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      in UK Politics

      Revealed: the worst-hit schools as spending freezes amplify ‘privilege gap’

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      Sign up for a full digest of all the best opinions of the week in our Voices Dispatches emailSign up to our free weekly Voices newsletterSeven in 10 schools across England have been hit by cuts and can’t afford the same essential running costs as when the Conservatives came to power in 2010, new analysis shows.Some 13,000 schools across the country were subject to cuts over the period, with the worst hit – Dunraven Secondary School in Lambeth – seeing its real-terms spending power slashed by a total of £4,093,473 this year when compared to 2010.Hundreds of schools have lost over £1m in real-terms funding compared to 2010, according to calculations by the National Education Union (NEU). On an individual level, some 2,000 schools have lost over £1,000 in real-terms budget per pupil under the Tory government.Shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson told The Independent: “I wish that I could commit to solving all of that if Labour wins the next election, and fixing it quickly, but I do have to be upfront about the scale of the challenge.“There will be that immediate investment of cash that we will make ending the tax breaks that private schools enjoy. But beyond that, we do need to get our economy growing so we have more to invest in our public services.”A Conservative spokesperson said: “Under Rishi Sunak and the Conservatives, we are boosting school funding to the highest level ever in real terms per pupil, driving up standards across the country up from 68 per cent of schools being rated good or outstanding under Labour to 90 per cent today with children in England named ‘Best in the West’ for reading.”Headteacher Claire works in an infant school in Milton Keynes. The school has lost out on £1,214 in real-terms funding for each pupil compared to 2010, according to NEU calculations, a dip of 13 per cent.Claire doesn’t believe that either political party is tackling the budget problem.“On a national level, I think funding just needs to be completely relooked at for schools… it doesn’t feel like it’s on the agenda for this election at all. I don’t feel that it’s a priority for any of the major parties.”The NEU has created the single-issue School Cuts social media campaign for the general election, which the union says has reached upwards of seven million people. The union is encouraging a letter-writing campaign to local candidates.The NEU calculates real-term cuts to schools by determining core funding and then outlining school expenditure each year, adjusting for inflation and other price shocks.Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the NEU, said that the impact of Conservatives’ education cuts is clearly visible in schools. “The truth is, 14 years of government cuts to schools have left education in crisis, and children are paying the price. We can all see the consequences: larger and larger class sizes, burned-out teachers leaving the profession, and buildings literally falling apart.”He added: “The government is failing a generation of children.”Government cuts to funding, in addition to a spike in children with special educational needs at mainstream schools, means that schools have been forced to make drastic decisions on what they can provide to students.Teachers like Claire are seeing that lack of resources widens the divide between children from high and low-income households, the latter of whom don’t get access to the same experiences, such as school trips.“What’s really worrying me is if we can’t give children access to resources and experiences, that’s going to affect their education. We won’t be able to close that privilege gap, between those that can and those that can’t. The cycle is just going to continue and repeat itself.”The above map from NEU data shows that schools have been impacted in all areas of the country, with most local schools facing budget squeezes in constituencies in the North West and South East.Schools in Slough, Bethnal Green and Stepney have lost close to £30m in real terms, comparing 2023-24 levels to 2010-11 levels. Meanwhile, London boroughs top the list of constituencies worst hit by cuts, with 17 having lost more than £1,000 on average per pupil.These take in constituencies such as Hackney North and Stoke Newington, Clapham and Brixton Hill, Tottenham, and the Cities of London and Westminster.Claire’s school in Milton Keynes is struggling with monetary pressures on all sides. Her only avenue for major costs like leaks and asbestos checks is the local council, which says it doesn’t have the money either. “It’s like a brick wall, basically,” she said.The budget is so small that the school can no longer afford to pay the caretaker. Now, teachers and office staff take out the bins themselves, perform health and safety checks, and pick up essential items after school. In an effort to get by, Claire says that the school relies on some goodwill: volunteer groups have come to paint the building, for example, and teachers’ husbands have even done repairs when needed. “Saying it out loud, I think, oh my God. We just get on with it,” said Claire. In a recent report, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said that “no real-terms growth in school spending per pupil over 14 years is historically unusual”.Over her 11 years at the school, Claire has noticed a huge drop in resources and budget, particularly when it comes to IT and school trips. “When I first started, we had a full suite of computers in the ICT room. The budget was in a surplus. We had an extension done at the time to make one of the classrooms bigger. There were significant pots of money, and we just don’t have that luxury any more. It’s just gone.”The ratio of pupils to teachers has gone down, too; and staff are juggling multiple roles, without having the pay or qualifications to match.“Lots of children are coming into school with significant speech and language difficulties. The services are not there in the NHS to support that. So we’ve got teaching assistants being expected to act like speech and language therapists when they’re not qualified to do that.”She added: “Schools and teachers are becoming almost social workers, to support families that are living in poverty.” More

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      in US Politics

      Congress’s latest ‘antisemitism’ hearing was an ugly attack on Palestinian rights | Moira Donegan

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      If you didn’t know what was really going on at US college campuses, the congressional hearing on Thursday – in which the presidents of Northwestern and Rutger’s and the chancellor of UCLA were called to testify before a Republican-controlled House committee – would do little to inform you.The House committee on education and the workforce has held six – yes, six – public events to draw attention to the supposed crisis on campus in the months since the 7 October attack on Israel. They’ve hauled university presidents to Washington to harangue them, allegedly for not being sufficiently punitive toward pro-Palestinian students and faculty. These hearings have been used to belittle and antagonize university faculty and students and have fed racist and anti-intellectual moral panics that have led to the resignations of several of the university presidents who have been called to testify, notably including Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania and Claudine Gay of Harvard.The hearings have aimed to pressure colleges and universities to crack down on a wide variety of politically disfavored speech, particularly pro-Palestinian and anti-war speech, and particularly that of students and faculty of color. In many cases, this pressure seems to have yielded the desired results: at Columbia, Minouche Shafik, the university president, twice ordered the NYPD onto campus to conduct violent mass arrests of anti-genocide student protesters; the first of these raids came the day after Shafik testified before the House committee and disparaged her own students in degrading terms.But on Thursday, at least, the university administrators seemed less nervous, a bit more subdued – even if they were not willing to defend the rights of their anti-war students or correct the Republicans’ lies about them.Michael Schill, president of Northwestern, Jonathan Holloway, president of Rutgers and Gene Block, chancellor of UCLA, were calm, if occasionally annoyed, as the Republicans on the committee told them they should be “ashamed” for using insufficient violence against protesters, called for the defunding of specific programs and the firing of individual faculty members, demanded that undergraduate students be expelled and compared pro-Palestinian demonstrators with Nazis and the segregationist George Wallace. At one point, a Republican congressman also digressed into a prolonged grievance over the firing of a Northwestern football coach.The Republican outrage at the college administrators is nominally due to what they say is a “scourge of antisemitism” on these campuses. That pretext is supported by the false conflation of anti-Zionism or simple concern for Palestinian life with antisemitic animus – a dangerous and insulting conflation that was made repeatedly and without contradiction throughout the hearing. In reality, the false equivalence of anti-Zionism with antisemitism is belied by the reality on the ground, in the campus anti-war encampments that have sprung up across the country and in the burgeoning young Jewish anti-Zionist movement. In the real world, Jewish students are not only safe and welcome in the encampments and in the broader anti-war movement; they are frequently emerging as intellectual and organizing leaders.But this reality was not convenient for the Republicans, who hope to cynically use a fear of antisemitism to provide a shield of moral righteousness to their anti-education, anti-diversity, anti-intellectual and fundamentally racist project. The flimsy pretext of fighting antisemitism was required to provide a thin pretext for an effort that is at its core about rooting out and punishing disfavored ideologies and attempting to eliminate them from the public sphere. To say that this is an insult to the history of antisemitism would be an understatement.The attempt to paint the anti-war movement as violent and malicious veered, at times, into the absurd. In one prolonged exchange, the hearing was shown a viral video, produced by a young Zionist influencer at UCLA. In the video, the man is standing in a path on campus, facing a small group of silent pro-Palestinian protesters wearing keffiyehs. The young man declares that he wants to pass them to go into an academic building. The students are mostly silent; one seems to ask him to use a different entrance. “I want to use THAT door,” the man says, pointing, and looking back at the camera. The protesters are quiet; they do not move. No one is violent, or even particularly agitated. The Republican committee members referred to this video repeatedly and in dramatic terms throughout the hearing, claiming it represented an epidemic of Jewish students being violently refused access to campus facilities.Meanwhile, other events on UCLA’s campus went largely unremarked. For while a pro-Palestinian encampment was present on UCLA’s campus for some days, so were pro-Israel demonstrators, whose much better-funded demonstration featured large groups of Zionist protestors bussed in from off campus, along with a jumbotron that played pro-Israel propaganda at all hours. When they were there, the Zionist group jeered and taunted the anti-genocide protesters, allegedly yelling racial slurs and rape threats and even allegedly releasing rats into the encampment.On the night of 30 April, a large group from the pro-Israel camp, many of them wearing Halloween masks, violently attacked the pro-Palestinian encampment. They brought “knives, bats, wooden planks, pepper spray and bear mace”, according to one witness, and proceeded to beat the anti-genocide protesters, pushing many into the ground using barricades. The police, whom UCLA had summoned to campus to help maintain order, stood by and allowed the attack to continue for hours. They seem to have assessed, correctly, what they were there to protect, and who they weren’t.At the hearing on Thursday, the Republicans went to extensive lengths to criticize universities that have engaged in negotiations with their student protest encampments, calling these talks “capitulation” to “pro-terror” and “pro-Hamas” forces. Since the encampments sprung up at many campuses this spring, not all universities have chosen to disperse their students by having them beaten and arrested; some have engaged in dialogue – with varying degrees of good faith – and attempted to persuade the students to pack up the tents in exchange for material concessions.At Northwestern, the successful negotiations resulted in a pledge from the administration to include funding for five undergraduate students and two faculty members from Palestine to come to campus, as part of the university’s broader international programming. This promise to include Palestinian scholars in campus life seemed to particularly offend the Republicans, who demanded to know why Jewish affinity groups had not been consulted before the commitment was made.This is not typical of such university funding decisions: Why would a Russian-speakers’ club, say, be consulted before a scholarship was offered to a Ukrainian student? But the message from the outraged Republicans was clear: the inclusion of Palestinians in university life, they feel, should be subject to a Jewish person’s veto.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      in Elections

      Biden Cancels $6.1 Billion in Debt for Former Art Institute Students

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      The announcement covers 317,000 former students and marks another step in the administration’s student loan relief efforts.The Biden administration on Wednesday canceled more than $6 billion in student debt for 317,000 people who attended the Art Institutes, a now-defunct network of for-profit colleges that President Biden said “knowingly misled” students.After a review of lawsuits brought by state attorneys general against the schools and their parent company, Education Management Corporation, the Education Department found that the Art Institutes falsified job placement figures in advertisements and misled prospective students with inflated salary expectations.In one case the department highlighted, an Art Institute campus in Florida appeared to have included the tennis star Serena Williams’s annual income in its graduate salary projections after she had attended classes there.“This institution falsified data, knowingly misled students and cheated borrowers into taking on mountains of debt without leading to promising career prospects at the end of their studies,” President Biden said in a statement.He also took a swipe at former President Donald J. Trump, whom he accused of ignoring the influence of predatory for-profit schools on students seeking what they believed were meaningful academic credentials.“While my predecessor looked the other way when colleges defrauded students and borrowers, I promised to take this on directly to provide borrowers with the relief they need and deserve,” Mr. Biden said.The president’s decision to cancel the student debt was another step in his pursuit of student loan forgiveness in the year since the Supreme Court struck down a far more ambitious plan to wipe out more than $400 billion in debt.Mr. Biden said last month that he would make another attempt at large-scale debt forgiveness for more than 25 million people, despite opposition from Republicans, who say it would be unfair to borrowers who struggled to pay off their student debt without assistance.In the meantime, the administration has forgiven about $160 billion in debt for 4.6 million borrowers by fixing and streamlining existing programs that have been plagued by bureaucratic and other problems for years.The action covers students who attended Art Institute schools between Jan. 1, 2004, and Oct. 16, 2017. The department said borrowers would be notified starting on Wednesday that they had been approved and would see their debt canceled automatically.Forgiving federal student loans for borrowers who the administration has determined were preyed on by their schools has emerged as one part of the administration’s student debt relief strategy, using its authority under an existing program known as borrower defense to repayment. To date, the administration has approved $28.7 billion in debt forgiveness for some 1.6 million borrowers whose institutions engaged in misleading practices or shut down.“In addition to providing critical relief to students, we need to hold wrongdoers accountable — otherwise, executives will continue to exploit students for their own benefit,” said Aaron Ament, the president of the National Student Legal Defense Network, which has represented former Art Institute students since 2018. More

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      in US Politics

      Dozens arrested in California and Texas as campus administrators move to shut down protests – as it happened

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      Police in Texas have arrested a journalist who was covering the protest at the University of Texas at Austin. A Fox 7 photographer was reportedly arrested after getting caught between protesters and law enforcement.Officers have clashed with students after dozens of local police and state troopers formed a line to stop protesters from marching through campus. They have detained multiple people. Greg Abbott, the Texas governor, said arrests would continue until “the crowd disperses”.“These protesters belong in jail,” he said.Police arrested dozens participating in peaceful student-led protests against the war on Gaza on Wednesday.Students have set up encampments at a number of universities in recent days to protest the war on Gaza and demand the schools divest from companies that are closely linked to Israel’s military operations.Here’s the latest:
      At least 34 protesters, including a member of the media from a local news station, were arrested during demonstrations at University of Texas in Austin on Wednesday.
      Faculty at University of Texas, Austin have announced a strike in response to what they called a “militarized response” to a “peaceful, planned action” on campus.
      At least 50 protesters were detained by Los Angeles police at University of Southern California (USC) during peaceful protests. Earlier in the day, police responding to a demonstration at USC got into a back-and-forth tugging match with protesters over tents.
      Last week at Columbia University, the focal point of national student demonstrations, more than 100 students, faculty members and others were arrested.
      More than 140 additional people were arrested on Monday night at a separate protest at New York University’s Manhattan campus.
      House speaker Mike Johnson appeared at Columbia University on Wednesday where he called for the resignation of the president of the university over her handling of the protests at the school.
      Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez assailed authorities for the “reckless and dangerous act” of calling police to non-violent demonstrations.
      US schools where protests have been reported include: University of Minnesota, Harvard University, Ohio State, University of California-Berkeley, University of Southern California, University of Texas-Austin, University of Michigan; Emerson College, MIT, Tufts University, Yale University, the New School, New York University, and Columbia University. Students at Sciences Po in Paris also began a solidarity protest on Wednesday.
      The number of protesters arrested on USC’s campus has surpassed 50, according to a LA Times reporter on the scene.LAPD has arrested at least 15 protesters on the USC campus, according to a Los Angeles Times reporter on the scene.The arrests came after law enforcement and university leadership told protesters to disperse. Protesters began to clash with law enforcement, some of whom shoved students, video shows.The number of people arrested as part of the University of Texas protests on Wednesday is at least 54, according to a reporter for local news publication the Austin American-Statesman.The number comes from the Austin Lawyers Guild, a leftist group that provides protest legal defense. The Guardian has reached out to the group for more details.Some USC protesters dispersed after the arrival of LAPD officers on campus, but dozens who remained are now facing off with law enforcement.In a statement posted on X at 5.50pm PST, the university said anyone remaining at the center of campus would be arrested.Los Angeles police officers are moving onto the USC campus to arrest protesters for trespassing, as they believe many demonstrators are not students, they said.In an announcement made via helicopter, LAPD officers told the protesters “Your time is up. Leave the area or you will be arrested for trespassing.”Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israel prime minister, said on Wednesday that student protests against the war in Gaza were “horrific”, characterizing protesters as “antisemitic mobs”.While there have been reports of antisemitism on campuses in recent weeks, protest organizers have blamed such incidents on outside agitators, insisting that their movements are peaceful. A group of professors at New York University released an open letter denying that any NYU-affiliated protesters had engaged in antisemitism or intimidation of others.Many Jewish-led groups protesting the war in Gaza have also pushed back against such allegations. As protests aligned with the Jewish Passover holiday this week, encampments at Yale and Columbia held Passover seders on Monday.When asked this week whether he condemned “the antisemitic protests”, President Joe Biden said he did. “I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians,” he said.Local news station Fox 7 Austin has confirmed that one of its photographers was arrested on campus during the protests Wednesday.A video shows the photographer being pulled backwards to the ground by Texas Department of Public Safety troopers. The station says he was then detained and taken to jail.Members of the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin have condemned what they call a “militarized response” to pro-Palestine protests on campus Wednesday.The statement said the peaceful, planned action was disrupted by police and state troopers, who responded violently and “made our entire community unsafe”.“We have witnessed police punching a female student, knocking over a legal observer, dragging a student over a chain-link fence, and violently arresting students for simply standing at the front of the crowd,” the statement said.In response, the faculty members stated that on Thursday there would be “no business as usual”, suspending classes, grading and homework. They called for a gathering on campus at 12.15pm on Thursday.Many of the protesters at the University of Texas have dispersed, but others have returned to the south lawn as the large police presence has waned. The department of public safety confirmed in a public statement that there were 20 arrests as a result of protests today.As protests continue at the University of Texas in Austin, police have encouraged occupants to disperse via an audio announcement that could be heard across campus. From local news reporter Ryan Chandler:Here are photos from Austin where police, including some on horses and holding batons, blocked the main lawn at the University of Texas and pulled several students to the ground to stop demonstrators from marching through campus.Police in Texas have arrested a journalist who was covering the protest at the University of Texas at Austin. A Fox 7 photographer was reportedly arrested after getting caught between protesters and law enforcement.Officers have clashed with students after dozens of local police and state troopers formed a line to stop protesters from marching through campus. They have detained multiple people. Greg Abbott, the Texas governor, said arrests would continue until “the crowd disperses”.“These protesters belong in jail,” he said.Cal Poly Humboldt, a public university on the far northern coast of California, where pro-Palestinian students are occupying a campus building, said on Wednesday that it would remain closed through the weekend.Protesters have barricaded themselves in Siemens Hall since Monday evening despite a large showing of local law enforcement who unsuccessfully attempted to force them out. Police have arrested three protesters.Students are reportedly also holding a sit-in in another campus building.The university said it is considering keeping the campus closed beyond the weekend, and accused students of stealing items and breaking “numerous laws”.Aside from the confrontation with police, media outlets report the mood on campus has been festive. Students there told the Sacramento Bee they felt compelled to take action.“I think the solution is to get involved, because at least I can feel like I’m doing my part. Even if it’s not enough, I’m doing the best I can to make something of it. I find peace in that,” one student said.With protests under way at universities across the US, the White House said on Wednesday that Joe Biden supports freedom of expression on college campuses.“The president believes that free speech, debate and nondiscrimination on college campuses are important,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the press secretary, said at a briefing.At least 10 protesters have been arrested at the University of Texas at Austin, according to the school.Dozens of state troopers and police officers in riot gear were at the scene after hundreds of students walked out of class to protest the war in Gaza and demand the university divest from companies that manufacture machinery used in Israel’s war.“UT Austin does not tolerate disruptions of campus activities or operations like we have seen at other campuses,” a statement by the university’s division of student affairs said.
      This is an important time in our semester with students finishing classes and studying for finals and we will act first and foremost to allow those critical functions to proceed without interruption.
      House speaker Mike Johnson, speaking on the steps outside the Low Library at Columbia University, called for the resignation of the president of the university, Minouche Shafik, over her handling of the protests at the school. Johnson said:
      I am here today, joining my colleagues and calling on President Shafik to resign if she cannot immediately bring order to this chaos.
      Johnson’s speech was repeatedly interrupted by a crowd of protesters. “Enjoy your free speech,” the speaker replied.The House speaker, Mike Johnson, is giving a news conference surrounded by a group of House Republicans, amid boos and chants of “We can’t hear you” and “Free, free Palestine”.Johnson urged that the “madness has to stop” and said Jewish students had shared with him experiences of “heinous acts of bigotry” because of their faith.Quoting Winston Churchill, Johnson said “it is manifestly right that the Jews should have a National Home where some of them may be reunited.”Johnson claimed Columbia University is being “overtaken by radical extreme ideologies” that “place a target on the backs of Jewish students”, adding:
      Let me say this very simply: no American of any color or creed should ever have to live under those kinds of threats. That is not who we are in this country.
      He said he met briefly with the president of Columbia University and encouraged her to take more action against the protesters. More

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      in US Politics

      Columbia president assailed at highly charged antisemitism Congress hearing

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      The head of a prestigious US university clashed with members of Congress today in highly charged hearings over a reported upsurge in antisemitism on campus in the wake of Israel’s war in Gaza.Minouche Shafik, the president of Columbia University, appeared beleaguered and uncertain as one Congress member after another assailed her over her institution’s supposed inaction to stop it becoming what one called “a hotbed of antisemitism and hatred”.Wednesday’s hearing follows months of rising tensions between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian demonstrators on the Columbia campus, amid disputes over what constitutes antisemitism and controversy about whether it should encompass anti-Zionism and opposition to Israel as a Jewish state.The hearing of the House of Representatives’ education and workforce committee is being staged under the emotive title of “Columbia in Crisis: Columbia University’s Response to Anti-Semitism.” A group of Jewish academics at the university have denounced the hearing in advance as heralding “a new McCarthyism”.At the hearing Shafik was repeatedly asked to explain the continued presence of one faculty member, Joseph Massad, after he had reportedly praised Hamas’s attack last October that left around 1,200 Israelis dead.In one particularly aggressive line of questioning, Elise Stefanik pushed Shafik to commit to removing Massad as chair of an academic review committee.Stefanik also pressed a harried Shafik, who became Columbia’s president last July, into changing her testimony after she earlier told the Democratic representative Ilhan Omar that she was not aware of any anti-Jewish demonstrations at the university.Pressing relentlessly, Stefanik effectively drove a wedge between Shafik and her three fellow senior Columbia colleagues, David Schizer, Claire Shipman, and David Greenwald – all members of the university’s antisemitism taskforce – by leading them to testify that there had in fact been aggressive and threatening antisemitic statements in campus demonstrations.Earlier, Shafik – trying to straddle between condemning antisemitism and permitting statements that some defined as free speech – struggled when confronted by Lisa McClain, the Republican representative from Michigan over the slogan “from the river to the sea” and support for a Palestinian intifada (uprising).“Are mobs shouting from the River to the Sea Palestine will be free or long live the infitada [sic] …antisemitic comments?” McClain asked.“When I hear those terms, I find them very upsetting,” Shafik responded.“That’s a great answer to a question I didn’t ask, so let me repeat the question,” McClain persisted. Shafik answered: “I hear them as such. Some people don’t.”“Why is it so tough?” McClain pressed. In answer, Shafik said: “Because it’s a difficult issue because some hear it as antisemitic others do not.”She eventually appeared to fold under pressure, answering “yes” and laughing nervously after McClain posed the same question to the president’s fellow Columbia staff, all of whom agreed that it was antisemitic.The hearing was something of a reprise of the committee’s previous cross-examination of the heads of three other elite universities, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, last December.That hearing led to the resignation of the University of Pennsylvania’s president, Elizabeth Magill, after she gave what were deemed to be over-legalistic answers to pointed questions from Stefanik over whether her institution’s rules on free speech permitted slogans that supporters of Israel interpret as calling for genocide.It also intensified the pressure on Harvard’s then president, Claudine Gay, whose responses to Stefanik were similarly criticised. Gay survived the immediate outcry over the hearing but stepped down weeks later over plagiarism allegations.Columbia has set up a taskforce on antisemitism but its members have declined to establish a firm definition.Rightwingers have painted the university as a hotbed of antisemitism, while opponents have accused the institution’s authorities of disproportionately punishing pro-Palestinian students who criticise Israel. The university last year suspended two groups, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, over their protest activities.Shafik – an Egyptian-born, British-American economist and former deputy governor of the Bank of England – had reportedly prepared assiduously for Wednesday’s event in an effort to avoid the pitfalls of her fellow university heads.Writing in the Wall Street Journal on the eve of the hearing, Shafik said legitimate expression should occur “within specific parameters”.“Most of the people protesting do so from a place of genuine political disagreement, not from personal hatred or bias or support for terrorism,” she wrote.“Their passion, as long as it doesn’t cross the line into threats, discrimination or harassment, should be protected speech on our campus.“Calling for the genocide of a people – whether they are Israelis or Palestinians, Jews, Muslims or anyone else – has no place in a university community. Such words are outside the bounds of legitimate debate and unimaginably harmful,” the op-ed continued.Her remarks appeared aimed at avoiding the criticism drawn by Magill and Gay over their appearance before the committee, when both responded to Stefanik’s questions about theoretical calls for genocide by referring to context.In an effort to bolster Shafik, 23 Jewish faculty members wrote an open letter published in the campus newspaper, the Columbia Spectator, criticising the premise of the hearing.“Based on the committee’s previous hearings, we are gravely concerned about the false narratives that frame these proceedings to entrap witnesses,” they wrote. “We urge you, as the university president, to defend our shared commitment to universities as sites of learning, critical thinking, and knowledge production against this new McCarthyism.”The academics also questioned the credentials of Stefanik – an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump – on antisemitism, saying she had a history of “espousing white nationalist policies”.As Shafik and her colleagues testified, the unrest that has characterized university life over the past six months was on display on Columbia’s campus, where students set up approximately 60 tents on the campus’s south lawn in the early hours of Wednesday. The tents, many of which were covered in signs that read “Liberated Zone” and “Israel bombs, Columbia pays”, were set up to urge the university to divest its ties from Israel.The university perimeters were lined with metal barricades and a heavy police presence, and the campus, which is usually accessible to the public, was restricted to Columbia ID holders.Members of the media were prohibited from entering the university, instead restricted to a barricaded pen near a bus stop outside the campus as student chants could be heard from inside the grounds. “Say it loud, say it clear, we don’t want no Zionists here,” some students chanted, according to the Columbia Spectator. A handful of protesters also crowded around the university’s main gates, with many shouting: “We say no to genocide!”
      This article was amended on 17 April 2024 to correctly identify the school where Elizabeth Magill resigned as president last year. The school was the University of Pennsylvania, not Pennsylvania University. More

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      in Elections

      Who Needs Paper? Many Students Embrace the All-Digital SAT.

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      Several test takers across the country found themselves in favor of the new format of the college admissions exam — even with some technical glitches.The Scantron bubbles were gone. So were the page-long passages and the pressure to speed-read them. No. 2 pencils? Optional, and only for taking notes.On Saturday, students in America took the newest version of the SAT, which was shorter, faster — and most notably, all online. Some exams were briefly mired by technical glitches, but even so, many test takers had positive views about the new format. They were especially relieved with the brevity of the exam — which dropped from three hours to a little over two hours — as well as the ability to set their own pace as they worked through the questions. “It’s here to stay,” said Harvey Joiner, 17, a junior at Maynard H. Jackson High School in Atlanta, referring to the digital format. “Computers are what we’re more comfortable with.”Given on paper for 98 years, the SAT was updated to reflect the experience of a generation raised in an era of higher anxiety, challenged attention spans and remote learning. The change comes as the College Board, which administers the test, and proponents of standardizing testing say that the exams still have a place in determining college acceptance and aptitude.Disrupted by the pandemic and rocked by concerns that the tests favor high-income students, the SAT has had a shaky few years, with many colleges removing standardized tests as a requirement for admission. Some selective universities, including Brown, Yale, Dartmouth and M.I.T., have since reinstated the test, but at most schools, it has remained optional. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      Support for Teaching Gender Identity in School Is Split, Even Among Democrats

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      Americans are deeply divided on whether schools should teach about gender identity, two polls found. But there was broader support for teaching about race.Americans are deeply split over whether gender identity should be taught in school, according to two polls released this week that underscored the extent of the divide on one of the most contested topics in education.Many groups, including Democrats, teachers and teenagers, are split on whether schools should teach about gender identity — a person’s internal sense of their own gender and whether it aligns with their sex assigned at birth, according to a survey by researchers at the University of Southern California and a separate survey by Pew Research Center.But on issues of race, another topic that has fueled state restrictions and book bans, there was broader support for instruction. That extended to some Republicans, the U.S.C. survey found.The results highlight nuances in the opinion over two of the most divisive issues in public education, even as the American public remains deeply polarized along party lines.The U.S.C. survey polled a nationally representative sample of nearly 4,000 adults, about half of whom lived with at least one school-age child, and broke responses out by partisan affiliation.Democrats were by and large supportive of L.G.B.T.Q.-themed instruction in schools, yet were split when it came to addressing transgender issues for younger students in elementary school.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      Texas: Republican-controlled school board votes against climate textbooks

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      Texas’s Republican-controlled education board voted Friday not to include several climate textbooks in the state science curriculum.The 15-member board rejected seven out of 12 for eighth-graders. The approved textbooks are published by Savvas Learning Company, McGraw Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Accelerate Learning and Summit K-12.The rejected textbooks included climate-crisis policy solutions, and conservative board members criticized them for being too negative about fossil fuels – a major industry in the state. Texas leads the nation in the production of crude oil and natural gas.Although Texas adopted standards in 2021 that requires eighth-graders be taught the basics about climate change, some argue that measure does not go far enough.Aaron Kinsey, a Republican board member and executive of an oilfield services company in west Texas, criticized photos in some textbooks as unduly besmirching the oil and gas industry during a discussion of the materials this week.“The selection of certain images can make things appear worse than they are, and I believe there was bias,” Kinsey said, according to Hearst Newspapers.“You want to see children smiling in oilfields?” said Democratic board member Aicha Davis. “I don’t know what you want.”Texas’s 1,000-plus school districts are not required to use board-approved textbooks. But the board’s decision wields influence.Some in powerful positions have tried to sway the board to reject the textbooks. On 1 November, Texas railroad commissioner Wayne Christian – who oversees the state’s oil and gas industry – sent a letter to the education board’s chairman Kevin Ellis, relaying “concerns for potential textbooks that could promote a radical environmentalist agenda”.Also contested was the inclusion of lessons on evolution – the theory addressing the origins of human existence which the scientific community supports and religious groups reject.The decision comes despite pleas from the National Science Teaching Association to not “allow misguided objections to evolution and climate change” to affect the adoption of new textbooks.The deputy director of the National Center on Science Education, Glenn Branch, said: “Members of the board are clearly motivated to take some of these textbooks off of the approved list because of their personal and ideological beliefs regarding evolution and climate change.”Texas is one of six states that has not adopted the Next Generation Science Standards in its K-12 science curriculum. The standards underscore that climate change is a real threat caused by humans and can be mitigated by a reduction in greenhouse gases.Texas has seen some of the most extreme effects of the worsening climate crisis in recent years. According to the Texas state climatologist, John Nielsen-Gammon, the summer of 2023 was the second hottest on record, after 2011.In 2021, Texas experienced an unprecedented winter storm that blanketed much of the state in snow, left millions without power after the electrical grid failed, and resulted in deaths. Houston also bore the wrath of 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, a devastating category 4 hurricane that destroyed homes and buildings while leading to the deaths of more than 100 people in Texas.The states ranks 41st out of 50 in the US.The Associated Press contributed reporting More