Free Republic

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...

So much hangs in the balance with this upcoming election. One crucial area of concern is the threat to recent alternate institution–building by conservatives, traditionalists, and right-libertarians. Clearly, many longstanding institutions, such as universities, no longer serve our needs; rather, they often undermine our visions of the good life, liberty, and the well ordered state. If leftists win in November, they will assuredly not just prevent further institution-building on the right, but also dismantle whatever conservatives have already built. If Trump wins, we get four more years to create, build, and prepare against whatever further erosion of our rights to...

If people are only racist or 'antiracist,' your ideology is easy to enforce after a certain point of proliferation because people believe it's bad for business to be on the side of alleged racism. “If you voted for Donald Trump, you are a racist. You have no wiggle room,” tweeted Jemele Hill on July 19. Hill is a writer at The Atlantic and the daughter of a Trump voter. While her contention might puzzle the average American, it would raise few eyebrows on college campuses, where racism and bigotry have been defined differently for years.Those expanded definitions, so broad they...

The parents don't even know what's going on because it's all at school,' says a fourth grade teacher in an interview. 'The parents question very little and they just assume the teacher knows what they're doing.' A world without textbooks or homework and where getting the wrong answer is celebrated may sound like an elementary student’s dream, but if such a fantasy becomes a reality, it would damage a generation of young minds. That is, however, exactly what is happening in many public elementary schools.Recently, I spoke with a fourth-grade teacher from the midwest, who shared her experience witnessing the...

George Washington University is urging students to read Conservatism and Racism, and Why in America They Are the Same in an effort to educate them about the dangers of stereotypes and discrimination. The "Solidarity Resource Syllabus" released by the Washington, D.C.-based school's Office of Diversity provides students with a reading list that focuses on racism in the United States. Among the 126 books that the university says "actively and effectively … [combat] injustice" is San Francisco State University professor Robert Smith's 2010 book that equates conservative beliefs with bigotry. That label applies to all who subscribe to right-leaning beliefs, including...

The Michigan State University administration pressured professor Stephen Hsu to resign from his position as vice president of research and innovation because he touted research that found police are not more likely to shoot black Americans. The study found: "The race of a police officer did not predict the race of the citizen shot. In other words, black officers were just as likely to shoot black citizens as white officers were." For political reasons, the authors of the study sought its retraction. The U.S. Department of Education warned UCLA that it may impose fines for improperly and abusively targeting white...

How colleges have become "islands of repression in a sea of freedom." As if further evidence were needed to confirm that race—and talking about race—is still the third rail of social debate, one only has to look at the paroxysms of moral indignation arising from the death in Minneapolis last month of George Floyd under the knee of a brutal police officer. In the wake of country-wide protests and demonstrations by Black Lives Matter and the group’s supporters, the discussion has, of course, come to campuses, those “islands of repression in a sea of freedom” where coddled, virtue-signaling students regularly...

John Wayne Exhibition Removed, at USC

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump Too many Universities and School Systems are about Radical Left Indoctrination, not Education. Therefore, I am telling the Treasury Department to re-examine their Tax-Exempt Status... ... and/or Funding, which will be taken away if this Propaganda or Act Against Public Policy continues. Our children must be Educated, not Indoctrinated! 11:49 AM · Jul 10, 2020

Our universities have nurtured and foisted on America and Canada an extreme radicalism that vilifies American and Canadian history, society, and culture. This radicalism stems in the first instance from identity grievance studies programs, such as feminist and gender studies, gay and queer studies, black studies, Hispanic and Chicano studies, indigenous studies, and ethnic studies, which have adopted marxist theories popular in sociology and political science.This far left ideology has diffused throughout the soft subjects of the social sciences, humanities, education, social work, and law. Far left radicalism has been adopted with enthusiasm by administrators and imposed on any laggard...