Free Republic

•Dozens of Yale students encircled a professor after he said he would not stop people from wearing offensive Halloween costumes •College master said he would not stand in the way of free speech and told offended people to 'look away' or challenge those wearing them •Video shows one young woman's fury at the professor, telling him to 'shut the f*** up' and that he should not sleep at night This video shows the moment dozens of students encircled a Yale University official and screamed at him for sending an email telling them to ignore people dressed in offensive Halloween costumes....

If conventional labor and finance capital have lost their scarcity value, then the era in which financialization reaped big profits is ending. Why is wealth/income inequality soaring? The easy answer is of course the infinite greed of Wall Street fat-cats and the politicos they buy/own. But greed can't be the only factor, for greed is hardly unknown in the bottom 90%. The only difference between the guy who took out a liar loan to buy a house he couldn't afford so he could flip it for a fat profit and the mortgage broker who instructed him on how to scam...

The state of New York looks to be the next state with plans to re-brand the Common Core by calling it something else but otherwise making virtually no substantive curriculum changes. New York Board of Regents chancellor Merryl Tisch announced in a public radio interview on Tuesday that education bureaucrats are “toying with” the possibility of a new statewide name for the perpetually unpopular Common Core State Standards Initiative... There is so much politicization about those words — ‘Common Core,'” Tisch said in the interview. “So we can call them the Empire State Standards, or New York’s Higher Standards. The...

UNC spokesman claims they "challenge students," and don't "advocate one viewpoint over another." So, will they accept my offer to come debate any professor on the topic, free of charge? Alec Dent, a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, broke the story in The College Fix: An English class offered at UNC Chapel Hill this fall called “Literature of 9/11″ explores the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks from the perspective of radical Islamists and those who view America as an imperialist nation. The course represents virtually everything wrong with American academia today. The reading list consists entirely...

Mitchell, a former assistant district attorney, says his comments were not an endorsement of shoplifting. A University of Wisconsin-Madison official claims laws against shoplifting are just an excuse to over-police minority communities. “I just don’t think that they should be prosecuting cases… for people who steal from Wal-Mart,” said Everett Mitchell, director of community relations for the university, during an on-campus event. “I don’t think [with] Target or all them other places, them big box stores that have insurance, they should be using the fact that people steal from there as justification to start engaging in aggressive police practices, right?”...

Multiple professors at Washington State University have explicitly told students their grades will suffer if they use terms such as “illegal alien,” "male," and “female,” or if they fail to “defer” to non-white students. According to the syllabus for Selena Lester Breikss’ “Women & Popular Culture” class, students risk a failing grade if they use any common descriptors that Breikss considers “oppressive and hateful language.” The punishment for repeatedly using the banned words, Breikss warns, includes “but [is] not limited to removal from the class without attendance or participation points, failure of the assignment, and— in extreme cases— failure for...

I have two confessions to make. First, I was a university professor from the late 1960s to the late 1990s. Over four-plus decades at the same institution, I went from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor to Full Professor. I enjoyed my career, most of the time. I took early retirement for personal and professional reasons. Subsequently, I was an adjunct professor at another university where a close family member is also employed. I retired from that post mostly for personal reasons. After nearly 40 years of teaching -- I was a high school social studies teacher for two years before...

Universities are an ecosystem, and when faculty are poached and grant money dries up, everyone suffers If you’re from Wisconsin, the Friday night fish fry is a big deal, and the fish you want on your plate is a yellow perch you caught yourself. But for years, the population of yellow perch has been in serious decline. Now on the verge of collapse, the future of this iconic fish is looking grim. Kind of like what is happening right now with the faculty at the University of Wisconsin, under siege from a legislative agenda that has been steadily decimating its...

Sara Goldrick-Rab, a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, caused a firestorm last month when she publicly compared her governor, Republican Scott Walker, to Adolf Hitler in a tweet. She poured fuel on the flames by tweeting at incoming freshmen who were Walker supporters, encouraging them not to attend the school because of Walker’s education funding policies. Then, she apologized. Now she’s promoting a class she’s teaching this fall on “scholar activism.” The graduate seminar will “explore the biographies and narratives of a diverse array of scholar activists, examine the sociopolitical and economic forces shaping their work, and consider...

One of the leading lights of Marxism on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison brings home a sweet salary of $170,000 per year. The well-heeled sociology professor is Erik Olin Wright .. The tenured, capitalism-hating professor’s annual salary of $170,000 is $117,587 greater than the household income of a typical Wisconsin family and is in the top 2 percent of all Americans. Whil an average middle-class family in Wisconsin survives on $4,368 per month, the Marxist professor enjoys a cushy monthly income of $14,166. He will teach exactly two courses in the fall semester for this princely sum. ......

Sapping the public's will to fight evil. One key reason why so few Americans are aware of the full nature and magnitude of the jihad threat is that the academic and media establishments labor so assiduously to cover it up. Those who are deemed the best minds of this generation devote their energies to convincing people that the threat is not as large as it is, or that it can be neutralized by adjustments to U.S. foreign policy (particularly the abandonment of Israel), or that the West is really just as bad, so we are hypocrites for opposing the jihad....

George Orwell said, "There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them." If one wants to discover the truth of Orwell's statement, he need only step upon most college campuses. Faculty leaders of the University of California consider certain statements racism and feel they should not be used in class. They call it micro-aggression. To them, micro-aggressive racist statements are: "America is the land of opportunity." That is seen as perpetuating the myth of meritocracy. "There is only one race, the human race." Such a statement is seen as denying the individual as a racial/cultural being....

“The purpose of propaganda is not the personal instruction of the individual, but rather to attract public attention to certain things, the importance of which can be brought home to the masses only by this means. Here the art of propaganda consists in putting a matter so clearly and forcibly before the minds of the people as to create a general conviction regarding the reality of a certain fact…it must appeal to the feelings of the public rather than to their reasoning power,” wrote Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf. Hitler continued, “The aim of propaganda is not to try to...

The University of New Hampshire has removed from its website a “bias-free language guide” that warned against using the word “American” because it fails to recognize South America. The guide was developed in 2013 by several advocacy groups whose members are appointed by the university president. It was mentioned in an annual report submitted by at least one of those groups in 2014, but the university said administrators did not know about it until this week, when it was criticized in the media. […] It suggested replacements for common terms, such as “person of material wealth” instead of rich and...

A Cambridge professor has claimed that three scientists investigating climate change in the Arctic may have been assassinated. Professor Peter Wadhams insists Seymour Laxon, Katharine Giles and Tim Boyd could have been murdered by someone possibly working for the oil industry or within government forces. The trio had been studying the polar ice caps - with a focus on sea ice - when they died within a few months of each other in 2013. Professor Laxon, 49, a director of the Centre for Polar Observation at University College London, was at a New Year's Eve party in Essex when he...

Among the great ironies surrounding the state of academia is the continued insistence on hearing more and more “marginalized voices” and increasing “diversity” on campus, as if there is some kind of archaic conservative establishment making that difficult to do. One would likely be hard-pressed to find a more left-leaning group than college professors and admissions officers, who prioritize pulling marginalized groups out of their marginalization and adding people of diverse cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds to campus conversations. Yet in their efforts to achieve a more egalitarian conversation, left-wing academics and their students completely ignore (at best) and marginalize (at...

Two Christian colleges located in states that had their same-sex marriage bans struck down by the United States Supreme Court's June 26 decision that nationally legalized same-sex marriage are offering employment benefits to legally recognized same-sex spouses of school employees. The employment practices of Hope College, a small Reformed liberal arts school in Holland, Michigan, and the nondenominational Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, will both comply with their states' new legal definitions on marriage after the high court's ruling. On Monday, Hope College President John Knapp sent an email to the Hope community explaining that while Hope will continue to...

The Episcopalian marriage of Fordham University’s theology chairman to his same-sex partner, just one day after the Supreme Court’s marriage ruling, begins a new flood of challenges to Catholic identity that most Catholic colleges and universities are unprepared to face, warns Cardinal Newman Society President Patrick Reilly.“Even if a Catholic college leader wants to uphold Catholic teaching on marriage, the persistent embrace of dissent and opposition to the Church at many Catholic universities makes it highly unlikely that the law will now permit them to uphold moral standards for professors,” Reilly said.“The fact that a theology chairman at a...

The chairman of the theology department at Fordham University has gotten married—to another man. The New York Times, which up until a few years ago, declined running wedding announcements involving same-sex couples, reported that J. Patrick Hornbeck II “married” Patrick Anthony Bergquist Saturday at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in Manhattan. The ceremony took place June 27, just a day after the US Supreme Court legalized same-sex “marriage” nationwide. That would not have been necessary legally, since New York State has allowed gay "marriage" since 2011. But the ceremony was conducted before the Episcopal Church in America voted this week...

Labor leaders and the higher education community are closely watching to see if other politicians follow Walker’s lead.“I don’t think it’s an immediate threat elsewhere, but it’s still a big concern,” said Mark F. Smith, senior policy analyst at the National Education Association, which has slightly less than 200,000 higher education members.David Bergeron, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, said he expects more such fights in upcoming years.“I think that this is just part of the evolution of attacks on … public benefits and on public sector employees of all sorts,” Bergeron said.------------ As Republican Gov. Scott...