Free Republic

A prominent Texas medical school will stop considering race or ethnicity in deciding whether to admit applicants, as part of an agreement with the Education Department’s civil rights office. The president of the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center signed the agreement in February, 14 years after the department began investigating a complaint filed by an anti-affirmative action group. The agreement is the first of its kind for the Education Department under Secretary Betsy DeVos, and comes as the Trump administration continues its hard turn against the use of race in admissions. Roger Clegg, general counsel for the Center for...

A group of students and professors at George Mason University has been triggered by the school’s decision to bring on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh as a visiting law professor, saying the hire threatens their mental well-being. Kavanaugh, however, isn’t even slated to teach a course at the school’s Virginia campus, but rather one in Runnymede, England, where the Magna Carta was signed. "The hiring of Kavanaugh threatens the mental well-being of all survivors on this campus," one female student said at GMU's board meeting last week, The College Fix reports. "It is affecting my mental health knowing that an...

Union College president David R. Harris penned an op-ed, entitled, “A Campus Is Not the Place for Free Speech,” in which he argues that it is the role of colleges and universities to filter the conversations on campuses to provide “constructive engagement.”

American college is terrible and, as a society, we should stop doing it – at least how it is being currently done. The greatest benefit of a system where most citizens are pushed to get college educations, whether they truly need and want one or not, would be a society of really smart, informed, and engaged citizens. Do you see that happening?No, you do not.Instead, we have a bunch of people who are dragged down by crushing debt after wasting years of their youth chasing a piece of paper that often has no relationship to these graduates’ futures. Compounding the...

Harvard University plans to remove portraits of one of its former university presidents, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, from a building named after him on campus, as two incoming faculty Deans suggest that students should not have to see photos of the former president while they’re “eating Cheerios” in the dining hall. The Lowell House will no longer be displaying portraits of former Harvard University president Abbott Lawrence Lowell and his wife Anna Parker Lowell by the time the building reopens for the fall 2019 semester, according to the school’s student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson.

When I was eighteen, I won a scholarship to the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University. I wanted to go. My dad refused to send me to a "fruit school," as he called it. Years later, after wasting thousands of his dollars by dropping out of ASU (because I didn't go to class—a fact I'm not proud of) we had another moment to talk about what went wrong. I asked him again why he didn't want me to go to Roosevelt and he repeated, "That's a school for fruits." I looked at him and said, "Dad, when...

The celebrity college admissions scandal feels tremendously validating. I don’t mean I’m reveling in the misfortune of vapid celebrities with disagreeable politics, although if I’m being honest, my schadenfreude meter blew past acceptable levels for a practicing Christian as soon as the story broke.I mean this: As soon as my wife and I started talking about marriage, we started talking about having kids, and as soon as we started talking about having kids, we started talking about what a good education for them would look like. That’s not a terribly uncommon sequence of events for college-educated couples who decide...

The college admissions scandal should be the populist issue of our time. Most of the talk in our politics about how "the system is rigged" is incredibly abstract and symbolic. But this is infuriatingly concrete. On Tuesday, the Justice Department revealed a massive effort by wealthy parents and a shady "admissions consultant" to bribe and cheat their way into getting kids into a slew of elite schools. Prosecutors say William Singer, the ringleader of the operation, sold two forms of services. For tens of thousands of dollars, parents could pay for their kids to have a proctor correct their incorrect...

The U.S. college admissions scandal that erupted this week has triggered private litigation accusing rich, well-connected parents of buying spots for their children at prestigious schools, and keeping children of less wealthy parents out. A $500 billion civil lawsuit filed by a parent on Wednesday in San Francisco accused 45 defendants of defrauding and inflicting emotional distress on everyone whose "rights to a fair chance at entrance to college" were stolen through their alleged conspiracy. In the largest known college admissions scandal in U.S. history, federal prosecutors on Tuesday said a California company made about $25 million by charging parents...

The massive college admissions scam that snared 50 people in a federal indictment, including two high-profile actresses, has prompted a class-action lawsuit filed by two California college students.

A thing that occurs to you if you attend an elite college or university, as I did, is that most of the professors teaching you are more or less the same beleaguered time-servers who would be teaching you at any other school. I well remember the sad, unshaven schlump in corduroys who taught one of my introductory English courses: He was fine. He knew his stuff. But so did the people who taught me English at my public high school. Sure, at name-brand colleges you can attend huge lectures given by name-brand professors who appear on television and the op-ed...

Only Professor Dershowitz's words here: Nobody can diminish the importance of this, involving as it does, some of the major, major universities in the country. Look every individual who's charged should be presumed innocent. We have to wait and hear the evidence, but this involves the most elite universities, coaches, the SAT, the ACT, this is really one of the great scandals of the twenty-first century. Having said that, I think it's just the tip of the iceberg. Remember, this doesn't involve the super- super-rich. The super-super-rich buy buildings for the university. They donate hundreds and hundreds of millions of...

A college entrance exam policy that was meant to help students with disabilities was exploited to enable cheating in an explosive school admission scandal. At least 50 people - including actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin - were charged with cheating on admission tests and bribing coaches in what's being described as the biggest school admissions scandal ever prosecuted by federal authorities. In the scandal parents had their children 'purport to having learning disabilities' so they could get medical documentation for it and take advantage of the College Board's special accommodations for students with disabilities. With medical proof, those students...

President Trump on Saturday announced he plans to sign an executive order soon requiring colleges and universities that accept federal research money to support free speech rights. Mr. Trump made the announcement at the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) after he called up onstage Hayden Williams, a conservative activist who was allegedly assaulted while on a recent recruiting trip to the University of California, Berkeley.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force Academy has installed several thousand closed-circuit TV cameras on campus over the past year to create a safer environment for cadets and to deter criminal behavior. The cameras were mentioned by Lt. Gen. Jay Silveria, the academy’s superintendent, during testimony Feb. 13 before a subcommittee hearing of the House Appropriations Committee about the military service academies. The superintendents of each military service academy testified nearly two weeks after the Pentagon released its annual report on sexual assault and harassment at the academies. The report’s anonymous scientific survey found that 747 students said they experienced...

More than half of universities in England have fewer than 5% of white working-class students in their intakes, according to researchers. A report from the National Education Opportunity Network (Neon) found that white youngsters in receipt of free school meals were the least likely of any group to study at university after those from Traveller backgrounds. (snip) Of the higher education providers who responded to a survey by Neon, fewer than 40% were doing outreach work specifically with white males and fewer than 12% with white females from low-participation backgrounds. (snip) Education secretary Damian Hinds said: “Whilst it’s right that...

Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire ex-mayor of New York and benefactor of the Johns Hopkins University, said Tuesday it’s “ridiculous” the institution doesn’t have an armed police force. *snip* Johns Hopkins is seeking approval from the General Assembly for a private police force to patrol the university campus in Homewood, the hospital campus in East Baltimore and the Peabody Institute in Mount Vernon.

An African-American pro-life speaker recently spoke at a Midwestern college and several members of the school’s student government declared the speaker “had made many students, staff, and faculty of color feel unheard, underrepresented, and unsafe on our campus.” On America’s politicized campuses, that hardly is news. However, these were not students at some notoriously leftist school like Oberlin; they were students at Wheaton College in Illinois, a well-known Christian college. Wheaton was the alma mater of the late evangelist Billy Graham along with three missionaries famously martyred in Ecuador in 1956. But today, a pro-life viewpoint that supposedly is common...

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — Peter Thiel is an optimist. Standing before a room full of nearly 100 right-of-center student journalists on Friday night, he told the crowd “we are not on the losing side of history.” But a “reformation” needs to happen first, the billionaire tech mogul and libertarian philanthropist said. “Universities today are as corrupt as the Catholic Church of 500 years ago,” Thiel said. During his speech, he spoke of an academia that has shut down debate, excommunicated conservative scholars, and insisted a college degree is the only way to “salvation,” that being a good job and solid future....

A coalition of liberal student organizations has condemned California State-Long Beach President Jane Close Conoley and her administration for allowing an event hosted by the school’s Turning Point USA group. On October 23, TPUSA hosted conservative pundits Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens who were greeted by some 200 demonstrators protesting outside the venue. The activists chanted phrases such as “Go home, fascists” and “Say it loud, say it clear, immigrants are welcome here.”