CUNY Law faculty back anti-Israel BDS resolution

The CUNY Law School faculty council approved an anti-Israel resolution supporting the pro-Palestinian boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.

The professors on May 12 voted to endorse the BDS resolution that previously passed the CUNY Law Student Government Association last December, a spokesperson for the law school said.

The vote was taken a day before CUNY Law School’s graduation ceremony last Friday. No other details about the vote were available on Wednesday.

The resolution discusses the disputed territories occupied by Israel in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

“The unceasing military occupation and colonization of Palestine by the Israeli state is a manifestation of both settler colonialism and structural racism, supported politically, financially, and militarily by the U.S,” the resolution said.

The resolution demanded that CUNY sever ties with Israel and accused the school of being “directly complicit in the ongoing apartheid, genocide, and war crimes perpetrated by the State of Israel against the Palestinian people through its investments in and contracts with companies profiting off of Israeli war crimes.”

The group called for the school to terminate student exchange programs with Israel and to join the Boycott Divest Sanctions movement against the nation.

The Israel-Palestinian dispute has raged in recent years among faculty and students at a number of City University of New York campuses. Students on both sides claim they have been subjected to bullying and discrimination.

Meanwhile, CUNY administrators — including Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez and campus presidents — recently returned from a mission to Israel. The mission was co-sponsored by the New York Jewish Community Relations Council and a clear indication that CUNY brass opposes the BDS movement.

The union representing CUNY professors also caused a stir last year by passing a one-sided resolution criticizing Israel aggression in the ongoing conflict. Pro-Israel professors quit CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress union in protest.

Not even ice cream has escaped the heated debate. Ben & Jerry’s provoked a backlash when it announced it would not sell its ice cream in the disputed territories.

https://nypost.com/2022/05/18/cuny-law-faculty-back-anti-israel-bds-resolution/

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The culture wars have crept into Oxbridge admissions

The characters in Sarah Vaughan’s thriller Anatomy of a Scandal include rich Oxford undergraduates from Eton whose main preoccupations are drinking and trashing rooms. They are what it is fashionable to call ‘privileged white males’; while the typical female Oxbridge student is ‘slim, tall, well dressed. Entitled… they knew they belonged there’. The truth, however, is that although Eton is one of the top academic schools in the country, its ‘beaks’ are puzzled by the sharp reduction in the number of their brightest pupils gaining places at Oxbridge. The number of offers has halved between 2014 and 2021.

Not very different to Vaughan’s narrative is the argument of the Sutton Trust that we have a problem when 65 per cent of court judges were educated at independent schools. But some of these were at school half a century ago, in a very different educational setting. Much depends anyway on how the statistics are framed. Do such figures include the half-and-half category of direct grant schools, most of which are now independent but which admitted very large numbers of state-supported scholars?

Stephen Toope, vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, said last week that ‘we have to make it very, very clear we are intending to reduce over time the number of people who are coming from independent school backgrounds into places like Oxford or Cambridge’. Actually, the colleges, not the university, choose whom to admit, but the selection of state school candidates in place of well-qualified competitors from private schools has been going on for a long time; it has simply become more obvious in the past few years. The university’s target figure for state school candidates has slowly crept upwards beyond three-quarters; but it was originally announced as a target (or, to use the current euphemism, ‘benchmark’), not a quota – I know because I was a member of the University Council then, and we were assured that what would always count in final consideration was candidates’ excellence.

So that meant going out and persuading state schools to send more applicants to Cambridge. It meant breaking down prejudices in some comprehensives which were telling their brightest students that Oxbridge was not for the likes of them. It is easy to play on the mystique of ivy-clad cloisters, ancient dining halls and arcane rituals, making what are much-loved traditions among a great many students of all backgrounds into deterrents, signs that the colleges were simply continuations of snobbish public schools whose members supposedly dominated Oxbridge social life and took pleasure in burning bank notes in front of beggars sleeping rough. But that snobbery is long gone. Entrance interviews turn on academic discussion, rather than the ability to catch a rugby ball.

To a remarkable extent these initiatives succeeded. Missions were sent to schools. ‘Access officers’ were appointed by colleges. Oxford and Cambridge were shown to be normal places, just like… just like what? They are not like anywhere except each other, and that is the reason for their stunning performance in the sciences and the humanities. Uniquely self-governing, containing a great variety of autonomous colleges, they possess secrets of success that mean they always stand at the top of the admittedly dubious international league tables. They provide a chance for undergraduates to ‘sit at the feet’, as one used to say, of some of the leading scholars and scientists in the world.

As more state schools match the performance levels of very good independent schools, it is only to be expected that more of their own candidates win places. Yet the TSA (‘Thinking Skills Assessment’) tests at Cambridge reveal some disturbing facts. Lately, successful candidates from private schools scored 73 on average, nearly five points higher than candidates from state schools. This worries many of those who teach maths and physics; their students have to cope with exceptionally challenging courses, and need to hit the ground running. In other words, candidates from one type of school with better scores are being turned away in favour of those from another type of school with lower scores.

So much for the claim made by the university’s spokesman in response to criticism of Toope’s comments: ‘The University of Cambridge does not discriminate against any applicant.’ Positive discrimination exists, and the other side of the same coin is negative discrimination against well-qualified candidates, who are often dismissed as ‘well-taught’, taking the credit away from the candidate. The head of one leading independent school asked me: ‘Where does meritocracy end and social engineering begin?’

Evidence of a deprived background (‘contextual data’) may well justify a difficult choice between closely matched candidates, in favour of the disadvantaged one. But when 35 per cent of independent school pupils receive some sort of bursary, sometimes total exemption from fees, it is clear that a very blunt instrument is being applied. Nor is it just those on very low incomes who may need help. I was governor of a school where we were discussing a rise in fees, to which I objected on ‘squeezed middle-class’ grounds, and was told by another governor, a delightful and wealthy man with rather limited horizons: ‘Well, they can forgo their winter skiing holiday.’ But that was a serious misrepresentation of the dilemma many parents face about where to find the money for school fees.

One hears academics saying: ‘The state-to-independent ratio is better this year.’ In what sense can one possibly say it is better? Maybe it is better because the Office for Students is less likely to threaten to claw back fees, as it can in theory do if the university is short of its target – but the idea that admissions to university are subject to an opinionated bureaucracy blindly pursuing its ideological objectives is deeply troubling.

Toope admits the crudity of making ‘state school’ a criterion for admission when he says the figures need to be broken down to identify selective grammar schools, which account for a significant proportion of state admissions. The implication that here too candidates will eventually suffer discrimination has already created outrage. The Times made public a case where a candidate from a state grammar school had a very high score of 82 in the TSA but was not even invited for interview. Of course there is, and should be, more to admissions than that score: a letter of reference, a personal statement, ideally the interview too. Creating a mix of students from different backgrounds who can strike sparks off each other is a desirable objective.

At the moment the really disadvantaged candidates are arguably the white males from outstanding independent schools. If they are rejected by their first-choice college and placed in the ‘pool’ so other colleges can look at their application, they nearly all sink without trace. So they go instead to Durham, St Andrews, Bristol and other Russell Group universities, excellent places – but, as Toope has hinted, they too are under pressure to cut numbers from certain types of school. One head talked to me about a potential brain drain as some of the best and brightest head to Harvard and Princeton, maybe never to return to Britain.

It is vital to remember that admitting students is all about individuals. University admissions have become another site for culture wars in which ‘white’, ‘male’ and ‘privileged’ are terms of disapproval, linked together to justify injustice. Imagined class must not determine admissions. School names should probably be omitted from application forms. Penalising applicants for their parents’ choice of school ‘strips the pupil of any agency’, to quote one distinguished head. It is a betrayal of the principles by which a great university has flourished.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/whos-out

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Critical race theory-related ideas found in mandatory programs at 39 of top 50 US medical schools

At least 39 of America’s 50 most prestigious medical colleges and universities have some form of mandatory student training or coursework on ideas related to critical race theory (CRT), according to CriticalRace.org, which monitors CRT curricula and training in higher education.

Earlier this year, CriticalRace.org found that CRT was prevelant in medical schools across the country. The project from Legal Insurrection Foundation, a non-profit devoted to campus free speech and academic freedom, has since expanded its database and found even more elite medical schools are focusing on "racialization" of medicine.

"The national alarm should be sounding over the racialization of medical school education. The swiftness and depth to which race-focused social justice education has penetrated medical schools reflects the broader disturbing trends in higher education," Legal Insurrection founder William A. Jacobson told Fox News Digital.

Jacobson, a clinical professor of law at Cornell Law School, founded CriticalRace.org’s extensive database that has also examined elite K-12 private schools and 500 of America's top undergraduate programs.

The schools examined were based on the rankings by U.S. News’ rankings of America’s top medical schools. The latest findings show that 39 of the top 50 medical schools "have some form of mandatory student training or coursework" related to CRT and 38 offered materials by authors Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi, whose books explicitly call for discrimination, according to Jacobson.

"Mandatory so-called 'anti-racism' training centers ideology, not patients, as the focus of medical education. This is a drastic change from focusing on the individual, rather than racial or ethnic stereotypes," Jacobson said.

Training is sometimes targeted, such as a new requirement for a major or department, and sometimes school-wide. The subjects of mandatory training and coursework are worded and phrased differently at individual schools, but use terms including "anti-racism," "cultural competency," "equity," "implicit bias," "DEI – diversity, equity and inclusion" and critical race theory, according to CriticalRace.org.

In 2021, the American Medical Association (AMA) committed to utilizing CRT in a variety of ways and criticized the idea that people of different backgrounds should be treated the same. All 50 schools examined by CriticalRace.org are accredited by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, which sponsors the Association of American Medical Colleges, which has also taken steps to support anti-racist initiatives, and the AMA.

Earlier this year, guidance issued by the Biden administration stated certain individuals may be considered "high risk" and more quickly qualify for monoclonal antibodies and oral antivirals used to treat COVID-19 based on their "race or ethnicity."

The study found that 12 schools have department-specific mandatory training, including The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University’s Committee on Anti-Racism and Equity (CARE) that established Discussing Anti-Racism and Equity (DARE) as an "educational intervention aimed at emergency medicine frontline providers."

According to CriticalRace.org, the curriculum for these medical students includes "conferences on racism and equity, simulations, reading groups, and film screenings integrated into the existing education at Brown in order to ‘encourage anti-racist attitudes and behaviors’ and to provide ‘equitable and actively anti-racist care’ by assessing implicit bias and structural racism."

The study also found that 17 schools have school-wide mandatory training, including Albert Einstein College of Medicine and University of Utah School of Medicine. These trainings at these schools consist of modules, online orientations, orientation programs and all other forms of training that fall short of an academic course, according to CriticalRace.org.

CriticalRace.org found that 28 of the 50 schools have school-wide mandatory curricula, such as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), CRT or similar elements embedded into the general curriculum of the university. The Ohio State University School of Medicine and Keck School of Medicine of USC are among the schools that fall into this category.

"Almost all medical students will have attended colleges and universities awash in so-called 'anti-racism' social justice educational and training mandates," Jacobson said. "These concepts will not be new to them, but they are attending medical school to learn about medicine and patient care, not as a refresher course on undergraduate race-focused education."

He believes "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion entrenched bureaucracies promote, protect and relentlessly expand their administrative territory in medical schools," but the resources should instead be used "to expand medical knowledge and patient care, not to enforce an ideological viewpoint."

The study found that 28 schools also have some sort of mandatory training for faculty or staff, which can either be department specific or implemented school-wide.

CriticalRace.org found that everything from onboarding new hires to filling out faculty research applications can include terms such as anti-racism, cultural competency, DEI, equity, implicit bias and critical race theory.

Jacobson’s team at CriticalRace.org isn’t finished putting a spotlight on the situation that many feel is plaguing medical schools across the nation.

"We expect to roll out a visual interactive map of our medical school database, to accompany our higher ed map, as part of a broader expansion of CriticalRace.org in the near future," Jacobson said.

Last month, nonprofit organization Do No Harm was launched to fight back against radical progressive ideology in the healthcare industry while promoting fairness, equal access, and the best, most personalized treatment for every patient.

"We are a diverse group of physicians, healthcare professionals, medical students, patients, and policymakers united by a moral mission: Protect healthcare from a radical, divisive, and discriminatory ideology. We believe in making healthcare better for all – not undermining it in pursuit of a political agenda," the organization’s website explains.

A recent Marist Poll, sponsored by Do No Harm, found a mere 28% of Americans feel elevating race or ethnicity as a more significant risk factor over medical history in determining the type of treatment prescribed for patients would be beneficial

Defenses of CRT-associated materials have ranged from outright denying CRT is being taught, to claiming that the underlying ideas are key to creating an inclusive educational environment.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/critical-race-theory-medical-schools-report

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My other blogs: Main ones below

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

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

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

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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