Free Republic

Intellectual rot within universities has become increasingly obvious. It stems from the widespread adoption of critical, feminist, and queer theories in academic work. The result has been a constant stream of illogical, unscientific, and otherwise incoherent academic papers. Organizations such as the Martin Center, Do No Harm, the National Association of Scholars, The College Fix, and Reality’s Last Stand have been at the forefront of exposing all of this. I think there is more to expose, however, not just in terms of the total volume of this wrongheaded work but also in terms of its misdirected moral compass. Whereas critiques...

The UNC System’s new policy requiring public posting of faculty syllabi is grounded in a sound principle: Taxpayers deserve to know what is being taught at their public universities. Greater transparency strengthens public trust and reinforces institutional accountability. Under the new policy, faculty are required to include specific categories of information in their syllabi, and universities in turn must make those syllabi publicly available. This is not merely a suggestion of openness but a formal compliance obligation placed both on individual instructors and on the institutions that employ them. Yet, while the policy contains important improvements to current practice, it...

Earlier this year, a New York Times report described a dramatic reversal in global university rankings. In the early 2000s, American institutions dominated the tables measuring scientific output. Seven of the top 10 were U.S. schools, led by Harvard University. Only one Chinese institution, Zhejiang University, appeared in the top 25. Today, the map looks very different. Chinese universities dominate the upper tiers of rankings produced by groups such as Leiden and the Nature Index. Commentators talk about a new academic world order. Some declare American decline. Others announce Chinese supremacy. Both conclusions rest on a shaky premise: that modern...

Engineering school taught us to write code. It never taught us to write. Now writing is the whole job. I went to engineering school at the University of Virginia. I appreciated the education. The engineering program is rigorous. I learned differential equations, thermodynamics, signal processing, data structures, and enough physics to respect what I didn’t understand. (And, I barely made it through.) I now wish I had majored in English if you’d told me that thirty years ago, I would have laughed at you, and then gone back to failing an electromagnetics exam. You know what I didn’t learn? How...

To understand how China has corrupted academic research in the West, including in the United States, begin at the top. China is currently headed by a man, Xi Jinping, who is himself an academic fraud. While serving in various government posts between 1998 and 2002, Xi was enrolled in an “in-service” doctoral program at Tsinghua University in Beijing. His dissertation on the marketization of rural areas was ghost-written by one of his staff members in a local government in southern Fujian Province, Liu Huiyu. She was later given a plum post at Jiangxia University in Fujian handling “library materials.” Xi’s...

In January, a change to UNC System policy that might appear to be merely administrative reopened a longstanding debate about the political oversight of academic knowledge. The issue concerns public access to syllabi—the documents that professors typically prepare for every course they teach, laying out the course’s goals, assignments, and schedule. The new policy stipulates that “each constituent [UNC] institution shall develop an online platform to house syllabi for each course offered in a given semester or session.” Many faculty have objected to the development. The North Carolina Conference of the American Association of University Professors—the main professional organization for...

Universities have ‘poisoned’ U.S. military education system, Hegseth said The U.S. Department of Defense announced the cancellation of its military education fellowships at 13 top universities on Friday, citing “toxic indoctrination.” “We are eliminating certain Senior Service College (SSC) Fellowship programs for the 2026-2027 academic year and beyond. I am also directing the compilation of a revised list of elite institutions offering equivalent programs to replace those eliminated,” the agency wrote in a memo to Pentagon leadership. ...

U.S. and Israeli airstrikes alone are unlikely to result in the ouster of the Iranian government, according to an expert in air campaigns, who said that the risks are growing for a more drawn-out war that could spread beyond the Middle East. Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago who has studied air power for three decades, told CBS News 24/7 that history does not support the idea that bombing alone can unseat a regime and install a more friendly leader. "The fact of the matter is, for over a century, states have been trying...

Attention DePaul University donors! Do you want to check out how your funding is being put to use? The institution just initiated an obnoxious, new anti-ICE journalism institute in partnership with radical ex-Mayor of Chicago Lori Lightfoot and another Chicago-based left-wing group financed by some of the most notorious leftists in American politics. The supposedly Catholic DePaul — which sits comfortably on a roughly $1.15 billion endowment — announced that it was launching the cringely-named Institute for Journalism and Racial Justice (IJRJ) during a February 25 campus event, according to student newspaper The DePaulia. The announcement came following a “community...

Ali Akbar Shdid teaches engineering at Henry Ford Community College in Dearborn, the city with the highest Muslim population in the United States. He shared a video on his Instagram after US and Israeli joint forces struck Iran on Saturday, condemning the attack and honoring the 'pure soul' of the Ayatollah. Shdid, who alleged Khamenei was a martyred by the 'Epstein regime,' accused Trump of making a 'huge mistake' by killing Iran's 'beloved leader,' despite Khamenei ordering the killing of a reported 30,000 citizens in recent anti-government protests. 'He thought that by killing him he's going to make the believers...

The report “Peer Review Gone Wild”—co-released by the Martin Center, the Goldwater Institute, and Defending Education—makes for compulsive reading. In it, Goldwater’s Timothy K. Minella details the dumpster fire that is the self-described “Feminist Collective,” an editorial board of activist reviewers at the American Political Science Review, one of the most prestigious political-science journals in the country. Several years ago, attempting to secure control of that journal, the Feminist Collective declared its intent to “actively dismantle the institutionalized racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, and settler colonialism that continue to characterize and structure [political science].” In practice, these intentions meant that the...

Advocating for diverse viewpoints on campuses is now apparently akin to saying “All Lives Matter,” or pushing a supposedly sinister Make America Great Again plot. That’s according to two recent op-eds, penned by professors at Stanford and Johns Hopkins, opposing efforts to get professors and students with different opinions onto campus. Academia has lost public trust precisely because anyone not of the far-left is admonished on campuses. Accusing proponents of viewpoint diversity of being Trumpy conspiracists certainly doesn’t help. Any professor who truly cares about academia should want more views on campus, regardless of their own politics. “It’s profoundly anti-intellectual,...

The lefty student government at a local California university rejected a proposal that would grant its student body free subscriptions to The New York Times, citing issues with how The Times covered major world-happenings. “The New York Times has historically been a little bit problematic and controversial in their reporting and in their journalism,” student official Alya Hassan, who voted against the proposal, told the Fresno Bee. Hassan referenced its coverage of Israel and Gaza as one example, adding the organization lacked journalistic integrity for avoiding words like genocide, ethnic cleansing and occupied territory in its reporting. The paper has...

Dr. Onwubiko Agozino, a sociology professor at the Virginia university, claimed in a Feb. 10 police report that eight white minors racially targeted him when they rolled up to his Christiansburg home blaring offensive music, throwing ice blocks, and hurling a flurry of racist jabs, including the N-word.He told authorities the "profane" music included "racial slurs," with local woke activists, New River Valley Indivisible, labeling the incident as a "calculated effort to terrorize and intimidate" Agozino and his family...Cops discovered the teens were attending a house party nearby and were merely clearing snow and ice from their truck bed, according...

An Ohio State professor was suspended for allegedly attacking a journalist who was trying to confront the university’s former president after footage of the assault went viral. Luke Perez, an assistant professor in the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society, was in a Smith Laboratory hallway talking to two freelance reporters when he launched his alleged attack on February 9. One victim, identified as Michael Neuman, attempted to walk past Perez when the staff member snatched at the man’s phone before grabbing the journalist and dropping him to the floor, according to the footage initially shared by...

When President Donald Trump signed a law that allowed for the National School Lunch Program to distribute whole milk again, he was actually sending out a signal to neo-Nazis, so says a New York University professor. In January, President Trump celebrated the bipartisan “Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act of 2025,” which will allow the federally subsidized school lunch program to offer the higher-fat content dairy once against. President Obama removed the option in 2010 over fears it was contributing to childhood obesity. The legislation passed by a voice vote in the U.S. House and unanimously in the U.S. Senate,...

Joseph Slaughter, who has defended illegal encampments at the Ivy League school, helped write new guidelines surrounding campus protest rules.. As a member of Columbia University's top disciplinary body, Joseph Slaughter helped draft guidelines meant to provide students with a "contemporary understanding" of school rules on campus protests. As an English professor, he delivered a lecture that lauded a string of terrorist plane hijackings as "spectacular" and "remarkable," according to audio obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. During his Oct. 9 talk, titled "Hijacking Human Rights," Slaughter referenced "pretty spectacular" footage of Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)...

Over the past year, a number of common tactics have emerged from the opposition to what is widely referred to as the Trump administration’s “defunding” of education. One of these is to decry the ostensibly catastrophic harm that will result from Trump’s moves, particularly in the areas of public health and scientific research. “American science and innovation should not be subject to the political winds of the day,” the Center for American Progress (CAP) intoned in a piece published over the summer. According to the authors, a would-be despotic, right-wing administration is “targeting” higher education for “political retribution.” “Higher education,...

Higher education is approaching a period of profound disruption, and many colleges may not survive, Arthur Levine, the newly appointed president of Brandeis University, said during a recent event. Levine estimated that between 20 and 25 percent of colleges will close in the coming years, while community colleges and regional universities move increasingly online. He made these remarks during a recent American Enterprise Institute event titled “Tackling Higher Education’s Challenges: A Conversation with Frederick M. Hess and Brandeis University President Arthur Levine.” Wealthier institutions may have the resources to withstand the transition, but many others do not. Levine said that...

If ever a case made plain the clash of values between freedom of speech and the desire of college administrators to compel everyone to support their “progressive” beliefs, Reges v. Cauce is it. This is an important First Amendment case, one in which the Martin Center joined in an amicus brief in support of a professor who was targeted with official retaliation because he spoke out against his university’s “land acknowledgement” policy and substituted his own views for the school’s. What nerve! Before getting into the details of the case, let’s examine the background. Specifically, why do so many college...