Free Republic

DURHAM, N.C. — Two days after announcing that Islamic students would be broadcasting a weekly call to prayer from the Duke Chapel bell tower, Duke University officials abandoned that plan Thursday, citing the furor the move had created.

Could the time to end federal aid to higher education have long passed? “The federal government has no constitutional authority to do anything with regard to higher education (or any level, for that matter),” George Leef writes in Forbes. “But in 1965, Congress was swarming with ‘progressives’ who were sure that because college seemed to be a good thing for the rather small percentage of Americans who went, the nation would benefit if almost everyone went.” “So the federal policy began to make higher education more ‘accessible’ for students, most significantly through grants and easily available loans. The result was...

... Instead of talking about new laws to enact and regulations to impose, it’s time to start talking about old ones that should be repealed. Your predecessors in office – and quite possibly you – have done grave damage to America with swarms of laws and regulations that take liberty and property away from the people, waste resources, enrich and empower special interest groups, and undermine the rule of law. The very best, most public-spirited thing you could do would be to repeal them. Here is a starter list. The Davis-Bacon Act. This law is a relic of the Depression,...

In a Dec. 5 op-ed, the president of California State University (CSU) claimed if you are “light skinned” you have “significant unearned privilege” and routinely think less of those who are different than yourself. In her piece, “Privilege at The Beach,”—referencing the Long Beach area where the school resides—Jane Close Conoley, a white woman herself, asserts that “light skin color and high income levels may attract significant unearned privilege.” Those who qualify for such privilege, often unknowingly exert distrust and “lower expectations of behavior” on those of another skin color. “Those who are less affluent with darker skin or from...

The concept of white privilege remains controversial in the same way people still argue about climate change. A small, increasingly-fringe faction might argue that it doesn't exist at all. Another broad, more conservative group might concede that it does, technically, exist, but still disagree about what it means, whether it's important and what, if anything, we can do about it. Still, many others would argue that acknowledging and working to understand it is an important step toward fixing the problem -- in the case of white privilege, the problem being compounded, inter-generational inequality that, although sometimes subtle, is still present...

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...

I believe the time has come for common sense to matriculate to the campuses of Ivy League colleges and engage in a little civil discourse. When a majority of students identify the Tea Party as a greater threat to America than ISIS, or dare I say Barack Obama, then they're clearly incapable of critical thought or being worthy of any respect whatsoever. And these are the best and brightest minds America has to offer? Oh, I beg to differ; more like ‘Western Civilization's Most Wanted’ for crimes against academia and can openers! The Tea Party - unlike the revoked charter...

Note: In the following article, I refuse to refer to Campus Crusade for Christ by their new name. I find their removal of the words “Crusade” and “Christ” to be offensive and demeaning (and just incredibly silly).Nearly half of the abortions in this country are performed on college-age women. According to Students for Life of America, 70% of all abortion-providing and abortion-referring facilities are located within five miles of a college campus. Given those staggering numbers, it would seem that campus ministries would be positioning themselves to do something about the problem. But most are doing nothing at all. If...

PHILADELPHIA, Sept. 17, 2014—In a national certified mailing sent today, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) warns the leaders of more than 300 of our nation’s largest and most prestigious public colleges and universities that they risk First Amendment lawsuits by continuing to maintain speech codes that violate student and faculty rights. The letters are being mailed from the main post office near Independence Hall in Philadelphia today to mark the 227th anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution. liberty bell “58 percent of our nation’s public colleges and universities restrict student and faculty speech with blatantly...

You’ve heard of grade inflation? Welcome to the world of degree inflation. A new report finds that employers are increasingly requiring a bachelor’s degree for positions that didn’t used to require baccalaureate education. A college degree, in other words, is becoming the new high school diploma: the minimum credential required to get even the most basic, entry-level job. The report is from Burning Glass, a labor market analytics company that mines millions of online job postings. The company found that a wide range of jobs — in management, administration, sales and other fields — are undergoing “upcredentialing,” or degree inflation....

An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education argues that accreditation ought to be denied to Christian colleges that require professors to sign statements of faith or otherwise “draw lines around what is regarded as acceptable teaching and research.” This seems like an obvious next step in the current march of secular intolerance, so I expect we’ll be hearing more arguments like this in the future: ** Why does accreditation matter? Aside from the traditional goal of conferring legitimacy on colleges and their programs, accreditation has taken on a far more consequential role: Students attending institutions that are not accredited...

Religious colleges and universities, often derided by academic elites, got a surprising shout-out recently from an Ivy League insider. harvard hoodie “Elite schools like to boast that they teach their students how to think, but all they mean is that they train them in the analytic and rhetorical skills that are necessary for success in business and the professions,” William Deresiewicz wrote in the July 21, 2014 issue of The New Republic. “Everything is technocratic—the development of expertise—and everything is ultimately justified in technocratic terms.” “Religious colleges—even obscure, regional schools that no one has ever heard of on the coasts—often...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Students in an Ohio State University psychology class are being taught that atheists have higher IQs than Christians, according to a report from a college watchdog organization. Campus Reform notes that a question from a recent online psychology quiz from the university implied that religious beliefs were directly related to IQ levels. “Theo has an IQ of 100 and Aine has an IQ of 125,” the quiz stated. “Which of the following statements would you expect to be true?” Students were then asked to select an answer from the following four options: 1.Aine is an atheist, while...

Over the past five years, an underground movement has been burgeoning on evangelical Christian campuses. Although many of these colleges explicitly ban “homosexual behavior,” they are now home to dozens of LGBT-friendly student groups. The umbrella organization Safety Net, founded in December 2011, encompasses groups from approximately 75 different evangelical Christian colleges. Some of these groups are tiny, and many operate in near-secret. But over the past two weeks, an LGBT group at Gordon College has made itself impossible to ignore. When we, the authors, attended Gordon College over a decade ago, the vast majority of administrators, faculty, and students...

In a decision that drew an unusually fierce dissent from the three female justices, the Supreme Court sided Thursday with religiously affiliated nonprofit groups in a clash between religious freedom and women’s rights. The decision temporarily bars the government from enforcing against a Christian college part of the regulations that provide contraception coverage under the Affordable Care Act. The court’s order was brief, provisional and unsigned, but it drew a furious reaction from the three female justices — Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan — who said the court had betrayed a promise it made on Monday...

A student in Virginia Beach says his attempt to start a Second Amendment Club on campus at ECPI University fell flat, leading to heated call for change online. The school says people don’t know the whole story. Right now gun rights websites are supporting Patrick Winslow’s fight to start his club, but the university claims it’s rooted in misinformation. 10 On Your Side got to the bottom of the debate that has so many people up in arms. “I have now taken on an effort to want to educate the students and the faculty on the Constitution, Declaration of Independence,...

Congratulations, graduates, on your diploma. Now what about that $29,000 student loan debt? More than 70 percent of graduates will carry student debt into the real world, according to the Institute for College Access and Success. And the average debt is just shy of $30,000. But the news will get worse next week when interest rates on student loans are set to rise again. Though federal student loan rates are fixed for the life of the loan, these rates reset for new borrowers every July 1, thanks to legislation that ties the rates to the performance of the financial markets....

No Koch Bros wanted at B.C. Brooklyn College, part of the disastrous and dysfunctional City University of New York sinkhole, has a $60 million endowment. A drop in the bucket compared to CUNY’s horrifying $3 billion budget.46% of its wildly inflated budget comes from New York State. New York City taxpayers kick in another 10%.With so much taxpayer money, involuntarily extracted, they just aren’t in need of any dirty Koch Brothers cash. Brooklyn College’s liberal politics are keeping grants and progress from faculty and students, one frustrated CUNY professor told the Observer.The CUNY college has turned down a $10 million...

I thought this was interesting and Freepers might get a kick/laugh out of it. Look at number 1 major requiring the least amount of study and number 5.

Colorado Christian University has won an important case against the Department of Health and Human Services contraception mandate. Instead of CCU being forced to provide employees and students abortifacients, a federal judge in Denver has ruled that the school can retain its religious freedom. It's a significant decision, and one that the Supreme Court will surely keep in mind as it prepares to decide on the high profile Hobby Lobby v. Sebelius case. The Becket Fund, a non-profit, public interest law firm who represented CCU in its lawsuit, emailed LifeNews the good news: In a carefully reasoned opinion, the court...