Free Republic

For 11 years, Professor Duke Pesta gave quizzes to his students at the beginning of the school year to test their knowledge on basic facts about American history and Western culture. The most surprising result from his 11-year experiment? Students’ overwhelming belief that slavery began in the United States and was almost exclusively an American phenomenon, he said. “Most of my students could not tell me anything meaningful about slavery outside of America,” Pesta told The College Fix. “They are convinced that slavery was an American problem that more or less ended with the Civil War, and they are very...

Comedian Bill Maher delivered his long-anticipated and controversial speech at the University of California Berkeley winter commencement on Saturday–and it turned out to be a rather conventional liberal address. Though much debate surrounded Maher’s views on Islam, he largely avoided the subject, instead telling students to make climate change their generation’s priority. “I hope all of you here today consider the environment to be paramount among the many challenges we face.” Ironically, Maher would later tell students to think for themselves. “Be a free thinker. One reason our politics is so screwed up is that everyone has become so tribal....

Comedian and pundit Bill Maher is this year’s commencement speaker at the University of California-Berkeley’s winter graduation ceremony. While Maher’s original invitation to address today’s event was uncontroversial, after an on-air argument he subsequently had with Ben Affleck about the nature of Islam, campus Muslim groups at Berkeley demanded that Chancellor Nicholas Dirks retract Maher’s invitation to speak.