Free Republic

I am mad. I am mad because I am scared. And if you are a woman, you should be, too. Emailgate is a bitch hunt, but the target is not Hillary Clinton. It’s us. The only reason the whole email flap has legs is because the candidate is female. Can you imagine this happening to a man? Clinton is guilty of SWF (Speaking While Female), and emailgate is just a reminder to us all that she has no business doing what she’s doing and must be punished, for the sake of all decent women everywhere. There is so much of...

The American academy, which has revealed itself to be markedly susceptible to the intrigues of the Saudi-based radical Wahhabi sect and the Muslim Brotherhood, now faces the challenge of an Iranian radical presence. Since 2014, admission of Iranian students to U.S. colleges has been permitted by the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control. Iran has yet to flood the U.S. with its own professors.

Aristotle often evaluated a thing with respect to its “telos” – its purpose, end, or goal. The telos of a knife is to cut. The telos of a physician is health or healing. What is the telos of university? The harvardmost obvious answer is “truth” –- the word appears on so many university crests. But increasingly, many of America’s top universities are embracing social justice as their telos, or as a second and equal telos. But can any institution or profession have two teloses (or teloi)? What happens if they conflict? As a social psychologist who studies morality, I have...

Infantile skittishness on campus is not confined to just politically correct and so-called diversity issues, as bad as that is. As a recent Wall Street Journal article pointed out, college students are now literally flooding mental-health centers on campus year round for anything and everything. Here's some of what the Journal found.   At Ohio State University, a clinical psychologist holds a well-attended 'Beating Anxiety' workshop twice a week. To defuse anxiety, the students are advised to exercise, get more sleep, and refrain from "catastrophic thoughts" brought about things like an upcoming physics exam or if my friend doesn't text me back right...

The sustainability campaigns on American college campuses, which we have covered for about as long as they have existed, may seem more ubiquitous than pledge drives on PBS. Nevertheless, some scholars think they haven’t gone far enough. "We are currently on track to having the hottest year ever, breaking the record established last year," Marcus Peter Ford writes on the Academe blog maintained by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). "We also set records for warmth in 2013 and 2014." "And yet, to date, climate change has had little impact on how we understand the purpose of higher education....

They wrote that in a fair and just world, “there would be no pets at all, no fields full of sheep, and no barns full of pigs, cows and egg-laying hens. There would be no aquaria and no zoos.” “If animals matter morally, we must recalibrate all aspects of our relationship with them. The issue we must confront is not whether our exploitation of them is ‘humane’ — with all of the concomitant tinkering with the practices of animal-use industries — but rather whether we can justify using them at all,” they concluded.

Tampons are now a genderless necessity, according to Brown University, who have announced that they will be providing tampons for both men’s and women’s bathrooms across the university this academic year. The tampons will be delivered to bathrooms by the university’s student president, Viet Nguyen, as well as 20 volunteers, with Nguyen claiming the initiative is a means of educating students that men menstruate as well as women. In an email to the student body, Nguyen said, “There’s been a lot of conversation about why pads and tampons are a necessity, not a luxury, but not a lot of action....

Cornell is hiring a dean of students whose job it will be to promote diversity on campus... So far, though, the interview process isn’t going particularly well for one top candidate, Vijay Pendakur...he dared to say that he’d consider all students when making decisions as the dean of students. “If I say, ‘The dean’s area of focus is diversity and inclusion,’ the unspoken thought in response often is, ‘Oh, so he’s here for only the marginalized students,'” he told the crowd. “So we need to undo that, because that is a deeply problematic framework. If we’re going to make progress,...

The University of North Dakota (UND) is offering students the chance to live in a specialized housing community dedicated entirely to social justice. The Social Justice Living-Learning Community is “designed for students who are involved in promoting a more inclusive and just society,” and promises to provide such students with opportunities for “creating and leading positive social change.”

Usually university officials go into overdrive to solve a reported hate crime. Apparently they become more deliberate when the alleged victim is a Jewish student. "On Thursday, the UC Irvine Office of Student Conduct announced that it had concluded a three-month investigation into an aggressive and disruptive incident on the UCI campus last May," the Louis D. Brandeis Center reported on August 22, 2016. "The incident involved an anti-Israel mob that disrupted a small event held by a Jewish student group on campus." "The angry mob of about 50 students blocked the entrances and exits while loudly chanting angry, anti-Israel,...

Academics have been arguing for decades that colleges and universities are engines of economic growth. Now they seem to have scientific proof, or do they? "We estimate fixed effects models at the sub-national level between 1950 and 2010 and find that increases in the number of universities are positively associated with future growth of GDP per capita (and this relationship is robust to controlling for a host of observables, as well as unobserved regional trends)," Anna Valero and John Van Reenen, of the London School of Economics, write in a working paper that they published this month at the National...

Colleges and universities are forever feeling shortchanged by taxpayers. They needn't worry. For one thing, they are far richer than those of us who actually pay federal levies. For another, academia has succeeded in securing millions for what look like panel discussions at the Modern Language Association. "The National Institutes of Health has spent more on exercise programs for refugees, anti-tobacco video games, weight-loss programs for truckers, and studies on gay hook up apps than it has to fight the Zika virus," Elizabeth Harrington reported in the Washington Free Beacon on August 8, 2016. And a good chunk of that...

Editor’s Note: The original article appeared in the Times of Israel. As yet another indication that the university campus has become "an island of repression in a sea of freedom," last March a pro-Israel group, Hasbara Fellowships Canada, was barred from participating in a "Social Justice Week" event organized by the Student Association of Durham College and University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT). The stated reason for the exclusion? The student association (which, not coincidentally, had just approved a pro-BDS resolution against Israel) informed the Hasbara group that since the "organization seems closely tied to the state of Israel…it...

The titles of “hero” or warrior” are probably two of the most appropriated titles today by those who are the least deserving of that distinction. They do not walk a warrior’s humble path of honor and self-sacrifice but, instead, seek fame pursuing a selfish agenda through intimidation and threats of violence. This is no truer than those screaming children at our universities along with their liberal professors screaming for muscle or those threatening riots if a particular candidate is elected President of the United States.

Perhaps universities should begin teaching ethics again, or at least bioethics. In the course of her investigation into the sale of fetal tissue, illegal under federal law, U. S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-TN, discovered a relationship between the University of New Mexico and a local abortion provider. Rep. Blackburn, who chairs a House Select Investigative Panel, wrote to the attorney general of the state, urging him to investigate further. She cc'd New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez on the letter. The section of the federal code "which forbids the transfer of fetal tissue for valuable consideration" also "requires that safeguards be...

Looking back through the years I have seen it all coming: the militant ignorance of students strutting across our college campuses today, the authoritarian style of the administrators, the mediocrity of the professors and the sheer goofiness of the students. It all came out of the late 1960s. Most of my fellow 1960s graduates went on to careers in the professions, commerce and industry. But some remained on campus, becoming professors, administrators and increasingly, as the years went on, swamis of identity politics. They established women's studies programs, black studies programs and gay studies programs. Now, I assume, there are...

We experienced an aggressive protest at UC Davis, but this is part of a disturbing, growing trend of censorship of conservative speech on college campuses. This is an extended version of an article from our last printed newsletter. Warning: This blog post includes strong language when directly quoting leftist protesters. On February 29th through March 1st at UC Davis, we faced our most aggressive, persistent, and unreasonable protest yet. As many of you know, our preferred way of doing outreach is to set up a simple poll table that asks questions like, “Should Abortion Remain Legal?” and provide options for...

A struggling liberal arts college that had a striking waterfront campus but fewer and fewer students is closing its doors. Dowling College President Albert Inserra said Tuesday the college, on eastern Long Island, will stop operating at the end of the week. He said months of negotiations aimed at finding an academic partner to help keep it afloat had failed.

While The Donald hits the hustings talking, yea, bellowing, about the jobs America has lost, academia has actually added to its payrolls, but kept mum about who is picking up the tab. "The number of jobs in higher education expanded in 2016 at the highest growth rate for the first quarter in three years," according to Higher Ed Jobs.com. Two emerging professions servicing the academic community are Title IX advisers and diversity consultants. The former show university employees how not to run afoul of the federal law which was originally intended to bar discrimination by gender that has morphed into...

Truncated title. Full title: Feds Order Colleges to Stop Checking Criminal/School Discipline History Because it Discriminates Against Minorities The Obama administration has ordered the nation’s colleges and universities to stop asking applicants about criminal and school disciplinary history because it discriminates against minorities. Institutions are also being asked to offer those with criminal records special support services such as counseling, mentoring and legal aid once enrolled. The government’s official term for these perspective students is “justice-involved individuals” and the new directive aims to remove barriers to higher education for the overwhelmingly minority population that’s had encounters with the law or...