Free Republic

As higher education braces for the impact of coronavirus, the nation’s largest university system is poised to undermine the value of its own degrees by dropping admissions testing for political reasons. Last week University of California President Janet Napolitano released a plan to stop using the SAT and ACT in admissions. The tests would be optional for freshmen applying to enter in 2022 and excluded except in certain circumstances for 2023 and 2024. Ms. Napolitano hopes the university can create its own test for 2025, but even if that’s not possible she wants the tests scrapped entirely from then on....

A self-proclaimed "vegan runner" from Berkeley, California received backlash on Saturday after asking neighbors to close their windows when cooking meat because the smells were 'overpowering and offensive.' The rant was posted to @BestNextDoor -- an account that houses neighborhood drama -- which showed the runner had requested nearby residents only barbeque vegetables because it's "always hard for me this time of year when the weather starts warming up." "Several nights a week I'm out running around dinnertime and when people have their windows open I can smell what they are cooking," the request said. "I've noticed a sharp uptick...

... [A] task force of the faculty senate at the University of California, of all places, is resisting the movement to ban test scores in admissions. The 227-page report, completed in late January, recommends that the UC system keep standardized tests like the ACT and SAT as admissions requirements, and it demolishes the logic of the politically motivated anti-testing movement. The report dispatches the myth that standardized math and reading tests are useless for predicting college performance. Based on data from tens of thousands of students in the UC system, the report concludes that “test scores are currently better predictors...

UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall is no more, its name removed from the law school today (Thursday, Jan. 30), campus officials announced. The denaming — the outcome of a nearly three-year process launched after a Berkeley lecturer discovered the racist writings of John Henry Boalt, a 19th century Oakland attorney — is the first time a Berkeley facility’s name has been eliminated due to its namesake’s character or actions.

The University of California has been requiring prospective faculty members to affirm that they support diversity. This was Orwellian in its own right—reminiscent of the university system's 1950s loyalty oaths, which required faculty to attest that they were not members of the Communist Party. It now appears that at one campus, UC-Berkeley, the diversity initiative goes much further than previously understood. Whether a candidate has proposed a specific, concrete plan to advance diversity is now being used as a litmus test for some positions. No candidate who fails the test can even be considered for employment. Abigail Thompson, a UC-Davis...

We’ve recently been discussing the use of mandatory “diversity statements” for academic job candidates, and the University of California’s commitment to not just using them in all searches, but giving these statements precedence in the hiring process, so that if your statement doesn’t exceed a minimum numerical cutoff for promoting diversity, increasing it in your past, and promulgating it in the future should you be hired, your candidacy is terminated (see here and here). This practice of making candidates not only swear fealty to diversity, but also show a history of concerted efforts to increase it, has been controversial, deemed...

Climate experts are apparently backing President Donald Trump’s repeated arguments that California’s wildfires were a result of poor land management rather than climate change, E&E reported Thursday. Roughly 75% of damage stemming from California’s wildfires was a result of “the way we manage lands and develop our landscape,” Scott Stephens, a professor of fire science at the University of California, Berkeley, said Wednesday at a conference in Washington. Wildfires used to burn through 4.5 million acres a year in the 18th century, when indigenous communities populated California’s countryside, Stephens noted. “Fire was almost as important as rain to ecosystems,” he...

While public universities across the nation ban conservative speakers or permit students to violently protest them, one of the offending colleges has erected a Palestinian terrorist shrine. The University of California Berkeley, successfully sued for discriminating against speakers with conservative views, has allowed a student group at the taxpayer-funded institution to construct a display honoring distinguished female terrorists from Palestine. A New York-based newspaper dedicated to covering Jewish and Israel-related issues provides details and photos of the UC Berkley sanctuary honoring the jihadists involved in bombings and hijackings. This is the same university that wasted public funds to fight...

Seventy years ago the University of California introduced a loyalty oath, requiring employees to swear they were “not a member of the Communist Party.” After a contentious period in which 31 faculty were fired for refusing to sign, the requirement was reconsidered. An eventual consequence was the current Standing Order of the Regents 101.1(d): “No political test shall ever be considered in the appointment and promotion of any faculty member or employee.” This is a statement of principle. No one will be denied a position at the University of California based on political beliefs. No communist, no conservative, no progressive,...

No excerpt from Bloomberg allowed, story here.

BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA — Conservative commentator Ann Coulter was invited to the University of California-Berkeley campus Wednesday evening to deliver a speech sponsored by the Berkeley College Republicans. Several hundred angry protesters swarmed the venue in an attempt to shut down her appearance, forming a wall to prevent students from entering the auditorium, and hurling expletives at the police who were there to provide security.

Ann Coulter: Adios, America! On November 20, 2019, the Berkeley College Republicans will be hosting Ann Coulter, conservative syndicated columnist and author of twelve New York Times bestselling books. Ms. Coulter will be speaking about the current United States immigration system and the dangers of mass immigration. This topic has become increasingly taboo in recent years, but it was a central campaign issue for President Donald Trump. Coulter is the legal correspondent for Human Events and writes a popular syndicated column for Universal Press Syndicate. She is a frequent guest on many TV shows, including Good Morning Britain, HBO's...

Next time you stop by a cafe and order a coffee to-go, you may need to BYOC. Earlier this year, some Bay Area coffee shops got rid of disposable cups and now even more will require customers to either bring their own or “rent” a mug. Berkeley is pioneering the new trend, having passed a disposable cup fee, and shops will begin charging customers 25 cents for every disposable cup used beginning this January. Ahead of the change, the city has piloted a program that lets customers rent real mugs and be able to return them at 11 locations throughout...

Said they deserve 'uncomfortable' lives A UC Berkeley graduate student and instructor took to Twitter on Wednesday to vent about his repulsion for rural Americans and why they deserve to live "uncomfortable" lives. Jackson Kernion, a graduate student who has taught at least 11 philosophy courses at the university, posted that he "unironically embrace[s] the bashing of rural Americans." "They, as a group, are bad people who have made bad life decisions," he said in the since-deleted tweet. "Some, I assume, are good people. But this nostalgia for some imagined pastoral way of life is stupid and we should shame...

Berkeley College Republicans, or BCR, announced Tuesday that it will host Ann Coulter on the UC Berkeley campus, two and a half years after the right-wing author withdrew her controversial campus speech in 2017 amid safety concerns. Coulter, a self-identified “right-wing polemicist” who has previously garnered criticism for her controversial political views, is scheduled to discuss U.S. immigration policy during her Nov. 20 talk, titled “Adios, America!”

Berkeley Declares A ‘Climate Emergency,’ Calls For Population Control 2:51 PM 06/13/2018 Michael Bastasch | Contributor The California city that was home to 1960s radicals and known for excessively liberal politics declared a “climate emergency” on Tuesday evening, backing policies to “humanely stabilize” the human population. The Berkeley City Council unanimously voted to mobilize other California governments “to initiate a just local, state, national, and global climate emergency mobilization to restore a safe climate.” The council’s resolution, introduced by Council Member Cheryl Davila, warned that man-made global warming was “driving a global fresh water scarcity crisis and the sixth mass...

...the most interesting part of liberal writer George Packer’s widely noticed recent Atlantic essay, “When the Culture War Comes for the Kids.” The article details his dismay at the identity politics/standards-shredding orthodoxy that has overtaken New York’s public schools under leftist Mayor Bill de Blasio. (Is he still a candidate for president, by the way? I’ve lost track. . .) Packer here sounds like a late-60s liberal who is about to move to a New York suburb for better schools for his kids. Worth reading the whole thing if you have time, but the interesting part to me begins in...

The Berkeley, California, City Council is getting headlines for its decision last week to ban supposedly gendered language from its city code. “Manhole” and “manpower” are now out in favor of “maintenance hole” and “human effort.” Somewhere George Orwell is crying, but the city’s progressive lords were even more destructive when they also moved to ban natural gas from nearly all new buildings. The ordinance is due for a second reading this week and already has unanimous council support. Beginning Jan. 1, with few exceptions the city will deny developers permission to build a home, town house or small apartment...

From sanctuary cities to brutally high taxes, California is the undisputed center of gravity for today’s far-left. If you want to see how liberal policies would look on a national level, you don’t have to imagine it. You can just look at the thousands fleeing the once-great state. In the latest chapter of California’s descent into liberal madness, the city of Berkeley – a hotbed of radical liberalism – became the first city in America to ban natural gas from new homes and businesses, including restaurants that use natural gas for stoves. Environmentalists are reportedly hailing this development as a...

Berkeley city councilmember Rigel Robinson was invited on Thursday to appear on Tucker Carlson's show — and responded by calling the cable news host a "white supremacist goblin."