Free Republic

A student is suing Occidental College in Los Angeles for expelling him after a female student allegedly sent text messages indicating she had wanted to have sex, arranged for a rendezvous, then one week later accused him of sexual assault. The case is the latest to follow the Obama administration’s new effort to crack down on campus rape. The plaintiff, who filed anonymously as John Doe, said the female student texted him asking if he had a condom, informed a friend she was “goingtohave ‘sex” (sic) and coordinated a route to his dorm. Police investigated and decided not to prosecute,...

Employment rates for college graduates are dismal. Aggregate student debt is staggering. But university administrative salaries are soaring. The campus climate of tolerance has utterly disappeared. Only the hard sciences and graduate schools have salvaged American universities' international reputations. For over two centuries, our superb system of American public and private higher education kept pace with radically changing times and so ensured our prosperity and reinforced democratic pluralism. But a funny thing has happened on the way to the 21st century. Colleges that were once our most enlightened and tolerant institutions became America's dinosaurs. Start with ossified institutions. Tenure...

Continuing their commitment to silence anyone who might stand in the way of their agenda, gay and lesbian groups are now beginning to criticize supporters who are thought to be insufficiently loyal. The most recent case involves Douglas Laycock, a University of Virginia law professor, who is married to the University’s president, Teresa A. Sullivan. A man with impeccable progressive credentials, Laycock has been a longtime supporter of gay rights and same-sex marriage—filing an amicus brief in the 2012 Supreme Court case, United States v. Windsor that urged the court to extend same-sex marriage benefits to every state in...

Colin CampbellMay 29, 2014Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg accused the entire Ivy League of liberal political bias during a particularly fiery commencement address at Harvard University Thursday. "It is just a modern form of McCarthyism," Bloomberg said of university "censorship" of conservatives. "Think about the irony: In the 1950s, the right wing was attempting to repress left wing ideas. Today, on many college campuses, it is liberals trying to repress conservative ideas even as conservative faculty members are at risk of becoming an endangered species" "And that is probably nowhere more true than it is here in the...

Public Records Inquiry Indicates Professor Lied to University About Middle East Trip 8 Groups Demand Investigation... San Francisco State University (SFSU) Professor Rabab Abdulhadi received more than $7,000 from SFSU to fly to Jordan, the West Bank and Israel to meet with members of known terrorist organizations. Abdulhadi was the faculty advisor to the SFSU knife-wielding student investigated by the FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force. She was also caught on tape glorifying terrorism to SFSU students. “On at least four official University documents signed by several SFSU and CSU administrators, including SFSU President Wong and CSU Chancellor White, Abdulhadi...

Jennifer Polk was a few years into her Ph.D. in history at the University of Toronto when she attended a departmental meeting and heard that 50 per cent of the school’s graduates were getting tenure-track professor jobs. “They were patting themselves on the back,” she says. “I was sitting there horrified.” She realized she needed another plan. Since that meeting several years ago, the number of jobs for academics has fallen further. The chance of becoming a professor is now estimated to be one in four. Charmaine Grant began her Ph.D. three years ago partly because she couldn’t get a...

They had a dream. For almost a hundred years now, the famed academic-artistic-and-punditry industrial complex has dreamed of a government run by their kind of people (i.e., nature’s noblemen), whose intelligence, wit, and refined sensibilities would bring us a heaven on earth. Their keen intellects would cut through the clutter as mere mortals’ couldn’t. They would lift up the wretched, oppressed by cruel forces. Above all, they would counter the greed of the merchants, the limited views of the business community, and the ignorance of the conformist and dim middle class.

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...