Free Republic

Columbia University has canceled all in-person classes amid escalating anti-Israel protests that have sparked fear in Jewish students - and a warning from a rabbi. President Minouche Shafik on Monday said she was 'saddened' by the situation and that the school 'needed a reset'.

The University of Southern California has cancelled all of the speakers scheduled to speak at the commencement ceremony amid controversy. On April 15, the prestigious private university announced its decision to ban the valedictorian from speaking at this year's graduation on May 10. Asna Tabassum, 21, was banned for being outspoken in her pro-Palestinian support, which has led her to be labeled anti-Semitic.

The Center for Collegiate Mental Health (CCMH) recently issued its 2023 Annual Report. It presents an abundance of dire information about the therapy-addicted young people now trying to make their way through the wasteland of undergraduate education. I have read it so you don’t have to. But before I turn to its diagnostic particulars, let me indulge with the broader picture that appears nowhere in CCMH’s report. Virtually everyone, including CCMH, agrees that American college students are suffering an epidemic of mental illness. But why? Among the recent books on the topic is The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring...

West Virginia has no time to lose. Its 55-percent labor-force participation rate is better only than Mississippi’s. Life expectancy is under 73 years, again placing West Virginia in second-to-worst place among U.S. states. Median family income is also near the bottom, whatever family size we compare. Economic development is our best way out, and the surest path to that result is education reform. It’s not a matter of sending more high schoolers to a four-year college program. While it’s true that completing college—indeed, having any college education regardless of completion—is positively correlated with higher income, artificially increasing access is not...

In the aftermath of Hamas’s attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, campuses across the country erupted with intense, heated protests. Except the protests weren’t against the brutality of Hamas’s massacre of innocent civilians. No, students had come to the conclusion that such actions were justified, and it was Israel’s military response to the attacks that needed to be stopped. In one of many such instances, pro-Palestinian student groups at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill used a paraglider, one of Hamas’s modes of attack, in fliers promoting the event. As UNC provost Chris Clemens said: “There is no doubt...

For Joe Biden, it's got to be maddening.Day after day, he cooks up another legally questionable student loan forgiveness program, announces it to much fanfare to a fawning media, and all he gets for it is young people moving to vote for President Trump.According to Politico:Polls show former President Donald Trump is ascendant with the youngest bloc of the electorate, even leading President Joe Biden in some surveys, as less-engaged young voters spurn Biden. Meanwhile, Biden is stronger with seniors than he was four years ago, even as his personal image is significantly diminished since he was elected last time.That...

The University of Texas at Austin is laying off dozens of employees who previously worked in diversity, equity and inclusion roles in response to a state law that banned such programs, according to the Texas chapter of the American Association of University Professors. Employees who had previously worked in DEI roles received layoff notices Tuesday. That came months after the university had reassigned them from those positions to comply with the legislation, which went into effect Jan. 1. The school declined to provide a specific tally of the number of people affected, though the AAUP said 60 is a “conservative...

Yesterday afternoon, Joe Biden visited Wisconsin and announced a new student loan bailout program, “a proposal that would cancel at least some debt” for more than 30 million borrowers.Then, last night, Alexandria Ocasion-Cortez joined Stephen Colbert on the Late Show to discuss the move, applauding Biden’s gift of “hope” for college graduates who will now have the opportunity to… “travel abroad” on trips they would have been otherwise unable to afford if they were held to the original stipulations of the loan.By passing the debt onto people who didn’t incur it—er, I mean, by implementing loan “forgiveness,” Biden is buying...

A national college athletics association has banned biological males who claim to be females from competing in women’s sports, a win for women’s rights.As the number of injuries inflicted and titles stolen by men competing in female sports and events continues to climb, the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) made the right decision, becoming the first national college governing body to make it mandatory for athletes to compete based on their biological sex, according to CBS Sports.NAIA president Jim Carr admitted to CBS Sports that there are “different opinions” about transgenders competing in women’s sports, but fortunately, his organization...

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris offered a “history lesson” Thursday to explain the recent resurgence of popularity in women’s college basketball. The only problem? Her “history” is very, very wrong. In a conversation with Spectrum News’ Tim Boyum, Harris stridently and confidently claimed that women’s basketball was gaining popularity because, in the past, the women’s tournament didn’t have brackets. Do you know? Okay, a bit of a history lesson. Do you know that women were not. The women’s teams were not allowed to have brackets until 2022. Think about that. And what? That. Talk about progress. You know better late...

On January 5, 2024, Western Oregon University (WOU) announced a bold change to its grading regime: “The letter grades of D- and F” have been axed in favor of a mark of “No Credit (NC)” for undergraduates. WOU’s provost, Jose Coll, clarified that this new system will not lower the university’s academic standards but, rather, “increase retention and graduation rates.” The university will no longer “mask” students’ “demonstrated abilities” with a slew of poor marks, following the likes of Brown University and Hampshire College, which have already exchanged letter grades for alternative measures in some instances. By removing troublesome grades,...

Caitlin Clark, who is to basketball what Taylor Swift is to pop music and culture, albeit with far more talent, scored 42 points and added 12 assists while leading her Hawkeyes to a 94-87 victory over Angel Reese and the LSU Tigers.

More than 150 students, staff and alumni have reportedly been diagnosed with cancers and other diseases linked to a university building teeming with toxins. Cases of lymphoma and thyroid and breast cancers have been reported among patients who spent time at Poe Hall, a class building at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. The building closed in November 2023 amid reports of exposure to concerning levels of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), toxic chemicals linked to cancer. An investigation the month before found that PCB levels in five rooms were more than 38 times the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) building limit. The...

American Jews are in a strange predicament. On the one hand, following Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, radical-left partisans learned that antisemitism is an increasingly important and effective part of their racialist ideology. On the other hand, holdovers from the Left’s tolerant but distant past are not prepared to abandon the party that has abandoned them. They still feel the need to distract the public from the inroads made by antisemitism deep within the Democratic party. They do this by pointing to the so-called epidemic of white supremacy on the right—an epidemic that is more imagined than real. This...

Okay, to be fair, “beware” kind of applies to all of academia at this point, but I think this one is worth mentioning, and I happened upon it by chance:‘New’ refers to the improbability of any one discipline or mode of thinking (e.g. Marxism, postmodernism) producing similar results, and that ‘no one (other than the interdisciplinarian) takes responsibility for studying the complex problem, object, text, or system that falls between the disciplines or that transcends them’ (Repko & Szostak, 2016, p. 324).This passage comes from a 2020 college textbook, the Third Edition of Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies by Allen F....

Men are turning away from college and the shift could have profound implications for the economy, their health and the American family. Today, only 39% of young men who have completed high school are enrolled in college, down from 47% in 2011, according to a recent analysis by Pew Research. That works out to about 1 million fewer young men in college compared to just over a decade ago. The trend isn’t new but as scholars like Richard Reeves have pointed out, the gradual retreat from higher education signals a larger crisis facing boys and men.

Many Americans realize that our higher-education system is decaying, its standards in decline while costs continue to rise. Is this situation like a tooth with a cavity that can readily be fixed? Or is the decay so deep that we need something far more serious, such as a root canal? David Barnhizer’s new book, Conformity Colleges, strongly suggests that we must have the latter. His subtitle explains that we suffer from “the destruction of intellectual creativity and dissent.” That’s an accurate diagnosis. An emeritus professor of law, Barnhizer has written a no-holds-barred exposé of the tragic fall of our institutions...

“Finally.” It’s a word those who’ve spent years sounding the alarm about the plight of higher education have been saying a lot lately. Finally, the thought-policing and groupthink have become undeniable. Finally, the cost of toxic dogmas is coming clear. Finally, the bloat and cartel-like behavior is being seen for what it is. The train-wreck congressional testimony by the leaders of some of the nation’s most prestigious universities, the blatant and unrepentant campus antisemitism on display, and the laughably hypocritical double standards applied to speech have illustrated the problems in higher education, even for voters and policymakers who have neither...

Coach Prime is not playing around with this advice to his players. Coach Deion Sanders is aware that during Spring Break, many of his Colorado Buffaloes players will likely go on vacation and party like there is no tomorrow. According to the program's schedule, all theplayers will have a full week of vacation to do what ever they want but 'Coach Prime' wanted to remind them of how important it is for them to behave during this time. The coach can't keep an eye out for all of them 24/7 but he can only hope the advice he gives them...

In May of 2011, I wrote the following words in the Chronicle of Higher Education: “Online learning has become the third rail in American higher-education politics: Step on it and you’re toast.” In so doing, I planted my foot squarely on that electrified third rail. Besides being roundly criticized in the comments section, I learned that my administration at the time—which was, unbeknownst to me, planning a major online expansion—did not appreciate what they saw as an attack on their sacred (cash) cow. I was removed from my administrative position, had my pay cut, and was threatened with dismissal. Being...