Free Republic

he Communist Manifesto is the third-most popular assigned book in universities' syllabi, according to the Open Syllabus Project. The Open Syllabus Project was made available to the public on January 22. It gathered over 1 million syllabi published on university websites, and set up a Syllabus Explorer to rank the frequency of assigned texts. The project's founders describe it as an "effort to make the intellectual judgment embedded in syllabi relevant to broader explorations of teaching, publishing and intellectual history."

The academic boycott against Israel continues to broaden, with a new petition signed by 168 academics and researchers in Italy calling to suspend all agreements with Israeli universities as well as the Technion, Israel's Institute of Technology in Haifa. The petition comes three months after 343 British academics signed another petition calling for an academic boycott of Israeli universities on the grounds that they participate in violations of international law and support the occupation. [...] Among the boycott measures proposed by the petition are the cessation of all collaboration with the Technion and other Israeli universities, including academic and cultural...

Some years ago, I conceived a business idea which I hereby make available free and for nothing to any enterprising soul who wishes to do a bit of good for the community. You know how there are services that store "cord blood" of newborns which, being rich in stem cells, could be used later in life to treat various diseases? My idea is somewhat similar. Here's how it would work. Whenever an aspiring academic bureaucrat is appointed to the presidency of a college or university, this service would undertake, for a small recurring fee, to receive and safely store his...

Whenever there is Islamic violence the media uses the word terror not jihad. The problem is that the jihad of murder is only one of the four jihads and it is the least of jihads. The jihad of murder will kill people, but the jihad of money, speech and writing brings us closer to Sharia. Sharia annihilates a civilization. ... The jihad of money has invaded our universities which reject critical thought about Islam in exchange for donations from the Saudis. The Islamisation of universities is far worse than murder. Another jihad that is killing us is found in religious...

It turns out the "war on women" exists after all, and it's being carried out by women like Joy Behar and other pagan progressives like her. This week Behar's TV show, The View, provided proof that a male creep/perp need not be anywhere in the room for real life victims of sexual assault to be thrown under the bus. Sure, Bill Clinton is "a dog," admitted Behar, while being confronted with his past infidelity and its impact on Hillary Clinton's presidential hopes. But hey, according to Behar taxpayer-funded birth control and satisfying the blood lust to kill innocent babies (millions...

Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense.... Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American “Where were you born?,” because this implies that...

Our own Katie Pavlich over at Town Hall came across a poll of college students taken back in September which is either a hopeful sign for the future or some “too good to be true” sampling errors run wild. A survey conducted by Inc./Woman Trend of one thousand college students age 18-24 sought to capture their feelings about Social Justice Warrior issues currently driving protests on campuses around the nation. The results, as I already implied, are shocking to say the least. A new scientific poll sanctioned by Young America’s Foundation and conducted by Inc./Woman Trend shows the majority of...

As campuses across the country are roiled in paroxysms of self-righteous indignation over race, groups of black students, perhaps inspired and emboldened by the anarchistic successes at University of Missouri, have formed coalitions and presented elaborate, and breathtakingly audacious, lists of demands which they have nailed to the doors of their respective university administrations.

For over half a century, American universities, with few exceptions, have ceased teaching and begun indoctrinating. In the past few weeks, this downhill spiral has accelerated. The university is now a caricature of an educational institution. It is difficult to come up with an idea or policy that is more absurd than the ideas and policies that now dominate American campuses.

Academia loves to proclaim its concern for the dispossessed but seldom wants to discuss its role in their exploitation. "High-tech companies, university lobbyists, and powerful leaders in both parties have ramped up their plans to import unlimited numbers of legal foreign workers into our country through an alphabet soup of cheap labor visa programs," Michelle Malkin and John Miano allege in their book, Sold Out: How High-Tech Billionaires and Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are Screwing America's Best and Brightest Workers. Malkin and Miano name names too, of people, places and things that make America's immigration system look like something Upton Sinclair...

As the Long March of the left burns and hacks its way through the nation's remaining cultural institutions-reenacting the Cultural Revolution on American soil-and Europeans who balk at being invaded by the Vanguards of Islam are condemned as Islamophobic bigots, it's appropriate to reflect upon the words of a woman who is considered by many to be America's greatest poet. She captures the surreality of living in a time and place where rational thought has been cast out of the public square Much Madness Is The Divinest Sense To a discerning eye Much sense the Starkest Madness 'Tis the Majority...

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) says widespread race protests at American colleges and universities are being carried out by "leftist, coddled kids" with "trust funds.""We're seeing universities all across this country with leftist, coddled kids - usually with trust funds - protesting against horrible aggression, because the micro-aggression [of] 'I heard a word that scared me,' " Cruz said at the Presidential Family Forum in Iowa on Friday, according to the Des Moines Register. "What's wrong with our universities?" Cruz, who is running for president, criticized political correctness for discouraging the pursuit of truth. "The best answer to political correctness is...

University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 agreed to the modified demands of student protestors on Thursday evening. He signed the document at about 8:20 p.m., approximately 32 hours after students in the Black Justice League began a sit-in in his office and after significant negotiations over the content of the demands.

When I was brought up in America it was a nation very different from the one I live in today. I was taught that everyone should be treated with respect and that respect must be the foundation for all of my interactions. Living according to the Christian belief of doing no harm to others became a part of everyday life. Along with this was the knowledge that anything was possible; that the United States was the land of opportunity. “Rugged individualism” was not a mere slogan, it was the focus and basis for taking advantage of opportunities that lie ahead....

The protests at the University of Missouri that resulted in the ouster of President Tim Wolfe and Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin have reinvigorated student movements against freedom of speech across the nation. Brenda Smith-Lezama, vice president of the Missouri Students Association, took pride in the rising groundswell of support for censorship saying "it's about time the youth of this nation take a stand against the verbal pollution that hides behind the First Amendment. Social justice shouldn't be thwarted by slavish devotion to the out-dated idea that everyone has the right to speak his mind regardless of the consequences." Smith-Lezama hailed...

An Associate Master at Yale writes an email complaining that basically college kids...KIDS...are too politically correct and too wimpy to deal with it. The specific topic was on whether or not the university should police what students wear on Halloween to make sure they don't don anything too offensive (i.e. some New England WASP has no business  dressing up as...say...Geronimo wearing black face, or anything at all for that matter). That is an oversimplification of what was actually said (the link above has the full text of the email), but it's also the gist. The email became widely known and...

What does it take to generate a rabid, Maoist-style mob demanding political purges, on an Ivy League campus, in 2015? An email defending “offensive” Halloween costumes, apparently. That’s what kicked off the latest nadir in campus zealotry, this time at no less a university than Yale. Typically the fall is a time when Yale students are obsessed with defeating arch-rival Harvard at football, a war on the gridiron that occasionally turn ugly. This year the sport of choice seems to be the public castigation of professors by students, a battle on the quadrangle destined to become just as menacing.

An unethical smear campaign is launched against any faculty member who is pro-Israel. It is frightening to see the persecution that follows. Professor Denise Nussbaum is a strong believer in objective truth and a lover of Zion. She is also the Chair of the Sociology Department, an author, and an expert in “bias, diversity, race, ethnicity, and discrimination” at her campus: Mount San Jacinto College (MSJC) which occupies four campuses in California: San Jacinto, Menifee, Beaumont/Banning, and Temecula. Professor Nussbaum has received grants and awards on this very campus for her work in “diversity training.” How ironic, how tragic, that...

The Donald might not notice him and even Jeb Bush may barely acknowledge his existence, but Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is still causing absolute apoplexy on the part of his state’s university professors. Governor Walker waves as he arrives to speak at the 42nd annual Conservative Political Action Conference ‘Tenure no longer exists in Wisconsin,” Chuck Rybak avers on his blog. “We have entered the era of pretendure.” “ The only moral thing to do, right now, is abolish the tenure file.” Rybak is an Associate Professor of English and Humanistic Studies at the University of Wisconsin—Green Bay. “As someone...

A California judge has ordered the University of Southern California to stay its expulsion of football player Bryce Dixon, who was expelled late last year for alleged sexual assault. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert H. O'Brien granted Dixon's request for a stay of the results of a disciplinary process that was "lacking in due process, with no hearing, no right to counsel, no rules of evidence, no presumption of innocence, no right to possess copies of witness statements and evidence and no right to confront witnesses against him," according to Dixon's writ of administrative mandate. Dixon's expulsion comes from...