Free Republic

Elite universities know they’re in the wrong. For years, they’ve been: Charging upwards of 60% for “overhead” costs for federal research grants. Blatantly violating the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 Civil Rights ruling barring race-based admissions and hiring practices. Allowing rampant antisemitism on campus. Reliant on international students from illiberal regimes. Facing both mounting pressure from the Trump administration to change their ways, and vocal opposition from their Marxist students and faculty to remain the same, university presidents are starting to fold:

OPINION: The First Amendment exists to protect dissent and divergent opinions, not just ideas that align with rigid campus orthodoxy The University of Oregon just learned a very costly lesson about free speech. This cautionary tale began in June 2022, when Portland State University Professor Bruce Gilley responded to a University of Oregon Division of Equity and Inclusion “racism interrupter” post on Twitter by retweeting it with the comment “all men are created equal.” Ironically, it seems that UO’s definition of “inclusion” didn’t include tolerance for the principle of colorblindness. Rather than recognizing that Gilley’s quote from the Declaration of...

Buried in a recent report from the Economic Innovation Group is a statistic that should make every university administrator in America lose sleep: Foreign-born workers who arrived in the U.S. on student visas now out-earn their native-born peers with college degrees by nearly $30,000 annually. They’re also more than twice as likely to work in research and development—the engine room of national progress. Let me be very clear: This isn’t about IQ. It’s about institutions. It’s about a cultural drift so deep, so corrosive, that a native-born population is slowly being nudged out of its own future—not by brute force...

A mysterious fever gripped the nation in 2020. Some called it mass formation psychosis. Others called it hysteria. It was a result of three distinct events, as well as institutional responses designed to exploit existing societal tensions. Those three events were the Covid-19 pandemic, the death of George Floyd, and the impending re-election of Donald Trump. So much of what we were told by the authorities and the experts at that time has now been debunked. But those who work in academia know that, as crazy as life was out in the “real world,” it was even crazier in the...

This is truly astonishing. Whoever built these underground structures were highly advanced than humans.

A professor at the University of Chicago recently cursed against the school and said she only worked there to “build power” for Palestinian solidarity. The professor, Eman Abdelhadi, made the statements on July 5 during a socialism conference held in Chicago, according to The Daily Caller. In her remarks, Abdelhadi reportedly said that UChicago is “evil” and a “colonial landlord,” and that she asked herself why she worked there. “F**k the University of Chicago—it’s evil,” the professor said. “You know, it’s a colonial landlord. Why would I put any of my political energy into this space?”

On May 15, the University of Wyoming Board of Trustees voted to cancel five degree tracks, including a Ph.D. in Botany, an M.A. in Molecular Biology, and a B.A. in Art History. Most notably, they also cut the bachelor’s degrees in African American and Diaspora Studies and in Gender and Women’s Studies. According to the university’s Standard Administrative Policy and Procedure, a program is considered low-producing if it averages fewer than five graduates per year at the undergraduate level or fewer than three per year at the master’s level over a five-year period. That was the case for the Gender...

A need to reinvest in civics education has become a bipartisan refrain in recent years. While academics lament declining trust in our institutions and worsening political polarization, civics education has become an often-invoked panacea. But civics has also become a front line in the ongoing culture wars. Liberal faculty suspect high-profile civics initiatives at the University of Florida, the University of Texas-Austin, and Arizona State University of corroding academic freedom and creating “conservative DEI” programs on campuses across the country; meanwhile, a recent $1 billion congressional plan to boost civics education fell victim to conservative opposition. Civics education alone cannot...

The best time for a university to perform a civil-rights audit was two full years ago, right after the Supreme Court announced its decisions in the Students for Fair Admissions cases. The next best time is now. In short, the Supreme Court wrote in 2023, “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.” That means ending discrimination not only in admissions but across the entire university. Furthermore, Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act has long been interpreted to ban racial discrimination across all of a university’s programs and activities. Even the Biden administration’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR)...

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.”...