Free Republic

The University of Nevada at Las Vegas's president announced on Friday that a student's discrimination complaint against an economics professor was unwarranted because it violated the professor's academic freedom. The decision by the president, Carol C. Harter, in favor of the professor, Hans-Herman Hoppe, reversed a committee's recommendation that he serve a one-week unpaid suspension and receive a letter of reprimand. "I believe professors are entitled the freedom to teach theories and to espouse opinions that are out of the mainstream or are controversial," Ms. Harter said in a statement released on Friday. "Whether anyone in the university agrees or...

Unwritten social and political rules affect what scientists in many fields study and publish, according to a paper published today in Science, and those constraints are even more prevalent than formal constraints, such as government or university regulations. The paper is based on interviews with 41 researchers at top academic departments in fields such as neuroscience, drug and alcohol abuse, and molecular and cellular biology. The interviews were conducted by Joanna Kempner, Clifford S. Perlis, and Jon F. Merz, of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Brown University, and the University of Pennsylvania, respectively. They asked the researchers if...

A Smithsonian-backed editor is defrocked by the priesthood of science for publishing an article on Intelligent Design Science is typically praised as open-ended and free, pursuing the evidence wherever it leads. Scientific conclusions are falsifiable, open to further inquiry, and revised as new data emerge. Science is free of dogma, intolerance, censorship, and persecution. By these standards, Darwinists have become the dogmatists. Scientists at the Smithsonian Institute, supported by American taxpayers, are punishing one of their own simply for publishing an article about Intelligent Design. Stephen Meyer, who holds a Ph.D. from Cambridge and is a research fellow at the...