Free Republic

A professor of international affairs and comparative literature at Penn State believes soon-to-be canceled late-night talk host Stephen Colbert will go down as one of the “most important satirists” in the history of the country. Writing in The Conversation, “scholar of political satire” Sophia McClennen (who over a decade ago opined that conservatives are just too dense to grasp Colbert’s “smart comedy”) puts Colbert in the same class as Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, and … Benjamin Franklin. This is because the “best satirists do more than entertain […] they influence public discourse and leave lasting marks on political life,” she...

David Blackman, a native of Plano, Texas, was thrilled to be starting law school at Penn State in the fall of 2025. A former 911 call operator and a veteran of the Texas State Guard, Blackman, 26, loved the university’s football team and its location in the Appalachian Mountains. “I’ve been a fan of Penn State since I was a teenager,” Blackman told the Washington Free Beacon. He arrived on campus in August 2025, a 50 percent merit scholarship in hand, excited for game nights in Beaver Stadium and a three-year reprieve from the Texas heat. Then he sat through...

For 45 years, research at American universities has been supervised by Institutional Review Boards (IRBs), which are committees that ensure scientific research is conducted ethically. At most universities, faculty, students, and staff must obtain approval from the IRB before engaging in any aspect of scientific research. To protect research participants, the IRB scrutinizes research protocols, stimuli, and even recruitment materials (such as emails and flyers). Researchers may not begin their research until they receive the IRB’s blessing. This, however, does not end the IRB’s supervision. Any change in procedures—even trivial changes to wording in a recruitment flyer or a clarification...

I was 22 when my grandmother forgot me. It took her 12 years to die from Alzheimer's. It started with little things, like where her glasses were or what day it was. Soon she didn't know who I was. For a while, she addressed me as her son, but then, as the disease ate away more of her mind, she forgot him too. Then I was the young, handsome version of her husband, until he too faded away. After a while, I was just a nice young man who came to visit her. The rest of the time, she was...

My recent article “A Roadmap to Take Back Higher Education” got a mixed reaction from tradition-minded professors. They liked the general framework of the scale of the problem facing the humanities, the suggestion to support the new autonomous schools being developed rather than individual professors, and the suggestion that philanthropists dedicate large-scale grants for these schools. They didn’t like my suggestion that philanthropists need to focus on supporting teaching, not research: If [philanthropists] fund professors with 2-2 teaching loads and a half-dozen worthy books to their credit, they will have wasted their money. Their dollars will be far more effective...

A California college professor who scuffled with pro-Israel demonstrators has pleaded guilty in the death of a Jewish man who was fatally injured during the clash. According to the New York Post, Loay Abdel Fattah Alnaji, 54, admitted on Tuesday to felony involuntary manslaughter and felony battery causing serious bodily injury in connection with the 2023 death of Paul Kessler, a 69-year-old pro-Israel demonstrator from Southern California. The incident unfolded during rival demonstrations in Thousand Oaks, where anti-Israel activists and Israel supporters gathered amid escalating tensions following the Oct 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks and the following war in Gaza....

Since the assassination of Lincoln, the press and academic culture have worked together to create a sense of moral purpose in killing Republican presidents.

The Lone Star State has done something rare, new, and needed: It has given its anti-DEI statutes teeth. As of January 9th, students, faculty, and university employees can now report violations of Senate Bill 17, a 2023 statute banning all Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) practices, to a complaint portal at the State Office of the Ombudsman’s website. A dropdown menu lists the six possible areas where Texas colleges and universities might sneak in DEI measures, ranging from the curriculum to hiring processes. Non-student citizens can use a separate portal to provide unofficial feedback and complaints. According to the complaint-process...

The defiant president of the University of Wisconsin system has resisted calls for his resignation, risking expulsion, but he’s been given no reason for his impending termination. Jay Rothman, the head of the public Badger State higher-education network since 2022, shot back at the board of regents last month for him to resign or retire from the post after a “unidentified majority” had lost confidence in his leadership. The former chairman and CEO for Milwaukee-based Foley & Lardner LLP rejected the board’s threat that they were “prepared to terminate my employment despite all that has been accomplished,” he said in...

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...