U. Chicago Prof Cancels Midterm, Tells Students to Join Anti-Trump Protest Instead
“As a small contribution to this day of action I am cancelling the midterm and calling you, if you are able, to join the Chicago demonstration”
Higher education has become synonymous with progressive activism. Learning is a secondary consideration.
The Washington Free Beacon reports:
University of Chicago Stats Professor Cancels Midterm, Pushes Students To Join Anti-Trump Protest Instead
A University of Chicago professor canceled a midterm Thursday and called on his students to use the time to join an anti-Trump protest, an email obtained by the Washington Free Beacon shows.
Yali Amit, a statistics professor who has long opposed Israel, told his machine learning and large-scale data analysis class he was canceling the exam as “a small contribution” to the nationwide demonstrations being held that day to oppose President Donald Trump and Elon Musk. In an email to his students, Amit said he would post the exam as a homework assignment and included a link to a sign-up site for the Chicago-area protest, which called to “STOP THE BILLIONAIRE TAKEOVER .”
“The country is in an emergency. The Trump administration is kidnapping people off the street, deporting them to foreign prisons, jailing and threatening to deport students who demonstrated in support of Palestinians,” Amit wrote in his email. “So, today, thousands across the country are demonstrating in a national day of action. As a small contribution to this day of action I am cancelling the midterm and calling you, if you are able, to join the Chicago demonstration announced here” (emphasis in the original).
“Marching against this dangerous authoritarian administration is of utmost importance!” he added in the email.
Amit’s email comes as the Trump administration pushes for reforms at universities that have failed to rein in anti-Semitism, taught politicized course materials, and maintained legally questionable DEI policies. The administration has not spared the University of Chicago from that push—last month, the Department of Health and Human Services cut nearly $6 million in federal grants to the University of Chicago.
Amit isn’t the first professor at a prestigious higher education institution to cancel classes to protest the Trump administration this semester. Several Columbia University professors in March canceled classes in solidarity with Mahmoud Khalil, the student activist and foreign national in ICE custody. One even gave students an automatic “A” for a canceled midterm.
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Comments
The University of Chicago used to be one of the good ones. Its economics department gave us Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell.
Do the students who wanted to learn data analysis get their tuition money back?
Can they sue?
Maybe, maybe not. But it would only be exercising due diligence for potential employers to ask where new hires went to school….
another call from omars troops to be violent
gives 9 11 off a holiday for them to celebrate
This deadbeat should be hit with disciplinary action for his failure to do essential elements of his actual job.
Merely being fired is not sufficient punishment.
The clown should be blacklisted.,
This would seem to violate U. Chicago’s principle of Institutional Neutrality (although the professor would claim that he was expressing his political views as an individual, and not claiming to speak for the University). Nonetheless, I would hope that U. Chicago tries to sanction him for interfering with a key university function in refusing to give students a final exam.
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