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School Video Shows Off-Duty Officer Putting His Knee on a Girl’s Neck

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School Video Shows Off-Duty Officer Putting His Knee on a Girl’s Neck

A police officer in Kenosha, Wis., has resigned from his place as a college safety officer after video circulating on social media confirmed him restraining a 12-year-old scholar by placing his knee on her neck.

Surveillance footage launched on Friday by the Kenosha Unified College District exhibits a struggle on March 4 between two college students within the cafeteria at Lincoln Center College. Within the video, faculty district staff intervene, together with a Kenosha Police Division officer working off-duty for the varsity district. The officer, Shawn Guetschow, has been an officer with the Kenosha police for 4 years, in accordance with the division.

The video exhibits Mr. Guetschow restraining the scholar and kneeling on her neck for a minimum of 20 seconds. The woman’s identify has not been launched.

Drew DeVinney, an legal professional for the woman’s father, Jerrel Perez, mentioned that Mr. Perez took his daughter to the emergency room that night time to be evaluated for neck accidents and concussion signs. Mr. DeVinney mentioned she was present process continued remedy and neurological analysis to find out the extent of her accidents and that she was given a physician’s be aware allowing two weeks of medical go away whereas she recovers.

“She’s humiliated, she’s traumatized,” Mr. Perez mentioned at a information convention this week, including that daily, she tells him, “‘Daddy, I don’t need to go to highschool.’”

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Mr. DeVinney famous that the maneuver by Mr. Guetschow mirrored the one utilized by Derek Chauvin within the homicide of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020.

“The officer continued to push his knee into Jerrel’s daughter’s neck as she instructed him she couldn’t breathe,” Mr. DeVinney mentioned.

This week, Mr. Guetschow resigned from his place with the varsity district, citing the “psychological and emotional pressure” it positioned on his household, and “the shortage of communication and or help I’ve acquired from the district.” The police division has not mentioned whether or not it could take motion in opposition to the officer and didn’t reply to a request for remark. Efforts to succeed in Mr. Guetschow’s police union had been unsuccessful.

In 2021, Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin signed a package deal of payments involving using drive, together with a invoice prohibiting using chokeholds by regulation enforcement. However even with out this laws, Mr. Guetschow’s actions represent extreme drive, Mr. DeVinney mentioned.

“I need to see this officer get charged, as a result of if it was me or one other mum or dad or any grownup that put their knee on a child, that might be abuse,” Mr. Perez mentioned. “Why does that make him any completely different?”

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Mr. DeVinney mentioned that the household intends to deliver a lawsuit in opposition to Mr. Guetschow, the police division and the varsity district. The household can also be working to get the police division to dismiss a cost of disorderly conduct in opposition to the scholar.

In a press release just a few days after the incident, the division mentioned that it was “investigating the incident in its entirety whereas being cautious to not make conclusions based mostly off a small piece of knowledge shared on social media.”

The varsity district declined to remark pending doable litigation.

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Education Officials Placed on Leave in Trump’s Sprawling Effort to Curb D.E.I.

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Education Officials Placed on Leave in Trump’s Sprawling Effort to Curb D.E.I.

The Education Department placed a number of employees across its offices on administrative leave on Friday, part of a wave of what staff members and union representatives say are dozens of suspensions at the agency in the Trump administration’s purge of diversity efforts.

In letters obtained by The New York Times, the department notified affected employees that they would lose access to their email accounts, but would continue to receive pay for an indefinite period.

The department cited guidance from the Office of Personnel Management, which had directed agencies to submit plans for shedding staff associated with diversity, equity and inclusion efforts by the end of the day on Friday.

Brittany Holder, a spokeswoman for the American Federation of Government Employees, said the union estimated that at least 50 department employees had been suspended.

The range of people affected led several of those who had been placed on leave to conclude that they had been ensnared in a governmentwide effort to stamp out diversity initiatives, despite what they described as little more than superficial contact with mentors offering general coaching on workplace inclusivity.

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The move was an early indication that Trump officials had begun looking to root out any D.E.I. efforts believed to be conducted “in disguise” after they had already moved to shutter offices explicitly focused on those efforts earlier in the week. It came as dozens of agencies raced to comply with an order issued by President Trump on his first day in office directing them to dismantle diversity offices and remove staff affiliated with them.

But according to interviews with those placed on leave and people familiar with the notifications, the department appeared to have cast a wide net, suspending people whose job titles and official duties had no connection to D.E.I., and whose only apparent exposure to D.E.I. initiatives came in the form of trainings encouraged by their managers. One of the training workshops that employees speculated may have led to their being flagged took place more than nine years ago.

It was not immediately clear what criteria the department used to identify those placed on leave, or which of those employees’ activities might fall under the broad order issued by Mr. Trump to roll back D.E.I. initiatives across the federal government. The Office of Personnel Management memo laying out the purge of diversity programs last month called on employees to report any efforts to “disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language.”

A spokesman for the department did not respond to requests for comment.

Subodh Chandra, a civil rights lawyer who is representing one of the staff members placed on leave in the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, said his client was “utterly baffled” by the move. The staff member, a West Point graduate and an army veteran, was appointed to the employment, engagement and diversity and inclusion council formed under Mr. Trump’s previous administration by his political appointees, Kimberly Richey and Kenneth Marcus. A former prosecutor, he has received “perfect” ratings in the last three evaluations, Mr. Chandra said, in his role overseeing a two-state regional office.

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The committee continued under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., but it has not met since December, Mr. Chandra said, and certainly not since Mr. Trump took office.

“My client served his country with distinction in the U.S. Army during and after 9/11,” Mr. Chandra said. “He happens to be a white male, although that shouldn’t make any difference, whether he or anyone else is a victim of a McCarthyist witch hunt. He should not be a victim of retaliation for opposing discrimination against anyone. And I hope the administration will stop misguided persecution of those serving our country faithfully. We are contemplating all of our legal remedies.”

Another staff member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of their tenuous position, said that diversity trainings were seen as routine around the department, with one two-day session having drawn around 300 people over several years.

Several staff members said that Denise L. Carter, who was named acting education secretary until Mr. Trump’s nominee to lead the department is confirmed, had urged colleagues to attend sessions, offering them at no cost to participants as recently as last year.

The recipients of the letters giving notice of suspensions included staff members who worked in the department’s Federal Student Aid office and others in the civil rights office. The department also notified all employees in the civil rights office who had joined recently and were still in a probationary period that their positions would be reviewed to determine their necessity.

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The letters told employees that the decision to place them on leave was “not being done for any disciplinary purpose,” and was “pursuant to the president’s executive order.” But they did not specify how long the leave would last, or why those employees had been identified for suspension.

Through its first two weeks, the Trump administration has repeatedly said it would temporarily pause certain programs and sideline some federal workers while it conducts more comprehensive reviews that could inform staff reductions and bureaucratic changes. But it has done so haphazardly, leading to unintended disruptions and stoking anxiety among many federal workers.

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Trump’s Orders Could Drain Millions From Universities, but Few Protest Openly

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Trump’s Orders Could Drain Millions From Universities, but Few Protest Openly

The opening weeks of President Trump’s second term have cast America’s campuses into turmoil, with upheaval that threatens to erode the financial foundation of higher education in the United States.

As the administration orders the end of diversity programs and imposes cuts to foreign aid, university presidents and their lawyers fear that millions of dollars in federal funding could ultimately vanish. Some research projects, including many connected to the U.S. Agency for International Development, have been suspended, and program directors have made plans for layoffs.

But universities have largely been quiet. Professors and administrators alike seem wary of provoking a president who has glorified retribution and has already started to tighten the funding spigot. Staying out of the spotlight, some reason, is prudent.

Those who have spoken have often relied on carefully calibrated letters and statements, noting that they are watching but hardly offering any overt opposition. In some instances, researchers and campus leaders have been pressured into silence by a government that has demanded they not speak to reporters as money remains bottled up.

“It’s a hard time and it’s an uncertain time and the combination is nearly paralyzing,” said Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, which counts more than 1,600 colleges and universities in its membership.

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The uncertainty, Dr. Mitchell said, has created “reluctance to speak out for fear of repercussions,” a phenomenon he described as “a rational fear.”

The White House’s threat last week to freeze trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans posed a major risk to universities, though the plan’s legal fate has been thrown into doubt. Other orders, like ones suspending foreign aid and insisting that federal money not go toward diversity, equity and inclusion work, are still convulsing campuses.

On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump and others now in his administration crusaded against a cadre of pre-eminent schools, despite the president being an alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania and Vice President JD Vance holding a law degree from Yale. But the early policy pushes are striking at campuses far beyond the Ivy League.

That includes public research universities that are the pride of many state systems and that are, in some cases, integral to the Feed the Future initiative at U.S.A.I.D. The project, whose website has been offline for days, promotes global food access. But it is built around “innovation labs” at universities in the United States, many of them juggernauts in red states, like the University of Georgia and Mississippi State University.

The program, which has spent billions over the years, has effectively been on hiatus as Trump administration officials conduct a broad examination of American aid abroad.

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“Reviewing and realigning foreign assistance on behalf of hardworking taxpayers is not just the right thing to do, it is a moral imperative,” Tammy Bruce, the State Department spokeswoman, said in a statement announcing the pause. The department claimed last week that it had already “prevented” at least $1 billion in “spending not aligned with an America First agenda.”

As the administration trumpets the closing of the nation’s checkbook, universities have hardly harnessed their own bully pulpits. Despite outrage over campus protests, tuition levels and particular professors and courses buffeting the higher education industry, many individual universities retain enormous sway and good-will in their communities and states.

For now, though, schools seem to be reluctant to try to tap into that. Mississippi State, which leads a Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Fish under a $15 million grant, declined to comment. A spokesman for the state’s higher education board said officials were “aware of the temporary pause” and would “continue to monitor this directive.”

And the University of Georgia, home to the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Peanut, similarly referred an inquiry about the pause in aid to the state’s higher education system. The system, led by Sonny Perdue, Mr. Trump’s agriculture secretary during his first administration, did not respond to an interview request.

An inquiry to U.S.A.I.D. about claims that it had directed researchers to avoid speaking to the news media went unanswered. The agency, founded in 1961, has itself become a cauldron of worry as top officials have been placed on leave and Elon Musk, who is seeking to cut $1 trillion in federal spending, declared that the administration would close it. (It is not clear whether Mr. Trump or Mr. Musk have such authority.)

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On Monday, after agency employees assigned to the Washington headquarters were told to stay home from work, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that he was serving as the agency’s acting administrator.

Some of the silence and hesitancy from campuses stems from confusion. In recent days, university lawyers have scrambled to decipher terse stop-work orders, in part to determine whether schools can use their own money to continue research projects that had been receiving federal support.

If legal, such an option might be financially feasible for only some universities. Federal dollars are seen as the only practical, long-term option for most projects that have relied on backing from Washington.

In the 2023 fiscal year, the federal government gave universities almost $60 billion for research.

During a Faculty Senate meeting that was streamed online on Monday, Jennifer L. Mnookin, the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, urged professors to “hold off” on optional expenses so the university could help ensure that “you’re making smart choices.”

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“The transition has created for us an enormous amount of uncertainty, combined with fast-moving and changing information,” she said. “It’s generated some potentially quite significant threats to important aspects of our mission, as is true for our peer institutions nationally.”

Universities across the country are for now using a subtle playbook to try to stave off funding losses: beseeching their congressional delegations to intervene, and sometimes deploying Republican-aligned lobbyists across Washington.

“These are different times,” said former Senator Trent Lott, a Mississippi Republican who became a lobbyist after he left the congressional leadership. “I’m sure everybody is trying to figure out how it’s going to play out and what they need to do. Different team in town and people are going to have to figure out how to deal with it.”

Schools braced for changes after Mr. Trump’s election, including to the nation’s academic research landscape. The first weeks of the new administration have nevertheless been jarring, said Jeffrey P. Gold, the president of the University of Nebraska.

“The abruptness and the scale of the messaging have been the largest elements of surprise,” he said in an interview, adding that the outcomes of many projects could be harmed if more delays and cuts materialize.

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Some critics of Mr. Trump’s budget-cutting ambitions have tried to borrow language from the administration’s rhetoric to make their points.

Mark Becker, the president of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, said the possible end of U.S.A.I.D. support for research risked the nation’s stature and competitiveness abroad.

We urge the administration to resume the critical work of U.S.A.I.D. to assure American prosperity and security,” he said. “It is by empowering our nation’s scientists to tackle global challenges that we will secure U.S. leadership for decades to come.”

Mr. Becker is one of the few academic leaders applying such explicit public pressure against a specific set of potential cuts.

But congressional Democrats have assailed the chaos that they say the administration has unleashed in higher education.

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Representative Nikki Budzinski, a Democrat whose district includes the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said she had been “in regular contact with the university since the freeze and, now, the miscommunication about the freeze.”

“It’s really, truly creating panic across the board,” she added. In a statement, the university said its Soybean Innovation Lab, which works to improve agriculture in 31 countries, was notified recently that funding had been paused. It has received more $50 million since 2013.

Republicans expect that voters, especially in conservative states, will have some tolerance even for cuts that affect their communities.

“Probably most Nebraskans are in favor of looking for greater efficiencies,” said Tom Osborne, a Republican who coached the University of Nebraska’s football team to three national championships and later served three terms in Congress. “But sometimes it can pinch a little bit here and there.”

Mr. Osborne predicted that changes to some programs would probably go unnoticed by many voters.

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“Looking at the papers and talking to people here,” he said, “I have not heard a whole lot of conversation about it.”

But the consequences already feel acute at some campus offices. At Iowa State University, the compensation of at least 11 people is tied, to some degree, to a U.S.A.I.D. grant that promotes curriculum modernization in Kosovo and that grew out of a decade-old “sister-state” partnership between Iowa and Kosovo.

“We are not to put forth any efforts on these activities,” said Curtis R. Youngs, a professor in the Department of Animal Science who works on the project.

The grant is worth $4 million over five years. “By U.S.A.I.D. standards, that’s not a huge grant,” Dr. Youngs said. “But it’s a sizable grant from our perspective.”

Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

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Lawsuit Accuses University of California of Allowing Race to Factor in Admissions

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Lawsuit Accuses University of California of Allowing Race to Factor in Admissions

Over the last few months, University of California officials have boasted that they have admitted the most racially diverse class ever to their sprawling system.

They have managed to do this, they say, despite a 28-year-old state ban on considering race in college admissions, known as Proposition 209.

But a lawsuit filed on Monday by a newly formed group takes aim at the university’s efforts, accusing the California system of cheating by secretly restoring race-conscious admissions in defiance of the state law. The group, Students Against Racial Discrimination, was organized by a persistent critic of affirmative action.

The lawsuit accuses the California system of harming all students by gradually bringing back racial preferences in recent years to stem public outrage over the low number of Black and Hispanic students at the state’s top universities.

Stett Holbrook, a spokesman for the University of California system, said the university had not yet been served with the legal papers, so it could not reply directly to the lawsuit. But he said that after the ban, it had adjusted its admissions practices to comply with the law, and it collected undergraduate students’ race and ethnicity for statistical purposes only, not for admission.

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Students Against Racial Discrimination was founded last fall by a group that includes researchers and Asian American anti-affirmative action activists. Among them is Richard Sander, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has made something of a crusade of fighting affirmative action.

The group’s approach emulates the strategy of Students for Fair Admissions, the organization that defeated Harvard and the University of North Carolina in the landmark 2023 Supreme Court ruling that rejected affirmative action in college admissions nationwide.

The lawsuit accuses the University of California system of violating protections against racial discrimination in Title VI of federal civil rights law and the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

It asks the court to order the U.C. system to select students “in a color-blind manner” and to appoint a court monitor to oversee admissions decisions, to “eliminate the corrupt and unlawful race and sex preferences that subordinate academic merit to so-called diversity considerations.”

Last month, the U.C. system reported that Black undergraduate enrollment was up by 4.6 percent and Latino enrollment by 3.1 percent across the 10 campuses. It contrasted those increases with the many other universities that have struggled to maintain Black and Hispanic enrollment in the wake of the Supreme Court decision.

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Over nearly a decade, the data show a steady but small rise in African American freshman admissions systemwide — to 7,139, or 5 percent, for the fall of 2024 from 4,358, or 4 percent, in 2016. The percentage of Hispanic students has also risen slightly, from a much bigger base. (About 6 percent of Californians are Black and 40 percent are Latino.)

The university said it had increased undergraduate enrollment overall and the diversity of the incoming class last fall by capping out-of-state enrollment and through funding support from the state, especially at the most in-demand campuses. It also targeted recruitment and college preparatory courses at disadvantaged students and eliminated the SAT and ACT testing requirement.

John Aubrey Douglass, a senior research fellow at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at Berkeley, said that while he was not an insider on admissions practices, “my sense is that admissions is highly regulated and careful to stay clear of Prop 209 restrictions, and the Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action.”

Much of the increase in enrollment can be explained by the demographic pool of applicants, and their growing readiness for college as they take required courses and as their high school graduation rates increase, he added.

California voters adopted Proposition 209, which banned the use of race in admissions at public universities in the state in 1996, becoming the first of nine states to take similar action.

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The first class at Berkeley’s law school after Proposition 209 was approved had only one Black student, and he had been admitted before the referendum. The situation at Berkeley was so dire that it became the topic of a “Doonesbury” cartoon, in which Joanie Caucus, a Berkeley law graduate, arrives at her reunion to be told that not much has changed except, “Well, we no longer admit Black people.”

Dr. Sander said in an interview that he believes that Berkeley reverted to race-conscious admissions almost immediately.

If so, the impact has been small. The number of African American freshmen admitted to Berkeley has risen to 683, or 5 percent, in the fall of 2024 from 464, or 3 percent, in 2016.

Janet Gilmore, a spokeswoman for the system’s flagship, the University of California, Berkeley, said the institution was complying with the law.

“U.C. Berkeley is committed to admitting and enrolling the best and the brightest students and we do so in compliance with all state, federal and university policies and laws,” she said.

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In the fall of 2006, after the passing of Proposition 209, only 96 of the 4,800 freshmen expected to enroll at U.C.L.A. were Black, the lowest figure since 1973. Twenty of those were athletes, according to a front-page article at the time in The Los Angeles Times. The Black students became known as “the infamous 96,” and administrators blamed the situation on the ballot measure. (Four more Black students were admitted on appeal.)

U.C.L.A. also buckled to public outrage, the complaint says. U.C.L.A. referred questions about the case and its admissions to the larger university system.

In the lawsuit filed on Monday, the complaint cites Tim Groseclose, a member of a faculty oversight committee for U.C.L.A. admissions during that period, who said U.C.L.A.’s chancellor had made admissions more subjective. Dr. Groseclose, now a professor of economics at George Mason University, believed that “this new policy became a subterfuge for reactivating racial preferences in admissions,” the complaint says.

Dr. Sander argues that affirmative action is detrimental to Black and Latino students who are less prepared and struggle academically. His theory, known as “mismatch,” argues that students will do better on measures like grades, persistence in science and math and graduation rates at a college that better matches their preparation. The complaint says that the system has become more and more guarded about such data, shutting down websites that provided it.

But many experts have disputed the mismatch theory, especially after Justice Antonin Scalia commented in 2015, during oral arguments in an affirmative action case at the Supreme Court, that Black students might be better off going to “slower-track” colleges where they could succeed.

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Matthew Chingos, then a vice president of the Urban Institute, challenged Justice Scalia’s comments at the time. Research has shown that students with similar credentials who attend different colleges are more likely to graduate from the more selective colleges, Dr. Chingos noted.

And his analysis found that the mismatch conclusions were based on “at best very weak evidence for this claim and no evidence of any connection to affirmative action policies.”

The complaint filed on Monday allows that “the effects of Proposition 209 upon U.C. and its students were complex and are still debated by academics.” And the evidence it offers is sometimes contradictory.

To bolster the point that the system is cheating, the complaint says statistical analysis shows an improbable parity between the Black and Hispanic admission rates and the overall admission rate. And it says that Dr. Sander’s analysis of publicly available U.C. law school data shows that Black students with relatively low LSAT scores and grade point averages have 10 times as good a chance to be admitted as a white or Asian American student with similar credentials.

But the complaint also notes that Black and Latino graduation rates across the system were “much higher” in 2006 than in 1998. It argues that is because students “cascaded” down to lesser colleges where they could compete.

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And it concedes that there were other factors at play that could explain the increase in Black and Hispanic students — not that they were being favored in the admissions office, but that more were applying and getting in as the university system responded to Proposition 209 by putting more resources into helping them.

Susan C. Beachy contributed reporting.

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