Free Republic

It’s not nuclear war. It’s not global warming. It’s closer to home. Once, America had the world’s best educated workforce. Today, our average American high school graduates are two and a half years behind those in top-performing countries. The curriculum of our colleges is at the level of high schools in top-performing countries. The U.S. has “gone from being the world’s best educated workforce to the least well educated in the industrial world: an existential crisis,” according to a National Center On Education and the Economy (NCEE) policy brief, co-authored by Marc Tucker. Having the lowest level of basic skills...

The Rutgers University professor who was under an internal review after posts she made on Facebook following the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, writing “Let’s hope today’s events inspire others" will teach this fall. ... The Rutgers University professor who was under an internal review after posts she made on Facebook following the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, writing “Let’s hope today’s events inspire others” will teach this coming fall. A source provided Campus Reform with screenshots of the Facebook posts, which were made by Rutgers University Writing Program Assistant Teaching Professor Tracy Budd in the...

Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts has fired 10 employees following anti-Israel protests at the school earlier this spring. “College leadership has made the difficult decision to eliminate ten staff positions to help us realize our necessary cost savings,” announced an Aug. 13 email sent by the college’s leadership. “We are grateful for the contributions these dedicated staff members have made to the College, and we have made arrangements to support them in this transition.” School President Jay M. Bernhardt initially announced the plans for the staff reduction on June 18, citing dropping enrollment in the college. Bernhardt attributed the falling...

The Coalition for Carolina recently noted that UNC-Chapel Hill has dropped out of the top-10 “average adjusted faculty salary” rankings for the 2023-24 academic year, as measured against a select group of peer institutions. The implication from the announcement is that this is a bad thing. “We should demand to see our faculty in the top 10 in salaries, respect and shared governance,” the progressive organization declared. “It is concerning, because the quality of our faculty determines the quality of the University and the quality of education that students receive.” Complaints about faculty salaries from within the academy often imply...

Last year the Republican-controlled state government in Florida passed legislation requiring its public universities to do what are called “post-tenure reviews” on all their tenured professors every five years, as part of an effort to eliminate what Governor Ron DeSantis called “deadweight” and “unproductive tenured faculty.” The bill not only limited the ability of professors to protest termination decisions, it was also aimed at eliminating “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs across the board. At the University of Florida the first round of tenure review has now produced some startling numbers, literally proving DeSantis’ claims. The report said that, out of...

A professor has won a multimillion dollar settlement after exposing retaliation he faced for challenging woke policies at a California community college. Matthew Garrett, a former history professor at Bakersfield College recently won a $2.4 million dollar settlement after being terminated from his teaching post for allegedly making “insulting,” “untrue” and “personal” comments about black students and professors during a committee meeting organized by the Kern Community College District (KCCD). [snip] Garrett’s lawsuit named several defendants, including KCCD board president John Corkins, who said of Garrett and a number of his colleagues, “that’s why we put a rope on them...

Near the end of this academic year, two elite universities announced the elimination of one of the most prominent symbols of the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) apparatus on campus: the dreaded “diversity statement” for academic positions. If you were an academic on the job market during the past decade, you couldn’t escape this ubiquitous requirement. It seemed nearly every job opening, from assistant professor of history to dean of an engineering college, asked applicants to write a statement discussing their experience with DEI and their commitment to advancing it. In some cases, hiring committees reviewed the diversity statement first,...

After the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at his Saturday campaign rally, one Baltimore, Maryland professor is claiming that she and other Black Americans justifiedly wish that the attempt to kill “evil” Trump had been successful. In a July 15 opinion piece published by NewsOne, Dr. Stacey Patton, a professor at Morgan State University, wrote of hypotheticals surrounding a successful attempt, stating that Black Americans “are wishing for the death of evil”. The piece, titled “‘Is He Dead?’ Why Black People Are Not Grieving The Failed Assassination Of Donald Trump”, explores how Black Americans would supposedly have responded...

A professor at Rutgers University posted to Facebook after someone tried to kill former President Donald Trump, writing “Let’s hope today’s events inspire others.” A source provided Campus Reform with the Facebook posts, which were made by Rutgers University Writing Program Assistant Teaching Professor Tracy Budd in the hours after someone tried to assassinate Trump during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. ”Let’s hope today’s events inspire others,” Budd said in one post. ”They shot his wig. Sad,” Budd wrote in another. Budd’s Facebook is set to private, but her cover picture contains a poster at a protest that read: “Capitalism...

The decision by Florida governor Ron DeSantis in 2023 to oust the radicals controlling the state’s tiny liberal-arts college, New College of Florida, has elicited frenzied reactions from the global Left. The effort by a democratically elected government to bring political balance, educational excellence, and fiscal sanity to a failed public institution of 800 students is seen as nothing less than a collegiate March on Rome. The reaction has rather proven the point: The leftist control of higher education has become so totalitarian that even the slightest hint of deviance is viewed as a mortal threat to the revolutionary project....

University hired 6 new DEI deans in 1 year The Massachusetts Institute of Technology added more than 1,200 new administrative/support staff positions in less than a decade – including six “diversity, equity, and inclusion” assistant deans in one year, a College Fix analysis found. Meanwhile, between 2013 and 2022, undergraduate student enrollment remained basically flat. The administrative hiring increase coincides with concerted efforts by the research university to “advanc[e] diversity, equity, and inclusion” throughout its programs. During the 2022-23 school year, the most recent data available, the university employed 6,693 full-time administrators and support staff, according to information the school...

In its first year, the Biden administration launched a fast-track Scientific Integrity Task Force, intended to “lift up the voices of Federal scientists of many perspectives and backgrounds” and put scientific integrity “paramount in Federal governance for years to come.” The task force took a “whole-of-government” approach to ensuring the scientific integrity of federally funded research and included representatives from the 21 federal agencies that maintain scientific-research programs. For those with a high pain threshold, the final report may be seen here. Prominent among the move’s critics have been the Council on Governmental Relations (a consortium of research universities) and...

Young people, women, and Democrats reported the largest drops.Confidence in higher education has plummeted to its lowest level ever according to the results of two new national polls commissioned by FIRE and conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. In two AmeriSpeak panels representative of the U.S. household population, we asked Americans: “How much confidence, if any, do you have in U.S. colleges and universities?” This question was first asked in February and then again in May, and its wording is similar to a question posed by Gallup in Summer 2023 when Americans were asked about their confidence in...

A respected philosophy professor who plunged to his death amid an investigation over historical sexual assault allegations led an “extremely kinky, illicit drug taking” double life behind closed doors, according to an escort who entered into a “sex contract” with the 77-year-old promising to “make her daddy happy.” Dr John Forge, an honorary professor at the University of Sydney who authored numerous books on morality and ethics, was found dead at the base of Cataract Gorge in Launceston, Tasmania on May 2, hours after a detective knocked on his door to request he attend a police station for questioning. It’s...

We learned about the complexities and mysteries of artificial intelligence, the uses of innovative statistical analyses that could improve policing, and the Confucian roots of Xi’s totalitarianism. We discussed the early modern origins of ideological movements, Milton’s translation of Homeric epic into a Christian drama of rebellion and salvation, and Moby Dick’s critical analysis of corporatism. We explored the religious roots of modern politics and the influence of Hebraic constitutionalism on the Founding Fathers. We reflected on Shakespeare’s dialectical examination of politics in his Roman dramas. This was no academic conference. It was a job interview. Faculty searches often take...

Law school deans from over 100 higher learning institutions across the country signed a letter calling on students to disagree with people respectfully, while upholding the rule of law and championing the U.S. Constitution. The American Bar Association’s (ABA) Task Force for American Democracy unveiled the letter, which was signed by 119 deans, including Kerry Abrams of the Duke University School of Law; Paul Brest of Stanford Law School; Jennifer Gerarda Brown of Quinnipiac University; Jens David Ohlin of Cornell Law School; Heather K. Gerken of Yale School of Law; Risa Goluboff of the University of Virginia School of Law;...

For almost 400 years America has seen its citizens educating their children and themselves, though both the scope, structure and quality of education has changed somewhat during that time. For much of the history of the United States, education of children took place primarily at home, often along with private schools for some, and locally managed and supported schools for others. Education included the general ethos of Christianity and Biblical morality as well as academic subjects. The New England Primer and later, the nation-wide McGuffey's Readers (120+ million copies) were the primary instruments of education, and in helping to form...

A Columbia Law Review article that argues Jews "capitalized on the Holocaust to create a powerful narrative that monopolizes victimhood" was subject to an atypical editing process that omitted "a large number of Jewish students," according to sources familiar with the process. While prospective pieces are typically available for the Law Review's roughly 100 members to assess ahead of publication, the "Nakba" piece was handled behind closed doors by a group of roughly 30 student editors, according to Columbia Law School professor Joshua Mitts. While that group edited the piece "over several months," Mitts said, other editors—including Jews—were unaware even...

On Friday, May 31, alumni descended on Columbia University's Manhattan campus to celebrate their class reunions. In addition to eating and drinking, the festivities included several panel discussions featuring professors and administrators...In the audience, according to two attendees, were several top members of the Columbia administration. Given the sensitivity of the subject—the eruption of anti-Semitism on campus in the wake of Hamas's Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel put a national spotlight on the school, and Columbia recently settled a lawsuit with a Jewish student who accused the school of fostering an unsafe learning environment—the administrators' presence made sense.The administrators...

When accepting the Heritage Foundation’s 2024 Salvatori Prize on May 22, Chris Rufo remarked that state legislatures in red states such as Oklahoma need to start exercising oversight of their public universities. He’s right. “There is an endemic rot of indoctrination, politicization, and intellectual intimidation,” Joel Gardner observed on this website in 2020, “that is eviscerating the historical purpose and nature of our institutions of higher learning.” This remains true today and not just in elite institutions. The rot is widespread even in public universities in Oklahoma, one of the reddest states in the nation. Fortunately, with Republicans in possession...