Free Republic

The University of Colorado announced last week that it is expanding its apparently endless inquiry into misconduct by faux Indian Prof. Ward Churchill after a recent series by the Rocky Mountain News demonstrated: That Churchill has no Indian blood, as he claimed to obtain tenure. CU acted with far greater dispatch in the case of Prof. Phil Mitchell, canned in March after 20 years when his department chief discovered that he was a conservative and a Christian. The grounds for firing Mitchell, 1998 Teacher of the Year at CU, were that he quoted black conservative Thomas Sowell in a discussion...

Queer Orthodoxy at the University of Colorado By Jon SandersFrontPageMagazine.com | June 8, 2005Academic Marxism shows up clothed in the attire of many scholarly courses of study.  In its most recent incarnation, academic Marxism makes an entrance as the sexy bedfellow of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder.There, in diligent pursuit of scholarly material, co-director of LGBT studies and English professor Mark Winokur  explored the Internet. But such a research tool as the computer is not without its ethical problems for Professor Winokur.  With the peculiarly tortured conscience of a Marxist, Winokur...

The victory of two dark-horse candidates for Dartmouth College's board of trustees this week has revived a struggle over competing visions for the future of the small Ivy League campus. Peter Robinson, who wrote speeches for Ronald Reagan and is a fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Todd J. Zywicki, a George Mason University law professor who contributes to a libertarian-leaning web log, ran on platforms that were scathingly critical of the administration, saying it has become too politically correct and has stifled fraternities, de-emphasized athletics, and shortchanged teaching in favor of research.

The U.S. Army, busy fighting off insurgents in faraway Baghdad, may be challenged on Canadian soil for the first time on May 2. A hostile collective of community members and students intends to "disrupt" the army's visit to the University of Toronto, after having intercepted a U.S. Army letter sent to university professors. Representatives of the U.S. Army International Technical Center Canada will be at the university Monday to give a presentation, where they will outline opportunities and goals for research collaboration with U of T faculty. In a faxed letter to the administrative assistant, office of the Vice Dean,...

I’m here to announce that we are not a nation of scholars. Good lord, we’re barely literate. It’s a wonder that more of us don’t walk around with our knuckles dragging on the ground. And it’s about time that high school counselors and all the rest of us quit pretending that every 17 and 18 year old squirt should be shoehorned into colleges and universities. Probably half, maybe three-quarters of the kids wandering around the Groves of Academe have no legitimate reason to be there. Of course I realize that in order for those youngsters to be out in the...

The story I'm about to relate took place on my visit to the Manoa campus of the University of Hawaii in Honolulu last week. It is entirely indicative of the unprofessional, ungracious, and unacceptable behavior of many professors on our college campuses, in this case the chairman of the Political Science Department at this school, a man named Jonathan Goldberg Hiller. The student who invited me to the University on behalf of the College Republicans -- I will call him Jamie -- is a political science major. In anticipation of my visit, Jamie had asked Professor Hiller if his Department...

The recent flap about tenured University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, the wacky white man pretending to be of American Indian heritage, may not seem to have much in common with federal employees or federal judges. Upon closer examination, we see that all three suffer from the same mindset: Arrogance and insolence as a result of a failed system of lifetime tenure, a system that also guarantees plush retirement benefits. Tenure ensures that professors can never be fired for incompetence, and the retirement benefits ensure that only a few will leave the profession on their own. Not coincidentally, the good...

Get ready for even more of the ultimate spring break intellectual experience! You won’t believe the academic insanity as Iowahawk’s Dave Burge and his inquiring camera crew catch real live college faculty getting their freak on at the beach…  in the clubs…. even the hot transgressive action back in their hotel symposia! From Rocky Mountain ski lodges to the beaches of Florida and Cuba, to the hot sun of Texas and across the border to Mexico where anything goes, this all-new video is the biggest, craziest, most blazing Profs Gone Wild spring break video yet! Profs Gone Wild: Extreme Ultimate...

My last column, "Forget Free Speech, Liberals Don't Tolerate Campus Conservatives," drew the ire and attention of thousands. Published online by GOPUSA and the Washington Times, it sparked still more debate on the issue of liberal bias on campus. Conservative professors from North Carolina, Wisconsin and across the country e-mailed their support. One celebrity endorsement came from former U.S. House Historian Christina Jeffrey, who currently presides over the South Carolina Association of Scholars. In her words, this past column was my "best ever." Still more students, parents and alumni stepped up, sending e-mails and notes, while weighing in on countless...

A recent proposal in the Tennessee General Assembly has caused a great deal of angst on college campuses in our state over the past couple of weeks. The bill (HB0432), proposed by State Rep. Stacey Campfield of Knoxville in the House and Raymond Finney of Maryville in the Senate is known as the “Academic Bill of Rights.” To hear some tell it, you’d think it was an effort to repeal the First Amendment. Professors at this and other institutions strongly oppose it. Some label it a “witch hunt.” It has been editorialized against on this page. Let’s examine it. So...

One should remember that Philip Jessup, a diplomat and a liberal Republican was also attacked by McCarthy and as the domestic cold war escalated there were people who had nothing to do with the any group on the left or even liberal New Deal Democrats who got caught in the harassment. ... Even the comical ones usually end with major injustice, for example, a NLRB employee . . . was finally fired and had his career destroyed by a more rightwing dominated loyalty board in the early Eisenhower administration. . . ... the names of people who signed Communist party...

A look at recent cases of professors being disciplined, criticized or let go for unpopular statements: -The University of Illinois fired biology professor Leo F. Koch in 1960 for a letter to the editor of the campus newspaper that read: "A mutually satisfactory sexual experience would eliminate the need for many hours of frustrating petting and lead to much happier and longer lasting marriages among our younger men and women." -Leonard Jeffries Jr. lost the chairmanship of African-American studies at the City College of New York in 1992 after saying in a speech that "Russian Jewry had a particular control...

This author maintains that contemporary liberalism has devolved into little more than a pose. It has become a stance, an attitude -- self flattering and insistent on its intellectual and moral superiority. Furthermore, its childish utopianism, and its adolescent craving for excitement, require scapegoats to explain the failure of the real world to match its utopian longings. And the Jews are the always available, anti-utopians. For today's liberals, George Bush is the functional equivalent of the universal scheming and nefarious, Jew--the dreaded Neo-Con (after all, hasn't Dubyah surrounded himself with a cabal of Jewish foreign-affairs advisors). Therefore, it should come...

Perk from regents: The ex-commissioner is paid $117,600 annually for teaching a college class She teaches at the University of Utah, but gets paid through Utah State University. She was Utah's longest-serving commissioner of higher education, all the while getting her check through USU. She took a sabbatical last year and once again collected her six-figure salary through the Logan school. Why does Cecelia Foxley continue to get paid by a university she hasn't taught at since 1985? It's part of the perks that Utah higher-education officials offer their top administrators.

As soon as Mark (pseudonym) walked into his Women in Literature class, his professor handed him a note stating the following: It has come to my attention that your comments to other students sitting near you in our Women in Literature (sic) have been both critical of the class subject matter, derogatory of the ideas other students are contributing to class discussion, and crudely dismissive of issues I have raised. At first, Mark could not believe he was being described as “crudely dismissive” by his professor. After all, she talked about her private life in class and published a book...

From Yale to the University of North Carolina, liberal academia is being challenged by a new generation of conservative leadership. Credible tales of professors grading down conservative students have always run rampant. Biased lectures remain the unremarkable norm. One variable has changed, however. Liberal academia lacks its traditionally receptive audience. During the opening weeks of the Iraq war, professors were shocked by the absence of antiwar fervor among their pupils. Leading up to the 2004 elections, record numbers of undergraduates joined the College Republicans and other conservative organizations. Ingenious student protests, such as Berkeley’s affirmative action bake sale and Duke’s...

At the University of North Carolina, three incoming freshmen sue over a reading assignment they say offends their Christian beliefs. In Colorado and Indiana, a national conservative group publicizes student allegations of left-wing bias by professors. Faculty get hate mail and are pictured in mock "wanted" posters; at least one college says a teacher received a death threat. And at Columbia University in New York, a documentary film alleging that teachers intimidate students who support Israel draws the attention of administrators. The three episodes differ in important ways, but all touch on an issue of growing prominence on college campuses....

Traditionally, clashes over academic freedom have pitted politicians or administrators against instructors who wanted to express their opinions and teach as they saw fit. But increasingly, it is students who are invoking academic freedom, claiming biased professors are violating their right to a classroom free from indoctrination. For example, at the University of North Carolina, three incoming freshmen sued over a reading assignment they said offended their Christian beliefs. In Colorado and Indiana, a national conservative group publicized student allegations of left-wing bias by professors. Faculty received hate mail and were pictured in mock "wanted" posters; at least one college...

The left-wing takeover of American universities is an old story. As far back as the 1930s, Irving Kristol recalled in "Memoirs of a Trotskyist," City College of New York was so radical that "if there were any Republicans at City -- and there must have been some -- I never met them, or even heard of their existence." Soon the virus had spread to the nation's most elite institutions. In 1951, William F. Buckley Jr. created a sensation with "God and Man at Yale," which documented the socialist and atheist worldview that even then prevailed in the classrooms of the...

Prior to the Louisiana Tech game Saturday, UT students and community members were passing out stickers that read "Vols for Bush." Among the groups involved in this were the UT College Republicans, UT Vols for Bush, UT Students for Bush, and the Knox County Republican Party. Apparently, these stickers posed a problem for the UT administration, who claim the stickers were produced illegally. Mike Young, from the Office of Trademark Licensing, approached CRs Jerod Hollyfield, Nathan Fortner, and myself, and confiscated our stickers. They then met with Knox GOP officials at the tailgate party near Neyland Stadium, and informed them...