Free Republic

Dear Professor Meinhold, Members of the Faculty Senate Steering Committee: It has been several weeks since I published my column “My Faculty Values and Your White Privilege” on Townhall.com. In that column, which I have linked here, I warned you about the dangers of a resolution you passed condemning faculty members for publicly commenting on the demographic characteristics of students. I specifically enumerated five problems with your statement, which was an overreaction to a free speech controversy involving a faculty member (yours truly). The problems I enumerated demonstrated that your committee did not think matters through before passing the emotionally...

A former IUPD cadet and IU student, expelled for violating the University’s consent policy, is suing IU for gender discrimination. Aaron Farrer, 21, alleges that the University’s policies for sexual assault investigations unfairly favor women and fail to protect the accused, according to court documents. “IU violated Title IX by creating a gender biased, hostile environment against males, like Farrer, based in part on IU’s pattern and practice of disciplining male students who accept physical contact initiated by female students, but failing to discipline female students who engage in the same conduct,” Farrer’s attorneys wrote in the complaint.

Here we go again. Debates about academic freedom and political bias at colleges are as hot and outrageous as ever. Consider five recent farragoes. First in Oregon, there is the case of a professor, Nancy Shurtz, being disciplined harshly for wearing blackface at a party, to which students were invited. Second, in Ohio, assistant professor Joy Karega was dismissed after a long controversy about her inflammatory statements about white males and influential Jewish people on social media. Third, in New York City, associate professor Matthew Lasner was mobbed after he and his homosexual partner heckled Ivanka Trump on an airplane....

This news organization spent an hour talking to Edwards, 74, about what Kaepernick has done and where the movement needs to go. Here is an edited version of the conversation with the UC Berkeley professor emeritus who lives in Fremont: . . . "When I contacted the Smithsonian (new National Museum of African American History and Culture), I told them they shouldn’t wait another five or six years to get Kap’s shoes, jersey and photo of the Time magazine cover and a photo of him kneeling. They need to do that now. They absolutely agreed."

(CNSNews.com) – The new Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture’s tagline is “powerful moments in African American history, culture, and community.” However, the museum – with a $540 million price tag funded 50 percent by U.S. taxpayers and with a collection of more than 36,000 artifacts and 100,000 people represented – doesn’t include many prominent blacks, including Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and Edward Brooke, a Republican who became the first African American to be elected to the U.S. Senate by popular vote in 1966. After touring the new museum and exploring the website, which contains...

A Columbia University professor accused of a three-year sexual relationship with his daughter was charged with incest yesterday. Political science professor David Epstein, 46, allegedly bedded his 24-year-old daughter between 2006 and 2009. Epstein, who specialises in American politics and voting rights, is said to have also exchanged twisted text messages with the girl during the consensual relationship. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1337416/David-Epstein-Ivy-League-professor-charged-incest-relationship-daughter.html#ixzz4UIP4FTPV Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

In a new statement, Drexel University is more steadfast in its defense of Professor George Ciccariello-Maher’s right to express his opinion — however demented it may be. On Christmas Eve, the admitted “actual communist” had tweeted “All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide.”

A coalition of 25 student groups at the University of Maryland have issued a letter to the school’s administrators containing 64 demands to help “marginalized student populations” feel more welcome on campus. Among the demands is a ban on public screenings of the film “American Sniper.” The group, who call themselves ProtectUMD, sent the letter in the wake of President-Elect Donald Trump’s victory, according the Diamondback student newspaper Monday. In response to Trump’s election, the student coalition demanded additional support and protection for minority groups — particularly the Muslim, illegal immigrant, pro-Palestinian, and LGBT communities. The Muslims students especially wished...

The University of Wisconsin-Madison is offering a course next semester called “The Problem of Whiteness,” and it’s not sitting well with a Republican legislator. Wisconsin Rep. Dave Murphy, who is also the chairman of the Assembly Committee on Colleges and Universities, has asked the university to cancel the course, saying it prompts racial division. “I am extremely concerned that UW-Madison finds it appropriate to teach a course called, ‘The Problem of Whiteness,’ with the premise that white people are racist,” Murphy said in a statement this week. He even threatened to pull funding for the state university. The course, taught...

Set to appear in the January/February 2017 print issue, the responses published ranged from liberal authors to TV hosts to average readers of the monthly magazine and the people cited spanned nearly the duration of human history. . . . Ronald Reagan. Tens of thousands of gay men were wiped off the map simply because he refused to speak, much less act. What’s worse than ignoring a national health crisis while you stuff your face full of jelly beans and your wife reads her horoscope in the next room?

In this season’s most anticipated holiday spin-off, Campus Reform visits the University of Virginia dressed as “The Hipsters Who Stole Christmas.” With schools across the country outright banning even such innocuous Christmas decorations as evergreen trees and images of Santa because they could be interpreted as being “non-inclusive,” Campus Reform wanted to find out what students think of the idea.

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...

While hysteria and fearmongering over the governance of a Republican president have become standard—George W. Bush was frequently referred to as “Bushitler”—present-day anti-Trumpers have taken the acrimony to another level. Sadly, public schools are on the frontlines. Just six days after the election, the teachers union in Los Angeles supported students who skipped school to protest the “politics of fear, racism and misogyny.” “As educators, as people spending every day with students and caring about each student’s future, we believe we have a sacred role in times like these,” the union said in a statement. Sacred? . . . San...

Universities across the nation are taking steps to actively purge male students of what’s been labeled “toxic masculinity.” Examples abound of campuses hosting training sessions, group meetings, lectures and other programs to effectively cleanse what many campus leaders and left-leaning scholars contend is an unhealthy masculinity in young men today. On campus, toxic masculinity is often blamed for sexual violence, body shaming, a “hyper-masculinized sporting culture,” acts of domestic terrorism and much more. For example, a class at Dartmouth College this semester, “The Orlando Syllabus,” identifies so-called toxic masculinity as playing a role in the mass murder spree at a...

Report: D.C. School Marching Bands Skipping Trump’s Inaugural Parade Christopher Wilson. For the first time in 20 years, no Washington, D.C., public school marching band will perform at the inaugural parade. According to a Wednesday report from NBC Washington, no local public schools submitted applications to perform in the parade. The original deadline was Nov. 28 but was extended to Dec. 5 to allow more time to apply. A D.C. public schools spokeswoman told the NBC affiliate that she was unaware of any band in the district that had applied to participate in the Jan. 20 parade. Other high schools...

The notion that American academia is a liberal bubble and echo chamber is nothing that Legal Insurrection hasn’t documented and decried a thousand times. But it is refreshing to hear that complaint coming from the lips . . . of a leading liberal journalist. Today’s Morning Joe devoted a segment to self-described liberal Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times column, “The Dangers of Echo Chambers on Campus.” Key lines: “We liberals . . . too often, we embrace diversity of all kinds except for ideological . . . We champion tolerance, except for conservatives and evangelical Christians. We want to be...

(Snip) We liberals are adept at pointing out the hypocrisies of Trump, but we should also address our own hypocrisy in terrain we govern, such as most universities: Too often, we embrace diversity of all kinds except for ideological. Repeated studies have found that about 10 percent of professors in the social sciences or the humanities are Republicans. We champion tolerance, except for conservatives and evangelical Christians. We want to be inclusive of people who don’t look like us — so long as they think like us. (Snip) Whatever our politics, inhabiting a bubble makes us more shrill. Cass Sunstein,...

Much to my surprise, I showed up in the WikiLeaks releases before the election. In a 2014 email, a staffer at the Center for American Progress, founded by John Podesta in 2003, took credit for a campaign to have me eliminated as a writer for Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight website. In the email, the editor of the think tank’s climate blog bragged to one of its billionaire donors, Tom Steyer: “I think it’s fair [to] say that, without Climate Progress, Pielke would still be writing on climate change for 538.”

A staff member at Ohio State University allegedly pleaded with Facebook friends to show a little sympathy for Abdul Razak Ali Artan, the Somali-born terrorist behind Monday's attack that left nine people hospitalized. The since-deleted post attributed to Stephanie Clemons Thompson, Ohio State University Assistant Director of Residence Life, urged people to "find compassion for his life" and to "come together." The message also warned readers "DO NOT SHARE THIS POST."

Merrimack College assistant professor Melissa Zimdars, author of the “fake news” list circulated online (Photo: Twitter)The mainstream media are going wild circulating a viral list of so-called “fake news” websites – and the list includes established news sites like WND, Zero Hedge, Breitbart, Red State, the Daily Wire and Project Veritas – but WND has found a leftist, Trump-bashing assistant professor in Massachusetts who specialized in “fat studies” is behind the effort to target and discredit legitimate news organizations.Meet Merrimack College Assistant Professor Melissa Zimdars, a 30-something self-identified feminist and activist who has expressed great dislike for President-elect Donald Trump...