Free Republic

Students from universities including Yale, Stanford and UCLA have been refusing to eat in solidarity with Palestinians at risk of starvation in GazaWhen I speak to Iman Deriche, she hasn’t eaten in five days. “There are some moments of fatigue,” she says. “But I’m doing well.” The 21-year-old Stanford University student is one of 24 students and three faculty members who are taking part in a hunger strike in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. They aren’t alone: students and faculty at universities across the US are going on hunger strike with activist organisation Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), from...

Former President Barack Obama and failed presidential candidate Kamala Harris on Thursday night attacked the 47th president’s actions as dangerous and “unconstitutional.” Obama, during an on-stage interview at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, chided Trump’s efforts to right-size the federal government and crack down on rampant illegal immigration among other actions to fulfill his “America First” agenda. “It’s unimaginable that the same parties that are silent now would have tolerated behavior like that from me, or a whole bunch of my predecessors,” Obama said.

After decades of partnership with the U.S. government, colleges are facing new doubts about the future of their federal funding. President Donald Trump’s administration has been using the funding spigot to seek compliance with his agenda, cutting off money to schools including Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. All the while, universities across the country are navigating cuts to grants for research institutions. The squeeze on higher education underscores how much American colleges depend on the federal government — a provider of grants and contracts that have amounted to close to half the total revenue of some research universities,...

Republicans are searching for ways to "pay for" their tax cuts. Democrats want the rich to pay more tax. Here's a solution that should make everyone happy. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith is suggesting a tax on the $840 billion college endowments. These endowments will soon eclipse $1 trillion in size -- more money than the entire GDP of many countries. It's high time that bloated and entitled universities pay their fair share for the government services they use. Why not? Their professors forever lecture us about tax "fairness," but the schools where they teach a few...

President Donald Trump is ordering the deportation of foreign students who took part in pro-Hamas protests on college campuses in the US as he launches a wide-ranging crackdown on anti-Semitism. Trump said he would instruct his Justice Department to 'aggressively prosecute terroristic threats, arson, vandalism and violence against American Jews'. He added: 'To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice... we will find you, and we will deport you. 'I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathisers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never...

An anti-Israel convention that was recently held in a Chicago suburb offered advice to college students on how they could make their campus "Palestinian." The Free Press reported on the 17th Annual Convention for Palestine, which took place last week at the Tinley Park Convention Center... "I think we need like a JVP, or something like that, with Jewish people. We want White people, Jewish students there."... ...sessions geared towards college students include "Make Your Campus Palestinian" to "amplify the voices of Palestinian students" and to effectively oppose "anti-Palestinianism."

To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.Nicholas dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.This development puzzled Dames...

I previously criticized the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) for selecting Todd Wolfson as its new president. Wolfson is a controversial voice within the teaching academy and immediately doubled down on the bias against conservatives and those calling for greater intellectual diversity. He is now decrying the election and publicly joining the resistance to the Trump Administration. Some of us have been writing for years about the decline in viewpoint diversity and the rise of an academic orthodoxy in higher education. It is one of the focuses of my new book, The Indispensable Right. Wolfson personifies the intolerance for...

A radical activist who believes black students should only be taught by same-race teachers has received $20million from billionaires such as Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. Sharif El-Mekki has lobbied for a focus on anti-racism education in public schools through his prominent nonprofit and time as an adviser to Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, as reported by The Free Press. A former middle and high school teacher, El-Mekki lobbies through his nonprofit, the Center for Black Educator Development, CBED, which describes its mission as a 'world where... all black students are taught by high-quality, same-race teachers... Other donors of the foundation...

Abbey Ballentine, a student from Ohio’s Cleveland area, selected nearby Notre Dame College because it had everything she was looking for. It was a small, friendly campus with competitive Division II soccer and it was close to home.Illustration by The Epoch Times, Birmingham-Southern College, Cabrini University, Clarks Summit University, University of the ArtsBy late fall of 2023, just a few months into her freshman year, she heard rumors the school had financial problems.The official closure announcement was made early into the spring semester and the college closed its doors in May.Campus advisors and administrators helped students quickly find other schools...

Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts has fired 10 employees following anti-Israel protests at the school earlier this spring. “College leadership has made the difficult decision to eliminate ten staff positions to help us realize our necessary cost savings,” announced an Aug. 13 email sent by the college’s leadership. “We are grateful for the contributions these dedicated staff members have made to the College, and we have made arrangements to support them in this transition.” School President Jay M. Bernhardt initially announced the plans for the staff reduction on June 18, citing dropping enrollment in the college. Bernhardt attributed the falling...

Last year the Republican-controlled state government in Florida passed legislation requiring its public universities to do what are called “post-tenure reviews” on all their tenured professors every five years, as part of an effort to eliminate what Governor Ron DeSantis called “deadweight” and “unproductive tenured faculty.” The bill not only limited the ability of professors to protest termination decisions, it was also aimed at eliminating “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs across the board. At the University of Florida the first round of tenure review has now produced some startling numbers, literally proving DeSantis’ claims. The report said that, out of...

Before Cazenovia College in Upstate New York closed in May 2023 because of decreasing enrollment and financial problems, students were given a list of comparable schools in the same region with similar tuition fees, major courses of study, financial aid availability, and athletic programs.The administration building at Cazenovia College has remained vacant since the four-year school in Upstate New York closed in May 2023. A portion of the campus has since been leased to the New York State Police, which operate a training academy there. (Aaron Gifford / The Epoch Times)One of the schools on that list, Wells College, shut...

The higher-education industry is having a bad decade. Some problems are obvious: With wokeness and campus unrest, colleges and universities have lost some of their mystique. They’ll tell you to “follow the science,” right before they tell you that men can get pregnant. Violent antisemitic riots haven’t done much to burnish their image, nor have the limp responses to those riots from many university administrations. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make ridiculous. Mission accomplished! Then there’s the economics of it: The reward of college was supposed to be a good job at the end. [snip] Younger people are...

JEFFERSON CITY, Tenn. (WATE) — A scheme designed to let foreigners do information technology work as if they were actually in the United States has been unraveled by federal investigators. The investigation claimed that Jefferson City was home to one of several “laptop farms” that helped make the scheme possible.According to court documents, the schemes involved defrauding over 300 U.S. companies using U.S. payment platforms, online job site accounts and proxy computers located in the United States. The Justice Department shared that two people have been arrested and search warrants were executed in Jefferson City, Washington, D.C. and other jurisdictions.Federal...

More than two-thirds of Americans think the Supreme Court was right to hold Harvard's race-based admissions policy unlawful. But the minority who disagree have no doubt about their own moral authority, and there's every reason to believe that they intend to undo the Court's decision at the earliest opportunity. Which could be as soon as this year. In fact, undoing the Harvard admissions decision is the least of it. Republicans and Democrats in Congress have embraced a precooked "privacy" bill that will impose race/gender quotas not just on academic admissions but on practically every private and public decision that matters...

History gives us conviction and guidance. Today, as we watch ravaging antisemitism and the defacing of the American flag on university campuses, prevalent examples in history of courage and bravery should spur us to respond.In 1942, German medical student Hans Scholl was awakened to the persecution of Jews in the Western world. While serving on the Eastern Front, Scholl and his war buddies, Willi Graf and Alexander Schmorell, witnessed firsthand the Nazis’ murder of innocent Polish Jewish civilians.Scholl committed to exposing the evil being done against the Jewish population. Together with Graf, Schmorell, Sophia Scholl, and Christoph Probst, he began...

Why and how did this angry, odious, insufferable fantasist become the intellectual lodestar for the global left? This week, with the global celebration of May Day and with the ongoing protests on the nation’s college campuses, it is worth remembering that the man who largely inspired both was a hateful, intellectually shallow misanthrope, remembered by history and admired by jesters and dupes largely because of his odiousness. The First of May is celebrated by socialists around the world, not specifically because of Karl Marx but to honor the anarchists hanged for the Haymarket Affair in Chicago in 1886. Nevertheless, this...

Perhaps the noblest thing that thinking people can do is let America’s university system implode. Watching these pro-Hamas riots taking place on some of America’s most pampered and privileged college campuses feels a lot like ripping off a dirty bandage only to discover that the foul-smelling flesh is teeming with gangrene. I know that most of the country’s esteemed academic institutions traded intellectual vitality for vapid political correctness many years ago, but still, students waging violent jihad in support of Israel’s destruction are a gut-wrenching sight. These are the same youthful, useless idiots who are always banging on about banning...

Back on April 15, I received an extremely courteous message from Matthew Weinberg, the chairman of the UCLA chapter of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), inviting me to speak on campus in mid-May. While I was grateful for the invitation and immediately accepted, being invited to UCLA was the equivalent of getting a message from the dentist saying it’s time for a root canal: it’s painful and unpleasant, but necessary. The pro-Hamas mob in the campus encampment, however, might not allow someone as dangerous as me to speak there. Yes, they’re the ones in charge. YAF explained what is happening...