Free Republic

Anybody who still believes in the liberal arts believes that higher education exists for a higher purpose than putting graduates in jobs. At the same time, even the truest believer has to grapple with the real harm done to graduates who can’t get the jobs they need to pay for that education. In the face of perpetually rising costs and ballooning student debt, it’s hard to keep the faith. One response is to decouple higher education from the liberal arts tradition and reduce it to professional preparation. Several state legislatures have recently passed bills pushing public universities to cut programs...

Southern Methodist University will not allow a CAIR-Texas-promoted Muslim youth leadership symposium branded “Unapologetically Muslim: Youth in Action” to take place on its campus after reviewing the planned event and citing what the university called the State of Texas’ “current designation of the symposium’s organizer.” SMU announced the decision in a statement to The Dallas Express after DX requested comment about the September 19 Muslim Youth Leadership Symposium, which CAIR-Texas had advertised for the SMU campus. SMU says event will not take place SMU described the symposium as unaffiliated with the university and said allowing it to proceed on campus...

The mainstream media and leftist government bureaucrats are at it again, pushing panic, fear, and unverified headlines to control the public narrative, only to get caught red-handed when local officials demand basic transparency. During a high-profile press conference on Tuesay, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, alongside state health officials and Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health, announced that two “measles-associated deaths” occurred in Lancaster County. The legacy media immediately ran with the headlines. Two people died FROM measles. Case closed. Get the shot. Blame the unvaccinated. Blame RFK Jr. There’s just one major problem: Local authorities have ZERO record of these alleged...

In 2009, an anonymous university support staff member wrote to C.K. Gunsalus—a prominent academic who specializes in the study of higher education administration—looking for advice and, frankly, a little bit of kindness. The staffer claimed that many of the faculty members at their institution, including a number heavily involved in campus activism, refused to treat them with any respect. Their collective attitude towards non-academics, even those who worked for the university, was akin to that reserved for “a servant or a child.” Gunsalus’ answer, which Inside Higher Ed published as an advice column, amounted to little more than word salad....

Today we are seeing in real time a coordinated and concerted effort to undermine our Country’s history, traditions and institutions. It is part of the war waged in the “long march through institutions” that is the core of the campaign, in Barack Obama’s words, to “fundamentally transform[] the United States of America.” Nothing less than the total destruction of this country will be tolerated by those who are disciples of both totalitarian murderers from Mao Zedong to Che Guevera, and of the Ivy League sociologists, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. A comprehensive discussion of this existential threat to Western...

Have you ever seen a medical professional, or do you anticipate seeing one in your life? For most of us, the answer is yes. For all of us, the quality of education provided to medical professionals is of vital importance because we live in a world where public health professionals can rule over us in many respects. So something like this should scare the hell out of you:Jeffrey Flier @jflier · Follow The editorial standards of the @NEJM must be questioned for deciding to publish this article as it is presented below. Such terrible judgement. Jason Arday and the Perils...

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...