Free Republic

Since Hamas initiated a brutal and barbaric terrorist attack against Israel and the Jewish people on October 7th, many Americans—Jewish and not—have mourned alongside the world’s only Jewish state and have understood the necessity of a swift and decisive military counterattack. But in the green quads and ivory towers of American academia, a very different reaction has been brewing. For the past two decades, the David Horowitz Freedom Center has shone a rare spotlight on the genocidal Jew hatred emanating from our college campuses. Student organizations like the Hamas-funded and Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Students for Justice in Palestine have infiltrated our...

A handful of Cooper Union’s Jewish students barricaded inside the university’s library Wednesday when pro-Palestinian protesters blew past security and aggressively pounded on the building’s doors. A Jewish senior at the East Village institution recounted the terrifying moment she watched the demonstrators slam anti-Zionist posters against the window and shout “anti-Semitic rhetoric” just a few feet away. “When they started banging on the door, my heart started pounding. I was crying. I think if the doors weren’t locked — I don’t know what would have happened,” the student, who asked to remain anonymous, told The Post. “I don’t want to...

Before graduating, students should demonstrate a minimum competence in math, science, and general knowledge. The sheer madness that has gripped many elite universities since October 7 and the butchery, rape, torture, and mutilation of some 1,000 Israeli civilians by Hamas murderers have shocked the public at large. Campus craziness is, of course, nothing new. But quite novel for campuses was the sudden jettisoning of prior campus pretenses. Universities have brazenly dropped their careful two-faced gymnastics to reveal at last–unapologetically, proudly, and defiantly–the moral decay that now characterizes American higher education. Recent news stories have exposed this rot to the world,...

America’s leading universities have an antisemitism problem—and it starts at the top. This past week, university presidents and deans across the country wrote to their students and faculties to express concern in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on Israel by Hamas. What they said, and what they did not say, provides a window into the culture of intellectual and moral rot and cowardice that reigns at these once-great institutions. Those who attack Jews or Israel are all too often exempt from their excoriation. Hamas terrorists massacred some 1,300 Israelis, took approximately 200 hostages, most of them civilians, and left...

What is “collegiality,” and what do universities need to do to establish it? Radical academics and administrators in higher education are now using “lack of collegiality” as a pretext to abrogate academic freedom or fire professors, regardless of tenure. The latest examples include Matthew Garrett at Bakersfield College, Scott Gerber at Ohio Northern University, Stephen Porter at North Carolina State University, and Amy Wax at the University of Pennsylvania. National Association of Scholars president Peter Wood writes that, in each of these four cases, “the university tried (sometimes successfully) to rid itself of a faculty member not for any academic...

Are our secular universities, especially those leaning most radically left, soon to collapse – or at least, soon to lose their current positions of power and influence? A good case can be made that the answer could well be yes.First, there has been a serious dip in enrollment in our colleges and universities across the nation. As noted in a March 9, 2023 headline on the Fortune website, “The labor shortage is pushing American colleges into crisis, with the plunge in enrollment the worst ever recorded.”Yes, “What first looked like a pandemic blip has turned into a crisis. Nationwide, undergraduate...

The only way to make sense of the firing of Zack Rackovan from his job at Penn State in March 2022 is to understand that the entire system has gone completely off the rails. Penn State fired him after it rejected his religious exemption for the experimental COVID-19 jab. It was an exemption he feels he shouldn’t have had to submit in the first place. Zackovan believes no one should be mandated to inject an unknown, experimental substance into one’s body, regardless of religious beliefs. Here’s the catch, though. Rackovan had worked in a “fully remote” graphic design job at...

From Westenbroek v. Kappa Kappa Gamma Fraternity, decided today by Judge Alan Johnson (D. Wyo.) (the defendant is, for historical reasons, labeled a "fraternity," but today it would be described as a sorority): "Embittered by their chapter's admission of Artemis Langford, a transgender woman, six KKG sisters at the University of Wyoming sue their national sorority and its president. Plaintiffs, framing the case as one of first impression, ask the Court to, inter alia, void their sorority sister's admission, find that KKG's President violated her fiduciary obligations by betraying KKG's bylaws, and prevent other transgender women from joining KKG nationwide....

March 25, 2021, Rutgers University became the first university in the nation to announce it would require students to take COVID vaccines for fall 2021 enrollment, retracting its January 8, 2021 announcement that “…with our stance of human liberties and our history of protecting that, the vaccine is not mandatory.” What happened within a few short months that made Rutgers ultimately decide to hell with student civil liberties? Rutgers claimed and still does to this day that it has a “commitment to health and safety for all members of its community” even though on July 30, 2021, Rochelle Walensky issued...

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, better known as FIRE, filed a lawsuit on behalf of six California community college professors to stop statewide regulations adopted in March of 2023 requiring they “espouse and teach politicized conceptions of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion.’ " These new regulations amended Title 5 of the California Code of Regulations to include diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility standards in the evaluation and tenure review of employees. According to the lawsuit, this means the more than 54,000 professors who teach within the California community college system will be required to include “anti-racist” perspectives into their...

Trans influencer and biological male Dylan Mulvaney appears to be trying to cash in on his newfound infamy after sparking a national Bud Light boycott this summer by soliciting speaking gigs on college campuses. “Booking speaking opportunities for the upcoming 23/24 school year and would love to come visit,” Mulvaney told his 1.8 million followers in an Instagram Story on Wednesday, according to a report by the New York Post. The trans influencer also included an email address “for serious inquiries,” before signing off with “love ya!” Notably, the Creative Arts Agency’s (CAA) talent agency lists Mulvaney on its website...

The benefactor behind The T.W. Lewis Foundation, Tom Lewis, set the record straight on Friday about his decision to pull funding from the ASU-Barrett Center for Personal Development. Lewis’ decision to pull the funding comes after the executive director of the Center said, in an opinion piece published in The Wall Street Journal, that she was being fired and the Center was closing because she organized an event featuring Charlie Kirk, Robert Kiyosaki and Dennis Prager. Ann Atkinson noted that the February event “outraged” faculty members at ASU’s honors college, Barrett, which houses the center. Lewis’ statement appears to support...

The University System of Georgia spent millions on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts prior to cuts from the state budget approved earlier this year, according to a Monday report by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC). The report detailed a nearly 200-page response from system Chancellor Sonny Perdue to Georgia Republican Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who questioned how much had been spent on DEI efforts following complaints from the former over the approved $66 million decrease in funding for the system. The report said that although it was difficult to calculate one total sum spent on DEI from all 26 of...

At least 39 universities in 17 states have installed morning-after pill vending machines, and at least 20 more are considering them, the Associated Press reported, citing the American Society for Emergency Contraception. “With some states enacting abortion bans and others enshrining protections and expanding access to birth control, the machines are part of a push on college campuses to ensure emergency contraceptives are cheap, discreet and widely available,” according to the report.

Texas became the latest state to ban diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in public schools earlier this month. Governor Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 17 into law, prohibiting DEI offices in Texas public colleges and universities starting in 2024. The new law comes months after the University of Houston’s decision to ban DEI statements in faculty hiring. “The issue is not diversity – the issue is that equity is not equality, and DEI practices conflate the two, Governor Abbott’s spokesman Andrew Mahaleris told Campus Reform. “Some universities and woke professors have been using DEI to advance political agendas and...

Shortly after the Supreme Court declared affirmative action college admission policies unconstitutional, President Joe Biden said his administration would direct the Department of Education to scrutinize how "practices like legacy admissions … expand privilege instead of opportunity." The department could start by examining how politically connected families like the Bidens get their children into Ivy League schools. In 2018, Hunter Biden tapped his father and a number of Biden family connections to help get his daughter into the University of Pennsylvania. Text messages and emails from Hunter Biden's laptop, reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, show how Joe and Hunter...

Once this is in place, hopefully it will serve as a model for other states. The Texas Tribune reports: Texas lawmakers find consensus on bill banning diversity, equity and inclusion offices in public universities Texas public universities’ diversity, equity and inclusion offices likely have six months left before they’re banished. State lawmakers came to an agreement Saturday on legislation that would ban DEI offices, programs and training at publicly funded universities, largely adopting the version that the Texas House approved a week ago, with some minor changes.

American higher education is undergoing several revolutions at the same time. The DEI revolution, ongoing for decades, has reached a tipping point. The professorial class and campus administrations are close to cementing it as the official ideology of American universities. However, a rearguard action, led by Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida, finds its state legislature aiming to eliminate the DEI offices that symbolize and spearhead this radicalization, pointing toward an education that emphasizes professional competence and reasonable patriotism. Soon, shrinking enrollments and a demographic cliff will strain many colleges and universities to the breaking point. Enrollments, 20.5 million in 2011,...

There was a time when conservatives told themselves that safe spaces, trigger warnings and speech bans would stay on campus. “Just wait until those kids get out into the real world and discover that they can’t get jobs studying critical race theory,” they would snicker. Not only can they get jobs, but their job in government and corporate DEI is purging you. There’s no real world anymore. We live in a giant totalitarian campus in the University States of America whose administrators are government officials and corporate leaders in which elections matter much less than catering to the whims of...

Student enrollment is continuing to decline at the University System of Georgia. Overall enrollment for the spring semester at the system’s 26 institutions fell to 311,484, down 0.9% from last spring, Angela Bell, the system’s vice chancellor of research and policy analysis, told members of the Board of Regents Tuesday. The system’s enrollment grew steadily from 2014 through 2021, Bell said during the regents April meeting on the campus of the University of North Georgia in Dahlonega. But enrollment has declined during the last couple of years to the point where it stands only about 500 students above 2019, she...