Hedge fund founder Bill Ackman announced on Friday he would launch an AI plagiarism review of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s faculty and leaders with possible plans to extend the probe to other elite universities.
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Higher education is making news these days. In Congressional testimony, the Presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn couldn’t tell whether calling for the genocide of the Jews constituted harassment without knowing the context. The effects of their testimony reverberate.
Days later, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) issued a lengthy report condemning “Political Interference and Academic Freedom in Florida’s Public Higher Education System.” Prominently featured was a detailed complaint about New College of Florida, where I serve as admissions director.
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The House Education and Workforce Committee is opening an investigation into Harvard University, MIT, University of Pennsylvania and other schools, following a recent congressional hearing about antisemitism on college campuses.
House GOP Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik R-N.Y., called the testimony of the universities’ presidents “morally bankrupt.” Democrats and Republicans have condemned the universities’ presidents’ responses to questions about how their respective schools combat hate speech and antisemitism on campus.
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“Menstruation Scientists claim that 20% of MIT women are impaired at work.”
“In order to save Democracy from misinformation, we need more mob rule.”
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In many states across the country, voters appear to be returning to in-person voting for their top preference, after vote-by-mail was greatly increased and heavily promoted during the coronavirus pandemic.
According to the Associated Press, many states, including key swing states, have seen massive drops in the number of requests for mail-in ballots. In Georgia, where nearly one million ballots were cast by mail in the primary elections in 2020, only about 85,000 voters have requested mail-in ballots for this year’s primary. Other states that saw similar declines include Ohio, West Virginia, and Indiana.
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In case you missed it, on Monday MIT announced that they would be reinstating their SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles. Like many universities, MIT had ditched the tests during the pandemic.
Even prior to the pandemic, however, there had been a widespread push to abandon these tests to enhance diversity.
“Data shows tests like the SAT are biased against students from low-income households. Poorer students tend to perform worse on the test,” CNN reported in 2015. “Blacks and Hispanics also consistently score lower on the SAT than whites.” (CNN conveniently left out that Asian Americans score much higher than whites, presumably because it didn’t fit the narrative.)
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The federal government has spent an astounding $42,000 per federal taxpayer on so-called “stimulus” efforts since the pandemic began. Where did all that money go? Well, as it turns out, one of the biggest stimulus programs, the Paycheck Protection Program, failed miserably.
At least, that’s the finding of a new study from MIT economist David Autor and nine coauthors. They examined the $800 billion Paycheck Protection Program, which gave “loans,” most of which won’t have to be paid back, to businesses. It was created by Republicans and Democrats in Congress alike in hopes of helping businesses preserve their employees’ jobs for the duration of the COVID-19 crisis.
The study tracks the money to see where it ended up and what it achieved. The results… aren’t pretty.
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A University of Chicago professor, whose prestigious lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was cancelled at the behest of a Twitter mob who disagreed with his viewpoints, warns that “free society is at risk” as “woke ideology” and cancel culture takes hold.
Dorian Abbot, a professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago, had his appearance at the Carlson Lecture cancelled on Sept. 30 “to avoid controversy” just eight days after a Twitter mob consisting of MIT students, postdocs and recent alumni went after him, according to a written account published on Common Sense by Bari Weiss
For 10 years, Abbot has been teaching and researching climate change and the possibility of life on extrasolar planets, never considering himself a very political person until about five years ago when he noticed a shift in attitude toward discussions involving a difference in opinions, Abbot wrote on Weiss’ Substack.
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A Huawei employee allegedly ghostwrote an op-ed on behalf of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, who defended Huawei’s ties with American universities, according to a report from the Washington Free Beacon.
In 2019, Nicholas Negroponte — the co-founder of the MIT Media Lab — wrote a defense of the Chinese company’s partnership with MIT and other post-secondary institutions. He argued that the United States “should collaborate with leading technology companies and their research labs, rather than banning them.”
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