Free Republic

Many people seem shocked at the recent savagery of a mob of students at Middlebury College, who rioted to prevent Charles Murray from addressing a student group who had invited him to speak. They also inflicted injuries requiring hospitalization on a woman from the faculty who was with him. Where have all these shocked people been all these years? What happened at Middlebury College has been happening for decades, all across the country, from Berkeley to Harvard. Moreover, even critics of the Middlebury College rioters betray some of the same irresponsible mindset as that of the young rioters. The moral...

Joe Scarborough went on an epic rant this morning against liberal academia and the way it shuts down and ultimately radicalizes conservative students who grow frustrated with being stifled in the classroom. The segment began as an effort to explain Stephen Miller’s personality, as Morning Joe cited a column by Andrew Sullivan in which he speaks of conservative students who are often “mocked, isolated, and anathematized on campus” and often react by adopting “brattish and obnoxious positions just to tick off their SJW peers and teachers.” Scarborough took it from there, growing increasingly inflamed as he described his personal experiences...

The Writing Center at the University of Washington is telling students that expecting Americans to use proper grammar perpetuates racism. A press release put out by the University of Washington’s Writing Center argues that “there is no inherent ‘standard’ of English,” and that pressure to conform to proper American grammar standards perpetuate systems of racism. “Linguistic and writing research has shown clearly for many decades that there is no inherent ‘standard’ of English,” claims the writing center’s statement. “Language is constantly changing. These two facts make it very difficult to justify placing people in hierarchies or restricting opportunities and privileges because of...

The “swamp” in question of course is Washington DC, but also includes much of the bureaucracy, judiciary, and cultural command posts of the country, such as the media and entertainment industries. The tributaries comprise America’s educational system, long dominated by the radical left and protected by tenure and union power. It is this ideological effluent center that has done so much to poison the discourse of American politics, smearing every institution that contributed to the country’s greatness, and radiating hatred of all things most citizens hold dear—family, patriotism, free enterprise, free speech, freedom of religion, the Bill of Rights generally,...

Multiple studies released by statisticians and psychologists have revealed evidence for potential professional and personal harm to academics and students expressing conservative political leanings in universities across America. As the largely conservative "Greatest Generation" faded into retirement in the 1990s, "Baby Boomers" holding increasingly liberal worldviews came to dominate university faculty.  Studies released by the Heterodox Academy, tasking themselves with studying the evolving hegemony of "progressives" in academia, have revealed a significant lack of diversity in political thought encompassing various universities and academic departments. So dominant is leftist ideology that across university departments in nearly all states, an average...

The left-wing students who riot on campus, declaring they are offended on behalf of their racial, religious or gender identity, have become a cliché already. Americans around the country note that they seemingly spend more time destroying property than studying, and many, especially conservatives, smirk at the delicate, overly emotional students, derisively called “snowflakes.” But what is an avalanche but a lot of “snowflakes” moving in the same direction, and Scott Greer, author of the new book “No Campus For White Men,” argues it is a dangerous mistake for conservatives to dismiss them. After all, they’re winning. “Identity politics really...

Joe Biden is now a Penn professor. Penn officially announced on Tuesday what had been reported and rumored and talked about on an open mic by Biden himself: that the former vice president would join the faculty as the Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor and lead the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, which will be located in Washington, D.C., and have an office on Penn’s campus. “At Penn, I look forward to building on the work that has been a central pillar of my career in public office: promoting and protecting the post-WWII international order that keeps...

It is difficult not to cackle with irony at the possibility of President Trump -- he of the monosyllabic vocabulary, odd sentence structures, and Joe Six-pack mentality -- forcing Ivory Tower elitists to raise their sights above their current postmodern descent. Instead of fiddling while Berkeley burned, Trump quickly responded to the anarchy that prevented Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking after an invitation by the campus Republican Club. Upon witnessing scenes from the spectacle, which included thousands of protestors, numerous fires, smashed windows, and at least one vicious beating, the President tweeted: If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and...

One of the many ironies in academe is the degree to which academics invert reality. This tendency is usually on full display at the Modern Language Association (MLA) annual convention at which thousands of English professors from around the world gather to see and hear previews of the latest courses and "studies" that proliferate in academe. For example, at the latest gab fest in Philadelphia, GerShun Avilez of the Department of Sexual Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill quoted at length from a poem nearly three decades old by a noted, at least at the MLA,...

Sixty years ago, Chief Justice Earl Warren warned our nation that we had a choice. Either “teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate,” or “our civilization will stagnate and die.” There was no third option. Today, we face this choice again. Recent attempts to shame professors for unpopular views and to curtail the due process rights of those accused of misconduct are cause for alarm. Especially when academic freedom is endangered at places such as Yale — long celebrated as a leader on freedom of expression — we know that the erosion of...

As day follows day and January 20 approaches, my colleagues and students experience something along the lines of Shakespeare's Sonnet 60: "Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore, / So do our minutes hasten to their end." As far as they're concerned, the ascent of Donald Trump spells D-O-O-M. It is easy to understand why they believe it. Professors and administrators at the best universities in the land have gone so deeply into identity politics that they can only regard him as an atavistic clod. They have raised the ordinary frictions of daily affairs into a melodrama of...

Huston Smith, a renowned scholar of religion who pursued his own enlightenment in Methodist churches, Zen monasteries and even Timothy Leary’s living room, died on Friday at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 97. His wife, Kendra, confirmed his death. Professor Smith was best known for “The Religions of Man” (1958), which has been a standard textbook in college-level comparative religion classes for half a century. In 1991, it was abridged and given the gender-neutral title “The World’s Religions.” The two versions together have sold more than three million copies.

A Georgetown University associate professor had a month-long meltdown after a Muslim woman explained why she voted for President-elect Donald Trump. Asra Q. Nomani, a former Georgetown journalism professor and Wall Street Journal reporter, wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post Nov. 10 explaining why she, as a Muslim woman and “long-time liberal,” voted for Trump. “I support the Democratic Party’s position on abortion, same-sex marriage and climate change,” Nomani wrote. “But I am a single mother who can’t afford health insurance under Obamacare.” C. Christine Fair, a previously “friendly colleague,” went on a 31-day screed against Nomani spanning across Twitter...

As controversy swirled around President-elect Donald J. Trump's battle with the CIA concerning its questionable intelligence product on Russian hacking, a strong defense of the agency and an attack on Trump came from Joshua Rovner of Southern Methodist University (SMU). Professor Rovner declared in a press release, "By ignoring intelligence, Trump risks policy tunnel vision." But the idea that the CIA’s "intelligence" was sacrosanct was put in question when it was suggested that Obama's CIA director John Brennan was orchestrating what Rep. Peter King (D-NY) called a "hit job" on Trump. King said, "We have John Brennan--supposedly John Brennan--leaking to...

A professor who made an alarming statement on social media that “All I want for Christmas is white genocide” now is blaming everyone, except himself, for the criticism that erupted from the apparent inducement to violence. The statement came from Drexel University’s George Ciccariello-Maher and came to the public through Twitter, on Christmas Eve. Here is it: The College Fix reported there were a number of reactions, including that from Drexel officials who said they were seeking a meeting with Ciccariello-Maher because, while the professor certainly has the right “to freely express their thoughts and opinions in public debate,” his...

The Caucasians among the tender young minds exposed to Professor George Ciccariello-Maher at Drexel University are on notice that their teacher wants them exterminated because of their race. Not exactly a welcoming atmosphere. I wonder if any of them might be “triggered” by this tweet the good professor offered in the spirit of the holiday?

Students at the University of Wisconsin, Madison are demanding that their school’s administration put members of a conservative club “through intensive diversity training.” An online petition being circulated by the school’s “Student Coalition for Progress” condemns the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) chapter on campus for hosting Ben Shapiro, whom they claim has “used his following and nationally syndicated media presence to deny the realities of systematic and institutional violence against Black and Brown people, sexual assault survivors, Muslims, LGBTQIA+ people, people with low income[s], people with differing abilities, undocumented immigrants, and anyone that [sic] is systematically targeted along identity...

Why do universities put out papers that are so biased toward liberalism that the bias is obvious to everyone but the universities? Why are colleges so biased toward the political left? It turns out, colleges are not only heavily biased politically to the left but their percentages are so far left that they select against conservatives in almost every area.

America was founded to destroy “native Americans” and to find a place to invent slavery which never existed before. These slaves built the country, settled the land, fought its wars and invented everything while white male devils whipped the slaves, oppressed women, keeping them barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, lying around idly when not destroying the environment. Christians are hateful bigots who want to ruin your sex life while atheists are enlightened believers in science and Muslims practice the “Religion of Peace™” while living in fear of religious oppression. Then these racist, bigoted, homophobic, sexist, drug addled, white, male,...

Because of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, the year 2016 has been dubbed by some as the Year of the Revolution. That moniker may be a stretch, but these are exciting times for those of us who’ve long advocated political decentralization, and want a President who all but guarantees to shake up the system in an anti-establishment sort of way. If there was ever a system that needed a good shaking up in an anti-establishment sort of way, it’s ours, and not a minute too soon. While Brexit and the election of Donald Trump are good things in...