Free Republic

It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry over the demand by U.S. college students for “trigger warnings” to alert them that something they’re about to read or see in one of their classes might traumatize them—apparently a new trend, according to the New York Times. Ditto for off-beat campus sculptures, placards displayed by protesters and more. Poor dears. These are the same kids who would riot in the streets if their colleges asserted any form of in loco parentis when it comes to such old-fashioned concerns as inebriation and fornication. God forbid they should be treated as responsible,...

Academia is hell. In the latest higher-education fad, students want "trigger warnings," according to The New York Times. It appears that some students are so fragile that they want university staff to protect them from big bad ideas. Students around the country say they want "explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them or, as some students assert, cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in victims of rape or in war veterans." An Oberlin College draft -- now "under revision" -- for trigger warnings suggested faculty "be aware of racism,...

From the Nazis to the Stalinists, tyrants have always started out supporting free speech, and why is easy to understand. Speech is vital for the realization of their goals of command, control and confiscation. Basic to their agenda are the tools of indoctrination, propagandizing, proselytization. Once they gain power, as leftists have at many universities, free speech becomes a liability and must be suppressed. This is increasingly the case on university campuses. Back in 1964, it was Mario Savio, a campus leftist, who led the free speech movement at the Berkeley campus of the University of California, a movement that...

Some scholars are actually entertaining the possibility that America might be overregulated and, of course, you can find them at the Federalist Society. “All three branches have caused it and done nothing to stop it,” Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at American University, said at the Federalist Society’s recent conclave at the Mayflower Hotel here in Washington. American businesses must comply with about 4,000 new federal regulations per year, William Kovacs of the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, noted at the Federalist Society meeting. This is in addition to the 200,000 U.S. government rules that have already been put in...

Mike Rowe the star of “Dirty Jobs,” his long running series on Discovery Channel sought out and performed a huge variety of jobs that actually got his hands – and the rest of him – dirty. He showed what others do every day to keep the country running with plenty of food, fiber and mobility. Mike was seen on a dairy farm shoveling cow manure, inside an Air Force transport plane fuel tank; in factories and farms cleaning out sumps; slaughter houses dealing with offal; crawling into places that a claustrophobic (not homophobic) like me would panic in. I only...

A college education historically has been the route to a better-paying job and a satisfying career. But currently, more than half of college graduates are “underemployed” in jobs that don’t require a college degree. Why the growing disconnect? Certainly, the main reason is our economy’s slow recovery. But I believe another reason is the lack of substantive learning in many students’ college studies. And while not unique in this regard, the failure to prepare students to adequately perform in degree-required jobs is evident in the undergraduate curriculum at the University of Minnesota. Every year Vascular Solutions hires recent college graduates...

In the U.S., the politics of the left versus the right rolls on with the predictability of traffic jams at the George Washington Bridge. It's a lot of honking. Until now. All of a sudden, the left has hit ramming speed across a broad swath of American life—in the universities, in politics and in government. People fingered as out of line with the far left's increasingly bizarre claims are being hit and hit hard. Commencement-speaker bans are obligatory. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice withdrew as Rutgers's speaker after two months of protests over Iraq, the left's long-sought replacement for...

As commencement approaches, this year’s graduating seniors can look forward to pep talks about how employable humanities majors are. “Upon graduating from college, those who majored in the humanities and social science made, on average, $26,271 in 2010 and 2011, slightly more than those in science and mathematics but less than those in engineering and in professional and pre-professional fields,” Vartan Gregorian writes in the Carnegie Reporter. “However, by their peak earning age of 56 to 60, these individuals earned $66,185, putting them about $2,000 ahead of professional and pre-professional majors in the same age bracket.“ “Further, employers want to...

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...