Free Republic

This coming January, the NCAA will convene in Texas to decide the future of standardized testing requirements for student-athletes. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the NCAA and universities nationwide have taken steps to waive or modify admissions and eligibility criteria. With the pandemic coming to an end, it is yet to be determined which policies and requirements will be reimplemented by these institutions and which may be scrapped entirely. Division I and Division II college athletes are held to a specific set of academic eligibility requirements by the NCAA. These include a minimum GPA (2.3 for Division I...

American higher education is a stunning success, but mostly for the people who work in it. Faculty members and administrators enjoy employment that pays pretty well and is more secure than jobs in most other fields. The working conditions are pleasant, and the perquisites are often alluring. The purpose of colleges and universities, however, is not to provide a comfortable living for the faculty and staff but to educate students. In that regard, they have been doing worse and worse for the last 50 years. The cost of education (or at least of obtaining a degree) has risen enormously, while...

This week the Department of Education sent out letters to the 16 million students who expected the government to cancel at least $10,000 of the debt they each accrued to attend expensive colleges. In the letter, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona expressed sympathy for their plight and blamed "enemies of our democracy for thwarting the President's efforts to reduce your suffering." "As we saw this year, the Supreme Court--the most undemocratic institution within our government--cruelly block the President's executive order granting you partial relief," Cardona wrote. "They said he lacked authority to unilaterally do this since the Constitution gave Congress...

The “ivory tower” has long been the lens through which American popular culture views higher education. The phrase conjures up images of seminar rooms and high-minded ideas debated at a comfortable distance from the “real world.” It is this picture, however, that is now out of touch with reality. Facing stagnant salaries, diminished job security, pressure to maintain student enrollment, and an ever more anti-intellectual culture, few professors feel like they are living in anything like a lofty ivory tower. If there is a constituency still living the ivory tower dream, it is not professors but their bosses: university administrators....

While Charles de Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws was an oft-cited source during the federal convention of 1787, his observations weren’t limited to the balance of powers in government. He also touched on the nature of educational systems in republics and despotisms. Parents and educators form our first impressions. They prepare people for civil life in republics and for servitude in despotisms. From previous chapters, Montesquieu had explained the springs, the forces which propel nations. Public virtue is the propellant in republics, while the bayonet of fear prods despotisms. Education in despotic countries debases the mind. The mind of...

A conservationist in Ukraine discovered an ancient cave complex with Viking carvings behind an abandoned house. Dmytro Perov, a conservationist at the Center for Urban Development in Kyiv, grew up hearing stories about an ancient cave somewhere on the estate of his great-great-grandmother and her family, he told Life Pravda in a Nov. 7 interview. Perov knew the location of the three-story manor — now a dilapidated, abandoned house — in central Kyiv. Perov decided to investigate, he told Live Pravda. He went with a few friends to try and find the cave. After searching for half a day, the...

Jumping to conclusions is sometimes a big mistake. I recently became puzzled and mildly infuriated when I read that Stanford University was going to have a conference on freedom of expression and academic freedom—but was admitting only invitees, allowing no press or other interested persons to attend. That sounded like limiting expression and dissent to me. Then I read the news accounts further and realized that Stanford’s graduate business school was making a prudent decision. More specifically, the school’s Classical Liberal Initiative was inviting a blue-chip group of serious scholars, entrepreneurs, and free-speech activists for what looked like a stellar...

In September 2022, three researchers published the provocatively titled article, “Do Introductory Courses Disproportionately Drive Minoritized Students Out of STEM Pathways?” That article got loads of social media publicity for its conclusion that unequal withdrawal rates from STEM degree tracks are due to systemic racism. Co-authors Chad Topaz (“Data scientist/mathematician and activist” and co-founder of the Institute for the Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity and Equity) and Nate Brown (“Math faculty like me can be a major barrier to diversifying STEM fields”) added to their scholarly research an opinion article that provides a guide for “How STEM Faculty Can Fight...

Full Title: President Reagan's Photo Opportunities on November 13, 1987, President Reagan Meeting with Congressman Frank Wolf and Senators Jesse Helms and Bill Armstrong in Oval Office, President Reagan Meeting with Senators Joe Biden and Strom Thurmond in Oval Office, President Reagan Meeting with American Legion Commander in Oval Office, President Reagan Meeting with American Lung Association Poster Child in Oval Office (Tom Smothers with Yo-Yo) on November 12, 1987

A group of Russian archaeologists and historians was invited to Mexico to examine the famous collection of El Toro artifacts. As a rule, these are stone and clay products, which depict various motifs of ancient Indian culture. However, among the numerous objects found, images that clearly point to paleocontact are of the greatest interest. Academic science at the beginning of the 21st century proclaimed all artifacts related to such topics as falsifications. And, by the way, about 20 thousand items have already been discovered, and their number is increasing. It was the latest artifacts from the collection that ended up...

I believe this is from the Dan Smoot Report from the 1960s: VIDEO AT LINK........... “The ideal of a constitutional republic is individual liberty. In this century, great strides have been made toward the goal of subverting our republic, and transforming it into a democracy. The foremost tactic of the subverters is subversion of “language” — by calling America a democracy, until people thoughtlessly accept the term, and use the term. Totalitarians have obscured the real meanings and principles of American government.” ~ Dan Smoot Notice that Benjamin Franklin did NOT say “a democracy if you can keep it”. He...

In July, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) published a 190-page proposal for new rules under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. If passed, the rules would reintroduce Obama-era standards for defining and addressing “sexual harassment,” which means, in practice, restrictive speech codes, proliferating Title IX jobs on the public dime, and campus kangaroo courts. This time, the OCR intends to add a mandatory reporting requirement that would turn teachers and professors into enforcers of an infantilizing sex bureaucracy. The most troubling aspect of the new rules, however, is what they do on the gender-identity...

Student loans have been at the forefront of higher-education policy discussions for quite some time. The recent actions taken by the Biden Administration on student-loan forgiveness have made the issue all the more prevalent. One of the key arguments of those who favor forgiveness is that students didn’t know what they were getting themselves into when they signed up for huge loans. While I don’t entirely buy that argument, my own experience with student loans suggests that it has a surprising amount of credence. According to a survey conducted by the Brookings Institution, only 52 percent of surveyed students could...

This week Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker blocked enforcement of Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act,” saying that “it infringes on the right of university professors to exercise their freedom of speech in their classrooms.” Walker declared that “professors are the priests of our democracy. The enemies of our democracy cannot be permitted to interfere with their efforts to convert students to the correct way of thinking about our history and our society.” Bryan Griffin, press secretary for Gov. Ron DeSantis asserted that “the Stop WOKE Act protects the open exchange of ideas by prohibiting teachers who hold agency over others...

My sources are a current article on a homicidally, sexually obsessive chromosomal-xy, whose case is of a type commented-on long ago by a true expert, former Psychiatrist in Chief, Johns-Hopkins Hospital, who showed in his 2004 FirstThings article Surgical Sex that a large proportion of male-to-female transgenders have a psychiatric disorder, a "paraphilia", called auto-gynephilia--they want to become women so they can have lesbian sex with chromosomal-xx persons. And I will refer to a book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters by Abigail Shrier that shows that young chromosomal-xx people are so pressured into violent sex by chromosomal-xy...

Remedial classes have been standard practice at community colleges since about the 1980s. The original intent of these not-for-credit courses was to protect underperforming students from failing actual college classes. Remedial courses gave such students the extra support they needed to eventually take those classes—and succeed in obtaining a degree. However, in recent years there has been some debate over the effectiveness of remedial courses. This culminated when Governor Gavin Newsom of California signed a bill severely limiting the ability of community colleges to place students into such classes. Colleges cannot now mandate remedial courses for academically underprepared students except...

Dryden Community School Board in Michigan just appointed their youngest-ever trustee, Carl Austin Miller Grondin, at age 23 and parents are outraged over his disturbing online presence. Parents aren’t upset about his age, but rather over his antics. Active on TikTok and Instagram, Grondin describes himself as “chaotic evil” and “unhinged” while posting pictures and videos filled with, offensive language and sexually inappropriate attire.In a recent article about the appointment, Grondin said, “I want to be the person I never saw growing up in Dryden as the only openly LGBT kid… A ton of the administrators like (Dryden Junior/Senior High...

The increasing use of “diversity statements” in hiring and faculty evaluation has provoked considerable concern from free-speech advocates and defenders of academic freedom. An American Enterprise Institute study last November found that these statements were required for 19 percent of academic jobs and were especially common at prestigious universities. The danger of the trend is perhaps best illustrated by a University of California, Berkeley, search that filtered applications in the biological sciences for “contributions to diversity, equity and inclusion.” This eliminated 679 of 893 nominally qualified candidates on DEI criteria alone. Organizations like the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression...

Counselors are being taught not to be objective and neutral with their clients, but rather to view the emotionally vulnerable people who come to see them as opportunities to imprint and spread "Social Justice" ideology. In this video I provide shocking examples of the current state of counselor training at an American university. (click link for video)

America, it would seem to some, is irredeemably racist, bigoted, and guided by hate. Those fighting against these pervasive evils have experienced a great “awokening” and are on a noble crusade to perfect American society by transforming its centers of power and influence. In doing so, many of our nation’s institutions are attempting to redefine what is acceptable thought, speech, and behavior by creating formal structures of control. Thus do they reprimand and publicly castigate the fallen. The U.S. Naval Academy (USNA), the nation’s premier institution through which future Navy and Marine Corps officers are educated and trained, has now...