Free Republic

Scott MacConnell cherishes the memory of his years at Amherst College, where he discovered his future métier as a theatrical designer. But protests on campus over cultural and racial sensitivities last year soured his feelings. Now Mr. MacConnell, who graduated in 1960, is expressing his discontent through his wallet. In June, he cut the college out of his will. “As an alumnus of the college, I feel that I have been lied to, patronized and basically dismissed as an old, white bigot who is insensitive to the needs and feelings of the current college community,” Mr. MacConnell, 77, wrote in...

Critical Race Theory, or CRT, is the study of systemic racism and how it relates to society, law and economics. The subject began in liberal universities in the 1980s, and has gained a lot of traction over the last three decades, as more attention has been brought to the rampant racism in American society. CRT has since been adopted by a large number of colleges, and is now offered as an undergraduate course at many progressive universities. However, CRT is yet to make it into school curricula, despite the demands of many progressive groups urging the states and Federal government...

Mainstream now means teaching LGBT to second-graders. On July 14 the California board of education added LGBT mandates to the state’s new K-12 social studies program, revised for the first time in ten years. This ended a long struggle over school-based Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender studies, playing out for decades inside and outside the state. The San Francisco Chronicle called the event “a landmark move that puts the ongoing LGBT civil rights fight into the mainstream of public education.” The newly adopted state curriculum is “not only acknowledging diversity,” commented state superintendent of public instruction Tom Torlakson with customary...

A new video series is aimed at indoctrinating preschoolers with the LGBT message — a strategy that one pro-family activist says is far from new. The series, titled "Queer Kids Stuff" teaches preschoolers what the terms "gay," "bisexual" and "transgender" mean in an attempt to normalize the LGBT lifestyle with youth at an early age — a tactic that has repeatedly been used over the years to influence impressionable children. Advocates of homosexual behavior admit that they are trying to get to the youngsters before they hear anything negative about homosexuality. MassResistance founder and director Brian Camenker expresses concern that...

Professors are at it again, demonstrating in public how little they understand the responsibilities and limits of their profession. On Monday a group calling itself Historians Against Trump published an “Open Letter to the American People.” The purpose of the letter, the historians tell us, is to warn against “Donald J. Trump’s candidacy and the exceptional challenges it poses to civil society.” They suggest that they are uniquely qualified to issue this warning because they “have a professional obligation as historians to share an understanding of the past upon which a better future may be built.” Or in other words:...

The lame excuse a sitting attorney general gave for meeting privately with the husband of a prime FBI suspect who was himself a possible target of investigation reveals, if we needed more revelation, the mental vacuity and profound ignorance of leftism. Anyone familiar with the cognitive degradation of Marxism can see the pattern. When the Bolsheviks first came to power, there were some bright, though of course wicked, minds: Lenin, Bukharin, Trotsky. Soon, however, the Bolsheviks descended into such grotesque mediocrity that even Molotov began to be seen as a clever Bolshevik, and Voroshilov was placed in command of the...

An elite Manhattan school is teaching white students as young as 6 that they’re born racist and should feel guilty benefiting from “white privilege,” while heaping praise and cupcakes on their black peers. Administrators at the Bank Street School for Children on the Upper West Side claim it’s a novel approach to fighting discrimination, and that several other private New York schools are doing it, but even liberal parents aren’t buying it. They complain the K-8 school of 430 kids is separating whites in classes where they’re made to feel awful about their “whiteness,” and all the “kids of color”...

(CNSNews.com) -- The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has published a study arguing that the College Board’s Advanced Placement European History exam (APEH) “warps and guts the history of Europe to make it serve today’s progressive agenda.” “It [APEH] mentions neither Christopher Columbus nor Winston Churchill,” a NAS press release points out. “APEH’s distortions turn Europe’s extraordinary history and unique contribution to the formation of our world into a generic narrative of modernization,” says NAS director of communications David Randall, who authored the study entitled The Disappearing Continent: A Critique of the Revised Advanced Placement European History Examination. “We do...

One way to measure the left-wing bias in academia is by looking at the degree to which those who don't subscribe to that point of view go to camouflage their outlook on life. "Approximately a third of the conservatives we interviewed, for example, concealed their politics prior to tenure by 'passing' as liberals," Jon A. Shields and Joshua M. Dunn, Sr., write in their book, Passing On the Right: Conservative Professors In the Progressive University. Shields teaches at Claremont McKenna College. Dunn is an associate professor at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. They traveled extensively in order to...

Youths in Fairfax County, Virginia, can now be disciplined and even expelled from school for criticizing the intrusive and aggressive transgender ideology. The transgender change in school regulations was imposed last night during a dramatic board meeting where only 12 pro-trans witnesses were invited to testify. The board members met on Thursday night only after being informed the night before that the discipline change would be considered. No opposing voices were allowed to be heard, parents were relegated to shouting opposition from the seats and some were ejected from the meeting.

A conservative professor who speaks openly about his opposition to gay marriage after having been raised by a lesbian couple has announced that he will be resigning his tenured position following a long battle with liberal activists. Robert Oscar Lopez, former associate professor of English and classics at California State University at Northridge, recently resigned his position with the academic institution. In an interview with The Christian Post, Lopez explained that the decision to move on came as a result of longstanding mounting pressure from activists on and off campus.

Hoo-wee, the New York Times will really have to extend itself to top the boner and mother-of-all-corrections at the American Journal of Political Science... The authors regret that there is an error in the published version of “Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies” American Journal of Political Science 56 (1), 34–51. The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed... The erroneous results represented some of the larger correlations between personality and politics ever reported; they were reported and interpreted, repeatedly,...

The people of North Carolina and the alumni of N.C. State University deserve an apology. Administrators at the school have implemented a patently unconstitutional policy, which forces students to apply for a permit in order to share the gospel on a public university campus they fund with their hard earned tax dollars. To make matters worse, the permit policy is being used to target Christians specifically while others are being allowed to exercise their rights unfettered. Now that a federal judge has called their bluff, the lawless North Carolina attorney general continues to defend the indefensible. Roy Cooper had the...

Students at Yale University are demanding radical changes that would remove white male authors from the English department’s curriculum. According to a petition submitted to faculty, Yale students are demanding that a course on “Major English Poets” be removed from the curriculum because it lacks diversity.

...the University of Miami received a donation in late April from a wealthy atheist to endow what it says is the nation’s first academic chair “for the study of atheism, humanism and secular ethics.” ...established after years of discussion with a $2.2 million donation from Louis Appignani, a retired businessman and former president and chairman of the modeling school Barbizon... ....“I’m trying to eliminate discrimination against atheists,” said Appignani, 83, a Florida resident. “So this is a step in that direction, to make atheism legitimate.” ....It took some persuading for the University of Miami to agree to create a chair...

Editor's note: This column was co-authored by David Wojick, head of DEWA, a cognitive science and policy analysis consultancy. In an outrageous fit of activism the Portland School Board has banned the teaching of climate science. Of course they have not banned climate science by name, but their new order effectively bans teaching much of what we know about climate, especially the potential role of natural variability in global warming and climate change. In fact they appear to have ruled out the teaching of climate science that is specifically required by the State of Oregon. This is bad news for...

Dartmouth University’s Alumni Relations department has concluded that no student will be punished for the Black Lives Matter incident last year, where activists stormed a library on campus and hurled racial abuse at students. In November it was reported that a 150-person strong group of BLM protesters stormed the campus study space, screaming racially motivated chants such as, “F*** you, you filthy white f***s!”, “F*** you and your comfort!”, and “F*** you, you racist s***s!” One girl was even reported to have been pinned by protesters against a wall, who allegedly shouted “filthy white bitch” in her face. Vice Provost...

Portland public schools ban textbooks that cast doubt on climate change | Fox News The Portland Public Schools board voted last week to ban any materials that cast doubt on climate change, the Portland Tribune reported. According to the resolution passed May 17, the school district must remove any textbooks and other materials that suggest climate change is not occurring or that says human beings are not responsible for it. “A lot of the text materials are kind of thick with the language of doubt, and obviously the science says otherwise,” said Bill Bigelow, a former Portland public school teacher...

Science is broken. That's the thesis of a must-read article in First Things magazine, in which William A. Wilson accumulates evidence that a lot of published research is false. But that's not even the worst part. Advocates of the existing scientific research paradigm usually smugly declare that while some published conclusions are surely false, the scientific method has "self-correcting mechanisms" that ensure that, eventually, the truth will prevail. Unfortunately for all of us, Wilson makes a convincing argument that those self-correcting mechanisms are broken. For starters, there's a "replication crisis" in science. This is particularly true in the field of...

Scientific Regress by William A. Wilson May 2016 he problem with ­science is that so much of it simply isn’t. Last summer, the Open Science Collaboration announced that it had tried to replicate one hundred published psychology experiments sampled from three of the most prestigious journals in the field. Scientific claims rest on the idea that experiments repeated under nearly identical conditions ought to yield approximately the same results, but until very recently, very few had bothered to check in a systematic way whether this was actually the case. The OSC was the biggest attempt yet to check a field’s...