Free Republic

In an undated post regarding admissions to graduate arts and sciences programs for the 2026–27 academic year, Boston University indicated that the history of art and architecture program was not admitting candidates, along with American studies, anthropology, religion, and romance studies programs. In November 2024, meanwhile, the school had already indicated that its department of the history of art and architecture would not accept Ph.D. students for the next academic year, according to a report from Inside Higher Education. In an email obtained by the publication, the heads of the College of Arts and Sciences, which includes the art history...

The recent closure of The Dwelling at Biola University — a support group for students identifying as LGBT or experiencing same-sex attraction — marks the end of a chapter in a difficult struggle to reconcile biblical orthodoxy with contemporary campus culture. As someone who walked away from a lesbian identity after encountering the full Gospel, I am sympathetic to the administration's challenges and deeply concerned about the implications of its approach. President Barry Corey deserves credit for seeking to provide a safe environment for struggling students. His vision of "grace and truth" resonated with many: upholding biblical sexual ethics while...

After nearly closing in 2019, a Western Massachusetts college continues to face challenges, missing its 2025 enrollment goal by half. Instead of recruiting 300 students, Hampshire College in Amherst enrolled about 150 new students. That makes for a total of 750 full-time students, Jennifer Chrisler, Hampshire’s newly named president, told MassLive in November. Chrisler attributes some of the admissions challenges to other institutions opening up their waitlists and taking more students than usual, forcing even more competition between institutions to vie for the same students. Many universities struggled with a decline in international students due to federal policies. “That had...

“We’re going to allow, it’s very important, 600,000 students,” Trump told reporters. “We’re going to get along with China. But it’s a different relationship that we have now with China.” There are currently 270,000 Chinese students studying in the United States, according to the Los Angeles Times. Back in May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the Trump administration would begin to "aggressively revoke" the visas of Chinese students.

In an August City Journal piece, my former colleague John Sailer wonderfully quoted an anonymous professor: “Every day, the universities wake up and break the law.” Just about every faculty-hiring process in America’s colleges and universities discriminates—sometimes barely legally, when it’s just political discrimination to ensure that only radical professors get hired. The education-establishment discriminators do that by drafting job advertisements with specializations that ensure only radicals need apply: a preference for environmental history, human rights, and/or social movements when they’re subtle, a specialization in genderqueer Palestinian sociology with a concentration on community engagement in Dubuque when they’re not. Political...

Sir Roger Scruton wrote in How to Be a Conservative that “the work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating; the work of creation slow, laborious and dull.” Conservative higher-education reformers would be wise to remember this. While there is much excitement in ripping down ridiculous, wasteful, and harmful bureaucracies in universities, the real work of improving them takes attention to detail, expertise, and care. In the past year, Missouri leaders have attempted to balance the exhilarating with the dull when it comes to reforming the state’s higher-education system. On the exhilarating front, the governor published a splashy executive order...

Every December, the staff of the Martin Center share our higher-ed-reform dreams for the coming 12 months. Some are obvious; others are fanciful. We offer them all here in a spirit of optimism, for the reader’s enjoyment and edification. Turn to the Founders The Founding Fathers are a source of insight and wisdom that should be drawn on more frequently. Their writings on liberty and natural rights shed light on questions of human dignity. Their example of simultaneous restraint and boldness in the appropriate contexts provides a model of leadership. And their educational vision adds clarity to the purpose of...

More than 20 years after it was on the other end of one of the biggest upsets in BCS history, Miami pulled off the biggest upset of the College Football Playoff era on New Year’s Eve. The No. 10 Hurricanes beat No. 2 Ohio State 24-14 in the Cotton Bowl to advance to the semifinal round of the playoff. Miami was a 9.5-point underdog at kickoff. Before Wednesday night, the biggest upset in playoff history — in either the four-team playoff or the current 12-team format — was Ohio State’s win over Alabama as a 7.5-point underdog on Jan. 1,...

In early 2020, the University of California set the tone for the rest of the country when its regents voted to drop SAT and ACT admissions requirements through 2024. That decision, initially framed as a pandemic necessity, quickly reshaped admissions nationwide. By late 2022, roughly 1,750 schools, or about 80 percent of U.S. universities, had adopted test-optional policies, according to Forbes.“It’s a sea change in terms of how admissions decisions are being made,” Robert Schaeffer, of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, told NBC News.“The pandemic created a natural experiment.”Five years later, the results of this “natural experiment”...

One of my consistent themes is that in the post-Christian West, sexual pleasure and hedonism have been elevated to the highest human good. Human beings are driven to ask, "What is the meaning of life," and when God exits stage left, what usually replaces Him is "pleasure." That's natural, of course, since pleasure by its nature is self-reinforcing. "If it feels good, do it" is hardly revolutionary, despite what the hippies said. Without religion, human beings struggle to come up with reasons to deny our darkest desires without appealing to moral standards that are generally rooted in religion, or at...

The Wolverines will undergo their second coaching change in three years, releasing Moore after eight years with the organization, including two as head coachMichigan fired coach Sherrone Moore for cause at the conclusion of his second season leading the Wolverines football program. Athletic director Warde Manuel said Wednesday the termination was the result of an inappropriate relationship between Moore and a staff member. "Sherrone Moore has been terminated, with cause, effective immediately," Manuel said in a statement. "Following a university investigation, credible evidence was found that Coach Moore engaged in an inappropriate relationship with a staff member. This conduct constitutes...

Higher-education reform has a new hero, and he hails not from the self-styled patrician environs of the Ivy League but from Texas. We all know how tough it is to reform higher education given the ideological capture that permeates many universities. But the chancellor of the Texas Tech University System has exerted himself in a way that should establish him in the official pantheon of friends of higher education. If such a pantheon does not exist, well, let Chancellor Brandon Creighton be the first illustrious inductee. What did the good chancellor do to merit this honor? In one fell swoop,...

The greed and naiveté of our institutions could play into the hands of the Chinese surveillance state It goes by an innocuous name – “Integrated Joint Operations Platform” (IJOP) – but it’s one of the most sinister components of China’s surveillance state, managing what has been described as a genocide against the Uighurs. The IJOP combines multiple systems of repression – location, messages, contacts, social media and other data from phones, together with information from checkpoints, cameras and biometric records. It then flags “suspicious” individuals for detention and forced labor. Now leading US universities have been accused of extensive...

The Trump administration is moving to dismantle the federal student loan repayment plan known as SAVE, the last remnant of the Biden-era effort to provide large-scale student debt relief. The U.S. Department of Education announced on Dec. 9 that it had reached a proposed settlement with Missouri and six other Republican-led states that sued to block the SAVE plan. The plan still needs approval from the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of Missouri’s Eastern Division. The states argued that the Biden administration exceeded its authority when it created SAVE in 2023, a program that offered millions of borrowers...

Conservatives interested in higher-education reform often ask themselves where things went wrong. Answers usually range from the radicalism of the 1960s to the rise of social media or the triumph of critical theories in various departments and then the university as a whole. True, but the problem lies deeper, as well. Few are willing to trace today’s ills to the rise of the Progressive University or, what is the same thing, the making of higher education in the image of the modern research university. The modern research university is a source of pride among modern peoples. Commercials for universities during...

Lane Kiffin's contract with LSU includes the unique clause that he will receive a payment equal to the amount he would have earned for coaching Ole Miss in the upcoming College Football Playoff, according to a term sheet obtained by ESPN on Monday. Kiffin, who agreed to a seven-year contract with LSU on Sunday that will pay him $13 million annually, will receive the same CFP bonus from LSU that he would have if he had remained with Ole Miss through this postseason. That begins at $150,000 for the Rebels' participation in a first-round CFP game, increases to $250,000 for...

Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley's son Nalin Haley on Monday accused Republicans of failing to acknowledge disillusioned Gen Z voters' struggles with unemployment and affordability. The first step our leaders need to do is admit that we have a problem. And right now I haven't heard any Republican leaders talk about the issues that young people are facing," Haley told "Fox & Friends."

Higher education is suffering from many woes, and the federal government (and sometimes Donald Trump in particular) often gets much of the blame for them. But one factor that, in my judgment, is ultimately responsible for much contemporary collegiate angst probably cannot be primarily blamed on the feds: the effects of grade inflation. I would submit that this affliction is the predominant single factor in the precipitous decline in student learning in American colleges and universities. Combined with long-term rising fees for college attendance, grade inflation has made universities an increasingly dubious value proposition: Attendees, their parents, and the public...

Americans have grown sour on one of the longtime key ingredients of the American dream. Almost two-thirds of registered voters say that a four-year college degree isn’t worth the cost, according to a new NBC News poll, a dramatic decline over the last decade. Just 33% agree a four-year college degree is “worth the cost because people have a better chance to get a good job and earn more money over their lifetime,” while 63% agree more with the concept that it’s “not worth the cost because people often graduate without specific job skills and with a large amount of...

Since its founding in 1923, Hillel has become the most important Jewish campus organization in America and abroad, with a presence on more than 800 campuses across the world. Its programs and leadership are central to campus Jewish life and, looked at a certain way, reflect the broader failure of colleges to educate students these days. Hillel was established on the premise that Jews themselves need to take responsibility for Jewish prospering by participating in cultural events and social programs and by being intellectually challenged in in-depth classes and seminars. The organization also sought to respond to campus antisemitism and...