New Jersey Becomes Second State Mandating Middle Schoolers Learn About LGBTQ Achievements

New Jersey will be the second state to mandate that middle and high school students learn about LGBTQ contributions.

Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy signed Senate Bill 1569, which requires schools to adopt curriculums that “accurately portray political, economic, and social contributions of persons with disabilities and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people.”

“The Governor believes that ensuring students learn about diverse histories will help build more tolerant communities and strengthen educational outcomes,” Murphy’s spokeswoman Christine Lee said in a statement, The Huffington Post reported Thursday.

The policies go into effect for the 2020-2021 school year.

One of Murphy’s plans when running for governor was expanding “LGBTQ equality,” according to his campaign website.

“In the era of Donald Trump, Phil will not give an inch on the equal treatment of our LGBTQ neighbors,” Murphy’s campaign website said.

Murphy passed a law in July 2018 so people could have their sex designation changed on birth and death certificates, The Huffington Post reported.

California was the first state to require addressing LGBTQ issues in school curriculums through the FAIR Education Act, which was signed in July 2011 and enacted in 2012.

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Cambridge University receives £100m gift from former student

Donation by financier David Harding will primarily be used to assist PhD students

The University of Cambridge is celebrating the largest single donation from a British donor in recent history, after announcing a gift of £100m from the financier David Harding to support students.

Harding, a physics graduate from Cambridge who became a billionaire and successful hedge fund manager, has pledged that some of the funds will go to promote access for students from disadvantaged and minority ethnic backgrounds.

The donations from the David and Claudia Harding Foundation will include £79m in scholarships and aid to postgraduate PhD students, with a further £20m as financial support for undergraduates. The final £1m will help fund Cambridge’s access programmes aimed at attracting disadvantaged students.

“This extraordinarily generous gift from David and Claudia Harding will be invaluable in sustaining Cambridge’s place among the world’s leading universities and will help to transform our offer to students,” said Stephen Toope, Cambridge’s vice-chancellor.

The fund to support postgraduate students, to be known as the Harding Distinguished Postgraduate Scholars Programme, will begin this year. Cambridge said that the programme will fully fund, in perpetuity, more than 100 doctoral students in residence at any one time.

“Scholarships will be available to the most talented students for research in any discipline and the successful candidates will be offered places at applicable Cambridge colleges,” the university said in a statement.

Harding – whose hedge fund Winton Capital is said to invest more than £20bn – said: “Claudia and I are very happy to make this gift to Cambridge to help to attract future generations of the world’s outstanding students to research and study there.

“Cambridge and other British centres of learning have down the ages contributed greatly to improvements in the human condition and can continue in future to address humanity’s great challenges.”

A recent investigation by the Guardian found that Cambridge is the wealthiest university in the UK, with a combined £11.8bn in identifiable assets, including £4.9bn held by the central university alone, and £6.9bn held by individual colleges.

Harding, 57, studied at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, graduating with a first-class degree in 1982, before working in the City of London as a stockbroker. In 1997 he founded the Winton Group, and he remains its chief executive.

The financier’s most recent high-profile donation was an estimated £3.5m to help fund the Britain Stronger in Europe campaign before the 2016 referendum.

The Hardings have previously pledged £20m to the Winton programme for physics at Cambridge university’s prestigious Cavendish laboratory, as well as donations to other leading institutions such as London’s Science Museum, the Crick Institute, and funding for the Harding Centre for Risk Literacy at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.

In historical terms the Harding donation, despite its nominal size, pales in comparison to the $10m donated to Scotland’s universities by Andrew Carnegie in 1902, or the legacies given to Oxford by Cecil Rhodes in 1903, with £4m to establish the famous scholarship that bears his name worth closer to £500m today.

In 2000 the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced a £130m gift to Cambridge to establish a scholarship fund, the largest single gift of the modern era.

In 2012, Michael Moritz and Harriet Heyman donated £75m to Oxford to found the Moritz-Heyman scholarships for disadvantaged undergraduates, with the pair also donating £25m to Christ Church college in 2008.

The Canadian investor John McCall MacBain is also likely to have matched Harding’s donation, having made a £75m donation to the Rhodes scholarship trust in 2013 with matching additions that have probably taken it to about £100m.

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Australian university introduces 'all gender' bathrooms in a bid to make trans and intersex students feel 'safe and welcome on campus'

At the expense of making a lot of women feel unsafe.  Isn't feminism great?

Sydney's University of Technology has introduced 'all gender' bathrooms in a bid to make 'students feel safe and welcome on campus'.

The toilets at UTS had previously been designated as 'unisex accessible', but members of the UTS Queer Collective urged the university to go further.

Their calls were heard, with UTS last week announcing the move and acknowledging many of its students 'don't identify with traditional binary genders'.   

'Others don't feel comfortable using a bathroom designated by gender, sometimes because they've had a negative experience using a single-gender bathroom due to their appearance or gender identity,' the university posted on its website.

'We have taken a step to improve the on-campus experience for people who prefer not to use single-gender bathrooms, with the establishment of all gender bathrooms in 10 of our buildings.'

Queer Collective members hailed the move on Monday, praising it as a 'big win' for  LGBTQI students. 'This is an important step for trans and gender diverse individuals to feel safe and validated on campus,' they posted on Facebook.

A former queer officer for the University Of New South Wales' Queer Collective called for other univeristies to follow suit. 

'It's a huge step towards acknowledging and including trans, intersex and gender non-conforming students and staff,' Alex Linker told Nine News. 'I am disappointed, however, that it was not my university that was the one who initiated this change. 'I hope that UNSW introduces gender-neutral bathrooms soon.'

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