Tag Archives: Universities

Protesters force UC Berkeley to cancel far-right speaker’s speech

vandalized bankf of america at scene of "protest"

(Reuters) – Hundreds of protesters at the University of California at Berkeley on Wednesday smashed windows, set fires and clashed with police as they forced a right-wing speaker to cancel his appearance at the liberal-leaning institution.

Two hours before far-right Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos was to give a speech at the student union, protesters tossed metal barricades and rocks through the building’s windows and set a light generator on fire near the entrance, footage from news outlets showed.

Police ordered protesters to disperse as the school put the campus on lockdown. Protesters also tossed bricks and fireworks at police in riot gear who fired rubber pellets back at the crowd, according to SFGate.com, a news outlet in San Francisco.

“We shut down the event. It was great. Mission accomplished,” a protester told CNN.

Some 150 “masked agitators” were responsible for the violence during the otherwise largely peaceful protest of about 1,500 people, the university said in a statement, noting that the school “is proud of its history and legacy as home of the Free Speech Movement” in the 1960s.

President Donald Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, previously headed Breitbart News and CNN reported that many of the protesters voiced opposition to the Republican president.

Many of Trump’s executive orders and proposed policies, including his suspension of the U.S. refugee program and temporary ban on travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries, have been met by largely peaceful protests that have drawn tens of thousands of people across the United States.

One protester at Berkeley held a sign that said “No Safe Space for Racists” while other protesters danced to hip hop music, footage from a Facebook Live feed showed.

Protesters later marched along streets near the campus where some smashed storefront windows and car windshields while clashing with police, the feed showed.

Yiannopoulos, whose account on Twitter was suspended last year after he was accused of participating in the online harassment of an African-American actress, criticized “the Left”, saying in a statement it was “absolutely terrified of free speech and will do literally anything to shut it down.”

He also said on Fox News that he was evacuated by police after protesters began throwing rocks and other objects at the building.

“Obviously it’s a liberal campus so they hate any libertarians or conservatives who dare to express an opinion on their campuses,” he said. “They particularly don’t like me.”

(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles, Brendan O’Brien in Milwaukee; Editing by Nick Macfie; Editing by Sandra Maler and Nick Macfie)

College dorms, new front in U.S. Battle over transgender rights

A gender neutral bathroom is seen at the University of California Irvine

By Scott Malone

BOSTON (Reuters) – As lawmakers across the United States battle over whether to allow transgender Americans to use public restrooms that match their gender identities, universities are scrambling to ensure that dorms meet federal standards.

At a time of year when the nation’s 2,100 residential colleges and universities are sorting out student housing assignments, they also are poring over a May letter from the Obama administration that thrusts them into the national debate on transgender rights.

Known as the “dear colleague” letter, it makes clear that federal law protects transgender students’ right to live in housing that reflects their gender identity.

Schools that fail to provide adequate housing to transgender students could face lawsuits or the loss of any federal funding they rely on.

Although hundreds of universities had begun to offer gender-inclusive housing in response to student demand in recent years, many are now reviewing or expediting their plans so they can provide the option to incoming students for the first time this fall.

The policies are intended not only to accommodate transgender students, university officials say, but to help siblings, gay students who want to live with straight friends of the opposite gender or simply groups comfortable with mixed-gender housing.

The May letter from the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice invoked Title IX, the 1972 law prohibiting gender discrimination at schools that receive federal funds.

“Title IX and the ‘dear colleague’ letters make all of us, all institutions, more accountable for students who may be on the margins,” said Darryl Holloman, dean of students at Georgia State University, which offered gender-inclusive housing options for the first time in the 2015-2016 academic year.

‘ONLY A MATTER OF TIME’

There are no official U.S. statistics on the number of colleges that offer gender-inclusive housing, although a count by Campus Pride, a non-profit that focuses on supporting the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students in U.S. higher education, found it could be as low as one in 10.

The author of that study, Genny Beemyn, director of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Stonewall Center, acknowledged the count, which shows just 203 universities, may underestimate the number of schools that offer gender-inclusive housing.

“More and more schools are grappling with it,” Beemyn said. “It’s only a matter of time until this becomes a much bigger issue.”

Universities in the Northeast and along the West Coast have been quickest to allow gender-inclusive housing, with those in the South and religiously affiliated schools least likely to do so, according to observers, including Demoya Gordon, transgender rights project attorney with Lambda Legal, an LGBT rights advocacy group.

The Association of College and University Housing Officers-International has seen an increase in the number of questions it gets about transgender housing, said spokesman James Baumann.

“It is certainly something that has gained momentum,” Baumann said. “When I first started 10 years ago the questions was, ‘Should we?’ And now the question is, ‘How can we?'”

The same letter that has universities examining their transgender housing policies sparked a broader fight by telling U.S. public grammar and high schools to allow transgender students to use bathrooms and locker rooms that reflect their gender identities.

Thirteen U.S. states joined a lawsuit accusing the Obama administration of overreaching, attempting to add transgender protections to a 1972 law that never mentioned the subject.

LESS OPPOSITION

The university moves have been less controversial in part because the population affected is one of the segments of society most comfortable with transgender issues.

Some 57 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds told a Reuters/Ipsos poll taken April 14 through May 3 that they believed people should use public restrooms that match the gender with which they identify. That is a far higher percentage than the 40 percent of Americans of all ages who held that view. The poll included responses from 6,723 people and has a credibility interval of 1.4 percentage points.

Few students are choosing gender-inclusive housing. At Georgia Tech’s Atlanta campus, 42 out of some 4,100 students housed in dorms sought it last year.

When Johns Hopkins University first offered it in the 2014-2015 academic year, 30 out of some 2,500 students enrolled, a number that doubled to 60 the following year.

“There are certainly some transgender students for whom it matters a lot but if it’s a gay man whose best friend is a lesbian and they decide they want to live together, this is an option,” said Demere Woolway, director of LGBTQ life at the Baltimore university.

College officials interviewed also emphasized they have no plans to phase out traditional gender-segregated housing.

“We have students … who want to maintain spaces where they are with people who have the same gender identity,” said Elizabeth Lee Agosto, senior associate dean of student affairs at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, which has offered gender-inclusive housing since 2007. “It’s important to have the full spectrum.”

(Reporting by Scott Malone; Editing by Bill Trott)

U.S. targets spying threat on campus with proposed research clampdown

A man walks through Killian Court at MIT in Cambridge

By Julia Edwards

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Leading U.S. universities are pushing back against a proposed State Department rule that would bar foreign students from more research projects and classes involving information seen as vital to national security.

The proposal by the administration of President Barack Obama reflects growing worries in Washington over a rise in intellectual property theft from foreign adversaries such as China.

Research related to defense technology such as munitions, nuclear engineering and satellite technology would be particularly affected by the rule, which is still in the proposal process and has not been widely reported.

Defense contractors such as Northrop Grumman, Boeing and Lockheed Martin regularly sponsor university research, but did not respond to requests for comment.

The new rule, which largely applies to company-sponsored research, threatens to shrink the pool of research opportunities available for U.S. colleges, which have grown strongly in popularity among high-paying foreign students in recent years.

Some top U.S. schools do not accept any research grants that restrict participation by foreign citizens because it runs counter to their policies of academic freedom and non-discrimination.

In a letter to the State Department, Stanford University said it joined The Association of American Universities (AAU), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Pennsylvania in criticizing the rule, citing “disastrous consequences.” The AAU represents 62 leading research institutions, including Harvard, Duke University, and the University of Chicago.

The universities say the rule would tip the balance too far in favor of national security against academic freedom.

“We wouldn’t be able to perform the same basic foundational research that we do,” said Stanford’s director of export compliance Steve Eisner. “Stanford has a policy of conducting research openly regardless of citizenship. We’re not going to tell our Chinese students that they can’t participate.”

No current cases of industrial espionage involve university research, though government officials told Reuters they suspect university faculty are violating loosely defined research rules.

A 2011 FBI report said “foreign adversaries and competitors take advantage” of the openness of information on college campuses and a small percentage of students, researchers and foreign professors are “working at the behest of another government.”

There were just under 1 million foreign students at U.S. colleges in the 2014-2015 school year, 31 percent of whom were Chinese, according to the Institute of International Education. That has grown from fewer than 100,000 in the 1960s when the United States began regulating their access to research.

In 2015, the number of intellectual property cases investigated by the FBI rose 53 percent from the previous year.

The FBI says China is the main culprit. It has accused Chinese nationals of attempting to export technology from the United States, including genetically modified corn seed and sensitive military information stored on Boeing computers.

The Department of Justice said in a statement that “we know that some foreign spies and criminals target students and faculty alike to steal valuable technology and intellectual property.” It added it was working with universities and laboratories to raise awareness of the threat.

A spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Hong Lei, said the United States should be improving cooperation with China instead of adding restrictions on foreign students.

“China’s scientific and technological developments have been achieved through the hard struggle of the Chinese people,” Lei said at a ministry briefing on Thursday.

SHRINKING RESEARCH CHOICES The proposed rule comes as universities face shrinking federal funding for research, forcing many to rely more on industry-sponsored projects.

State Department officials told Reuters they are aware of universities’ opposition to the rule, but have received no complaints or advice from companies that sponsor university research.

Experts in counterterrorism and counter nuclear proliferation told the State Department tighter restrictions on research access are necessary because universities are “a soft target,” said Tony Dearth, director of defense trade controls licensing at the State Department.

In the first case of its kind, University of Tennessee electrical engineering professor John Reese Roth was convicted in 2008 of exporting “defense articles” without a license, and of wire fraud and conspiracy and sentenced to four years.

Roth used foreign students in research on plasma-based flight-control devices for drone aircraft under a U.S. Air Force contract. He let two foreign students illegally gain access to sensitive information and export it to China, said the FBI.

The proposed rule would expand the definition of research classified as “technical” to any project that undergoes a pre-publication review by a private sponsor.

Unlike less-sensitive “fundamental” research, technical research is regulated in a variety of ways including a requirement that foreign students must apply for a license. Students from China, Iran and North Korea are usually denied licenses, said university officials.

The State Department argues that if a company wants to take a second look at research because it may be sensitive to its economic interests, foreign student involvement should be regulated.

Stanford told the State Department in a public letter that the new rule would affect a broad portion of industry-backed research because universities “routinely” allow sponsors to review results for up to 90 days.

Colleges that object to the government’s foreign-student restrictions have long avoided technical research and focused solely on projects classed as fundamental. The new rule would force them to either loosen their policies or give up defense-related research.

Schools with fundamental research-only policies are already in the minority. A Reuters survey of the top 35 research universities, ranked by R&D expenditures, found only 11 were still adhering to such a position.

Federal funding for research still dwarfs business funding, but the two are trending in opposite directions.

Over 2011-2014, federal funds for university research fell to $37.9 billion from $40.8 billion, according to the National Science Foundation. Over the same period, industry-sponsored university research grew to $5.9 billion from $4.9 billion.

“As federal funds have become scarcer and the competition has increased, I think we see a lot of universities expanding their partnerships with industry,” said Bob Hardy, director of intellectual property management at the Council on Government Relations, an association of research universities.

(Reporting by Julia Edwards; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh and Stuart Grudgings)

Sixteen States Back Christian Universities in Appeal Against ACA

Three Christian Universities found themselves with unexpected supporters for their appeal to the Supreme Court over the contraception mandates in the Affordable Care Act (ACA):  16 state governments.  Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia announced their support for the school’s appeal.

Houston Baptist University (HBU), East Texas Baptist University (ETBU) and Westminster Theological Seminary have appealed to the Supreme Court over a lower court’s ruling they expand the contraception options in their health insurance plans.  The schools currently offer 10 different forms of contraception, but do not want to carry four forms of contraception that fall into the category of abortifacient drugs, or drugs that cause an abortion.

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, who is defending the school’s rights, says the support of 16 states through friend-of-the-court briefs is a major bonus to the school’s case.

“This strong show of support for HBU and ETBU (and Westminster Theological Seminary) demonstrates just how important it is that the Supreme Court address the impact of the HHS mandate, particularly on religious groups,” said Diana Verm, Legal Counsel at the Becket Fund, in a statement. “It is especially significant that the 16 state governments are supporting HBU and ETBU at the Supreme Court.

The 16 states claim in their briefs that the schools maintain “a sincere religious conviction that complying with the disputed mandate is forbidden.”  The Attorneys General for the states also endorsed providing the schools with the same exemptions that are given to churches.

A federal appeals court ruled against the Little Sisters of the Poor in a similar case last month.  If the exemptions are not given to the schools and organizations challenging the mandate, they could face millions of dollars in IRS fines for not making the abortifacient drugs available as part of their health care plans.