Free Republic

The campus chief of police at Mount Holyoke College has been placed on leave after students confronted him about supporting President Trump. Students dug up tweets from Chief Daniel Hect which showed he thinks favorably of Trump, likes the National Rifle Association, and supports a Mexican border wall. Last month, members of the Mount Holyoke administration held a forum for students to engage with the newly hired chief of campus police. The Mount Holyoke News reports that students questioned Hect about his personal views amid “tension and tears.”

Two weeks before the Jussie Smollett case was revealed to be a hoax, The College Fix pretty much called it out as such. How did we know? Because we’ve seen it before. A lot. For the past seven years, we’ve chronicled dozens of similar examples nationwide on college campuses or perpetrated by students. In sum, more than 50 and counting. For starters, The College Fix tracked 9 campus hate-crime hoaxes between 2012 and 2014, as well as one that took place in 2011. Examples included two black students at Montclair State University who reported finding hateful and threatening graffiti aimed...

A Michigan State University department debuted Halloween posters titled, “A Culture is not a Costume" and included a guide called, “Is Your Halloween Costume Racist?” MSU’s Residence Hospitality and Services department featured the signs, which included a heavily detailed “Cultural Appropriation vs Appreciation” section, as spotted by Campus Reform. The boards are found throughout many of the university’s dorms. One poster brands the addition of a sombrero to a taco costume as “racist.” The poster contains a flowchart, which asks students whether their costumes use blackface, swastikas, or have “literally a name of a minority (that you are not) in...

This turned out to be a particularly oddly timed story to come across after the Synagogue shooting this morning. Someone should probably have a word with the parents and teachers in the Pittsburgh Public School system. At a recent meeting of the school board, a measure was brought up for a vote which sounds as if it should be a no-brainer except for the fact that it hadn’t been done long ago. Should the police who patrol on school campuses be armed? That was the question before the board. And they shot it down (pun intended) by a margin of...

A judicial process that doesn’t allow the accused to cross-examine his accuser or reliably see the evidence against him is a civil libertarian’s nightmare. It traduces every principle of fairness and is blatantly un-American. Yet Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is about to get savaged for replacing just such a process with something more in keeping with our longstanding legal norms. The Education Department is preparing new rules that would roll back the monstrously unfair Obama-era requirements for how colleges handle sexual-assault and harassment allegations. The Obama rules have been receiving a battering in the courts, where due process is still...

Socialist ideas are growing on college campuses at a rapid pace. The Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) organization claims to have gone from just 15 campus chapters in 2016 to 250 today, the Leadership Institute’s Campus Reform reported Tuesday. The YDSA claimed to have reflected this growth on their website’s recognized chapter list. “Currently, we've received over 250 campuses register for the fall drive! This explosion in interest shows that this semester will be the biggest ever for YDSA. We will be able to build a mass movement for democratic socialism and justice at campuses across the country,” they...

A professor at the University of St. Thomas in Texas recently blamed the Trump administration for the rise in microaggressions she and her colleagues have allegedly faced from each other since the 2016 election. Nicole Walters published “Trump’s America is Making Microaggressions an Even Greater Reality for Women Faculty of Color” in the recent issue of the peer-reviewed academic journal Women, Gender, and Families of Color.Walters—who is also a Dean at the Texas institution—cites the alleged rise in microaggressions on her campus as a “marked difference from President Barack Obama’s ethos of inclusivity and his message of hope and unity.”Since...

A Wyoming Republican Party delegate is challenging a University of Wyoming ban on the carry of firearms in its facilities. The ban is enforced through trespass law. The circuit court has issued a stay on the criminal trespass proceedings, to allow the issue of the legality of the ban to be determined before the trespass case goes forward. From kpvi.com: LARAMIE — A criminal case in Albany County Circuit Court involving the University of Wyoming’s campus gun ban has received a stay, pending a separate civil action against UW seeking to challenge the legality of that ban.During the Wyoming...

Semester after semester, year after year, tensions on college campuses have escalated, with intolerance of dissent climbing to darkly censorious levels. Facing Trump-fueled rage and censorship from campus leftists, conservative students reacted by bringing in the most offensive speakers possible, such as Milo Yiannopoulos. At the University of California, Berkeley, this rhetorical bomb thrower's opponents lit real fires and smashed the place. Then at Middlebury College in March, protesters against Charles Murray, the conservative social scientist, disrupted his event so that he simply could not speak. They did not want debate. He was obliged to give his address on video...

The reflective Mary Eberstadt has the latest Weekly Standard cover story, asserting that the late rise of identity politics especially among the young descends from the decline in family, despite myriad other theories. An excerpt: Maybe that cultural scream of ‘mine!’ is issuing from souls who did have something taken from them—only something more elemental than the totemic objects now functioning as figurative blankies for lost and angry former children. As of today, less than 65 percent of American children live with both biological parents, even as other familial boughs have broken via external forces like the opioid crisis, criminality...

Watch video => https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=0USSUEQ7hAw

Southern Methodist University officials on Tuesday revised a policy that aimed to protect students from "harmful or triggering" messages after a dispute erupted over an annual 9/11 installation that students had planned for the heart of campus. Nearly 3,000 flags have been placed on Southern Methodist University's Dallas Hall Lawn every year since 2010, but the group responsible for the display, Young Americans for Freedom, was recently told it must be moved. University officials told Grant Wolf, who leads SMU's Young Americans chapter, that the display can be placed only on Morrison-McGinnis Park, a less prominent campus location informally known...

Gun control advocates frequently advise against people using guns for self-defense. But Michael Bloomberg and various anti-gun politicians often use armed guards as protection. Talk is cheap. But when a professor resigns because of his university’s concealed carry policies, that’s a story that can get national attention. In May, associate history professor Jacob Dorman resigned from the University of Kansas. He accepted another tenured position at a different public university in a noncampus-carry state.

When the College Republicans chapter at Maryland’s Hood College decided to put up a temporary display honoring prominent conservatives, the group wanted to promote the free exchange of ideas. “We just wanted to provoke thoughtful discussion,” said club president Christopher Gardner. “We have done that.” In reality, the young Republicans accomplished even more by exposing how close-minded many of their fellow students have become.

What can be done? Acts of violence and physical intimidation aimed at conservatives on American campuses are growing – and college administrators, who sympathize with the progressive fascist lynch mobs doing the misdeeds, are generally fine with the mayhem. Although universities and colleges are supposed to be places where ideas are exchanged and challenged, they are easily the most reactionary institutions in modern American society. Confronting the established wisdom there is a career-ender. Free speech exists in theory but only within the narrowest of prescribed limits. Speakers who violate the politically correct canon are shouted down, demonized, and assaulted. Truly...

“You have an obligation to step up.”There are a lot of reasons to love former vice president Joe Biden. He's had a long and storied political career, he's one of the leaders in the government's fight against cancer; then there's his love for ice cream, his kind demeanor, and charming finger point (you know the one) earning him the nickname "Uncle Joe," and of course there were those memes. If you weren't convinced he was a national treasure before, then President Obama called then Vice President Biden "the best vice president America's ever had" when he awarded him the Presidential...

'Unwanted Advances' is a clarion call for accusatory university cultures gone madA spectre is haunting the American campus, and it’s called Title IX. Originally, you might remember, Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 was the law that required colleges to have women’s as well as men’s sports teams. It still does that, but since 2011 it does a lot more: Title IX, overseen by the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, now covers not just gender discrimination but all forms of sexual misconduct—a generously interpreted term that, if you’re a professor, now seems to include your...

Cassandra Hsiao and her family may not speak English in a typical way, but the high school senior's talent with words has caught the attention of all the Ivy League colleges. Last week, Hsiao, a first generation immigrant from Malaysia who lives in Walnut, California, received the exciting news that she had been accepted to not just one, but all eight Ivy League schools -- a feat few have achieved. "It was incredible," she told ABC News. "I wasn’t home at the time, but I was Facetiming my parents and there were tears on both sides of the screen." Hsiao,...

Our universities have become hotbeds of paranoia about guns. They have become irrational about guns in the hands of anyone who is not wearing a uniform. The paranoia has spread to any object that might be perceived as similar to a gun. Idaho University at Pocatello showed this paranoia on Monday, the 27th of February, 2017.  A student reported seeing a man carrying what she thought was a gun *case*.  This deserves emphasis.  She did not see a gun.  She thought she saw a gun case. The police were quickly alerted and the school was pretty much shut down...