Free Republic

A professor at American University recently taught students that right-wing terrorism in the United States is actually more of a pressing threat to American citizens than Islamic terrorism based on the number of attacks, not the death toll. Professor Erin Kearns said Americans seem most afraid of Islamic terrorists, but that so-called right-wing extremists here have actually committed a higher number of attacks. “I would guess that a handful of you are probably like, ‘Oh, it’s some radical of Islam, people who are using that to justify their violence,’” Kearns had said during a May lecture regarding what she contends...

Four years ago, when art Professor Elizabeth Stephens filmed the documentary “Ecosexual Love Story,” in which she and her partner licked trees, played with mud, and made love with the environment while naked, the term “ecosexuality” was still somewhat unknown. But a lot has happened since then, and ecosexuality isn’t such a mystery anymore. That interest can be traced in part back to Stephens, a UC Santa Cruz professor and one leader in the movement that melds art, sex and environmentalism, a la having sex with a tree or marrying the ocean. That interest can be traced in part back...

Concern over soaring tuition rates and ballooning student debt has propelled a rapidly expanding campaign for free public higher education at the local, state and even national level. In California, lawmakers, gubernatorial candidates and education advocates are among those pushing for ways to get rid of fees and other costs for some students. Some higher education experts noted that California already has arguably the most generous financial aid system in the country. It spends more than $2 billion annually on programs such as the Cal Grant, which covers up to four years of tuition at UC and CSU for low-...

Administrators at The Evergreen State College have announced that the embattled school faces a massive $2.1 million budget shortfall due in part to a drop in enrollment, and the institution has already handed out some temporary layoff notices as officials grapple with balancing the books.

Language is malleable, right? After all, a dictionary doesn't define a word's spelling, it simply gives the most common version of it. Well, how about a name? UCLA's The Den tweeted Monday morning that a recently unveiled statue at the new $700 million USC Village displays a typo.

A course has been slated to start this fall at Stanford University that looks (among other things) at the perils and possibilities of different political practices,” according to the course description, “including abolishing whiteness or coming to terms with white identity.” And yes, it sounds like a joke, but it is apparently a very real course: CSRE 136: White Identity Politics (ANTHRO 136B) Pundits proclaim that the 2016 Presidential election marks the rise of white identity politics in the United States. Drawing from the field of whiteness studies and from contemporary writings that push whiteness studies in new directions, this...

The Nebraska Board of Education is debating whether to include climate change in public school science classes and you can probably guess who is weighing in on its behalf. "Climate change is happening," David Harwood, a geology professor with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, told the board. "It is caused by human activity." What's he going to do when his next global warming protest gets cancelled because of a snow storm, in the middle of April?

Indrek Wichman, a mechanical engineer professor at Michigan State University, has eyed a troubling trend of social justice warriors making their way through the humanities and social sciences and, to his despair, they now have their sights set on leveling their destruction on engineering. WichmanHaving spent 30 years teaching mechanical engineering, Wichman acknowledges things have changed dramatically and is concerned that “feelings” and “micro-aggressions” have taken a predominant role, much to the detriment of the hard sciences. “The world we engineers envisioned as young students is not quite as simple and straightforward as we had wished,” he states in a...

If you’re one of those students who dreads math — especially algebra — you’ll soon get a bit of a break at the California State University system. For years, intermediate algebra had been a prerequisite for the system’s general math classes, meaning even students who weren’t majoring in math or science related fields had to complete the course before they could complete their math requirement. Beginning in the fall of 2018, students whose majors aren’t math or science heavy will be able to fulfill their math requirements without slogging through intermediate algebra first — part of a larger effort to...

Bethune-Cookman University, a struggling historically black school on Florida’s Atlantic coast, will end up shelling out $306 million for a residence hall which opened on campus in 2016. The private school will foot the $306 million cost for the 1,200-bed dormitory by paying monthly installments over 40 years to a real estate company called TG Quantum, reports The Daytona Beach News-Journal. For perspective, the $306 million cost of the dorm is a few million more than the entire annual gross-domestic product of the island nation of Palau. The monthly installments — which amount to a complex leasing arrangement — start...

Turkey issued arrest warrants for 72 university staff, state media said on Monday, including a former adviser to the main opposition leader who staged a mass rally on Sunday to protest a crackdown since a failed military coup last year.The warrants were issued under an investigation into the movement of the U.S.-based Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen, who is accused of orchestrating the attempted coup on July 15, state-run Anadolu news agency reported.Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the secularist CHP, told a huge crowd on Sunday Turkey was living under dictatorship and pledged to keep challenging the government after completing a 25-day...

HARTFORD, Conn. (WTNH)– Trinity College in Hartford is closed in response to a threat Wednesday afternoon. The college tweeted out that due to threats received, the Trinity College campus, at 300 Summit Street, is now closed until further notice. College officials also tweeted that campus buildings were only card ID access only. The nature of the threat is unknown at this time.

Strathclyde University sent an email to 650 “multi-cultural” students and staff after janitors complained about “people pooing in bins, showers and the likes” and apparently not knowing there were toilets designed for such personal business. The memo was emailed last week by the operations management team of the University's state-of-the-art Technology and Innovation Centre (TIC) to its 400 students and staff of 250.

The University of California Board of Regents recently passed a regulation capping the number of out-of-state students permitted at UC colleges, limiting the total number to 18 percent of the student body on most campuses. Yet that 18 percent cap will not apply to students who are in the country illegally. The Board of Regents passed the regulation, known as Policy 2109, after California lawmakers threatened to withhold nearly $20 million in public funds if an out-of-state cap was not put in place. Currently out-of-state students constitute 16.5 percent of the UC student body. The policy, approved May 18, holds...

Egypt's prestigious Al-Azhar University has accepted a Christian into its medical residency program, which some believe marks the first time the historic Muslim school has publicly accepted a Christian student. The Washington, D.C.-based Middle East news outlet Al-Monitor has reported that Abanoub Guirguis Naeem was allowed to officially enroll on May 17 by the dean of Al-Azhar's Faculty of Dentistry in Assiut, Khalid Siddiq, who confirmed his acceptance "Naeem applied to the college for a residency, and he was accepted along with other students," Siddiq told Al-Monitor. According to Al-Monitor, Naeem "is the first known case" of a Christian student...

Here are 115 books the NAS recommends for colleges and universities with common reading programs. The first list contains 80 books appropriate in level of difficulty and length for any college freshman. The second list contains 30 more ambitious choices... Recommended Books for More Ambitious College Common Reading Programs MATTHEW ARNOLD – CULTURE AND ANARCHY (1869) The point of culture is the pursuit of perfection; the uncultured are mere Philistines. Arnold eloquently articulates the High Victorian ideal of culture as singular and normative—a valuable corrective to the modern view of culture as plural and descriptive. Students will learn to consider...

A group of feminists at the University of Mary Washington is suing the college for failing “to protect them from a sexually hostile school environment” stemming from the social media app Yik Yak. The lawsuit, funded by the Feminist Majority Foundation for the group Feminists United, alleges the university and its former president, Richard Hurley, violated Title IX (which relates to offensive online posts) as well as the 14th amendment when they failed to take sufficient action to prevent offensive speech by male students at the university.

This afternoon I logged on to my daughter's college account and found out grades had come out. I was very excited to see that she had received a 3.75 and was very happy for her. I showed her and the entire family and we went out to celebrate (dinner). I shared my happiness via Facebook. Tonight I went back on to pay a fee that I had noticed earlier was yet unpaid and her grades are completely different! She has one A, a B, two C's and a D! I don't have any clue how this is possible. One of...

The University of Arizona is paying students to be social justice advocates and report on what they perceive to be ‘bias incidents’ and ‘socially insensitive behavior.’ According to The Washington Times, the students are being paid $10 per hour, for about 15 hours per week, to be social justice advocates. The students are focusing mainly on residence halls, and are also creating social justice posters to hang in the dorms and ‘partnering’ with other groups to hold social justice events on campus.

Bill Clinton will deliver the commencement address at Hobart and William Smith Colleges next month, the schools announced Wednesday. Clinton, the 42nd president of the United States and founder of the Clinton Foundation, is scheduled to speak at the Geneva colleges on Sunday, May 14. “We are honored to welcome President Clinton back to Hobart and William Smith as the 2017 Commencement speaker,” HWS President Mark Gearan said in a release. “President Clinton’s leadership has transformed millions of lives around the world, from his time as Arkansas attorney general and then governor, to two terms in the White House, and...