Free Republic

Students at Oxford University have succeeded in persuading Oriel College to remove a plaque in honour of Cecil Rhodes, an imperialist the university has deemed racist. The College has also applied to the local council for permission to remove a statue of him from their grounds. Earlier this year, the University of Cape Town was forced to remove a statue of Rhodes from their campus, after students attacked the statue repeatedly with excrement and wrapped it in black bin bags.

An professor at an Illinois Christian college was placed on leave Tuesday after wearing a headscarf to show solidarity with Muslims.Larycia Hawkins, who is a Christian and an associate professor of political science at Wheaton College in suburban Chicago, said Wednesday that her actions were demonstrations of her own faith. Hawkins began wearing a hijab to counter what she called the "vitriolic" rhetoric against Muslims in recent weeks."In the spirit of Advent, my actions were motivated by a desire to live out my faith. Period," Hawkins said Wednesday at a news conference at a Chicago church. Advent is the season...

There is something deliciously ironic about academic and media elites rethinking Woodrow Wilson, probably the president they have lionized most until the current occupant of the White House took office. It is an irony that Mr. Wilson himself would most likely not appreciate, and not just because he didn't appreciate many ironies. My predecessor at Accuracy in Academia, Dan Flynn, summed up the turnaround nicely in an article he wrote for the American Spectator recently. "The New York Times calls America's 28th president 'an unapologetic racist whose administration rolled back the gains that African-Americans achieved just after the Civil War,...

The list of schools where students can get a decent education has been dwindling for some time. And atmospheres of political correctness are nothing new. But with the second coming of '60s radicalism - met this time with weak-willed administrators caving to long lists of student demands - the issue is whether there are any universities where dissenting students have half a chance. Some schools are better than others. Colleges like Hillsdale in Michigan, which takes no funding from the federal government, does not have to worry about conforming to insane Title IX statutes. And its luminous faculty treats students...

Filmmakers sometimes hit the exact correct symbol to represent an idea.That's true of John Ford in the final scene of his masterpiece, The Searchers. Ethan Edwards, frontiersman and Civil War veteran, has succeeded in his years-long quest to rescue a young girl kidnapped by Indians and return her home. He brings her to the cabin, the family fusses over her, and all of them rush inside... All except Edwards, who remains alone, framed by the open door. With an almost childlike gesture,one arm gripping the other at the elbow,he turns away as the door,as if by the hand of God,is...

As campuses across the country are roiled in paroxysms of self-righteous indignation over race, groups of black students, perhaps inspired and emboldened by the anarchistic successes at University of Missouri, have formed coalitions and presented elaborate, and breathtakingly audacious, lists of demands which they have nailed to the doors of their respective university administrations.....[SNIP]...So while these sanctimonious moral brats may feel aggrieved and in need of campus-wide support systems to provide them "safe" spaces in which they can escape racism and oppression, the idea that universities should be compelled to set up mandatory training and teaching about racism, oppression, cultural...

The principal of DeWitt Clinton HS, a struggling Bronx school in Mayor de Blasio's multimillion-dollar Renewal program, changed students failing grades to passing without teachers knowledge or consent, insiders told The Post. In one case, Santiago Taveras gave a senior who received a "no show" in a global-history class a 75 and changed her failing 55 grade in gym to a minimum passing 65, records show. She then got a credit for each class, which she did not deserve, several staffers charged. He thinks he is God and can do whatever he wants. ... Taveras changed a students failing 55...

Our most prestigious universities now require diversity training for everyone coddled by un-Islamic aberrations based on Christian, Jewish, sexist and white privilege. Obama, bravely leading as always from the front, will follow them to combat Islamophobic speech and thought which He recently decreed to be felonies.During His Thanksgiving address this year, Obama likened the current crop of Syrian and other Islamic refugees to the Pilgrims who came to America many years ago. This Thanksgiving, President Obama is calling for Americans to lend a helping hand to another group of pilgrims fleeing persecution. “Nearly four centuries after the Mayflower set sail,...

At this point we could probably use a second blog to do nothing but stories about college campuses and the activities of the special snowflakes who are going to create safe space homes for themselves there. The story coming out of Vanderbilt this week might have been shocking in years past, but by now it’s just a footnote to the daily rap sheet. The students at this esteemed university, having seen the “success” of their fellow seekers of knowledge at Mizzou, are looking to give the boot to one of their professors. Her crime? Penning an editorial many months ago...

Students listen as the USC Student Government votes Tuesday on a resolution to increase diversity. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times) USC junior Vanessa Diaz was raised in Dallas. But at a party two years ago, she was asked if she could speak English. When Diaz became offended, the other student tried to pass off the question as a joke. But it did not amuse her, any more than the idea of Mexican-themed parties on Greek Row featuring students in sombreros and fake mustaches. Quote - Because of the society we live in, it's not OK to be overtly...

The first time I saw a friend wearing blackface I was a freshman in college. I was stunned. I was hurt. I was enraged. But more than anything, I was confused. He thought it was funny, albeit controversial. But to me it wasn’t a joke; it was pointed mockery. I imagined him laughing and joking as his friends painted his skin. I couldn’t understand why he would so callously and easily disrespect me and those like me, for fun. Now I have come to expect such acts, and the conversations that surround them, as routine displays of disrespect and cultural...

Those who thought academia couldn’t get more trivial might do a face palm over the trend toward gaming in higher education. “Several courses in my department at the University of Michigan have been gamified,” Kentaro Toyama, an associate professor in the School of Information there, writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “Assignments are called adventures, battles, and quests.” “Each activity earns experience points — a hundred thousand at a time — and students’ grades depend on their final scores. The classes differ from traditional courses in that students have more choice in the assignments they complete; they can work...

What does it take to generate a rabid, Maoist-style mob demanding political purges, on an Ivy League campus, in 2015? An email defending “offensive” Halloween costumes, apparently. That’s what kicked off the latest nadir in campus zealotry, this time at no less a university than Yale. Typically the fall is a time when Yale students are obsessed with defeating arch-rival Harvard at football, a war on the gridiron that occasionally turn ugly. This year the sport of choice seems to be the public castigation of professors by students, a battle on the quadrangle destined to become just as menacing.

•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...