Free Republic

After the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at his Saturday campaign rally, one Baltimore, Maryland professor is claiming that she and other Black Americans justifiedly wish that the attempt to kill “evil” Trump had been successful. In a July 15 opinion piece published by NewsOne, Dr. Stacey Patton, a professor at Morgan State University, wrote of hypotheticals surrounding a successful attempt, stating that Black Americans “are wishing for the death of evil”. The piece, titled “‘Is He Dead?’ Why Black People Are Not Grieving The Failed Assassination Of Donald Trump”, explores how Black Americans would supposedly have responded...

A professor at Rutgers University posted to Facebook after someone tried to kill former President Donald Trump, writing “Let’s hope today’s events inspire others.” A source provided Campus Reform with the Facebook posts, which were made by Rutgers University Writing Program Assistant Teaching Professor Tracy Budd in the hours after someone tried to assassinate Trump during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. ”Let’s hope today’s events inspire others,” Budd said in one post. ”They shot his wig. Sad,” Budd wrote in another. Budd’s Facebook is set to private, but her cover picture contains a poster at a protest that read: “Capitalism...

The decision by Florida governor Ron DeSantis in 2023 to oust the radicals controlling the state’s tiny liberal-arts college, New College of Florida, has elicited frenzied reactions from the global Left. The effort by a democratically elected government to bring political balance, educational excellence, and fiscal sanity to a failed public institution of 800 students is seen as nothing less than a collegiate March on Rome. The reaction has rather proven the point: The leftist control of higher education has become so totalitarian that even the slightest hint of deviance is viewed as a mortal threat to the revolutionary project....

University hired 6 new DEI deans in 1 year The Massachusetts Institute of Technology added more than 1,200 new administrative/support staff positions in less than a decade – including six “diversity, equity, and inclusion” assistant deans in one year, a College Fix analysis found. Meanwhile, between 2013 and 2022, undergraduate student enrollment remained basically flat. The administrative hiring increase coincides with concerted efforts by the research university to “advanc[e] diversity, equity, and inclusion” throughout its programs. During the 2022-23 school year, the most recent data available, the university employed 6,693 full-time administrators and support staff, according to information the school...

In its first year, the Biden administration launched a fast-track Scientific Integrity Task Force, intended to “lift up the voices of Federal scientists of many perspectives and backgrounds” and put scientific integrity “paramount in Federal governance for years to come.” The task force took a “whole-of-government” approach to ensuring the scientific integrity of federally funded research and included representatives from the 21 federal agencies that maintain scientific-research programs. For those with a high pain threshold, the final report may be seen here. Prominent among the move’s critics have been the Council on Governmental Relations (a consortium of research universities) and...

Young people, women, and Democrats reported the largest drops.Confidence in higher education has plummeted to its lowest level ever according to the results of two new national polls commissioned by FIRE and conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. In two AmeriSpeak panels representative of the U.S. household population, we asked Americans: “How much confidence, if any, do you have in U.S. colleges and universities?” This question was first asked in February and then again in May, and its wording is similar to a question posed by Gallup in Summer 2023 when Americans were asked about their confidence in...

A respected philosophy professor who plunged to his death amid an investigation over historical sexual assault allegations led an “extremely kinky, illicit drug taking” double life behind closed doors, according to an escort who entered into a “sex contract” with the 77-year-old promising to “make her daddy happy.” Dr John Forge, an honorary professor at the University of Sydney who authored numerous books on morality and ethics, was found dead at the base of Cataract Gorge in Launceston, Tasmania on May 2, hours after a detective knocked on his door to request he attend a police station for questioning. It’s...

We learned about the complexities and mysteries of artificial intelligence, the uses of innovative statistical analyses that could improve policing, and the Confucian roots of Xi’s totalitarianism. We discussed the early modern origins of ideological movements, Milton’s translation of Homeric epic into a Christian drama of rebellion and salvation, and Moby Dick’s critical analysis of corporatism. We explored the religious roots of modern politics and the influence of Hebraic constitutionalism on the Founding Fathers. We reflected on Shakespeare’s dialectical examination of politics in his Roman dramas. This was no academic conference. It was a job interview. Faculty searches often take...

Law school deans from over 100 higher learning institutions across the country signed a letter calling on students to disagree with people respectfully, while upholding the rule of law and championing the U.S. Constitution. The American Bar Association’s (ABA) Task Force for American Democracy unveiled the letter, which was signed by 119 deans, including Kerry Abrams of the Duke University School of Law; Paul Brest of Stanford Law School; Jennifer Gerarda Brown of Quinnipiac University; Jens David Ohlin of Cornell Law School; Heather K. Gerken of Yale School of Law; Risa Goluboff of the University of Virginia School of Law;...

For almost 400 years America has seen its citizens educating their children and themselves, though both the scope, structure and quality of education has changed somewhat during that time. For much of the history of the United States, education of children took place primarily at home, often along with private schools for some, and locally managed and supported schools for others. Education included the general ethos of Christianity and Biblical morality as well as academic subjects. The New England Primer and later, the nation-wide McGuffey's Readers (120+ million copies) were the primary instruments of education, and in helping to form...

A Columbia Law Review article that argues Jews "capitalized on the Holocaust to create a powerful narrative that monopolizes victimhood" was subject to an atypical editing process that omitted "a large number of Jewish students," according to sources familiar with the process. While prospective pieces are typically available for the Law Review's roughly 100 members to assess ahead of publication, the "Nakba" piece was handled behind closed doors by a group of roughly 30 student editors, according to Columbia Law School professor Joshua Mitts. While that group edited the piece "over several months," Mitts said, other editors—including Jews—were unaware even...

On Friday, May 31, alumni descended on Columbia University's Manhattan campus to celebrate their class reunions. In addition to eating and drinking, the festivities included several panel discussions featuring professors and administrators...In the audience, according to two attendees, were several top members of the Columbia administration. Given the sensitivity of the subject—the eruption of anti-Semitism on campus in the wake of Hamas's Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel put a national spotlight on the school, and Columbia recently settled a lawsuit with a Jewish student who accused the school of fostering an unsafe learning environment—the administrators' presence made sense.The administrators...

When accepting the Heritage Foundation’s 2024 Salvatori Prize on May 22, Chris Rufo remarked that state legislatures in red states such as Oklahoma need to start exercising oversight of their public universities. He’s right. “There is an endemic rot of indoctrination, politicization, and intellectual intimidation,” Joel Gardner observed on this website in 2020, “that is eviscerating the historical purpose and nature of our institutions of higher learning.” This remains true today and not just in elite institutions. The rot is widespread even in public universities in Oklahoma, one of the reddest states in the nation. Fortunately, with Republicans in possession...

When this endeavor becomes obvious to everyone, some will complain that there was no one who ever warned them. Actually, there was, but the warners were vilified, smeared, demonized, demonetized, blocked, shadowbanned, and silenced. “Executive Director Of ‘American Muslims For Palestine’ Osama Abuirshaid At George Washington University Encampment: We Will Take Back America, Just Like We Will Take Back Palestine; You Will Be The Past, We Will Be The Future,” MEMRI, April 25, 2024: Executive Director of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) Osama Abuirshaid said at an April 25, 2024 speech at the George Washington University encampment that protesters will...

The ‘iDIVERSE’ program bars white and Asian researchers from applying.. The University of California, Los Angeles, medical school was hit last week with whistleblower allegations that its admissions office has for years discriminated on the basis of race, in violation of California law, by holding black and Latino applicants to lower standards than their white and Asian counterparts. The allegations triggered an email message from the dean of the medical school, Steven Dubinett, who denied the claims and said that students and faculty "are held to the highest standards of academic excellence." He subsequently told an obscure Los Angeles Times...

On Tuesday, Harvard officials announced that the university would adopt a formal stance of ideological neutrality on political events and other controversial issues. The decision comes after months of tumultuous campus protests over the war between Israel and Hamas. Earlier this month, a faculty-led working group published a report that strongly recommended adopting a neutral stance on topics that do not directly concern the university itself. "The university has a responsibility to speak out to protect and promote its core function. Its leaders must communicate the value of the university's central activities. They must defend the university's autonomy and academic...

Harvard University announced yesterday (Tuesday) that it would no longer comment as an institution on issues that do not relate to its “core function” following the controversies surrounding the school's statements on the massacre of October 7 and the subsequent war between Israel and the Hamas terrorist organization. Interim Harvard President Alan M. Garber wrote in an email that Harvard would adopt the recommendation of a working group that the school not “issue official statements about public matters that do not directly affect the university’s core function.” “There will be close cases where reasonable people disagree about whether a given...

Student negotiators and university officials reached an agreement to end the pro-Palestine encampment on the University of Oregon campus after 24 days. Five UO Coalition for Palestine representatives emerged from Johnson Hall, where the encampment was moved on May 16, after meeting with UO administrators including President John Karl Scholz. According to Michael Dreiling, a sociology professor and facilitator between the coalition and the university, encampment members have 24 hours to leave after signing the agreement. By the end of the night, some demonstrators were already packing up their tents, and cheers rang out from the site of the encampment...

Welcome to Gaza Graduation. Let's see how much students know what they actually stand for.

Much “news” today consists of quick, divisive headlines with little regard for complexity or subtlety. A prominent example is the rapid firestorm that surrounded the conservative governments of Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia last year when some faculty loudly expressed their dissatisfaction with right-leaning higher-ed reforms. Having consulted an American Association of University Professors (AAUP) survey on the subject, media everywhere ran with the notion that red-state faculty would soon be fleeing, with many outlets printing articles claiming a “brain-drain” would soon occur. The AAUP survey in question, conducted last fall, attempted to understand whether and why faculty members...