Civil Rights Group Challenges ‘Flawed’ Vaccine Mandate at George Mason University

A civil rights group is calling on George Mason University (GMU) executives to reconsider their vaccination requirement for staff and students in the fall semester, claiming that it’s a scientifically “irrational” policy that violates constitutional rights and medical ethics.

The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), which describes itself as a nonpartisan, nonprofit civil rights group that seeks “to protect constitutional freedoms from violations by the Administrative State,” said in a July 22 statement that GMU’s “flawed reopening policy” for the fall semester “tramples on the civil liberties of students, faculty, and employees alike.”

The Fairfax, Virginia, university announced on July 22 its new vaccination requirements for the fall semester, citing the rapid spread of the Delta variant, the strain of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) considers to be more transmissible and potentially more resistant to vaccines.

“Mason is joining the growing community of universities that require all students, faculty, and staff to get vaccinated and to share verification of their vaccination status, in order to work, study, and live on campus,” GMU said in a statement. “We will, of course, approve appropriate exemptions for medical and religious reasons.”

GMU President Gregory Washington, in an email reported on by Just The News, wrote that disclosure of vaccination status “will be a prerequisite for eligibility for any future merit pay increases” for faculty staff.

The NCLA represents Todd Zywicki, a professor at GMU’s Scalia Law School who has recovered from COVID-19.

“For Professor Zywicki, who has recovered from COVID-19 and acquired robust natural immunity, it is not only medically unnecessary to undergo a vaccination procedure at the current time, but doing so also would create a risk of harm to him,” the NCLA wrote in the statement.

In a letter (pdf) to GMU executives, the NCLA urged them to reconsider their vaccination policy, arguing that the university’s refusal to recognize natural immunity or grant merit pay to staff who don’t share their vaccination status could lead to a lawsuit. The civil rights group is challenging GMU’s vaccination policy on the grounds of the Ninth and 14th Amendments.

“Although the Policy may be well-intentioned, GMU has breached its constitutional and ethical obligations by interfering with health decisions that should reside with individuals and their medical providers,” the NCLA wrote.

The NCLA urged GMU to reexamine the policy “to deem natural immunity at least equivalent to that achieved through vaccination, and to confirm that Professor Zywicki will not lose eligibility for future pay raises (merit or otherwise) if he does not wish to share his vaccination status.”

“George Mason is forcing me to choose between serving my students on one hand and undergoing an unnecessary and potentially risky medical procedure on the other. Multiple clinical studies have shown that natural immunity provides at least as much protection against reinfection as the most effective vaccines,” Zywicki said in a statement.

GMU officials didn’t respond to a request by the Epoch Times for comment by press time.

Vaccine mandates have become a hot-button issue, with advocates arguing that they’re necessary to keep people safe and opponents decrying them as unacceptable violations of bodily autonomy.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/civil-rights-group-challenges-flawed-vaccine-mandate-at-george-mason-university_3916504.html

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Bloated Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Staffs Explode Cost of Higher Education

The woke revolution on college campuses is being bolstered by a vast network of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” staffers who gobble up school budgets and enforce left-wing orthodoxy.

A recently released paper by Jay Greene, a fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy, and James Paul, a doctoral fellow at the University of Arkansas, sheds light on the inflation of diversity, equity, and inclusion staff on modern college campuses. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

The study examined the personnel at “65 universities representing 16 percent of all students in four-year institutions in the United States.” It found that a significant number of personnel at those universities are devoted solely to the task of promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Of course, general administrative bloat on college campuses is nothing new. There has been a sustained growth in administration in recent decades that has contributed to a drastically higher cost of education and tuition. It certainly has outpaced by far the increase in the number of employees engaged in teaching students or conducting research.

That alone should be cause for concern as a college degree weighs more heavily on students, many of whom are saddled with enormous student loan debt and increasingly questionable job prospects.

Perhaps worse, it’s becoming a bigger problem for taxpayers, many of whom never received a college degree or gained the benefits of one. When legislators and donors provide money for higher education, is that really what they think they are investing in?

The study’s authors found that “the average university has 45.1 people tasked with promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and that at some schools, the number is much higher. They found that the University of Michigan, for instance, has 163 diversity, equity, and inclusion personnel and that many other schools had similarly high numbers.

It seems that that emphasis is overtaking what one would assume is the core function of higher education; namely, teaching students.

For instance, the authors of the study compared the number of diversity, equity, and inclusion staff with the number of history professors typically on campuses and found that the average institution has “1.4 times as many DEI personnel as tenured or tenure-track history professors.”

At many schools, there were twice the number of diversity, equity, and inclusion staff as history professors.

What’s worse is that the total staff and faculty devoted to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives is likely much higher than what the study uncovered. As its authors note, “the DEI personnel count is likely an underestimate of universities’ commitment to DEI.” There are likely a huge number of staff on campus who do not include diversity, equity, and inclusion in their job titles, yet spend most of their time working on those goals.

Is the surge in diversity, equity, and inclusion staff on college campuses making them more welcoming places? That’s doubtful.

“Universities—especially those that are publicly funded—should be welcoming to all students, and it is admirable that inclusion is a priority for so many institutions of higher education,” they wrote. “Having said that, this research suggests that large DEI bureaucracies appear to make little positive contribution to campus climate.”

It’s more likely that the surge in diversity, equity, and inclusion personnel “may be better understood as a signal of adherence to ideological, political, and activist goals.”

It’s hardly news at this point that a commitment to “diversity” in modern academia not only ignores a diversity of viewpoints (where diversity actually matters), but often actively precludes it.

Instead of producing more desirable results for students, the explosion of diversity, equity, and inclusion staff both reinforces ideological dogmas while providing high-paying jobs to an empowered activist class.

“Employing dozens of DEI professionals—in the form of chief diversity officers, assistant deans for diversity, and directors for inclusive excellence—may be better understood as jobs programs subsidizing political activism without improving campus climate,” the authors of The Heritage Foundation study wrote.

This explosion in diversity, equity, and inclusion staff is certainly in line with larger trends in American society as diversity consultants operate to inculcate woke orthodoxies in elite institutions.

Swarms of diversity, equity, and inclusion officers enforce left-wing ideology on college campuses, corporate boardrooms, government agencies, and even K-12 schools. It has become a vast, hive-mind apparatus that keeps activists employed, dissenters cowed, and the revolution moving forward.

They are the glue holding together this top-down social revolution being foisted on America and much of the rest of the West.

Americans, regardless of ideology or background, pay for the wastefulness of our colleges and universities.

But Americans are not only paying the salaries of the swarms of diversity, equity, and inclusion administrators who eat out our substance, we are paying an even higher price for the destructive ideologies they impose and reinforce.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/08/02/bloated-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-staffs-explode-cost-of-higher-education

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http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

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http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

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