Free Republic

Peter Berkowitz is one of those rare public intellectuals who doesn’t mind being on the “wrong” side of hot controversies—which is to say, he’s willing to clash with the “progressive” juggernaut. A former professor at Harvard and George Mason Law School, Berkowitz is currently a fellow at the Hoover Institution and a columnist for RealClearPolitics. His new book, Reclaiming Liberal Education in America, is a collection of his essays on higher education written between 2014 and 2025. They give the reader a comprehensive view of the problems that beset our colleges and universities. He writes, “The nation’s elite institutions of...

Following the Hamas assault on Israel in October 2023, many American campuses erupted in turmoil—not due to the brutality of the attack, but in support of the Palestinian cause. In the minds of many American students, professors, and administrators, the Israelis are the aggressors and “had it coming.” Anyone who expressed support for Israel was apt to be harassed or even assaulted by pro-Hamas zealots. Jewish students were singled out for vituperation and taunts like “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free!” indicating a desire to see Israel wiped off the map. Encampments sprang up as activists...

Recently, Luke Burgis, Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Catholic University of America, posed a provocative question: “What is the strongest argument from the political Right AGAINST Great Books programs?” In my view, the Great Books is a fine program for lifelong learning. 15,000 people a year participate in discussion groups affiliated with the Great Books Foundation. By contrast, a parallel lifelong learning project—the daily two-pages-a-day study program of the Babylonian Talmud known as Daf Yomi—drew over 90,000 people (almost all of them men) to the official completion celebration of its seven-year cycle at MetLife Stadium, with a further 7,000 at the major...

Other than the Founding era, the Progressive era is the most interesting era of U.S. history, its a shame that most people scoff at looking directly at it though. We have so much to learn from this era and all that it did to us and keeps doing to us to this day. In modern times we are sold on ideas of things like a "living wage", not realizing that the idea is over 100 years old and rooted directly smack in the middle of progressivism. In 1915, Father John Ryan wrote the book "A Living Wage", after being deeply...

On Wednesday night, MS NOW’s The Last Word host Lawrence O’Donnell continued the network's promotion of the novel The Breakup, a futuristic book set 20 years into the future after a civil war and “national divorce.” O’Donnell called the book his “favorite new book” as he told fellow MS NOW host Jen Psaki details of the novel, including former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s role of “negotiating the disunion.” At the start of the show, amid the handoff with Psaki’s The Briefing, O’Donnell exclaimed, “Hey, Jen. We have some predictions for you in this book, my favorite new book. It is...

Million Dollar Weekend (1948) is a film-noir crime drama starring Gene Raymond as Nicholas Lawrence, a stockbroker who embezzles a million dollars and attempts to escape to Shanghai. Key plot developments so far (0:00 - 11:21): The Embezzlement: Nicholas plans to flee town with the embezzled money after finalizing his arrangements at the airport (2:44 - 4:41). The Encounter: While boarding his flight to Honolulu, Nicholas unexpectedly crosses paths with Cynthia Strong (Osa Massen) and a man named Alan Marker (Francis Lederer) (8:55 - 9:36). The Blackmail: It is revealed that Marker is blackmailing Cynthia, claiming he witnessed her murdering...

Researchers at Aalto University, together with international partners, have developed the most accurate model yet of how humans read. The new model uses reinforcement learning, a type of AI used in robotics, to explain -- and recreate -- the choices readers make as they move through text... Earlier models learned from large data sets pairing text snippets with eye-tracking data, then mimicked human behavior, but they lacked true understanding of the content and didn't generalize well across languages or contexts, Oulasvirta explains. In contrast, the new model follows the psychological mechanisms readers use to direct attention, revealing how understanding is...

For over a century, post-modern critics have insisted that literature must be liberated from the stifling realm of moralism in order to become truly authentic in its artistic approach. The various platitudes in this vein have been prolific: “Morality ruins creativity,” “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” or the proposition of “art for art’s sake,” which all seem less as genuine insights into the faculty of human creativity and more as rhetorical shields against difficult questions relating to the nature of truth. In our own contemporary age, the argument has at least partially mutated, but it has never...

William Franklyn-Miller, Kelsey Grammer, and director Jon Erwin join Fandango correspondent Nikki Novak to discuss their upcoming historical war drama, 'Young Washington'. William Franklyn-Miller shares his experience embodying the patriot George Washington before he became the Father of a Nation, Kelsey Grammer details why his character Lord Fairfax would invest this young man with such responsibility, and director Jon Erwin explains why the story of the Revolutionary War is so enthralling for himself and audiences. 'Young Washington' hits theaters July 3! "You See the Ambition" William Franklyn-Miller & Kelsey Grammer on 'Young Washington' | 17:42 Fandango (Fandango's Big Ticket) |...

Suppose you have a friend who knows little about American higher education but is eager to learn about it. You might want to recommend to him a book that introduces the subject with readily understood essays covering the range of problems we face. A good choice would be Higher Education in America: It’s Worse Than You Think. The book consists of nineteen essays by people who have been on the front lines in the battle to rescue our colleges and universities from the menaces of mediocrity and politicization. So, what has gone wrong with American higher education? One theme that...

I have been searching for quotes on how ineffective full auto fire is in the hands of untrained people. Grok4.1 gives these, but the links do not work or do not show the actual quotes. They may be correct but only in books or videos. If anyone can find an actual link which shows any of the following quotes, I would appreciate it. 1. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman (U.S. Army Ranger, author of On Combat and On Killing) “Full automatic fire is almost useless in the hands of anyone who is not well trained. The tendency is to spray and...

WASHINGTON—It’s no secret that America’s college campuses are in crisis. From violent protests and woke groupthink paralyzing free speech and rigorous debate to sky-high tuition rates, the average student faces too many challenges in pursuing higher education. To help identify why higher education isn’t working well and how to fix it, Encounter Books today published “Higher Education in America: It’s Worse Than You Think,” edited by Heritage President Dr. Kevin Roberts and featuring an introduction and conclusion by Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Christopher F. Rufo. The book draws on insight from college presidents, professors, researchers, and education policy experts to...

Diversity, equity, and inclusion have gotten a lot of attention over the past decade. In these pages, we’ve often lamented that universities’ focus on superficial measures of diversity undermines merit and overlooks viewpoint diversity. A new book by Duke professor Adrian Bejan, Diversity Through Freedom, emphasizes a different kind of diversity: the organic, inevitable, and beneficial diversity found in nature. He calls it “a phenomenon that has a mind of its own” that can’t be “shoehorned into a few distinct (antagonistic) classes.” The Martin Center sat down with Professor Bejan to discuss his book and its implications for higher education....

Why do public university officials do the things they do? What drives their decisions to allocate scarce resources in some ways and not others? In his recent book The University Unfettered, Ian F. McNeely offers a lot of insight into those questions. McNeely is a former (and current) faculty member and administrator, and he’s writing about his experiences at a state flagship university. He doesn’t say which one, although it’s easy to figure it out if you want to. But which state flagship doesn’t really matter, as there’s nothing unique about “The University” and those who run it. It is...

Harvey Mansfield is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Government at Harvard University. Still teaching at the age of 94, he has just published a collection of essays, Where Harvard Went Wrong: Fifty Years of Commentary that Fell on Deaf Ears. The book is a collection of his articles, speeches, and book reviews going as far back as 1975. He expounds on themes familiar to Martin Center readers, including grade inflation, the decline of merit and standards, the erosion of the curriculum, and the harms done by the obsession with affirmative action. Mansfield is proud to be conservative, one...

Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints (1973) is easily one of the most suppressed books of the 20th century. That’s because it’s a dystopian novel about mass third-world migration, a topic still considered taboo to many. While The Handmaid’s Tale and Nineteen Eighty-Four have become regular headliners of “banned book” campaigns and subjects of novel studies in school curriculums, English translations of Raspail’s magnum opus have been so hard to find that used hard copies sold for prices ranging into the hundreds. Until just last year, that is. In 2025, the indie heterodox translator-publisher Vauban Books came out with...

With two-thirds of the printed copies of his book--"Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery"--remaining unsold, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif) claims he bought these copies "to ensure it would be a best-seller. My plan is to give autographed copies to everyone who donates to my presidential campaign. I think my sly and speedy action here demonstrates my ingenuity as leader and gives me an early lead for the 2028 Democratic nomination for president." "Another factor that will put me ahead of my Democrat rivals is that I was born a poor black child with a low IQ and...

... 1973, Jean Raspail, who died aged 94 in 2020, published his dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints, for which he is now mostly remembered (certainly outside of France,... ). The Camp of the Saints is a book that refuses to lie down, so to speak, despite attempts to render it invisible or make it go away. The plot is simple. A huge armada of rotting hulks, bearing a million impoverished and half-starved Bengalis desperate to reach Europe, which they suppose to be a land flowing with milk and honey, sets out from Calcutta and eventually reaches the south...

In C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces, Queen Orual writes the story of her life to indict the gods. “Being, for all these reasons, free from fear, I will write in this book what no one who has happiness would dare to write. I accuse the gods, especially the god who lives on the Grey Mountain.” The gods have been unjust, Orual believes; the story of her life is her complaint. In Part Two of the novel, Orual presents her case before the gods and receives their just judgement. As she does so, all of her self-righteousness falls away; the...

As a professor of the classical liberal arts, I began reading Bob Pepperman Taylor’s new book, Liberal Education and Democracy, with interest. Taylor, who teaches law and politics at the University of Vermont, surveys a wide range of thought leaders, describing their foundational ideas in detail. One notable example is Taylor’s paraphrasing of Michael Oakeshott: “Liberal learning is learning to understand and perhaps even participate in a conversation that transcends a particular moment, a conversation that reflects on the human condition from a wide variety of times, places, and perspectives.” That’s well said. Taylor’s thesis begins with liberal-arts authors and...