Free Republic

Shellyne Rodriguez, the machete-wielding former Hunter College professor, has now been fired by the Cooper Union college. The school previously stood with Rodriguez after she trashed a student display and held a machete to the neck of a journalist. It appears that Rodriguez’s anti-Israel comments were finally too much for Cooper Union. What is interesting is what it takes at both Hunter College and The Cooper Union to be fired. We previously discussed a videotape of Rodríguez trashing a pro-life student display in New York. Before attacking the table, she told the students, “You’re not educating s–t […] This is...

This time, a medical school neuroscientist is on the hot seat for research misconduct at Harvard.Claudine Gay could at least argue that her academic misconduct wasn’t exactly brain surgery, but now that two of the academic scandals are at Harvard Medical School and one includes a neuroscientist, you get the idea.This is not just a story about DEI; it’s a story about an academy-wide collapse in standards.— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) February 1, 2024It is brain surgery in this case, and it’s pretty hard for Harvard to deny that there is a fundamental problem regarding academic integrity at its institution now...

Harvard University’s chief diversity and inclusion officer has been hit with dozens of plagiarism allegations tied to her academic work — including one claim she failed to properly cite her own husband’s study. The Ivy League school was handed an anonymous complaint on Monday listing at least 40 examples of alleged plagiarism by Sherri Ann Charleston dating back to 2009 — a decade before she joined Harvard, the Washington Free Beacon reported. The allegations, which include failing to properly cite other scholars’ work and not referencing them in footnotes, come just weeks after Harvard University president Claudine Gay resigned from...

It's not just Claudine Gay. Harvard University's chief diversity and inclusion officer, Sherri Ann Charleston, appears to have plagiarized extensively in her academic work, lifting large portions of text without quotation marks and even taking credit for a study done by another scholar—her own husband—according to a complaint filed with the university on Monday and a Washington Free Beacon analysis. The complaint makes 40 allegations of plagiarism that span the entirety of Charleston's thin publication record. In her 2009 dissertation, submitted to the University of Michigan, Charleston quotes or paraphrases nearly a dozen scholars without proper attribution, the complaint alleges....

The New York–based artist and musician Laurie Anderson said she would not take up a visiting professor position at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, Germany, amid scrutiny over her views on Palestine. Earlier this month, the school announced that Anderson, who has produced such works as the hit 1981 song “O Superman,” had been appointed its Pina Bausch Professor, a position named after a famed dancer. But since that announcement, the school appears to have reneged on its decision, citing the fact that Anderson signed a 2021 open letter that urges support for Palestine. The ARTnews Accord:...

Roger Kimball’s New Criterion editorial on “DEI’s dangerous lies” is titled “Gay science,” in honor of sacked Harvard president Claudine Gay. Roger’s editorial lacks only some accompanying reference to Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, which I actually read under the tutelage of my political philosophy teacher last year.It was in The Gay Science that Nietzsche announced “God is dead.” I thought Roger’s editorial might have announced that Harvard is dead. In each case, the assertion is a slight exaggeration, but it makes a point.The eminent historian Dominic Green makes the Harvard point in the Wall Street Journal column “No Task Force...

Harvard has willfully and intentionally destroyed the “Harvard brand.” In doing so, Harvard has hurt its present and future. It has also damaged the opportunities for its hundreds of thousands of living graduates who bought into Harvard being a boon to their professional careers. The quality of Harvard today, and not when they graduated, determines the added value of being a Harvard graduate.There is a story from the Talmud about people getting on a boat. One can imagine what a boat in their day was like, nothing like our monstrous seafaring ships. As the crew was preparing to shove off,...

DALLAS — The new year welcomed 30 new state laws in Texas. One of them could dramatically impact higher education. The Lone Star State will no longer allow its publicly funded colleges and universities to have Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion - or DEI - offices. "Diversity" refers to the representation of people from a variety of backgrounds – particularly referring to people of different races, genders, sexual orientations, disabilities, religions and more at all levels in an organization, including the leadership level. "Equity" focuses on fairness and justice, mainly referring to compensation and whether people are being paid or treated...

It seemed like a good idea. College campuses across the country were erupting in Jew-hating outbursts, and parents were rightly worried about their Jewish college-aged kids caught up in the frenzy of hate. On Facebook, a group called Mothers Against College Antisemitism (M.A.C.A.) was founded and grew quickly to over 50,000 members. They shared information, emailed, called, and signed petitions. They stood united against the oldest hatred rearing its head again. But just as fast, fissures formed. The cudgel of DEI – that is, “diversity, equity, and inclusion” policies that had been used against Jewish students – was the subject...

Collective bargaining through a labor union is supposed to “level the playing field” for workers, enabling them to obtain better terms than if they bargained on their own. That is the justification for federal and state laws that give elected unions exclusive representation power, meaning that all of the workers must accept the union as their representative. Individuality is out. That arrangement is fine with many, but what if some workers are unhappy with “their” union? What if they don’t think the union operates in their interest? What if it makes public statements they disagree with? The unions reply, “Too...

BOSTON (AP) — Harvard University has shed fresh light on the ongoing investigation into plagiarism accusations against former president Claudine Gay, including that an independent body recommended a broader review after substantiating some of the complaints. In a letter Friday to a congressional committee, Harvard said it learned of the plagiarism allegations against its first Black female president on Oct. 24 from a New York Post reporter. The school reached out to several authors whom Gay is accused of plagiarizing and none objected to her language, it said. Harvard then appointed the independent body, which focused on two of Gay’s...

Grade inflation is rampant and has been so for many years. Back in 2011, an in-depth study by three Ivy League economists looked at how the quality of individual teachers affects their students over the long term. The paper, by Raj Chetty and John N. Friedman of Harvard and Jonah E. Rockoff of Columbia, tracked 2.5 million students over 20 years, and, using a value added approach, found that teachers who help students raise their standardized test scores have a lasting positive effect on those students’ lives beyond academics, including lower teenage-pregnancy rates, greater college matriculation, and higher adult earnings....

SAN FRANCISCO - Thousands of college professors and other faculty members are set to start a week-long strike Monday. It's part of a system-wide strike across all California State Universities.

A Yale Law School dean, known for her 'Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion' fervor and a tumultuous history of free-speech and anti-Semitism controversies may be the university's next president. Heather Gerken, the current dean of Yale Law School, is now in the running to succeed Peter Salovey, five insiders told the Free Beacon. Gerken is already causing a stir in the high-stakes race with her track record that includes shaming a conservative student via email, letting 'woke' students cancel a speaker and hiring a trainer who claimed anti-Semitic hate crimes are exaggerated.

The College Fix has done a series of articles recently estimating the number of administrators at various colleges compared to the number of students. The numbers are pretty surprising.The University of Virginia employs one full-time administrator for every three undergraduates at the school, according to an analysis conducted by The College Fix…During the 2013-14 school year, there were 291 full-time administrators and support staff employees per 1,000 undergrads, and in 2021-22, the most recent year for which data are available, there were 318 full-time administrators and support staff employees per 1,000 undergrads.Meanwhile, the number of full-time educators per 1,000 undergraduates...

Harvard University has created a task force to fight antisemitism on campus — and the effort is already embroiled in controversy. The co-chair of the school’s newly appointed Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism once declared “veins of hatred run through Jewish civilization,” according to his 2023 book. “Israel’s dispossession of Palestinians from their land and oppression of those who remain have made it one of the most disliked countries on the planet,” Jewish history professor Derek Penslar claimed in his tome, “Zionism: An Emotional State,” in which he wrote, “Jewish culture was steeped in fantasies (and occasionally, acts) of...

Identity politics has corrupted academic disciplines and produced bad, politically warped forms of knowledge, says Alka Sehgal Cuthbert in Spiked, and even the hard sciences are no longer immune. Here’s an excerpt. Witness the introduction of ‘Afrochemistry’, a new module in Rice University’s undergraduate chemistry degree. Students who choose this module will “apply chemical tools and analysis to understand black life in the U.S.” and “implement African-American sensibilities [eh? How do you “implement” a “sensibility”?] to analyse chemistry”, according to Rice’s website. “No prior knowledge of chemistry or African-American studies is required for engagement in this course,” it assures prospective...

Tallahassee, Fla., January 17, 2024 – Today, the State Board of Education implemented strict regulations to limit the use of public funds for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs, activities, and policies in the Florida College System (FCS). The rule adopted by the Board defined, for the first time, DEI and affirmatively prohibits FCS institutions from using state or federal funds to administer programs that categorize individuals based on race or sex for the purpose of differential or preferential treatment. The Board's decision will ensure that taxpayer funds can no longer be used to promote DEI on Florida’s 28 state...

Have you ever met a college admissions officer? Who does he or she remind you of? The answer is: “someone who works at the DMV.” Put nicely, they’re people who’ve done the best they could with limited options. Put cruelly, they’re midwits on a power trip. Perhaps a tad less cynical. A little skinnier. Glasses a bit higher end. But platonically speaking, college admissions officers and DMV workers emanate toward the same form: the ultimate low busybody. DMV workers afflict the immense class of drivers with their mediocrity. Admissions officers’ victims are a smaller set — people who go (or...

An obscure bureaucratic entity, buried deep within Texas A&M, is attempting to rewrite the rules for how governmental bodies make information available to the public. If successful, it could have dire implications for citizen oversight. At issue is a series of requests by the American Accountability Foundation, a non-partisan watchdog group, that attempted to learn more about the role of so-called “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” initiatives at A&M’s medical school. Senate Bill 17, passed by the Texas Legislature last year, forbade these practices as of January 1 2024. During the December 11 meeting of the A&M “faculty senate,” Senior Associate...