Free Republic

At one time, most Americans (and virtually all academics) would have agreed with the famous saying, often attributed to Voltaire, “While I disagree with what you say, I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Over the last several decades, that has dramatically changed. Many academics now seem to embrace the opposite view—something like, “Since I disagree with what you say, I will do everything possible to silence you.” Is that an exaggeration? You won’t think so after reading Nicholas Wolfinger’s new book, Professors Speak Out: The Truth About Campus Investigations. Wolfinger, a sociology professor at the...

The Trump Administration has delivered a significant blow to Harvard’s wallet with a move that will likely get challenged in court. As The New York Post reported, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem moved to kick out thousands of foreign students enrolled at Harvard University by terminating Harvard’s international student program. She explained this was the administration’s way of holding the Ivy League school accountable for its violent, Anti-Semitic, and pro-China activities. “This administration is holding Harvard accountable for fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus,” Noem wrote on X. “It is a privilege, not a...

The Trump administration is, for the first time since the emergence of the full-blown DEI regime in higher education, looking closely at what that movement has produced and where it runs counter to educational and political norms. The administration is using its authority to pressure colleges and universities to move away from practices that are not in conformity with those norms. This has led to bitter complaint from the advocates of DEI ideology. In a recent Inside Higher Ed article, writer Sara Weissman ponders the “DEI Hills Higher Education Is Willing to Die On.” Naturally, DEI advocates want people to...

only God can judge the human heart, the extent of understanding & the level of freedom & consent The above words were entered by George Pell into his prison journal on May 22nd, 2019. Lest We Forget a great Man of God.

The U.S. is known for having exceptional private business enterprises. It is the prime mover in creating the most powerful and bountiful economy in history and also for having great colleges and universities. Its schools dominate world college rankings and draw students from throughout the world. Yet American universities are facing a dramatic decline in public support. This is manifested in lower enrollments today than a dozen years ago and widespread threats to their funding, as both the Trump administration (via threats to revoke tax exemptions, reduced research support, etc.) and Congress pose what some college leaders deem existential threats...

Last spring, I coauthored an AEI report examining the taxpayer-subsidized Truman Scholarship program, founded in 1975 to identify “aspiring leaders” during their college years and encourage “their commitments to careers in public service.” We found an overwhelming left-wing bias. Among the fellows selected between 2021 and 2023, just six of 182 winners expressed interest in even a single conservative issue. Meanwhile, 72 had explicit interest in “woke” areas like “LGBT+” advocacy, DEI, or immigration rights, while dozens more had biographies readily recognizable as left-leaning. The Truman Foundation recently named its 2025 winners, and nothing has changed. The College Fix reported,...

The Texas House on Wednesday passed with strong bipartisan support a bill to address what’s been called the “sexual abuse crisis” in Texas public schools. HB 4623, filed by state Rep. Mitch Little, R-Lewisville, seeks to provide redress in response to tens of thousands of complaints filed against Texas educators. “We have a sexual abuse crisis in our public schools in Texas. It’s indisputable and we can’t look away,” Little said when discussing his bill on the House floor Tuesday night. “In 2019, this chamber established a mandatory educator misconduct reporting portal. Between September 21, 2021, and July 2024, there...

The Trump administration has escalated its battle with Harvard University, freezing all future grants and threatening to strip the school’s tax-exempt status. In response, Harvard has adopted some conciliatory measures— rebranding its DEI office and cancelling its racially segregated graduation ceremonies—but, behind the scenes, the university’s discrimination machine continues to operate at full capacity. We’ve obtained a trove of internal documents that reveal Harvard’s racial favoritism in faculty and administrative hiring. The university’s DEI programs are more than “unconscious bias” training. They are vectors for systematic discrimination against disfavored groups: namely, white men. As one Harvard researcher told us, “endless...

Over the last several years, we have seen many colleges and universities make aggrieved statements in response to current events, from the election of President Trump to the death of George Floyd. The social implication is that if a school doesn’t speak out on an event, it is agreeing by omission. Many argue, however, that when colleges get involved in political issues, it only makes the political divide on campus grow larger. In fact, a recent survey from Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab found that the majority of students don’t want colleges to make statements about political events at...

The Trump administration’s flurry of action on education reform creates space for states to chart their own paths. Efforts to abolish the Department of Education aim to “return education to the states.” Yet most conservative states have mostly been timid in embracing and building a better future for higher education. This is partly a fault of imagination, partly a lack of will. Florida led the way in both imagination and will. Many acts of the DeSantis administration presaged those of the Trump administration. Florida banned DEI offices, while the Trump administration is using national civil-rights laws to root them out....

There comes a time in every man’s life when he must face the consequences of thinking for himself. For me, that moment arrived in a quiet digital knock at midnight—the “Community Guidelines Violation” email. Innocent enough on the surface. But it was the beginning of my journey through what can only be described as the Google Digital Re-Education Camp™. You think gulags are bad? Try being shadow banned so thoroughly your own mom can’t find your content. Welcome to Camp Compliance The invitation was simple: “Attend voluntarily or disappear algorithmically.” At first, I resisted. I figured I’d survive in the...

Although the Trump administration has made significant inroads toward eradicating the taxpayer-supported spread of transgender ideology across America’s youth, some examples of the insidious practice still remain. Most recently, New York’s Museum of Natural History began drawing harsh criticism from parents and others who oppose an eight-minute video being played on a loop inside the museum. “Dragfox,” a stop-motion-animated production, tells the story of a fox who takes a “magical journey” with a cross-dressing boy wearing his sister’s dress. The thinly veiled pro-trans message wasn’t lost on a slew of parents and children’s advocates, as the New York Post reported:...

Paediatric gender dysphoria has rapidly emerged as one of the most divisive and urgent issues in medicine today. In the past decade, the number of children and adolescents identifying as transgender or nonbinary has soared. In the US alone, diagnoses among youth aged 6 to 17 nearly tripled—from around 15,000 in 2017 to over 42,000 by 2021—signalling a seismic shift not only in culture but in clinical practice. Children diagnosed with gender dysphoria—a condition defined by distress related to one’s biological sex or associated gender roles—are increasingly being offered powerful medical interventions. These include puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and, in...

Gruesome animal experiments ending under Jay Bhattacharya. "Upon entering NIH meetings, I sometimes caught a favored capo slouching down in his chair after dutifully raising Fauci’s own," anonymous agency veteran claims. ****************************************************************** Don Corleone is out. St. Francis of Assisi is in. The National Institutes of Health is morphing from Godfather – whose portrait allegedly hung over the desk of longtime National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci – to Good Shepherd under Director Jay Bhattacharya, the "fringe epidemiologist" who preached to his own church not to treat COVID-19 infection as sin. Bhattacharya put an end to...

For years, would-be higher-education reformers have warned that America’s higher education crisis—soaring tuition, crippling student debt, and weak learning—was rooted in a dangerous myth: every high school graduate should go to college.In 2025, the proof is glaring. Public confidence in colleges has crashed to 36%, down from 57% in 2015. The college-for-all dream, though well-intentioned, has inflated costs, buried millions in debt, and watered down education. Built on sand, its reputation is collapsing before us.But you wouldn’t know any of this from many media accounts, according to which, as in this breathless headline, “Trump’s Demands of Harvard Escalate His War...

A friend’s son just relayed that the president and administration of the University of Alabama are getting lots of hate mail for allowing President Trump to speak to their graduates on campus. If you watched that speech or just want to send a word of encouragement or appreciation, please send an email to President Bell at president@ua.edu

I'm referring to not just the curriculum or majors offered, but also the administration and staff roster. My guess: 75-80% can be eliminated without material impact to the American economy (in spite of the insistence by liberal arts professors that this won't be the case).

Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Tex) took to the airwaves to warn that "randomly kidnapping folks and sending them to other countries could be considered an act of war. Let's look at it from the perspective of these other countries. How you you feel if hardened criminals like Tren de Aragua and MS-13 gang members were sent into your country? You'd be thinking 'what did we do to deserve this?' I wouldn't be surprised if the World Court issued an arrest warrant for Donald Trump for doing what he's doing." Acting Director of the US Immigration and Customs Tom Homan challenged what...

Ohio colleges and universities should prepare students for their roles as good citizens, promote diverse academic thought on campus, and give graduates the basic skills they need to succeed at a price they can afford. Regrettably, many of the state’s schools have failed to meet these rudimentary goals. Despite paying lip service to the seemingly relevant notions of “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion,” university campuses breed contempt for dissenting views that stray from liberal orthodoxies, with 80 percent of college students recently saying that they self-censor their views for fear of retaliation. This is the case despite universities investing huge resources...

Universities are currently experiencing a full-blown assault from the federal government and from red-state politicians. Tired of subsidizing universities as a hotbed of ideological activism, Republican leaders are cutting budgets, forcing reorganizations, asserting control of university governance, and taking control of the general-education curriculum at state universities. Republicans have generally been more skeptical of generous funding of public education, including at the postsecondary level, but this is different. According to Gallup, 56 percent of Republicans in 2015 had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education. In 2024, only 20 percent of Republicans did, and 50...