Free Republic

It’s simple, really. Why do so many college and university students hate Israel? Because they know nothing about it, and have bought into the propaganda they’ve been fed. In the midst of the recent and nationwide demonstrators featuring students (and many others) denouncing Israel for its alleged crimes, Algemeiner reported that “students who care strongly about the ‘Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories’ do not have knowledge of basic facts surrounding the subject, and do not share similar concerns about other geopolitical conflicts.” This wholly unstartling bit of information was gleaned from a survey of 230 undergraduates at University of California,...

A columnist covering K-12 education, I come to you, dear reader, with a warning: There’s a coming wave of college-freshman failure that will stress the institutions and systems of our universities. Grade schools haven’t and likely won’t recover from pandemic-era learning losses, and so, ready or not, a poorly educated generation is soon to flood your campuses. We’ve all read the statistics. Students lost out on months’ worth of education, obliterating two decades’ worth of academic improvements. What’s more, we’re experiencing something of a “long Covid” in education. According to the testing company NWEA, students aren’t just not catching up....

“How many lives are 1200 Israelis worth?” That chilling question was put forward by a Rhode Island history professor last week in a condemnation of Israel as a “white supremacist nation” that prompted the Hamas massacre. Many donors and parents have been repulsed in recent weeks by such extremist viewpoints on our campuses over the Israel-Gaza war. For some of us, however, the hostile environment is nothing new on campuses where faculties have been purged of conservative and libertarian voices for years. Indeed, many of the same figures have previously supported radical, or even violent, efforts directed against conservatives for...

The Wall Street Journal published an essay written by a political scientist who did something almost unique: he collected some data and discovered something interesting, if not surprising. From Which River to Which Sea?Is ignorance bliss? https://t.co/WdCBmhXZZn— Ayaan Hirsi Ali (@Ayaan) December 10, 2023It turns out that the students passionately advocating for a “free” Palestine have no idea about the cause to which they claim to be attached.They haven’t a clue.That shouldn’t surprise us since a substantial number of younger people believe the Holocaust is a hoax. They are so poorly educated and so indoctrinated that basic facts elude them,...

I’m not on TikTok, and I recommend you delete your account if you are (or your kid’s accounts, if they have them). If you don’t think you can live without it you can cut out the middleman and send all your personal data to the Chinese consulate (or reach out to Eric Swalwell’s office and ask for Fang-Fang’s number, same difference). But putting aside the communists who run it, there’s a big problem with the communists who use it – many of them are teachers, and a disturbing percentage of them are mentally unstable. This isn’t just about TikTok, it’s...

America’s top universities should abandon their long misadventure into politics, retrain their gaze on their core strengths and rebuild their reputations as centers of research and learning.

One down, two to go. Bill Ackman appears to have a scorecard tracking which college presidents lose their jobs for their congressional statements on on-campus antisemitism, and now he's training his full fire on the two university leaders who remain. (excerpt) And Ackman's quest seems to be picking up after Liz Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, resigned from her position on Saturday. On Sunday, Ackman penned an open letter to Harvard's governing boards of directors, where he reiterated his call for Claudine Gay to be removed. "In her short tenure as President, Claudine Gay has done more damage...

Post Governor Kathy Hochul @GovKathyHochul Calls for genocide on college campuses violate New York's Human Rights Law, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, & SUNY's Code of Conduct. We're prepared to take enforcement action if colleges & universities are found not in compliance. Read my letter to college presidents:

With the resignation of woke University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill, following an execrable performance addressing antisemitism in Congress, some kind of dam has broken. Now academics with actual achievements are beginning to speak out against the wokesterism that has laid low the reputations of their universities. CNN commentator Fareed Zakaria, who's best described as a left-leaning moderate, has thrown down the gauntlet about woke universities, calling them indoctrination centers, not places of learning, and demanded that universities return to their core mission of seeking the actual truth, demanding excellence, instead of creating their own "truths." He's on fire here:...

The recent Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action forbids the use of race in college admissions. Yet North Carolina public universities are already finding ways to circumvent the spirit of the ruling, such as by using essay questions that ask students about challenges they have faced or to reflect on their identity. These prompts allow students to say, for example, “As a Black student … ,” which is indeed permissible under Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard; students are not forbidden from bringing up their race in their applications. These essay responses, as well as the personal interviews that are...

II. Definitions A. Definition of Bullying Bullying, used as a shorthand for hostile and abusive behavior or power-based harassment, is defined here as harmful interpersonal aggression by words or actions that humiliate, degrade, demean, intimidate, or threaten2 an individual or individuals. For a violation of the Policy to occur, such aggression must be sufficiently severe or pervasive, and objectively offensive, that it creates a work, educational, or living environment that a reasonable person would consider intimidating, hostile, or abusive and denies the individual an equal opportunity to participate in the benefits of the workplace or the institution’s programs and activities....

The Biden administration has abolished the federal student-loan program, at least if a “student-loan program” is one in which students borrow money and then eventually repay it. What’s being erected in its stead is a scheme that’s rife with moral hazard, seemingly designed to inflate college costs, and best described as a “student-fraud program”—in which students borrow money, promise to repay it, and then … don’t. Biden’s loan-forgiveness shenanigans leapt into public consciousness when he tried to farcically read the 2003 HEROES Act to allow him to shovel $500 billion in loan “forgiveness” to his highly educated base and stick...

Many pro-Hamas demonstrations that have been taking place on US campuses since Hamas launched its war on Israel on October 7, when more than 3,000 Hamas terrorists invaded and raped, pillaged, murdered and kidnapped their way through the small communities of southern Israel, have reportedly been led by a radical organization known as National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP).According to a 2018 monograph… NSJP was founded in 2010 by leaders of American Muslims for Palestine and the US Palestinian Community Network, two organizations linked to US-designated terror organizations.

DECEMBER 1, 2023 SHARE THIS ARTICLE: The College Fix on Facebook The College Fix on Twitter The College Fix on Reddit Share on Email About eight percentage points higher than five years prior A supermajority of undergraduate grades given out at Yale University were an A or A- according to a new report from the student newspaper. The Yale Daily News obtained a copy of the 2022-23 grades report from an economics professor at the Ivy League university in Connecticut. The dean of Yale College, the undergraduate branch of the university, acknowledged that professors are not properly grading students. The...

Leaders of elite schools disgrace themselves before Congress—and expose the rot at the core of American higher education. Forget Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, now in theaters: if you want to watch an epic drama of vanity and failed leadership that ends in catastrophe, just tune in to the hearing held this week by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Summoned to account for the surging anti-Semitism on their campuses, the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania delivered a masterclass in obfuscation. When New York representative Elise Stefanik asked them whether calling for the genocide of the...

The Ivy league and their kindred so-called elite campuses may soon go the way of Disney and Bud Light. After October 7, the public was shocked at what they saw and heard on America’s campuses. Americans knew previously they were intolerant, leftwing, and increasingly non-meritocratic. But immediately after October 7—and even before the response of the Israeli Defense Forces—the sheer student delight on news of the mass murdering of Israeli victims seemed akin more to 1930s Germany than contemporary America. Indeed, not a day goes by when a university professor or student group has not spouted anti-Semitic hatred. Often, they...

Bill Ackman has claimed that Harvard president Claudine Gay was only appointed because she fitted the DEI office's criteria, after her shameful refusal to denounce campus protests calling for a Jewish genocide. The 57-year-old billionaire hedge funder has been heavily involved in the debate after expressing his views about Gay clearly on social media and calling for her resignation.

There is an obvious explanation as to why college students engage in “atrocity denialism” at pro-Palestinian marches. They are (well) clueless, and devoid of all rational thinking. The students aren’t shy about expressing their blissfully ignorant critique of Hamas as “liberators,” and their creepy foray into painting the dark side of evil -- the slaughter and torture of innocent civilians in Israel -- as “necessary.” Parents don’t have to wonder what’s happening with their kids’ expensive education, they can watch the academic dumpster fire on social media. There isn’t a shortage of embarrassing outtakes of the privileged millennials who are...

The unspeakable brutality and depravity of the October 7 Hamas assault on Israel led soon afterward to aggressive protests on many of our college campuses. The protests (and declarations, blog posts, marches, signs, etc.) were overwhelmingly in favor of Hamas, not the victims. Liberal feminist and women’s-rights groups were silent or dismissive of the widespread gross sexual abuse of Israeli women during the attack. At a large rally near campus, one professor at my school (Cornell) said that the attacks were “exhilarating.” While paying lip service to protecting civilians, his visceral reaction to what was known to be a barbaric...

(Key stakeholders were intrigued by the possibility of a new FBS subdivision that could allow schools to pay players directly) LAS VEGAS -- If there is a college athletics revolution in the near future, the NCAA is now admitting it wants to be part of it. In a letter sent to membership Tuesday, NCAA president Charlie Baker proposed sweeping changes to his association's amateurism model that would essentially create pay for play between schools and athletes. Baker proposed a new subdivision consisting of schools "with the highest resources" that would likely separate itself from the rest of the Football Bowl...