Skip to main content

Two graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin were recently dismissed from teaching assistant roles after sending a message to students titled “mental health and violence in Gaza.” In the Nov. 16 message, Parham Daghighi and Callie Kennedy wrote that they wanted to acknowledge “the mental health implications of the current escalation of violence in Gaza” and clarify that they do not “support the university’s silence around the suffering many of our students, staff, and faculty are experiencing on campus.”Less than a week later, on Nov. 22, both graduate students received a letter from a dean letting them know that they were “effective immediately … relieved of this work assignment” and “will not be reappointed as a TA next semester.”


 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It had taken a couple of weeks of negotiation but Joe finally got the deal he wanted and drove out of the dealership in his brand new Explorer. His girlfriend knew his real motivation for buying a utility vehicle was because he loved to go four-wheeling on Saturdays with his friends and felt a little conspicuous when he was always doing the "riding" and never the driving. Joe arrived and ran into her house as excited as a nine-year-old boy with his first bicycle. Mary was working at her computer as Joe came up behind her, gave her a big kiss on the cheek and said, "C'mon, c'mon, let's go! Let's go for a ride." They jumped into the Explorer and headed out of town. After a few minutes, Joe pulled over to the side of the road and invited Mary to drive. She got behind the wheel and found that she really enjoyed the sensation of sitting up so high with a great view of everything ahead of her. Joe instructed, "Hang a left here" and as Mary follow...
Post a Comment
Read more
No one knows exactly why 29-year-old Iranian costume design student Mahtab Savoji turned up dead in the Venice lagoon last week. Her body, nude except for a string of pearls around her neck, got tangled up between two water taxi drivers near the Via Cipro dock in Venice Lido on January 28. After fishing the corpse out of the lagoon, a Venetian coroner determined that the woman—then unidentified—had been strangled to death at least 24 hours before her body was thrown into the murky water. Her lungs did not contain water from the Venice lagoon, and her body showed no apparent signs of violence other than strangulation. But no one knew who she was or why she was there. Meanwhile, 250 miles away, the day after the mysterious body floated to the surface of the lagoon, Savoji’s friends in Milan—where she had shared an apartment with two hospitality workers from India since November—were starting to get worried. Savoji hadn’t been answering her cellphone, which wasn’t like ...
Post a Comment
Read more
The owner of a large southwest Alabama car dealership derided as "Taliban Toyota" by a competitor has been awarded $7.5 million in damages after a jury trial for his slander claim. Iranian-born Shawn Esfahani, owner of Eastern Shore Toyota in Daphne, Alabama, sought $28 million in compensatory and punitive damages from Bob Tyler Toyota, claiming employees at that Pensacola, Florida-based dealership falsely portrayed him as an Islamist militant to customers. "The feeling I received in the courtroom for the truth to come out was worth a lot more than any money anybody can give me," Esfahani told Reuters on Tuesday. Esfahani's lawsuit said that Bob Tyler sales manager Fred Kenner told at least one couple considering buying from Eastern Shore Toyota in 2009 that Esfahani was of Middle Eastern descent and was "helping fund the insurgents there and is also laundering money for them." Esfahani, a naturalized U.S. citizen, fled his native Ira...
Post a Comment
Read more