Free Republic

Fifth Circuit appellate judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, who was shouted down by Stanford Law School students as administrators looked on in silence, says the protesters behaved like "dogshit." Now, in an interview with the Washington Free Beacon, Duncan is calling on the school to discipline the students who disrupted his talk and to fire the school’s associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion, who stepped in during the event to chastise him and deliver what the judge described as a "bizarre therapy session from hell." Duncan’s remarks come after nearly a hundred students at Stanford Law School disrupted his remarks...

If you want to see the problem with American education, look at a chart illustrating the comparative growth in the number of students, teachers, and district administrators in our public schools in the period between 2000 and 2019. (See the chart below.) The number of district administrators grew by a whopping 87.6 percent during these years, far outstripping the growth in the number of students (7.6 percent) and teachers (8.7 percent).In illustrating the difference in these rates of growth, the chart also illustrates a fundamental change that has come over our nation as a whole during this period—a change in...

As Oscar Wilde tells us, “Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.” This is especially true of bureaucracies on college campuses. Once their seeds are planted, their growth often continues without check. Administrative offices have been growing on college campuses since the 1980s, undoubtedly contributing to the increasing cost of a degree. Besides being expensive, administrative growth shifts resources away from education towards administrative programming. This threatens to undermine higher education’s central mission of teaching and research. There has been particularly rapid growth over the past two decades in the area focused on the promotion of diversity, equity,...

“You have to go to college” was an article of faith when we were growing up in poor families. Now we wonder if our ticket out of poverty still has the same value. Far too many of this generation are leaving college with substantial debt and few meaningful job opportunities. Put a little differently, what is the value of a bachelor’s degree in women’s studies or sociology or any other fields that are not science, technology, engineering, mathematics, or business? Ask some of the young people working at your local coffee shop or favorite restaurant. They will probably tell you,...

It may not be the biggest state, nor the one with the most students, but Illinois leads the nation in school district spending on administrators. Even amid a looming statewide financial crisis, the state’s 852 districts spent more than $1 billion in fiscal year 2016, the most in the nation ... Illinois also spends twice as much per pupil on school administration as the national average — $544 in Illinois to $226 nationwide. Measured per pupil, that is the third highest rate in the country, nearly double New York at $349 and nearly five times as much as California, where...

AFGE calls recent actions by the VA ‘the latest overreach in their quest to bust unions’ and remove rights at workWASHINGTON – The country’s largest federal employee union filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to block recent union-busting actions by the administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs.  The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents more than 250,000 workers at the VA, filed the lawsuit along with the National Federation of Federal Employees and the National Association of Government Employees in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia late Wednesday, hours before the orders were to be...

The ideological bent of those overseeing collegiate life is having the biggest impact on campus culture. (Skip) ...participating in extracurricular organizations — the ever growing ranks of administrators have the biggest influence on students and campus life across the country. Today, many colleges and universities have moved to a model in which teaching and learning is seen as a 24/7 endeavor. Engagement with students is occurring as much — if not more — in residence halls and student centers as it is in classrooms. Schools have increased their hiring in areas such as residential life and student centers, offices of...

The most effective way to temper the tantrums of Antifa is to protest them at their homes and at the office The most effective way to drive Antifa activists into headlong panic would be to expose them for who they are in real life. Counter protesters like those brutally attacked in Berkeley, Calif. over the weekend should stop providing themselves as fodder at protests where police continue to Stand-Down. They should instead search for and find the identities of Antifa leaders and expose them at their homes and work fronts. Ripping off the masks of Antifa activists will send them...

GRESHAM, Ore. – Dexter McCarty Middle School student Alan Holmes understands that his freedom is intricately tied to those who fought and died defending the United States of America. His older brother joined the U.S. Marines when he was 19 years old and served a tour in Iraq, Fox 12 reports. But school officials apparently don’t share Holmes understanding or patriotic spirit, and recently forced the eighth-grader to change his shirt that depicted a traditional soldier memorial or face in-school suspension. Holmes choose the latter. “The principal, I asked him, is this considered a suspension? He said yes I’ll see...

When Hillary Clinton, President Obama and other progressives rail against “the fortunate,” “the haves,” and “the lucky,” don’t expect them to rail against public college presidents, no matter how much they richly, every pun intended, deserve it. Here, courtesy of the Chronicle of Higher Education, are some of the fortunate few: • Rodney A. Erickson, president of Penn State at University Park, who took home $1,494,603 in 2014; • R. Bowen Loftin, then of Texas A & M, who received $1,128,957 that same year; • Joseph A. Alutto, then of Ohio State, who got $996,169 in 2014; • Elson S....

Denver Public Schools had four times the number of administrators as any other large metro area districts last year, and salaries and benefits for those staffers are $22 million more than the next largest metro district, Colorado Department of Education figures show. The teachers’ union president reviewed the data Watchdog.org obtained and said the nearly $68 million paid to DPS administrators would be better spent on students. “We need to be talking about keeping dollars closer to classroom when it comes to public education,” said Henry Roman, president of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association. “Should they be putting the money...

Plague Journal (Children of the Last Days)Paperback– March 1, 2003 by Michael D. O'Brien In this book, the author spins “a story" about a newspaper editor who "is uncooperative" with the educational authorities, is quickly declared a child abuser, becomes a fugitive, witnesses the extra-judicial killing of a young Vietnamese man who assists him, his life generally falling apart. Either the common patterns of provocation and over-reaction seen in the news are a bizarre coincidence, or a protocol for dealing with uncooperative parents has been developed and distributed widely in training institutes for educational administrators. What is needed is...

A 20-year-old Dartmouth student says she may have to give up her Ivy League dream and drop out of school because the prestigious college won't allow her to carry a gun—to protect herself against a predator. Taylor Woolrich, a junior, says Dartmouth administrators told her they won’t let her carry a gun on campus, even though she lives in fear of a man who has been stalking her since she was a high school student in San Diego. “It’s absolutely unfair,” Woolrich said about her attempts to have the school make an exception to its weapons ban. “It’s one of...

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, writer Don Troop highlighted the current controversy at the University of Michigan concerning how much the university pays its administrators. At Ann Arbor in 2005, they paid less than $13 million on “additional pay” (i.e. bonuses) to administrators for meeting performance goals or taking on additional duties not in their job descriptions. By 2013, Michigan paid more than $46 million for these kinds of bonuses. michigan football A dozen professors at the university have published their research, including an open letter, on the website michiganexposed.info, where they call on the Michigan board and incoming...

Central Connecticut State University is in full lock down this afternoon and administrators are repeatedly urging students to stay indoors after an armed man was spotted on campus. Preliminary reports indicate that officers have contained the man in James Hall, a dorm at the university in New Britain, Connecticut. Shortly after the lockdown began, the Central Connecticut State website was taken down and replaced with a short, urgent warning: ´Campus Emergency. Remain Inside buildings. Stay in place! Stay away from Windows. Police are on the Scene.´

At the University of Minnesota, the number of employees with “human resources” or “personnel” in their job titles has grown from 180 to 272 since the 2004-05 academic year. Since 2006, the university has spent $10 million on consultants for a vast new housing development that is decades from completion. It employs 139 people for marketing, promotions and communications. Some 81 administrators make $200,000 per year or more. In the past decade, Minnesota’s administrative payroll has gone up three times as fast as the teaching payroll, and twice as fast as student enrollment. Oh, and tuition more than doubled in...

Disability advocates are on the offensive after a national group representing school administrators issued a report supporting the use of restraint and seclusion in schools.

... Never before have so many of the unemployed owed their job loss, not indirectly at all, but quite obviously directly, to the intentional, conscious directives of their president and his direct appointees, the czars and cabinet secretaries who have launched a direct frontal assault on industry after industry ever since their appointments. Consider: Car Dealers: In 2009, though everyone knew that the problems dooming Chrysler and General Motors were their enormous property and property tax obligations caused by too big, too old, factories, and their utterly unsupportable labor and pension costs, Barack Obama ordered the closure of over 3000...

House Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson (Conn.) is expected this week to introduce legislation that would create a Joint Select Committee on Job Creation, patterned after the supercommittee tasked with finding $1.5 trillion in spending cuts. In an Aug. 8 “Dear Colleague” letter, Larson said the jobs supercommittee would work under the “exact same terms” as the spending supercommittee. The latter panel has 12 members, six from the House and six from the Senate, and must reach spending-cut recommendations by Nov. 23.

<p>"The problem is at the consumer level, confidence is low and that is because, as you showed, showed we had underemployment with one out of every six Americans. The worst element of that is that among the unemployed, against the American history, more than approaching half, have [been] unemployed for over six months.</p>