Free Republic

President Trump continues to ramp up the pressure on Harvard: The university has lost $2.7 billion in funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the president is now attempting to bar Harvard from enrolling international students. Harvard is, of course, not alone in these forfeitures: The NIH has terminated over 400 grants to Columbia University, while Cornell University has received 75 stop-work orders from the Department of Defense even as the federal administration has frozen $1.7 billion destined for Brown, Northwestern, and Princeton Universities, as well as the University of Pennsylvania. But...

Independence Day makes Progressives squirm. They despise the principles of the American Revolution. If they could, their scotus judges would gut the Declaration as thoroughly as they have the Constitution. To them, our Noble Declaration, this expression of God-given reason subverts social justice; they are right. Since the Declaration is indeed hostile to their moral relativism, the Left has long attempted to minimize our founding to a fuzzy faith in the people. The “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and “all men are created equal,” translates in their Marxist minds as widespread democracy accompanied with equal...

Moments after the Supreme Court issued its majority opinion in Trump v CASA, leftwing Redditors were apoplectic. One of my favorites: Amy Coney Barrett is another racist Supreme Court justice giving Trump the power to be a fascist. It never ceases to entertain me that the same movement that has for decades delighted itself in persistently demeaning Clarence Thomas solely along racial lines, thinks it has the moral credibility to accuse anyone of being a racist. A safe rule to live by is when the log in your own eye permits you to castigate a black man as "Uncle Tom"...

In recent decades, academia has created or implemented a truly jaw-dropping array of programs and ideas. And not in a good way. Whether “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) policies or Annual Sex Week, these new notions all seem aimed at chipping away at the foundations of a society based on common-sense, truth, fairness, and morality. One such idea is the “land acknowledgment.” It is a statement that a particular event or organization is located on land that once belonged to specific indigenous tribes. Land acknowledgments first appeared in Australia in the late 1970s. They were adopted in Canada before coming...

‘It’s been really hard on my wife. It’s been really, really hard on my kids, especially my 10-year-old, who was woken up by the glass breaking.’ University of Michigan regents and some top executives are receiving 24-hour-security amid persistent threats and harassment from anti-Israel protesters. The Detroit News reported this week that the University of Michigan “has assigned 24-hour security to its regents and executive officers in response to harassment, property damage and personal threats that began last fall and have continued through June.” “UM regents Jordan Acker, Mark Bernstein and Sarah Hubbard said during separate interviews that the university,...

Most readers would agree, I think, that it is desirable to keep politics out of K-12 classrooms. And one would be hard-pressed to find anyone who favors having universities force secondary students to “learn” a particular political agenda. Yet that is what almost transpired in California this past spring. The story of how this came about, and the (at least partial) success of efforts to stop it, is one worth telling. Courses in “ethnic studies” have become a popular offering at high schools across much of the United States. In some school districts, taking a course in ethnic studies is...

CAMBRIDGE, MA — The Department of Homeland Security announced that a massive terrorist sleeper cell was discovered hiding just outside of Boston, Massachusetts. Authorities found the large group of infiltrated terrorists after a routine patrol around a well-known university's infamous quad uncovered dozens of Iranian sleeper cell operatives. "We've never seen anything like it," FBI spokesman Agent Dale Johnson said. "On the outside, they appeared to be dressed like college students and faculty, but every single one of them was a terrorist or terrorist sympathizer. We have reason to believe that the entire campus is, in fact, a terrorist training...

After years of obfuscation and denial, the U.S. Naval Academy, in a suit brought by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), recently admitted to using an applicant’s race during the admissions process. SFFA had sought to compel the Naval Academy to apply the same non-discrimination standards that the Supreme Court required in 2023’s SFFA v. Harvard. Ultimately, Judge Richard D. Bennett ruled that “the Naval Academy’s race-conscious admissions program withstands the strict scrutiny in the ambit of the Supreme Court’s opinion in the Harvard case.” Notably, Judge Bennett wrote that the Naval Academy’s admissions process complies with the Supreme Court’s strict-scrutiny...

Preston Damsky is a law student at the University of Florida. He is also a white nationalist and antisemite. Last fall, he took a seminar taught by a federal judge on “originalism,” the legal theory favored by many conservatives that seeks to interpret the Constitution based on its meaning when it was adopted. In his capstone paper for the class, Mr. Damsky argued that the framers had intended for the phrase “We the People,” in the Constitution’s preamble, to refer exclusively to white people. From there, he argued for the removal of voting rights protections for nonwhites, and for the...

As the policy director for the Classic Learning Test (CLT), I’ve had dozens of conversations with lawmakers across the country about college entrance exams over the last year. Surprisingly, the topic that has drawn the most intense scrutiny has not been the CLT: It’s been changes made to the SAT in 2024 (and similar changes to the ACT being implemented right now). First, most lawmakers are surprised to learn that the tests change at all. They are then flabbergasted to learn what the most recent changes to the SAT were. The most noticeable changes were to the structure of the...

A Washington State school district is defending a teacher who posted a “This Teacher Kills Fascists” sign on social media the end of last month. In the since-deleted Instagram post, Olympia High School teacher Ryan Akiyama (pictured) noted he had planned on putting the sign on his hydration pack for an upcoming race. According to The Olympian, Akiyama also wrote “Might need to print it on a T-shirt next for all my fellow WOKE DEI educators still showing up with courage and care. Yes, I’m woke. Yes, I teach DEI. No, I’m not sorry if that triggers the willfully ignorant.”...

After enjoying many decades of high public support, higher education in the U.S. is in serious decline. Polls show that a sizeable percentage of the populace now doubts that college is worth the cost and that it contributes to the public good. Enrollments keep falling, and the luster that a college degree used to confer on graduates has become tarnished, especially since recent events indicate that, instead of helping them mature, college turns them into ideologically obsessed activists. What has gone wrong? In his latest book, Let Colleges Fail, economics professor Richard Vedder employs his insights to answer that question....

Despite the fact that the Covid pandemic was officially declared over as of May of 2023 and the federal funds authorized in the American Rescue Plan Act had a "use by date" of December 31, 2024, Manhattan District Judge Edgardo Ramos ruled that Education Secretary Linda McMahon cannot recover the unused funds. McMahon argued that "these funds were intended to aid schools impacted by the shutdowns imposed in 2020. The money was intended to support pandemic recovery efforts like constructing sneeze guards in classrooms, tutoring students being remotely educated, and assistance for homeless students. The schools have been open for...

A student in North Carolina just got $20,000 richer. His school district was forced to apologize to him and make the cash payment because he was suspended for using the term ‘illegal alien.’ The left is so triggered by the topic of illegal immigration, that you can’t even use accurate language when talking about the issue without someone going crazy. FOX News reports: North Carolina school district to issue apology, pay $20K to student suspended over ‘illegal alien’ comment. .....Snip...... The teen received a three-day suspension last year after asking his teacher if a conversation in class was centered around...

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Edgardo Ramos issued an order preserving a previous preliminary injunction blocking the Department of Education (DOE) from canceling extensions to states that allowed school districts to continue to access COVID-19-related funds. The far-left Obama appointed Ramos originally issued his injunction on May 6. In March, Education Secretary Linda McMahon informed the states that extensions previously granted were being rescinded. The extension directs the DOE to continue to process current and future funding requests “without delay.”

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Space.com reported: “ISpace’s private Resilience Lander will attempt to touch down on the Mare Frigoris region of the moon’s surface on June 5, at 3:17 p.m. EDT (1817 GMT). […]

Just going to share this here for the people who think pushing radical gender-theory nonsense is compassionate: He considers transitioning from male to female the biggest REGRET of his life. VERY INTERESTING 3:28 VIDEO AT LINK.................... There are many young men and women like this out there. This guy didn't even get into the significant and dangerous health effects of injecting cross-sex hormones, both for men and women. How many lives have been hurt/ruined by the gender cult?

It takes me about eight minutes to walk across the campus of the New College of Florida, where I just concluded a year as a visiting professor. There are rare sightings of students, a grand total of 800, who dart in and out from under the palm trees like white ibises. The clock bell on the astroturf in front of the library can be heard from the waterfront all the way to the student dorms. The all-faculty email list for the 100 or so scholars emits messages such as: “Is anyone having trouble with the Internet?” Despite its minuscule size,...

I recently came across an alarming 2014 article on academic freedom in the Harvard Crimson. “Let’s give up on academic freedom in favor of justice” was the subtitle. The author was an obviously very bright female student. Academic freedom exists to allow a university to be unimpeded in its search for truth. It has been known since the 18th-century philosopher David Hume, if not before, that justice depends on first getting the facts right. A just conviction depends on true evidence. Academic freedom is necessary to achieve real justice. But not according to then-Harvard student Sandra Korn, whose first target...