Free Republic

Millennials.They may not yet be the present, but they’re certainly the future. These young, uninitiated minds will someday soon become our politicians, doctors, scientists, chefs, television producers, fashion designers, manufacturers, and, one would hope, the new proponents of liberty. But are they ready for it?Time after time, particularly on college campuses, millennials have proven to be little more than entitled, spoiled, anti-intellectual brats who place far too much emphasis on feelings and nowhere near enough emphasis on critical thinking. To the millennial, words are cause for the creation of safe spaces, alternative ideas must be stifled, and anything they perceive...

The Purdue University staffer who allegedly threatened online to rape pro-life women handed in his resignation Monday after refusing to apologize for his comments. Jamie Newman quit Monday morning amid outrage from students, the local community and pro-lifers across the nation, according to the Lafayette Journal & Courier. “Yeah, I just quit,” Newman wrote in an email to the newspaper. “Tell the world.” Purdue spokeswoman Julie Rosa said they accepted Newman’s resignation, which they believe is “the appropriate outcome” to the situation. Last week, Students for Life of America reported discovering Newman’s violent comment while monitoring online discussions about its...

"It's illegal to offend people," said the UT-Austin police officer to a Christian evangelist. The officer then proceeded to write the evangelist a citation. Yes, that actually happened in America. Thankfully, the citation was later voided and the officer received re-training. The event occurred just off campus where two evangelists were preaching against homosexuality. According to the police officer, a student complained that he was being "verbally harassed" which in fact he was not. The whiney student, if he exists at all, was simply being exposed to words and ideas that offended him. The accusation of "verbal harassment" is the...

Whenever there is Islamic violence the media uses the word terror not jihad. The problem is that the jihad of murder is only one of the four jihads and it is the least of jihads. The jihad of murder will kill people, but the jihad of money, speech and writing brings us closer to Sharia. Sharia annihilates a civilization. ... The jihad of money has invaded our universities which reject critical thought about Islam in exchange for donations from the Saudis. The Islamisation of universities is far worse than murder. Another jihad that is killing us is found in religious...

Harvard professor and legal eagle Alan Dershowitz talks about political correctness and 'safe spaces' on college campuses. Dershowitz tells college students to "stay home" if they want a safe space. ... they don't want to hear opposing points of view. They know everything they need to know about race, about gender, about rape, about you name it, climate control. They don't want to hear opposing points of view... ... We have to distinguish between safe spaces for ideas, where there should be none, and physically safe places where you're not intimidated or you're not threatened. And christian speakers, pro-Israel speakers,...

It's interesting that some of the same people who go ballistic at the suggestion that corporations are people are quite willing to ascribe human attributes to inhuman things. "I'm out to prove that rocks are alive and humans are not," Simon Porzak, a writing instructor at Columbia said at the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in Austin last week. Porzak had a slew of lines that kept the crowd at the MLA in stiches: ~ "Can I baptize a dog?" (he and his source left the question open) ~ "Crossing boundary lines with a pigskin" ~ "We never judge other...

That intact families are more economically solvent than fractured ones has long been observed outside of academe. Arguably, as with many other policy questions, on this one as well, academics tend to be the last to notice. The Fall 2015 issue of The Family in America: A Journal of Public Policy features an article by Glenn T. Stanton on "Family Formation and Poverty: A History of Academic Inquiry and Its Major Findings." Stanton is the director of Global Family Formation at Focus on the Family. His 20-page treatise takes us through half a century of seminal research on families and...

Overwhelming consensus' that Office for Civil Rights is treating its guidance as binding. Arne Duncan's temporary replacement isn't getting a honeymoon from the chairman of a Senate subcommittee, who is upset about the Department of Education's machinations against colleges. Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma is demanding answers from acting Secretary of Education John King about the authority of the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) to force colleges to strip students of their right to due process. Lankford isn't the first senator to raise the question of whether OCR's methods - issuing "Dear Colleague" letters that purport to explain existing...

Maybe it’s time we revived that phrase "question authority." "The president's ironclad confidence in the conclusiveness of the science, and therefore the desirability of 'common-sense gun safety laws,' is echoed widely with every new mass shooting, from academia to the popular press to that guy you knew from high school on Facebook," Brian Doherty writes in the latest issue of Reason magazine. Doherty actually examined that premise, and found it wanting. "Still, we have reason to believe gun prevalence likely surpassed the one-gun-per-adult mark early in President Barack Obama's first term, according to a 2012 Congressional Research Service report that...

Ann Althouse is a college professor who runs an eponymous blog. She recently blogged about a Chinese professor at Vassar, Hua Hsu, who believes: “there is a naïve idealism at the heart of student protest, which might be desperate or loud but never as cynical as the world that necessitated it." She goes on to say: “I — who went to college in 1969 — think they are a lot less weird than we were. But if you think they are weird — entitled, oversensitive, whatever — you should look to your own mind and ask why it has created...

Press Yawns As Univ. of Louisville Advertises Asst. Prof Position For Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans Only [ Full title ]. the University of Louisville placed an ad for a "tenure-track Assistant Professor position" which specified the racial/ethnic makeup of who would be considered eligible. It was removed after appearing for almost two months. ... The ad really really does insist that the position is "a tenure-track Assistant Professor position that will be filled by an African American, Hispanic American or Native American Indian." So where is Tom Perez's Department of Labor? Where is the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission? (All...

New data shows about half of Illinois high school graduates going on to the state's community colleges need remediation in at least one subject. That data was released this past week by the Illinois State Board of Education. It shows 48.7 percent of graduates who enrolled in the community college system needed remedial instruction to prepare them for entry-level college coursework. ... For the first time, that information is being reported with Illinois Report Card data.

Christians are "filthy" in the sight of Allah and worthy of being looted and slaughtered "in a time of jihad," according to an American imam and professor of religious studies at a prestigious private college in Tennessee. These are words Professor Yasir Kazi now disputes he ever said. Kazi (also spelled Qadhi) is a professor of Islamic studies at Rhodes College, a four-year liberal arts college in Memphis, Tennessee. He has two master's degrees from Yale and one from the University of Medina in Saudi Arabia. He is expected to complete his doctorate soon from Yale's department of religious studies,...

A Wheaton College professor announced on Facebook Thursday night that she will be wearing a hijab (Muslim head scarf) throughout her celebration of the Advent as a way of showing solidarity with Muslims. Larycia Hawkins, a political science professor at the Wheaton, Illinois, evangelical higher education institution, explained on her Facebook page that she will be wearing a hijab to work, class, and church. She also vows to wear the hijab during her trip to Chicago and even when she goes on an airplane to return to her hometown for Christmas. "I don't love my Muslim neighbor because s/he is...

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...