Free Republic

Things should be what they are, in higher education as elsewhere. Colleges advertising a liberal-arts curriculum should immerse their students in literature, history, and philosophy. STEM giants such as Georgia Tech should provide, to the extent possible, world-class labs. Community colleges should offer affordable credits to local residents. The University of Alabama should teach football. (I’m joking. Mostly.) This principle is particularly true for religious schools, which have a special obligation to be faithful to their stated purposes. Zaytuna College, a Muslim institution in California, should (and does) teach the Koran. Jewish Yeshiva University ought not to shill for “Palestine.”...

Average course grades tend to be lower in some college subjects than others. Engineering and the “hard” sciences, for example, retain reputations for being “harder” subjects than the humanities and social sciences, even though a naïve observer could just as well assume that students in the latter subjects are smarter. Do score-average comparisons really matter, though, in practical terms? After college, most graduates will be compared to one another from within their chosen fields. A “C+” engineering graduate will still be chosen ahead of a “C-” engineering graduate, just as an “A+” history grad will be chosen ahead of an...

In the sociological imagination, capitalism is now regarded as a sin standing next to sexism and racism. Routinely, sociologists call for their colleagues and students to oppose capitalism and use their classrooms as places where people can understand the repressive nature of “neoliberalism.” In fact, a former president of the American Sociological Association, Michael Burawoy, argued in his presidential address that one of the main purposes of sociology is to stand in opposition to capitalism. He warned the ASA that “unfettered capitalism fuels market tyrannies and untold inequities on a global scale.” Later in the same remarks, Professor Burawoy argued...

The House on Friday voted, 215-191, to overturn the Environmental Protection Agency’s vehicle emissions rule, with eight Democrats joining Republicans. Kamala Harris says she doesn’t support an electric vehicle mandate, but that’s what the Biden EPA rule effectively is. The EPA in March finalized greenhouse gas emissions requirements for auto makers through 2032. EPA’s models show that gas-powered cars will make up no more than 30% of sales by 2032. EVs made up a mere 7.6% of auto sales last year and less than 4% for General Motors and Ford. In eight years they will have to increase their EV...

Candidate Trump has disavowed the document (seriously or not). The former president may well lose the election. Nevertheless, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is a serious outline for governance in a conservative administration and deserves to be considered as such. Among the Project’s contents is a chapter on the United States Education Department (ED). The chapter, written by Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation with substantial input from seven other education-policy notables associated with the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, provides an agenda for conservative education reform that is one part bold, one part thorough, and one part cautious. It is...

Anyone who is keeping up with the latest happenings in higher education knows that this year has seen many institutions backpedaling on DEI programs. From Florida limiting public funding for DEI at its colleges, to the University of Wyoming closing its DEI office, to schools in Kansas, Idaho, and Oklahoma enforcing bans and limitations, the public’s patience with the Left’s “diversity” schemes seems finally to be running out. In May of this year, the UNC System joined these ranks when the Board of Governors repealed and replaced Section 300.8.5 of the policy manual, thus effectively banning DEI offices, employees, and...

[Editor’s note: Earlier this month, University of Austin provost Jacob Howland delivered remarks to the new institution’s inaugural faculty. The Martin Center is pleased to present the following (lightly edited) transcript of his talk.] Today, August 12, 2024, is the birthday of the University of Austin. This is the very first meeting of the assembled faculty and the first day of the first faculty orientation in the history of UATX. Today we begin to form our academic culture and to prepare for the arrival of our first class of undergraduates. “Don’t you know,” Socrates asks when he first takes up...

The $400 billion federal clean-energy lending program that has faced criticism for moving too slow is stepping up efforts to push cash out the door before the election. The Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office was turbocharged by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which gave it hundreds of billions of dollars to lend to clean-energy businesses. So far, it has only used a tiny fraction of that capacity. Biden administration officials fear that if Donald Trump is elected, the office would stop making loans. The program was largely dormant while Trump was president. “The election is everything,” said Adam Forgie, the...

A recent Gallup survey found that confidence in America’s colleges and universities has plummeted in the past decade, with only 36 percent of today’s adults expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in our higher-education system—down from 57 percent in 2015. Respondents offered several reasons for their low opinions, including the cost of obtaining a degree, the difficulty in finding a high-paying job even with a degree, and the perception of college campuses as indoctrination centers. I’d like to focus, in this essay, on the first of those reasons. The others are important, too, and may well...

Last fall, having drunk deeply of the Left’s cocktail of antisemitism, post-colonialism, and general nuisance-making, a small but virulent minority of American college students began “protesting” for “Palestine.” Inaugurated mere days after Hamas’s Oct. 7 sneak-attack against Israel, these agitations crescendoed with the establishment, in the spring of this year, of “Occupy Wall Street”-style encampments on university quads. Four months later, a new school year is upon us, and Israel’s war marches on. It is worth reflecting on what we learned from the ordeal, as well as what administrators and reformers ought to do if and when student activists resume...

One of the country's largest automakers announced this week that it was shifting its focus away from battery-powered electric vehicles (E.V.s) in favor of hybrids that still use some amount of gasoline. The decision to prioritize a transitional technology makes sense, even though federal regulators might not be happy. Ford Motor Co. CFO John Lawler told journalists Wednesday that the company would be shifting its focus away from all-electric vehicles. This included scrapping an electric three-row SUV previously planned for release in 2025. The decision marks a major shift in the company's priorities. Two years ago, the automaker restructured, cleaving...

In the good old days of American education, professors could speak their minds freely. Disagreements would often result, with others disputing the case that the speaker had made. The solid consensus, however, was that academic freedom must never be curtailed, since intellectual progress depends on the exchange of ideas, just as John Stuart Mill had argued in On Liberty. Perhaps the most disturbing trend in our colleges and universities today is the erosion of support for free speech. Professors who now take controversial positions have to worry about more than mere disagreement; they have to worry about punishment for having...

A 62-year-old Staten Island resident declared he wants to move after he was brutally attacked by a mob of teenagers during his daily evening stroll last month, according to reports. The man was walking near the intersection of Howard Avenue and Clove Road in the Sunnyside neighborhood just after 7 p.m. on July 15 when the group of delinquents began to harass him. Streetside surveillance cameras captured the moment when nine juveniles followed the man down the road, according to video obtained by silive.com. One of the delinquents rushed up behind the man who jumped into the middle of a...

By now, the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) industry’s capture of academia, business, and government is obvious to most Americans. From former Harvard president Claudine Gay’s televised equivocations before Congress to the unhinged, violent student and faculty occupations in support of Hamas at some of America’s most elite universities, many are no doubt wondering if DEI is producing something counter to its placid-sounding words. That this shameful behavior is occurring at civilian institutions of higher learning is probably no surprise to most observers. Unfortunately, DEI has metastasized beyond the confines of the civilian world and found a willing host in...

Perhaps the most exciting NCAA men’s basketball championship game ever played was also one of the biggest upsets. The 1983 North Carolina State University Wolfpack, despite being heavy underdogs to the University of Houston, managed to sink a last-second basket to win 54-52 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The iconic nature of NC State’s victory has played well to audiences in the 41 years since, and the NCAA has used images of the game and its players in publicizing its highly popular tournament. That a heavy underdog NC State team made this year’s basketball Final Four only added to the 1983...

Getting tens of thousands of dollars in student debt canceled isn’t guaranteeing an immediately better financial life for Americans. So far, about 943,000 people have had their loans eliminated through the federal government’s Public Service Loan Forgiveness plan, with balances averaging $72,000 when they are cleared. Nearly two million more had their student debt erased through programs for disabled borrowers or under income-driven repayment plans. An additional 1.3 million borrowers with $20 billion in loans have been approved for discharge through a program aimed at students who were misled by their colleges about things like job prospects. Many more are...

In 2019, the four-year graduation rate of all University of California (UC) undergraduates was 72.9 percent, while that of black UC students lagged behind at 59.9 percent. This disparity was emblematic of broader imbalances in college preparedness: In 2019, 74 percent of Asian Americans, 53.8 percent of whites, 36.1 percent of Latinos, 25.9 percent of American Indians, and 23.7 percent of blacks in California were prepared for college or professional careers according to the state’s “college and career indicator” factors. This unfortunate deficit was a result of persistent achievement gaps at the K-12 level. A CalMatters analysis in 2020 revealed...

In a recent Boston Globe column, correspondent Kara Miller wrote that our colleges and universities now “embrac[e] the status quo,” preventing them from responding to new challenges. Her article draws heavily on a 2023 book by Brian Rosenberg, former president of Macalester College, entitled Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education. Both Miller and Rosenberg write of the difficulty of fostering meaningful change in our colleges and universities. Private businesses in the United States demonstrating such inflexibility would quickly endanger their viability and existence. In today’s world, the intransigence of our institutions of higher education...

Kamala Harris is going to make a major economic speech on Friday. A centerpiece will be plans to blame inflation on “price-gouging” in food, medicine, housing, and more, and to go after said price gougers with all the tools of the regulatory state. ... In 301 AD, the roman emperor Diocletian faced a large inflation. According to Mike Duncan’s history of Rome podcast which I’ve been listening to lately, that inflation, we now know, had a simple cause: The Empire didn’t have enough tax revenue to pay soldiers. Not paying soldiers was very bad for the longevity of emperors. So,...

Early in the pandemic, a local merchant I know in New York, an immigrant who owns a small stationary store, worked tirelessly to obtain the goods his customers all then believed were needed—masks, hand sanitizer, and so on. He paid a markup for these goods, not to mention the time it cost him to secure them, and naturally passed the higher prices on to his customers. But given the emergency, he faced a price limit on what he could sell the masks for, with steep fines if he didn't comply. He fought these mandates in court and nearly lost his...