Academia

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7595896

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/26019

Birzeit University is no longer what it once was. The transformation has been gradual and, therefore, easily rationalized, but the result has been the hollowing out of a university that once led the Palestinian struggle.

It was an ordinary Tuesday morning when Israeli forces arrived at Birzeit’s campus. The semester was drawing to its close. Students were still inhabiting the familiar, minor dramas of university life: the arithmetic of grades, the quiet panic induced by syllabi reread too late, the low-level guilt attached to courses in which effort had not quite matched ambition. These anxieties, rehearsed and recognizable, belonged to a calendar that assumed continuity. The morning, like most mornings, appeared to agree with that assumption — until it didn’t.

The soldiers entered with confidence. They were under direct orders to disrupt and induce some shock into the body of a university with a long history of tit-for-tat with Israeli military authorities.

Birzeit had its golden age at the moment of its inception, or shortly thereafter. It lasted for a decade or two, depending on who is doing the remembering. It was an era defined less by institutional stability than by the university’s repeated closures by the Israeli military; classes reappeared in borrowed houses, in improvised rooms, in spaces whose chief qualification was that they could be made to disappear. Teaching became an exercise in logistics as much as in pedagogy, knowledge passed on under conditions that assumed interruption as the norm rather than the exception.

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7595897

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/26012

I am a student at the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Labor and Urban Studies and I am graced to be a part of the great struggle being led by students against imperialist and domestic state terror. From the encampments for Palestine to the walk outs against ICE, the students inheriting this world are exclaiming the loudest that things must change. They are leading the charge to counter the lies of the state, and their bravery is inspiring even more people to take to the streets to fight back.

As a product of this historic moment, as an active participant within it, and as someone who knows we can’t do it alone, I implore the labor movement to add all of its forces to the struggle against ICE and to use its power to shut society down, because this is your struggle too. The strikes on January 23, even though they were not a complete shut down of the city of Minneapolis, nonetheless sent shockwaves throughout the nation and chills down the spines of Trump and his pathetic cronies in ICE and the CBP. January 30 was a continuation of this popular enthusiasm; however, the labor movement was far less involvement.

Living in this era of genocide, the kidnapping of the president of Venezuela and the bombing of residential areas for the sake of advancing the interests of oil companies, and the brazen kidnapping of people by state agents like the days of slavery has left immigrants, people of color, and the working class of the U.S. and the world scared, uneasy, anxious, and pissed off.

We are pissed off that our lives are so callously thrown away, that we and our loved ones can find ourselves dehydrated and dying in a holding cell after being snatched off the street heading to school or trying to find work.

We are pissed when we’re forced to watch merchants in our neighborhoods who are like family to us be snatched and disappeared by the state.

We are pissed off and scared when we are forced to watch our neighbors be shot in the face for resisting state oppression.

We are pissed off that the Trump administration thinks it can throw its will around, crushing our communities and stripping our right to speak and organize and that is why we are in a moment hyper-organization.

Black youth like myself are tired of walking around in fear of the police, of ICE, and state violence. Minneapolis showed the way forward in 2020, refusing to accept another police murder, setting off the massive 2020 Black Lives Matter uprising. And now, Minneapolis is rising up again, and inspiring the country to do the same. Grassroots committees of community members in Minneapolis are organizingICE patrols and a nationwide student movement is taking to the streets to express solidarity and carry that same fight into their communities.

The mass shutdown and protests in Minneapolis, which were supported by many unions, revealed the power of solidarity and self-organization. It is because of that power that Trump terminated Gregory Bovino in an attempt by the administration to placate the movement by offering a despot on a slab in hopes that we will stop and that his administration may continue its offensive across the country. This is further illustrated by Trump’s “Border Czar” Tom Homan’s decision to withdraw 700 ICE agents from Minneapolis — an objective retreat by the state due to the movement’s strength.

We forced the state to acknowledge our power and their fear of it, showing us just how powerful the combination of the youth movement and the labor movement can be and giving us insight on how much more we can win if we can deepen that alliance.

Now is not the time to be scared or hold back. Now is not the time for the labor movement to limit ourselves to statement of support. Students of higher education, like those at CUNY, should join the wave of student walkouts happening across the country. Other Unions across the country like the PSC at CUNY and the United Federation of Teachers, should join the call for mass shutdowns in solidarity. Together, we can raise the call to kick ICE out of MInneapolis, to kick them out of our schools, and to abolish them and the Department of Homeland Security that terrorizes working class communities and communities of color.

Now is the time for us to acknowledge our strength and seize on its potential. Now is the time for labor to fully commit itself to the movement and follow the lead of the courageous students and community members taking up fiercely the fight against the cowards of ICE. Now is the time for bigger and louder labor contingents in our marches.

Now is the time to call for a nationwide strike against state terror to defeat Trump and his big bad state with the power of our alliance.

The post Open Letter from a CUNY Student to U.S. Labor Unions: Join the Fight Against State Terror appeared first on Left Voice.

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Opening paragraphs:

A randomised controlled trial (RCT) is a type of clinical trial that has long been the gold standard for establishing the efficacy and safety of health interventions. The prospective design of RCTs, combined with random allocation of patients to a real-world intervention, minimises bias and allows for claims of causality. However, a trend is emerging, particularly within the growing field of digital health and artificial intelligence (AI)—the application of the RCT or clinical trial label to studies that fundamentally do not meet its core definition criteria. The Lancet Digital Health, like many journals, has observed an influx of manuscripts that describe retrospective data analysis or simulation-based studies yet use the RCT classification. Authors increasingly cite papers from high-impact journals, including those describing AI for cardiac ultrasound and large language models (LLMs) for physicians’ performance on diagnosis and patient care tasks, to justify this semantic drift. Although these cited studies are methodologically sound, comparing different simulations or algorithms under controlled, randomised conditions blurs a crucial line defined by established clinical trial guidelines.

The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) provides a clear and essential definition: a clinical trial is a research project that prospectively assigns people or a group of people to an intervention to study the relationship between a health-related intervention and a health outcome. This emphasis on prospective assignment to a health intervention on people is non-negotiable for a true clinical trial. A retrospective analysis of existing data, or a study that randomises participants to different AI simulations without prospectively assigning a real-world, patient-facing therapeutic intervention, is fundamentally different. The study can be important and innovative, but by definition, it is not a clinical trial.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7465064

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/22873

New York, NY – Over 150 students from across the city gathered in Washington Square Park to demand ICE get out. The citywide walkout was organized by Get Free NYC, with the NYU Students for a Democratic Society helping to organize NYU students for the walkout.

NYU students gathered at the Kimmel Center first floor steps at around 11 a.m. to prepare for the walkout. The steps are a historic protest location at NYU, with many protests taking place on them throughout the past few decades. However, half of the steps were closed down in October 2023 in response to Palestinian liberation protests taking place there. The steps then underwent construction for over two years before finally unveiling new seating pods for students and the glass doors in front of the steps no longer being see-through. The construction served as a way to deter students from protesting, but it did not stop organizers from starting the walkout at this location.

At around 11:20, students held up signs reading, “ICE is the modern day fugitive slave patrol” and “We refuse to be silent.” Afterwards, students marched outside of Kimmel Center chanting “One -we are the students! Two – we won’t stop fighting! Three – ICE out our cities! Now! Now! Now! Now!” and “No ICE! No KKK! No racist USA!” Students marched towards the Washington Square Arch.

Students chanted “How do you spell terrorist? I-C-E” and “No ICE! No Wall! Legalization for all!” as more students from around the city continued to gather at the location of the protest. Dozens of journalists took photos of the rally.

JJ Briscoe, an organizer with Get Free NYC, opened up the rally. He highlighted the brutality of ICE, detaining and deporting millions of people from the country, separating families and murdering innocent people.

Zaara Ahmed, an organizer with the NYU Students for a Democratic Society, then spoke to the necessity of getting organized to fight back against ICE. She states that it is not enough to come out just for this rally but to continue coming out and to continue organizing.

#NewYorkNY #NY #ImmigrantRights #StudentMovement #SDS #ICE

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