Free Republic

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Organizers of a proposed charter school named after the president have rescinded the honor after the Obama Administration informed them of a long-standing White House policy disallowing the use of the president's name while he is in office. The group designing the Barack Obama Community Charter School also learned a state law prohibits naming institutions for a living person without his or her permission. The new name for the proposed K-8 is the Staten Island Community Charter School. One of the organizers, Lorna Harris of Silver Lake, said committee members are disappointed about having to change...

Tracking for Success Bethany Stotts, December 15, 2009 At a recent American Enterprise Institute (AEI) conference on “Increasing Accountability in American Higher Education,” panelists argued that the key to increased postsecondary accountability lies with better tracking-systems for student learning outcomes and increasing use of standardized tests. “For those of you who don’t know it [a student unit record system] basically is a data system maintained at the state or system level which contains one record per student containing information about enrollments, behaviors, and so on,” explained Peter Ewell, Vice President of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS)....

Social Media Facilitates Iran Student Protests Sarah Carlsruh, December 14, 2009 On Monday, December 7th—Iran’s national Student Day—thousands of students at Universities across Iran commemorated the 1953 murder of three student protestors of monarch Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. While demonstrations occur on this day every year, they have always represented an anti-American sentiment; this year they protested the government. Tehran University has long been a center for government protests and this Student Day—with green banners flying amidst tear gas and anti-riot police batons—was no different. Protests occurred on campuses across the country. The anti-government Green Movement, led in large part...

Some might recall my thread from a few months ago where my head was about to explode because my professor just pushes the concept that America = Bad and Communism = Good. It goes a lot deeper than that. So...this morning he poses this question to us (I feel like I am back in my first year here) but this is what I am dealing with. QUOTE: Colonialism and Imperialism For many countries that experienced the benefits/brutal horrors of European/American colonialism/imperialism, a communist system is an attractive form of government. Many of these colonized people were stripped of their ancestral...

<p>HAMMOND, Ind. - A former Purdue University graduate student convicted of threatening to kill President George W. Bush and others in Internet postings has been sentenced to more than four years in prison.</p> <p>Thirty-eight-year-old Vikram S. Buddhi, an Indian national who was living in West Lafayette, was sentenced Friday in U.S. District Court in Hammond to 57 months in prison and 3 years of probation.</p>

Zaytuna College, which plans to be the first accredited Muslim college in the United States, is set to open next fall in Berkeley, California. The college has been hailed as a victory for moderate Islam, a place to promote religious understanding by "blending traditional Islam and American culture and establishing a permanent place for the religion in American society," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. But Zaytuna College may not be as moderate as it seems--or moderate at all. The college's founders, Hamza Yusuf Hanson and Zaid Shakir, are similarly lauded as even-keeled Muslims who, according to the Chronicle,...

First, Colorado State University voted to ban concealed firearms on campus. Then the University of Colorado went a few steps further and cracked down on another nefarious threat: Nerf guns. Plans for a student-led game of humans vs. zombies took a hit after campus security officials discovered that players intended to use the popular orange-and-green toy weaponry. Simulated guns, even those that shoot spongy Nerf balls, are banned at the University of Colorado. (snip) CU spokesman Bronson Hilliard said students cooperated fully, replacing the Nerf guns with balled-up socks and even taking it upon themselves to hang fliers in dormitories...

New evidence about the 2007 Virginia Tech killings shed new light on the arrogance and hypritical stance of University leaders. The murder of 32 students was the worst mass shooting in U.S. history until the Ft. Hood massacre last month and remains the worst school shooting ever on U.S. soil. Virginia Tech is no stranger to violence. They had two shootings in the 2006-2007 school year. A student worried about the possibility of another shooting asked school officials to reconsider their "no guns" policy. School officials not only a href="http://www.buckeyefirearms.org/node/3669" target="_blank">rebuffed and mocked that request, they also cheered the defeat...

Employers and career experts see a growing problem in American society — an abundance of college graduates, many burdened with tuition-loan debt, heading into the work world with a degree that doesn't mean much anymore. The problem isn't just a soft job market — it's an oversupply of graduates. In 1973, a bachelor's degree was more of a rarity, since just 47% of high school graduates went on to college. By October 2008, that number had risen to nearly 70%. For many Americans today, a trip through college is considered as much of a birthright as a driver's license. Marty...

As the Climate-gate controversy continues to grow, amid charges of hiding and manipulating data, and suppressing research by academics who challenge global warming, there is one oft-repeated defense: other independent data-sets all reach the same conclusions. "I think everybody is clear on the science. I think scientists are clear on the science ... I think that this notion that there's some debate . . . on the science is kind of silly," said President Obama's Press Secretary, Robert Gibbs, when asked about the president's response to the controversy on Monday. Despite the scandal, Britain's Met, the UK’s National Weather Service,...

Defunct Republican Club Limits Oxy's Political Discourse After a dwindling presence on campus, the Republican club ceased to exist two years ago and has not been restarted, to the dismay of several students and faculty. Devon Puglia '08, a registered Democrat, was the President of the Republican club from '06 - '08. He said, "[The club] was very small and informal during my time, and by my senior year it was just me." He described Oxy professors and students being hostile to political opinion that didn't conform to the school's prevailing liberal ideology. "I'm sure there are plenty of...

College Thought Police Enforce Global Values By Mary Ann Collins December 7, 2009 "The way to redefine a word is to get the new definition repeated as often as possible.... This, so far as words are concerned, is the public opinion battle for belief in your definitions, and not those of the opposition. A consistent, repeated effort is the key to any success with this technique of propaganda." (L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology)[1] "A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all...

According to a university colleague, former president of Harvard and current White House economist Larry Summers once asked for help to "f--- up" one of the school's conservative professors.

Story here. The suspect is named Abdulsalam Al-Zahrani.Ironically, his victim, Professor Richard Antoun is described as "a caring and gentle man who spent his life trying to dispel stereotypes about different cultures, especially Middle Eastern cultures"

There’s an irony surrounding the academic discipline of anthropology, at least in its contemporary form: it’s a subject devoted to the study of man, yet it is profoundly misanthropic. In recent years, anthropologists (and sociologists) have learned to caricature every human impulse (even – or rather, especially – the benevolent and charitable) as imperialist, paternalist, or worse. Efforts to curtail female genital mutilation, for example, are cast as colonialist, as is Doctors Without Borders, an organization that has done much to improve the lives of the downtrodden. It has been instructive, therefore, to observe the Academic Left’s response to President...

There's encouraging news on that other Washington effort to force Americans into a government-run system. The White House plan to drive private lenders out of the market for student loans is igniting a backlash on campus and Capitol Hill. the administrators have been afraid to speak as the Department of Education pressured them to drop private lenders and embrace the department's own Direct Lending (DL) program. The pending bill, which has passed the House but is stalled in the Senate, would ban private lenders from making federally guaranteed loans after July 1, 2010. Congress has already enacted regulations in recent...

ClimateGate Professor Calls G-Warming Skeptic 'A**hole' on Live TV By Noel Sheppard Created 2009-12-05 12:05 A professor at the university in the middle of the ClimateGate [0] scandal called global warming skeptic Marc Morano "an a**hole" on live television Friday. This marvelously came moments after Andrew Watson, a professor at the University of East Anglia, told the BBC host moderating the discussion that the controversy surrounding e-mail messages obtained from his school's computers is "a real setback not because there's anything wrong with the science, but because the character assassination and the temperature of the debate which you can just...

Textbook Hope & Change Malcolm A. Kline, December 4, 2009 A new political science textbook, American Democracy Now, actually makes a stab at balance and, to a surprising degree, can claim some success. The attempt to level the academic playing field is particularly noteworthy since the publisher is McGraw-Hill, which has been scored for inaccuracies in its textbooks by reviewers in Texas and California—the two largest markets for texts. Moreover, the publisher promoted it as the first textbook written by an all-woman team, a politically correct distinction that suggests a similar treatment of civics. Even the title is reminiscent of...

Wash U Targets Conservative Students Allie Winegar Duzett, December 4, 2009 Washington University in St. Louis is charging conservative students over $800 for vandalism they did not commit. Several red hammer-and-sickle images were found spray-chalked onto the campus sidewalks. Campus Gulag reports: The university, failing to find out exactly who is responsible for the spray-chalking, is holding the [Young Americans for Liberty] students responsible for it. The Campus cops have repeatedly used words like felonious property damage (because the ‘damage’ is in excess of $750, which is a Class D felony in Missouri) in order to intimidate the students and...

U.N. Undersecretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, Sha Zukang, back to camera, talks to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, right, as Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed, left, and Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh, second from left, look on at an international conference on technology and climate change in New Delhi, India, Thursday, Oct. 22, 2009. (AP Photo/Manish Swarup) (CNSNews.com) – Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, is calling on Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) to conduct hearings on a possible conspiracy between some of the world’s most prominent climatologists to, among other things,...

The Obama administration might think Climategate is a nonevent, but on Monday, Pennsylvania State University announced it was launching an investigation into the academic conduct of Michael Mann, director of the school's Earth System Science Center. Yesterday, it was announced that Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, would step aside while his university conducts an investigation. With so much fraud being exposed in the academic community that studies and promotes global-warming theories, an example has to be made of someone. There are dozens of researchers at other institutions involved in this...

President Obama's climate czar, Carol M. Browner, and White House spokesman Robert Gibbs might think that Climate-gate is a nonevent, but on Monday Pennsylvania State University announced that it was launching an investigation into the academic conduct of Michael Mann, the school's Director of the Earth System Science Center. And Tuesday, Phil Jones, the director of the Climatic Research Unit at Britain's University of East Anglia, announced that he would stand aside as director while his university conducted an investigation. Dozens of researchers at other institutions could soon face similar investigations. . . .

Coase’s FCC Legacy Bethany Stotts, December 1, 2009 At first blush the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)—which regulates “interstate and international communications” using “radio, television, wire” and “satellite”—doesn’t seem like much of a free-market mecca. But panelists at a recent conference held at George Mason University (GMU) argued that the FCC was significantly affected 50 years ago by Ronald H. Coase’s noted article, “The Federal Communications Commission.” In this paper Coase argues that, with regard to broadcast radio, “the government and its historians based their regulatory views ‘on a misunderstanding of the nature of the problem’” and “goes on to present...

Marvin Olasky has touched upon a brilliant meme in terms of academia. As the universities and colleges have been hijacked by the Left, perhaps it is time to consider charter colleges. It would certainly improve the quality of education, considering the generation of know-nothings schools are producing these days. Cross-posted at RudyCarrera.com.

<snip>2.4 Diagnosis #4: The Attraction of Magnificent Academic Trusels. A "trusel" is an idea or a finding that is widely perceived to be true, but which is largely useless (or even of negative value). (The idea that a truth may lack value may be disturbing, but it is true, although it is not a trusel and probably will not be thought to be magnificent.) A "Magnificent Academic Trusel" (MAT) is a trusel that has been widely acknowledged for its intellectual content (explicitly or implicitly), but without a corresponding amount of attention being given to its utility or even to its...

Title IX Expansions Bethany Stotts, November 20, 2009 During a November 10 press call on “Women Scientists and American Competitiveness,” speakers suggested that Title IX should be used to focus on “educational equity” and not just athletic equity. One speaker stressed, in particular, the importance of reaching out to federal agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes for Health (NIH), the Department of Defense (DOD), and the Department of Energy (DOE) for additional grant money. (Predoctoral women received 63% of the NIH’s awards in 2007, but only 25% of “competitive faculty grants” that same year, reports...

National Academy of Title IX Malcolm A. Kline, November 20, 2009 As we’ve reported over and over again, no matter how unscientific their data, elites continue to insist that women are underrepresented in the sciences. Now, the national Academy of Sciences is publishing a whole reading list sure to tilt the playing field even further towards regulators idea of a Title IX utopia. NAS is even throwing in finger puppets of Marie Curie and George Washington Carver, two scientists who managed to achieve all that they did without the aid of the divisive rules. Among the titles that NAS is...

Bert Chapman, a faculty member at Purdue University, has drawn a lot of resentment and protest since writing a blog last month. Mr. Chapman blogs at Conservative web page Townhall.com. His views are extremely conservative, and his blog posting of Oct. 17, 2009 is no different. In the post, Mr. Chapman shows his opinion on homosexuality, citing his disagreement with the lifestyle based upon religious principle. Throughout the article, he brings in statistics on the costs of treating AIDS, the problems of tainted blood supplies, the forcing of medical personnel to treat STDs. All of these he seems to throw...

| The formal introduction: Mike Adams is a professor at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington and a syndicated columnist. The informal: He is probably the most outspoken Christian conservative professor in the United States now teaching at a state university. He's gone from passive writing to fiery prose, and from an incendiary lifestyle to one centered on true ideas. Q: Tell us about your 1.8 GPA in high school. I can't believe you brought that up! That was off limits! Q: How hard did you have to work to get a 1.8? My goal was to graduate with a 1.0,...

Left-wing media matters Cliff Kincaid, November 17, 2009 A professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Robert W. McChesney has said that “media reform” should be part of the march toward socialism in America and that capitalism has to be dismantled “brick by brick.” Van Jones, the ousted communist “Green Jobs Czar” of the Obama Administration, served with McChesney on the board of Free Press, a George Soros-funded organization, in 2007 and 2008. Despite its socialist orientation, Free Press is financially supported by extremely wealthy individuals such as George Soros, the leftist billionaire, and Marcy Carsey, one of the creators...

It's no secret higher-education costs have risen three times faster than inflation in the last 30 years. For perspective, President Obama proposes to nationalize one-sixth of the economy to address "skyrocketing health-care costs," which have gone up only twice as fast as inflation in 30 years. But even as more middle-class American families are priced out every year, ivory-tower school officials maintain a bachelor's degree is still a good investment — a bargain, they say — based on the gap between the average lifetime earnings of high school and college graduates. U.S. Department of Education data show the difference is...

More city kids are graduating from high school, but that doesn't mean they can do college math. Basic algebra involving fractions and decimals stumped a group of City University of New York freshmen - suggesting city schools aren't preparing them... "These results are shocking," ... "They show that a disturbing proportion of New York City high school graduates lack basic skills." During their first math class at one of CUNY's four-year colleges, 90% of 200 students tested couldn't solve a simple algebra problem... Only a third could convert a fraction into a decimal. The lack of math skills means the...

A fuming Gov. Deval Patrick is taking on University of Massachusetts officials who now say they must allow a convicted terror bomber to speak on campus because of “academic freedom” - even after angry cops thought the event had been stopped. “Gov. Patrick is outraged and extremely disappointed at reports that the University of Massachusetts has again extended a speaking invitation to Raymond Luc Levasseur,” said Patrick spokesman Joe Landolfi. The governor last night called on UMass brass to “review” the abrupt about-face. Levasseur, now under federal parole in a Maine halfway house, was the radical leader of United Freedom...

From: DGiannotti@eth.state.ma.us FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE November 6, 2009 Contact: David Giannotti, Communications Division Chief 617-371-9505 Ethics Commission's Enforcement Division Alleges that Town of Harvard School Superintendent and a Former School Committee Chairman Violated the Conflict of Interest Law Allegedly Used Official Positions to Secure Reimbursement of Private School Tuition by Harvard Public Schools The State Ethics Commission's Enforcement Division, in two Orders to Show Cause ("OTSC"), alleged that Harvard Superintendent of Public Schools Thomas Jefferson ("Jefferson") and former Harvard School Committee Chairman Paul Wormser ("Wormser") violated G.L.c. 268A, the conflict of interest law, by using Jefferson's official position as Superintendent,...

Former University of South Alabama Professor Barry Simpson, 44, was sentenced today by U.S. District Court Judge Joan A. Lenard to 63 months’ imprisonment, to be followed by three years of supervised release. Simpson was previously convicted of attempting to transmit obscene material to a minor using the Internet. As part of a child exploitation investigation, an undercover FBI agent posed as a 13-year-old girl in an Internet chat room. In the chat room, Simpson approached the undercover agent and initiated a conversation. During the course of the conversation, Simpson transmitted clothed pictures of himself and sexually explicit material to...

Supporters of Darwin’s theory continue to distinguish themselves on America’s college campuses—not for their reason and logic, but for their incredible ill manners and an almost pathological inability to engage in civil discussion. Last week, a factually-challenged attack on intelligent design was published in The Nevada Sagebrush, the student newspaper at the University of Nevada, Reno. Nothing new in that; I see ill-informed articles on intelligent design all the time. But after my colleague Rob Crowther posted a short comment suggesting that readers might actually want to hear from intelligent design proponents themselves (imagine that!), the Darwinist thought-police came out...

The Obama administration is trying to strong-arm America’s colleges and universities into complying with a bill that hasn’t been signed into law yet. The bill, which would replace current subsidized-student-loan programs with a government-run system, passed the House last month, but its fate in the Senate is far from clear. Sen. Tom Harkin, chairman of the Education Committee, plans to use the budget-reconciliation process to pass the contentious bill with a simple majority, but The Hill newspaper reports that it might not even have 51 votes. The bill is far from a fait accompli, making the administration’s pressure campaign all...

<p>EUGENE, ORE. – When I began examining the political affiliation of faculty at the University of Oregon, the lone conservative professor I spoke with cautioned that I would “make a lot of people unhappy.”</p> <p>Though I mostly brushed off his warning – assuming that academia would be interested in such discourse – I was careful to frame my research for a column for the school newspaper diplomatically.</p>

I had a somewhat disturbing conversation yesterday with Steve Fussell, the senior VP of human resources at pharmaceutical maker Abbott. His basic message, which I may pursue in a column down the road, was that Abbott is going to be hiring tons of people for high-paying jobs over the next decade, but not many of them will be Americans because we study the wrong things in college and we're not willing to work overseas. The key quotes: 1) "I hate to say we don't have the world's best universities. We may have the best minds, the best liberal arts education....

High school student Chad Farnan, 17, speaks at a campaign fundraiser for Shawn Black, a GOP candidate for the 70th Assembly District, earlier this month. The legal group that represents Farnan, Advocates for Faith & Freedom, has been ordered to pay $19,688 in legal fees. SANTA ANA – In a legal twist that challenges the notion of what a prevailing party is, a federal court clerk on Friday awarded $19,688 in court-related fees to the attorneys who represented high school teacher James Corbett, sued two years ago for making anti-Christian comments in class. Milli Borgarding, the deputy in charge of...

Government watchdogs are blasting taxpayer-funded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities that send college professors on free vacations and pay for programs on topics like the "cultural significance of the circus poster" -- just a few items on an eye-popping list of questionable NEH projects.

JACKSON, Miss. -The University of Mississippi has shortened one of its fight songs to discourage football fans from chanting "the South will rise again" during part of the tune, which critics say is an offensive reminder of the region's intolerant past. However, some fans have continued to recite the chant at the end of the song, "From Dixie With Love," despite the change made last week at the chancellor's request. The Ole Miss band performs the medley before and after games. Earlier this month, the Ole Miss student government passed a resolution suggesting the chant be replaced by the phrase,...

A dangerous idea has been gaining momentum within education-reform circles: Too many young people are going to college. Since Charles Murray took up this line in a series of Wall Street Journal op-eds and then in last year’s book Real Education, the idea has neared the mainstream. Though only directly addressed in a few words, this idea haunts nearly every page of Matthew B. Crawford’s otherwise excellent book Shop Class as Soulcraft, which made it up to number 17 and was listed as an editors’ choice on the New York Times Bestseller List. An article in National Review’s recent special...

Online (Re)Education Bethany Stotts, October 21, 2009 The newsmagazine Diverse: Issues in Higher Education ranked Walden University among the top ten of its “top 100 Graduate Degree Producers” in a number of categories this year, many rankings of which were for Master’s degrees in Education among minority populations such as the African-American, Hispanic and Asian communities. Diverse also placed Walden in 4th place for its number of “total minority” Masters degree graduates in Education. But what, exactly, is Walden teaching the nation’s future minority teachers? Walden faculty members featured at the University’s 2009 Social Change Conference offered a clue. In...

A recent survey of college professors by the Chronicle of Higher Education found that nearly 90% thought that the students they teach were not very well prepared in reading, doing research and academic writing by their high schools. At the same time, many college admissions officers ask students for 500-word "personal statements," which have become known as "college essays," and many high school English department spend a lot of their writing instruction on this sort of effort. History departments and English departments are assigning fewer and fewer term papers, so it is not surprising that lots of students are arriving...

A skirmish between powerful teachers’ unions and President Barack Obama over nearly $5 billion in education spending is shaping up as a preview of the battle to come over No Child Left Behind in Congress early next year. But the tables are turned: now the unions are worried that Obama, a Democratic ally, is going to be just as tough on them as President George W. Bush, a longtime foe.

School wants $52,000 for expenses related to suit against former professor. The University of Colorado is asking for more than $52,000 from Ward Churchill to recover costs the school incurred fighting a lawsuit filed by the former ethnic studies professor. The total tab, filed in Denver District Court last week, includes individual expenses ranging from $2 for courthouse parking to $22,095 for "in-trial video and visual exhibits." "The university believes that what we've filed is both fair and appropriate for some of the expenses that we incurred during the trial," said Ken McConnellogue, spokesman for the University of Colorado system....

InsideHigherEd.com writes: In the last few years, a conservative legal organization [Ed. -- Mark Levin's Landmark Legal Foundation] has filed complaints and extensive information requests to at least 11 colleges and universities with regard to labor centers that conduct research about and offer programs for unions. ... The [American Association of University Professors'] statement questioned the basis for the Landmark actions and said that the association was trying to undercut the labor centers by waging an ideological attack on them. Further, the statement noted that colleges and universities have a range of offerings for different organizations in society, and that...

Three-steps-from-crazy-cat-lady WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan is teaching at Harvard. Our spies report: "Peggy's a ridiculous, hilarious person to speaking with any authority on anything at all." They've provided us with her awesome quotes. We're presenting them emoticon-contextualized them for you...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwvUz0mtrOk&feature=player_embedded# This video found on michellemalkin.com is a good example of how propaganda comes out of our academia....^^^ To understand all these scientific and social FACTS that come at us from our learned and so-called intellectual eschelon, you have to understand the POLITICS of academia. As a young student striving for an education/poli-science degree, I worked at the university in the school of engineering as assistant to the dean . Our professors were HOT on anything to do with NASA at the time, because it meant mega-bucks from federal grants for the space program. It was required that our professors...