Free Republic

Last year Cornell University undergraduate Neetu Chandak appeared on “Fox and Friends” to share her objection to a course description that seemed overly critical of President Donald Trump while glorifying former President Barack Obama. Now, in an essay in The College Fix, Chandak says her remarks on Fox expressing concerns about liberal bias at the college and the explicit agenda of the course led to threats on her life and such constant harassment that she sought therapy and was afraid to leave her apartment. “It is difficult to express conservative views as a college student without being called names, attacked...

On Halloween evening, dozens gathered in Kroch library for the opening of “The World Bewitch’d,” an exhibition — on display through August 2018 — exploring the history of witchcraft. The exhibit features a variety of rare manuscripts, photographs and historical movie posters and is known to be the largest witchcraft collection in North America. The exhibit holds over 3,000 objects on superstition and witchcraft in Europe, mostly acquired in the 1880s but spanning multiple centuries of artifacts since the 1400s, according to the Cornell University Library website.... Students like Ellen Haines ’18 attended the event on their own. Hains said...

“God Bless America” is a “warmongering song” that should not be played at sporting events, according to an Ithaca College professor. “In the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, the expressions of hyper-patriotism took hold,” Professor Stephen Mosher wrote in an op-ed for The Ithacan, “Irving Berlin’s warmongering song ‘God Bless America’ became our second, unofficial national anthem at the ballpark.” That song, “God Bless America,” was sung by concertgoers in Las Vegas on Sunday night, led by country duo Big & Rich, just an hour before a shooter opened fire on them.... He added: “Maybe ‘America the Beautiful’ would be...

More than 300 students marched with Black Students United to Willard Straight Hall on Wednesday afternoon and are occupying the building at Cornell University after delivering a list of demands to the University’s president Martha Pollack. The protest follows the arrest of a Cornell student on Friday who police charged with assault after a black student said he was punched by a group of white men who had called him the N-word in Collegetown. The group’s 12 demands to Cornell include requiring coursework on “privilege and power,” hiring additional mental health personnel of color, and permanently banning the Psi Upsilon...

Members of the Cornell University Student Assembly (SA) are calling for “repercussions” against a fraternity after one of its members was heard chanting “build a wall.” According to The Cornell Daily Sun, the SA held a meeting Thursday attended by Cornell President Martha Pollack and Vice President for Student and Campus Life Ryan Lombardi, during which several SA members agreed that consequences needed to be enacted for “verbal marginalization.”

WASHINGTON -- A CNN journalist who resigned this week, after the network retracted a story about Russia and President Donald Trump's transition team, is a Syracuse native with strong ties to the region. Eric Lichtblau, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is a graduate of Jamesville-DeWitt High School and Cornell University. He began his journalism career at The Post-Standard, where he covered the Ithaca region for the newspaper. Lichtblau was thrust into the national spotlight after he and two other CNN journalists resigned, prompting Trump to blast the journalists and the network on Tuesday for reporting "fake news." The story was posted...

Reclaim NY hosted the event leading up to the release of a fully-fledged report on the affordability crisis and its detailed effect on Tompkins County. The report accredits a general economic decline in the Southern Tier to a loss of manufacturing sectors while other regions in the state continue to develop and therefore put Albany’s spending one step ahead. “Unlike Long Island or the Lower Hudson Valley that have higher incomes and larger tax bases, unfunded mandates are bankrupting county and town governments in the Southern Tier to the point where some can’t even afford a paint job on public...

Cornell University is adding a class to its fall curriculum called "America Confronts the World," The course description says the class will examine the differences between President Trump's "xenophobic nationalism" and President Obama's "pragmatic cosmopolitanism." Neetu Chandak, a student at the Ithaca, N.Y. school, said the campus is already well-known for its tendency toward liberal indoctrination. Chandak said the course sounds like one where she would not feel comfortable expressing her own personal views. She added that as a residency staff member, she is already ostracized by her fellow R.A.'s who do not share her worldview.

ITHACA, N.Y. -- The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement took an undocumented Mexican immigrant into custody Tuesday morning in Ithaca and scores of people in the community who considered the city a "sanctuary" are asking the same question: “How did this happen here?” Jose Lopez Guzman, 32, was taken into custody by multiple ICE agents around 11:30 a.m. on Cascadilla Street. He does not have family members in Ithaca. ICE said in a brief statement Tuesday night that the arrest happened “following a routine targeted enforcement action.” Khaalid Walls, regional director of communications for the northeast region of ICE, clarified...

WASHINGTON -- The Upstate New York congressman who faced overflowing crowds of protesters at town hall meetings managed to raise a record amount of money after the protests gained national attention. U.S. Rep. Tom Reed raised $585,282 in the first quarter of the year, a personal high for the fourth-term Republican from Corning. Reed's cash haul more than doubled the amount raised by each of the other members of Congress from Upstate New York, according to new disclosure reports filed with the Federal Election Commission. "We are off to our best start ever with more than a half-million dollars in...

ITHACA, N.Y. — The Ithaca City School District and Tompkins County Office of Human Rights have sent out a joint statement reassuring the community that transgender students will be protected in schools. They issued a statement this week in objection to the decision by the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice to withdraw federal guidelines regarding transgender students in schools. "Please know that we remain committed to the vigorous support for a student’s right to be respectfully treated according to their gender identity and to be free from discrimination, harassment, and bullying. We encourage all school districts in Tompkins County...

<p>Gusts of wind howled through the Ithaca Commons on Wednesday, flapping banners and dragging a rattling tambourine along the ground. But Ithaca’s women were louder.</p> <p>Nearly 200 women and men stomped along a one-mile loop from City Hall to the Commons in a march that served to both celebrate International Women’s Day and protest proposals from President Donald Trump and other Republicans on issues including health care and immigration.</p>

The right to speak on Cornell’s campus is a “paramount value,” one upon which the University has an “essential dependence,” according to the Campus Code of Conduct... But some groups that have hosted conservative speakers on campus are not buying the administration’s rhetoric, citing the thousands of dollars they have been asked to pay the University for security at their events. And they say it is a cost that hosts of conservative speakers disproportionately have to bear. “The University, through its current policy — intentional or not — imposes additional financial and administrative costs on groups wishing to host conservative...

ITHACA, N.Y. -- After nearly two hours of public comment and at least 30 speakers in favor of a newly proposed ordinance, Ithaca's Common Council unanimously voted to add teeth to its Sanctuary City policy, which was first passed in 1985, for Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees City officials, including police officers, are now specifically directed to not ask for a person's immigration status unless the person is actively committing a crime related to their status. The legal ordinance means that local law enforcement will not enforce federal immigration laws.

There was a great deal of hand-wringing about the dearth of protest art being made over the course of the 2016 presidential campaign, and after the election of Donald Trump. These hand-wringers, however, appear not to have looked very hard at all. Reverend Osagyefo Sekou and Jay-Marie Hill met on the frontlines of a 2015 Movement for Black Lives protest. After being pepper sprayed arbitrarily by police at the demonstration, where activists were demanding the release of an illegally detained 14 year old, Reverend Sekou helped wash the toxins out of Hill’s eyes. Several weeks later, they would title themselves...

Two Ithaca sisters couldn’t believe their ears when they heard Donald Trump call Hillary Clinton “such a nasty woman” during the final presidential debate in October. “I was speechless,” Christina Constas, who has been an Ithaca resident for more than a decade, told The Sun. Nearly three months later, the sisters have turned the phrase into a rallying cry for Ithacans worried about what President-elect Trump’s words and policies will mean for women and women’s health services across the country.

A federal judge cut in half the amount to which he said an attorney was entitled for representing a police officer in a reverse discrimination suit against the city of Ithaca. Northern District Judge Gary Sharpe granted the defendants' motion to stay the award granted to Rome lawyer AJ Bosman pending an appeal. Sharpe said plaintiff Christopher Miller's judgment of $280,004 after three trials in the case between 2012 and 2016 qualified him as the prevailing party and made Bosman eligible for fees. Miller, a white male, argued throughout the case that he was given difficult job assignments in retaliation...

Once they’d dated a few years, Julia and Greg eventually got married in May 2013, fresh off a year of caring for Greg’s mother in Pennsylvania. Immediately after, counting four years together, the two decided they would try to start a family. They tried for a few months, thinking eventually it would happen, but one day the pair got to the point where they were going to local doctors, trying to figure out what the problem was. Sometime last year, they decided to see what the next step looked like. This, the couple said, led them into seeking professional, medical...

ITHACA, N.Y. -- In an unprecedented State of the City Address Wednesday night, Mayor Svante Myrick addressed President-Elect Donald Trump and his administration, calling it "openly hostile" and saying that the City of Ithaca will stand for the needs of its residents in the face of adversity.... "I believe the fight against fascism will be waged and be won at the local level," Myrick said. "We are the antidote to fascism. We are the antidote to the rage that encourages people to vote against anyone who seems just a bit different." He said fascist governance works because it allows people...

An Ithaca man accused of killing a UPS driver said in court Monday afternoon that not only did he believe he shot and killed Donald Trump, but that no evidence could be presented to him to suggest otherwise. Justin R. Barkley, 38, said during his arraignment and subsequent attempt to plead guilty, "I shot and killed Donald Trump purposely, intentionally and very proudly." Now obviously Barkley is out of his mind. But the murder of an innocent man is another example of how the media's climate of hate can backfire. Did the media's paranoid fantasies about Trump feed into Barkley's...