about diversity, equity, and inclusion, social and emotional learning, social justice issues, and secular viewpoints concerning gender ideology."

Pittsburgh Public Schools did not return a request for comment.

In addition to its Kendi-inspired curriculum materials, Pittsburgh Public Schools' teacher trainings include a webinar that labels "middle to upper class white, heteronormative, Judeo-Christian, able-bodied, English-speaking" men as those complicit in promoting "whiteness." The training describes "whiteness" as a "place of advantage, privilege, or domination" that shapes "institutions, policies, and social relations," which mirrors a key tenet of critical race theory. The educator training resource also argues that individuals are racist even if they don’t intend to be and the only remedy is proactive efforts at "antiracism." In line with this thinking, teachers are told not to teach "colorblindness."

The district's teacher trainings also explore at length the Black Lives Matter movement. The webinars explain how to discuss the movement with students, particularly in order to "correct any misconceptions they might have about the movement." One misconception, the teacher trainings suggest, is that Black Lives Matter is violent, an argument that washes over the fiery riots that took place during the summer of 2020, which caused more than a billion dollars in damage and took several lives. The training resources also encourage teachers to talk about social justice protests with their students because they "have a really critical role" in developing patterns of behavior "that will hopefully carry throughout [a student’s] life." Another resource asks teachers if their students can explain the "role of civil disobedience in a democratic society."

"Dismantling Racism in Education," another material presented in the district's "racial equity learning resources," calls on "white educators" to "do the work that’s necessary to disrupt whiteness and white supremacy" within themselves and their classrooms. A video for educators on how to be "culturally responsive as a white teacher," meanwhile, pushes teachers to be activists for "critical consciousness." A training on "the spirit murdering of black children" argues that teachers "‘spirit murder’ the souls of black children every day through systemic, institutionalized, anti-Black, state-sanctioned violence." According to that resource, "school practices and officials are slowly killing Black children by murdering their spirits through intentional actions, physical assaults, and verbal stabbings."

Socialist intellectual Howard Zinn also inspires resources for Pittsburgh Public School officials as well. The Zinn Education Project embodies the socialist ideals of its namesake and claims to provide "a more accurate, complex, and engaging understanding of history than is found in traditional textbooks and curricula."

The district's open embrace of critical race theory stands in contrast to other Pennsylvania districts that have implemented controversial materials in a more subtle manner. Philadelphia's Great Valley School District, for example, denied using critical race theory materials as it simultaneously distributed a webinar to dozens of teachers in the district aimed at guiding them on how to teach students critical race theory under the radar.

Pittsburgh Public Schools, on the other hand, states openly on its website that Social Emotional Learning, a teaching pedagogy rooted in social justice narratives, is "the foundation on which academic learning takes place." It is "equally important," the district says, to master those "soft skills" as it is to master important academic skills such as reading and math. Additionally, the district’s website offers suggested materials for students on various race-focused subjects.

"As a parent and former school board member, I have grave concerns—especially for parents, who ultimately have the last say about what is being taught to their children," Gleim told the Free Beacon. The Republican lawmaker introduced a bill last month seeking to bolster parents' rights and end the requirement that teachers "know and acknowledge that biases exist" in education in order to obtain their teaching licenses. "In most areas of the state, including Pittsburgh, reading and math scores have declined significantly, yet the emphasis on student outcomes remains on these social soft skills and health-related issues that many parents believe to be in their purview of responsibility," she said.

The post 'Building an Antiracist America': Top Pennsylvania School District Pushes Teachers To Infuse Critical Race Theory Into Their Lessons appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

While the Court rejected affirmative action, Harvard president Lawrence S. Bacow noted that it also "ruled that colleges and universities may consider in admissions decisions ‘an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.’"

"We will certainly comply with the Court’s decision," Bacow and other Harvard administrators wrote in a Thursday statement.

Harvard president-elect Claudine Gay released a video statement saying that the school was still "working to understand this decision and its implications for our policies."

"While we don’t have all the answers about what’s next, we do know that we will move forward together," she said.

The essays could provide a loophole for advocates of race-based admissions, some of whom have vowed to fight the ruling. In a speech on Thursday, President Joe Biden said "we can’t let this decision be the last word" on affirmative action, and said he would direct the Department of Education to come up with alternatives to ensure racial diversity on college campuses.

But the move could also violate the Court’s ruling, which held that college admissions essays could not be used directly as a tool to continue race-based admissions.

Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion, said that while nothing prohibits schools from considering essays that discuss the race of the applicant, "universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today."

"A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination," Roberts wrote. "In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race."

Bacow's full statement to the Harvard community can be read below.

Dear Members of the Harvard Community,

Today, the Supreme Court delivered its decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. The Court held that Harvard College’s admissions system does not comply with the principles of the equal protection clause embodied in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. The Court also ruled that colleges and universities may consider in admissions decisions "an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise." We will certainly comply with the Court’s decision.

We write today to reaffirm the fundamental principle that deep and transformative teaching, learning, and research depend upon a community comprising people of many backgrounds, perspectives, and lived experiences. That principle is as true and important today as it was yesterday. So too are the abiding values that have enabled us—and every great educational institution—to pursue the high calling of educating creative thinkers and bold leaders, of deepening human knowledge, and of promoting progress, justice, and human flourishing.

We affirm that:

Because the teaching, learning, research, and creativity that bring progress and change require debate and disagreement, diversity and difference are essential to academic excellence.

To prepare leaders for a complex world, Harvard must admit and educate a student body whose members reflect, and have lived, multiple facets of human experience. No part of what makes us who we are could ever be irrelevant.

Harvard must always be a place of opportunity, a place whose doors remain open to those to whom they had long been closed, a place where many will have the chance to live dreams their parents or grandparents could not have dreamed.

For almost a decade, Harvard has vigorously defended an admissions system that, as two federal courts ruled, fully complied with longstanding precedent. In the weeks and months ahead, drawing on the talent and expertise of our Harvard community, we will determine how to preserve, consistent with the Court’s new precedent, our essential values.

The heart of our extraordinary institution is its people. Harvard will continue to be a vibrant community whose members come from all walks of life, all over the world. To our students, faculty, staff, researchers, and alumni—past, present, and future—who call Harvard your home, please know that you are, and always will be, Harvard. Your remarkable contributions to our community and the world drive Harvard’s distinction. Nothing today has changed that.

Sincerely,

Lawrence S. Bacow

President, Harvard University

Alan M. Garber

Provost, Harvard University

Meredith Weenick

Executive Vice President, Harvard University

Claudine Gay

Dean, Faculty of Arts and Sciences

President-elect, Harvard University

Tomiko Brown-Nagin

Dean, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study

Nancy Coleman

Dean, Division of Continuing Education and University Extension

George Q. Daley

Dean, Harvard Medical School

Srikant Datar

Dean, Harvard Business School

Emma Dench

Dean, Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Francis J. Doyle III

Dean, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

Douglas Elmendorf

Dean, Harvard Kennedy School of Government

William V. Giannobile

Dean, Harvard School of Dental Medicine

David N. Hempton

Dean, Harvard Divinity School

Rakesh Khurana

Dean, Harvard College

Bridget Terry Long

Dean, Harvard Graduate School of Education

John F. Manning

Dean, Harvard Law School

Sarah M. Whiting

Dean, Graduate School of Design

Michelle A. Williams

Dean, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

The post Harvard Hints It Will Use Personal Essays To Circumvent Court Ruling appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

• The 6-3 opinion argued that race-based admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina run afoul of the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution because they "unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points."

Why it matters: Some have argued the Supreme Court faces a "crisis of legitimacy" because its opinions do not always reflect the views of the American public. By this standard, the Court's decision to strike down race-based affirmative action is laudably legitimate.

• The vast majority of Americans, including a majority of Democrats, oppose race-based affirmative action in university admissions, polls show.

By the numbers: More than two-thirds of Americans say colleges and universities should not use race as a factor in admission, according to the New York Times. Opposition to affirmative action is slightly higher when respondents are asked about public universities funded by taxpayers.

• Americans oppose affirmative action at public colleges and universities by an overwhelming margin of 74 percent to 26 percent.

• A solid majority of Democrats agree: Sixty percent said they oppose race-based admissions at public universities, while 58 percent said the same about private universities.

What they're saying: "The opinion today will serve only to highlight the Court's own impotence in the face of an America whose cries for equality resound," Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissenting opinion.

• Alas, the American public appears to have a different definition of "equality."

Bottom line: The Supreme Court's legitimate decision to end race-based affirmative action is an accurate reflection of the American public's views. Congratulations!

The post Legitimacy Restored: Supreme Court Ends Affirmative Action, Outcome Backed by Vast Majority of Americans appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The DSA, the nation's largest socialist organization, made the pitch in a 2018 pamphlet titled "Why Socialists Should Become Teachers." It argues that "socialists should take jobs as teachers (and other school-based workers) for the political, economic, and social potential the industry holds." The decision to get in the education industry, the pamphlet says, is a "strategic" route to toppling the capitalist economy.

"While teachers don't make a product that is sold on the market, we are necessary in the reproduction of a capitalist economy and the perpetuation of classes," according to the pamphlet, which was written by West Virginia socialists after teachers in the state went on strike. "It is teachers who train, both socially and technically, the workers of the future."

"There is a growing national network of educators in DSA working to transform our schools, our unions, and our society," the pamphlet boasts.

The pamphlet came as the socialist group's ranks swelled amid anti-Donald Trump fervor. The group's sprawling platform demands an end to capitalism, prisons, the five-day work week, and "state recognition of the gender binary," along with enshrining "social ownership" of all major industry and infrastructure, energy production, and wealth redistribution.

Since the 2018 directive, the DSA through its local and regional chapters has worked with teachers' unions across the country to push left-wing initiatives that are unrelated to education, including "reparations" for black students and affordable housing developments on school property. DSA members have been elected to lead two major unions in Los Angeles and Boston, and the group's national youth branch, the Young Democratic Socialists of America, held its national conference this year at the Chicago Teachers Union headquarters. Socialists who count themselves as members of the organization are winning school board seats around the country as well.

While the organization's efforts have gone largely unnoticed by the public, those who follow public education closely say the playbook is obvious.

"The DSA is leveraging the education process to advance its unpopular agenda," said Rhyen Staley, a researcher for Parents Defending Education who has tracked the trend and noted that the socialist push comes as students across the country "are struggling to read and write."

The DSA brands itself as a decentralized "political and activist organization" and boasts more than 92,000 members—a more-than-tenfold increase since Trump's election in 2016, when the group included just about 8,000 Democratic Socialists. In Trump's first year in office, the group's ranks more than tripled to 25,000, CNN reported at the time.

The DSA's financial coffers grew as well. Total revenue in 2015 was just over $490,000, according to its tax filings. By 2021, the latest tax year for which DSA filings are available, funds reached nearly $6.9 million.

It is during this period of explosive growth that the DSA embraced the strategic alliance with teachers' unions, which now embrace several socialist policies. The Colorado Education Association, which represents teachers across the state, approved a resolution this April condemning capitalism. It came at the behest of a DSA member, Bryan Lindstrom, who urged the union to commit to dismantling capitalism in favor of "a new, equitable economic system."

Teachers have gone on strike across the country to demand DSA agenda items such as paying reparations to black students, defunding police, building subsidized housing on school land, teaching "climate literacy" through a "racial justice lens," buying electric buses, and instructing students about "structural racism."

In California cities, teachers have gone on strike to demand that district leaders fulfill DSA agenda items. The United Teachers of Los Angeles shut down classrooms for days in March over a platform crafted from the DSA's "Green New Deal" for public schools. Their asks included more campus solar panels and a climate literacy course taught through a "racial justice lens." The union president, Cecily Myart-Cruz, is a DSA member who in 2019 spoke at the organization's national convention.

And shortly after the Los Angeles strike, the Oakland-area DSA chapter helped organize a teachers' union strike for "common good" proposals such as reparations for black students. The DSA coordinated a "solidarity working group" to plan the strike, canvassed for the authorizing votes, and ran a phone bank to finance the walk-out, according to the local chapter calendar.

In exchange for pushing the DSA's policy agenda, the teachers' unions have won a passionate advocate in their political fights. In Chicago, the city's DSA locked arms with the Chicago Teachers Union when the union made lofty demands for school reopenings that even the city's Democratic leadership couldn't get behind. The DSA argued that leaders wanted kids in classrooms only "to keep the gears of the economy moving and the already exorbitant profits for the ruling class flowing" and to "push the march towards privatization of public education."

The DSA's growing ranks in schools have helped the organization enter public school governance as well, with socialists winning seats on local school boards in blue cities where teachers' unions typically sway elections for their chosen candidates. Two members of the Los Angeles DSA were elected to the board of the nation's largest district, Los Angeles Unified—the first in 2019 and the second in 2022. One of them, Jackie Goldberg, is now president of the board. Since 2018, Democratic Socialists have won school board seats in Nevada, Minnesota, Texas, New York, Wisconsin, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania.

These school board seats give Democratic Socialists sway over both sides of teacher contract negotiations, Staley said, and further promote DSA policies within school districts. This dynamic played out in Los Angeles this year, when the teachers' union strike for a public school "Green New Deal" coincided with a similar policy push by the district's two DSA-affiliated board members in the name of creating "sustainable, healthy, resilient, and equitable learning environments."

None of these efforts have come as a surprise to union critics like Rebecca Friedrichs, a longtime Southern California teacher who lost her 2016 U.S. Supreme Court case against forced unionization by the California Teachers' Association.

"If you want to bring down a republic, you have to capture the schools first," Friedrichs said. "Groups like the DSA have been the leaders of that."

Neither the DSA nor any of the various unions mentioned responded to requests for comment.

The post The Emerging Alliance Between America's Leading Socialist Organization and Teachers' Unions appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Many hailed the move as a sign that Stanford was turning over a new leaf and lavished praise on Jenny Martinez, the law school's dean, for her perceived defiance of the campus mob.

But the promised training wasn't much of a crash course in free speech. Instead, it was an online program that required barely a minute's effort, according to five people who completed the training as well as screenshots and recordings reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. Students were given six weeks to watch five prerecorded videos, most about an hour long, then asked to sign a form attesting that they had done so.

The videos could be played on mute, and the form—which could be accessed without opening the training—did not ask any questions about their content, letting students tune out the modules or skip them entirely.

"I watched none of the videos," one student said. "I never even opened the links. On the day the training was due, I went to the attestation link provided by the university, checked a box confirming I watched the videos, and that was the end of the matter. Whole process took 10 seconds."

The free speech program was much less demanding than the law school's modules on Title IX and alcohol issues, which require students to answer questions demonstrating an understanding of school policy, according to people who'd completed both trainings. The contrast has shaken students' faith in Stanford's vaunted recommitment to freedom of speech, which, one said, appears to have been "nothing more than hollow virtue signaling."

Stanford Law School did not respond to a request for comment.

The training followed a widely reported incident in which students shouted down Judge Kyle Duncan of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals with help from Stanford diversity dean Tirien Steinbach. The episode, which was captured on video, touched off weeks of crisis management at the elite law school: Duncan received a formal apology, Steinbach was placed on leave, and the law school announced a series of steps it was taking to avoid a similar debacle in the future.

"As one first step," Martinez wrote, "the law school will be holding a mandatory half-day session in spring quarter for all students on the topic of freedom of speech."

The gap between what was promised and what was delivered could hamstring the law school's efforts to repair its relationship with the federal bench. Following the Duncan shout-down, two circuit court judges, James Ho and Elizabeth Branch, said they would not hire clerks from Stanford Law until they saw evidence of "lasting institutional change."

The training did little to promote such a shift, students said, because the activists who disrupted Duncan were the least inclined to sit through it.

"I overheard people joking about the program in the courtyard," said Josh Rooney, a second-year law student. "The students complying with the training were the ones who already agreed with it."

Even students sympathetic to the program reported muting it once they realized how perfunctory it was.

"Anyone could start the training and just fuck off and not listen," one student said. "It was just a waste of everyone's time," another added.

The videos seemed tailor-made to avoid controversy. They included a conversation between a public defender and a prosecutor, a bipartisan panel of judges, and a talk by the dean of Berkeley Law School, Erwin Chemerinsky, who discussed the basics of First Amendment law and how it applies to college campuses. None of the panels addressed events at Stanford directly, students said, though Chemerinsky did criticize the broader trend of campus shout-downs, according to a video of his talk reviewed by the Free Beacon.

The Duncan imbroglio was one of the most extreme examples of that trend in recent memory. Students bombarded the judge with insults and sexual invective, making it impossible for him to deliver his planned remarks. One protester yelled, "We hope your daughters get raped," according to Duncan and Tim Rosenberger, the former president of the Stanford Federalist Society, who had invited Duncan to speak about cryptocurrency regulation.

The most shocking moment came when Steinbach, the law school's associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion, took the podium from Duncan and berated him for causing "harm."

"Do you have something so incredibly important to say," she asked, that it is worth the "division of these people?"

Though the law school later placed Steinbach on leave—calling her intervention "inappropriate"—the diversity dean appeared unchastened. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed in March, she claimed that she had deployed "de-escalation techniques" when she confronted Duncan. And in an op-ed published in The Hill on Tuesday, Steinbach attacked "right-wing media" for misrepresenting "a verbal skirmish" between student protesters and the judge.

It is unclear whether Steinbach, who draws a six-figure salary, is still employed by Stanford, though the biography accompanying her piece this week referred to her role in the past tense, describing her as "an attorney who has served as associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion at Stanford Law School."

Steinbach did not respond to a request for comment.

The post Stanford Law School Promised Free Speech Training. It Delivered a Campus Joke. appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The new standards will go into effect beginning in the 2024-25 school year. The standards, which have not been updated since 2006, have been under review since April 2020.

The Social Studies Standards Guiding Principles, released in December 2020, directed the school board to develop curriculum materials that are "actively anti-racist, and that explicitly address discrimination against traditionally marginalized groups." They also state that social studies lessons should "focus on the tenets of critical race theory (CRT) when describing power structures and systems."

Under the new curriculum, fourth-graders are expected to "evaluate the significance of 1619," an indication that the curriculum intends to reframe the narrative of American history around racial oppression. The fourth grade curriculum also refers to the "contradictions" of both the American Founders and the Declaration of Independence.

Seventh-graders are also encouraged to evaluate George Washington’s "legacy as an enslaver" while studying early American history.

When studying World War II, fifth-graders will examine the experiences of "Latinx, Indigenous, [and]  LGBTQ+" servicemen returning home after the war.

The new curriculum will also direct students to "create plans to affect [sic] change."

Fifth-graders, for example, will "develop a plan for taking action to address an issue of local, national, or global concern." Eighth-graders will learn to "use technology and online platforms for civic engagement and to drive social change."

Students in high school Government and Civics classes are required to "evaluate the effectiveness of United States Government's response to the threat of climate change, and develop a corresponding plan of action."

Such calls to action are absent from the previous guidelines.

D.C. is the latest locality to introduce an "anti-racist" curriculum. In 2020, nearby Fairfax County Public Schools revamped its history curriculum using materials developed by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Biden administration has awarded grants to fund "climate justice" curricula in elementary schools.

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Only 16 students from the state's public schools identified as "non-binary" during the 2019-20 school year, enrollment figures from the New Jersey Department of Education show. By the 2022-23 school year, however, that number skyrocketed to 675 students, a more than 4,000 percent increase, according to the figures. Among the 675 students who identified themselves as "non-binary," 41 are in elementary school.

The explosion of self-identified "non-binary" students in New Jersey public schools comes as the state's liberal leaders argue that parents should not be informed if their child expresses a change in his or her gender or sexual identity. When a local school board last month passed the policy, arguing that it aligns with an effort to inform parents of anything that could have "a material impact on a student's physical and/or mental health," New Jersey Democratic attorney general Matthew Platkin sued the district. For Platkin, the policy "discriminates" against LGBTQ students by requiring teachers to "out" students "to their parents without their consent." The state's liberal governor, Phil Murphy, endorsed the lawsuit.

"Hanover Township Board of Education's new policy requiring staff to 'out' LGBTQ students to their parents violates the rights of our students—jeopardizing their well-being and mental health," Murphy said in May.

Erika Sanzi, director of outreach at parental rights nonprofit Parents Defending Education, said the jump in "non-binary" students comes as no surprise, pointing to school policy and curriculum that are "completely based in gender ideology."

"These numbers aren't surprising to anyone who has been following the massive social contagion of adopting different gender identities, especially among adolescent girls," Sanzi told the Washington Free Beacon.

Beyond the climbing proportion of New Jersey public school students who identify as non-binary, recent studies have shown a similar increase in transgender identification. A 2017 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study, for example, found that roughly 1.8 percent of U.S. high school students identify as transgender. A subsequent American Academy of Pediatrics study released four years later found nearly 10 percent identified as such.

Adolescent mental health struggles are also up, particularly among LGBTQ-identifying youth. A 2021 nationwide survey from the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ advocacy group, found that 70 percent of LGBTQ youth said their mental health was mostly or always "poor" during the coronavirus pandemic.

Nicole Stouffer, a New Jersey parent and biostatistician who founded parent advocacy group NJ Fresh Faced Schools, said the massive increase in self-identified "non-binary" students is both "statistically significant and medically relevant."

"Since non-binary gender is normalized in the schools, expect that this count will become higher for the 2023-24 school year," Stouffer told the Free Beacon.

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According to a grant listing from the Department of Health and Human Services, the program, known as Monitoring Microaggressions and Adversities to Generate Interventions for Change, seeks to discover how "comments, jokes, and behaviors that are demeaning to a marginalized group" affect health outcomes.

Queer black women with HIV "live at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities and within social structures that take a daily toll," the grant description states. However, the impact of microaggressions on this group has "largely been ignored."

The program is supervised by Sannisha Dale, an associate professor of psychology, who chairs the department’s Diversity and Equity Committee.

Dale's first contact with the project was in 2019, according to the University’s website. Through text messages and regular visits, the grant team monitored 151 women to understand how microaggressions affected their daily levels of distress and consumption of medication.

"[Microagressions] can be someone saying, ‘She doesn’t look like she’s positive,’ as if HIV has a face," Dale said. "Or ‘I’m HIV negative, I’m clean,’ as if someone else is dirty."

The Biden administration has shown a willingness to shell out cash for LGBT initiatives. Biden’s most recent budget proposal included a $400 million State Department program to help LGBTQ Africans access the internet. In January, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded a grant to translate a gay dictionary into Spanish.

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The objections could sink the proposal, currently under consideration by Georgetown’s administration, to rename the school in honor of Albright, the first female secretary of state who passed away last year.

Critics claim that Albright, who served under the Clinton administration, "supported some of the U.S. government’s most devastating interventions in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and South Eastern Europe."

"By moving ahead with this project, the University would honor a name associated with gross human rights violations," said the petition.

Protestors say that Albright oversaw the Clinton administration’s sanctions against Iraq, which were imposed in response to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s buildup of weapons stockpiles and refusal to cooperate with international arms inspectors. Hussein’s lawless actions led to the death of half a million Iraqi children under the sanctions.

"When asked many years later to comment on the half a million Iraqi children who died as a consequence of the drastic sanctions imposed on Iraq during her tenure, Madeleine Albright’s answer was ‘the price was worth it,’" said the petition. "These facts are well known among the SFS faculty, students, and alumni, and suggest that a renaming would be met with considerable unease and opposition in the School."

Georgetown University President John DeGioia is expected to make a final decision on the renaming soon.

According to a source familiar with the internal debate, about half of the foreign service school’s faculty objects to the renaming. The university press office declined to comment on the petition.

The Walsh School of Foreign Service is one of the top international relations programs in the United States and a training ground for many Washington diplomats. Albright was a former professor at the school.

Marwa Daoudy, an associate professor at SFS who helped organize the protest, said the petition "received +1300 signatures... largely from our great community of SFS alumni and students!" since it was launched last week.

Samar Saeed, another organizer, called the renaming proposal "a disgrace."

"I honestly don’t know how this aligns with @Georgetown values of ‘women and men for others,’" she said.

The Washington Free Beacon reached out to faculty members who declined to publicly voice support for Albright – potentially a reflection of the traction the protest has gained on campus. President Bill Clinton, a School of Foreign Service alumnus, also did not respond to a request for comment.

The School of Foreign Service is currently named after its founder Edmund A. Walsh, a Jesuit priest, and staunch anti-Communist who advocated for preemptive nuclear strikes against the Soviet Union. Some faculty members and students have also objected to the renaming because they say it erases Walsh’s legacy at the school, which he founded in 1919 at the age of 34.

The post Georgetown Faculty Object to Renaming Foreign Affairs School After Madeleine Albright appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The Pew Research survey, published Thursday, found that 76 percent of Asian Americans believe colleges should not consider race or ethnicity when making admissions decisions.

Just over half of Asian Americans who have heard of affirmative action have a favorable view of it, while only 19 percent say it is a bad thing, per the poll. When asked directly about the use of race to screen college applicants, however, only 21 percent say they are in favor.

The poll results come as the Supreme Court is preparing to rule on two affirmative action challenges that the group Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) brought against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. In oral arguments, the majority-conservative Court appeared ready to overturn previous rulings that permit colleges to use race as a factor in admissions.

SFFA has argued that Harvard in its admissions process specifically discriminated against Asian Americans, who as a group are academic overachievers.

The Pew results are in line with other surveys. A 2022 Washington Post poll found that 65 percent of Asian Americans support banning colleges and universities from considering race, along with 63 percent of all U.S. adults.

"Overall, majorities of Asian adults across gender, age, education, and origin groups say race or ethnicity should not factor into college admissions," the Pew survey states. Clear majorities across the political spectrum opposed race-based college admissions, with 90 percent of Asian Republicans saying race should not be a factor, along with 69 percent of Asian Democrats.

According to the Pew survey, 87 percent of respondents say that high school grades should be considered. Seventy-one percent say standardized test scores and community service should play roles in admissions decisions.

Asian-American views on the issue reflect the views of Americans in general. Eighty-two percent of U.S. adults believe colleges should not consider race in admissions decisions, the survey found.

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