This change, announced through an emailed administrative memo, comes after the Florida Board of Governors labeled expenditures related to DEI programs as prohibited expenditures.
The memo explains that “to comply with the Florida Board of Governor’s regulation 9.016 on prohibited expenditures, the University of Florida has closed the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer, eliminated DEI positions and administrative appointments, and halted DEI-focused contracts with outside vendors.”
The Board of Governors defines DEI as “any program, campus activity, or policy that classifies individuals on the basis of race, color, sex, national origin, gender identity, or sexual orientation and promotes differential or preferential treatment of individuals on the basis of such classification.”
Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters is standing by policies affecting the transgender community in state schools following the death of 16-year-old Nex Benedict, which has resulted in increasing calls for his removal from office.
“To make sure that all individuals are safe in a school, we want every student to be protected, we want every student to be successful,” Walters told ABC News in an interview Tuesday. “That also means we’re not going to lie to students. And we’re not going to push a gender ideology.”
However, an open letter is calling for Walters’ immediate removal from office for, the letter claims, “fostering a culture of violence and hate against the 2SLGBTQI+ community in Oklahoma schools.” The letter is signed by about 350 local, state, and national organizations, including GLAAD, Human Rights Campaign, Oklahomans for Equality and more.
What are Walters’ “radical” views? Pretty much what a majority of people currently believe and what was almost universally accepted as truth just a few years ago.
Walters said he believes there are only two genders and that those are based on the sex someone is “assigned at birth.”
[…]
“When you are born, you have a gender: you either have an XX chromosome or an XY chromosome,” Walters said. “We’ve seen radical leftists who’ve tried to create this idea of gender fluidity, which frankly, it confuses students, and causes all kinds of chaos in the classroom and chaos with families.”
[…]
“What we see here is an effort from the left to lie about the death of this child to push an agenda and to try to push us off of our positions and our stances,” Walters told ABC News. “We’re not going to back down to that. we’re going to continue to move the state forward and education.”
Bearing in mind that the trigger to this latest kerfuffle was the death of a kid whose cause is not yet known. What we do know is that it was not a direct result of bullying or violence at school. It was most likely a drug overdose or unrelated medical issue, but we’re waiting on the autopsy results.
Authorities are awaiting the full results of the autopsy and toxicology reports for more insight into the circumstances surrounding the teen’s death. The state medical examiner’s office will determine the final cause and manner of death.
IOW, Walters is 100% correct. The leftists are using the lie about a dead kid to bully a school district into ideological submission.
Loaning money to unemployed college kids has always been a high-risk endeavor. When the federal government guaranteed, and then took over, the loans, that risk was transferred to taxpayers against their will. Now this is what far too many deadbeat college grads and dropouts think about taxpayers. Selfish deadbeats.
Santos is “overwhelmed” by her student loan balance because she currently doesn’t have a job. She asked her TikTok viewers: “Are you guys paying your student loans back?”
Surprisingly, a significant number of people who commented admitted they aren’t paying their loans back. Some, like Santos, appear to have forgotten completely, while others have purposefully sent their loans to collections or ignored their payments altogether.
Many of those who commented said they haven’t started paying their student loans back because they can’t even afford their monthly payment.
Families interested in applying to OCS through the WPCP are invited to a virtual Q&A session hosted by Impact Christian Schools on Tuesday, February 6 at 6:30 p.m. Attendees will have the chance to explore educational options, ask questions, review tuition details, and make informed decisions about their child’s education.
It’s not just Claudine Gay. Harvard University’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, Sherri Ann Charleston, appears to have plagiarized extensively in her academic work, lifting large portions of text without quotation marks and even taking credit for a study done by another scholar—her own husband—according to a complaint filed with the university on Monday and a Washington Free Beacon analysis.
The complaint makes 40 allegations of plagiarism that span the entirety of Charleston’s thin publication record. In her 2009 dissertation, submitted to the University of Michigan, Charleston quotes or paraphrases nearly a dozen scholars without proper attribution, the complaint alleges. And in her sole peer-reviewed journal article—coauthored with her husband, LaVar Charleston, in 2014—the couple recycle much of a 2012 study published by LaVar Charleston, the deputy vice chancellor for diversity and inclusion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, framing the old material as new research.
Through that sleight of hand, Sherri Ann Charleston effectively took credit for her husband’s work. The 2014 paper, which was also coauthored with Jerlando Jackson, now the dean of Michigan State University’s College of Education, and appeared in the Journal of Negro Education, has the same methods, findings, and description of survey subjects as the 2012 study, which involved interviews with black computer science students and was first published by the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education.
Here we go! Referendum pending. I would remind readers that I and other local professionals did and analysis and made recommendations to improve and adjust facilities for the district four years ago. It would have reduced the footprint to match enrollment and made substantial improvements. Cost? About $50 million. The study was utterly ignored and they continued to neglect facilities like they had for the decade before. When the referendum comes, vote no. Don’t reward poor management.
WEST BEND — The West Bend School District’s construction partner, Findorff, provided financial estimates for four broad groups of building and site work that total $229.4 million over 15 years across the district, or more than $15 million a year on average.
The West Bend School Board heard the presentation at its Jan. 22 meeting, learning about how the detailed building and site conditions assessment completed in December of 2023 by Eppstein Uhen Architects (EUA) were being used to develop the preliminary 15-year budgets.
That assessment covers current and future capital maintenance needs of the district’s facilities and sites, according to a recent release. The budget estimates presented at the meeting do not include estimated costs for the other two components of the facility assessment related to educational adequacy and capacity/space utilization.
According to Jen Wimmer, superintendent of the West Bend School District, the ongoing capital maintenance needs of the West Bend School District’s buildings are significant.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Nearly 30,000 professors, librarians, coaches, and other workers at California State University, the largest public university system in the U.S., walked off the job Monday in a weeklong strike to demand higher wages.
The stoppage across Cal State’s 23 campuses comes two weeks after CSU officials ended contract negotiations with a unilateral offer starting with a 5% pay raise this year, effective Jan. 31, far below the 12% hike that the union is seeking.
With the new semester beginning Monday, classes for many of the system’s 450,000 students could be canceled, unless faculty individually decide to cross picket lines.
Harvard’s account acknowledges that the university did not handle the review perfectly, suggesting that the university was in crisis as it faced an uproar over its handling of antisemitism on campus.
“These allegations arose in a time of unprecedented events and tension on campus and globally,” the report said. “We understand and acknowledge that many viewed our efforts as insufficiently transparent, raising questions regarding our process and standard of review.”
On Friday, Harvard also announced new rules to rein in student protests.
In a message just before the start of college classes Monday, Harvard said that demonstrations would not be permitted in classrooms, libraries, dormitories or dining halls without permission. Instead, protests are limited to “courtyards, quadrangles and other such spaces” and cannot block students from walking to class.
The clarification did not directly address the question raised at the congressional hearing that contributed to Gay’s resignation: whether protesters chanting slogans like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — which many supporters of Israel interpret as a call for wiping out Israel — would be against Harvard’s code of conduct.
For example, the handout that was included with the WILL news release tells students, “As beneficiaries of racism and white privilege, you sometimes take a defensive posture even when you are not being individually blamed. You may personalize the remarks, not directed personally at you. It is the arrogance of your privilege that drags the focus back to whites.”
The handout repeatedly generalizes about whites, saying, “Whites are more willing and more comfortable decrying our oppression than scrutinizing our privilege.” It uses the term whites over and over again.
Read the handout here. One excerpt generalizes about white people’s beliefs about police and the court system.
Another excerpt is critical of conservative talk show legend Rush Limbaugh, telling students that quotes by him were “loaded with white people’s fear of people of color and what would happen if they gained ‘control.’ Embedded here is also the assumption that to be ‘pro-black’ (or any other color) is to be anti-white.”
The handout shared by WILL also contains this passage, “By saying we are not different, that you don’t see the color, you are also saying you don’t see your whiteness. This denies the people of colors’ experience of racism and your experience of privilege.” Another excerpt tells students, “To say people of color can be racist, denies the power imbalance inherent in racism.”
The principal of a Brooklyn high school that forced children to learn from home the day after 2,000 migrants moved in for a night has hit back at parents who criticized the decision.
Parents were left outraged after their children were ordered to learn from home when the migrants were evacuated from Floyd Bennett Field because of a torrential rain storm.
‘I don’t understand how people who never come on a Zoom like this could take an opportunity like this evening to throw mud,’ Cohen said, according to the Post.
Cohen told parents on the call that she made the decision to move the children to remote learning on Wednesday because she didn’t know when classrooms would be ready again after the migrants were bused back to their shelter.
Oh, we dare. She prioritized housing illegal aliens in the buildings to support a political agenda instead of using those buildings to educate children. She made her priorities clear.
Yet another COVID response failure. But here’s the dirty little secret… some colleges don’t care if students will be successful or not as long as the check clears.
After the COVID pandemic made it difficult for high school students to take the SAT and ACT, dozens of selective colleges dropped their requirement that applicants do so. Colleges described the move as temporary, but nearly all have since stuck to a test-optional policy. It reflects a backlash against standardized tests that began long before the pandemic, and many people have hailed the change as a victory for equity in higher education.
Now, though, a growing number of experts and university administrators wonder whether the switch has been a mistake. Research has increasingly shown that standardized test scores contain real information, helping to predict college grades, chances of graduation and post-college success. Test scores are more reliable than high school grades, partly because of grade inflation in recent years.
Without test scores, admissions officers sometimes have a hard time distinguishing between applicants who are likely to do well at elite colleges and those who are likely to struggle. Researchers who have studied the issue say that test scores can be particularly helpful in identifying lower-income students and underrepresented minorities who will thrive. These students do not score as high on average as students from affluent communities or white and Asian students. But a solid score for a student from a less privileged background is often a sign of enormous potential.
Here we see the Marxist mindset in action. There was a time when plagiarism was considered objectively bad. It is cheating. It is stealing someone else’s work. But in this era, plagiarism is only bad when done by certain classes of people. Other classes of people are allowed to do it. Further, if you point out that a person who is a member of a protected class is committing plagiarism, then you are now a bigot who is “attacking” them.
Make no mistake. Gay is a racist cheater and Harvard loves her for it.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The downfall of Harvard’s president has elevated the threat of unearthing plagiarism, a cardinal sin in academia, as a possible new weapon in conservative attacks on higher education.
The plagiarism allegations came not from her academic peers but her political foes, led by conservatives who sought to oust Gay and put her career under intense scrutiny in hopes of finding a fatal flaw. Her detractors charged that Gay — who has a Ph.D. in government, was a professor at Harvard and Stanford and headed Harvard’s largest division before being promoted — got the top job in large part because she is a Black woman.
Just a reminder that Harvard has done absolutely nothing to combat the fact that they encourage terrible scholarship, bigotry, and cheating. Business as usual.
She won’t be leading the Crimson, but green shouldn’t be a problem.
Outgoing Harvard President Claudine Gay will still likely earn nearly $900,000 a year despite being forced to resign her position as the school’s top administrator.
Political Science professor Gay — who stepped down amid a tempest of allegations she did not do enough to combat antisemitism and academic plagiarism Tuesday — will now return to a position on the Cambridge, Mass., school’s faculty.
Here is my full column that ran in the Washington County Daily News last Saturday.
As Christmastime envelops our nation in warmth and the faint scent of peppermint, I am reminded about how much it is a part of our shared American culture. As a Christian, I celebrate Christmas as the traditional birthday of my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. But the secular celebration of the Christmas season, imbued with family gatherings, the exchange of gifts, a shared soundtrack, movies, parades, sweet things, and sweet people, has become a distinctly American cultural touch-point that binds together families and communities.
Every group of people — whether it be a family, business, or a nation — has a culture whether they intend to have one or not. The United States is a very large country with beautifully diverse regional and local cultures, but there are several distinctly American common cultural elements that thread through our society. Those common cultural elements are waning in the face of neglect and intentional destruction.
The American culture is derived from our founding ethos rooted in European and American Enlightenment philosophy and frontier expansionism. It is a culture that celebrates the individual as a divine creation in which natural rights are innate and inalienable. This respect and adoration for the individual underpins much of American culture.
Because individuals are the foundational element of American culture, we created a system of government based on self-governance where individuals elect our leaders. Americans are reflexively anti-authoritarian because any concentration of power is a threat to the power of the individual.
Our respect for the individual explains Americans’ instinctive support for human rights. When each and every human is respected and honored as a unique and cherished individual, it is impossible to not support and respect the natural human rights of each individual. Those rights include, but are not limited to, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Individual rights are the reason we have property and the rule of law. The right of an individual person to own the fruits of their own labor rejects the notion of collective ownership. The rule of law exists to provide a predictable and rigorous framework that protects individuals from the power of governments and other individuals who seek to deprive them of the free exercise of their natural rights and the disposition of their property.
The respect for the sovereignty of the individual and respect for individual natural rights is the very heart of liberty and our American love of liberty. What is liberty if not the love of individuals being free to conduct themselves as they wish without interference from their fellow humans? When one individual’s exercise of liberty threatens another’s, we surrender our personal violent power to the necessary evil of government to resolve the conflict through the rule of law.
It is our American love of the individual that breathes life into our culture of tolerance, multiculturalism, and respect for others. “Live and let live” has long been core to the American ethic. We have long striven for the ideal of equality and liberty where individuals of every race, creed, and religion are brothers and sisters in one family that we call “America.”
America’s historic respect for individuals is being assaulted. For over a generation, our schools have been contaminated with philosophies of collectivism, intersectionality, and neo-Marxism. These philosophies reject the sovereignty of the individual in favor of bundling people into groups of oppressors and oppressed, favored and unfavored, good and bad. In these philosophies, concepts like the rule of law, self-governance, and individual liberty are rendered obsolete and replaced with authoritarianism whereby chosen people rule by right in order to correct the perceived wrongs of history and any means are justified by the righteous ends.
If we fully lose our American culture of individualism, we will lose the philosophical support structure upon which our system of government, rule of law, and personal liberties are based. We already see it happening as collectivists are perfectly willing to erase our border, celebrate the raping and murder of Jews, arbitrarily transfer the earned wealth of millions to a few, and weaponize the judicial system to punish people who are members of the “wrong” group.
It is not too late, but it is getting close. I pray that everyone has a restful Christmas season to connect with family and friends as the beautiful individual people they are. Next year will be a pivotal year in the history of our nation.
The University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents unanimously fired UW-La Crosse Chancellor Joe Gow during a closed-door meeting Wednesday after discovering videos posted on porn websites featuring him and his wife.
Gow, 63, and his wife, Carmen Wilson, are featured on several porn websites using “Sexy Happy Couple” as the account name, a moniker also used on at least two social media accounts.
The couple also published two books detailing their experiences in the adult film industry, under pseudonyms. Both books and the social media accounts feature photos clearly showing Gow and Wilson.
Every group of people — whether it be a family, business, or a nation — has a culture whether they intend to have one or not. The United States is a very large country with beautifully diverse regional and local cultures, but there are several distinctly American common cultural elements that thread through our society. Those common cultural elements are waning in the face of neglect and intentional destruction.
The American culture is derived from our founding ethos rooted in European and American Enlightenment philosophy and frontier expansionism. It is a culture that celebrates the individual as a divine creation in which natural rights are innate and inalienable. This respect and adoration for the individual underpins much of American culture.
Because individuals are the foundational element of American culture, we created a system of government based on self-governance where individuals elect our leaders. Americans are reflexively anti-authoritarian because any concentration of power is a threat to the power of the individual.
Our respect for the individual explains Americans’ instinctive support for human rights. When each and every human is respected and honored as a unique and cherished individual, it is impossible to not support and respect the natural human rights of each individual. Those rights include, but are not limited to, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Individual rights are the reason we have property and the rule of law. The right of an individual person to own the fruits of their own labor rejects the notion of collective ownership. The rule of law exists to provide a predictable and rigorous framework that protects individuals from the power of governments and other individuals who seek to deprive them of the free exercise of their natural rights and the disposition of their property.
The respect for the sovereignty of the individual and respect for individual natural rights is the very heart of liberty and our American love of liberty. What is liberty if not the love of individuals being free to conduct themselves as they wish without interference from their fellow humans? When one individual’s exercise of liberty threatens another’s, we surrender our personal violent power to the necessary evil of government to resolve the conflict through the rule of law.
It is our American love of the individual that breathes life into our culture of tolerance, multiculturalism, and respect for others. “Live and let live” has long been core to the American ethic. We have long striven for the ideal of equality and liberty where individuals of every race, creed, and religion are brothers and sisters in one family that we call “America.”
America’s historic respect for individuals is being assaulted. For over a generation, our schools have been contaminated with philosophies of collectivism, intersectionality, and neo-Marxism. These philosophies reject the sovereignty of the individual in favor of bundling people into groups of oppressors and oppressed, favored and unfavored, good and bad. In these philosophies, concepts like the rule of law, self-governance, and individual liberty are rendered obsolete and replaced with authoritarianism whereby chosen people rule by right in order to correct the perceived wrongs of history and any means are justified by the righteous ends.
A University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire staff member sued her employer over being ousted from a position in a campus diversity office allegedly for being “White.”
The lawsuit alleges that when Rochelle Hoffman was promoted to UW-Eau Claire’s interim director of the campus’s Multicultural Student Services office, the school’s former Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and Student Affairs Olga Diaz was told by students that a White woman was not fit to preside over a position intended to serve students of color.
“You hired a white woman as the Interim Director?” one student was cited in a federal complaint against the university.
Per the complaint, another student asked, “Do you personally feel white staff can do as effective a job as a person of color, within a space for people of color?”
Hoffman said she felt compelled to resign last year after eight months of intense hostility and staff questioning her “legitimacy” after being promoted to interim director of the campus’s Multicultural Student Services office, the complaint states.
Harvard University, in the face of mounting questions over possible plagiarism in the scholarly work of its president, Claudine Gay, said Wednesday that it had found two additional instances of insufficient citation in her work.
The issues were found in Gay’s 1997 doctoral dissertation, in which Harvard said it had found two examples of “duplicative language without appropriate attribution.”
Last week, Harvard said an earlier review had found two published articles that needed additional citations, and that Gay would request corrections.
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Wednesday declined to hear a lawsuit brought by Democrats seeking to end the state’s taxpayer-funded private school voucher program.
The lawsuit could be refiled in county circuit court, as both Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ administration and Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos had argued. The Supreme Court rejected it without comment in an unsigned, unanimous order.
Democrats who brought the lawsuit asked the state Supreme Court to take the case directly, which would have resulted in a much faster final ruling than having the case start in lower courts.
Many Americans were shocked by the militant antisemitism that erupted from our nation’s universities in the wake of Hamas’ evil murder, rape, kidnapping, and torture of Israeli civilians on October 7th. Some of us have watched the growing racial and religious hate growing in our universities for years, but the virulent display of hate by students and faculty has laid bare a malignant cancer in our culture.
The darker realization is that the bigotry we see on campuses all over our nation is being taught. It is the result of the incremental, but intentional, decline of our universities into schools that prioritize teaching people to be leftist activists instead of enlightened thought leaders. We see that prioritization on full display in Wisconsin.
The legislative Republicans, led by Speaker Robin Vos and undermined by Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, have been withholding money for employee raises for the Universities of Wisconsin until UW agreed to eliminate its Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) staff. Although DEI is infused throughout the Universities, the UW currently has 43 exclusive DEI positions and about 34,000 total employees.
Despite the stated high-minded rhetorical ideals around DEI, it is part of the cancer in our universities. DEI purports to promote individualism and unique individual experiences. In practice, it devolves into categorizing people into arbitrary racial, ethnic, religious, gender, and economic groups, assigning a relative value to each category, and then encouraging separatism and discrimination. It fosters a culture of dehumanizing the “other” by assigning people to groups instead of engaging them as individuals. DEI programs favor racial segregation in dorms and learning spaces, quotas for admissions and hiring, and silences voices from unfavored people. As practiced on our UW campuses, DEI has long since left behind principles of tolerance and equality.
Furthermore, while some DEI professionals still try to adhere to classical liberal principles of inclusion, many of these DEI positions have become destination jobs for some of the most hateful, bigoted, and vile people in our society. Too many times when we watch another racist screed online, we see it coming from someone who has a career in the protected DEI club of academia.
Seeing this cancer growing in our state universities, Speaker Vos and his compatriots sought to use a financial wedge to force positive change at UW by withholding money for employee raises until the UW eliminated its 43 dedicated DEI positions. Last week, Vos caved and agreed to a compromise that I thought gave too much for too little.
In the sixteen-point deal, the UW would agree to freeze, not eliminate, its DEI positions in place. UW would also agree to adhere to rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court to not discriminate in admissions, pull back on racial discrimination for hiring, add a teaching module about freedom of expression, and implement an automatic admission program for Wisconsin’s top High School students.
In return for these modest concessions by UW that involve mostly doing things that they should be doing anyway, Vos agreed to open the financial floodgates and lavish hundreds of millions of dollars on UW to pay for employee raises, build a long-sought new engineering building, pay for several new building projects all over the system, and pay to demolish and remove 21 old buildings. That is a lot of construction for a UW with steeply declining enrollment.
Despite this surrender by Vos where UW got almost everything it wanted, the UW Regents voted to reject the compromise. What does this tell us about the UW Regents and the leadership of the Universities of Wisconsin?
In a $7.53 billion budget for the Universities of Wisconsin, the Regents always had budgetary room to pay for employee raises and buildings, but they prioritized DEI and administration. At UW-Madison alone, they have grown administration and support staff by 23 percent in the last ten years according to The College Fix. The instructional staff to undergrad ratio has stayed constant at about one to ten while there is now about one administrator for every four undergrads.
There was always budgetary room for employee raises – there still is – but the UW leadership decided to hold those raises hostage to put pressure on the legislature to agree to continue to fund DEI.
Is it any wonder that our universities have become cesspools of hate and division? The leadership and administration of those universities are making the choice to maintain and grow cancerous teachings at the expense of all else. We are regressing as a culture in terms of tolerance, acceptance, and inclusion and that regression is being led by our universities like the Universities of Wisconsin.
