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      The supreme court’s blow to US affirmative action is no coincidence | Eddie R Cole

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      On Thursday, in a 6-3 decision, the US supreme court ruled against affirmative action in American colleges and universities. The obvious concern now is whether the ruling will significantly reduce the number of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students enrolled at elite institutions. But a more dire reality undergirds the court’s decision: it reflects a decades-long drive to return higher education to white, elite control.That movement predates affirmative action by at least a century, because no entity impacts American life more than higher education. During the Reconstruction era following emancipation, Black people were allowed to advance in political and various other roles, but white powerbrokers drew a hard line at higher education. On 28 September 1870 the chancellor of the University of Mississippi, John Newton Waddel, declared: “The university will continue to be, what it always has been, an institution exclusively for the education of the white race.”Waddel was not alone in his appraisal. Following the civil war, many white academic leaders and faculty members believed higher education was designed solely to educate white people. Waddel and other white academics maintained that the University of Mississippi’s faculty “never, for a moment, conceived it possible or proper that a Negro should be admitted to its classes, graduated with its honors, or presented with its diplomas”.Over the past century, Black Americans’ struggles to secure equal educational opportunity have always been met with white resistance. The recent lawsuits filed by Students for Fair Admissions – an organization led by anti-affirmative-action activist Edward Blum – against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina are not about academic merit or even the mistreatment of white or Asian American students; they are an extension of this movement to ensure American higher education can be used to maintain social norms.This is why, in defending affirmative action, the argument for campus diversity falls short. Rather than make wealthy, majority-white campuses more diverse, affirmative action was intended to acknowledge and address the nation’s history of racism and atone for past racial harms that disproportionately affected descendants of enslaved Black people.This was made plain in 1963 – one of the most racially tumultuous years of the civil rights movement. By summer, John F Kennedy – a Harvard University alumnus in his third year in the White House – was forced to take immediate action about racial segregation, in part because it had become a foreign policy embarrassment to the United States that belied the nation’s stated commitment to democracy.Kennedy sought assistance from many leading administrators in American higher education. “I write you personally to seek your help in solving the grave civil rights problems faced by this nation,” Kennedy wrote, on 12 July 1963, to select college presidents and chairs of trustee boards. “The leadership that you and your colleagues show in extending equal educational opportunity today will influence American life for decades to come.”Kennedy explained to academic leaders that the nation’s problems affected “both white and Negro students and their families”. He asked academic leaders to implement “special programs” to address said problems, but did not specify what the programs should be. He deferred to academic leaders to ensure initiatives were “carried out” toward that goal.Motivated by Kennedy’s appeal, Black and majority-white colleges and universities worked together to address racism. By October 1963, racial initiatives were discussed at meetings of the American Council on Education and the Association of American Universities. In April 1964, presidents and faculty from Black campuses met at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which hosted a two-day conference on “Programs to Assist Predominately Negro Colleges and Universities”.The leaders of wealthy majority-white campuses committing to numerous programs, most of them focused on Black colleges and universities. The programs – supported by the Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, and other foundations – included new opportunities for Black college faculty to attend summer institutes and graduate schools and created exchange programs between faculty and students on Black and white campuses. Harlan H Hatcher, president of the University of Michigan, explained that his university’s partnership with the Tuskegee Institute “can help them in the development of a strong liberal arts program. They, in turn, will advise us on the [racial] programs.”For Michigan and its peer institutions, considering race in college admissions was part of a broad range of affirmative action practices launched in the 1960s. Affirmative action was a comprehensive set of programs that sought system-wide change to expand educational opportunity. The goal was not to ensure that some Black people could attend a few dozen of the nation’s wealthiest institutions, but instead that there be widespread investment in creating a more equitable higher education system – investing in the Black colleges and universities that long served the people most disenfranchised because of the nation’s history of racism.The blowback was immediate, however. By the 1970s, white academic leaders and foundation officers mostly abandoned their support of Black colleges and universities, and the lasting remnant of that era was racial consideration in admissions on select wealthy, majority-white campuses. That changed with the supreme court’s ruling this week.The ongoing racial backlash in this country extends beyond affirmative action. We’re witnessing a battle over ideology, and higher education is at the center. The efforts to ban diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; dismantle the faculty tenure system; restrict how aspects of Black history are taught; and withhold billions from Black universities are also part of this sinister movement. The movement limits Black presence, Black thought, and even Black control of Black institutions to return all of academia to white, elitist control. Those seeking control have no desire for higher education – the environment most concerned with solving complex problems – to have any role in redressing the legacy of racism.The dismissal of race and racism dialogue in higher education should alarm all Americans, because the supreme court decision is not about restricting unfair racial advantage in college admissions – it is about maintaining the social inequality that has long restricted most Americans, regardless of their race, while a few are allowed to preserve and maintain their privileged status in society. The result is a weakened university that does not solve racial problems but instead upholds them.
      Eddie R Cole is an associate professor of education and history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom More

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      Trans people, students and teachers are besieged by DeSantis’s crusade. But he’s not done yet

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      No public school teacher or college professor in Florida has been more outspoken in his criticism of Governor Ron DeSantis than Don Falls. In the spring of 2022, the 62-year-old social studies high school teacher became the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the governor to block enforcement of the recently approved Stop Woke (Wrongs Against Our Kids and Employees) Act.The DeSantis-backed legislation banned the supposed teaching of critical race theory – a scholarly examination of how social conceptions of race influence laws, political movements and history – in the Sunshine state’s public schools and universities. When Falls heard that a Jacksonville law firm was drafting litigation to stop the new law from taking effect, the grandfather of five decided to raise his head above the proverbial parapet.“One thing I’ve taught my students is that there are certain fundamental values associated with a democracy, and if they’re going to work, you’ve got to stand up for them,” recalled Falls, who has taught for 38 years. “I couldn’t have taught that to my students and then, when the ball was in my court, pass it on to somebody else.”In his first year as Florida’s chief executive, DeSantis raised public school teachers’ salaries and paid tribute to the mostly gay, lesbian and transgender victims of one of the country’s most deadly mass shootings in recent times. But as he built his national profile, attracting attention for his controversial views on masks and vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic, he took a sharp swing to the right and stepped up his courtship of the party’s Trump-loving base.Now, with rumors he is close to launching his presidential bid, DeSantis is highlighting his crusade to “reform” public education in Florida and restrict the rights and freedoms of the state’s transgender population as centerpieces of a nationwide agenda for what he calls “America’s revival”.Last year, DeSantis and his Republican allies went further and rammed house bill 1467 through the state legislature, requiring all reading material used in public schools to be reviewed by a “trained media specialist” to ensure that the material be “free of pornography” and “appropriate for the age level and group”. Critics say it empowers conservative groups to ban books whose contents they disagree with, even if they are age appropriate.Falls continued to resist. Confronted with a choice of either removing the estimated 250 to 300 books in his classroom or submitting them to the vetting process, he and other colleagues at the school opted to conceal their covers by enveloping them in plain brown paper, thereby shielding themselves from possible criminal prosecution or civil liability.He posted a wryly written sign inside his classroom that read: “closed by order of the governor”.Book bans, pronoun bansOn 23 February hundreds of college students walked out of their classrooms at six public universities to protest against DeSantis’s decision to abolish diversity, education and inclusion (DEI) programs and policies that had been mandated in 2020 in all of Florida’s dozen institutions of higher education by other political appointees, including the former governor Rick Scott.Demonstrations were also held in early March to denounce HB 999, legislation that would eliminate college majors and minors in “critical race theory, gender studies or intersectionality”, render a professor’s tenure subject to review at any time, and require colleges to offer general education courses that “promote the philosophical underpinnings of Western civilization and include studies of this nation’s historical documents”. It would also formally outlaw spending on DEI programs, which seek to promote the participation and fair treatment of people from all walks of life.“We’re seeing more and more students who, emboldened by some faculty members, shout people down and shut down viewpoints they don’t agree with,” the chief sponsor of the legislation, state representative Alex Andrade, told the Guardian. “People are forgetting that public universities are a component of a state government’s executive branch, and when we’re trying to encourage and enforce discrimination in the name of diversity and equity, we’re getting it wrong.”The sweeping scope of that legislation, coupled with three other education bills that would, among other things, forbid school staff and students from using “pronouns that do not correspond with a person’s sex”, has left educators in Florida feeling incensed and dumbfounded.“There aren’t actually any majors in critical race theory or intersectionality,” noted Andrew Gothard, an English instructor at Florida Atlantic University and president of United Faculty of Florida, the union that represents more than 25,000 faculty members in the Sunshine state’s dozen public universities and 16 state and community colleges. “The goal is to eliminate all thought that diverges from the governor’s political platform, and it’s absolutely terrifying.“Any time you’re telling people they can only teach history in a way that praises the motherland, you’re straying into Hitler Youth territory.”Multiple requests from the Guardian for an interview with Governor DeSantis went unanswered. But in a recent statement, DeSantis defended HB 999 because it seeks to push back “against the tactics of liberal elites who suppress free thought in the name of identity politics and indoctrination”.DeSantis called a press conference on 8 March to debunk what he termed “the ‘book ban’ hoax” in relation to the Stop Woke Act, asserting that books containing pornographic content and other kinds of violent or age-inappropriate content had been discovered in libraries and classrooms in 23 school districts statewide. These included Maia Kobabe’s widely acclaimed Gender Queer: A Memoir, one of 10 books that received an Alex Award from the American Library Association in 2020 for having “special appeal for young adults ages 12 through 18”.“Our mantra in Florida has been education, not indoctrination,” DeSantis wrote in his recent memoir, The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival. He hailed Florida as one of the first states to enact a parents’ bill of rights, which in his telling guarantees mothers and fathers “the right to inspect the materials being used in their kids’ schools”.Yet DeSantis also omits any reference to the state’s grossly underpaid public school teachers, who rank 48th nationwide in average salaries according to the National Education Association.‘Slate of hate’Another target of the 44-year-old governor is the state’s LGBTQ+ community and, in particular, the transgender population. A new bill, house bill 1421, titled “Gender Clinical Interventions”, would prohibit transgender individuals from amending their own birth certificates and eliminate transition-related care such as hormone therapy and puberty blockers for minors.The chief sponsor of the bill, state representative Randy Fine, tweeted in March that the legislation would outlaw the “butchering of children” and free Florida taxpayers from having to subsidize “the sexual mutilation of adults”. In reality gender-confirming surgical procedures are seen as lifesaving, and are mostly offered to teenagers who are at least 15 years of age or older. Even among this group such operations are “exceedingly rare”, according to the National Center for Transgender Equality.Not to be outdone, state senator Clay Yarborough introduced senate bill 254 that would allow the state to take temporary custody of children who may be receiving gender-affirming care now or in the future. (Yarborough declined the Guardian’s request for an interview.)The barrage of bills focusing on transgender people is part of a broader onslaught by far-right thinktanks and consultants on democracy, abortion rights and racial progress, according to Nadine Smith, a co-founder and executive director of Equality Florida, an LGBTQ+ community rights organization.“It’s not surprising to see this slate of hate introduced,” said Smith. “This rightwing shift has everything to do with usurping Trump on the right in the forthcoming Republican presidential primary elections. DeSantis is not driven by convictions or a core set of values, he is driven only by ambition and his desperation to become president.”The civil rights advocate remembers a different Ron DeSantis four years ago. Elected governor for the first time in 2018 by a razor-thin margin of about 32,000 votes, the former congressman and co-founder of the rightwing House Freedom Caucus gravitated towards the center-right during his early time in office.DeSantis issued a proclamation on the third anniversary of the 2016 mass shooting in an Orlando gay nightclub that paid tribute to the 49 people who died but failed to mention the targeting of the LGBTQ+ community as a possible motive of the killer.The governor came under fire for that omission and reissued the proclamation with amended wording. He even met with a survivor of the shooting and other members of the city’s LGBTQ+ community as a sign of solidarity.“The DeSantis we are seeing now doesn’t sound like the DeSantis who ran for governor the first time,” said Smith. “He went from being someone who went to the Pulse nightclub and responded to the criticism to someone who routinely calls LGBTQ+ people groomers and incites violence towards us.”The number of anti-LGBTQ+ demonstrations in Florida has soared in recent months. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) project documented 17 such episodes during 2022, up sharply from the six that the organization chronicled in 2021 and the five that were recorded in 2020. Some degenerated into riots. Nationwide, Florida ranked third in these incidents, surpassed only by California and Texas.Members of the state’s transgender population say they are feeling the intensifying heat.Morganti (not his real name) moved to the Gulf coast city of Bradenton from Louisiana in 2016. The 35-year-old New College of Florida student still identified as a woman at the time, and struck up a relationship with a local woman. “She and I could hold hands walking through a shopping mall, and when I first came down here it wasn’t a big deal,” said the third-year marine biology major.But the bearded trans man has noticed a palpable change in the political climate during the intervening six years. No violent confrontation has occurred to date, but he has dealt with comments about his voice and body.The hostile takeover of New College by six of DeSantis’s rightwing allies on its board of trustees earlier this year has not helped matters, and Morganti says he will move abroad to obtain his master’s degree once he has finished his undergraduate studies in January 2025.“If Ron DeSantis doesn’t make it to the White House, he will still be our governor – and that means Florida isn’t going to be a safe place to live in,” he said.If the 2022 and 2023 sessions of the Florida legislature are anything to go by, DeSantis is betting that legislation targeting the state’s transgender population and consolidating Tallahassee’s control over the curricula of the state’s public schools and universities will also strike a chord among voters in the Sunshine state and beyond.Whether or not DeSantis does mount a presidential bid in 2024 remains to be seen, as would the eventual success of such a campaign.In the meantime, university professors, schoolteachers and members of Florida’s LGBTQ+ community will continue to feel besieged for the foreseeable future. Some educators predict the departure of many colleagues in the coming months and years.“We have a governor and a legislature who are going rogue to harm the state,” said the union president, Andrew Gothard. “These laws are going to cause a major exodus of faculty and students from Florida’s system of higher education.” More

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      Wellesley College students vote to admit trans men and non-binary people

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      Students at the famed Wellesley College for women voted this week to extend admission to trans men and non-binary students, though campus administrators have said there is “no plan” to immediately change school policy.In a non-binding election on Tuesday, students at the liberal arts college in Massachusetts voted to open admission to all non-binary and transgender students, including trans men, reported Wellesley News, the college’s student newspaper.Wellesley’s alumni include former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, ex-US secretary of state Madeleine Albright, and other public figures.The proposed resolution, which will be presented to Wellesley’s board of trustees, would allow trans men to be admitted to the university. Non-binary applicants, regardless of their sex at birth, would also be considered for admission, according to the resolution approved by students.The ballot measure would also call for the university to replace gender-specific language with gender neutral language in reference to its student body, including using they/them pronouns in place of she/her pronouns, according to CNN.The admissions policy which students have voted in favor of modifying notes that anyone who identifies as a woman is eligible for admission, the college’s website says.Non-binary students “who were assigned female at birth” are currently considered eligible for admission. But trans men are not considered for admission.Students have argued that the resolution came in part because of students who transitioned in college and felt excluded by the university’s use of descriptors including “women” and “alumnae”, the Boston Globe reported.Despite the student support, Wellesley administrators have said they will not consider the ballot measure ratified by students.“Although there is no plan to revisit its mission as a women’s college or its admissions policy, the college will continue to engage all students, including transgender male and non-binary students, in the important work of building an inclusive academic community where everyone feels they belong,” Wellesley’s media relations director, Stacey Schmeidel, said.Wellesley’s president, Paula Johnson, spoke about the proposed question last week in an open message entitled: “Affirming our mission and embracing our community.”Johnson’s message said: “Wellesley is a women’s college that admits cis, trans, and non-binary students – all who consistently identify as women.” Johnson added that Wellesley’s being both a “women’s college and a diverse community” was not a mutually exclusive proposition.Several students were critical of Johnson’s open message, with the Wellesley News’s editorial board calling out Johnson for intervening in student discourse and neglecting to mention legislative attacks on transgender people in her broader statement.“The Wellesley News editorial board is once again stating that transgender and non-binary students have always belonged and will continue to belong at Wellesley, a historically women’s college,” the editorial board wrote in a letter.Students have previously criticized the university’s lack of inclusive language for transgender and non-binary students.Students also have urged Wellesley’s board of trustees to keep a mural featuring the transgender flag which was powerwashed in 2021.School administrators have said that they support students who transition after being admitted, noting on their website that “[once] accepted to Wellesley, every student receives the full support and mentorship of college faculty, staff, and administrators through graduation”.Wellesley currently has no data on how many transgender and non-binary students attend the college, according to the New York Times. More

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      ‘Just the tip of the iceberg’: Kimberlé Crenshaw warns against rightwing battle over critical race theory

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      ‘Just the tip of the iceberg’: Kimberlé Crenshaw warns against rightwing battle over critical race theory Exclusive: Author and academic cautions pushback against racial justice education feeds revival of segregationist policiesThe professor who is a leading voice on critical race theory has warned that the rightwing battle against racial justice education not only threatens US democracy, but encourages a revival of segregationist values and policies.‘Cowering to politics’: how AP African American studies became the most controversial course in the USRead moreKimberlé Crenshaw is among top American academics and authors recently stripped from the latest draft of the advanced placement (AP) African American studies course being piloted in US high schools, after Florida’s rightwing governor, Ron DeSantis, led an aggressive backlash against it.The Columbia University and UCLA law professor and co-founder of the African American Policy Forum thinktank, believes that the escalations against racial history teaching, in Florida and elsewhere represent “the tip of the iceberg” of rightwing efforts to retract the progress since the civil rights era and push America towards authoritarianism.“Are [schools] on the side of the neo-segregationist faction? Or are [they] going to stick with the commitments that we’ve all celebrated for the last 50, 60 years?” Crenshaw asked, referring to headway made on equal opportunities since the 1960s.“The College Board fiasco, I think, is just the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot of interests that have to make this decision,” she said.The College Board, the organization that administers college readiness exams and AP courses for high schoolers to earn college credits, denied bending to political pressure amid accusations that the curriculum has been watered down.But in what many viewed as a response to DeSantis’s ban, the work of Crenshaw and other high-profile progressive Black figures, such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, were relegated from required reading to “optional” within the course.Several topics, including intersectionality, queer studies and the Black Lives Matters movement, were downgraded. The new version of the course now suggests Black conservatism as a research project idea.DeSantis, who will probably run for president in 2024, claimed the course violated state law and “lacks educational value”.Even apart from outrage at states moving to ban the course outright, if the edited version ends up being the course’s final form when it is set to launch fully in 2024, Crenshaw cautions that states teaching the significantly pared-down version will see its students earning the same credits as those studying the fuller version that includes the kind of contemporary and intersectional material she views as vital.Making such core topics optional “is exactly the same structure of segregation”, she said. “It’s like ‘we’re going to create this so that the anti-woke [camp] will permit states to decide whether they want the segregated version, or whether they want a more fully representative and inclusive version,’” said Crenshaw.Crenshaw is widely known for her activism and scholarship on two essential schools of thought on anti-Black racism. She is a trailblazer in critical race theory, which explores the persistence of systemic racism in US legal institutions, pioneered by law professor Derrick Bell. And she coined the term intersectionality, in 1989, describing how different identities such as race, gender and sexuality cut across each other and overlap.And from the previous draft last fall to the current version of the AP course, the key word “systemic” disappeared entirely and the word “intersectionality” went from several to a lone mention.Crenshaw said that the “frightening” choice in the new AP course to make contemporary lessons optional follows a similar logic to how corporations navigated Jim Crow segregation.Crenshaw noted that Donald Trump and the right’s Make America Great Again (Maga) extremism is directly linked to the College Board’s decision – and further back to strategies used during decades of racial segregation laws that prevailed from post-Reconstruction to the 1960s.“One of the truly, bone-chillingly frightening things about the aspiration to ‘make America great again’ that’s amplified by what’s happening with the College Board is that one of the most sustained features of segregation in the past was the fact that businesses were not only enablers, they facilitated segregation,” she said, driven by the profit motive and the white supremacy movement.“So when businesses and segregation were aligned, it was a chokehold on Black freedom aspirations,” she said.Crenshaw spoke to the Guardian from the sunlit living room of her New York home. A nearby desk that Crenshaw calls the “graveyard” is stacked with commonly banned books – books that Crenshaw herself hands out as part of her Books Unbanned tour, such as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.She urges a stronger, concerted pushback to this latest manifestation of racist history. “What was brilliant about the civil rights movement is that they really pressured national interests, corporate interests, to break with their policies of simply facilitating segregation in the south,” she said.Crenshaw believes that the College Board development reflects just one part of a continuous strategy from the right to target and disenfranchise minority groups.“It’s called ‘make America great again’. So what is it about this America now that this faction finds wanting?” she asked.“The energy and power structure of the Maga [movement] is really this desire for a time where there isn’t a sense of ‘I have to share this country with people who don’t look like me, [and] what we are born into was never an even playing field,’” she said.So when the “idea of greatness” harks back to the time of racial tyranny, she noted, far-right forces attempt to forgo the teaching of said history, so that “future generations have no tools, no exposure, no ability to critique the present as a reflection of the past”.Today’s most influential Republicans have made inclusive education a target and taken the supreme court further to the right, undermining other democratic institutions, as well as playing down the 6 January 2021 insurrection where extremist Trump supporters tried to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory over Trump and some carried Confederate flags inside the US Capitol after breaking in.In Crenshaw’s view, this is all with the goal of transforming the “decades-long journey towards greater social justice” into what the right admonishes as “wokeness” – which is in fact the encouraging of racial justice and equity.“Wokeness has become the oppression, not the centuries of enslavement and genocide, and imperialism that has shaped the lives of people of color, in ways that continue into the present,” said Crenshaw.Crenshaw traces the aggressive disinformation campaigns about critical race theory to a September 2020 executive order passed by then president Donald Trump that restricted federal agencies and contractors from providing diversity and equity training.“When that happened it was a five star alarm for me. Because if this can happen with the stroke of a pen, it means that our entire infrastructure that we’ve built since Brown [v Board] is weakened,” said Crenshaw, noting the landmark supreme court case that prohibited segregation in US public schools, adding that several elite universities rushed to comply with Trump’s mandate.Soon after, she became acutely aware that Trump and activist Republicans were twisting the term critical race theory and critiquing Black history taught in schools, or slamming research such as the New York Times’ 1619 project in order to spread moral panic.“The ban on anti-racism is so profound, that even the story of a kindergarten or first grade integrating an all-white school runs counter to [the new laws],” said Crenshaw, referring to the memoir of activist Ruby Bridges, the first Black child to integrate an elementary school in the American south in 1960.“So, white kids’ feelings are more important than black kids’ reality.”She continued: “They got their marching orders and into the school boards they went, and into the legislatures they went.”She warned: “If parents can be convinced that there is a wrong happening in public schools, they might be convinced to agree to the dismantling of public education across the board.”Colleges and universities have faced similar assault, Crenshaw noted, as professors are targeted under state laws.Crenshaw further laments the risks of conservatives’ steady takeover of the supreme court and the dismantling of federal voting rights protection and threat to affirmative action in higher education.“This court stands poised to really gut the entire civil rights infrastructure that was built by blood, sweat and tears,” said Crenshaw.Overall, Crenshaw exhorts Democrats and the media to employ much more vigor and urgency in addressing escalating attacks on US institutions, noting that many news outlets frame “the push towards authoritarianism as a [mere] rebrand”.“It was wishful thinking to believe that once the campaign was over, this was going to go away,” said Crenshaw, referring to the Biden-Harris victory in the 2020 election.But Crenshaw remains buoyed by hope that the next generation can overcome attempts at retrenchment from the far right: “This is the next generation’s lap to run. And we’ve got to hand them a baton that they can carry.”In the meantime, Crenshaw says there must be more acknowledgment of what’s at stake.“At some point, there has to be a recognition that we’re fighting for the soul of the country,” she said.TopicsUS politicsUS educationToni MorrisonRon DeSantisDonald TrumpThe far rightFloridafeaturesReuse this content More

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      ‘We can’t keep living like this’: Michigan governor denounces campus shooting

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      ‘We can’t keep living like this’: Michigan governor denounces campus shootingGretchen Whitmer calls for action on ‘uniquely American problem’ after gunman kills three Michigan State students and wounds five Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, denounced the “uniquely American problem” of gun violence on Tuesday after a gunman murdered three students in a mass shooting at Michigan State University on Monday.Three people killed in shooting on Michigan State University campusRead moreWhitmer spoke at an emotional press conference in East Lansing at which authorities identified the shooter, who died by suicide, and revealed other details about the attack that left five students critically wounded.“We cannot keep living like this,” the Democrat said, noting that Tuesday marked exactly five years since 17 students and staff were killed in Florida in the worst US high school shooting.“We’re all broken by an all too familiar feeling. Another place that is supposed to be about community and togetherness shattered by bullets and bloodshed.“We know this is a uniquely American problem. Today is the fifth anniversary of the Parkland shooting. We’re mere weeks past the lunar new year shooting at a dance hall [in California] and a few months past a shooting at an elementary school at Uvalde [in Texas], and looking back at a year marked by shootings at grocery stores, parades and so many other ordinary everyday situations.“Our children are scared to go to school. People feel unsafe in their houses of worship, or local stores. As parents, we tell our kids it’s going to be OK. But the truth is words are not good enough. We must act and we will.”University officials named two of the victims.Alexandria Verner, a junior from Detroit, was “a beautiful soul” who enjoyed playing basketball, softball and volleyball in her years at Clawson high school, according to her father, Ted Verner.Brian Fraser, a sophomore from Grosse Point, Michigan, was also identified. The name of the third victim was being withheld at their family’s request, officials said.Joe Biden said he and the first lady were praying for the victims, their families and the Michigan State community in a statement renewing the president’s call for an assault weapons ban.“Every American [should] exclaim ‘enough’ and demand that Congress take action,” Biden said.He said the justice department was awarding $231m to 49 states and territories “to create and implement crisis intervention projects” including red flag programs and for mental health and substance abuse supports.At a lunchtime event in Washington, the president said there was “no rationale” for assault weapons.“Three lives have been lost and five seriously injured. It’s a family’s worst nightmare. It’s happening far too often in this country. We have to do something to stop gun violence ripping apart our communities,” Biden said.The interim deputy chief of Michigan State campus police, Chris Rozman, named the gunman as 43-year-old Anthony McRae, who he said had no affiliation to the university.He said McRae shot dead two students and wounded several at Berkey Hall before walking to the student union building less than a block west and killing another.McRae “quickly fled that building – he was not in the building for that long”, Rozman said. “We have absolutely no idea what the motive was at this point.”Rozman said the shooter was located in Lansing at 11.35pm, about three hours after the shooting, after a tip from “an alert citizen” from a photograph released by police.McRae died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Rozman said, adding that he was unable to provide details of the firearm recovered and that investigators executed a search warrant on a residence connected to McRae.Cellphone video showed students running across campus in panic as shots rang out while others barricaded themselves into classrooms and bedrooms for several hours.“The shooter came in our room and shot three to four times,” a student, Dominik Molotky, told ABC News. “I’m pretty sure he hit two students in our classroom.”The Democratic Michigan congresswoman Elissa Slotkin echoed Whitmer’s calls for reform, saying she was “filled with rage” at having to address another press conference only 15 months after a high school shooting in Oxford township near Detroit left three dead and eight injured.“We have children in Michigan who are living through their second school shooting in under a year and a half,” Slotkin said. “If this is not a wake-up call to do something I don’t know what is.“You either care about protecting kids or you don’t. You either care about having an open, honest conversation about what is going on in our society, or you don’t, but please don’t tell me you care about the safety of children if you’re not willing to have a conversation about keeping them safe in a place that should be a sanctuary.”Whitmer, fighting tears, said Biden had called to offer condolences and support.“Our Spartan community and Michiganders across the state are devastated,” she said, referring to the nickname of Michigan State’s sports teams. “Spartans will cry and hold each other a little closer. We will mourn the loss of beautiful souls and pray for those fighting for their lives in the hospital.”The chief medical officer at EW Sparrow hospital in Lansing, Denny Martin, said four of the five wounded required surgery and all remained in critical condition.The Michigan State interim president, Teresa Woodruff, said all classes were canceled until at least Monday.According to the Gun Violence Archive, as of Tuesday there had been at least 67 mass shootings in the US in 45 days in 2023. The archive defines a mass shooting as one in which four people are wounded or killed, not counting any shooters.TopicsMichiganUS politicsUS universitiesnewsReuse this content More

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      Harvard Kennedy School condemned for denying fellowship to Israel critic

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      Harvard Kennedy School condemned for denying fellowship to Israel criticACLU and Pen America back former Human Rights Watch chief Kenneth Roth and say decision ‘raises serious questions’ Leading civil rights organisations have condemned Harvard Kennedy School’s denial of a position to the former head of Human Rights Watch over the organisation’s criticism of Israel.Harvard blocks role for former Human Rights Watch head over Israel criticismRead moreThe American Civil Liberties Union called the refusal of a fellowship to Kenneth Roth “profoundly troubling”. PEN America, which advocates for freedom of expression, said the move “raises serous questions” about one of the US’s leading schools of government. Roth also received backing from other human rights activists.But the Kennedy School found support from organisations that have been highly critical of Roth and HRW, particularly over the group’s report two years ago that accused Israel of practising a form of race-based apartheid in the Palestinian occupied territories.The Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy offered Roth a position as a senior fellow shortly after he retired as director of HRW in April after 29 years. But the school’s dean, Douglas Elmendorf, allegedly vetoed the move.A professor of human rights policy at the Kennedy School, Kathryn Sikkink, told the Nation that Elmendorf said to her that Roth would not be permitted to take up the position because HRW has an “anti-Israel bias” and its former director had written tweets critical of Israel.Roth told the Guardian that Harvard’s move was a reflection of “how utterly afraid the Kennedy School has become of any criticism of Israel” under pressure from donors and influential supporters within the school of Israel’s rightwing government.The director of the ACLU, Anthony Romero, urged the Kennedy School “to reverse its decision”.“If Harvard’s decision was based on HRW’s advocacy under Ken’s leadership, this is profoundly troubling – from both a human rights and an academic freedom standpoint, he said. “Scholars and fellows have to be judged on their merits, not whether they please powerful political interests.”PEN America also backed Roth.“It is the role of a human rights defender to call out governments harshly, to take positions that are unpopular in certain quarters and to antagonize those who hold power and authority,” the group said. “There is no suggestion that Roth’s criticisms of Israel are in any way based on racial or religious animus.“Withholding Roth’s participation in a human rights program due to his own staunch critiques of human rights abuses by governments worldwide raises serious questions about the credibility of the Harvard program itself.”The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which promotes free speech on college campuses, wrote to Elmendorf saying that the Kennedy School “undermines its laudable commitment to intellectual diversity and free inquiry when it rescinds a fellowship offer based on the candidate’s viewpoint or speech”.But Harvard found support from organisations that have been highly critical of Roth and HRW over the group’s reports on Israel.NGO Monitor, a Jerusalem-based organisation that campaigns against humanitarian groups critical of Israeli government policies, accused HRW under Ross’s leadership of seeking to “delegitimize Israel”.“The dean at Harvard was not fooled by the moral facade granted to Roth and HRW. He recognized Roth’s central contributions to legitimizing antisemitism,” NGO Monitor’s president, Gerald Steinberg, said.UN Watch, a pro-Israel lobby group, described the Kennedy School’s move as “good news”.“Ken Roth had a pathological obsession with singling out Israel for differential and discriminatory treatment, disproportionately to shocking degrees, with the apparent aim to portray the Jewish state in a manner that would evoke repulsion and disgust,” it said.Roth has long been the target of a personalised campaign of abuse, including charges of antisemitism, even though his father was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. He said HRW faced similar attacks on its motives when it released its report titled A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution, even though leading Israeli politicians have also “warned that the occupation has become a form apartheid”.“The irony is that when we issued the report, the Israeli government was at a loss to find anything wrong with it. They fell back on the usual arguments of, ‘you must be antisemitic’. I take that as a … victory because if all they can do is name call, they have nothing substantive to say,” he said.The Kennedy School did not respond to requests for comment.TopicsUS newsUS politicsHarvard UniversityHigher educationUS universitiesIsraelPalestinian territoriesnewsReuse this content More

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      Ketanji Brown Jackson grills lawyer in case seeking to end affirmative action

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      Ketanji Brown Jackson grills lawyer in case seeking to end affirmative actionNewest member of US supreme court seems to reject idea that affirmative action in university admissions is unconstitutional The newest US supreme court justice and the bench’s first Black woman, Ketanji Brown Jackson, made a clarion call in favor of keeping race as one of many factors in US higher education admissions, as America’s highest court heard oral arguments on the issue of affirmative action.The court is hearing two back-to-back cases brought against the University of North Carolina (UNC) and Harvard University by a conservative activist group, Students for Fair Admissions, but has not ruled.The group aims to block colleges from diversifying their student bodies by taking race into consideration alongside academic achievement and multiple other elements, essentially claiming that such a policy gives an unfair leg-up to African American and Hispanic students, who are underrepresented on campus, and discriminates against white and Asian American students.US students on why affirmative action is crucial: ‘They need our voices’Read moreA supporter of affirmative action, Cecilia Polanco, previously told the Guardian that: “A lot of the assumption is that someone less qualified than me took my place. That’s not what affirmative action does. It offers support to students who are just as qualified and may have different life experiences.”With a 6-3 conservative super-majority now on the court, affirmative action is deemed to be in jeopardy.Jackson has somewhat controversially recused herself from the case being heard second, against Harvard, because she attended it, though other current supreme court justices also attended Harvard but have not recused themselves.But Jackson spoke out stridently on Monday in the first case, involving UNC at Chapel Hill, when arguments were heard at the supreme court in Washington, where protesters on both sides gathered outside.Against Patrick Strawbridge, a lawyer for the plaintiff, Jackson said: “You haven’t demonstrated or shown one situation in which all they [the universities] look at is race. They’re looking at the full person.”Strawbridge said affirmative action violates the US constitution’s equal protection guarantees and federal non-discrimination statutes.Jackson said: “What I’m worried about is that the rule that you’re advocating, that in the context of a holistic review process, the university can take into account and value all of the other background and personal characteristics of other applicants, but they can’t value race … that seems to me to have the potential of causing more of an equal protection problem than it’s actually solving.”The justice was nominated in February by Joe Biden upon Stephen Breyer’s retirement. She was confirmed by the US Senate in April and had already been making an impact in the court’s new term.‘It means the world to us’: Black lawmakers’ euphoria greets Jackson confirmationRead moreOn Monday she explained her reasoning to Strawbridge by giving a hypothetical example of two aspiring students applying to UNC.She said: “The first applicant says, ‘I’m from North Carolina, my family has been in this area for generations since before the civil war, and I would like you to know that I will be the fifth generation to graduate from University of North Carolina. I now have that opportunity to do that. And in my family background, it’s important to me that I get to attend this university – I want to honor my family’s legacy by going to this school.’She continued: “The second applicant says ‘I’m from North Carolina. My family has been in this area for generations since before the civil war, but they were slaves and never had a chance to attend this venerable institution. As an African American, I now have that opportunity and given my family background it’s important to me to attend this university. I want to honor my family legacy by going to this school.’“Now, as I understand your no-race-conscious admissions rule, these two applicants would have a dramatically different opportunity to tell their family stories and to have them count.”Jackson added: “The first applicant would be able to have his family background considered and valued by the institution as part of its consideration of whether or not to admit him, while the second one wouldn’t be able to because his story is in many ways bound up with his race and with the race of his ancestors.“So I want to know, based on how your rule would likely play out in scenarios like that, why excluding consideration of race in a situation in which the person is not saying that his race is something that has impacted him in a negative way – he just wants to have it honored, just like the other person has their personal background family story honored – why is telling him no not an equal protection violation?”Strawbridge said the university could take into account factors such as whether a student would be the first generation in their family to attend and whether they may be economically disadvantaged, but he said that race should not be relevant these days.TopicsUS supreme courtUS politicsUS universitiesnewsReuse this content More

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      Penn State students outraged over invitation to far-right Proud Boys founder

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      Penn State students outraged over invitation to far-right Proud Boys founderUncensored America, a conservative student group, has invited Gavin McInnes to speak at the school in late October Students at the prestigious US university Penn State are outraged that Gavin McInnes, founder of the far-right group the Proud Boys, is coming to speak at their Pennsylvania college on Monday.The Proud Boys, an often violent US extremist group, have been labeled a terrorist organization by New Zealand and Canada. Many of its members align with white supremacist, antisemitic or Islamophobic ideologies. And five of its members were charged for their actions during the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.‘Start smashing pumpkins’: January 6 panel shows Roger Stone discussing violenceRead more“My friends and I are pretty disgusted,” said Sam Ajah, a third-year student. “The university can’t just abdicate all responsibility. They’re giving [McInnes] a platform, access, legitimacy.”Ajah, a 21-year-old geography major and president of the Penn State College Democrats club, is one of many students who feel strongly about the university hosting McInnes. Although organized by Uncensored America, a conservative student-led group at the cost of roughly $7,000, Penn State is holding out against pleas to cancel or ban the event.“As a public university, we are unalterably obligated under the US constitution’s first amendment to protect various expressive rights,” the school said in a statement. It also acknowledged and criticized the hateful rhetoric that speakers like McInnes are known to espouse.Such an event is not a first for Penn State. Last year, Milo Yiannopoulos, a British “alt-right” political commentator, was hosted by Uncensored America at a talk on campus.Yiannopoulos, who told a crowd at the University of Massachusetts a few years prior that “feminism is cancer”, often plays off his offensive remarks as ironic jokes. “Pray the Gay Away” was printed on a red poster advertising his talk in Penn State’s student union hall.Students were opposed to that earlier event too, but the tension surrounding this upcoming talk is different – it is palpable.“I mean, Yiannopoulos is offensive and kind of a clown,” said Mia Bloom, a former professor at Penn State who researches extremism, conspiracy theories and the far right.“But Gavin McInnes is actually dangerous. This event is deliberately provocative. It’s not a free speech issue if it endangers the student community.”McInnes established the Proud Boys during the 2016 presidential elections. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, white nationalists and neo-Nazis cite him as a gateway to the far right.Since then, members of his organization have been regulars at Make America Great Again rallies, recognizable for wearing black and yellow clothing, and they are frequent participants in street riots across the country.“We will kill you. That’s the Proud Boys in a nutshell. We will kill you,” McInnes said during his Compound Media show in 2016.Ajah and many of his peers will not attend the protest against the talk scheduled for 24 October, partly out of fear of violence. They feel this is the best message to send. Ajah wants students to think twice about their safety.“It’s not my place to go as a black queer person,” he said. “Why would I when people are espousing hateful rhetoric at you for just being you.”Ajah disagrees with Penn’s “lackluster and hands-off approach”, which the school also came under criticism for after the Yiannopoulos talk last year.“It’s not our job to verify or take into consideration speakers like this just because they are palatable to a certain student audience,” Ajah said. “In ignoring the hateful stuff McInnes has done, the university is just accepting it.”When Kevin McAleenan visited Georgetown University’s law school in 2019 to give a lecture, he was effectively driven from the stage. McAleenan, then the acting secretary of homeland security under Donald Trump, could not be heard over chants such as “Hate is not normal” and “Stand up, fight back” from the audience.Georgetown has since re-evaluated the school’s free speech policies.TopicsThe far rightUS universitiesPennsylvaniaUS politicsnewsReuse this content More