Free Republic

Earlier this month, I got the chance to be a student again for just one morning. It was an opportunity offered to all members of the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Visitors, and I jumped at the chance to go back to campus to observe two classes. Among the options were two courses in the new School of Civic Life and Leadership. My first class of the day was “Practice of Civic Life and Leadership,” taught by Professor John Rose, which the course catalog thus describes: This course focuses on the ideas and practices necessary to analyze arguments and disagree in...

It is a low bar to clear, but college accreditation has never been so hotly commented on as at present. Many in the higher-ed world fear for its future. Two recent columns in the Chronicle of Higher Education are typical. In one, Robert Shireman, a Democratic appointee to the committee that advises the secretary of education on the recognition of accrediting agencies, warns of an “accreditation war” driven by “Christian nationalism.” Republican “Christian nationalists,” Shireman believes, “don’t want their own, separate, accrediting agency; they want to force the rest of higher education to accept their radical beliefs.” The implicit premise...

By now, most North Carolinians are at least somewhat familiar with Generative AI (GenAI). As tech journalist George Lawton explains, GenAI “uses sophisticated algorithms to organize large, complex data sets into meaningful clusters of information in order to create new content, including text, images and audio, in response to a query or prompt.” It is the foundation of numerous platforms, including Open AI’s ChatGPT and Dall-E, as well as Google’s Gemini. And it is either a bane or a boon, depending on one’s perspective—especially, perhaps, in the field of education. Since OpenAI publicly released ChatGPT-3.5 in November 2022, students have...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Campus mentors. Move-in events. Scholarships. Diversity offices that made them feel welcome on predominantly white campuses. As U.S. colleges pull back on diversity, equity and inclusion practices, students of color say they are starting to lose all of these things and more. The full scope of campus DEI rollbacks is still emerging as colleges respond to the Trump administration’s orders against diversity practices. But students at some schools said early cuts are chipping away at the sense of community that helped open the door to higher education. “It feels like we’re going back. I don’t know how...

Subtitle: Community colleges have been dealing with an unprecedented phenomenon: fake students bent on stealing financial aid funds. While it has caused chaos at many colleges, some Southwestern faculty feel their leaders haven’t done enough to curb the crisis. When the spring semester began, Southwestern College professor Elizabeth Smith felt good. Two of her online classes were completely full, boasting 32 students each. Even the classes’ waitlists, which fit 20 students, were maxed out. That had never happened before. “Teachers get excited when there’s a lot of interest in their class. I felt like, ‘Great, I’m going to have a...

For the entire existence of the James G. Martin Center, we have been arguing that, due to governmental policies, higher education has been badly oversold. That is, many students have been lured into college even though they have little interest in or aptitude for advanced academic studies. The notion that a college degree was a sure-fire investment that would pay off handsomely after graduation was erroneous, but great numbers of students and their families were taken in by that siren song. Moreover, a stigma somehow attached to students who didn’t go to college—if you had to “settle” for working after...

(2024) On Nov. 4, Dartmouth Dining began enrolling students in a palm biometric recognition scanner system at the Class of 1953 Commons. Starting this winter term, students will be able to use palm biometric technology to enter the Class of 1953 Commons instead of swiping in with a physical ID card. The biometric technology is created by IDEMIA, a technology company that specializes in biometrics and cryptography. According to Dartmouth Dining director Jon Plodzik, any student who wants to utilize the new system in the winter term can complete the enrollment process by visiting the signup area in ’53 Commons....

Artificial Intelligence (AI) looks to upend higher education—all education—in no end of ways. The advantage it gives to cheaters by itself is upending the practice of teaching. But AI poses its greatest threat to the liberal arts, to the studia humanitatis, by getting rid of the basic function of this education: to prepare recipients for a job serving the state. At its best, this kind of education also prepares students to govern the state—to converse about the ends of government and to decide prudently how to achieve them as citizens of a democratic republic, as the leaders of an aristocratic...

The Trump administration is pushing for a legal agreement that would task a federal judge with supervising Columbia University, which is fighting to restore federal funding, according to a published report. The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday the federal government’s antisemitism task force wants to resolve its dispute with Columbia through a settlement known as a “consent decree.” A consent decree may be used to ensure Columbia follows through on changes negotiated with the federal government. If college administrators break such an agreement, which is legally binding, the university may have to pay a fine or face other penalties....

Since the 1997 founding of Western Governors University (WGU), a private, nonprofit institution developed to pioneer so-called competency-based education (CBE), a growing number of colleges throughout the U.S. have explored the model to varying degrees. Sometimes referred to as “proficiency-based learning,” “mastery-based learning,” or “student-centered education,” CBE is an alternative model of academic instruction that empowers students with variegated choices in learning pace, individualized academic support, and progress based on mastery of course materials. According to the latest national survey regarding CBE, conducted in 2020 by the American Institutes for Research, 47 percent of institutional respondents reported being in the...

Ghosted on dating apps, rejected by colleges and passed over for jobs — rejection isn’t fleeting for Gen Z. In fact, it’s becoming a defining feature of their collective identity. As young adults come of age in a culture shaped by hyper-curated digital existences, political tumult and cultural and economic instability, a new pattern has emerged: Gen Z is facing more rejections at more critical life stages than any recent generation. What happens when the entire group begins to internalize “no” as the default response? Author Delia Cai says Gen Z egos or their alleged “sense of entitlement” isn’t what’s...

Witchcraft has been feared, mocked and romanticized — but rarely has it been fully understood as a story of feminist resistance and enduring cultural power. Feminist studies scholar Jane Ward has set out to change that narrative. Her latest book — a collaboration with co-author Soma Chaudhuri — introduces “feminist witch studies,” a new interdisciplinary field that explores the power, persecution and political dimensions of witchcraft across cultures. Ward, a professor at UC Santa Barbara, first engaged with the subject while preparing a course on the history of witches and witchcraft. Known for her work in sexuality and gender studies...

I’m Gen X. I was pretty young when I earned my PhD, so I’ve been a professor for a long time—over 30 years. If you’re not in academia, or it’s been awhile since you were in college, you might not know this: the students are not what they used to be. The problem with even talking about this topic at all is the knee-jerk response of, “yeah, just another old man complaining about the kids today, the same way everyone has since Gilgamesh. Shake your fist at the clouds, dude.”1 So yes, I’m ready to hear that. Go right ahead....

Last week we shared some charts on the utter failure and folly of federal intervention in education for K-12.An even bigger failure has been the $1.5 trillion student loan boondoggle. As even more federal dollars have flowed into higher education in grants and (largely forgivable) loans. This is the result:We got a lot of praise and criticism from readers for our call to impose an excise tax on university tax-free endowments above $1 billion. But what is clear is that almost none of these treasure chests of wealth are being used to make college more affordable. Shameful.

Around 9.7 million student loan borrowers became past-due on their bills after the Covid-era payment pause expired, according to a new estimate by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.After the Covid-era pause on federal student loan payments expired in September 2023, the Biden administration offered borrowers a 12-month “on-ramp” to repayment. During that time, borrowers were shielded from most of the consequences of falling behind on their payments. That relief period expired on Sept. 30, 2024.By the end of the off-ramp period, the New York Fed estimates that the volume of past-due federal student loans hit 15.6%, with over...

Over 4 million Gen Zers are not in school or work in the U.S. and in the U.K. 100,000 young people joined the NEETs cohort. But it’s not generational laziness that’s to blame. Experts are taking swipes at “worthless degrees” and a system that “is failing to deliver on its implicit promise.” There’s been a mass derailment when it comes to Gen Z and their careers: about a quarter of young people are now deemed NEETs—meaning they are no longer in education, employment, or training. While some Gen Zers may fall into this category because they are taking care of...

Charlie Kirk @charliekirk11 If woke is a mind virus, then white college indoctrinated women are the most susceptible hosts. 0:06 / 0:46 1:24 PM · Mar 20, 2025

It’s not like we didn’t know this already, but college-educated white women are the scourge of society. They’re political maniacs with views so left-wing you’d think it’s satire. They’re all about being ‘woke,’ DEI, and other lunacies that don’t have a positive reception outside of a college faculty lounge. NBC News broke it down. The white vote remains crucial, and that will be the case in future elections, despite liberal America’s persistent claim that white voters, especially white men, won’t matter. It’s an assumption that was brutally gutted in 2024. Yet, this is a core Democratic Party voter bloc, so...

Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and many other universities were founded explicitly as Protestant Christian institutions, only to devolve over time into something else. So, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Evangelical Protestants in America started again, creating a new generation of colleges and seminaries that they hoped would avoid the mistakes of their predecessors. But as the current controversy over Wheaton College attests, history seems to be repeating itself. And the problem reaches far beyond Wheaton. For 12 years I served as a professor at Seattle Pacific University (SPU). Founded by pious Free Methodists in the 1890s, the school...

At America’s elite universities, we are told that pursuing free inquiry and civil discourse is a fundamental value. Administrators champion “grand” initiatives such as the Duke Provost’s Initiative on Free Inquiry (though it is laughable that a university feels the need to announce its commitment to free inquiry; is that not the point of academia?), roll out glossy programs housed in liberal echo chambers, and occasionally invite conservative speakers such as Liz Cheney—sorry, I meant conservative speakers such as Richard Burr. In reality, these institutions have largely failed to cultivate an environment where civil discourse can organically flourish. Instead of...