News today from UCLA, George Washington University, University of Michigan, and University of Nebraska.
A federal judge in San Francisco has ruled that the NSF must restore about 300 grants that were suspended at UCLA. The judge’s argument is that the freezing is a violation of an injunction in June which disallowed the NSF from freezing grants at the University of California. This is about a third of the grants that are currently frozen.
The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting the NIH may restrict the collection of data on gender. This would be to align with a January executive order. Sex-related data could still be collected, but the same EO defines sex as “an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female. ‘Sex’ is not a synonym for and does not include the concept of “gender identity.”
The Department of Justice announced yesterday that it has found George Washington University to be “in violation of federal civil rights law by acting deliberately indifferent to the hostile educational environment for Jewish, American-Israeli, and Israeli students and faculty.”
GWU was one of ten universities initially investigated by the Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, which is a different list than the one announced in April.
As of this writing, neither enforcement action nor proposed settlement terms have been announced.
The University of Michigan School of Public Health will not admit a new cohort into its PhD program in Epidemiologic Sciences during the next admissions cycle due to disruptions to research funding and fellowship support.
The University of Nebraska announced on Friday that it will be offering buyouts to tenured faculty as it attempts to make up for a budget shortfall.
NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya authored an op-ed in the Washington Post yesterday detailing why the agency is moving away from mRNA vaccines. The argument – loss of public trust in the platform– is the same as what he cited during Steve Bannon’s podcast over the weekend. As of this writing, he is making a similar argument on CNN.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Administration is planning a major review of the Smithsonian to “to ensure alignment with the president’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.”