Free Republic

Conservatives in control of an Ivy League school? This dream might become a reality as conservative alumni fight for their rights to be candidates for the Board of Trustees at Dartmouth. This battle began two years ago when two candidates who were endorsed by the Alumni Association were defeated by two “outsider” candidates. Another independent candidate also won a position on the board. Since that time, the University has tried to rewrite the Board’s constitution and bylaws to prevent such a thing from occurring ever again. The conservative blogs and media caught wind of this and since then the Battle...

When the always provocative American Council of Trustees and Alumni issued its critical report of the Universities of North Carolina, the group’s typically thorough review got a surprising fan letter. “As I prepared for this job, I read your report [Governance in the Public Interest: A Case Study of the University of North Carolina System] thoroughly some time ago,” the incoming president of the UNC system had written. “There are many recommendations in this report that I agree with totally.” “Thank you for doing it; it has been an extraordinary help to me.” In its first decade of existence, ACTA...

On the Web site of an unofficial alumni organization at the University of California, Los Angeles, there are profiles "exposing" the university's "most radical professors" who "actively proselytize their extreme views in the classroom." These professors are described as "brainless" and are berated for never having left the "fantasy world of college." [snip] There are other disturbing examples today and throughout history. In Colorado and Indiana, as a result of widely publicized student allegations of left-wing bias in the classroom, several professors have received hate mail and at least one received a death threat. The number of organizations across America...

Recently Albert Hunt's last column for the Wall Street Journal mentioned how he was recruited by the late and great Robert L. Bartley, who made that newspaper's editorial page unsurpassed in quality. What made the hiring of Albert Hunt especially significant was that Bartley was a staunch conservative in the Reagan tradition, while Hunt is a standard issue liberal. It was precisely for that reason that Bartley wanted Hunt to write for the Wall Street Journal, so that readers would be sure to get more than one side of the issues discussed. Many years ago, when I was teaching economics...

The Classics on Campus: Looking for William Shakespeare by: Malcolm A. Kline, March 24, 2004 Mention the classics on college campuses today and you are lucky if you get references to Coca-Cola or cars—and that’s in the faculty lounges and administration offices. One of our readers summed up the change in college education in an e-mail to us. “My God,” he wrote, “when I went to university I studied Plato, Socrates, Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, European and World History, French Literature, and Canadian History, to mention a few of the courses I took. And I was taking Engineering!” Researchers at the...