Free Republic

•The phrase 'politically correct' is now a microaggression according to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. •The university’s 'Just Words' campaign aims to 'raise awareness of microaggressions and their impact.' •These microaggressions include the words: 'lame,' 'thug,' 'trash,' and 'third world.' The phrase “politically correct” is now a microaggression according to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The university’s “Just Words” campaign is the work of UWM’s “Inclusive Excellence Center” and aims to “raise awareness of microaggressions and their impact”—microaggressions like “politically correct” or “PC.” Merriam-Webster defines “politically correct” as “conforming to a belief that language and practices which could offend political sensibilities (as...

Of the nearly $600,000 Cornell’s faculty donated to political candidates or parties in the past four years, over 96 percent has gone to fund Democratic campaigns, while only 15 of the 323 donors gave to conservative causes. The Sun’s analysis of Federal Election Committee data reveals that from 2011 to 2014, Cornell’s faculty donated $573,659 to Democrats, $16,360 to Republicans and $2,950 to Independents. Each of Cornell’s 13 schools — both graduate and undergraduate — slanted heavily to the left. In the College of Arts and Sciences, 99 percent of the $183,644 donated went to liberal campaigns. The law school...

What is your position on the climate-change debate? What would it take to change your mind? If the answer is It would take a ton of evidence to change my mind, because my understanding is that the science is settled, and we need to get going on this important issue, that’s what I thought, too. This is my story. More than thirty years ago, I became vegan because I believed it was healthier (it’s not), and I’ve stayed vegan because I believe it’s better for the environment (it is). I haven’t owned a car in ten years. I love animals;...

Perception is everything. Wars are often won or lost based on how the actors perceive one another’s strengths and weaknesses, not so much how strong or weak they are in reality. So it goes with any agenda item. When people sense a shift in public opinion on an issue, a fair number will shift right along with what they perceive. Thus, power elites can shape behaviors and attitudes by applying various techniques of crowd psychology, focused on propaganda and silencing dissent. ... Effective propaganda also keeps you in the dark about the fact that you are being manipulated. You Can’t...

Greensboro College student Claire Sellers, who claims her play was heckled so badly that performers vomited afterwards. Greensboro College student Claire Sellers, who claims her play was heckled so badly that performers vomited afterwards. A liberal arts college in North Carolina is pledging to identify and potentially punish students who heckled a play about sexual assault the college forced them to attend. “It Stops Here,” an original play produced by students at Greensboro College, was first performed last Wednesday before a crowd of students, but the performance didn’t go as planned. According to people at the play, members of the...

Case in point is a freshman-level English class taught at several major universities across the country called “The Literature of 9/11” — which focuses almost entirely on writings from the perspective of the Islamic terrorists, rather than the nearly 3,000 Americans who were slaughtered by them. “These readings offer points of view that justify terrorism, paint the United States and its government as wholly evil and immoral and desecrate the memory of the victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks,” the UNC College Republicans said in a recent letter to Chancellor Carol Folt.

A federal judge has denied a transgender teenager’s request to allow him to use the same bathroom as his peers at his public school in Virginia. Instead, the judge ruled Friday, the teenager must continue using a separate, private bathroom that he has said makes him feel “singled out and humiliated.” Gavin Grimm, a teenage boy who was born female, used the boys’ bathroom for seven weeks with no problem, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which brought a lawsuit against the Gloucester County School Board on his behalf. But then parents heard about the teen using the boys’...

The first San Francisco elementary school to make bathrooms gender neutral has proudly removed the circles, triangles, and stick figure signs from the kindergarten and first-grade bathrooms that delineate the differences between the sexes.Principal Sam Bass of Miraloma Elementary said the change at the beginning of the school year was prompted by the needs of six to eight students who are outside calling themselves simply boys or girls, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Bathrooms for children older than first grade will be altered in coming years, even outside bathrooms that have multiple stalls.Bass told the Chronicle, “There’s no need...

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...

Those who teach in higher education are relatively OK with some religious groups, according to a study based on a 2012 online national survey that drew 464 complete responses. Asked to assess religious groups on a “feeling thermometer” of 1 to 100, Jewish people, mainline Protestants and Catholics all achieved an average score of 65 or higher, researchers led by University of North Texas sociologist George Yancey reported in an online article in the journal Sociology of Religion. Next to the bottom, just slightly above fundamentalists, were Protestant evangelicals with an average score of 48. Based on the rankings and...

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. ......

Are the nation’s Ivy League schools giving short shrift to conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices when they confer honorary degrees? A survey by one professor suggests the answer is yes, and that the reason is ideology. Of the 14 honorary degrees bestowed by Ivy League institutions to living justices, 12 went to those on the high court’s left side, said ...legal scholar John McGinnis of Northwestern University School of Law. The two exceptions, from Brown and Yale, went to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a moderate... Ginsburg, perhaps the court’s most liberal justice, is the record holder with honorary degrees from...

It's a rare, if not historic pushback—tens of thousands of people across the Canadian province of Ontario are announcing loudly that they oppose the new sex education curriculum proposed by the province’s premier, Kathleen Wynne. Large numbers of protestors have made their voices heard in front of Wynne's office, in front of the provincial legislature at Queen's Park, and at the offices of Members of Provincial Parliament across the province. Harking from every culture and ethnic group, the protestors are demanding one thing: Let kids be kids. The entire phenomenon is startling for a number of reasons. First of all,...

Like fascists, Communists, and boy-band producers, the American Left has always believed it could fine-tune human nature if it could only “get ’em while they’re young.” That’s why the Left works so hard to impose its will on schools and universities. As John Dewey, America’s high priest of educational progressivism, explained in 1897, the student must “emerge from his original narrowness” in order “to conceive of himself” as a cog in the larger social order. Last week’s gay-marriage ruling will yield a new wave of liberal efforts to ensure that schools do their part to combat wrong-headed “narrowness.” Justice Anthony...

A lesbian public elementary school teacher divulged during a homosexual activist conference workshop for teachers how she indoctrinates students -- starting at age four -- to support homosexual relationships. Presenting at the event, Ontario public school instructor Pam Strong told those in attendance how she convinces her young Canadian students that same-sex "marriage" and other LGBT lifestyles are acceptable and honorable. "And I started in kindergarten ... what a great place to start," Strong told those in attendance,according to LifeSiteNews.com. "It was where I was teaching. So, I was the most comfortable there." The homosexual activist organization Canadian Centre for...

A University of Pennsylvania English course taught by a poet who performed for President Obama at the White House ended up exactly as the professor envisioned it: college kids watching porn. “Wasting Time on the Internet,” a once-a-week creative writing course taught by Kenneth Goldsmith that required students to stare at a computer screen for three hours completed its first class this spring. Goldsmith wrote last fall that students could use the three hours to watch porn, and then “use it as the basis for compelling erotica.” “I’ve never taught this class before, but I have a hunch that it’s...

The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill has just made an enormous political mistake. Just days after being put on accreditation probation in the wake of a massive academic fraud scandal, they decided to fire wrestling coach C.D. Mock. His firing comes under suspicious circumstances and has serious First Amendment implications. The university is claiming that C.D. Mock was fired because of his teamÂ’s performance. It is true that his team has not finished higher than fourth at the ACC Championships since 2008. But there is more to the story. Coach Mock is not your ordinary wrestling coach. He is also...

On March 30, a major Harvard-affiliated hospital in Boston, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), expelled a well-respected urologist from its medical staff because he voiced concerns about the unhealthy nature of homosexual behavior and objected to the hospital’s aggressive promotion of “gay pride” activities. Dr. Paul Church has been a urologist on the BIDMC staff in Boston for nearly 30 years. He is a member of the Harvard Medical School faculty. He has done research on diagnosing prostate and bladder cancer, and has been a frequent volunteer for medical mission projects in Mexico and Africa. He has also spoken...

As if the case of Rachel Dolezal couldn’t get any sillier, anti-racism activist Tim Wise says that the “black” former NAACP chapter president once “tried to stop him from speaking” at Eastern Washington University because … “white folks can’t speak with any legitimacy to issues of racism.” Dolezal was a part-time professor at the college.

I am white. I was born and raised in South Carolina, a state to which my grandmother’s family came in the 1600s. They owned slaves. Part of her family were Pinckneys, which means that someone in my family may have owned someone in the family of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was killed in the terrorist attack on Charleston’s Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church Wednesday night. Those same people who owned his ancestors were likely involved in, or at least aware of, the suppression first of the Stono rebellion in 1739 — which resulted in mass executions and the placement...