Free Republic

The Democratic Socialists of America have been growing in power within the Democratic Party, most notably by capturing a number of Democrat nominations in the 2026 primaries, though it’s important to remember that they already hold plenty of seats in public office. They aren’t a new phenomenon in 2026, it’s just that they are now receiving substantial public notice in 2026. A very different thing. In fact, the Democratic Socialists of America – essentially the borderless movement of global communism – have been making inroads in the Democratic Party for generations, but only recently have they felt comfortable dropping the...

No state matches Florida in higher education reform. Its landmark Senate Bill 266, passed during the 2023 legislative session, abolished DEI offices. It also requires general education reform in state universities and colleges. Few reforms simply implement themselves. The rubber of implementation started hitting university roads in 2023. Florida’s Board of Governors (BOG), which oversees the entire university system, put forward a rule to remove Sociology 1000: The Principles of Sociology as part of general education reform. Final BOG approval came in early 2024. Then Florida’s college system removed Sociology 1000 from its 28 schools in April 2024. Beginning in...

Michigan activist Robert Davis joined investigative reporter Charlie LeBuff on his “No BS Newshour” podcast that was released on Wednesday. During their discussion, Davis argued that Jocelyn Benson is ineligible to run for public office in Michigan after she allegedly made false statements on her campaign forms for governor. Michigan election law can be very strict, preventing candidates who make minor errors in their paperwork from getting on the ballot. Robert Davis claims Jocelyn Benson was not truthful on her forms and should be removed from the ballots. Davis went further, saying Benson should also lose her current position as...

Massachusetts District Court Judge Richard Stearns dismissed the Trump administration's lawsuit asserting that Harvard University was not doing enough to quell antisemitism on its campus. Stearns acknowledged that "while there have been incidents of Jews being threatened, intimidated, and discriminated against, who's to say that the University must take action? It seems to me that any actions that could be taken would run afoul of the First Amendment's prohibition of interference in the 'free exercise' of Muslim religious beliefs. The Quran contains many passages explicitly calling for the persecution, subjugation, and killing of Jews. The Trump Administration's demand that University...

It turns out that a controversial University of Chicago professor arrested last year for alleged felony aggravated battery on a police officer is the sister of Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for a U.S. Senate seat in Michigan. Eman Abdelhadi, an assistant professor focused on religion, gender, identity, and demography, is El-Sayed’s maternal half-sister, the Washington Free Beacon reported. “A self-described ‘Queer Muslim’ and ‘community organizer’ who uses the pronouns ‘she/they,’ she has been at the center of far-left protests on campus,” the Beacon reported. Abdelhadi, a signatory to an open letter pledging “solidarity” with the “Palestinian resistance” shortly after...

Simon Baron-Cohen, the distinguished Cambridge autism specialist, has been speaking movingly about his friend, Jason Arday, in a BBC radio interview. Baron-Cohen said the last contact he had with Arday was hours before he was found dead at an address in south London yesterday afternoon: “He really wasn’t coping. He was being subjected to relentless scrutiny…ridicule, discrediting every detail of his life… He wasn’t coping with the loss of his career, the loss of his reputation. He felt he couldn’t go on.” Baron-Cohen went on to talk about him as “an incredibly kind and gentle and caring and generous man”....

Universities play—or should play—a critical role helping the next generation of teachers, legislators, judges, and voters understand how to live together in our constitutional republic. For many students, they represent the first opportunity to join with others to address a need or advocate for a cause, which is a freedom central to American liberty. But while the Supreme Court has mostly gotten free speech on campuses right, it has left freedom of association at risk. Congress should ensure that our taxpayer-funded public universities are modeling the constitutional values necessary to preserve the republic for the next 250 years. In 1831,...

The leadership of the “Student Intifada,” the National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP), has escalated its war against normalcy and decency in academia. Its incrementalist approach to taking over every campus (as it has haughtily claimed is inevitable) began with targeting students, moved on to targeting faculty, and has now put university presidents and trustees in its cross hairs. The following cases represent only a subset of their recent activities. Cornell University President Targeted The post-October 7 attacks against Jewish students are well-known and widely-documented. So too are efforts to isolate and stigmatize Jewish and Zionist faculty members. Only...

Oregon State University requires undergraduate students who enrolled in summer 2025 or later to complete two “Difference, Power & Oppression” (DPO) courses as part of its Core Education curriculum. The university’s core education requirements include “Difference, Power & Oppression Foundations” and “Difference, Power & Oppression Advanced.” Many courses can fulfill each requirement. Professors must complete specialized training to teach DPO courses. In addition to “difference, power, and oppression,” participants in the DPO Academy learn about “feminist and critical pedagogies” and “fundamentals of curriculum transformation.” The description of the Advanced courses explains the reasoning for the requirement. “The inequitable distribution of...

... The paper “Niceness as Whiteness in School Police Officers’ Perceptions of Student Arrest” addresses the “perceptions of arrest” by school resource officers, or SROs) in two school districts. The officers appear to be precisely what you are looking for in an SRO: empathetic and reluctant to make arrests. The researchers admit that they try to avoid arrests. However, according to the authors, hidden behind those sympathetic approaches was, of course, a boiling caldron of racism in terms of the racial disparity of those arrested. Indeed, the researchers realized that it was the niceness itself that was the evidence of...

... Although more Americans identify as conservative than liberal, policy programs tilt far to the left. In many programs, the number of conservative faculty is negligible, with left-leaning faculty outnumbering their right-leaning counterparts at leading policy schools by 7-to-1. While the leftward lean of university faculty and administration is old news, the lack of ideological diversity in policy schools has a particular import. After all, policy schools are explicitly charged with educating students to navigate issues like taxation, policing, abortion, and immigration. A half-century ago, Harvard University president Derek Bok explained that programs like his institution’s famed Kennedy School of...

Jasmine Crockett recently repeated a familiar talking point: that black women are the most educated demographic in America. However, this false claim is not supported by the data. Yet it continues to circulate in political discourse because it serves a psychological need rather than an empirical one. According to the Postsecondary National Policy Institute, Asian and white women hold bachelor’s degrees at higher rates than black women. Hence, black women are not the most educated group in the country. The statistic that black women are the most educated relies on selective interpretations of enrollment data among narrow age cohorts. It...

A point that has generated much discussion is the decline in confidence in and support for higher education. Over the last ten years or so, the percentage of Americans who say they have a high degree of confidence in our colleges and universities has fallen, while the percentage who say they’re skeptical about the value of higher education has risen sharply. Many in the higher education establishment have dismissed this as having no importance—merely the result of increasingly vicious right-wing polemics aimed at one of the nation’s great engines of “progressive” influence, they say. Nothing to be concerned about. Some...

Meta has been ordered to pay $567 million into a New Mexico abatement fund after a judge found the company’s platforms contributed to the youth mental health crisis in the state, marking another major blow to Big Tech in a growing wave of child safety litigation. The order, reported by CNBC, follows an earlier finding that Meta willfully violated New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act. The company had already been hit with $375 million in civil penalties earlier this year. The new $567 million abatement fund brings the total price tag in the case to nearly $1 billion. Judge Bryan Biedscheid...

It’s now been three years since the United States Supreme Court declared that race may never be used as a “negative” or operate as a “stereotype” in higher education. While that landmark case, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, dismantled affirmative action in admissions, race still lingers as a factor in many other areas of higher education. One such area is financial aid—specifically grants and scholarships. The National Scholarship Providers Association estimates that 11% of all higher-education scholarships still contain eligibility requirements for race, ethnicity, or other demographic factors, even after SFFA. Race-based scholarships, though, are facing increasing scrutiny. Last...

On Monday morning, Columbia Journalism School reminded the public of how much it’s a waste of time and money as a black hole of far-left propaganda by declaring that they were “pleased to welcome” former CBS’s 60 Minutes correspondents Scott Pelley and Sharyn Alfonsi as “Journalists in Residence” for the upcoming academic year. Dean Jelani Cobb — who appears regularly on MS NOW to offer deranged, hate-filled hot takes against half the country — made the announcement as something they’re “excited and honored” to have happen, adding “[t]heir distinguished track records in investigative reporting highlight the amazing opportunity our students...

In March, a jury convicted Colin Gray on multiple charges, including second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter, stemming from his decision to give his son, Colt Gray, a rifle for Christmas. ============================================================ Colin Gray, who gave his 14-year-old son a rifle as a Christmas gift that was later used in a high school shooting, was sentenced on Thursday to 15 years in prison. In March, a jury convicted Gray on multiple charges, including second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter, stemming from his decision to give his son, Colt Gray, a rifle for Christmas. Colt Gray used the gun in a mass shooting...

Shortly before Donald Trump’s second inauguration, I summarized for the Martin Center the possible reforms to collegiate accreditation his administration might adopt. I divided these conservative reforms into three broad groups: anti-DEI measures, outcomes-based reforms, and elimination of accreditors’ role as “gatekeepers” of Title IV tuition aid. The U.S. Department of Education recently concluded its “Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization (AIM) negotiated rulemaking” process. The results are predictably less sweeping than Trump’s campaign rhetoric promised, but largely follow the lines he drew then and in his subsequent executive order. I will briefly summarize the newly approved rule changes under those same...

Harvard Medical School (HMS) has just released the Report of the HMS Open Inquiry Working Group, which contains detailed recommendations for restoring liberty to the school. These recommendations, if put into practice, would institute significant reform at HMS. But that is very important—and even if successful, they would leave vital work undone. The Working Group was a serious effort. Dean George Daley called on HMS’ emeritus dean Jeffrey S. Flier to chair it—and Flier has an impressive track record of pronouncements in favor of intellectual pluralism. His selection as chair indicated a real commitment to reform. The Report includes eleven...

Thirty-two college students have failed part of their history midterm exam after falling for an AI-cheat trap when they blindly copying ChatGPT-generated answers without bothering to proofread thoroughly. Jason Gibson, a history professor at Alcorn State University in Mississippi, secretly embedded a hidden prompt in the exam instructions using a white font, invisible to students but readable by AI chatbots if the instructions were copied and pasted. The prompt instructed the AI to randomly insert absurd nonsense about Madagascar into every response. Instead of answering questions about the Industrial Revolution, dozens of students unknowingly turned in essays declaring that "Madagascar...