Free Republic

Janet Napolitano has announced she will resign as Secretary of Homeland Security to become president of the University of California system. Napolitano, who has been Secretary of Homeland Security since 2009, will leave the position late August or early September. There are many aspects of her departure; each will be thoroughly aired. I focus on Napolitano's shift from politics to academe. There are interesting implications of her move. Consider, first, Napolitano's educational background. A daughter of the dean of the New Mexico School of Medicine, Napolitano attended Santa Clara University, a private Jesuit institution of higher education in California's Silicon...

Looks like Phys-Ed major is the way to go!  h/t Kirby

A Sonoma State University student has filed a religious accommodation request after she said she was ordered to remove her cross necklace because it might offend other students. “It’s amazing in this day of diversity and tolerance on university campuses that a university official would engage in this type of obvious religious discrimination,” said Liberty Institute attorney Hiram Sasser. The Liberty Institute is representing Audrey Jarvis, 19, a liberal arts major at the northern California university. On June 27, Jarvis was working for the university’s Associated Students Productions at a student orientation fair for incoming freshmen. During the event, her...

British universities are breeding-grounds of the most appalling hatred against America, the UK, Israel, free-thinkers, "apostates," and religious and sexual minorities What is worse, is that organizations who lie and lie and lie again can get away with it. Four years ago, on Christmas Day, a young Muslim who had recently finished his studies at a British university tried to blow up a plane over Detroit. Had Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab's plan succeeded, he would have killed all the people on the trans-continental plane he was on, and many more on the ground below. Fortunately Abdulmutallab's bomb failed to go off...

NEW YORK (MainStreet)—When SLM Corp., the largest education financing entity in the country more commonly known as Sallie Mae, announced in January that profits for the fourth quarter of 2012 decreased to $343 million, from $506 million earned in the same quarter in 2011, it was a conspicuous reminder of how lucrative the student loan business is....

Excerpt:NEW YORK (MainStreet)—The American automobile industry was once the envy of the world. But the automobile companies and their workers gradually slipped into complacency. Eventually, the industry was characterized by increasing costs and decreasing quality. The workers and executives earned more, but produced less. Soon their product was inferior to that of Germany and Japan. Eventually, companies became bankrupt and - were it not for the American taxpayer – would have been dispatched to the ash heap of history. It seems that the American education system, while currently still the envy of the world, is following that same trajectory. The...

Would you like to know what America's young people are actually learning while they are away at college? It isn't pretty. Yes, there are some very highly technical fields where students are being taught some very important skills, but for the most part U.S. college students are learning very little that they will actually use out in the real world when they graduate. Some of the college courses listed below are funny, others are truly bizarre, others are just plain outrageous, but all of them are a waste of money. If we are going to continue to have a system...

University advises ‘nodding’ at an assailant will prevent attack Women who are about to be raped at or near the University of Arkansas at Little Rock should nod at their attackers as an alternative to using deadly force, according to that university’s safety expert. Huh? The Arkansas legislature recently gave schools the authority to opt out of the state’s concealed carry laws and thereby ban guns on campus. Most schools have chosen to do so, including Arkansas State University and the University of Arkansas, as reported by The College Fix. The ban extends to even professors and staff members, leaving...

People can believe a lot of crazy stuff nowadays and not be fired from their jobs, but a senior research associate at the Catholic University of Leuven learned that you better not believe that God can heal. The university is the oldest and largest in Belgium. It was founded in the 1400s under the approval of the Vatican. But as modern Europe has secularized, so has the University, and even here, faith has come under fire. Fernando Pauwels worked at the University's Research Institute for Work and Society for 11 years without a negative review when he was suddenly fired....

ItÂ’s commencement season. College seniors across the country are donning mortarboards, getting misty-eyed and preparing to face the realities of President Barack ObamaÂ’s sparkling economic recovery. The Daily Caller is a little misty-eyed, too, because college students will soon disperse from campuses for a long summer, which likely means far fewer stories about stupid and otherwise outrageous occurrences on campus. The time is right, then, to celebrate the academic year that was. Here are the 20 stupidest, most outrageous and most cringe-worthy campus moments of 2012-13. Florida Atlantic University: Worst university in AmericaWhat an embarrassing year for Florida Atlantic. The...

By his own admission, Gordon Gee is an unlikely university president. Born during World War II in Vernal, Utah, Gee took an unfamiliar path to be head of one of the nation’s most prestigious schools — Ohio State University. Now, the intelligent, quick-witted rural Utah boy finds himself embroiled in a controversy of his own making, which may be due in part to his roots. “Despite leading universities for more than half my life, I am a most unlikely university president. Unlikely by virtue of several factors — academic background, temperament, faith, and family history,” he told the Columbus Metropolitan...

It was an eminent centre of learning long before Oxford, Cambridge and Europe's oldest university Bologna were founded. Nalanda University in northern India drew scholars from all over Asia, surviving for hundreds of years before being destroyed by invaders in 1193. The idea of Nalanda as an international centre of learning is being revived by a group of statesmen and scholars led by the Nobel prize winning economist, Amartya Sen. "After Nalanda was destroyed in the 1190s it lingered on for a while - from time to time some people noticed that there was some teaching going on in the...

The White House Office of the Press Secretary For Immediate Release May 23, 2013 Background Briefing by Senior Administration Officials on the President's Speech on Counterterrorism Via Conference Call 12:03 P.M. EDT MS. HAYDEN: Hi, guys. Thanks for joining, and apologies for a slight delay. We're here talking today about the speech the President is about to give at 2:00 p.m. at National Defense University on counterterrorism. This call is on background, attributable to senior administration officials. This call is embargoed until 2:00 p.m. when the President speaks. We actually don't have a lot of time so we'll go ahead...

A man reported to be a serving soldier is dead and two people have been shot in Woolwich, south east London, after what Sky sources understand is being treated as a terrorist attack. Downing Street has called a meeting of the Government's Cobra emergency committee after the incident in John Wilson Street, which David Cameron described as "truly shocking". Sky sources understand that senior police officers believe the killing was likely to be a politically-motivated Islamist terrorist attack. Dozens of weapons - including a number of knives - and pools of blood could be seen on the ground, where a...

As families celebrate graduation around the country, former Secretary of Education William J. Bennett asks if this is really cause to celebrate. He and coauthor David Wilezol discuss their book Is College Worth It?: A Former United States Secretary of Education and a Liberal Arts Graduate Expose the Broken Promise of Higher Education with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez. KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: “Students pay $100,000 or more for what they could get for almost nothing. With new technology and online breakthroughs, you could get a better education in a coffee shop or your parents’ basement than you will get...

Last week, Yale announced that its student health plan will cover sex-reassignment surgery for students, deeming it an important part of “equal-access” health care. This might shock anyone who doesn’t follow academia, but I wasn’t the least bit surprised. This is just the latest of seemingly endless efforts by colleges to accommodate the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) student community. “We hope that this represents a commitment to catch up to our peers in terms of offering transgender students an equitable student life and health care experience,” Gabriel Murchison, a member of Yale’s Resource Alliance for Gender Equity, told...

Duke University plans to raise its student fees in order pay for students' sex reassignment surgery. Duke University recently made the decision to raise student fees in order add sex-reassignment surgery to their healthcare plan. The private university, located in North Carolina, follows Brown and other universities in offering coverage for the controversial operation. Administrators say they will cover the cost of the reassignment surgery up to $50,000 that will be covered with a cause a 0.3 percent increase to overall student fees. LGBT advocates on campus immediately celebrated the university’s decision.

The federal government gave out more than $40 billion for research and development (R&D) to universities across the country in fiscal 2011. Universities depend heavily on federal funding, with many of the top programs relying on the government for more than 60% of their R&D budgets. As a result, many research program directors fear that the federal cuts promoted by the sequester will hurt future funding. A few of the top schools received a disproportionate share of the governmentÂ’s spending on grants for R&D. Of all 896 schools that received federal money for R&D, approximately 20% of those funds went...

After sternly warning college students to stop harassing his wife or they would face consequences, former Rep. Allen West, R-Fla., now finds himself the target of a complaint.

<p>A University of Buffalo professor was apparently so incensed by a campus display erected by a group of pro-life students that she engaged in a profanity-laden rant which attracted the attention of the authorities. Being lectured by the police to tone down her tirade apparently incensed the professor even more and she proceeded to rage against the pro-life students’ display with even more vitriol. The event, captured on a student’s cell phone, ends when the authorities detain the professor.</p>