Free Republic

Will artificial intelligence become the greatest boon to higher education since online learning? (This assumes that online learning was a boon, which is a topic for another day.) Or will it mean the utter destruction of academia as we know it? Those are the two views I see expressed most frequently these days, with various individuals I respect taking opposite sides. As someone who is naturally skeptical of this kind of over-the-top rhetoric, I believe the answer lies somewhere in the middle. Despite the forceful yet mixed messages surrounding AI and its applications to higher ed, I have so far...

If you don’t like the pro-Hamas demonstrations by American college students, then you won’t like American higher education, which is the garden in which these flowers were grown. Within hours of the atrocities committed by Hamas operatives who invaded Israel on October 7, groups of American college students had organized to express their support for the terrorists. This caught many Americans by surprise. How could college students at some of America’s best universities sympathize with the perpetrators of gruesome attacks on unarmed civilians? The surprise, however, was not universal. Those of us who pay close attention to American higher education...

Harvard is an entirely antisemitic university. The president says soothing words to her Jewish audiences and does not have the internal fortitude to punish the little monsters that the American educational system has created, and her university nurtures. If there were any positive outcomes of the Covid disaster—disease and response—it might be that parents became aware of what their children were being taught. Parents casually walking behind their kids while the latter were “learning” via Zoom heard discussions of sexual orientation, the US as a terrible country, and the demented concepts of intersectionality that made those parents and their kids...

George Washington University on Tuesday suspended a student group that projected pro-Hamas and anti-Semitic images onto the school's library. Just one day later, the group's leader defied the suspension, spearheading a campus protest that targeted the school president's home.Lance Lokas, a junior at the university who as of February served as president of its Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, wielded a megaphone as he led scores of anti-Israel protesters on a Wednesday afternoon march through campus, the Washington Free Beacon witnessed while on the scene. Protest attendees—including students who have been photographed at past Students for Justice in Palestine...

Truer words have never been spoken

Arizona State University canceled an on-campus event where Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., was going to speak Friday. The event was organized by the Arizona Palestine Network, which is not an on-campus organization at ASU. Tlaib was going to give a speech at the "Palestine is an American issue" event. An ASU spokesperson told Fox News Digital the event didn't follow university policies and procedures. "Organizers of events using ASU facilities must be properly registered with ASU and must meet all university requirements for crowd management, parking, security, and insurance. In addition, the events must be produced in a way which...

On October 7, 2023 the words “never again” rang hollow for the first time since the Holocaust when 6 million Jews perished at the hands of the Nazis. Employing a level of barbarism that should cause even the most fervent anti-Semite to recoil in disgust, Hamas terrorists systematically tortured and murdered over 1200 Jews. Many of those who watched the video footage of these events will never fully recover and those who do now have unimaginable horrors permanently etched in their memories. Hamas redefined what is meant by “man’s inhumanity to man.” This attack was a massive intelligence failure on...

There have been at least 234 pro-Hamas rallies on U.S. college campuses since the October terrorist attacks against Israel, the Anti-Defamation League told Congress on Wednesday. The large number of protests highlights the growing influence of pro-terrorist and anti-Semitic groups at American universities, a trend that has drawn condemnation from lawmakers and calls for banning Hamas-supporting groups on college campuses. "We tracked 234 anti-Israel and pro-Hamas rallies on U.S. campuses," said ADL director Jonathan Greenblatt during a House Ways and Means Committee hearing on Wednesday. "Not calls for a two-state solution, not calls for a one-state solution. These were calls...

antisemitic rhetoric and attacks have increased at some of America's leading institutions, Jews on college campuses have been left scratching their heads, asking how itis possible that progressives could present the veneer of tolerance and modern thinking, while celebrating Hamas' barbarity and embracing hate. But, in fact, "progressive" intolerance is nothing new for college campuses, with antisemitism and even Nazism part of many universities' dark pasts. Jay Richards of the Heritage Foundation raised eugenics as another example. "It's hard for us to imagine now, but it was an idea that was shared by essentially all elite opinion makers and institutions...

Nearly as many college students support Hamas as they do Israel amid the raging Middle East war, a new survey claims. The online poll of 609 college students by Intelligent.com found that 22% of respondents sympathize with Hamas while 26% side with the Israeli government. That means about 1 in 5 of college students back a militia group designated a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union for its warfare against the Jewish state. Meanwhile, 82% said they sympathize with Palestinian civilians, while 72% feel for Israeli civilians, the poll found.

A pair of University of Arizona education professors was recorded telling a “Cultural Pluralism for Young Children” class that Hamas is not comprised of terrorists, but is a “resistance” group merely opposed to Zionism.Rebecca Lopez and Rebecca Zapien (pictured above), both of whom teach “teaching, learning & sociocultural studies,” initially appear to differ somewhat in their views in the audio obtained by the X account Israel War Room.But not for long.One of them concedes that Hamas representatives appear to be “like, speaking, like very antisemitic,” but is countered by her peer who says “they’re probably anti-Zionist, which, again, is about...

Since the horrific attacks by Hamas on October 7, we have watched in dismay as thousands and thousands of college students, faculty, and staff have rallied, marched and chanted, calling for the overthrow of the state of Israel, and for genocide against its Jewish residents. (For the benefit of those unaware of the euphemism in the chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free,” this actually means “…shall be free of Jews.”) We have watched in recent years as the Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (BDS) movement spread across higher education (and big business, and Wall Street too, for that matter),...

…and hollow women, too.I’ve been writing for years about the rise of toxic ideologies on America’s college campuses – totalitarian, anti-Israel, outright anti-Semitic – but still have been surprised by what has happened in these places since October 7. We need to discuss the reasons why it’s gotten so bad.A few days ago, someone republished an essay, written in 2016, by a professor who has taught at several ‘elite’ colleges. Excerpt:My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be...

Texas A&M is expected to fire football coach Jimbo Fisher on Sunday morning, sources confirmed to ESPN.

Looking for Freeper advice. My son is applying to colleges that have a Film major. He wants to be a producer. He wants to start his own business. We are in California, and you wouldn't think that CA is veteran friendly, but California does grant tuition waivers for all California public colleges for 0%+ disabled Vets. I'm afraid that some more liberal colleges will require the Covid VAX. I'm adamant about my kids not getting that vax. Any Freepers in the Film industry? Is there such a thing as a conservative or semi-conservative public college in California?

When we think of “Newspeak,” the fictional language invented by George Orwell for his dystopian novel 1984, we typically think of powerful authoritarian governments manipulating language for the advancement of power and ideology. In such a case, the language substitutes for reality itself to protect the perceived infallibility of totalitarian leadership and its totalist ideology. But the battle for language is not restricted to governments. Newspeak develops wherever a totalist ideology emerges—it is, in fact, a necessary characteristic of the ideology. Such battles for language dominance are ongoing all the time, and the chief locus for these battles is the...

Student organizations play a major role in shaping a campus environment outside of the classroom. Students’ participation in athletics, activism, extra-curricular learning, events, and other activities is typically organized by student-run clubs that work to supplement formal academic instruction. Many such organizations are funded by their respective universities, which means that close scrutiny of potentially discriminatory funding practices is merited. Indeed, there are drawbacks to using mandatory fees to subsidize student organizations at all. UNC-System schools provide substantial funding to registered student organizations by allocating revenues collected through mandatory student fees. UNC-Chapel Hill states that its required student-organization fee “supports...

U.S. News & World Report released its 2024 “Best Colleges” ranking in September. Marketed as a guide for students in their college-selection process, the list is, in reality, a reputational ranking that rewards rich and selective institutions while saying little about the educational product they offer. As such, not much has changed in this year’s rankings. The new list looks more like the shuffling of a feudal hierarchy than an actual competition between organizations working to be the best. Because of the cost and time commitments involved in getting a degree from a higher-ed institution, the decision to attend college...

Trump proposes creating a free American Academy to replace current WOKE universities.

Many Americans were surprised by the seemingly spontaneous protests on college campuses in support of “Palestine” after the Hamas assault on Israel. After all, how could anyone do anything other than condemn the Hamas pogrom, in which babies, children, and the elderly were massacred, raped, and burned alive? The answer lies in the toxic mix of politics, ignorance, and antisemitism emanating from the failure of American academia, especially the field of Middle East studies. The shocking anti-Israel vitriol on display at protests since October 7 would have been impossible in the 20th century. For decades, large swaths of academia have...