Free Republic

Some colleges and universities in the United States have been struggling with student performance, particularly since they began spending more time protesting Israel or the police than on the classes they signed up for. And the DEI push concerning who does or doesn't get admitted isn't helping either. But no school wants to go public and say that they are graduating a bunch of sub-par students, right? Western Oregon University has joined the ranks of those who are finding creative solutions to these challenges. They will simply no longer issue failing grades to anyone such as "D-" or "F." They...

‘It is still unknown if any of these six departures are related’ Another diversity staffer at Quinnipiac University left this month, the sixth DEI official in one year, prompting questions about the turnover rate. Sarah Hellyar, the interim Title IX coordinator, resigned in January and began a new job in the same role at Antioch University, the Quinnipiac Chronicle reports. Her resignation follows two others in December and three more since January 2023, all of them in diversity-related positions at the private Connecticut university. Last week, new interim Vice President for Equity and Inclusion David Fryson said in an email...

The University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, has launched a segregated pool activity called “Black Folx Swim,” which expressly excludes participation by non-black swimmers. “The aim is to get more Black Folx into a space where they haven’t always been welcomed, while providing them the opportunity to learn swimming skills,” the school’s website states. Swimming lessons are taught exclusively by “experienced black swimmers/instructors,” the site adds, noting that the segregated pool time “is dedicated to building a better relationship with water for the Black community.”

Student group requested high court block race-based admissions at the academy amid ongoing legal battle.. West Point defended using race in its admissions process in response to a student group's request that the Supreme Court force the military academy to pause the practice while a lawsuit makes its way through lower courts. "For more than forty years, our Nation’s military leaders have determined that a diverse Army officer corps is a national-security imperative," U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote in a Tuesday court filing. "Achieving that diversity requires limited consideration of race in selecting those who join the Army as...

The university's VP of Academic Affairs said the changes will no longer 'mask' students' 'demonstrated abilities'.. An Oregon university announced they will abandon failing letter grades, citing a "GPA fixation" that negatively impacts students. Western Oregon University issued a news release earlier this month that revealed the school would be replacing "D-" and "F" grades with "no credit" to discourage undergrads from dropping out. ... The difference is that the grade of NC will not negatively impact student GPAs, ... the decision came after data from the university showed that 65% of freshman students who dropped out had earned at...

Five prominent U.S. universities have agreed to pay a total $104.5 million to settle a lawsuit accusing them of price fixing. Brown University agreed to pay $19.5 million, Columbia and Duke are each paying $24 million, and Yale and Emory are each paying $18.5 million, according to United Press International. The lawsuit was brought forward by eight former students against 17 universities, alleging they colluded as "a price-fixing cartel" to "fix" price competition when it came to financial aid. It essentially states the schools collectively shared confidential data and information about admissions and financial aid, from which they adopted a...

A team of researchers from Northwestern University says they have developed a cutting-edge, power-generating fuel cell that runs on dirt by capturing the electricity generated by microbes that live in soil. Previous attempts at microbial fuel cells (MFCs) have been stymied by low power outputs and unreliable performance, but the Northwestern system seems to have conquered these issues. The inventors of the dirt-powered fuel cell believe it can revolutionize precision farming, while lessening the use of batteries that often contain toxic chemicals and rely on lithium and heavy metals that are a limited resource and can damage crops and soil....

Here’s another good reason not to plunk down $126,584 (that’s the total for four years of tuition unless it goes up between now and 2027) to send your kid to Rutgers. Long considered to be one of America’s premier universities, the beloved alma mater of Mr. Magoo is now a sinkhole of woke indoctrination, with academic standards sinking lower than Old Joe Biden’s ethics. A professor at Rutgers Law School has lied openly in an academic paper and has refused to back down, knowing that she will face no consequences from an administration that is as corrupt and compromised as...

DEI commitment includes a recent $17 million faculty initiative, ‘identity centers,’ and more Vanderbilt University employs more than one full-time administrator for every two students ... the private Nashville university employed 3,516 full-time administrators and support staff, according to information the school filed with the federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. Administrators and support staff include management, student and academic affairs divisions, IT, public relations, administrative support, maintenance, legal, and other non-academic departments. In 2022, Vanderbilt’s reported full-time undergraduate student enrollment was 6,983. That amounts to 517 full-time administrators and support staff per 1,000 undergrads, or more than one for...

Comparably sized but more prestigious Cornell paid far less this fall, suggesting big payouts could continue into 2024. Cheers from GWU law professor who encouraged students to sue university. Class-action lawyers may have frowned when Cornell University agreed to pay just $3 million last fall to settle a lawsuit seeking tuition refunds from its shutdown of classroom instruction early in the COVID-19 pandemic – a far cry from Ivy League peer Columbia's $12.5 million payout for the same actions two years earlier. They are likely grinning now that a comparably sized but less prestigious private university, blocks from the White...

Faculty said they felt trapped in an ‘alternate reality’ when trying to navigate the college’s ‘toxic’ DEI environment.. College students attending universities with restrictive speech codes are used to walking on eggshells and keeping their heads down on campus out of fear of committing social suicide or experiencing violence. In the disordered world of contemporary higher education, Jewish students receive limited, if any, support from school administrators amid explicit calls for violence against them, while other students face punishment for banal infractions like rolling a “free speech ball” around campus. But if you are shocked at how students are subject...

Academic malfeasance by Harvard's president deserves media coverage and condemnation, not excuses. ... Claudine Gay is the president of Harvard University. In recent weeks, she has come under fire for plagiarizing portions of her 1997 doctoral dissertation, as well as published articles she had authored in recent years. Examples of plagiarism were first identified by the conservative writer and activist Christopher Rufo, following Gay's much-derided congressional testimony regarding antisemitism on campus. Rufo has all but declared war on the Ivy League, which has prompted many academics to ignore his claims on grounds that he is acting in bad faith; Harvard...

These self-styled 'progressives' are in reality trying to reverse four centuries of progress, taking us back to a time when a small cadre of elites ruled the world and everyone else basically lived as a serf. ... However else we might define “wokeness”--using terms like “leftist,” “Marxist,” or “progressive,” all of which are accurate enough—it is without question anti-Enlightenment, an explicit repudiation of Western, Judeo-Christian values. That is unfortunate. We call it the “Enlightenment” for a reason. Humanity emerged (in Europe, at least) from 1500 years of moral, intellectual, and spiritual darkness, where the vast majority of people lived short,...

If you haven't been worried by the reactions of so many American students, professors, and university presidents over the Hamas terror attacks against Israel on October 7, then maybe you haven't been paying attention. Antisemitism has run rampant on many campuses, and when three top school heads appeared before Congress, they failed to condemn "protesters" who were harassing Jewish students, shouting "intifada revolution," and calling for the extermination of the entire country.But the news about the poison being spread in our system of higher education just keeps getting more disturbing as a new Harvard-Harris poll shows that an astonishing 51...

Harvard University covered up a high-level investigation into whether its controversial president was a plagiarist — and used an expensive law firm to threaten The Post over our own probe. ... Harvard did not disclose that it had conducted a plagiarism investigation into its president Claudine Gay when she appeared before Congress last week. ... Anne Williamson, of Miami University, Ohio, said she was “shocked” by the parallels to her work and one of Gay’s papers and said: “It does look like plagiarism to me.” ... The 27 instances were in two academic papers published in two peer-reviewed journals between...

With the resignation of woke University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill, following an execrable performance addressing antisemitism in Congress, some kind of dam has broken. Now academics with actual achievements are beginning to speak out against the wokesterism that has laid low the reputations of their universities. CNN commentator Fareed Zakaria, who's best described as a left-leaning moderate, has thrown down the gauntlet about woke universities, calling them indoctrination centers, not places of learning, and demanded that universities return to their core mission of seeking the actual truth, demanding excellence, instead of creating their own "truths." He's on fire here:...

Excuses - and silence - in the face of evil.. Slaughter in cold blood. Beheadings of babies. Torture. Rape as a weapon of war. All were part of Hamas’s genocidal attacks against Israeli Jews on October 7, 2023. This rampage, which took more Jewish lives in one day than on any other day since the Holocaust, should shock the conscience of any person who has a conscience. But what we see too often instead is a disgusting display of excuses, moral equivalence, and indifference in response to the gruesome violence that Jews, including so many defenseless women and girls, suffered...

Foxx warned that other universities should expect to be faced with similar investigations... Rep. Dr. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), Chairwoman of the Committee on Education and the Workforce, has announced a formal investigation into Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT. This comes after the presidents of all three universities refused to affirm that “calling for the genocide of Jews” is necessarily against the rules at their respective universities. Each of the three university presidents refused to answer “yes,” after being asked multiple times whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” violates their own university policies. All three presidents repeatedly...

A University of Pennsylvania donor is withdrawing a gift worth around $100 million to protest the school's response to antisemitism on campus. The big picture: The final straw for Ross Stevens, founder and CEO of Stone Ridge Asset Management, was Tuesday's widely criticized congressional testimony by Penn president Liz Magill. Details: The gift from Stevens, a Penn undergrad alum, was given in December 2017 to help establish a center for innovation in finance.

An ultra-rare gigantic rat so big that it puts New York City's subway-dwelling rodents to shame has been caught on camera for the first time. Uromys vika, a giant rat known for being "one of the world's rarest rodents" according to the University of Melbourne, is found in just one isolated spot throughout the world – the island of Vangunu in the Solomon Islands. The species was only first identified by a single animal discovered in 2017, but recently, university researchers said that after placing out glass oil lamps filled with sesame oil, they captured 95 images of four different...