Free Republic

First, a flashback to Tuesday's Chicago Tribune article about Thomas Klocek's free speech struggle at DePaul University, as the Chicago college's president, Father Dennis Holtschneider, speaks out about free speech: "I get accused of being against free speech," Holtschneider said. "But freedom of speech for students requires they have a professor who treats them with respect." Well, the free speech problems at DePaul go beyond its reprehensible conduct in the Klocek affair. FIRE, by the way, is short for Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. From the organization's mission statement: The mission of FIRE is to defend and sustain individual...

Before he became an unlikely cause celebre, Thomas Klocek was an anonymous foot soldier in the bookish garrison of the ivory tower. The job title may be "adjunct," but their myriad ranks are a bulwark of higher education. They teach the introductory courses the permanent faculty disdains. That frees tenured professors to do research and work with graduate students. It also helps balance the budget. Adjuncts are paid by the course, at academia's equivalent of Wal-Mart wages. At DePaul University, where Klocek long taught, he reached a high of $34,000, one year. Other years, his earnings were $16,000. But he...

America got a wonderful present this Christmas past. On Christmas Eve, 2003, Catholic news services reported the findings of a special commission investigating Catholic school resources. The commission found nearly two-thirds of high school catechetical materials used throughout the United States are trash.The Heart of the Church That is, these texts are not in conformity with the Catechism of the Catholic Church. When asked about the problem, Archbishop Alfred Hughes of New Orleans, the head of the commission, replied, “The committee recognizes that the causes are manifold. A particular area of concern is the way in which catechetical leaders,...

Thomas Klocek was, until September 2004, a popular adjunct professor in the School of New Learning at DePaul University in Chicago. A private university linked to the Vincentians, DePaul may not be prestigious, but it is one of America's fastest-growing universities. Many readers will recognize it as the home of the notorious anti-Zionist, Norman Finkelstein. Klocek taught at DePaul for fourteen years until his dismissal on what I can only describe, not merely as the flimsiest, but as the most prejudicial of grounds. During a Student Activities Fair, a group of eight students representing Students for Justice in Palestine and...

Publication of The Case for Israel has made me the target of vicious personal attacks. A systematic effort to discredit the book, and me, has been undertaken by a well-organized group of Israel bashers led by Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, and Alexander Cockburn. As soon as the book reached the bestseller lists and began to get good reviews around the country, this triumvirate went to work. They had a model for their attack going back 20 years. The mode of attack is consistent. Chomsky selects the target and directs Finkelstein to probe the writings in minute detail and conclude that...

So what happened? On September 15, 2004, I attended a student activities fair at the Loop Campus of DePaul University. I noticed a group there called Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), and I saw they had some literature. On the front of one of the brochures was a picture of Rachel Corey, the American who had been accidentally killed by an Israeli bulldozer. The literature, however, had her murdered by the Israelis; it also included many other incendiary and anti-Israeli remarks. As I was reading the pamphlet, I asked the students, “Did you know that in addition to the...

CHICAGO, May 18, 2005—DePaul University administrators have suspended Professor Thomas Klocek without a hearing after he engaged in an out-of-class argument with pro-Palestinian students at a student activities fair. When the students complained to administrators, Klocek was denied the rights that DePaul guarantees to professors accused of wrongdoing and immediately suspended. Statements from DePaul administrators indicate that Klocek was disciplined because of his harsh criticism of the students’ viewpoint, despite DePaul’s stated commitments to free speech and academic freedom. “DePaul has unquestionably violated Professor Klocek’s due process rights, and the university did so because his statements were allegedly offensive,” commented...

The elevation of Pope Benedict XVI to the Papal Suite at the Vatican might give some of America’s Catholic colleges and universities the chance to be more than Catholic in Name Only (CINO). “Catholic theology is not individual reflection but thinking with the faith of the Church,” then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said in a 1999 U. S. visit. “If you will do other things and have other ideas of what God could be or could not be, there is the freedom of the person to do it, clearly.” “But one should not say this is Catholic theology.” When Nigerian Cardinal Francis...

After the University of Colorado's Ward Churchill scandal, you might think it's nearly impossible for U.S. universities to get rid of faculty members. It's not so. While it's true that faculty members can embrace terrorists, demean their victims, plagiarize the work of others, lie about their ethnic backgrounds for better positions and generally hold America and Americans in contempt, there is something they can say on the college campus that will get them fired. In fact, I can tell you very easily and succinctly what a college professor can do to get the ax on nearly any university campus across...

During his 14 years at DePaul University, Thomas Klocek dwelled in adjunct-professor purgatory, quietly coming and going times a week from his Loop classroom and his home on the city’s Southwest Side. His evalutions from students in the university’s School of New Learning were consistently positive—and that, apparently, was enough for his bosses because nary a supervisor visited his classroom. Klocek’s invisibility ran out, however, one day in September when he got caught up in a heated debate at a student activities fair on the school’s downtown campus. He stopped at a table where two student groups—Students for Justice in...

Liberals need to watch their mouths. After the build-up to war and the presidential election, it's as if they got drunk and said some things they shouldn't have. On www.sorryeverybody.com, liberals have posted messages such as, "We're sorry half our country is a bunch of morons." That translates from drunk-speak to English as "Hey, I'm not going down without a fight!" It's as if now, instead of sobering up and apologizing for their indignation, they're just getting drunker in their bitterness. It's gotten so out of hand, columnist Jay Ambrose recently wrote that liberals' lack of tolerance for conservative or...

Adjunct professor Thomas Klocek of the School of New Learning staged a press conference Tuesday, March 1 to protest his suspension from his teaching position. The suspension stemmed from an incident last academic quarter involving two cultural student groups. According to those present, Klocek was involved in heated arguments in which school officials later said was "threatening and disrespectful to students." In a formal letter to the board of trustees sent out by his attorney, Klocek listed several demands from DePaul: “A public apology by the President to be published in the DePaulia stating that DePaul violated its own policies...

March 1, 2005 — A dispute over censorship inspired a DePaul University professor to show up at his own press conference bound and gagged. Last fall, DePaul University professor Thomas Klocek was suspended without a hearing for challenging the viewpoints of certain Muslim students on campus at a student activities fair. He is now demanding a public apology from the university president in order to avoid litigation. Klocek showed up to the news conference bound and gagged, illustrating what he believes the university did to him by censoring his views on the Middle East. Klocek says he was unfairly suspended...

COSTA MESA, Calif. -- Some parents and parishioners have accused the Roman Catholic diocese in Orange County of violating church doctrine by allowing a gay couple to enroll their children in a church school. The group demanded that St. John the Baptist School in Costa Mesa accept only families that pledge to abide by Catholic teachings, the Los Angeles Times reported in Sunday's editions. Church doctrine opposes gay relationships and adoption by same-sex couples. "The teachings of the church seem to have been abandoned," John R. Nixon told the Times. "We send our children to a Catholic school because we...

he most radical experiment in American higher education today isn't taking place at an Ivy League university. Nor is it happening at one of the country's prestigious liberal-arts colleges such as Amherst or Davidson or at a big-name state university. No, this bold and significant academic undertaking has been quietly but powerfully under way for more than three decades on a bucolic mountain meadow near Santa Paula, Calif., 65 miles northwest of Los Angeles and not far from Santa Barbara. Thomas Aquinas College (TAC) is a small school, and Roman Catholic, as its name suggests. Its 330 students come for...

JEFFERSON CITY (AP) - Democratic State Auditor Claire McCaskill expressed disappointment yesterday in decisions by some Catholic leaders to shun politicians who support abortion rights. McCaskill, a Catholic who supports abortion rights and is running for governor, is building a home in the St. Louis suburb of Kirkwood and attends the nearby St. Gerard Majella parish. St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke, shortly before coming to Missouri in January, told Catholic politicians in his former diocese who supported abortion rights and euthanasia not to receive Holy Communion. He also issued a notice in the Wisconsin diocesan newspaper ordering priests not to...

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- A recent statement from Archbishop James P. Keleher, of Kansas City, Kan., admonishing Catholic institutions to stop hosting politicians who support abortion rights has drawn mixed reactions from area Catholics. In his statement Friday, Keleher asked institutions under his jurisdiction not to invite politicians or others who favor abortion rights to speak or take part in other presentations at their facilities. Sister Mary Collins, prioress of Mount St. Scholastica, a monastery for about 185 Catholic nuns in Atchison, said Keleher's statement put her in a difficult position. "Benedictines are disposed by the rule of Benedict to...

(LifesiteNews.com/CWN) - A teacher at an all-girl Catholic school in Delaware, who was fired for signing her name to a pro-abortion newspaper advertisement, is suing the school for "illegally" firing her. Michele Curay-Cramer, 32, was fired from Ursuline Academy when her name appeared in the pro-abortion ad. The lawsuit said the school's action violated the woman's rights under the Civil Rights Act. Curay-Cramer claims that she is still a bona fide Catholic: "The Catholic Catechism says that if you do what you do with a clean conscience, then you've done nothing wrong." She also described herself as "pro-life, pro-choice." In...

IMMOKALEE, FlA. -- On farmland where peppers, tomatoes and sod have been grown, Thomas Monaghan, onetime fast-food magnate, is pursuing what may be the last phase of his life's work: the saving of souls. "My No. 1 priority now is to help as many people get to heaven as possible," said the 65-year-old founder of Domino's Pizza and former owner of the Detroit Tigers. "I believe the best way to do that is education." The result, if Monaghan's vision and an artist's conceptions are translated into reality, will be the first new Roman Catholic university in the United States in...

SEATTLE CAROLYN Harrison, 42, has enough on her plate. A mother of two school-age children, she teaches English and coaches girls' basketball at a Catholic high school in Tacoma, and is working toward certification as a school administrator. But now she also finds herself trying to overturn the nasty legacy of a 19th-century senator. She is a plaintiff (as is a student at Eastern Washington University) in litigation (undertaken by the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Justice) that may reach the U.S. Supreme Court. It could overturn laws - 37 states, including all Western states, have them - that are residues...