UC & Other Universities Support Harvard

From The Dartmouth: [Dartmouth] signed onto an amicus brief filed July 22 with the First Circuit Court of Appeals in support of Harvard University’s April lawsuit against the Trump Administration. Thirty-five other colleges and universities also signed the brief, including all Ivy League universities except Harvard. In the ongoing case, the Trump administration is appealing a September 2025 ruling in favor of Harvard after the administration froze $2.2 billion in federal grants because the university refused to comply with federal demands to make institutional changes such as reforming admissions and hiring practices, shutting down diversity, equity and inclusion practices and addressing antisemitism “or other bias” in campus programs. 

The brief argues that “even temporary cuts” to federal research funding could have “permanent effects” which “endangers” the “life-changing and history-altering innovations” that arise from “basic research” conducted at colleges and universities... Amici institutions listed advancements in “scientific progress” made possible by federal funding — such as the computer, DNA sequencing, the pacemaker and the “decades-long collaboration among academia, government and industry” which produced the internet — as “enormous long-term benefits” of university research...

Full story at https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2026/08/flavin-dartmouth-signs-brief-in-support-of-harvard-in-research-funding-lawsuit-against-trump-administration. 

List in image above and brief at:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca1.53667/gov.uscourts.ca1.53667.00108480602.0.pdf.

Straws in the Wind - Part 167

From the Daily Princetonian: In an interview with The Daily Princetonian this September, University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 was asked about a lobbying group he reportedly spearheaded to fight the Trump administration’s increases to the tax on university endowments. When pressed on which other universities were involved in the group, he declined to name them. The ‘Prince’ reached out to the 20 U.S. universities with the largest endowments that could be hit by the new endowment tax about whether they were part of the lobbying group. 19 did not respond to multiple requests for comment and one, Rice University, declined to comment...

“When we asked particular institutions to work with us, some of them want to be more open about that, some of them want to be less so,” Eisgruber said...

Full story at https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2025/11/princeton-news-universities-eisgruber-endowment-lobbying-group.

18 friends... But not UC

From Forbes: A group of the nation’s leading research universities has requested that a federal judge allow them to file a legal brief supporting Harvard University’s lawsuit against the Trump administration over more than $2 billion in frozen federal grant money. The 18 institutions requesting permission to file an amicus curiae (or “friend of the court”) brief are:

Boston University; Brown University; California Institute of Technology; Colorado State University; Dartmouth College; Johns Hopkins University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Michigan State University; Oregon State University; Princeton University; Rice University; Rutgers University; Tufts University; University of Maryland, College Park; University of Oregon; University of Pennsylvania; University of Pittsburgh; and Yale University.

The request was granted on Friday by Judge Allison D. Burroughs, who is presiding over the federal lawsuit. The schools have not yet filed the brief, but in their request they state that each of them “has received millions of dollars in federal investments in scientific research over the decades.” ...

Full story at https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2025/06/07/18-research-universities-back-harvards-lawsuit-against-funding-cuts/.

Rank - Part 3 (comparisons and equivalencies)

As might be expected, the latest US News and World Report college rankings have created controversy, in part because of a shift in methodology that shifted ranks up and down compared with the prior year.

You can read more about the controversies - somewhat similar to the earlier controversies concerning law schools and med schools at:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/admissions/traditional-age/2023/09/22/us-news-rankings-changes-spur-complaints-and-apologies.

But rather than get into the weeds, yours truly thought we might benefit from looking at comparisons and equivalencies. As you likely know, both UCLA are touting themselves as the best public university. But the public qualifier actually means both tied for 15th. 

But that means the two are not quite so good as Chicago, but are a bit better than Rice.

Moving down the list we find that UC-Davis and UC-San Diego at #28 are equivalent to each other and also to the U of Florida.

UC-Irvine and UC-Santa Barbara are equivalent to NYU at #33.

 

At #60, we find that UC-Merced is equivalent to Renssalear and Santa Clara U.

At #76, UC-Riverside is like SUNY-Buffalo.

And finally at #76, UC-Santa Cruz is like Rutgers and the U of Illinois-Chicago.

Go figure.

Source: https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/search?_sort=rank&_sortDirection=asc.

We are not alone - Part 2

In an earlier posting, we noted that another UC campus - Santa Barbara - was joining UCLA in tightening up its coronavirus rules.* But like the disease, the tightening up has spread: 

From Inside Higher Ed:

The University of California, Los Angeles, restored its indoor mask mandate last week, joining the University of Hawai‘i system, Pennsylvania State University (for both the main campus and 13 others), and other colleges and universities. “The past few weeks have revealed a consistent rise in COVID-19 cases in Los Angeles County and on our campus. Last week alone, UCLA had close to 870 new cases, which, per the UCLA COVID-19 Pivot Matrix, would place us at the ‘severe’ level,” said a letter announcing the mandate.

The letter outlined limited cases where masks may be removed: performance arts rehearsals and performances, indoor dining, and when alone in one's room. At commencement, June 10-12, all attendees must wear masks indoors, but speakers may remove their masks for their addresses, and graduates “may momentarily remove their masks while walking across the stage and while being photographed on or adjacent to the stage,” the letter said. (UCLA operates on a quarter system, and the spring quarter classes are not over until June 3.) Other institutions that have announced mask mandates have already had commencement and are in summer sessions, or their renewed mandates were announced just prior to commencement. UCLA also said weekly testing for COVID-19 will continue until June 15.

For colleges, indoor mask mandates were a key part of their response during earlier peaks of the pandemic. The lifting of mask mandates was seen by many as a sign that the pandemic was behind us. But most of the colleges are citing rising COVID-19 cases as a reason for their actions. Here are some of the colleges restoring mask mandates:

• Penn State University. On Friday, the university restored mask mandates for the university’s main campus and the Penn State campuses at Beaver, Greater Allegheny, New Kensington and Schuylkill. The university previously announced that masks were required at the campuses in Abington, Behrend, Brandywine, Great Valley, Hazleton, Lehigh Valley, Scranton and Wilkes-Barre. The College of Medicine also continues to require masks indoors. Penn State said it acted on the basis of guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based on county COVID-19 rates.
• University of Hawai‘i system. The system restored its mask mandate for the entire university system except when people are working in a room alone or at least six feet from others. “The indoor face mask requirement will remain in place and be re-evaluated when the level of COVID-19 transmission in the state decreases,” the university said.
• University of Pittsburgh. The university on Friday cited the CDC in restoring the requirements for the Pittsburgh, Greensburg and Titusville campuses. Masks remain optional on the Johnstown and Bradford campuses.
• University of Delaware. The university imposed an indoor mask requirement last week, citing “rising numbers of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations around the country, including in Delaware over the past week.” The university permitted people to be outdoors without a mask, but administrators at commencement appeared with masks outdoors...

All of those colleges acted last week. Some of the colleges that acted earlier to restore indoor mask mandates include Gallaudet, Georgetown, Howard, Johns Hopkins and Rice Universities; and the University of Rochester.  California State University, Los Angeles never removed its mask mandate.

Rochester had promised when instituting its mandate on April 15 to update the policy in early May. On May 4, Rochester announced, “Campus health officials believe indoor masking has reduced the number of COVID infections among students in recent days. Based on the effectiveness of the mask requirement in returning COVID cases to more manageable levels, as well as the still relatively high rate of COVID infections in the greater Rochester community and in New York State—the current face mask policy will remain in place for now, including at indoor commencement ceremonies and events.”

Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/05/31/ucla-university-hawai%E2%80%98i-penn-state-adopt-mask-mandates.

===

*http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2022/05/we-are-not-alone.html.

New consortium including three UC campuses to ensure future of SlaveVoyages database

 

UC Santa Cruz has joined a newly formed consortium of institutions to ensure the preservation, stability, and future development of what has become the single most widely used online resource for anyone interested in slavery across the Atlantic world.

The SlaveVoyages database, previously hosted at Emory University, will now function as a cooperative academic collaboration through a contractual agreement among six institutions: Emory University, the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture at William & Mary, Rice University, and three campuses of the University of California that will assume a joint membership — UC Santa Cruz, UC Irvine and UC Berkeley.

Slavevoyages.org had its origins in the 1960s, when historians began collecting data on slave ship voyages and estimating the number of enslaved Africans to cross the Atlantic from the 16th through 19th centuries. Over the years, the data was transferred from punch cards, to laptop computer, to a CD-ROM published in 1999, until it ultimately landed on a website at Emory University in 2008.

“Twenty years and four million viewers after its first appearance as a CD-ROM, the future of 48,000 slaving ventures recorded in SlaveVoyages is finally secured for posterity," noted Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of Harvard’s Hutchins Center, a consortium member.

Gates has described SlaveVoyages.org as “a gold mine” and “one of the most dramatically significant research projects in the history of African studies, African American studies, and the history of world slavery itself.”

SlaveVoyages.org is the culmination of both independent and collaborative work by a multidisciplinary team of international scholars and historians —  including UC Santa Cruz history professor Greg O’Malley.

He helped create the Intra-American Slave Trade Database, which was added to www.slavevoyages.org as a companion to the much older Transatlantic Slave Trade Database in 2019. It documents more than 11,500 trading voyages that moved enslaved people from one port in the Americas to another.

O’Malley compiled the foundational data set of about 7,600 voyages for the Intra-American Database in research for his first book Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807, and then partnered with UC Irvine professor Alex Borucki and other scholars to expand the coverage to all of the Americas and take the project online.

“One powerful thing that the Intra-American Slave Trade Database reveals is just how ubiquitous slavery was in the Americas,” O’Malley noted. “We don’t just document voyages to the obvious places we all think of associated with slavery, such as Virginia, South Carolina, or Jamaica. The Intra-American database shows voyages delivering enslaved people as far north as Newfoundland and as far south as Argentina.”

“All of the original 13 colonies that would become the United States appear in the database receiving shipments of enslaved people. And ships registered in every colony traded slaves elsewhere as well. So slavery was not just a southern problem or atrocity. It was an American one, and I mean ‘America’ as both the entire U.S. and the entire hemisphere. Slavery was virtually everywhere in the Americas, in varying degrees, and white colonists across all the colonies profited from slave trading.”

O’Malley serves on the Operational Committee for the whole website, which reviews data submitted by researchers for inclusion, responds to the many inquiries from the media and the website’s users, and plans future developments. In that capacity, he was involved in the outreach to other institutions about consortium membership, meeting with staff at the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture as part of recruiting them to join… 

Full news release at https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/uc-santa-cruz-joins-new-consortium-ensure-future-slavevoyages-database

A Different Kind of Title 9 Controversy

Of late, most Title IX stories and controversies involved sexual harassment and assault issues. UCLA is mentioned in the item below in connection with programs that seek to encourage women in STEM fields.

Women-only STEM college programs under attack for male discrimination

Teresa Watanabe, 8-20-19, LA Times

Female-only science programs, launched by many universities to redress gender imbalance in such fields as computer science and engineering, are coming under growing legal attack as sex discrimination against men.

The U.S. Department of Education has opened more than two dozen investigations into universities across the nation — UC Berkeley, UCLA and USC as well as Yale, Princeton and Rice — that offer female-only scholarships, awards, professional development workshops and even science and engineering camps for middle and high school girls. Sex discrimination in educational programs is banned under Title IX, a federal law that applies to all schools, both public and private, that receive federal funding.

A new study released Tuesday found that 84% of about 220 universities offer single-gender scholarships, many of them in STEM fields: science, technology, engineering and math. That practice is permitted under Title IX only if the “overall effect” of scholarships is equitable. The study, by a Maryland-based nonprofit advocating gender equity on college campuses, showed the majority of campus awards lopsidedly benefited women.

In California, for instance, 11 colleges and universities reviewed offered 117 scholarships for women and four for men, according to the survey by Stop Abusive and Violent Environments. The group was originally founded to lobby for due process rights for those accused of campus sexual misconduct, who are overwhelmingly male — and launched the current project challenging single-gender programs in January.

“The pendulum has swung too far in the other direction,” said Everett Bartlett, the organization’s president who plans to file federal complaints against about 185 campuses if they don’t sufficiently respond to questions about the scholarship practices. “We’re not a society based on quotas, we’re a society based on fairness,” Bartlett said.

Emily Martin of the National Women’s Law Center argued that such female-focused programs are allowed under Title IX as permissible affirmative action to overcome conditions that resulted in “limited participation” of one gender in a particular educational program. She blasted the growing national wave of complaints alleging that men are being treated unfairly under Title IX — most prominently in sexual misconduct cases and now in STEM programs.

U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has proposed sweeping changes to Title IX rules that would bolster the rights of the accused in sexual misconduct cases and is expected to issue final rules this fall. The department could not immediately respond to questions about the single-sex investigations.

“There’s a pretty well-organized and well-financed movement that is pushing out the false narrative that men are the victims of feminism,” said Martin, the center’s vice president for education and workplace justice. “The Trump administration has emboldened those trying to use this moment and this Department of Education as a weapon against women’s advancement.”

One public college female professor disagreed. She filed a Title IX complaint against UCLA challenging two workshops for women held by the campus Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics.

The January “Women in Mathematics and Public Policy” workshop focused on cybersecurity and climate change and specified on a flier that “only women will be invited to participate.” The “Collaborative Workshop for Women in Mathematical Biology” was held in June to focus on biological and medical questions. Its flier specifically welcomed female but not male graduate students, recent PhDs and other researchers. The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights notified the professor in May and August that it was launching an investigation into both workshops, which were supported with federal funds.

The professor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she feared retaliation, said she worked with UC professors to file the complaint to push back against what she described as an erosion of meritocracy and growing favoritism of women in the sciences. As a mentor to college students of all genders, she said, she sees more men becoming discouraged about their chances of success in the field.

In university hiring, a 2015 study by Cornell University found that hypothetical female applicants for tenure-track assistant professorships were favored, 2 to 1, over male counterparts.

“I obviously want women to be able to have opportunities to further their education and have employment in STEM, but I feel everything is being pushed for women,” she said. “For me, Title IX is about being completely fair.”

UCLA did not exclude men from participating in the two workshops despite the focus on women, campus spokesman Ricardo Vazquez said. Moreover, he added, the institute has held 59 workshops over the last three years and the “vast majority” of participants were men...

Full story at https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-08-20/women-only-science-programs-discrimination-complaints

Forbes on Diversity Ranking of "Top" 10 Colleges

1. California Institute of Technology
2. University of California, Los Angeles
3. University of California, Berkeley
4. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
5. Rice University
6. Stanford University
7. University of Southern California
8. Amherst College
9. Duke University
10. Columbia University

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/michellecheng/2016/07/22/10-top-colleges-that-get-high-grades-for-student-diversity/