Free Republic

Illinois State University’s first attempt to articulate its vision for reopening amid the coronavirus pandemic this fall didn’t sit well with everyone. The plan, dubbed “Redbirds Return” after the central Illinois college’s mascot, drew swift criticism from faculty after it was shared in early June, prompting instructors to draft their own proposals and call for greater precautions when scores of students are expected to descend on campus next month. The faculty’s letter objecting to plan has been signed by more than 500 employees, students, parents and other community members. “Since releasing the plan, we’ve received a great deal of feedback,”...

Sedition in the Obama Oval Office? Judicial Watch Sues On Illicit Foreign Funding of Our Colleges and Universities Soros Funds St. Louis Prosecutor Charging Couple for Protecting Home State Department Pushed Leftist Revolution? Trump Effect: Big Bet on Virus Drug Still Winning Sedition in the Obama Oval Office? Barack Obama, Joe Biden and their top intelligence officers huddled in the Oval Office shortly before Donald Trump was inaugurated to discuss what they would do about this new President they despised. Now we aim to find out more about this conspiracy. We just filed a FOIA suit against the Department...

A new report summarizes research showing the financial and health repercussions of keeping schools, colleges, and child-care facilities closed far outweigh any risk. The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity report also offers recommendations on how to reopen for the safest and fairest results. Report coauthor Avik Roy said in a tweet the report aims for policymakers to learn of and “heed the educational, social, and public health impact of prolonged school closures” for the nearly 80 million U.S. students who have already been out of school for months in 2020. The article described the nation’s current educational plans as...

The Jesuits were once renowned for their intellectual rigor. Any person who graduated from a Jesuit-run institution was presumptively well educated, morally centered, and capable of reasoning. Marquette University, a Jesuit institution, has slipped from that standard, for it attacked an incoming freshman for supporting Trump. However, the bracing honesty coming from New Saint Andrews College signals that there's still hope for a rigorous Christian education in America. In 1881, the Jesuits founded Marquette University, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. To Marquette's credit, although established as a single-sex men's college, in 1909, it became the first coeducational Catholic university in the world....

Faculty wants “dedicated study space” for Black students only, plus enforced “unconscious bias” training. Issuing the ultimate woke wishlist, The Faculty Association at California State university has demanded that all “Black Native, and Indigenous students” should be given free tuition as a “redress for systemic anti-Black racism in the CSU.” The CFA has also charged that “the historical and longstanding infrastructures of universities” should be dismantled because they are “fundamentally grounded in a white supremacist colonial discourse and culture.” Campus Reform reports that the CFA also wants to overturn the ban on affirmative action, and is arguing that “racial pay...

A friend of mine told me that her daughter, who attends UCLA, will be living at home and taking only online classes in the fall.  While the family will be spared the cost of on-campus housing, there is no tuition deduction.  On Monday, Harvard announced the same policy.  Also on Monday, the Trump administration used the new academic reality as a way to eject Chinese nationals from America. For several decades now, America's colleges and universities have been making bank by holding spaces open for foreign nationals, especially Chinese students who are the scions of powerful people in the Communist Party.  The beauty...

Fed up with Defund the Police? Worried that hordes of “peaceful protestors” might soon show up to burn and pillage your neighborhood? Want to make your views known but unsure where to begin? Here’s a way to hit back: DEFUND THE UNIVERSITIES. It’s no secret that much of the radical ideology fueling the Black Lives Matter and Antifa riots are the product of our dysfunctional higher educational system. Universities today are almost 100% hard left-wing bubbles, openly hostile to any conservative thought. They are intolerant of opposing opinions, the very opposite of the kind of dialogue intended for higher education,...

When mobs tore down a statue of Ulysses S. Grant and defaced a monument to African American veterans of the Civil War, many people wondered whether the protesters had ever learned anything in high school or college. Did any of these iconoclasts know the difference between Grant and Robert E. Lee? Could they recognize the name "Gettysburg"? Could they even identify the decade in which the Civil War was fought?Universities are certainly teaching our youth to be confident, loud and self-righteous. But the media blitz during these last several weeks of protests, riots and looting also revealed a generation that...

As colleges attempt to recover from the pandemic and prepare for future semesters, a New York University professor estimates that the next 5-10 years will see one to two thousand schools going out of business. Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at the New York University Leonard N. Stern School of Business told Hari Sreenivasan on PBS’ “Amanpour and Co.” that many colleges are likely to suffer to the point of eventual extinction as a result of the coronavirus. He sets up a selection of tier-two universities as those most likely not to walk away from the shutdown unscathed. During the...

Behind the anti-American hate seen in the current rioting, arson, and looting is the long term undermining of America carried out systematically in our universities. Various social movements—the counter-culture movement of the 1960s, the feminist movement from the 1960s, the revival of Marxism in the 1970s, the race activists from the Black Panthers to Black Lives Matter, the gay liberation movement, the Palestinian anti-Israel movement—have been adopted and absorbed in universities in their most extreme and maximalist forms. Professors have ceased to see themselves as scholars striving for impartial and objective knowledge, choosing instead to be advocates of preferred groups...

American universities may be next to feel the big chill in China-US relations as a group of US lawmakers are proposing a bill to ban mainland Chinese from studying science and technology in the United States, arguing they pose a threat to national security. The two senators and one member of the House of Representatives on Wednesday said the Secure Campus Act would effectively bar Chinese nationals from receiving visas for graduate or postgraduate study in so-called STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields. Those from Taiwan and Hong Kong would be exempt. “The Chinese Communist Party has long used...

Colleges are laying off their adjunct faculty, who mostly are women and people of color. Keisha Blain attended a top program in her field, collaborated with renowned scholars and wrote an award-winning dissertation — all of which she was sure would lead to an immediate and secure academic appointment. But upon graduating from Princeton University with a Ph.D. in history in 2014, she discovered that she had vastly underestimated the number of scholars seeking tenure-track positions. Blain was competing not only against her direct peers, but also against talented scholars who hadn't been able to find steady work in the...

Than Asian Americans Artificially diversifying universities through quotas does not help to close the very real racial achievement gap in education. CaliforniaÂ’s legislature is trying, yet again, to bring back racial preferences in college admissions. Never mind that its residents overwhelmingly approved a ban against such discrimination in a referendum. If lawmakers succeed, they will penalize Chinese Americans, a growing force in the state. So why such dogged determination that could backfire politically?Several forces are at work here. One is that without such inducements as the racial preferences of affirmative action, the whole structure of identity politics eventually collapses. Those...

A probe by the Department of Education into colleges that accept foreign investments and donations has uncovered $6 billion in previously unreported foreign donations from US adversaries including China and Russia. House Republicans were monitoring the investigation into the schools to determine if they were violating Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965, which prohibits an “Institution of Higher Learning” from failing to properly report foreign gifts of $250,000 or more. In a letter from the department, general counsel Reed Rubinstein said that while some colleges recognized that foreign cash from US adversaries could pose a security risk,...

Admissions tests, allegedly biased against minority students, will be phased out over five years The University of California board of regents voted Thursday to stop using the SAT and ACT college admissions exams, reshaping college admissions in one of the largest and most prestigious university systems in the country and dealing a significant blow to the multibillion-dollar college admission testing industry. The unanimous 23-to-0 vote ratified a proposal put forward last month by UC President Janet Napolitano to phase out the exams over the next five years until the sprawling UC system can develop its own test. The battle against...

The University of Missouri announced the furloughing of 579 employees, one of several measures to reduce a $17 million shortfall in the budget year that ends June 30. The furloughs come in addition to 49 layoffs, 569 salary reductions, and 217 voluntary salary decreases. Administrators also are planning for a 12.5% cut for the upcoming fiscal year that begins on July 1. West Virginia University identified 875 employees who will be placed on temporary furloughs, beginning May 24 and lasting either through June 28 or July 26. The University expects to save $4 million through the furloughs. On Thursday, the...

Harvard decided not to apply for their $9 million share of the $2.2 trillion CARES Act - the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, after President Donald Trump brought the issue into the national limelight. Princeton followed suit. The other Ivies are still deciding whether to accept up to $62.9 million in CARES money — despite their collective endowment of $140 billion. However, our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com discovered that these funds are just the tip of the iceberg. We scoured the backend of the U.S. Department of Education website and found the full database: 5,137 colleges and universities that...

Any tax-funded bailouts for higher ed need to be contingent upon urgent structural reforms, and a new paper from the National Association of Scholars provides the blueprint. Should universities receive taxpayer-funded bailouts? The answer depends on who you ask. According to Universities U.K., the lobby group for British universities, the answer is an unequivocal yes, even when the suggestion has caused some dithering and calls for a further probe into the Conservative-led government.The Russell Group Universities, the British version of the American Ivies, will be the hardest hit due to the latest crisis, according to one study. In the United...

KALAMAZOO, MI -- More layoffs are coming for employees at Western Michigan University as leaders look to cut expenses amid the coronavirus pandemic. The university will implement staffing reductions in phases between now and September, said Jennifer Bott, provost and vice president for academic affairs, during a budget briefing published this week on Western’s YouTube channel. WMU could lose another $85 million in the next fiscal year because of the coronavirus pandemic, Bott said. Further staffing cuts will be part of overall cost-cutting efforts, she said, as nearly 70% of the university’s general fund expenses go to employee compensation. “We...

Harvard University is preparing to cut more expenses as revenue losses deepen due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The university reported a $415 million revenue loss in fiscal year 2020, and it projects a $750 million shortfall from original budget plans in the next fiscal year, which begins July 1. Those projected losses are causing university officials to consider furloughs and layoffs, Harvard said in a Tuesday letter to its community. The university announced initial cost cutting measures last month, including salary freezes for all faculty and exempt staff, a university-wide hiring freeze, deferring or canceling all discretionary spending, a review...