Free Republic

The brain incubator at Harvard, the place which according to legend, and certainly the US News and World Report's annual paid college infomercial, is the repository for some of the smartest people in the world, is furious. The reason - Harvard's illustrious faculty has learned that they too will be subject to their own policy recommendations as relates to Obamacare, which they themselves helped conceive. As the left-leaning NYT reported earlier today, "for years, Harvard’s experts on health economics and policy have advised presidents and Congress on how to provide health benefits to the nation at a reasonable cost. But...

This is almost as delicious as unions — who did everything in their power to get it enacted — calling for ObamaCare's repeal once they realized the harm it would do to their members. It seems that ivory tower professors at Harvard, where health experts helped craft the law, are now grumbling about the impact ObamaCare is having on their pocketbooks. Harvard administrators say ObamaCare pushed them to make cost-saving — for Harvard — changes to their health benefit plan. As its enrollment guide explains, Harvard "must respond to the national trend of rising health care costs, including some driven...

Harvard faculty members are apoplectic over changes to their university-provided health-care plans related to Obamacare — after Harvard researchers spent years promoting the Affordable Care Act. The New York Times reports that faculty members voted unanimously in November to oppose a slight increase in out-of-pocket costs Harvard proposed for the plans. The university administration cited the need to confront the “added costs” caused by Obamacare provisions. Despite the protests, the university enacted the increase in January. That hasn’t stopped faculty from waxing apocalyptic about the change. “Deplorable, deeply regressive, a sign of the corporatization of the university” is how classics...

For years, Harvard’s experts on health economics and policy have advised presidents and Congress on how to provide health benefits to the nation at a reasonable cost. But those remedies will now be applied to the Harvard faculty, and the professors are in an uproar.

Harvard University and its law school reached a settlement Tuesday with the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights, pledging to revise its sexual harassment and sexual assault policies in order to address concerns that the university had failed to adequately provide a safe campus environment for students. The agreement represents the latest example of how the Obama administration's aggressive use of Title IX, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender at schools that receive federal funding, is reverberating across the country's institutions of higher learning. The Education Department's Office of Civil Rights is investigating dozens of colleges and universities...

It's every parent's nightmare, but true: Major U.S. corporations are funding a campaign of sophisticated, psychologically intrusive "gay" indoctrination programs targeting very young children in elementary schools across America. It’s part of a very well-planned and well-funded effort to reach children as young as possible without their parents’ intervention. The national program, called “Welcoming Schools”, skillfully works on the minds of young children in three ways: (1) Introducing the concept of homosexuality to children. (2) Telling them that homosexuality is normal and natural. (3) Telling them that their parents or friends who portray homosexuality in a less than positive way...

".......An Instagram of that “No Cops No Prisons” banner displays a number of hashtags, including #turnuptheanger, a hashtag associated with TMOC. (The first mention of #turnuptheanger on Twitter, for example, directs to a Facebook page hosted by the Trayvon Martin Organizing Committee NYC.) It’s not the only apparent link between the “dead cops” chant and TMOC. At the beginning of the video and before the call to kill police, you can hear what sounds like, “arms up, shoot back!” That slogan appears on TMOC’s Twitter account....... [SNIP] ......There are not many TMOC members willing to openly admit that they’re part...

The National Review thinks kids today are softer than cotton candy. They drew this conclusion based on the students’ and their institutions of higher learning reactions to the double non-indictment of two grand juries hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away from their campuses. Requiring everything from grief therapists (University of California) to delayed final exams (Harvard, Occidental, Columbia), the kids just can’t seem to shake the trauma. And if that weren’t bad enough, now people are making fun of them as well. Another Harvard Law student, writing on behalf of all of those Ivy Leaguers troubled by the goings-on...

From Tom Cotton to Ted Cruz, many of the biggest new names in the GOP are graduates of Harvard -- the school the right loves to hate. Mocking the arrogance of “liberals from Harvard” is a foolproof applause line for any Republican looking to rev up a conservative audience. But when the 114th Congress gavels into session in January, GOP speechwriters are going to need some new material. That’s because many of fastest rising stars in the Republican Party, including Senators-elect Tom Cotton (Ark.), Ben Sasse (Neb.), Dan Sullivan (Ak.) and Rep.-elect Elise Stefanik, all graduated from Harvard. Along with...

December 13, 2014 Naked College Students Vs. Black Lives Matter protesters by Cardigan Dean of College Rakesh Khurana speaks on behalf of protesters during Primal Scream early Thursday in Harvard Yard. Dean of Student Life Stephen Lassonde stands at his side.Dean of College Rakesh Khurana attempts to gain the attention of the participants of Primal Scream by climbing onto the shoulders of a Primal Scream runner Thursday in Harvard Yard. Other students organized a protest in response to recent police brutality that attempted to delay the start of the run. A group of about 30 students attempted to hold a...

If you are a woman, it’s a pretty seductive argument : “Research shows men really are more stupid than women.”However, when your entire research universe is drawn from a self-selecting pool of low IQ specimens -- it’s hard to give the conclusion too much weight: Study Abstract: Sex differences in risk seeking behaviour, emergency hospital admissions, and mortality are well documented. However, little is known about sex differences in idiotic risk taking behaviour. This paper reviews the data on winners of the Darwin Award over a 20 year period (1995-2014). Winners of the Darwin Award must eliminate themselves from the...

The technologies of the past, by replacing human muscle, increased the value of human effort – and in the process drove rapid economic progress. Those of the future, by substituting for man’s senses and brain, will accelerate that process – but at the risk of creating millions of citizens who are simply unable to contribute economically, and with greater damage to an already declining middle class. Estimates of general rates of technological progress are always imprecise, but it is fair to say that, in the past, progress came more slowly. Henry Adams, the historian, measured technological progress by the power...

..that overcharged him $4 Last week, Ben Edelman, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, ordered takeout from a local Chinese restaurant. Upon his return, Edelman discovered the restaurant, Sichuan Garden in Brookline, Mass., had overcharged him a total of $4 on his $53.35 order of shredded chicken with spicy garlic sauce, sautéed prawns with roasted chili and peanut, stir-fried chicken with spicy capsicum and braised fish filets and Napa cabbage with roasted chili. Now most people in this situation might call the restaurant to point out the error, get a refund or future credit for takeout, or just swallow...

Minority students at three prestigious law schools say they want to delay final exams because they’ve been busy protesting grand jury decisions in the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of white police officers in New York City and Ferguson, Missouri, and haven’t had time to study. Student groups at Harvard Law School, Georgetown University Law Center and Columbia Law School say demonstrations and rallies over the Eric Garner and Michael Brown cases have prevented many students from adequately preparing for exams. Cities across the country have seen large-scale demonstrations since grand juries in both cases recently decided...

There is a form of derangement to which professors at highly competitive elite institutions are vulnerable. Jonathan Gruber of MIT (Economics PhD, Harvard) is much in the public eye right now, but Ben Edelman of Harvard Business School (Economics PhD, Harvard, along with a Harvard Law School diploma and a masters in statistics) is beginning to join him in the ranks of infamously arrogant. Hillary Sargent of Boston Magazine gained access to an email exchange between Professor Edelman and a Chinese restaurant, which he believes overcharged him, based on the prices in their menu that was part of their...

Chris Hughes and Sean Eldridge have always been entitled brats. And now the media finally noticed. How swiftly things change. In just the past two months, one half of this pair managed to single-handedly destroy a storied journalistic institution, while the other suffered a crushing electoral defeat in New York’s 19th Congressional District. Last week, the 31-year-old Hughes forced the resignations of both the editor and literary editor of The New Republic, whose 100th anniversary he presided over last month at a star-studded gala in Washington, D.C. In protest of the magazine’s newly ensconced CEO’s plan to transform TNR into...

Nearly a century ago, Harvard had a big problem: Too many Jews. By 1922, Jews accounted for 21.5 percent of freshmen, up from 7 percent in 1900 and vastly more than at Yale or Princeton. In the Ivy League, only Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania had a greater proportion of Jews. Harvard’s president, A. Lawrence Lowell, warned that the “Jewish invasion” would “ruin the college.” He wanted a cap: 15 percent. When faculty members balked, he stacked the admissions process to achieve the same result. Bolstered by the nativism of the time, which led to sharp immigration restrictions, Harvard’s...

BOSTON (AP) -- Lawsuits filed Monday against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill argue that affirmative action policies should be banned at colleges across the nation. The federal suits allege Harvard and UNC rely on race-based affirmative action policies that impact admissions of high-achieving white and Asian American students. The Harvard lawsuit also contends that the Ivy League university specifically limits the number of Asian Americans it admits each year. The Project on Fair Representation, an Alexandria, Virginia-based legal defense fund, said Monday's filings will be the first in a series of legal challenges against...

Two months before 17-year-old Alexa of northern New Jersey—a national merit scholar, Girl Scout Gold Award recipient and standout soccer player—planned to submit her application to Amherst, anxiety set in. Even though she met all the requirements to land her on the college's competitive playing field, she wanted an independent education counselor (IEC) to give the final nod on her application. It didn't matter that her parents, guidance counselor, coach and teachers invested more than 100 hours steering her through the college process. Her parents contacted a pricey New York City college-planning service and, after relating Alexa's long list of...

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex) says she will introduce legislation that would establish a federally funded Barack Obama sperm bank in the upcoming "lame duck" session of Congress. She says she got the idea from a similar proposal to establish a Vladimir Putin sperm bank in Russia. "We can't afford to fall behind in what could turn out to be a critical competition to propagate the seed of the nation's best and brightest," Lee argued. "Granted, it would be decades before the offspring of President Obama's banked sperm could be expected to make a strategic difference, but if we fail...