Free Republic

At the University of Chicago no man looms larger than Milton Friedman, the Nobel laureate who led the “Chicago school” of economics and who died in 2006. When the university announced plans for a $200m economics institute in May, it seemed fitting that the centre should be named after him. But a small war broke out. On June 6th more than 100 faculty members wrote to the university’s president to protest against the institute. Armed with academia’s common weapons, indignation and verbosity, they said they were all “disturbed by the ideological and disciplinary preference implied by the university’s massive support...

...Baby boomers, hired in large numbers during a huge expansion in higher education that continued into the ’70s, are being replaced by younger professors who many of the nearly 50 academics interviewed by The New York Times believe are different from their predecessors — less ideologically polarized and more politically moderate ...Solon Simmons at George Mason University found that the notion of a generational divide is more than a glancing impression. “Self-described liberals are most common within the ranks of those professors aged 50-64, who were teenagers or young adults in the 1960s,” they wrote, making up just under 50...

Some Duke professors are challenging the conventional "miles per gallon" terminology employed by the automobile industry. Researchers with Duke's Fuqua School of Business say that posting a vehicle's fuel efficiency in "gallons per mile" rather than "miles per gallon" would help motorists make better decisions when buying a new car. The study will appear in the June 20 issue of Science magazine. It was inspired by a debate professors Richard Larrick and Jack Soll had while carpooling in a hybrid car, according to a Duke press release. The two management professors ran experiments showing current "miles per gallon" terminology led...

One hundred nine historians already nearly unanimously agree. They call the presidency of George W. Bush a "failure." The History News Network (HNN), who polled the historians, failed to name them or where they work. Wonder why? American Enterprise magazine, in 2002, examined voter registrations to determine the political affiliations of humanities professors at an assortment of colleges and universities, public and private, big and small, located in the North, South, East and West. Of those registered with a political party -- and most were -- historians overwhelmingly belong to a "party of the left" (Democratic, Green or Working Families...

Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer is a college professor with a long history of political activism and fearless liberalism.—AP, 5-11-08, profile of candidate for Minn. Dem primary nomination [emphasis added]. Fearless liberalism? Fearless? It's fearless for an American college professor to be a big-time liberal? Give me a fearless break! Yet that's how the AP described the predictably left-wing politics of the man challenging Al Franken for the right to challenge Republican Norm Coleman for his seat in the US Senate. Among Nelson-Pallmeyer's positions: * opposed to the death penalty in all circumstances * suppport nationwide legalization of same-sex marriages * favors a...

NORFOLK At the end of this semester, Steven Aird will lose his job as an associate professor of biology at Norfolk State University for giving out too many F's. He is not going quietly. Aird says his termination is part of a dumbing-down of academic standards at NSU - a move by administrators to intimidate faculty members into passing undeserving students and rewarding inferior work. Other faculty members in NSU's School of Science and Technology say they, too, have experienced pressure to bend their standards to pass more students, and more than a dozen current and former students in the...

College students and their families are rightly outraged about the bankrupting costs of textbooks that have nearly tripled since the 1980s, mainly because of marginally useful CD-ROMs and other supplements. A bill pending in Congress would require publishers to sell “unbundled” versions of the books — minus the pricey add-ons. Even more important, it would require publishers to reveal book prices in marketing material so that professors could choose less-expensive titles. The bill is a good first step. But colleges and universities will need to embrace new methods of textbook development and distribution if they want to rein in runaway...

A community college in New York has been presented with a demand letter from the American Center for Law and Justice to halt a professor's classroom practices that allegedly have damaged at least one student – so far. The letter from the ACLJ targets Suffolk County Community College and will be the prelude to a federal lawsuit if the issue isn't resolved, the organization said. At issue is a professor's demand that students "change their own personal viewpoints or state that they are unsure of whether their own personal beliefs are correct" on religious issues, according to the letter. That...

Conservatives complain that college professors lean left when it comes to politics — and the data mostly show that's true. But new research suggests the personal politics of academics have little effect on what their students think. The research, to be published this year in the journal PS: Political Science and Politics, analyzes separate surveys on the attitudes of about 6,800 students at 38 universities and how they changed between their freshman and senior years. Then it examines whether those results are affected by the political attitudes of the faculty at their particular schools. The short answer is no, according...

Iraq War Spending Deconstructed by: Malcolm A. Kline, March 31, 2008 ...Two professors have actually made an earnest, exhaustive attempt to calculate the cost of the Iraq War but they look at it as two academics who have been through the revolving door to government jobs and back again to the Ivory Tower. “Defense comes to four percent of the Gross Domestic Product [GDP] but how much has GDP increased?” Linda J. Blimes said at the Center for American Progress (CAP) last week. “We are a wealthy country and in one sense can afford it but you have to look...

"In a lawsuit Van der Hooning filed against the U of I, he claims top administrators of the business school indicated there were too many "jarheads" in the program. Van der Hooning says he was ordered to reduce MBA scholarships from 110 to 17, and told to concoct "technical reasons" to dump veterans from the program." "In other words, he claims that the U of I ordered a cover-up."

In 2006, nearly 60 percent of Wisconsin voters passed a referendum banning same-sex marriage and civil unions. UW-Oshkosh political science instructor Bill McConkey challenged the new amendment in court, asserting he was denied the right to vote on the question of marriage and civil unions separately. A Dane County judge recently concurred, allowing McConkey’s suit to move forward. McConkey, a self-described “Christian, straight, married father of seven,” one of whom is a lesbian, recently stated, “People have asked me, ‘Would you have filed this suit if it wasn’t for your daughter?’ To be real honest, maybe not. Maybe I would...

Striking Out by: Bethany Stotts, January 28, 2008 The popular online professor ratings site, ratemyprofessors.com, has been eliciting some fiery responses to what professors see as the accountability-undermining anonymity of online technology. The subsidiary mtvU of MTV Networks, owner of ratemyprofessors.com, hosts the “Professors Strike Back” series in which professors “rebut” the anonymous and often insulting comments left on the ratings website. A 24-hour channel, mtvU broadcasts to 750 campuses and over 7.5 million students. Throughout the series, many professors decried the ratings website as promoting non-constructive venting which often occurs in the heat of the moment and reflects the...

USC Takes Left Turn by: Don Irvine, January 18, 2008 In the 2000 election cycle USC professors and staff members donated slightly more money to George Bush’s presidential campaign than to Al Gore. What a difference eight years make. According to a report by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Responsive Politics for the current election cycle have given a total of $66,250 to presidential candidates with 98 percent of that amount going to Democrats making the university one of the most pro-democratic party campuses in the nation. This has led USC political science professor Anthony Kammas to question the role...

Scholars of the Year by: Malcolm A. Kline, January 10, 2008 Because of the nature of our work, we don’t often get to do “best of” lists. By definition, almost, we are chronicling professors of questionable scholarship in our often vain search for accuracy in academia. What we have assembled, then, is something of a bottom 10 list, sort of a reverse U. S. News & World Report ranking. Indeed, it was hard to narrow down such a selection from the more than 100 professors a year whose antics we cover. Arguably, and we would argue the point, our own...

Coin trays in Texas cars may actually get to see the faces of dead presidents. The much-discussed and controversial Trans-Texas Corridor, or TTC, has breathed life into the debate of toll roads in Texas. Plans for the Trans-Texas Corridor include TTC-Instate 35, which starts in Laredo and extends north to Gainesville, running along the eastern part of Texas; and Interstate 69/TCC, which has three openings in Laredo, McAllen and Brownsville and follows the coast to Texarkana. Much of the TTC will be privately operated toll roads, run by the Spanish firm Cintra. The TTC will not run through San Antonio,...

...In a shift of historic importance, America's colleges and universities have largely abandoned the idea that life's most important question is an appropriate subject for the classroom. In doing so, they have betrayed their students by depriving them of the chance to explore it in an organized way, before they are caught up in their careers and preoccupied with the urgent business of living itself. This abandonment has also helped create a society in which deeper questions of values are left in the hands of those motivated by religious conviction - a disturbing and dangerous development. ...Over the past century...

In 1997, the National Association of Social Work (NASW) altered its ethics code, ruling that all social workers must promote social justice "from local to global level." This call for mandatory advocacy raised the question: what kind of political action did the highly liberal field of social work have in mind? The answer wasn't long in coming. The Council on Social Work Education, the national accreditor of social work education programs, says candidates must fight "oppression," and sees American society as pervaded by the "global interconnections of oppression." Now aspiring social workers must commit themselves, usually in writing, to a...

Even though he didn't get a majority for re-election last year, Gov. Rick Perry's 39 percent was ahead of everybody else. And so he's now in a term that lasts into 2011. In the eyes of some of his detractors in the blogosphere, that's too long. Political activist Linda Curtis has started a website calling on legislators in 2009 to impeach the governor (www.impeachperry.indytexans.org/). That's a pretty rash idea. But since Texas doesn't allow for recall elections, like the one that nailed California Democratic Gov. Gray Davis in 2003, Texans' only way to toss Perry out before the 2010 election...

Fired Professor Ward Churchill to Sue University Last Edited: Wednesday, 25 Jul 2007, 1:26 PM MDT Created: Wednesday, 25 Jul 2007, 12:50 PM MDT (Credit: MyFox) SideBar Related Items Stories Colorado Prof Fired After 9-11 Remarks LAKE CHARLES -- DENVER -- Ward Churchill will file a lawsuit against the University of Colorado on Wednesday. He is challenging his dismissal as a professor from the institution. University of Colorado regents voted 8-1 Tuesday to accept school president Hank Brown's recommendation to fire him. CU Regent Cindy Carlisle had the lone dissenting vote. Ward Churchill and his attorney, David Lane, plan to...

University Expected to Fire Controversial Professor Today By Susan Jones CNSNews.com Senior Editor July 24, 2007 (CNSNews.com) - Ward Churchill's own lawyer expects the tenured University of Colorado professor to be fired on Tuesday. "Ward Churchill will be fired, and Wednesday, I'll be filing a lawsuit" over free-speech rights," the Denver Post quoted attorney David Lane as saying. The university's governing board plans to hold a closed session on the Boulder campus today, and a decision on Churchill is expected in the middle of the afternoon. According to the Denver Post, Churchill's supporters are planning to show their support at...

ACLU urges CU regents not to fire Ward Churchill July 20, 2007 The American Civil Liberties Union sent a letter to the University of Colorado's Board of Regents on Thursday, urging them not to fire professor Ward Churchill. "I think that the protection of the First Amendment rights is vital in the university and in the general public," said Cathy Hazouri, executive director of ACLU of Colorado.

Seemingly arcane historical disputes can often cast a powerful light on the state of our collective soul. It is for that reason that I like to read books on obscure subjects: they are often more illuminating than books that at first sight are more immediately relevant to our current situation. For, as Emily Dickinson put it, success in indirection lies. In 2002, the Australian free-lance historian and journalist, Keith Windschuttle, published a book that created a controversy that has still not died down. Entitled ‘The Fabrication of Aboriginal History,’ it sets out to destroy the idea that there had been...

Sarge Speaks: The Duke 88 June 21, 2007 by Bob Parks Every now and then I get an email from a reader that puts a topic into words as good, if not better than I. This is one of those occasions. Sarge57 sent me an account of a message sent to the "Concerned Duke Faculty", now affectionately known as the "Gang of 88". His letter was impassioned, but never rude or obscene. The response he received was telling…. "I wish to offer my personal encounter with one of the Duke 88 after I sent them a group email. It is...

Duke deal shields faculty Some spoke out after rape claims Anne Blythe and Eric Ferreri, Staff Writers DURHAM - Duke University's settlement with exonerated lacrosse players gives legal protection to faculty members, some of whom have been under siege for speaking out in the wake of the gang-rape allegations. Neither side would disclose the terms of the agreement, announced Monday, but Duke's faculty chairman, Paul Haagen, informed professors that one provision is that all faculty members have been released from liability related to the lacrosse case. That news sparked another round of vitriolic messages from e-mailers and bloggers still exercised...

CU committee would give Churchill a virtual pass For anyone who cares about the integrity of American higher education, recent reports that the University of Colorado's Privilege and Tenure Committee has recommended professor Ward Churchill be suspended for a year but not fired is a blow to the stomach. And bad news for CU, too. Don't get us wrong. We don't believe for a moment that President Hank Brown will actually adopt the committee's advice and let Churchill remain as a permanent blight on the Boulder campus. At the end of this month Brown will, we remain confident

It's a brilliant Sunday morning, but the sunshine deceives. Step outside and the air is frigid, still below the freezing point. South University Avenue looks like a mirage in the windy cold. The winter just refuses to give up. The detritus of our national day of alcohol abuse - pardon me, St. Patrick's Day - litters the streets and yards of campus. Cracked green knickknacks are blown about. Partially-filled beer cans roll down South U. One block away, the Campus Chapel on 1236 Washtenaw Avenue opens its doors for Sunday service. On campus, the sacred and profane maintain an uneasy...

Liberalism at our colleges

LONDON -- U.K. intelligence officials have just provided a chilling assessment of the terrorist threat Britain faces. The country has become "al Qaeda target No. 1," security sources told me, confirming last week's press reports. Intelligence services now judge Britain's "home grown" terrorists to be organized, trained and controlled either directly from Pakistan or via Pakistani networks in Britain. Until now, intelligence services thought British Islamist terrorists had no hard links to al Qaeda despite sharing its ideology. "Clean skins" in the security jargon, they were believed to have acted alone or in self-constructed cells. This theory was the product...

The left-leaning faction that dominates American higher education doesn't take kindly to strangers -- particularly those who challenge the prevailing academic orthodoxies. Just ask Harvard's Larry Summers. Or consider the escalating governance controversy at Dartmouth College. A few reformers have achieved a bit of influence, and now the New Hampshire school's insular establishment is doing everything it can to run them out of Hanover. Since 1891, Dartmouth has been among the handful of colleges and universities that allows alumni to elect leaders directly... In practice, the Trustees have been largely ornamental overseers, rubber-stamping the management decisions of the "progressive" college...

The U.S. interstate highway system was built to give military tanks easy access to the inner cities in order to put down the expected revolution by black militants. The technocrats who died in the Twin Towers were the equivalent of little Adolph Eichmans. The United States government orchestrated the 9/11 attacks for its own benefit. The above three statements were all theories proffered by college professors: the first at Chicago State University in 1969, and the second by professor Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado in 2001. The third and most recent is by professor Kenneth Barrett at the...

Not too long ago I wrote an article entitled Women’s MisStudies about a debate between Professor Mike Adams of University of North Carolina-Wilmington and Dean Gay L. Gullickson of University of Maryland College Park. The debate was over Women’s Studies programs and Women’s Resource Centers. Included in my article was this passage: “I was able to ask Gullickson how she can say that women’s studies is good for research when, as Carrie Lukas points out in her new book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex and Feminism, these texts have misinformation and missing information that women need to make...

Polls that show public confidence in college professors as well as in grade and high-school classroom teachers are not inconsistent with other survey findings that show bias on the part of pedagogues everywhere. “In addition to doctors and teachers, those rounding out the top five of generally trusted occupations and professions are scientists (77%), police officers (76%) and professors (75%),” the results of a Harris poll released on August 8th show. “Conversely, the five occupations that are least trusted to be truthful include actors (26%), lawyers (27%), stockbrokers (29%), trade union leaders (30%) and opinion pollsters (34%),” Harris interactive goes...

Dissident Arab Gets the Treatment by Ahmad Al-Qloushi What Ahmad Al Qloushi says: * "The Borders of [Israel] should be from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River" * "America and Israel are great democracies" * "I could never believe how Jews were portrayed in my school in Kuwait" * "When I met a Jewish person in America for the first time my initial beliefs were confirmed" * "Walid Shoebat is a brave man and incredible human being and has done more for the Arab world in a short time than all Arab leaders put together" I am a 17-year-old Kuwaiti...

I really appreciate the question. I personally think it is very important to address current politics and wars in our classes. Unfortunately, given the many attacks on academic freedom over the last few years, this has become more important and more difficult. --snip-- On another note, a colleague recently e-mailed me that she is trying to get the American Studies Association to include an emergency panel at the 2006 meeting addressing the current war in Lebanon but has not made much headway. She contacted me because the roundtable I co-organized for ASA will be on issues related to the U.S...

Grove City College publishes an excellent newsletter titled "Visions and Values." Its July 2006 edition features an interview with Dr. Richard Pipes, acclaimed Russian historian and Harvard University professor of Sovietology. The interview was conducted by Grove City College professor of political science Dr. Paul Kengor. Dr. Pipes, who served on the National Security Council during the Reagan administration, explained that there are actually only a few communists among academics. At first glance, that's a puzzling observation, given the leftist bias at most college campuses. Drs. Pipes and Kengor explain the puzzle in a way that makes perfect sense. While...

Hired by the University of Wisconsin to teach “Islam: Religion and Culture,” this fall at the Madison campus, Kevin Barrett believes that the 9/11 attacks on America were planned and executed by the U.S. government and not the work of terrorists. Barrett co-founded Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth. Barrett’s views have caused a divide in Wisconsin. Barrett and university officials have stated that Barrett’s personal views will not be discussed or taught in the class. Supporters of Barrett argue that he has the right to academic freedom. Some state legislatures called for the university to fire Barrett immediately. So which...

"'I can't imagine that CU is going to suddenly decide the First Amendment deserves some respect,' Lane said. He said Churchill would sue if the firing is upheld.'...'Ward Churchill compared WTC victims to Holocaust Nazi'"-CNN article, Tuesday, June 27, 2006 Leave it to the leftist media to distort the truth. Churchill was NOT fired for his atrocious comments about the victims of 911 as they imply. He was fired for academic misconduct. Only down near the end of the CNN article do they add: "The school's committee on research misconduct said Churchill 'has committed serious, repeated, and deliberate research misconduct.'"...

How dare American occupiers conduct an air raid against peace activist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi! ....

Three-time New York Times bestselling author David Horowitz discusses and signs his book "The Professors: The 100 Most Dangerous Academics in America," at the Nixon Library, Monday, May 15 (10:30a.m.)

"I mean, this is a person who, not too many years from now, we may be seeing in front of a war crimes tribunal."Juliet Schor is a professor of sociology at Boston College. She has written a number of books analyzing the American labor market. What I have quoted is an obvious acknowledgement by an extensively trained, well executed professional of academe, providing her insight on the future of Saddam Hussein or Usama bin Laden. However, I would be lying. The person Ms. Schor refers to is United States Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice. Madamn Secretary is slated to receive...

IF his presidency ended now, US President George W. Bush would go down in history as a failure, according to a majority of US college history and political science professors surveyed across America. And, 67 per cent of the 744 professors responding to the survey conducted by Siena College's Research Institute said they doubted Mr Bush "has a realistic chance of improving his rating" during his remaining time in office. The results of the survey were made public by the Albany-area research institute. "While time is needed to fairly and accurately gauge how well any president ranks with his predecessors,...

PoliticsInTheClassroom.com is a new site dedicated to helping students put politically biased professors on record. Visit the Site: Politics in the ClassroomIt seems like almost every other week the antics of politically biased teachers and administrators make national headlines. Teachers need to stop indoctrinating and get back to educating. This site seems like a good idea, at least in the sense that it might deter biased teachers from imposing their political views on students.

A University of Chicago professor has ignited an intellectual firestorm in halls of ivy and corridors of power with an essay in a highbrow British journal. Writing in the London Review of Books, John Mearsheimer, a U. of C. political scientist, and his academic partner, Harvard University professor Stephen Walt, offered a simple diagnosis for what ails U.S. foreign policy. How did we get involved in a seemingly endless Iraq war? Why are we reviled in Muslim countries and targeted by terrorists? "Why," they asked, "has the United States been willing to set aside its own security in order to...

One of the most egregious manifestations of academic arrogance has been the effort to ban the military from campus – specifically military recruiters and the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC). So many colleges and universities participated in this action that, in 1994, a law was finally passed by the Congress mandating that if a university wants to continue to receive federal funds then they have to permit the military to recruit. This law was challenged in court by several law schools. The "Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (FAIR)," a group of law schools and professors, sued the Secretary of...

But back to the Hope lingering there in the box. In some versions of the myth, it’s not a foolish hope but a rational one... I want to think optimistically and so postulate a scenario such as this: Iraq does fall into civil war. The surrounding countries all become involved. The U.S. does go ahead with its Iran attack plans. . . the U.S. [further] curtails basic rights. The “Shiite Crescent” erupts . . . the Islamic world recoils in horror at U.S. behavior . . . European public opinion turns . . . against the U.S. and the NATO...

THE MOST leftist-dominated institution in American life today is our system of higher education. Studies have shown that liberal faculty members outnumber conservatives in some disciplines by 30 to 1. At colleges and universities all over the country, the watchwords are "tolerance" and "diversity" - which, in the university world, means a community where everyone looks different but thinks alike. By now, the evidence of leftist dominance is so overwhelming that no one can credibly dispute it. But does that dominance really present a problem? Not to the left (of course). They would argue that their universities are havens of...

While the anti-war movement of the 1960s was led by students, today’s campus demonstrations are just as likely to be orchestrated by professors; and the funny thing is, they are the same people. “The generation that came of age in the 1960s is now approaching retirement in the universities and their children and grandchildren are very different in the way they think about the world,” historian David Hackett Fischer said in an interview with The American Enterprise (TAE) magazine. “The excesses of these movements always build in their own contradictions.” Some observers who survey the college scene might argue that...

Nine of the "101 Most Dangerous Academics in America" teach at Columbia University, according to a new book by conservative activist David Horowitz. The book, "The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America," published by Regnery, profiles 101 professors from campuses across the country. "Columbia is a national scandal," Mr. Horowitz told The New York Sun in a telephone interview. "That a serious, top-tier university ... is an ideological fortress is an emblem of the utter debasement of the academic endeavor." His book lists several professors from the university's department of Middle East and Asian languages and cultures, including...

The Professors: The 101 most dangerous academics in America by David Horowitz Coming to a Campus Near You: Terrorists, racists, and communists— you know them as The Professors. We all know that left-wing radicals from the 1960s have hung around academia and hired people like themselves. But if you thought they were all harmless, antiquated hippies, you’d be wrong. Today’s radical academics aren’t the exception—they’re legion. And far from being harmless, they spew violent anti-Americanism, preach anti-Semitism, and cheer on the killing of American soldiers and civilians—all the while collecting tax dollars and tuition fees to indoctrinate our children. Remember...