The funding has been distributed to eight research teams from the Office of the Vice President for Research, according to a Campus Reform article.
Dr. Zachary Marschall, editor in chief of Campus Reform, says the education watchdog learned the half-million project is part of the university’s multi-million dollar initiative to fight racism.
“What we want our audience to be aware of,” he tells AFN, “is how much a public university is spending money and resources into this singularly minded and, you know, misguided initiative. It is a complete waste of taxpayer money."
One of the projects is called “Racial Capitalism and Anti-Racism in Kenyan Conservation.”
What does that mean? According to the UM press release, the goal of that project is to “identify how and why racialized conservation injustice occurs and how it can be prevented in the future.”
Another project is called "Ubuntu-AI: Empowering Design Collaborations Across the Black Atlantic with Artificial Intelligence.”
That course's goals include investigating "how AI might reverse its potentially debilitating impact on Black artisans.”
Reacting to the lengthy, nice-sounding titles, Marschall says it’s like the projects were thrown together by combining nouns and adverbs with an emphasis on minorities.
“And you get an academic project that, somehow, it gets funding,” he says.
