Free Republic

President Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday, revoking an anti-white racist Obama-Biden era school discipline guidance that was issued by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Department of Education (DOE) in January 2014. The President signed a total of seven new education executive orders relating to college universities, AI in education, and DEI practices in schools. “The Federal Government will no longer tolerate known risks to children’s safety and well-being in the classroom that result from the application of school discipline based on discriminatory and unlawful ‘equity’ ideology,” the order titled “Reinstating Common Sense School Discipline Policies” reads. In...

It is a low bar to clear, but college accreditation has never been so hotly commented on as at present. Many in the higher-ed world fear for its future. Two recent columns in the Chronicle of Higher Education are typical. In one, Robert Shireman, a Democratic appointee to the committee that advises the secretary of education on the recognition of accrediting agencies, warns of an “accreditation war” driven by “Christian nationalism.” Republican “Christian nationalists,” Shireman believes, “don’t want their own, separate, accrediting agency; they want to force the rest of higher education to accept their radical beliefs.” The implicit premise...

A star academic behind an influential but unsound study arguing that black infants die more often with white doctors has for years been privately beleaguered by plagiarism charges from her own subordinates and will soon depart her university, leaving the multimillion-dollar antiracism center she founded in jeopardy. University of Minnesota Prof. Rachel Hardeman’s rise to academic superstardom in the wake of the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis included major media coverage of her research on racial bias and maternal and infant mortality, a tenured position, and recognition as one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people. Now, two former...

Hundreds of students and recent graduates have seen their visas revoked by immigration officials since United States President Donald Trump took office for a second time on January 20, 2025, with several also arrested. Many of the targets of the visa revocations and arrests are students who participated in pro-Palestine protests which erupted on campuses across the country in 2024 amid Israel’s brutal war on Gaza. Others are individuals with more indirect links to Palestine – or those who have shown support for Gaza on social media. The Trump administration alleges that these students spread anti-Semitism and pro-Hamas sentiment on...

By now, most North Carolinians are at least somewhat familiar with Generative AI (GenAI). As tech journalist George Lawton explains, GenAI “uses sophisticated algorithms to organize large, complex data sets into meaningful clusters of information in order to create new content, including text, images and audio, in response to a query or prompt.” It is the foundation of numerous platforms, including Open AI’s ChatGPT and Dall-E, as well as Google’s Gemini. And it is either a bane or a boon, depending on one’s perspective—especially, perhaps, in the field of education. Since OpenAI publicly released ChatGPT-3.5 in November 2022, students have...

Watch VideoFox News host Mark Levin gives his take on the judicial branch’s role on ‘Life, Liberty & Levin.’

Two people were killed an six more were injured during the mass shooting that took place Thursday at Florida State University. As I described here, the shooter was stopped in the act and sent to the hospital by police. It sounds like he's going to survive. He was later identified as Phoenix Ikner, a 20-year-old student at FSU. His mother was also identified as a local sheriff's deputy. Ikner used one of her handguns in the attack. However, today we've got a lot more information about Ikner and his history and what it shows is a lot of family problems,...

There is a story in the news today about two colleges. One is the oldest college in America, having been founded before the American Revolution. It is also perhaps the very most elite of the Ivy League. It is the goal of most children of the elite in America, which is the closest we have to an aristocracy; “legacy”, or the children of its graduates, are still given a major “leg up” when applying to go there. Its researchers in many fields, from economics to literature to medicine, are the recipients of billions of dollars of government grants. It recently...

The left’s embrace of violence has reached the edge of the cliff. “The ultimate source of political power is, and always will be, violence,” George Mason University graduate student Nicholas Decker posted, promoting his recent Substack titled “When Must We Kill Them?” Decker is working on his PhD in economics, but his post had nothing to do with President Trump’s economic policy. Instead, it was a fantasy piece about the left murdering Trump administration officials, including Trump, over some perceived attack on Americans’ freedom. “Evil has come to America,” Decker said. “The present administration is engaged in barbarism; it has...

Thirty years before the fall of communism, Karol Wojtyła began to see that if a successful defense of the “metaphysical sense and mystery” of the human person were not mounted and then embodied in the institutions of society and culture, the results would be terrible indeed: Bad ideas would have awful consequences. And the result would not be George Orwell’s totalitarian dystopia, described in the novel 1984; the result would be the soft-totalitarian dystopia of manufactured and genetically manipulated humanity described in the other great mid-20th-century dystopian novel, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Huxley, it must be admitted, was not...

ABOUT THE POLL The Yale Youth Poll surveyed an online sample of 4,100 registered voters from April 1 to April 3, with an under-30 oversample of 2,025. The survey was conducted in English, and its post-weighting 95% CI margin of error is ±1.9 percentage points for the full sample and ±1.8 percentage points for the youth sample. Full toplines can be found here(Link is external); crosstabs are available upon request. A full list of questions can be found here(Link is external). Results were weighted to ensure a sample that accurately reflects the American population. For the general population sample, results...

A 10-year-old California girl is set to graduate from college this spring. “I just enjoy learning,” she said. “There’s so many interesting things out there.” Alisa Perales, who learned how to read at 2 years old and began doing algebra at the age of five, started taking classes at Crafton Hills College — a community college in Yucaipa, California — when she was just 8 years old, according to a report by ABC7 WWSB. “It’s very fun to me,” Perales told the outlet. “It’s almost as fun as playing outside or riding a bike or doing whatever. I just enjoy...

For the entire existence of the James G. Martin Center, we have been arguing that, due to governmental policies, higher education has been badly oversold. That is, many students have been lured into college even though they have little interest in or aptitude for advanced academic studies. The notion that a college degree was a sure-fire investment that would pay off handsomely after graduation was erroneous, but great numbers of students and their families were taken in by that siren song. Moreover, a stigma somehow attached to students who didn’t go to college—if you had to “settle” for working after...

The family of 17-year-old murder suspect Karmelo Anthony revealed to use a portion of the $400,000 in online donations—originally raised for legal defense—to buy a new home and hire private security, citing “racist threats” they claim to have received following the fatal stabbing of Austin Metcalf, a 17-year-old student and beloved member of his high school’s football team. The shocking revelation came during a court hearing in which Anthony’s bond was reduced from $1 million to $250,000 by Judge Angela Tucker of the 199th Judicial District Court, with only 10% required for his release. With the donation pot overflowing, Anthony...

Any good accountant knows that when the organization pushes back against an audit they are hiding something. (Leftist) Harvard University professors are suing to block the Trump administration’s review of nearly $9 billion in federal contracts and grants awarded to the Ivy League school. The review is part of the government’s crackdown on what it says is antisemitism on college campuses. Via Reuters.

Some students get suspended for fighting, others for wanting the American flag in the classroom. The latter, WBFF-TV reported Wednesday, happened to high school senior and aspiring U.S. Marine Parker Jensen, a student at Townson High School in Baltimore, Maryland. Jensen noticed classrooms at his high school did not display the American flag. According to WBFF, the Baltimore County school board policy and the Maryland Education Code both require the flag to be present in every room. When Jensen went to the Board of Education to ask about the lack of flags at school, he did not get answers. Instead,...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) looks to upend higher education—all education—in no end of ways. The advantage it gives to cheaters by itself is upending the practice of teaching. But AI poses its greatest threat to the liberal arts, to the studia humanitatis, by getting rid of the basic function of this education: to prepare recipients for a job serving the state. At its best, this kind of education also prepares students to govern the state—to converse about the ends of government and to decide prudently how to achieve them as citizens of a democratic republic, as the leaders of an aristocratic...

FATHER IN TRUMP HAT GOES BALLISTIC ON SCHOOL BOARD. This is Poudre school district in Colorado. 2:15 VIDEO AT LINK...............

Since the 1997 founding of Western Governors University (WGU), a private, nonprofit institution developed to pioneer so-called competency-based education (CBE), a growing number of colleges throughout the U.S. have explored the model to varying degrees. Sometimes referred to as “proficiency-based learning,” “mastery-based learning,” or “student-centered education,” CBE is an alternative model of academic instruction that empowers students with variegated choices in learning pace, individualized academic support, and progress based on mastery of course materials. According to the latest national survey regarding CBE, conducted in 2020 by the American Institutes for Research, 47 percent of institutional respondents reported being in the...

The Center for Innovative Public Health Research uses taxpayer dollars for deviant projects. For nearly a decade, the federal government has funded a nonprofit group that works to educate minors about sex toys, while discouraging them from telling their parents about it. The Center for Innovative Public Health Research has received more than $22 million in federal money since 2016. According to its website, the group creates “health education programs” that “promote positive human development.” But the content of those programs—and the comments of the organization’s CEO, Michele Ybarra—suggest that CIPHR’s “human development” goals are anything but positive. Take Girl2Girl....