Free Republic

From: DGiannotti@eth.state.ma.us FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE November 6, 2009 Contact: David Giannotti, Communications Division Chief 617-371-9505 Ethics Commission's Enforcement Division Alleges that Town of Harvard School Superintendent and a Former School Committee Chairman Violated the Conflict of Interest Law Allegedly Used Official Positions to Secure Reimbursement of Private School Tuition by Harvard Public Schools The State Ethics Commission's Enforcement Division, in two Orders to Show Cause ("OTSC"), alleged that Harvard Superintendent of Public Schools Thomas Jefferson ("Jefferson") and former Harvard School Committee Chairman Paul Wormser ("Wormser") violated G.L.c. 268A, the conflict of interest law, by using Jefferson's official position as Superintendent,...

A University of Illinois faculty member is leading an effort to perform sex changes on papayas. That's right, the large, yellowish, sweet fruit. Papayas, it turns out, have not just one but three sexes: male, female and hermaphrodite. The third produce the yummy fruit while the male and females are mostly useless to farmers. U. of I. plant biology professor Ray Ming secured a $3.1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to change the papayas' sex to grow only plants that produce hermaphrodite offspring. Currently, farmers don't know which plants are hermaphrodite until the plants have grown and flowered,...

America is turning out plenty of science and engineering grads, a university study concludes, but many of the best are taking jobs in finance and consulting. U.S. colleges and universities are graduating as many scientists and engineers as ever, according to a study released on Oct. 28 by a group of academics. But that finding comes with a big caveat: Many of the highest-performing students are choosing careers in other fields. The study by professors at Rutgers and Georgetown suggests that since the late 1990s, many of the top students have been lured to careers in finance and consulting. "Despite...

Supporters of Darwin’s theory continue to distinguish themselves on America’s college campuses—not for their reason and logic, but for their incredible ill manners and an almost pathological inability to engage in civil discussion. Last week, a factually-challenged attack on intelligent design was published in The Nevada Sagebrush, the student newspaper at the University of Nevada, Reno. Nothing new in that; I see ill-informed articles on intelligent design all the time. But after my colleague Rob Crowther posted a short comment suggesting that readers might actually want to hear from intelligent design proponents themselves (imagine that!), the Darwinist thought-police came out...

Cambridge University Allows Muslim Students To Wear Burkhas Under Their Mortar Boards At Graduation By DAILY MAIL REPORTER 30th October 2009 Strict dress code: How a Muslim Cambridge University student might look at their graduation ceremony. Cambridge University is to allow female Muslim students to wear burkhas under their mortar boards at graduation ceremonies, it emerged today. The university has a strict dress code for the prestigious events at the city's Senate House, to which all students must adhere in order to graduate. The university website warns students that the code 'is strictly enforced at ceremonies, and if you do...

Those of us laboring for academic reform often feel like Sisyphus, rolling a rock up the hill only to have it come crashing down again. The gods of academe seem to have condemned higher education to inevitable decay. That thought came to me as I read about the demise of an institute (at Hamilton College) that did everything right, yet the overlords of Political Correctness purged themselves of enemies and “deviationists.” I use these terms because the notion that all-is-political, enemies-must-be-destroyed is linked so strongly to communism and its close cousin national socialism. In the above unhappy story, Mark Bauerlein...

Jayson Blair, who was at the center of a major journalism scandal as a New York Times reporter in 2003, will be the featured speaker at Washington and Lee University’s 48th Journalism Ethics Institute on Friday, Nov. 6. The title of Blair’s talk is “Lessons Learned.” The public is invited to the presentation at 5:30 p.m. in Stackhouse Theater, Elrod Commons. Blair resigned from the Times after an investigation found that he had plagiarized and fabricated major portions of stories that he had written during four years with the Times. Some of the stories that he covered in this manner...

Yale Self-Censors New Book Examining Extreme Muslim Reaction to Danish Cartoons of Prophet Muhammad Thursday, October 01, 2009 By Pete Winn, Senior Writer/Editor (CNSNews.com) – Four years after a Danish newspaper published a dozen cartoons depicting Muhammad, and set off violent protests by Muslims, Yale University Press has touched off protests of its own by censoring the offending cartoons out of a scholarly book it has just released on the protests. “The Cartoons that Shook the World,” by Brandeis University professor Jytte Klausen, examines in detail what happened during those protests – violent incidents staged by Muslim extremists. But Yale...

Government watchdogs are blasting taxpayer-funded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities that send college professors on free vacations and pay for programs on topics like the "cultural significance of the circus poster" -- just a few items on an eye-popping list of questionable NEH projects.

JACKSON, Miss. -The University of Mississippi has shortened one of its fight songs to discourage football fans from chanting "the South will rise again" during part of the tune, which critics say is an offensive reminder of the region's intolerant past. However, some fans have continued to recite the chant at the end of the song, "From Dixie With Love," despite the change made last week at the chancellor's request. The Ole Miss band performs the medley before and after games. Earlier this month, the Ole Miss student government passed a resolution suggesting the chant be replaced by the phrase,...

A recent study of the applicants to seven elite colleges in 1997 found that Asian students were much more likely to be rejected than seemingly similar students of other races. Also, athletes and students from top high schools had admissions edges, as did low-income African-Americans and Hispanics. Translating the advantages into SAT scores, study author Thomas Espenshade, a Princeton sociologist, calculated that African-Americans who achieved 1150 scores on the two original SAT tests had the same chances of getting accepted to top private colleges in 1997 as whites who scored 1460s and Asians who scored perfect 1600s...

Muslims Protest Geert Wilders Outside Dutch ParliamentEverywhere you look these days Americans' most basic freedom is under attack by the jihadists of the international left. The infamous UN Human Rights Commission which includes the worst human rights violators on the planet (now joined by the Obama Administration) has recently passed a resolution which paves the way for the Islamic Conference's measure against religious defamation -- defined as linking Islamists to terrorism. At home Democrats have attached a "hate crimes" amendment which would make thinking a crime to the new defense appropriations bill. Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh has been...

Harvard University’s failed bet that interest rates would rise cost the school at least $500 million in payments to escape derivatives that backfired, reports Bloomberg. Harvard paid $497.6 million to investment banks during the fiscal year ended June 30 to get out of $1.1 billion of interest-rate swaps intended to hedge variable-rate debt for capital projects, the school’s annual report said. Harvard said it also agreed to pay $425 million over 30 to 40 years to offset an additional $764 million in swaps. The transactions began losing value last year as central banks slashed benchmark lending rates, forcing the university...

How Harvard Nearly Went Bankrupt After A Rogue Interest Rate Swap Went Very Sour Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/16/2009 17:45 -0500 The school that epitomizes the dangers of groupthink (especially by very intelligent people) and tends to get caught in both the virtues and vices of its own ingeniosity, saw just how expensive hubris can be in 2009. Harvard's endowment dropped 27.3% in 2009 to $27 after hitting roughly $10 billion higher the year before. /snip Yet most notable in the entire report is an interesting story for all those who claim that representing the $200 or so trillion...

Verbotten. story here.

Harvard University last year lost nearly $2 billion in the cash account it uses to pay for daily operations, by investing the money with its endowment fund instead of keeping it in safer, bank-like accounts. The loss, disclosed today in the university's annual financial report, resulted from Harvard financial executives taking the unusual step of placing a large mount of the university's cash with Harvard Management Co., the entity that runs the school's endowment and invests in stocks, hedge funds and other risky assets. Typically, companies and institutions manage their cash accounts conservatively in order to have funds readily available,...

The Temple Muslim Students Association is attempting to shut down the scheduled appearance of Geert Wilders on October 20. As part of its Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, and its campaign to Stop the Campus War Against Israel and the Jews, the David Horowitz Freedom Center is sponsoring appearances by Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders at Temple and Columbia universities (October 20 and 21). The Muslim Students Association has issued a statement condemning the event and calling on the Temple Administration to close it down. The MSA statement can be found at the end of this post. The David Horowitz Freedom Center statement...

Morehouse College, one of the few remaining all-male historically Black colleges has taken a courageous stand with its new dress code that bans ghetto thug attire and cross-dressing on campus.Black Voices gave some background:Morehouse President Dr. Robert M. Franklin, Jr. is implementing the code starting today as part of his "Five Wells: well read, well spoken, well-traveled, well dressed and well balanced." Here are the standards as published in the student newspaper, The Maroon Tiger (via The Daily Voice):It is our expectation that students who select Morehouse do so because of the College's outstanding legacy of producing leaders. On the...

Minuteman Project Founder Jim Gilchrist News Release     For Immediate Release October 15, 2009  Media contact: Tim Bueler (530) 401-3285   Anti-Free Speech Fanatics at Harvard Threaten Disruption and Violence       Cambridge , Ma.-Harvard University seems to be resigned to suffer the same embarrassing fate as Columbia University in 2006 as they scamper to rescind their previous invitation to Jim Gilchrist, founder and president of the Minuteman Project, to participate in its immigration symposium scheduled for this Saturday, October 17 in Cambridge , Ma.         Despite appearing at last February’s symposium at the Harvard Law School on immigration law...

In early October, Kurt Westergaard, a Danish cartoonist, visited Princeton and Yale, two of America’s top universities, to speak to students, who are supposed to be tomorrow’s elite. The students did not feel any sympathy – indeed, were almost hostile – towards Mr. Westergaard, an artist who has been living under constant police protection since he drew a cartoon of Muhammad, the founder of Islam, four years ago. Mr. Westergaard arrived at both Princeton and Yale heavily guarded by policemen. Ten officers kept watch inside the room – with more on guard outside – when he addressed his audience in...

If you’re sick of hearing bad news you’ve starting reading the right column today. Everyone else is talking about the end of the world. There are predictions of war in the Middle East. There’s talk of an even greater economic downturn in the not-too-distant future. Some people are even predicting the Union will begin to dissolve in a few short years. But I’m spending the week telling stories, real stories, about some great people and some great organizations that give me hope. Stick with me for the next few days and you’ll probably feel a whole lot better about your...

Three-steps-from-crazy-cat-lady WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan is teaching at Harvard. Our spies report: "Peggy's a ridiculous, hilarious person to speaking with any authority on anything at all." They've provided us with her awesome quotes. We're presenting them emoticon-contextualized them for you...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Gone are the hot breakfasts in most dorms and the pastries at Widener Library. Varsity athletes are no longer guaranteed free sweatsuits, and just this week came the jarring news that professors will go without cookies at faculty meetings. By Harvard standards, these are hard times. Not Dickensian hard times, perhaps, but with the value of its endowment down by almost 30 percent, the world’s richest university is learning to live with less. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard’s largest division, has cut about $75 million from its budget in recent months and is planning more....

British society cites 'legal issues' just days before event Just one week before Michael Savage was scheduled to debate via video link at the Cambridge Union in England, the co-presidents of the two-century-old society informed the top-rated radio host they have canceled the event. As WND reported, the invitation from the Cambridge Union Society for the Oct. 15 debate was issued in July after Savage was banned from entering the United Kingdom by Prime Minister Gordon Brown's government along with Muslim extremists and leaders of hate groups. In an e-mail today to Savage producer Beowulf Rochlen, Cambridge Union leaders Julien...

Vanderbilt Student Group Protests Wachovia's Support of ACORN Vanderbilt University's chapter of Youth for Western Civilization will be protesting Wachovia Bank's support of ACORN today in front of Wachovia's West End location from 4:30 – 5:30pm.ACORN, or the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, has recently come under fire since conservative activists revealed the multiple instances of outrageous behavior.Most notably, videos surfaced of ACORN employees giving advice on how to receive tax breaks for housing underage, illegal immigrant El Salvadorian prostitutes.Since then, both houses of Congress have voted to defund ACORN and Bank of America has opted to "suspend...

Conservative activist David Horowitz will not be speaking at St. Louis University this month after school officials raised objections about the title and content of his speech, "Islamo-Fascism Awareness and Civil Rights." The SLU College Republicans, a student group, had invited Horowitz to speak on campus. The event would have been paid for out of student activity fees. SLU said in a statement that it did not "ban" Horowitz from campus. Rather, the school was concerned that the event could be viewed as "attacking another faith and seeking to cause derision on campus." Horowitz, reached by phone on Friday, called...

Derrius Quarles leans back in his seat and methodically analyzes Aristotle's theory of truth during freshman honors English class at Morehouse College. He strides across campus in a navy blue tailored suit and a bold red sweater handing out business cards that boast "Student/Entrepreneur/Leader." But behind the 19-year-old's dauntless appearance is a past that few on campus know. When Quarles was 5, the state took him away from his mother. He spent his childhood bouncing from home to home before ending up on his own at 17 in an apartment on Chicago's South Side. His arrival at a prestigious, historically...

MONTREAL -- Half of American high-school seniors surveyed recently thought Sodom and Gomorrah were a married couple. A McGill University professor's reference to the patience of Job drew blank stares from students in his religion course. An art history teacher in France found children were mystified by the "strange bird" (a dove representing the Holy Ghost) common in Renaissance paintings. Until recently, such confusion was little more than fodder for faculty-room jokes, evidence of the increasing secularism of Western societies. But educators attending a conference at McGill University yesterday heard there is growing recognition in Europe and North America that...

BOSTON - Sex in a dorm at Tufts University is fine. Sex in a Tufts dorm with your roommate there? That's a no-no. The Boston-area school has a new policy this semester banning sexual activity while a roommate is in the same room.

Several years ago, I discovered a curious phenomenon among the diverse freshmen in the developmental English classes I teach. These are students who fail the placement exam and are forced to take a reading and writing refresher course before moving on to basic composition. In one of their grammar exercises, the name Charles Lindbergh appears. What I discovered was that roughly 90% of the developmental students didn't know who he was. That in itself would be unremarkable. More remarkable was the fact that when I mentioned the name to my honors students, roughly 90% knew that Lindbergh was a pilot,...

Sept 27, 2009 — What would Darwin do? Just in time for the 150th anniversary of The Origin of Species, his magnum opus has been reprinted with an introduction not by a scientist or historian, but by a Christian evangelist. He and a Christian movie actor are trying to get their special edition to students at major universities. Talk about brashness. Darwin’s defenders are stepping on themselves to condemn this – well, blasphemy...

David Axelrod, senior adviser to President Barack Obama, will appear at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 7, at the University of Delaware's Mitchell Hall. The presentation, in which Axelrod will speak briefly and then engage in a conversation with Ralph Begleiter, UD's Edward and Elizabeth Goodman Rosenberg Professor of Communication and Distinguished Journalist in Residence, is part of the fall public affairs lecture series, “Assessing Obama's First Year.”

Here is the flier circulating on UNC-Chapel Hill Campus about which Chancellor Holden Thorp HAS NOTHING to say! Apparently to falsely label a Professor Emeritus in good standing as a White Supremacist and “suggest” neighbors and friends “contact him” at his home address is just ordinary campus rhetoric-all in good fun. When the Professor *all in good fun* “suggests” he is a crack shot he is summarily reprimanded and removed as advisor to a student group! Good Grief! The Chancellor of a major University no longer feels compelled to even go through the motions of impartiality any

Chris Higgins, 21, an upbeat Harvard University junior, is a social studies major who has worked at an orphanage in Uganda and backpacked around China while learning Mandarin. He is also a master sergeant in the Army ROTC, an officer-in-the-making who has spent weekends firing an M-16, rappelling, and honing land-navigation skills while many classmates are launching a blitz on the college social scene. “I have a mission,’’ said Higgins, a native of East Setauket, N.Y. That mission - to serve the country and gain leadership experience - is shared by a sharply growing number of American undergraduates, who have...

-Ronald Reagan Eureka College -George H. W. Bush Yale University -George W. Bush Yale University Harvard Business School - Bill Clinton Georgetown University University of Oxford (Rhodes Scholar) Yale Law School -Barack Obama Occidental College (transferred to Columbia University) Columbia University Harvard Law School

WASHINGTON, Sept. 25 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz was joined by world leaders and nearly 3,000 guests as he delivered the keynote address to inaugurate the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Other speakers during the ceremony included the KAUST Chairman of the Board of Trustees and Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources, His Excellency Ali Al-Naimi, Minister of Higher Education, His Excellency Dr. Khaled Al-Anqari, and the President of KAUST, Professor Choon Fong Shih.

I've been thinking a lot recently about the disparate gap in reasoning between the mainstream academic elites and the rest of America. Why is it that liberalism is so often an outgrowth of scholarly people? The most prominent colleges in America---the ivy league schools---are often the most liberal environments, and produce the writers, artists and politicians who are often the most liberal. Why is this so?

The U.S. government failed to send promised college tuition checks to tens of thousands of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars before they returned to school this fall, even after being warned that it was inadequately staffed for the job. The Veterans Affairs Department blamed a backlog of claims filed for GI Bill education benefits that has left veterans who counted on the money for tuition and books scrambling to make ends meet. Veterans like American University student John Kamin, who received a letter Wednesday from the Army. He was hoping it contained news that his overdue GI Bill...

Boeing employees are about to lose a fabulous perk, and the cost-cutting move could mean a significant financial hit for some local colleges and universities as well. Until now, when a Boeing employee enrolled for any class at any accredited college, the company picked up the tuition — with no restrictions. Boeing currently pays for the classes of about 6,000 employees in the Puget Sound region and 21,000 companywide. But many of those enjoying free classes will lose that benefit at year-end, when Boeing starts limiting its subsidy to cover only courses that further an employee's career at the company....

There is so much for high school seniors and their parents to know about colleges that they not only need to get a lot of information but also need to make sure it is the right kind of information. A number of college guides have useful information but, unfortunately, the best-known and most pretentious of these guides — "America's Best Colleges"— is grossly misleading. There is no such thing as a "best" college, any more than there is any such thing as a "best" wife or a "best" husband. Who would be best for a particular person depends on that...

If you are straight, white, and male, please stand up. Congratulations, you are more privileged than you probably ever realized. Because of your blessed birth, you are responsible for the victimization of thousands of your underprivileged peers. You may not be aware, but implicitly you hate, resent, and distrust everyone who does not look like you. How does this make you feel? No, do not answer. Instead, allow us to tell you how you should be feeling. You should be feeling extremely guilty and ashamed, and in order to move past your racist tendencies and make amends for being born...

The American university is the anti-Disneyland, the saddest place on Earth. Today's colleges can make MSNBC seem fair and balanced and give the term "clinical depression" a sunny and joyful flavor. It's no wonder so many prominent liberal intellectuals are angry, begrudging, and gloomy. They imbibe four to ten years of it during their college studies. And their brethren in the media give them a consistent platform for their gloom. A few years ago, the Washington Post discovered that over 72 percent of college professors classify themselves as liberal. The study showed that the most left-leaning departments are in the...

SOUTH BEND -- In the aftermath of the controversial commencement visit by President Barack Obama, the University of Notre Dame's president plans to participate in the March for Life in January in Washington, D.C. The Rev. John I. Jenkins, the university president, announced Wednesday in an e-mail to the campus community that he will participate in the Jan. 22 march. He encouraged others to join him. A March for Life is held each January in the nation's capital on the anniversary of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion. "I plan to participate in that march. I...

I am looking for a list of conservatives colleges in Texas, specially states universities around the San Antonio area, any recommendations? My daughter will be ready for college in about 3 yrs, and I am doing my research and planning to start visiting them. I also would like to know what colleges are the ones we should avoid at all costs.

Before I came to the UA, I didn’t have a clear-cut political affiliation. I vaguely remember playing the conservative part to piss off the liberal girls in high school — which I had thought to be the apex of instigative game spitting, but which never actually worked for me — and though it was easy to anger and frustrate with intense conservative views, it was even easier to become an ardent, self-identifying liberal when I started college. Here at the UA, we’re inculcated with a myriad of fresh perspectives that usually undo or very seriously deepen our understanding of viewpoints...

Protesters Disrupt UC Regents Board Meeting The Associated Press Sep. 16, 2009 SAN FRANCISCO -- A meeting of the University of California Board of Regents was briefly disrupted by demonstrators protesting layoffs, executive pay and proposals to raise student fees. The regents left the meeting hall at the UCSF campus Wednesday after more than 100 protesters stood up and chanted for about 15 minutes until they were forced out by campus police. Fourteen demonstrators who refused to leave were handcuffed and escorted out of the meeting room. Most of the demonstrators were UC union employees. UC officials are discussing plans...

Parents will be forbidden from receiving and accessing their dependent child's grades at colleges and universities - even when they pay for the entire cost of the child's education. Just pay up and don't ask questions

Harvard’s endowment tumbled 27.3 percent in its latest fiscal year, largely because of problems with its private equity and hedge fund portfolios, lopping off $10 billion and shrinking its portfolio to $26 billion. The loss is the biggest percentage decline at Harvard in 40 years and has prompted a review of how it manages its money and allocates assets. Jane Mendillo, who took over the endowment on July 1, 2008, intends to manage more of the school’s assets directly instead of using outside money managers and to hire additional people to oversee the management by outsiders. In her letter describing...

CHEYENNE, Wyo. (Sept. 8) — A decision by the University of Wyoming to name a new center for international students for former Vice President Dick Cheney is drawing criticism from people who say Cheney's support for the Iraq war and harsh interrogation techniques should disqualify him from the distinction. The former vice president and wife Lynne are expected to attend Thursday's dedication of the new Cheney International Center on the Laramie campus. Protesters plan to be there, too. The center is funded in part with $3.2 million the Cheneys donated to the university in several installments while he was vice...

William Ayers will appear at Purdue University on September 24th as a panelist about urban schools as part of the first annual Cummings-Perrucci Annual Lecture on Race, Class, and Gender Equality. Ayers will hit the campus in West Lafayette, Indiana, according to a story in today’s Lafayette Journal & Courier under the curious headline “Ex-radical to attend forum at Purdue.” Ex-radical? According to the story, some groups are already organizing protests against Ayers and the university. Political Science professor Harry Targ – who was singled out in David Horowitz’s book as one of America’s most dangerous academics – takes his...