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Prolific bank robber Willie Sutton when asked why he held up banks supposedly said, Because that's where the money is. Bill Gertz of the Washington Free Beacon, who reports on an FBI internal document stating that Cuban intelligence is targeting American academia and university professors to recruit spies, brings to mind Sutton's declaration. Why should Cuban intel target colleges? Because that's where the communists are.

Is your daughter a victim of male oppression? Blame Aladdin – as well as The Little Mermaid, Pocahontas, The Lion King and Toy Story 2. Disney cartoons and other G-rated children’s movies are full of “gendered sexuality,” subjecting women to the male “objectifying gaze,” as “heterosexuality is constructed through hetero-romantic love relationships as exceptional, powerful, magical, and transformative.” These were the conclusions of Women’s Studies professors Karin Martin and Emily Kazyak in their 2009 research paper, “Hetero-Romantic Love and Heterosexiness in Children’s G-Rated Films.” The sociologists examined “all the G-rated films grossing $100 million dollars or more between 1990 and...

April is the cruelest month, and August is the melancholy month. Even the crickets sing a different song at dusk as August begins summer's slow retreat. Children listen for the back-to-school bells as autumn closes in and the days begin to get noticeably shorter. Bicycle baskets morph into book bags. Sandals give way to tighter shoes, and the days of flip-flops are numbered. Sand from the beaches becomes the sand through the hourglass in the science lab. Free spirits are rounded up and structured into classes of whiteboards and textbooks overflowing with data. Teachers promise expeditions to new frontiers...

The University of Colorado is moving to fire a tenured faculty member after the Boulder campus paid $825,000 this week to settle a graduate student's allegations that the philosophy professor retaliated against her for reporting she was sexually assaulted by a fellow student. Chancellor Phil DiStefano recently issued a notice of intent to dismiss associate professor David Barnett, campus spokesman Ryan Huff confirmed to the Daily Camera. If fired, Barnett would be only the fourth tenured professor ever dismissed by the university in its 138-year history. Barnett is accused of compiling a 38-page report painting the victim as "sexually promiscuous"...

A Kent State University associate professor of history is standing by his call for “jihad” and statement that Israel is “a regime that is the spiritual heir to Nazism.”In an “open letter” to “academic friends of Israel,” Julio Pino accuses the pro-Israel academic community of being “directly responsible for the murder of over 1,400 Palestinian children, women and elderly civilians.”In his statement that quotes former Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and compares the academics to alleged Nazi collaborator and philosopher Martin Heidegger, Pino writes “Your names are scrawled on every bullet fired, bomb dropped, body buried and burnt forehead in Gaza. May...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Students in an Ohio State University psychology class are being taught that atheists have higher IQs than Christians, according to a report from a college watchdog organization. Campus Reform notes that a question from a recent online psychology quiz from the university implied that religious beliefs were directly related to IQ levels. “Theo has an IQ of 100 and Aine has an IQ of 125,” the quiz stated. “Which of the following statements would you expect to be true?” Students were then asked to select an answer from the following four options: 1.Aine is an atheist, while...

College campuses often seem culturally biased against non-liberals. But in some cases, political bias so deeply and obviously pervades official campus policy that no one can even defend it when challenged. On that front, the Young Americans for Liberty declared victory in their legal battle with the University of Michigan after administrators agreed to pay out $14,000 and revise discriminatory funding policies. Last year, YAL asked the university for $1,000 to bring anti-affirmative action activist Jennifer Gratz to speak on campus. UM collects mandatory fees from all students and uses them to subsidize events hosted by recognized student groups. But...

the state’s ability-to-function-in-a-modern-economy rate among graduates hovers at a dismal 37 percent. That is, according to the state Department of Education, only 37 of every 100 students who entered high school in 2009, and stayed long enough to graduate, learned enough by last June to do college-level academic work — or to enter the workforce in any meaningful way. And in New York City, the ratio was one in four. So let’s cut to the chase: If 75 percent of New York high-school seniors get diplomas, but only 37 percent are academically or economically functional ... Per-student spending — just...

The more we insist everyone must attend college, the less colleges will offer what students need. About a month ago, I came across a pair of letters online. The first, simply signed “Alumnus,” is an angry retort to his alma mater’s request for a donation. He is irritated that his degrees and the time and money spent on them have left him $40,000 in debt and unemployed for two years-plus after graduation. The second, signed “A Dedicated Professor,” is an attempt to take Alumnus to task for his lack of understanding about the significance of a true education—something he accuses...

A white professor is suing Alabama State University (ASU) over claims the historically black university discriminated against him and his partner based on their race and sexual orientation. According to the lawsuit filed in federal court on June 11, Dr. John Garland is suing the ASU and eight current and former employees for racially discriminating against applicants for university positions and subsequently targeting him when he retaliated against those practices. “[Garland’s supervisor] expressed his opinion, stated or implied, that Dr. Garland did not belong at the University and was not ‘suited to [the University’s] type of students’ because Dr. Garland...

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,...