Free Republic

A California professor has been busted for trying to arrange to rape a 7-year-old in conversations with an undercover FBI agent where he suggested luring the girl with a doll and chocolate, prosecutors said. Rodger “Rod” Githens, an associate professor at the University of the Pacific, was arrested on April 21 on charges including receipt and distribution of images of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct, a criminal complaint from the Eastern District of California confirms. The graphic complaint includes extensive details of Githens’ online conversations with an undercover FBI agent posing as a “‘taboo-friendly’” 30-year-old man who claimed...

In a demonstration of its “commitment to inclusion,” the Purdue University Student Government agreed to allocate $17,000 for a “rainbow crosswalk” during its last official meeting of the school year. According to The Exponent, the crosswalk will span the intersection of Mitch Daniels Boulevard (formerly West State Street) and Grant Street (pictured). Resolution author Lillian Ferguson said the high cost of the project is due to its “more resilient” thermoplastic design in lieu of mere paint. She noted such materials would give the crosswalk a decade of life before it would need repairs or replacement.

Former University of Kentucky championship swimmer Riley Gaines was recently assaulted by demonstrators at San Francisco State University for her support of keeping biological men out of women’s sports.Federal Appeals Court Judge Kyle Duncan was shouted down at Stanford Law School.Cornell University’s student government recently passed a resolution calling for automatic trigger warnings from faculty — though, thankfully, the administration rejected it.College campuses have long been the front line for America’s culture wars. Columbia University, Princeton, Brandeis, and the University of California at San Diego gave jobs to Marxists, such as Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm in the...

Mississippi’s public colleges and universities have until Thursday to send an accounting of their spending on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) to the state. The request comes from an Apr. 6 email sent by the Office of the State Auditor to the eight schools in the Institutions of Higher Learning (IHE). In her email, Laura Gray of the office’s Government Accountability Division calls the probe “a performance review” of DEI programs. The Sun Herald recently shared a copy of the email sent to Delta State University in Cleveland and writes that the office made its request based on a similar...

A U.S. judge delivered a speech at a university on March 24, a few weeks after students and a top staffer prevented him from doing so at Stanford University. U.S. District Judge Kyle Duncan, a Trump appointee, told listeners at the University of Notre Dame that there’s a “vital tradition of free speech in this country” and that students have the right to protest him. “It’s a great country, where you can harshly criticize federal judges and nothing bad will happen to you. You might even get praised or promoted,” he said. “But make no mistake. What went on in...

Recent reports attribute the nationwide low reading proficiency for K-12 students, in part, to progressive curricula from teachers colleges. Progressive approaches to teaching reading, one education advocate said, come from a 'desire to ... move away from what had been thought of as the drudgery and pain of institutional style education.' ... Recent reports show that school districts are ditching progressive curricula from teachers colleges and returning to best practices for reading. The nationwide low reading proficiency for K-12 students is attributed, in part, to these curricula. Though Campus Reform has identified teachers colleges as sites of social justice and...

MADISON, Wis. — Most students who responded to a survey about free speech on University of Wisconsin campuses said they’re afraid to express their views on controversial topics in class because they fear other students won’t agree or it could hurt their grades, according to findings released Wednesday. A third of respondents, meanwhile, said they’ve felt pressure from an instructor to agree with a certain viewpoint. Almost half said they at least somewhat agree that administrators should bar controversial speakers if some students find the message offensive. “I want the University of Wisconsin System to be looked upon as a...

As students recover from a ‘hangover from virtual high school,’ some Pittsburgh-area universities are responding with shorter tests and looser policies around attendance and deadlines. Some instructors lower expectations for students’ mental health and as a response to generational differences, but others say that continuing remote learning habits does a disservice to students. ... Recent interviews with students and instructors in the Pittsburgh area reveal that some colleges and universities responded to the pandemic by lowering expectations. A PublicS ource article described a “hangover from virtual high school” at Point Park University, the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt), and other Pittsburgh...

When it comes to fighting the power, Prof. Mark J. Perry is doing it. He’s been filing complaints for civil rights violations against universities that discriminate on the basis of race and sex – for example, establishing all-women or all-minority scholarships or programs – because doing so, even if it’s for fashionable reasons, is against the law. I asked him a to talk about what he’s doing and why, and at the end he has some advice on how you can help, and an offer of assistance. I chime in with some other things you can do. 1. Please describe...

Russell Jacoby, Professor Emeritus, Department of History, UCLA, admits that in the late 1980s, “I argued that the conservatives should awake from their nightmare of radical scholars destroying America and relax; academic revolutionaries preoccupied themselves with their careers and perks. If they made waves, they were confined to the campus pool.” Today he writes, “Only now do I see I got something wrong—as did my critics. … I missed something, the dawning takeover of the public sphere by campus denizens and lingo.” Indeed, Jacoby’s December 19, 2022 article in The Tablet is titled, “The Takeover. Self-righteous professors have spawned self-righteous...

In the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, academic-freedom disputes routinely took a particular shape. In a small town, somewhere in the heartland, there would be a college campus on which a young academic loudly voiced his opinions on controversial matters—mostly political, but sometimes also on sexual morality, or even on legalizing drugs. This would offend the sensitivities of some local townspeople. Someone like the local mayor would lean on the college president (probably a personal friend), the president would then lean on the department chair, and the young professor was soon gone. The American Association of University Professors would then...

Roughly one century ago, “progressives” set out to take over American education. They wanted to extirpate the individualism that had always been the hallmark of the people’s character, so that they would be receptive to the collectivism and central control that progressivism calls for. The best way to make that happen would be to instill their precepts in young minds. The progressives (I will not call them “liberals” even though that’s common parlance today; the progressive project is the exact opposite of true liberalism) have been extraordinarily successful in their goal of dominating our educational institutions. For many decades, they...

From time to time something happens which seems to illustrate and magnify a very disturbing and possibly catastrophic impact on society. Such an episode erupted in New York recently. Dr. Maitland Jones, Jr., a prestigious professor of organic chemistry at New York University, was fired by the University’s administration over the strong protests of his fellow professors in the Chemistry Department. Why was Dr. Jones fired? The answer is simply because he was “too hard” and students were not receiving the grades in his class to which they felt they were entitled. First, who is Dr. Jones? A three-time graduate...

Colleges nationwide and in California continue to lose undergraduate students, but the declines have slowed compared to the past two years when the pandemic upended education, a national report shows. California saw a 1.1% drop in undergraduates since last year, a slower decline than last fall when enrollment dipped 5.9%, according to preliminary fall 2022 data released Thursday by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Nationally, the rate of undergraduate decline is also 1.1%, which is slightly less than the 1.7% drop in fall 2019. For the first time since the pandemic, the declines nationwide are steeper at four-year schools...

On Thursday’s broadcast of CNN’s “New Day,” CNN Chief Business Correspondent and host Christine Romans stated that under President Joe Biden’s student loan cancellation, “the winners are the colleges that just keep raising tuition again and again and again.” And the plan doesn’t address the root cause of student loan debt, the massive cost of college.

DEVELOPING: The son of a Boston police captain was an ISIS supporter who planned to set off an improvised explosive device and was arrested after illegally purchasing four firearms on July 4, according to the AP and a Justice Department press release. Authorities say 23-year-old Alexander Ciccolo, who also went by the name Ali Al Amriki, spoke about setting off an explosive device “in places where large numbers of people congregate, such as college cafeterias,” and was seen purchasing a pressure cooker similar to the kind used by the perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing.

Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares issued a legal opinion this week addressing the issue of vaccine mandates at state institutions of higher education. The issue at hand was whether or not in-state colleges and universities could require the vaccine “as a general condition of enrollment or in-person attendance.” "A prior Opinion of this office…concluded that the ‘broad specific and implied discretion’ granted to institutions of higher education in § 23.1-1301 and other statutes contained in Chapter 13 of Title 23.1 permitted public institutions of higher education to condition in-person attendance on receipt of an approved COVID-19 vaccine. That opinion, however,...

Findings come as anti-Semitic attacks on students have skyrocketed in recent years An overwhelming number of diversity, equity, and inclusion officers at American universities, who are ostensibly hired to create a welcoming space on campus, use social media to bash Israel and Jews, according to a study. Researchers reviewed the Twitter feeds of 741 diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) officials at 65 different U.S. universities to determine their attitudes on Israel and, for purposes of comparison, China. They found that DEI staff "tweeted, retweeted, or liked almost three times as many tweets about Israel as tweets about China." Of the...

Public colleges disperse hundreds of thousands of dollars in financial aid to scammers; professor says it’s abuse of taxpayer dollars and real students can’t enroll in needed courses The California Community Colleges system is being overwhelmed by thousands of fake students, or “bots,” applying and enrolling in classes to scam money from financial aid. Kim Rich, a criminal justice professor at Pierce College, first noticed the issue during the summer semester in June 2021, when she discovered multiple “students” in her online class exhibiting suspicious behavior: submitting work done by someone outside the class, registering for the same courses, and...

Public health officials are investigating an influenza outbreak at a Michigan university that has resulted in more than 500 cases, as several schools have also seen surges in flu activity. The University of Michigan's Ann Arbor campus in Washtenaw County has reported over 525 cases among students since Oct. 6 -- about three-quarters of them among people unvaccinated against the flu... ...Other campuses are also battling flu outbreaks. Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey, has logged 150 flu cases among students since Nov. 1... Spikes in flu cases have also been seen at Florida State University and Florida A&M University,...