Free Republic

Recent events at the University of Missouri, Yale University and some other colleges demonstrate an ongoing ignorance and/or contempt for the principles of free speech. So let's examine some of those principles by asking: What is the true test of one's commitment to free speech? Contrary to the widespread belief of tyrants among college students, professors and administrators, the true test of one's commitment to free speech does not come when one permits people to be free to express those ideas that he finds acceptable. The true test of one's commitment to free speech comes when he permits others to...

Mayor de Blasio said his son Dante has been active in protests over racial issues at Yale — and they both agree the school should drop the name of a prominent defender of slavery. Dante, a freshman, is assigned to Yale’s Calhoun College, named for John C. Calhoun, a U.S. vice president and South Carolina senator who vehemently backed slavery as a “positive good” for the nation. “He’s very concerned, and he certainly notes the fact that the college he’s in, Calhoun College, is named for someone it shouldn’t be named for,” de Blasio told reporters Monday. “ That’s quite...

In the opening chapters of “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning,” Yale professor Timothy Snyder forcefully acknowledged what he calls the “ecological” Anti-Semitism of the Fuhrer, “An instructive account of the mass murder of the Jews of Europe must be planetary, because Hitler’s thought was ecological, treating Jews as a wound of nature.” In spite of such an assertion, however, the great caveat of Snyder’s book is he inexplicably fails to discuss the Nazi ecological historical record that should have informed his thesis ...

Unhappy with a series of small concessions from the administration, protesters at Yale University have released a new list of demands that include firing people they don’t like and giving their favored programs a budget increase of at least $8 million a year. The new demands, released by a group calling itself Next Yale, were read aloud to Yale president Peter Salovey Thursday night by protesters who marched to his front door at midnight. The group says the demands are necessary to “reduce the intolerable racism that students of color experience on campus every day.” Salovey is given until Nov....

Come for free tuition, stay for the anti-Semitism. Seems other lefty college students are jealous of the Yale and University of Missouri kids, so on Thursday they launched a Million Student March at 100-plus campuses. On Fox News, one "Million" leader called for free tuition, a minimum-wage hike and cancellation of student debt (to be covered by new taxes on the 1 percent). But the rally here at CUNY's Hunter College came with an added, ugly twist, thanks to the NYC Students for Justice in Palestine. In a Facebook post, NYC-SJP added an anti-Semitic spin. It blamed tuition costs on...

Today, I would like to share an experience that is common amongst Veterans … that uncomfortable feeling we get when we see young – military aged – adults talk about changing the world and fighting the injustices they are experiencing on college campuses or on “main street” USA. We Have Seen the “Real World” – As Veterans, upon hearing this our minds flash first to young Americans who stood up and took an oath that had to be backed up with real action that placed their young lives in real danger. We can’t force out the images of places we...

Leftist activists interrupted and spit on Conservatives attending a free speech rally at Yale. One student, Edward Columbia, who did not register for the event, showed up near the beginning of the event and began displaying signs at the front of the room stating, "Stand with your sisters of color. Now, here. Always, everywhere."

Students at Yale University, a bastion of wealth and privilege, are angry because an employee at the university dared suggest that if white children want to dress up as the Disney character Mulan for Halloween, it would not be inappropriate but instead would be children dressing up as a favorite character. Clearly, this person is a white, privileged, racist bigot. Or at least she is in the minds of the college students as Yale. Never mind that an Ivy League university had people engaged in a debate on the appropriateness of Halloween costumes to ensure people were not offended. Students...

The following article is not the standard USDW post concerning a defense issue. Nevertheless, I feel that the situation on our nation’s campuses can eventually affect all of us. It has future implications for America and which course the country will take. Will it be one for freedom or tyranny? During the past week, the nation has witnessed a myriad of lunatic temper tantrums and protests by college students who are demanding an end to free speech on campus, the destruction of the First Amendment and the Constitution and the creation of “safe spaces” where they can be protected against...

The infants at Yale's Silliman (residential) College may deserve better, but it would have to start with fresh diapers and spankings. When I was a Yale undergraduate about a half century ago, my fellow students were young men, not infants; they had senses of humor. Those who helped us to learn were adults. They did not much care whether their words might offend the easily offended. Neither did we.This song was sung by the returning class of 1963, my class. I wish I had been able to attend and wonder whether it will eventually cease to be sung at Yale. Video...

<p>The infamous *Shrieking Girl* at Yale University who now famously berated a professor for not making Yale a *safe space* is from a relatively privileged background and has been frantically moving to delete her online presence, an investigation by The Daily Caller News Foundation reveals.</p>

Two of America’s three branches of federal government have declared war on parental authority. President Obama’s Department of Education has been explicitly attacking schools that have the audacity to prefer traditional morality. However, making sense of the Education Department’s actions requires looking at the Obergefell same-sex “marriage” decision. The Obergefell decision explains why the Department of Education will not stop until it has eliminated parental authority to teach traditional morality to their children.The Department of Education has recently targeted an Illinois public school. The school allowed a (biologically male) transgendered student to participate in girls’ sports. The student was...

The first time I saw a friend wearing blackface I was a freshman in college. I was stunned. I was hurt. I was enraged. But more than anything, I was confused. He thought it was funny, albeit controversial. But to me it wasn’t a joke; it was pointed mockery. I imagined him laughing and joking as his friends painted his skin. I couldn’t understand why he would so callously and easily disrespect me and those like me, for fun. Now I have come to expect such acts, and the conversations that surround them, as routine displays of disrespect and cultural...

Half a century ago, student activists liberated themselves—partly, at least—from in loco parentis: the paternalistic notion that college administrators should serve as watchful guardians, restricting students’ activities and rights in order to provide a safe environment for them, the way a mother or father would. Today, students across the country are determined to undo this liberation. At Yale University, a group of aggrieved minority students have demanded the resignations of administrators who wisely rejected calls for emotional coddling. Nicholas Christakis, the master of Yale’s Silliman College, and his wife, Erika Christakis, an early childhood educator at Yale, conveyed to students...

...the screaming in the dark you do on campus is more or less the same screaming in the dark you did in the crib, the same howl for the same reason.

Ah the 1960’s: the decade of America’s counter-cultural revolution.  Youthful revolutionaries circa 1960 found fault with America’s materialism and sought to improve society’s inequities tied to race, class, and gender. Campus unrest was rampant, civil discourse was not-so-civil, and everyone, everywhere seemed consumed by racial tension fueled by charges of discrimination. Had we done a better job, perhaps we wouldn’t still be litigating the same grievances 50 years hence.At the half century mark all we’ve effectively done is impose mandatory politically correct speech, create campus “safe spaces” and raise children who grow more hyper-sensitive to real and/or perceived micro-aggressions with...

Campus leftists disrupted a Yale University conference on free speech and terrorized attendees Saturday as part of a lingering protest against school administrators' allegedly permissive attitude toward culturally insensitive Halloween costumes.

Marx and Man at Yale Campus leftists disrupted a Yale University conference on free speech and terrorized attendees Saturday as part of a lingering protest against school administrators’ allegedly permissive attitude toward culturally insensitive Halloween costumes. Attendees at the “Fifth Annual Conference on the Future of Free Speech: Threats in Higher Education and Beyond,” sponsored by the school’s William F. Buckley Jr. Program, were given an unscheduled demonstration of the threat that college students pose to higher education today as they were harassed and spat upon by protesters.

An Associate Master at Yale writes an email complaining that basically college kids...KIDS...are too politically correct and too wimpy to deal with it. The specific topic was on whether or not the university should police what students wear on Halloween to make sure they don't don anything too offensive (i.e. some New England WASP has no business  dressing up as...say...Geronimo wearing black face, or anything at all for that matter). That is an oversimplification of what was actually said (the link above has the full text of the email), but it's also the gist. The email became widely known and...

Conservatives have long accused academics of shredding the Constitution, figuratively speaking, but a Project Veritas sting operation recently caught them doing it literally. Undercover video released last week showed administrators at Yale, Cornell, Syracuse, Vassar and Oberlin agreeing to rip up copies of the Constitution handed out off campus after an investigator posing as a student described the document as “triggering” and “oppressive.” “Well, I think that the Constitution means things to different people; like you said it is a flawed document and the people who wrote it are certainly flawed individuals in my mind,” Cornell lead Title IX investigator...