Free Republic

BERLIN—The Biden administration is pressing European allies to back off plans to rebuke Iran for advances in its nuclear program as it seeks to keep tensions with Tehran from escalating before the autumn’s U.S. presidential election, according to diplomats involved in discussions. The U.S. is arguing against an effort by Britain and France to censure Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s member state board in early June, the diplomats said. The U.S. has pressed a number of other countries to abstain in a censure vote, saying that is what Washington will do, they said. U.S. officials deny lobbying against...

The conventional wisdom among “progressives” is that black Americans must be given preferences in college admissions, hiring, and government contracting because the nation is so suffused with racism that they cannot advance otherwise. There are many problems with that view, and in her book The Adversity of Diversity Carol Swain explores them. As a black woman who grew up in impoverished conditions in rural Virginia, Swain has a compelling case to make against the idea that preferences actually help blacks. Her success in life is a strong counter to the leftist racial agenda, and she argues that it makes matters...

Clearly, the most newsworthy story in American collegiate life recently has been the widespread eruption of pro-Palestinian protests over the war between Israel and Hamas. A central demand of pro-Palestinian demonstrators has been that colleges divest themselves of investments in Israel, which presumably means not only Israeli-owned companies but also American firms doing business there. This demand is inane on many levels, even if you accept (which I don’t) the premise that Israel’s determination to eliminate Hamas’s military capabilities is wrong. First of all, many large American companies (McDonald’s and Coca Cola come to mind) do business in Israel, but...

Much “news” today consists of quick, divisive headlines with little regard for complexity or subtlety. A prominent example is the rapid firestorm that surrounded the conservative governments of Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia last year when some faculty loudly expressed their dissatisfaction with right-leaning higher-ed reforms. Having consulted an American Association of University Professors (AAUP) survey on the subject, media everywhere ran with the notion that red-state faculty would soon be fleeing, with many outlets printing articles claiming a “brain-drain” would soon occur. The AAUP survey in question, conducted last fall, attempted to understand whether and why faculty members...

A university library I visited recently was giving away stickers that said, “You Belong Here.” Surely this affirming declaration does not mean that students can’t flunk out or get expelled, or that employees can’t ever get fired. I began to wonder what it means to belong at one’s college or university. The sticker’s message soon became newbiquitous: I’ve since noticed “belonging” referenced by corporate consultants, as well as high-school and university administrators who have added a “B” to DEI. Some education scholars have argued that student success depends on a sense of belonging. Educational leaders are trying to build belonging...

The Martin Center opposes the Biden administration’s new loan-forgiveness rules for two basic reasons: They are outside of the Department of Education’s authority, and they will have adverse consequences. Economists often refer to special-interest legislation—bills passed to favor some politically influential group with benefits extracted from society in general. The nation’s Founders were well aware of that prospect and sought to prevent it in their writing of the Constitution. In Federalist 10, James Madison wrote about the evils that arise when “factions” can use governmental power to enrich themselves at the expense of others. The Constitution’s limitations on and division...

Back when there were still two Germanys, one a parliamentary democracy aligned with the West and one a Soviet satellite surveillance state, I had trouble remembering which was the Federal Republic and which the Democratic Republic—until I realized that the one calling itself democratic wasn’t. Even today, North Korea’s official name is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. The least democratic regimes in the world pretend to be the most democratic. Then as now, Marxists and those who have learned from them often justify abuse of language by redefining the key term. Words come to mean their opposite. To the...

Teachers’ grading practices have changed and students’ grades have drifted up in recent years, a pandemic-era legacy that is being met with mixed reaction from educators across the country. Dating back to 2020, when the pandemic upended American education overnight, many schools have adopted a more lenient approach to grading. Some eliminated zeros or removed penalties for late work. Many teachers report “giving grace” to struggling students. Others say they have felt pressure from administrators to limit failure rates. Higher grades have come even as students’ test scores and attendance rates have dropped. A study in Washington state found that...

Young people who smoked marijuana in the 1960s were seen as part of the counterculture. Now the cannabis culture is mainstream. A 2022 survey sponsored by the National Institutes of Health found that 28.8% of Americans age 19 to 30 had used marijuana in the preceding 30 days—more than three times as many as smoked cigarettes. Among those 35 to 50, 17.3% had used weed in the previous month, versus 12.2% for cigarettes. While marijuana use remains a federal crime, 24 states have legalized it and another 14 permit it for medical purposes. Last week media outlets reported that the...

At nearly all American colleges and universities, the “soft” disciplines have been overrun by “progressives” who insist that their beliefs alone must be taught, whether or not they’re pertinent to the subject. They are determined to turn students into ideological clones of themselves. Will this indoctrination help students succeed after graduation? That question never arises. My recent Martin Center article about a lawsuit brought by a professor in UNC’s School of Social Work prompts a look into the politicization of that field. Part of the background to that case was the School’s overwrought reaction to the death of George Floyd...

When postal manager José Belloso put his Paris apartment up for sale this year he was required to have an inspector grade the home for energy efficiency under strict rules designed to fight climate change. Belloso’s building was built in the early 1900s from millstone, a porous sedimentary rock that was popular among architects of France’s Belle Époque. His apartment flunked the inspection—and under a regulation that came into force this year, the property was barred from the rental market until costly renovations are made. Belloso was ultimately forced to knock 50,000 euros, equivalent to $54,000, off his asking price...

A wave of bills combating “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) efforts on college campuses have made their way into several state legislatures this year. Bills introduced in states such as Utah, West Virginia, Arizona, Kentucky, Iowa, and South Carolina all aim to quell an agenda of racial discrimination and political litmus testing antithetical to higher education’s purpose. But not all of the bills are created equal. While each is designed to curb DEI practices, some articulate the restrictions with greater clarity and specificity. Additionally, some have superior mechanisms of oversight and accountability. A few institutions include provisions upholding viewpoint diversity,...

More university professors are joining the demonstrations roiling college campuses, both to voice support for Gazans and to defend their students’ right to protest. Faculty, many of whom are in their 60s and 70s and came of age during the era of Vietnam War protests, are pushing back against university presidents, accusing the leaders of heavy-handed and inconsistent crackdowns on free speech, and warning against a wave of authoritarianism some say has been creeping onto campuses for years. Professors in leadership positions are guiding calls for votes of no-confidence, spearheading classroom walkouts and visiting encampments alongside students. Many are facing...

Mohamed Abdou is a pro-Hamas “anarchist interdisciplinary activist-scholar of Indigenous, Black, critical race, and Islamic studies, as well as gender, sexuality, abolition, and decolonization” at Columbia University. Now, I don’t mean to pick on Abdou; it’s just that he happens to teach virtually every trendy pseudo-intellectual identitarian twaddle concocted by modern man. Ultimately, we make Abdou’s job possible. Nearly every student loan taken in the United States is either given by the government or fully guaranteed by taxpayers. This sounds wonderful in the abstract, since it allows every student a chance at higher education. The reality, however, is that we...

American federalism is struggling. Federal rules are an overwhelming presence in every state government, and some states, due to their size or other leverage, can impose their own policies on much or all of the country. The problem has been made clearer by an under-the-radar plan to phase out diesel locomotives in California. If the federal government provides the state with a helping hand, it would bring nationwide repercussions for a vital, overlooked industry. Various industry and advocacy groups are lining up against California's costly measure, calling on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to deny a waiver needed to...

It’s hardly front-page news that trust in higher education is at an all-time low. But what is overlooked is just how dire the situation is for small, private colleges with meagre endowments. Last year, for example, 14 of these institutions closed, the victims of plummeting enrollment. In the New York metropolitan area, some institutions have been forced to sell off portions of their real estate to stay alive. Such colleges’ plight is partially attributable to the falling birthrate since the Great Recession, but the far more important cause is the disconnect between what these colleges offer and what students want....

Maryam Alwan figured the worst was over after New York City police in riot gear arrested her and other protesters on the Columbia University campus, loaded them onto buses and held them in custody for hours. But the next evening, the college junior received an email from the university. Alwan and other students were being suspended after their arrests at the “ Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” a tactic colleges across the country have deployed to calm growing campus protests against the Israel-Hamas war. The students’ plight has become a central part of protests, with students and a growing number of faculty...

Over the past few years, numerous plagiarism scandals have rocked the world of higher education. Prominent public intellectuals and university scholars have been caught improperly citing passages or even straight-up wholesale copying from other scholars’ works in their academic writing. The most high-profile of these scandals involved Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard University. She resigned her position under pressure due to her academic misconduct, which involved lifting quotes from other authors and not attributing other writers’ work. Many of Claudine Gay’s supporters were quick to minimize her actions. For example, D. Stephen Voss, associate professor of political science...

JASPER COUNTY, INDIANA - Dave Duttlinger's first thought when he saw a dense band of yellowish-brown dust smearing the sky above his Indiana farm was: I warned them this would happen. About 445 acres of his fields near Wheatfield, Indiana, are covered in solar panels and related machinery – land that in April 2019 Duttlinger leased to Dunns Bridge Solar LLC, for one of the largest solar developments in the Midwest. On that blustery spring afternoon in 2022, Duttlinger said, his phone rang with questions from frustrated neighbors: Why is dust from your farm inside my truck? Inside my house?...

Earlier this month, the U.K.’s National Health Service released the Cass Review, a report that urged Great Britain to pump the breaks on the experimental, sterilizing treatments marketed as “gender affirming care.” By contrast, earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Education issued its new Title IX regulations, which require public schools to facilitate a school-to-sterilization pipeline. According to the Biden administration, Title IX of the Civil Rights Act now requires schools to treat students who suffer, or claim to suffer, from gender dysphoria as though they were the opposite sex. As the Cass Review argues, this is essentially a...