Free Republic

The defense of free speech has always been a bedrock bipartisan principle. So it’s unusual to hear a veteran liberal politician excuse campus outrage squads that shout down dissent. But that’s exactly what former Vermont governor and Democratic National Committee head Howard Dean did in a recent appearance.. Dean’s take on this was that there are “consequences to free speech.” He caricatured Erika Christakis’s thoughtful, sensitive letter as an ugly screed mocking “snowflake” students and defending racist costumes. He also described the protesters as well-behaved, despite their screaming and bullying. ... Dean is hardly alone...progressives on and off campus are...

Milo, who calls Trump 'Daddy' has been a supporter of MAGA since Trump first said it. This has pissed off the entire left, especially on campus in what Milo has named 'The Dangerous Faggot Tour', in which he destroys feminists, Clinton supporters, the racists of the Black Lives Matter movement, Soros, Podesta and the rest. He even has a city named after him in that furturistic fantasy novel series that is pissing off the left. Like how dare an author not be a socialist or communist? Look on Maps at this article posted here a month ago, there is a...

Ruth Malhotra has had quite a time at Georgia Tech. She's been attacked by the Administration of her school under a repressive speech code for standing for traditional marriage, had a liberal teacher fail her in a course because she chose to attend the Conservative Political Action Conference. Then she received death and rape threats from fellow students, and the Administration did nothing about it. On tonight's must-listen to edition of the Truth and Hope Report, Ruth Malhotra shares her experiences at Georgia Tech and tells us what we can do to protect the rights of college students. Click here...

Factual Statements=Unprotected Harassment!? A Terrifying Precedent at Tufts by Greg Lukianoff May 11, 2007 Today, FIRE announced the decision by a disciplinary panel at Tufts to find the conservative student newspaper, The Primary Source, guilty of “harassment” for, among other things, publishing a satirical ad that listed less-than-flattering facts about Islam during Tufts’ Islamic Awareness Week. You can see the ad here, and Eugene Volokh has also published it with excellent commentary over at his blog, but, just to make sure people see the ad for themselves, I have reprinted the full text: Islam Arabic Translation: Submission In the Spirit...

Harvard Lays an Egg The triumph of the diversity faction and the fall of Larry Summers by James Piereson 03/06/2006, Volume 011, Issue 24 When the late Allan Bloom visited the Harvard campus some years ago to deliver a speech on his bestselling book The Closing of the American Mind, he began his remarks with the salutation, "Fellow Elitists," a takeoff on Franklin Roosevelt's address years earlier to the nativist Daughters of the American Revolution which he introduced with the words, "Fellow Immigrants." Bloom was having some fun at the expense of Harvard's students and faculty, all of whom had...

Last week I was doing some reporting on one of the feature pieces in this issue- an interview with Dr. Daniel Maguire. For anyone not familiar with Maguire, he is a Theology professor here at Marquette who has gained a reputation as quite an outspoken fellow. An ex-Jesuit, Maguire now claims to derive inspiration from a number of world religions and insists Jesus did not come into this world to serve in Christians’ atonement. (Without stealing Maguire’s mantra, I will just say that he and I differ on almost every issue and tangent addressed in the 45-minute interview.) But at...

A Closer Look at the 'Five Stooges' Investigating Ward Churchill by Jim Paine from Dictionary.com: stooge (stj)n. The partner in a comedy team who feeds lines to the other comedian; a straight man. One who allows oneself to be used for another's profit or advantage; a puppet. One would think that with all the public attention on the actions of CU's Standing Committee on Research Misconduct (SCRM) vis á vis its treatment of the Ward Churchill investigation, SCRM would approach the task of selecting the final investigating committee members with care, nay, with great fear and trembling. One would think SCRM...

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. - Leftist leaders at the University of California, Santa Barbara have begun distributing a profanity-sprinkled "Disorientation Guide" that calls for a return to the activist spirit of the 1960s. The guide, which came out last week, features interviews with the college's "most politically active" professors, a directory of local liberal organizations and commentaries on subjects including feminism, corporate media, proper "queer" terminology and the value of blogs.It also chronicles the history of UCSB activism, including the infamous 1970 burning of the Bank of America in Isla Vista."A lot of people have passion for certain issues, but never...

College campuses can be political hotbeds. And that has some members of Congress thinking they should get involved. Some Republicans are pushing a measure through the House of Representatives meant to ensure that students hear "dissenting viewpoints" in class and are protected from retaliation because of their politics or religion. Colleges say the measure isn't needed, but with Congress providing billions of dollars to higher education, they are worried. The measure's chief promoter, Marxist-turned-conservative activist David Horowitz, says an academic bill of rights will protect students from possible political "hectoring" and discrimination by their professors.... The federal government provides loans...

It has far fewer campus chapters than NOW, but a fledgling group called NeW is mounting a cultural challenge to the National Organization for Women and joining a growing attack on the progressive culture of U.S. universities. ___ WASHINGTON, D.C. (WOMENSENEWS)--"Out with the NOW, in with the NeW!" That is the motto of the Network of Enlightened Women (NeW), a fledgling college group in Virginia that wants to change the campus culture of feminism and challenge the agenda of groups such as the National Organization for Women, which has more than 100 official and unofficial campus chapters in the nation....

A Brooklyn College professor says Ebonics is superior to the tongue of White Devils --Assistant Professor of Adolescence Education at Brooklyn College --Teaches that rap music is an effective tool for teaching English literacy to schoolchildren, and that proper English is language of white "oppressors" --Required students to view Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911 Priya Parmar is an Assistant Professor of Adolescence Education at Brooklyn College's School of Education in New York, where she teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses to aspiring teachers. Of special interest to Parmar, whose doctoral dissertation is titled "KRS-One Going Against the Grain: A Critical Study...

The sea is far from full, but the current still can serve. The tide, ebbing for decades, has begun to flow. It is time to seize the initiative lest we miss the moment and lose our ventures.   "After the Vietnam War, a lot of us didn't just crawl back into our literary cubicles; we stepped into academic positions. With the war over, our visibility was lost, and it seemed for a while — to the unobservant — that we had disappeared. Now we have tenure, and the work of reshaping the universities has begun in earnest."  — Jay...

Thomas Klocek, the DePaul professor who lost his job without due process after arguing with several students about the Middle East at a student activities fair, has now sued DePaul. Much of the suit focuses on claims that DePaul defamed Klocek, in part by providing the public with false and misleading information about his health. Klocek also claims breach of contract. In this case, DePaul has shamefully taken a single encounter where the facts are in dispute (the students and professor present radically different versions of the event), and has transformed it into a veritable festival of repression. First, DePaul...

Through a serendipity, I was able, just before the Memorial Day Weekend, to invite myself to a propaganda offensive against the Iraq war conducted by the anti-American left at Pacific Palisades High School. It was an experience that revealed more than I was happy to know about the state of our public school classrooms. The in-school event was a production of the Pali Hi English Department, whose plan was to corral 300 students for an hour and forty-five minute lecture by an anti-war speaker from "U.S. Tour of Duty," a group that works with Medea Benjamin's Code Pink in active...

Concerned that public schools are becoming sites of liberal indoctrination, activists have generated a wave of efforts to limit what teachers may discuss and to bring more conservative views into the classroom. After all, they say, if related campaigns can help rein in doctrinaire faculty on college campuses, why not in K-12 education as well? So far this year, at least 14 state legislatures have considered bills aimed at colleges that would restrict professors and establish grievance procedures for students who perceive political bias in teaching. None have become law, but the movement has momentum: Four state universities in Colorado,...

Brooklyn College's School of Education has begun to base evaluations of aspiring teachers in part on their commitment to social justice, raising fears that the college is screening students for their political views. The School of Education at the CUNY campus initiated last fall a new method of judging teacher candidates based on their "dispositions," a vogue in teacher training across the country that focuses on evaluating teachers' values, apart from their classroom performance. Critics of the assessment policy warned that aspiring teachers are being judged on how closely their political views are aligned with their instructor's. Ultimately, they said,...

While American universities may proclaim diversity as an exalted value, a recent study shows that the only freedom of thought that really exists on campus is "to believe the dominant political ideology. Other ideologies are marginalized." (Klien and Western. For full text of study, follow links below.) But Phil Mitchell doesn’t need a study to validate what he has experienced for over 20 years. "The truth is, universities are the most hostile, narrow-minded and intolerant environment in society," Mitchell said. Mitchell, 57, is a former history professor at the University of Colorado (CU) and a deeply committed Christian. He was...

Nowhere is the orthodoxy of political correctness more firmly established than on college campuses. Woe betide the unwary student who runs afoul of a certified victim group. While it's OK to pillory males, Christians, corporations or the military, any slight - real or imagined - that gives offense to women, minorities or homosexuals, for example, can bring on severe consequences. In this kind of environment, College Republicans at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island displayed remarkable courage in taking on the PC establishment. Their target was V-Day. No, not Valentine's Day, but Vagina Day, which has replaced, in feminist circles,...

Today, former graduate student Scott McConnell filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York, because it expelled him from its education master’s program based on his personal beliefs. In January 2005, administrators summarily dismissed McConnell because he had expressed views that opposed "multicultural education” and had stated in an academic assignment that "corporal punishment has a place in the classroom.” Story Continues Below The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) took up McConnell’s case, reminding Le Moyne, a Jesuit college, that its actions breached its own promises to respect students’ academic freedom and due process....

DePaul’s Jihad against academic freedomApril 18th, 2005 DePaul University in Chicago is one of the fastest growing universities in the country. It has become the largest Catholic-affiliated university in America. Muslim and Arab students are one of the segments of DePaul's student population that has seen the greatest increase in numbers in recent years. Although no figures are available, these students are an important source of revenue for the University, and many may well pay full tuition, making their attendance particularly lucrative. Perhaps in recognition of this market segment, the University hired Norman Finkelstein to teach in its Political Science...