Free Republic

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...

The University of Saint Katherine, a small nonprofit in North San Diego County, recently announced it will close May 18, citing “financial pressure due to unprecedented inflation and rising state-mandated labor costs.” It’s not alone. Nationwide, universities face financial hardships that appear to be getting worse. More than 100 colleges and universities have closed or merged, or announced plans to, over the last eight years, according to a tracker updated this month by Higher Ed Dive. The list, which does not include for-profit colleges and also omits mergers among public institutions, totals 108 since 2016. The closures span the spectrum...

The anti-Israel demonstrations at Columbia University, among other colleges and universities, may be, for many involved, simply about venting anger or rage. But at Columbia, they do make a specific demand: that the university divest its endowment from firms involved in the Israeli economy. A December 1 document signed by 89 student groups—ranging from the Young Democratic Socialists of America to the Sexual and Reproductive Health Action Group at the Mailman School of Public Health—made divestment the explicit focus: Columbia’s current investment portfolio enables and lends legitimacy to Israel’s violations of international law. Columbia is both morally obligated and compelled...

Interrogations of university leaders spearheaded by conservative congressional representatives. Calls from right-wing senators for troops to intervene in campus demonstrations. Hundreds of student and faculty arrests, with nonviolent dissenters thrown to the ground, tear-gassed and tased.We’ve been here before. In my book “Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America,” I detail how, throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, conservative activists led a counterattack against campus antiwar and civil rights demonstrators by demanding action from college presidents and police. They made a number of familiar claims about student protesters: They were at once coddled elitists,...

As the pro-Hamas protests rage on at universities across the nation, some of our enemies are laughing at us and encouraging the protesters to wreak even more havoc. It’s been a crazy period as mobs have taken over a number of campuses and are making tent cities, chanting hateful messages, committing vandalism, and causing Jewish students to feel extremely unsafe. Militias backed by Iran, however, are enjoying our plight and our mocking the U.S., condemning Israel, and egging on students to keep it up:The Sabereen News, a Telegram channel affiliated with Iran-backed Iraqi militias is inciting American students to escalate...

An official with the Palestinian terror group Hamas and the supreme leader of Iran have praised the growing college campus protests in the United States against Israel's military offensive in Gaza, including pro-Hamas demonstrations at Columbia University that have driven fear into the hearts of Jewish students. Columbia University in New York City announced a shift to hybrid classes after protestors set up a "Gaza Solidarity Encampment" last Wednesday. This led to the arrest of more than 100 people after Columbia University President Minouche Shafik authorized police to clear the camp. The demonstrators resettled the encampment, and there have been...

The recent wave of violent protests and arrests at elite universities like Yale and Columbia have only confirmed for Scott Katz that he made the right decision to attend Elon University. The North Carolina college, where he is currently wrapping up his sophomore year, is a long way from his hometown of Lafayette Hill, the predominantly liberal Philadelphia suburb where the average home costs $610,000. Katz, who is Jewish, says the antisemitism that’s increasingly visible at colleges nationwide—especially in the Ivy League, and other elite institutions like Stanford and Berkeley—hasn’t even touched his campus. “I haven’t been affected by it...

The University of North Carolina system oversees 16 state universities. Campus locations include Chapel Hill, Wilmington, Charlotte, Asheville, and Greensboro. UNC-Chapel Hill, originally called the University of North Carolina, was founded in 1789 and is one of the oldest public universities in the United States. According to Wikipedia statistics, some 245,000 students attended UNC system universities in 2021. One of the schools in the UNC system, UNC-Greensboro, is in the news these days because of a decision by Chancellor Franklin D. Gilliam Jr. to cut undergraduate and/or graduate programs in physics, mathematics, computer science, anthropology and nursing, citing “university direction,...

History demonstrates that attempts to “cure” a problem by exceeding the federal government’s constitutional powers generally lead to more and worse problems... “A rage ... for an abolition of debts ... or for any other improper or wicked project ....” — James Madison, Federalist No. 10.. The courts, in the exercise of what is called “equity jurisdiction,” have long excused borrowers from obligations incurred through fraud, duress, and other forms of creditor unfairness.. In addition, federal bankruptcy laws (authorized in the Constitution by Article I, Section 8, Clause 4) offer a path to safety for debtors who get in over...

New details are emerging about the Canadian tourist charged with abducting and raping an 80-year-old grandmother with Alzheimer's at a luxurious Bahamas resort. Gordon Wilkie, 61, of New Waterford, Nova Scotia, was arrested and charged with rape in the shocking incident on January 28 at the Warwick Hotel Paradise Island Bahamas. DailyMail.com can confirm that Wilkie is a faculty member at Novia Scotia Community College, where he specializes in renewable energy and has been placed on leave following his arrest.