A speech by former William “Lia” Thomas teammate Paula Scanlan promotes “dehumanizing and cruel,” views according to a letter signed by Franklin & Marshall College affiliates.
The letter, signed by more than 125 professors, administrators, and staff, criticizes the speech planned for Wednesday and hosted by the campus Young Americans for Freedom and the national Young America’s Foundation.
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The University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) saw the amount of donations from China more than triple in its most recent reporting period, shortly after the university faced a scandal regarding Joe Biden’s storage of classified documents in his think tank’s offices at the university.
As reported by Fox News, the surge in foreign donations was revealed in documents obtained by Americans for Public Trust (APT). With donations from individuals and entities directly tied to the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the university saw roughly $25 million in such donations during the 2022-2023 academic year. By contrast, the academic year of 2021-2022 saw just $8.6 million from China.
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Harvard may assume the forced resignation of its president, Claudine Gay, has finally ended its month-long scandal over her tenure.
Gay stepped down, remember, amid serious allegations of serial plagiarism—without refuting the charges. She proved either unable or unwilling to discipline those on her campus who were defiantly anti-Semitic in speech and action.
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Sporting associations have tightened rules regarding transgender athletes competing in women’s sports in 2023, drawing complaints from LGBT activists.
The issue of men competing in women’s sports has received considerable scrutiny amid instances such as Laurel Hubbard, a biological male, competing against women in the weightlifting events during the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, as well as University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas’s participation in the 2022 NCAA championships, where the biological male won the 500-yard women’s final and placed highly in other events. The international governing bodies for cricket, fishing and track and field barred biological males from competing in women’s events in 2023, following a similar decision by the international governing body for competitive swimming in 2022.
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The Pennsylvania House of Representatives voted down legislation Wednesday providing over $33 million in state funding for the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) veterinary school due to concerns about antisemitism on campus, according to The Associated Press.
Former UPenn President Liz Magill stepped down alongside Scott Bok, the chairman of UPenn’s Board of Trustees, on Dec. 9 after the university faced heavy criticism for UPenn’s handling of antisemitism on campus and Magill’s testimony to Congress earlier this month. The state’s House of Representatives passed the funding measure in the first two votes but failed to clear the necessary two-thirds majority required by the state’s Constitution, according to the AP.
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University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill is resigning from her position, according to multiple reports on Saturday.
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Over 70 members of Congress called for the removal of the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Friday following their testimony at a Tuesday hearing, which caused widespread outrage.
Harvard President Claudine Gay, Penn President Elizabeth Magill and MIT President Sally Kornbluth refused to say during the hearing if calls for genocide were violations of their campuses’ codes of conduct, and Gay and Magill later backtracked on their statements following widespread backlash. The letter, spearheaded by Republican New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, calls on the boards of the universities to “immediately remove each of these presidents” from their positions.
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The House Education and Workforce Committee is opening an investigation into Harvard University, MIT, University of Pennsylvania and other schools, following a recent congressional hearing about antisemitism on college campuses.
House GOP Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik R-N.Y., called the testimony of the universities’ presidents “morally bankrupt.” Democrats and Republicans have condemned the universities’ presidents’ responses to questions about how their respective schools combat hate speech and antisemitism on campus.
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The University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) has lost a potential gift worth nearly $100 million after the donor behind it voiced his disapproval of the college’s response to a rise in anti-Semitic protests and incidents on campus.
As reported by Axios, alumnus Ross Stevens, the founder and CEO of Stone Ridge Asset Management, said that his primary reason for withdrawing the donation was the poor testimony by UPenn president Liz Magill before Congress on Tuesday. He had first announced the gift in December of 2017, which was intended to establish a center for innovation in finance at the university.
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The donor revolts at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and elsewhere are the long-overdue wake up calls that their faculty and administrators needed. The overwhelming majority of politically progressive faculty and administrators have long guarded their right to advance their cherished political causes inside and outside the classroom, while punishment has awaited those who challenge the shibboleths. Instead of the free exchange of ideas and the intellectual capaciousness that ultimately advance social justice, it is now clearer than ever that it is not social justice they have fostered but mindless ideology and hate.
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Influential donors have been retracting their support from the University of Pennsylvania, citing concerns over anti-Semitism on campus following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. Now, billionaire Len Blavatnik, a philanthropist and noteworthy figure in the business world, has joined the growing list of benefactors expressing discontent with the university’s handling campus anti-Semitism.
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The University of Pennsylvania, which hosts the Penn Biden Center, took hundreds of thousands of dollars from the American University of Beirut (AUB) in 2022, roughly five years after AUB paid a settlement to the United States government in connection with its alleged ties to Hezbollah, a U.S.-designated terror organization.
UPenn received $474,947 from AUB in 2022, with the donations earmarked as “Education/Tuition/Scholarship,” according to a 2021-2022 foreign gift disclosure obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request. AUB settled a lawsuit with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan, paying $700,000 and promising to revise its policies, following a suit alleging the university assisted organizations linked to Hezbollah, Reuters reported.
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Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) released statements defending students’ pro-Hamas speech after campus protests, but in the past have muzzled conservatives for speech and online statements.
Harvard University President Claudine Gay and UPenn President Elizabeth Magill both said their respective universities support “free expression” in statements made after pro-Palestinian rallies at the colleges following Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror attacks in Israel. In the past, however, conservative speakers and professors at the universities have frequently been shouted down, and some have been canceled for online statements.
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Three leaders of the University of Pennsylvania faculty senate released a statement Thursday condemning those who “use their pocketbooks to shape our mission” after donors began withdrawing support over the school’s response to the Israel-Hamas war.
UPenn donors began pulling their funding from the university after President Liz Magill failed to initially label Hamas as a terrorist organization in an Oct. 10 statement about the Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians. The university’s faculty senate tri-chairs, Tulia G. Falleti, Eric A. Feldman and Vivian L. Gadsden, accused individuals of trying to censor free speech by “surveilling both faculty and students” and criticized those who would try to use their “pocketbooks” to buy the speech of university students and faculty, according to the statement.
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The University of Pennsylvania lost the support of one major donor and saw one board of trustees member resign, both out of protest against the rise of anti-Semitism at the university in the wake of the massive Palestinian attacks against Israel.
As reported by Breitbart, Jon Huntsman, a former Governor of Utah, former U.S. ambassador, and former presidential candidate, announced publicly that he would not be donating to the school any further, due to the school’s refusal to issue a statement of any kind on the matter.
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The subject of barriers came up in an unintentionally comical way a few weeks ago, during former University of Pennsylvania swimmer Paula Scanlon’s testimony before Congress.
As Campus Reform reported, Scanlon testified that she and her teammates were “forced to undress in the presence of a 6-4 biological male with fully intact male genitalia 18 times a week”—a reference, of course, to Will “Lia” Thomas.
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While former President Donald Trump faces an array of federal charges in two separate cases as a result of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation, no one has yet been charged in a separate special counsel probe of President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents while he was vice president.
In January 2023, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Robert Hur special counsel to investigate the Biden case.
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Former University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann earned $22.76 million in 2021, most of which was due to a contractual accrued deferred compensation payout, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
“Gutmann’s total figure for 2021, reported on the 990 tax form, includes her annual compensation of a base salary of $1.56 million and a bonus of $1 million and the $20.2 million deferred compensation and supplemental retirement funds, which also includes investment gains the money made over 17 years,” the Inquirer reported June 17.
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“Exclusion U,” a feature documentary released this year, details how Ivy League universities accumulate billions of dollars as they restrict class sizes, turn away qualified students, and favor the children of the rich.
“Ivy League endowments are worth $193 billion dollars, but they only educate 0.3 percent of U.S. undergrads,” the film’s narrator stated. “That’s less than 63,000 students.”
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Pennsylvania school districts are paying thousands in membership dues to the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education (GSE), which offers administrators trainings on identifying “microaggressions” and growing “racial literacy,” according to documents obtained through a public records request by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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An alleged illegal alien is accused of causing a highway car crash near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, around 4 p.m. on Tuesday, The Pennsylvania Daily Star learned.
Robert Jones, 62, was driving his wife Lisa, 59 in a Mercedes Benz SUV in East Hempfield Township. Jones said that a dump truck driven by Gabriel Corillo crashed into their vehicle and that the police report revealed Corillo, who did not speak English, has no U.S. driver’s license.
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On Wednesday, hundreds stopped by Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) tables on 9th Street in South Philadelphia this weekend for two things Philadelphia has generated lots of over the years: cheesesteaks and liberty.
FIRE, a Philadelphia-based institution since its founding in 1999, held the “Free Cheesesteaks for Free Speech” event as part of a larger $3.1-million pro-free-expression campaign featuring broadcast ads, billboards and digital promotions. The group, which initially focused on fighting speech restrictions on college campuses and recently broadened its mission to include other forums, hopes the effort will raise awareness of ongoing battles to honor the text and the spirit of the First Amendment.
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An analysis found that Democrats received 99.7% of political donations from University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) faculty members during the 2021-2022 year.
UPenn reflects the norm in higher education as faculty members at other universities send the vast majority of political donations to Democrats.
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Numerous university think tanks have had national political leaders as figureheads. The University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement isn’t unique in that regard. What does set the center apart from similar institutions — besides its recent immersion in national scandal — is its limited research output.
The Penn Biden Center is undergoing intense and somewhat bipartisan criticism for having housed nearly a dozen classified government records after Joe Biden used the space as his main D.C. office from 2017 to 2019 while also nominally working as a professor. The documents were discovered last November and other restricted federal materials turned up this month in the president’s Delaware home. Some of the records were generated when Biden served as a U.S. senator and others materialized when he was vice president.
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President Joe Biden’s D.C.-based think tank operated by the University of Pennsylvania reportedly held a two-day “bootcamp” last year during which congressional staffers were urged to support greater cooperation between the United States and China.
The Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement has become the subject of heightened public attention in light of revelations earlier this month that Biden, who used the establishment as his main D.C. office, kept classified federal documents there.
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A Democratic California congressman this week weighed in on President Joe Biden’s classified-document scandal, characterizing the president’s housing of restricted records in his University of Pennsylvania office and his Delaware home as indefensible. A member of the House Oversight and Armed Services committees, U.S. Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA-17) told Fox News that Biden warrants scrutiny for keeping numerous records he obtained during his earlier service as a U.S. senator and later as vice president. Khanna noted that the law requires classified federal documents to be kept in “sensitive compartmented information facilities” (SCIFs). While presidents can sometimes temporarily designate rooms within their personal properties as SCIFs, Biden has never suggested any spaces in his home or office were deemed to be such areas.
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The Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy & Global Engagement, the University of Pennsylvania think tank of which President Joe Biden was once the de facto leader, has had no publicized activity for nearly a year and its future is uncertain. Biden reportedly used the Washington, D.C.-based center as his main D.C. office for much of the time between the end of his vice presidency in 2017 and his presidential run in 2020. From 2017 to 2019, Biden received approximately $900,000 in salary for a Penn professorship that did not require him to teach regular classes.
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A Texas congressman is asking the U.S. Department of Education (DoE) to investigate funding that foreign entities have bestowed on the University of Pennsylvania.
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Revelations that President Joe Biden kept classified federal documents at his University of Pennsylvania office in Washington, D.C., have brought renewed scrutiny to his relationship with the university — and the role many Penn professors had in persuading his administration to kill a Justice Department project combatting Chinese espionage.
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A review by The Pennsylvania Daily Star of output from the Penn Biden Center, the foreign-policy think tank established in 2017 to coincide with the start of Joe Biden’s professorship at the University of Pennsylvania, suggests the center has produced little to no original scholarly work. The Washington, D.C.-based center has drawn heavy media scrutiny after news came out earlier this month that nearly a dozen classified federal documents were housed there until last November. Biden reportedly used the location as his main D.C. office after his vice presidency ended and before he became president.
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The House Oversight and Accountability Committee on Wednesday demanded the University of Pennsylvania release information about anonymous donations from China to the Penn Biden Center, where classified documents were found, over concerns the Chinese Communist Party may have influenced Biden administration policies through the contributions.
“The Committee has learned UPenn received millions of dollars from anonymous Chinese sources, with a marked uptick in donations when then-former Vice President Biden was announced as leading the Penn Biden Center initiative,” the GOP-led committee said. “Following the formation of the Penn Biden Center, donations originating from China tripled and continued while Joe Biden explored a potential run for President.”
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“Today, Penn’s relationship with China is strong, and continues to grow.”
That’s how the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Global website still refers to the Philadelphia-based Ivy League school’s association with the communist-run nation.
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President Joe Biden’s former private office in Washington, D.C., where roughly a dozen classified documents were discovered earlier last November, was recently a site for high-profile University of Pennsylvania internships.
Administrators of the Philadelphia-based Ivy League school brought the former vice president aboard as a professor in the winter of 2017 to coincide with the “soft opening” of the 13,800-square-foot Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. Just under a year later, the think tank officially commenced operations with a stated aim of engaging “our fellow citizens in shaping this world, while ensuring the gains of global engagement are widely shared.”
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Prestigious business schools across the country are adding more opportunities to study diversity equity and inclusion (DEI) and environmental, social, and governance (ESG), a trend that’s expected to continue, professors told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
ESG prompts investors to consider factors such as environmental impact and social awareness when making investments, while DEI is a push to increase diversity and inclusion initiatives in institutions such as schools and the workplace. Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), and Bentley University all offer courses in both subjects as they grow more prominent.
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The Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement opened in 2018 as then-former Vice President Joe Biden’s “think tank.” It was founded, according to the institution, “on the principle that a democratic, open, secure, tolerant, and interconnected world benefits all Americans.” But it looks like Biden, his 2020 presidential campaign, his liberal allies, and perhaps some foreign friends have grabbed the brunt of the center’s benefits.
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Concerns about funding ties linking China, Joe Biden and the heavily Chinese-funded University of Pennsylvania were brought to the attention of state law enforcement almost two years ago, with no official action taken by the state’s then-Attorney General Josh Shapiro or any members of his staff.
The letter, sent by a group called “Take Back Our Republic” and addressed to Shapiro and other high-ranking members of his team, was sent in July of 2021. That was nearly a year and a half before the Biden classified document story broke, resulting in Attorney General Merrick Garland appointing a special counsel on Thursday to investigate the matter.
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The University of Pennsylvania will spend $890,000 in the next six years with the goal of “increasing inclusivity in teaching and learning” in the STEM fields thanks to a $385,000 grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
The funding “will support a rigorous examination of STEM education at the undergraduate level,” according to a university news release.
Penn officials committed an additional $385,000 to the initiative. Penn is just one of 104 schools who received the six-year grants from HHMI under their “Inclusive Excellence 3 initiative,” according to science research foundation’s website.
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Dozens of athletic competitions for women and girls have been upended by the participation of males identifying as transgender women, who benefit from a host of biological advantages over female competitors, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation found.
Transgender-identified males have competed in a variety of women’s athletic competitions, from school sports for young children to top college events and Olympic competitions. Differences in an average woman’s strength, stamina and physique compared to the average male are sustained even when a male undergoes testosterone suppression, according to the Sports Councils’ Equality Group.
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During the University of Pennsylvania’s homecoming football game against Yale late last month, around 75 climate protesters stormed the field and delayed the start of the second half by about an hour.
Nineteen Fossil Free Penn protesters ended up being detained by campus police, and due to their actions some received notice that their membership in official Penn student groups could be in jeopardy.
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Pennsylvania’s Senate voted 30-20 last week to approve legislation banning biological males from competing in females’ school and college sports programs.
Sens. Judy Ward (R-Hollidaysburg) and Kristin Phillips-Hill (R-Jacobus) offered the measure so that female athletes need not compete against males who, they noted, have “distinct and meaningful physical advantages over women” including greater height, bone density, heart size and lung size.
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Women’s groups in Pennsylvania are quiet after the University of Pennsylvania’s (UPenn) biologically male transgender swimmer Lia Thomas won the women’s National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) 500-yard freestyle swimming championship at the end of last week.
The Pennsylvania National Organization for Women (PNOW), Women’s Way and the Women’s Law Project did not return The Pennsylvania Daily Star’s Tuesday comment requests regarding whether they felt Thomas’ win was a victory for women.
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University of Pennsylvania transgender swimmer Lia Thomas won the 500 free event at the NCAA Women’s Championships by 1.75 seconds Thursday.
In first place, Thomas swam finished at 4:33.24, according to results published on swimmeetresults.tech. The three runners-up swam 4:34.99, 4:35.92 and 4:36.18.
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In celebration of Women’s History Month, colleges and universities are hosting events to celebrate womxn, not women.
In an effort to become more inclusive of those that deny biological reality, higher education is in fact erasing women’s opportunities to excel in academics, athletics, and career tracks.
I am proud to be a woman. Women have been pivotal to our society. But making women compete with men undermines females’ ability to achieve success.
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TRANSCRIPT: McCabe: Investigative journalist Peter Schweizer, in his new book Red-Handed, reports how the Chinese Communist Party has targeted American institutions of higher learning. Schweizer told The Star News Network how these institutions, after receiving funds from communist China, have worked to suppress criticism of the communist regime there and…
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Transgender swimmer Lia Thomas won an Ivy League Championship in the women’s 500-yard freestyle event Thursday, beating most of her competitors by about one lap, according to multiple sources.
Thomas, who competed on the University of Pennsylvania men’s team for three years before adopting a transgender identity, beat the second-place 500 free swimmer by seven and a half seconds and the third-place swimmer by more than ten seconds, according to an event summary.
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With midterm elections this year, Pennsylvania’s 2022 congressional re-districting plans are under scrutiny. The state lost one congressional district last year, bringing the total number down to 17.
The proposed map is not finalized, but FiveThirtyEight reports that three congressional districts will likely be “highly competitive seats.”
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Sixteen women on the University of Pennsylvania swim team said their transgender teammate, Lia Thomas, should not be allowed to compete in the women’s category, The Washington Post reported.
The teammates sent a letter to the university and to Ivy League officials asking that they not take legal action against new NCAA rules which would block Thomas from competing in the 2022 championships, according to the Post. The women said they supported Thomas’s decision to live as a transgender woman, but they say “the biology of sex is a separate issue from someone’s gender identity.”
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The investigative reporter and author of the new book “Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win” told The Star News Network that U.S. colleges and universities, such as the case with Yale University and Joseph Tsai, are not complying with federal reporting laws in regards to their gifts from China and Chinese nationals.
“Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965 is very explicit,” said Peter Schweizer, the founder and president of the Government Accountability Institute and the host of “The Drill Down” podcast. “It says that if U.S. colleges and universities take in foreign donations, they’re required to report those to the federal government.”
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A female swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania said the school brushed off her and her teammates’ concerns about sharing locker rooms with a male swimmer, the Daily Mail reported.
She and her teammates felt uncomfortable sharing locker rooms with transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, who has male body parts and is reportedly “attracted to women,” according to the Daily Mail.
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As President Joe Biden’s nomination of University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann as ambassador to Germany proceeds in the U.S. Senate, a new book reveals that financial support from communist China to her university nearly tripled after the school established its Biden Center four years ago.
The flow of dollars from People’s Republic of China entities to Penn has already fueled contentiousness about Gutmann’s nomination. In a November letter to Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) expressed their concern regarding the amount of money the university has accepted from Chinese institutions and companies. Committee Ranking Member Jim Risch (R-ID) has since come out against Gutmann’s prospective appointment and has cited the $86 million in Chinese contributions and contracts that Penn has received since 2014.
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