Free Republic

A former member of the radical 1970s group the Symbionese Liberation Army says the University of Illinois has told him he'll lose his job teaching there. James Kilgore said Tuesday that he was told earlier this month that the university will not let him teach classes after this semester. He said he was not told why, but he suspects the university was pressured by donors or people with political connections.

Campus Reform on Tuesday reported that Brent Terry, professor at Eastern Connecticut State University who teaches creative writing, told his class that a 2014 GOP victory in the Senate will turn America into a very different kind of country and that colleges will start closing up. A current student, who disagreed with the Terry, who according to Campus Reform, wants to remain anonymous recorded the audio of Terry’s rant against Republicans accusing Republicans that they will not and do not want blacks, Latinos, old and young people to vote and Terry incorrectly stated that it is because they are all...

Imagine walking into a college class Monday morning and finding the professor ranting against those 'racist, misogynist, money-grubbing people' known as Republicans. Welcome to intro to creative writing at Eastern Connecticut State University (ECSU). If the GOP takes control of the House and the Senate in 2014, Professor Brent Terry warned, ‘colleges will start closing up’ and America could very well revert back not to 1955, but to 1855:' There are a lot of people out there that do not want black people to vote, do not want Latinos to vote. Do not want old people to vote, or young...

Journalism, which was ranked as the worst job in America last year, inched up a notch to finish at number 199, just ahead of lumberjack on CareerCast’s latest list of the top 200 best and worst jobs in the U.S. for 2014. By “worst jobs,” they are referring to employment opportunities. This is a reversal of last year when lumberjack came in at 199, after finishing at number 200 in 2012. Neither job has a very bright future, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimating that logging positions will drop by 9% by 2022, and reporters by 13%. Logging has...

If you love literature, you might find it easier to actually buy it than take a course in it. “According to the most recent comprehensive report on staffing by the Modern Language Association and the Association of Departments of English, published in 2008, English lost 3,000 tenure-track positions from 1993 to 2004, roughly 10 percent of the total,” Marc Bousquet writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “Even that understates the case, since more than a third of the new tenurable hires have not been in traditional literary fields but in composition, rhetoric, theory, cultural studies, new media, and digital...

Oberlin College professor Eunjung An sued her employer last month, alleging that Oberlin failed to protect her from Ali Yedes, a fellow French Department professor whom An alleges has harassed her and threatened her life. ... According to Prof. An, Prof. Yedes — who also serves as the faculty adviser of Oberlin’s Muslim Students Association (MSA) and as a “religious life affiliate” for the Islamic Center of Cleveland (ICC) — has “engaged in a pattern of severe or pervasive unwelcome harassment directed at Plaintiff and other female employees at Oberlin” since January 2006. An alleges that last August, Yedes told...

And about time. “I’d rather talk about Luddite liberals and insufferable progressives,” Pepperdine historian Gordon Lloyd said at the Philadelphia Society’s annual meeting. For its part, the Philadelphia Society provided a receptive audience for the topic. The Society was founded in 1964 by conservative intellectuals in the wake of the Goldwater defeat. Thus, the word Philadelphia in the title is a reference to the spirit of 1776 and many of its annual meetings take place outside the City of Brotherly Love. Lloyd, at this year’s meeting in Chicago, dismissed the “libertarian Left” as “a perverse Libertarianism.” Born in the West...

An economist from Troy University offered an explanation for why so many of his peers failed to anticipate the 2008 recession that shows no sign of ending. “We’re not, in economics, very good at forecasting,” Scott Beaulier told an audience at the Philadelphia Society’s annual meeting in Chicago last weekend. “Sixty economists predicted 2.8 percent growth in 2008,” Beaulier reminded the crowd at the Renaissance Hotel in downtown Chicago. Obviously, they were a bit off, yet none were chastened. “What that missed prediction led to was a doubling down,” Beaulier said. “The Right said it came from too much government.”...

This weekend, the University welcomed mothers from all over to celebrate Moms Weekend. ... While the daytime activities are innocent enough, when the sun sets over Champaign, the scene of Moms Weekend changes completely, as moms who have not been out in 10 years begin to roam the streets with their children in hopes of a reliving their college days. Similar to Dads Weekend, students often take the weekend with their moms as an opportunity to show them how they really spend their weekends: When students aren’t exclusively at the library during the weekend, the local bars on campus are...

One of the fascinating dichotomies in academia is that its denizens, who more often than any other group, profess themselves obsessed with society, are more likely to show themselves absorbed with self. “The egological turn may be a reaction to the overtheorization of humanistic studies that dominated the late 20th century,” Theodore Ziolkowski, a professor emeritus at Princeton, writes in The Chronicle Review. “But it could easily have a similar negative effect if it simply replaces theory with the preening self of the author.” In the March 21, 2014 issue of The Chronicle Review, Ziolkowski surveys some of this literature....

An Oberlin College professor has filed a lawsuit because, she claims, another professor on the Oberlin faculty has harassed her and created a hostile work environment for female employees for years. The plaintiff is Eunjung An, professor of French and cinema studies ... comparative literature professor Ali Yedes informed an unnamed Oberlin employee last year that he had helped his nephew obtain a student visa to the United States expressly to “stab and kill someone from his department.”.. Yedes serves as the school’s “Muslim Religious Life Affiliate (Islamic Center of Cleveland).” .. An’s lawsuit claims that Yedes has been engaged...

They pit employees against each other to maximize performance, set financial quotas and are adapting to a rapidly changing technological landscape. That sounds like a description of corporate executives, but it also applies to the illegal sex trade, according to a study published Wednesday by the Urban Institute in Washington. "Many pimps had a business savvy, and they knew what they needed to do to maximize profits," said Meredith Dank, the study's lead author and a former commodities analyst. "They saw themselves as managers, as business owners, as entrepreneurs." The conclusions are based on interviews in eight U.S. cities. The...

APALACHIN, N.Y. — The State University of New York's Broome Community College ... Warren had served as chairman of the community college's Criminal Justice and Homeland Security program. He also was a former police officer and New York state-certified criminal investigator.

Yet the liberal obsession with “academic freedom” seems a bit misplaced to me. After all, no one ever has “full freedom” in research and publication. Which research proposals receive funding and what papers are accepted for publication are always contingent on political priorities. The words used to articulate a research question can have implications for its outcome. No academic question is ever “free” from political realities. If our university community opposes racism, sexism, and heterosexism, why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of “academic freedom”? Instead, I would like to propose a...

As a group of students begins studying for a calculus exam, a white student turns to an Asian peer and says, “Hey, would you mind helping me solve this problem? It’s really difficult, but you can probably do it.” The Asian student agrees to help, but for some reason feels uncomfortable with the way the question was asked. Is the Asian student being oversensitive? Was the white student subtly and subconsciously displaying racial prejudice against Asians? Could both be true? According to Dr. Derald Sue, a professor of psychology at Columbia University, the Asian student may have been the victim...

A Dallas-based company that writes research papers, essays and other classroom assignments -- so students don't have to -- says it is doing so well that it has expanded its staff from just a few writers to more than 100 in the past year. The company bills itself as the one "students trust to write professional, in-depth and plagiarism-free essays that receive the highest grades for all levels of coursework...so they no longer have to face the burden of academic coursework." It says the writing is done for an "affordable" fee; and it has foreign writers on staff for non-American...

A Common Core-aligned elementary school homework assignment in a Jefferson County, Colorado school district tells children that by 2512, Kansas will be an oceanfront state, that the “Smokey” Mountains [sic] will become the “Smokey” Islands [sic], and that a sharp decline in the human population will take place, all due to man-made global warming.

Although the title of a panel at the Modern Language Association indicated it would be a forum for dissident Iranian artists, the panelists made few claims that the dictatorship there might dispute. Several panelists debated interpretations of contemporary Iranian art and film in a session entitled, “Media, Justice, and Revolution in Contemporary Middle East.” Only 15 people in attendance, including a moderator and three panelists. The panel featured Babak Elahi, an associate professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Pouneh Saeedi, a Trent University professor and Amy Motalgh of the American University of Cairo. Elahi analyzed an Iranian art website...

The high-profile bullying case of a black student has thrust San Jose State under an intense spotlight to improve the college experience for its minority students and diversify its predominately white faculty. But an analysis of demographic figures by this newspaper shows that a lack of racial diversity in academia runs wide and deep: The South Bay campus' faculty is more diverse than other major Bay Area universities and the state's two university systems. At San Jose State, 59 percent of the faculty are listed as white, although 10 percent of the professors didn't specify a race. The faculty at...

However if one truly wants to make such a big deal out of what we call the armed conflict which occurred in America from 1861 to 1865 , and if its historical accuracy and honesty that one truly seeks, then I think Douglas Southall Freeman is, perhaps, the truest to historical accuracy in coining the proper term . . .