Free Republic

Alan Jacobs’ new book, Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind, is a coaxing argument to read “old books that come from strange times.” Readers of his previous works The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction and How to Think will not be surprised that Jacobs, distinguished professor of humanities at Baylor University, brings intellectual heft to the self-help genre. Jacobs focuses on why we ought to pay attention to old books. There is no surprise in learning that such reading makes us deeper, fuller persons, and more humble. Ex post facto...

Loughlin was released from the federal lockup in Dublin, California, where she had been serving her sentence for her role in the college admissions bribery scheme, the federal Bureau of Prisons said. Her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, is serving his five-month sentence at a prison in Lompoc near Santa Barbara, California.

In his book Bubbles and Crashes, Brent Goldfarb says a bubble is much like a stock that traders keep buying because others are doing the same thing. “This usually happens when a company or product has a compelling narrative around it that isn’t backed up by data,” Goldfarb writes. “They’re easy to invest in, there’s a lot of uncertainty about the future value, and it’s often about a lot of novice investors.” The student loan bubble checks all of these boxes. Americans have been hearing about a student loan “crisis” for over a decade, and there’s a reason for that....

Researchers from the Heartland Institute and Stopping Socialism created a list of the 50 most conservative colleges in the United States. Information such as surveys, cost, and enrollment were all considered when making the list with the goal of preventing indoctrination "with far-left ideas like socialism."Factors considered when compiling the list included surveys from Niche.com, which ranks colleges; Young America’s Foundation, Princeton Review, and experts at the Heartland Institute. Researchers also looked at enrollment and admissions information from various schools, and the cost of attendance.The top five are as follows:1.) Hillsdale College2.) Grove City College3.) College of the Ozarks4.) Liberty...

New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks ignited a wave of backlash after insulting rural Americans who have no contact with the “expert class.” SNIP “Look at how much more Republicans are affected by conspiracy theories than the Democrats, so it can’t just be the internet, there must be some demand,” Brooks said, pointing out the “two core problems.” “A lot of people in the expert class live in blue cities who are thriving,” he claimed. “And a lot of people left behind in the rural parts of America, they feel threatened economically, culturally, socially and they have no contact...

I’ve never set foot on my elite women’s college campus, but that didn’t save me from my enraged peers when I announced, “If you support Trump, you are my friend. If you support Biden, you are my friend. If you feel the need to degrade those who feel differently from you...maybe we aren’t friends.” That’s all I said on my Instagram story, yet execrable messages began trickling into my direct messages from my peers. I was told that I was a part of the problem, and that nobody wanted to be friends with me. I was accused of believing that...

Critical race theorist Ibram X. Kendi declared this week that the expression “legal vote” used to describe votes cast in conformity with U.S. laws is “functionally racist.” “The term ‘legal vote’ is as fictionally fraught and functionally racist as the terms ‘illegal alien’ and ‘race neutral’ and ‘welfare queen’ and ‘handouts’ and ‘super predator’ and ‘crackbaby’ and ‘personal responsibility’ and ‘post racial,’” Kendi wrote on Twitter. When Kendi added in a follow-up tweet, “There are so many more terms like this. What did I leave out?” his woke followers jumped on the bandwagon, insisting that any terms questioning the Left’s...

In this election season it’s almost impossible to find pro-Trump bumper stickers or signs anywhere in my town. The reason is not lack of support but fear of vandalism, or worse: People nationwide have been physically assaulted and even threatened with loss of their livelihoods for no other reason than that they plan to vote as one half of the country does, and political goals are now commonly pursued by violent means. With this our civilization seems to be regressing to a more primitive stage of its development—a time when disputes were settled by force instead of rules, and before...

In a year when numerous faculty members who aren’t “woke” have been pilloried, and many universities are revamping themselves in accordance with the agenda of Black Lives Matter and Antifa, I was amazed to read an article by Harvard history professor Naomi Oreskes and her student, Charlie Tyson, who claim that research findings that university professors overwhelmingly lean to the left are wrong. Oreskes and Tyson published “Is Academe Awash in Liberal Bias?” in the Chronicle of Higher Education on September 14. Their piece violates common sense and misconstrues basic statistical reasoning.

With two major universities naming colleges after him staffed by former Obama-Biden administration cronies and receiving generous donations from anonymous foreign sources, Joe Biden's embrace of Big Academia's money machine has been shielded by their respectability. This despite neither the Penn Biden Center for the University of Pennsylvania nor the Biden Institute of the University of Delaware providing any evident academic or research function for either of their host universities. While the former vice president is certainly feeling vulnerable due to the attacks on his one surviving son and his inexplicable financial arrangements, it is only one weak point in...

Public concern about higher education is clearly widespread. The causes are many: ugly treatment of visiting speakers, a stifling political uniformity resulting in ideological extremism and hatred, and fringe radical ideas seeping out of the campuses into the wider world. Less publicly visible are numerous recent studies that tell us how little most recent graduates have benefited from higher education. They record astonishing deficiencies in reasoning, writing, reading, basic knowledge, and civics. But with all this, the public is still uncertain. Most see the symptoms but don’t quite know what to make of them, and so continue to send their...

Whites and non-whites training to be Residential Assistants at the University of Kentucky were segregated according to their race and put through different presentations. The separate trainings were provided to Young America’s Foundation through the organization’s Campus Bias Tip Line, which included emails and documents about the training. White RAs were sent to a “White Accountability Space” where they were given a document that listed 41 “common racist behaviors and attitudes of white people.” ... The person who alerted YAF to the segregation wished to remain anonymous and said that white students were required to have the document on their...

Warwick University academic ‘broke German court ruling that protected dead woman’s reputation’The daughter of a Holocaust survivor has begun a legal battle to protect her deceased mother’s reputation from allegations that she had a lesbian relationship with an SS guard. Earlier this year, a German court ruled that Dr Anna Hájková, associate professor of modern continental European history at Warwick University, had violated the woman’s postmortem personality rights by publicly claiming that she had a sexual relationship with the Nazi guard while imprisoned in concentration camps. The woman’s daughter is now taking further legal action against the academic in Frankfurt...

FILE – In this Sept. 9, 2015 file photo, students arrive for the first day of school at Stuyvesant High School in New York. A push to diversify New York City’s most elite public high schools is facing a backlash from the group that makes up most of the schools’ current student bodies: Asian-Americans. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File)One of the tenets of the pseudo-political religious cult that is Marxism is that capitalism is doomed by its own “internal contradictions.”Why do I call Marxism a religion? If you look at Marxism through the lens of comparative religion, what do you have?...

A Rhode Island professor with a history of incendiary comments against conservatives is under fire this week for appearing to suggest that the fatal shooting of a Patriot Prayer supporter during unrest in Portland last month was morally justified. The comment from Erik Loomis, a history professor at the University of Rhode Island, came in response to a comment on his blog post: “Why Was Michael Reinoehl Killed?” The post questioned whether police deliberately “murdered” 48-year-old Michael Reinoehl, the man who fatally shot Aaron “Jay” Danielson on Aug. 29, the night Trump supporters clashed with backers of Black Lives Matter...

Two viruses—one biological, the other ideological—have delivered a mortal blow to American higher education. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of colleges and universities will soon be wiped out by an unprecedented combination of financial exigency and revolutionary ideology. Professors at collapsing institutions are desperate to leave, and slews of senior faculty, including some very distinguished ones, have taken early retirement. Empty campuses will flood the market, amid extreme softening in the commercial real estate sector more generally. Eager buyers might consider the leafy 60-acre campus of MacMurray College, an Illinois liberal arts school that closed its doors in May after 174 years...

According to a 2019 Cato Institute study, 75 percent of immigrants who are American citizens are very proud to be American compared to only 69 percent of native-born Americans. Based on my own experience, I expect the discrepancy to be much greater if you compare the sentiments of all immigrants to those of American-born elites, especially the young.

In a piece published today in The Atlantic, John McWhorter writes that he is getting as many as 50 emails a week from academics who are living in fear that their careers could end at any moment. Their fear isn’t the coronavirus it’s the creeping leftist orthodoxy which treats any disagreement as cause to hound someone out of their job. McWhorter labels it a new form of Maoism on campus, complete with struggle sessions straight out of the Cultural Revolution: A statistics professor says:"I routinely discuss the fallacy of assuming that disparity implies discrimination, which is just a specific way...

America’s college students are returning to campus for the Fall semester, and many are finding themselves in an environment that no longer resembles an academic institution, but something closer to a correctional facility for young adults. It’s not just a handful of schools that are pursuing extreme restrictions and punitive measures in the name of “stopping the spread” of the coronavirus, but something that has become a nationwide norm. College campuses have transformed into some of the most restrictive environments in America. Yesterday, after hearing about these conditions, I sent out a post on social media asking for testimonials from...

'After adjustment for demographic and socioeconomic factors, the group most likely to attend selective colleges were students in male breadwinner-female homemaker families.'Teens whose mothers worked part-time or not outside the home were significantly more likely to be admitted to and attend a highly selective college or university than teens whose mothers worked full time, finds a study out today from the Institute for Family Studies. The study controlled for external factors including family income, parental education, the child’s sex, race, and family composition.“Students are more likely to be accepted by and attend highly competitive colleges when their mothers are at...