The College Fix

Dean specializes in the study of disease factors in pregnant women

In a fall welcome email to students, a public university dean criticized pro-life laws, the SCOTUS affirmative action ban and the movement against critical race theory in schools.

“Over the summer, we witnessed the SCOTUS decision and its domino effect on other higher education policies in some states [and] the continued passing of anti-abortion laws that are increasingly impacting women’s access to safe and effective healthcare,” University of Massachusetts Amherst School of Public Health Dean Anna Maria Siega-Riz told entering students.

Dean Siega-Riz (pictured) also spoke of “the attempts to reframe how slavery affected the lives of Blacks in this country” in her speech, posted to the UMass Amherst website Tuesday.

“All you need to do is hop on social media and you’ll immediately be aware of the obstacles we face to fulfill our school’s mission to ‘serve, inspire and improve the quality of life and health equity,” she continued.

An economist whom The College Fix featured earlier this month discussed on economist Glenn Loury’s Substack the controversy over Florida’s African American history curriculum standards supported by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

“The critics essentially claim that presenting examples of the agency enslaved blacks used for their own benefit would whitewash US slavery,” Robert Cherry, economist and professor emeritus at Brooklyn College, wrote on the blog. “To these critics, only a persistent and unending presentation of its horrors is appropriate, regardless of what realities those presentations elide.”

However, “during the first half of the twentieth century the slavery literature was awash with presentations that minimized the system’s brutality, and in response [historians denying slaves’ agency] overcorrected,” Cherry continued.

“A new generation of [left-wing] historians, such as Herbert Gutman and Eugene Genovese, emphasized how black slaves utilized agency to seek to make a better situation out of the very limited resources offered to them,” Cherry wrote.

Welcome letter author Dean Siega-Riz specializes in reproductive and perinatal epidemiology (disease factors analysis) and maternal and child nutrition, according to her faculty bio.

In May, UMass Amherst paid $677,250 for 15,000 abortion drug mifepristone, according to a contract obtained by The College Fix through a public records request.

MORE: Most states introduced measures against critical race theory

IMAGE: University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health

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