Tag Archives: The College Fix

Using Lawsuits To Provide Equal Benefits For Americans

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On Monday, The College Fix posted an article about the program in the Commonwealth of Virginia that provides in-state tuition for illegal aliens.

The article reports:

Virginia’s outgoing Attorney General Jason Miyares quickly agreed to a consent decree to resolve a Justice Department lawsuit filed against the state in late December challenging laws allowing students in the country illegally to qualify for in-state tuition and financial aid at public colleges and universities.

“In a joint court filing, Miyares and lawyers for the Justice Department asked a federal judge to declare the Virginia Dream Act invalid and bar state authorities from enforcing it. If approved, the joint consent decree order would make Virginia the fourth state to scrap its policies that allow eligible undocumented students to pay the lower in-state tuition rate,” Inside Higher Ed reported Jan. 2.

“The joint agreement came just one day after the Trump administration sued Virginia over its in-state tuition policies—the seventh such lawsuit.”

A Dec. 30 news release from the Justice Department announcing the lawsuit had stated: “These laws unconstitutionally discriminate against U.S. citizens who are not afforded the same reduced tuition rates, scholarships, or subsidies, create incentives for illegal immigration, and reward illegal immigrants with benefits that U.S. citizens are not eligible for, all in direct conflict with federal law.”

The article concludes:

Similarly, Virginia followed suit, prompting an appeal, WRIC reported: “In a Dec. 31 joint press release, the Legal Aid Justice Center, the ACLU of Virginia and the Dream Project announced that they had filed an emergency motion to intervene in a federal lawsuit that took aim at both undocumented and refugee students in Virginia.”

“The Attorney General of Virginia has abandoned his duties to defend Virginia law and the people of the Commonwealth, so we must,” said ACLU-VA Senior Immigrants’ Rights Attorney Sophia Gregg in the release. “Attorney General Jason Miyares has sided with the Department of Justice — intentionally working in secrecy and over a holiday weekend — to manufacture a predetermined outcome to deprive Virginian students of not only their futures but their day in court.”

If  you are going to give in-state tuition rates to people who are here illegally, why not just give everyone in-state tuition rates?

Where Your Taxpayer Dollars Go

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On Thursday, Legal Insurrection posted an article based on information from The College Fix.

The article reports:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture granted Southern University Agricultural & Mechanical College in Louisiana $600,000 to study menstrual cycles in “transgender men,” according to a new database compiled by the American Principles Project.

The database, “Funding Insanity: Federal Spending on Gender Ideology under Biden-Harris,” states the school “will Study Menstrual Cycles in ‘Transgender Men And People With Masculine Gender Identities, Intersex, And Non-Binary Persons.’”

“The first occurrence of menstruation occurs at approximately 12 years of age and ends with menopause at roughly 51 years of age,” the grant description states. “A woman will have a monthly menstrual cycle for about 40 years of her life, averaging to about 450 periods over the course of her lifetime.”

“It is also important to recognize that transgender men and people with masculine gender identities, intersex and non-binary persons may also menstruate,” it states. “At any given moment about 26% of the world’s population is menstruating.”

So what? Why do I care about men pretending to be women menstruating?

The article concludes:

Reached by The Fix, an APP spokesman said the grant and others listed in the database are “the tip of the iceberg.”

“We know that this is just the tip of the iceberg. Our project looked only at grants and contracts that specifically pertained to gender ideology in some way. But there is far more spending out there relating to DEI, critical race theory, and other left-wing ideologies that we did not capture here,” Paul Dupont told The Fix via email.

“There is a great deal of work that still needs to be done to identify and hopefully eliminate this graft. DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency] is going to have some busy weeks and months ahead,” Dupont said.

Let’s do more research on things like cancer and less on this foolishness.

It’s Time To Re-educate Our Children

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On Monday, The College Fix reported the following:

Nearly 90 percent of Ivy League grads support the “strict” rationing of gas, meat and electricity to fight climate change, according to a new poll.

The conservative Committee to Unleash Prosperity, in a survey that sought to measure the beliefs of “elites,” stated the findings reveal climate change “is clearly an obsession of the very rich and highly educated.”

“An astonishing 77% of the Elites – including nearly 90% of the Elites who graduated from the top universities – favor rationing of energy, gas, and meat to combat climate change. Among all Americans, 63% oppose this policy,” the organization reported.

The poll, released this month and titled “Them vs. U.S.: The two Americas and how the nation’s elite is out of touch with average Americans,” was billed by the committee as a “first-of-its-kind look at the views of the American Elite.”

They are defined as “people having at least one post-graduate degree, earning at least $150,000 annually, and living in high-population density areas (more than 10,000 people per square mile in their zip code).”

Another key finding is nearly six in 10 “elites” say there is too much individual freedom in America.

The report is based on two surveys of 1,000 elites conducted last fall.

Remember the song “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys”? Maybe it should be rewritten to say, “Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Go to Ivy League Colleges.”

Individual freedom is what made America great. Individual freedom is what allowed these graduates to achieve what they needed to achieve to get into Ivy League schools.

The article concludes:

The “shocking” findings reveal “a wealthy, partisan elite class that’s not only immune from and numb to the problems of their countrymen, but enormously confident in and willing to impose unpopular policies on them,” argued Isaac Schorr in an op-ed Friday for the New York Post.

“It’s near impossible to behold the results and not acknowledge they’re indicative of a fundamental disconnect between two Americas,” he wrote. “That disconnect should be of as much concern to proud aristocrats as it is to the peasantry.”

The new poll results are reminiscent of another survey The College Fix reported on last summer which found two thirds of college students believe climate change is an “existential threat” to their generation; however, fewer than one in five were willing to give up their smartphones to help.

 

We Can Fight The “Woke” Crowd

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On September 29th, The College Fix posted an article about Cornell University and the bust of Abraham Lincoln.

The article reports:

A bust of President Abraham Lincoln that was quietly removed from a Cornell University library during the summer of 2021 after a concern was lodged will once again grace the halls of a library at the Ivy League school.

Elaine Westbrooks, the Carl A. Kroch university librarian at Cornell, said in a statement Thursday the bust of America’s 16th president is slated to soon be placed where it originally debuted — the school’s Uris Library when it opened in 1891.

“Over the summer, I directed the cleaning and return to public exhibition of a bust of Abraham Lincoln, a valuable item in the Cornell Library’s vast permanent collection,” she said in a written statement provided to The College Fix. “The bust will soon return to its original room in Uris in the heart of our Ithaca campus.”

Westbrooks was tapped as librarian in March 2022, roughly seven months after the bust was removed from the Rare and Manuscript Collections section of Kroch Library. The bust had been displayed there in front of a decal plaque of the Gettysburg Address since 2013.

“The Lincoln bust … had been featured in a temporary exhibit commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. That exhibit ended in August 2021 and the bust was moved to storage. Subsequent questions about this curatorial decision inspired thoughtful conversation among library staff. I was moved by the outpouring of interest in this historic artifact and made plans to return the bust to public view,” Westbrooks said.

You have to do a little reading between the lines, but the article tells an interesting story:

The Fix was told of the situation by Cornell University biology Professor Randy Wayne, who said at the time that when he asked around about the display’s fate, all he was told was: “Someone complained, and it was gone.”

In the months that followed, Wayne said he received an outpouring of responses from alumni grateful he sounded the alarm. He then prepared a report for the Cornell Free Speech Alliance about the controversy.

He said some donors and alumni were concerned about the bust’s removal as well as arguments from campus leadership that denied his claim the bust was a victim of cancel culture. Instead, administration said it was always only a temporary display, despite the fact it had been up for eight years.

Wayne’s report detailed a meeting he had in mid-July with Westbrooks on what might have prompted its removal.

The article concludes:

Asked what role concerned alumni and donors had in the decision to re-display the bust, Wayne said he believes it was a big one.

“They made all the difference,” Wayne said via email. “The alumni and donors have a deep love for Cornell and have sincere gratitude for the education that they got here. They did not want cancel culture to ruin it for their grandkids.”

Please follow the link to read the entire article. People who believe in not erasing history can make a difference.

Level The Playing Field–Don’t Move The Finish Line

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On Thursday, The College Fix posted an article about a court case involving an accounting lecturer at UCLA.

The article reports:

Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge H. Jay Ford III recently ruled against entirely dismissing a lawsuit filed against UCLA by accounting lecturer Gordon Klein, who would not implement a lenient race-based grading system in the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s death.

The judge, in his March 30 ruling, did allow some causes of action lodged against the University of California system regents and UCLA Dean Antonio Bernardo to be dismissed, but allowed several others to proceed. A jury trial has been scheduled for April 2023.

Ford stated in his ruling that Klein has provided evidence that “would support judgment in his favor” regarding his breach of contract, false light and labor code violation claims.

Cornell law Professor William Jacobson, in explaining the ruling, noted UCLA had sought dismissal of the case under California’s anti-SLAPP protections, “which provides an expedited process for adjudication of whether the claims fall under the statute.”

Jacobson said the ruling means UCLA’s avenues for avoiding a jury trial are small.

“While I don’t think that precludes later motions practice, there already has been a review of evidence by the court and the court found that the claims are legally cognizable. So it’s unclear to me what the path would be to get the remaining parts of the case dismissed prior to trial,” he wrote on his Legal Insurrection blog.

Following Floyd’s death, Klein received a request from a non-black student asking that he provide academic leniency for black students under emotional duress at the time.

Klein responded June 2, 2020, by asking how he was supposed to identify black students in the online class; whether he should also go easy on white students from Minneapolis; how much leeway to show half-black students; and how the student feels about Martin Luther King Jr.’s admonition to not evaluate people based on “the color of their skin.”

The article concludes:

Klein declined to comment to The College Fix this week on the ruling. Bernardo referred a request for comment to UCLA’s media affairs division.

“The rulings last week in no way addressed the question of punitive damages. The court dismissed some of Professor Klein’s causes of action, and made no final rulings on the merits of any of the remaining claims against the university or Dean Bernardo,” UCLA spokesman Bill Kisliuk told The College Fix.

Last fall, Klein wrote an op-ed explaining the motivation for his lawsuit and why he seeks both compensatory and punitive damages.

“You see, most of my income comes not from teaching at UCLA but from consulting to law firms and other corporations. Several of those firms dropped me after they got wind that I’d been suspended — the better to put distance between themselves and a ‘racist.’ That cost me the lion’s share of my annual income,” he wrote.

This is another example of the insanity that has gripped our college campuses. Giving a student a grade he has not earned does not help anyone. The goal of an education is to prepare a student to be a contributing member of society. To pad a grade for any reason undermines that goal. I choose not to name names, but in recent years we have seen the folly of putting people in positions based on their race, sexuality, gender preference, etc. The request by the student for academic leniency was simply the predecessor to promotions based on something other than merit.

Fighting Back Against Indoctrination

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The College Fix posted an article yesterday about a course being taught at the University of North Carolina Wilmington by Dr. Mike Adams.

The article reports:

“What does the evidence say about the claims of the Black Lives Matter movement?”

“Is the criminal justice system really systematically racist?”

“Is there really a rape epidemic on our college campuses?”

“What was that you were saying about white privilege?”

“What was that you were saying about patriarchal oppression?”

These are some of the study prompts for a new class to be offered at the University of North Carolina Wilmington called “Issues in Criminal Justice.” Were these topics taught by a left-leaning scholar, the classroom conversations and readings might have gone one way.

But the class is the brainchild of one of the most well-known and outspoken Christian conservative scholars in the nation — criminology Professor Mike Adams — and he promises that students will finally get a chance to hear how those on the right would answer these questions, and more.

He calls the class “a reasoned response to systematic academic malpractice.”

“Please note that whereas political leftists author virtually all of the readings in your other courses, conservatives and libertarians author most of the readings in this course,” the syllabus states. “This is done so that you will be exposed to beliefs that contradict those of the vast majority of your professors. Often, these dissenting views are presented only as caricatures. In this class, you will hear from the proponents of such views directly.”

Among the required reading list: Mike Lee’s “Our Lost Constitution: The Willful Subversion of America’s Founding Document”; John Lott Jr.’s “More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime And Gun Control Laws”; K.C. Johnson’s and Stuart Taylor’s “The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack On Due Process At America’s Universities”; and Heather Mac Donald’s “The War On Cops: How The Attack On Law And Order Makes Everyone Less Safe.”

The article concludes:

Adams said he is disappointed in how his colleagues no longer teach both sides of an issue.

“There’s a legitimate question as to whether all my colleagues are just incompetent or whether it’s just that they have a moral compass that points to them,” Adams told The Fix. “I’m really trying to figure out if they’re intellectually herniated or just morally herniated. But in all likelihood it’s improper to attribute it to one or the other. It’s got to be a combination because the situation has just gotten so bad. I just have to teach a course like this one.”

Adams made national headlines in 2014 when he won a seven-year court battle against the University of North Carolina Wilmington for retaliating against him for his conservative, Christian views. As part of the settlement, campus leaders agreed to adopt procedures protecting Adams from renewed retaliation.

Adams told The Fix that in light of his past experiences, he is not worried about his academic freedom or the pushback this class might receive from some corners of campus. In fact, he added, controversy is one sign of robust intellectual diversity.

“I’m worried if I don’t cause controversy,” he said. “I’m extremely worried about that. A lack of controversy on college campuses is a sign of sickness and intellectual atrophy.”

Thank you, Dr. Adams, you are a courageous man who is making a difference.