Free Republic

Anyone who is keeping up with the latest happenings in higher education knows that this year has seen many institutions backpedaling on DEI programs. From Florida limiting public funding for DEI at its colleges, to the University of Wyoming closing its DEI office, to schools in Kansas, Idaho, and Oklahoma enforcing bans and limitations, the public’s patience with the Left’s “diversity” schemes seems finally to be running out. In May of this year, the UNC System joined these ranks when the Board of Governors repealed and replaced Section 300.8.5 of the policy manual, thus effectively banning DEI offices, employees, and...

It's a given that the number of conservative professors on campus is very small. What few there are probably exist solely in the economics department or in a few cases the law school. Lately, the idea of viewpoint diversity (sometimes called ideological diversity) has caught on among people on the right, especially as more woke politics is being exported by universities. This debate may have peaked last year when university presidents were called before congress to defend their handling of pro-Palestinian protests, but the basic idea that universities discriminate against conservatives has been around for a long time. Now there...

While a substantial number of Christian colleges continue to maintain ties with Planned Parenthood, one pro-life organization is celebrating that over a dozen schools have taken action this year to address concerns about their ties to the nation's largest provider of abortions and cross-sex hormones for youth confused about their sex. The Demetree Institute for Pro-Life Advancement, a project of the pro-life advocacy group Students for Life of America, released a report highlighting the findings of its 2024 Christian Schools Project. The data for the report is based on research conducted throughout the 2023-2024 academic school year, culminating with outreach...

While a substantial number of Christian colleges continue to maintain ties with Planned Parenthood, one pro-life organization is celebrating that over a dozen schools have taken action this year to address concerns about their ties to the nation's largest provider of abortions and cross-sex hormones for youth confused about their sex. The Demetree Institute for Pro-Life Advancement, a project of the pro-life advocacy group Students for Life of America, released a report highlighting the findings of its 2024 Christian Schools Project.The data for the report is based on research conducted throughout the 2023-2024 academic school year, culminating with outreach to...

Former Vice President Mike Pence made his professor debut this week at Grove City College. In April, the college announced that Pence would be a distinguished visiting fellow for the college’s new Center for Faith and Public Life, teaching a political science class alongside College President Paul McNulty. “I just have immense respect for the mission of Grove City College,” Pence said in a news release. “The opportunity to teach several courses with young men and women who I know are going to be Christian leaders in this country in the years ahead is a great privilege.” On Thursday, Pence...

Northern Illinois stunned No. 5 Notre Dame 16-14 with a late field goal by Kanon Woodill on Saturday. Woodill kicked a 36-yard field goal with 31 seconds left as Notre Dame couldn’t stop the Huskies after a second interception by Riley Leonard. It's Northern Illinois' first win ever against a team ranked in the top 10 of the AP Top 25.

For second consecutive year, Harvard bottom ranked school with score of 0.00 The top five worst universities for free speech also all happen to be mostly Ivy League institutions, according to a major new student survey released today by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Harvard, Columbia, New York University, the University of Pennsylvania and Barnard College made up the bottom five schools, respectively. Conversely, the top rated school was the University of Virginia. Last year’s highest, Michigan Technological University, came in second best for free speech. In third place was Florida State University, and fourth and fifth were...

Former President Donald Trump’s youngest child, Barron Trump, was spotted arriving at New York University Wednesday to kick off his first day of college life. The towering 18-year-old was flanked by Secret Service agents as he stepped onto the downtown Manhattan campus with a black Swiss Gear backpack casually slung over his shoulder. Dressed in a white polo, black pants and Adidas Gazelle sneakers, Barron’s first stop was the dean’s office before being whisked off to classes, sources told The Post. It wasn’t immediately clear what classes the teen plans to take while at NYU, where tuition starts from roughly...

I could be wrong, but don't be surprised if the return of students to campuses winds up having a big impact on the presidential race. Student activists have an outsized impact on our cultural life. Unlike the masses of Hamas supporters who pour out into the streets of our cities, in the eyes of the ruling elite, these students matter. What they say or do on college campuses will get far more attention than the thousands of Islamists who have poured out into our streets. The Islamists invade city streets, and while the elite live in cities, they really only...

America’s youth are being pushed into a one-size-fits-all college track that saddles many with debt — without preparing them for careers.A few months ago, a handful of lucky Gen Xers virtually won the lottery when the White House directed the Department of Education to “adjust” their student loan accounts, in some cases down to zero. Joel Lambdin, a 49-year-old string musician from New York City, became a poster child for this one-time forgiveness measure, as Business Insider reported. During his studies and bohemian career, Lambdin had accumulated $250,000 in student debt that remained in forbearance for more than 25 years...

Last week I wrote about the demographic changes in enrollment at MIT this year after the Supreme Court's decision banning affirmative action.The university’s admissions department on Wednesday released its first-year class profile, showing a sharp drop in its Black student population. About 5% of MIT’s incoming class of 2028 is Black, a significant drop from its 13% average in recent years. Latino students make up 11% of the class of 2028, compared to a 15% average in recent years.Since then, three more elite schools have released enrollment data which shows a similar pattern.The percentage of Black students entering Amherst this...

A recent Gallup survey found that confidence in America’s colleges and universities has plummeted in the past decade, with only 36 percent of today’s adults expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in our higher-education system—down from 57 percent in 2015. Respondents offered several reasons for their low opinions, including the cost of obtaining a degree, the difficulty in finding a high-paying job even with a degree, and the perception of college campuses as indoctrination centers. I’d like to focus, in this essay, on the first of those reasons. The others are important, too, and may well...

Dear parent of a college student: please don't ever answer emails or other official school communication that is sent to your student's email address. I know you mean well. But when you answer his emails on his behalf you aren't "advocating" for your student. Rather, you are unintentionally infantilizing the student, preventing him from exercising adult responsibilities. If I were a potential employer interviewing a recent college graduate and I found out his mother monitored his emails and answered on his behalf, I would pass on him. Clearly, he isn't sufficiently independent for adult employment. I want to be clear...

Last fall, having drunk deeply of the Left’s cocktail of antisemitism, post-colonialism, and general nuisance-making, a small but virulent minority of American college students began “protesting” for “Palestine.” Inaugurated mere days after Hamas’s Oct. 7 sneak-attack against Israel, these agitations crescendoed with the establishment, in the spring of this year, of “Occupy Wall Street”-style encampments on university quads. Four months later, a new school year is upon us, and Israel’s war marches on. It is worth reflecting on what we learned from the ordeal, as well as what administrators and reformers ought to do if and when student activists resume...

Florida State Seminoles fans are known for their football team, but they're also known for their ability to party. So when they arrived in Dublin, Ireland for a 'Week 0' football game against the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets, they brought that party with them from Tallahassee. Multiple tweets from fans at the stadium report that the Florida State fans drank the Aviva Stadium out of beer - or at least on their half of the stadium.

Learning isn't necessarily cumulative. Human experience over the centuries provides lessons, some clearer than others. But each generation has to learn lessons anew, and some do not. The lessons about economic growth taught over the long run of history are clear. Growth is not inevitable, and while riches may be accumulated, or appropriated, by the few in high positions, the lives of the very large majority throughout the centuries have been nasty, brutish and short. The exception, the Great Enrichment, began some three centuries ago, around the North Sea, in the Dutch Republic and England, according to economic historian Deirdre...

Young Democratic Socialists of America chapters are slated to host stay-at-home strikes to “weaponize” students against their institutions.Over 100 Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) university chapters are invited to participate in a “National Student Strike for Palestine,” urging universities to divest from Israel, by staying home and skipping class.“We need disruption—and a strike does just that. When students refuse to go to class, the university cannot function,” said a YDSA organizer, as reported by The Free Press.Throughout the previous academic year, hundreds of pro-Hamas protests, which YDSA calls “a beautiful show of organizing energy”, took place across America’s campuses....

In 2019, the four-year graduation rate of all University of California (UC) undergraduates was 72.9 percent, while that of black UC students lagged behind at 59.9 percent. This disparity was emblematic of broader imbalances in college preparedness: In 2019, 74 percent of Asian Americans, 53.8 percent of whites, 36.1 percent of Latinos, 25.9 percent of American Indians, and 23.7 percent of blacks in California were prepared for college or professional careers according to the state’s “college and career indicator” factors. This unfortunate deficit was a result of persistent achievement gaps at the K-12 level. A CalMatters analysis in 2020 revealed...

The Coalition for Carolina recently noted that UNC-Chapel Hill has dropped out of the top-10 “average adjusted faculty salary” rankings for the 2023-24 academic year, as measured against a select group of peer institutions. The implication from the announcement is that this is a bad thing. “We should demand to see our faculty in the top 10 in salaries, respect and shared governance,” the progressive organization declared. “It is concerning, because the quality of our faculty determines the quality of the University and the quality of education that students receive.” Complaints about faculty salaries from within the academy often imply...

For nearly five decades, American universities systematically discriminated against white and Asian Americans. Quotas, “holistic review processes,” and “factors” were used to advance the Left’s racist social policies, first on the pretense that they remedied prior discrimination, next in alignment with the theory that diversity was good for the nation, and most recently to deal with the pretend phenomena known as “systemic racism” and “white privilege.” Such racist, utopian scheming used to be called “affirmative action,” an innocuous term designed to conceal blatantly racist and unlawful discrimination. But despite the anodyne packaging, discrimination against whites and Asians violates the plain...