Free Republic

Footage emerged this morning showing Democrats led by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) trying to barge their way into the Department of Education building in their latest pathetic publicity stunt following other protests earlier this week. As TGP readers know, the Trump White House on Tuesday drafted an executive order to abolish the Department of Education, a significant campaign promise by President Trump. After officers refused to let them in, Democrats immediately melted down and began bullying the guards. Some also started comparing one security officer defending the building to segregationists blocking black kids from entering schools during the Jim Crow...

Two outstanding situations sometimes warrant government intervention in the marketplace. First, “natural monopoly” providers, such as public utilities, would charge all the market could bear without government regulation. Second, unprofitable markets, such as those for orphan drugs and certain types of research and development, would not exist to meet certain public needs absent government subsidies or donor contributions. Yet, confusion and “market failures” abound when government-subsidized or nonprofit entities compete in the marketplace with private, taxpaying entities. Consider the mid-20th-century prospects of private U.S. railroads, which purchased all the land and laid all the rail on their own roads, competing...

If you have a complete and total disability, you may not be liable for repaying certain types of federal student loans. This is based on eligibility for the Total and Permanent Disability (TPD) Discharge Program, which is offered through the United States Department of Education and overseen by student loan servicer Nelnet. You need to meet specific disability requirements to qualify for loan forgiveness through this program, and there are three main ways you can get approved. If you are experiencing a total disability and you struggle to repay federal student loans as a result, read on to find out...

Because of the current president and the current composition of Congress, we may never have a better opportunity to eliminate federal funding for illegal aliens in K–12 government schools.

The University of Michigan’s recent about-face on DEI is both encouraging and instructive. Yes, even high-profile institutions with long records of supporting racial favoritism and radical ideological movements can show common sense—but sometimes it takes public humiliation in the media and losses in courtrooms to get them to budge. After last month’s first set of executive orders from President Donald Trump, other schools would do well to drop DEI before experiencing the embarrassment that rattled Ann Arbor. In December, UMichigan officials announced that they would no longer ask job applicants to submit “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) statements as part...

The Trump White House on Tuesday drafted an executive order to abolish the Department of Education, NBC News reported. Trump vowed to wage war with Education Department and give power back to the states. “On Day 1, I will sign a new executive order to cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content onto the shoulders of our children,” Trump said. “And I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate.” Trump said he wants to strip the entire...

No joke: Wired wants you to believe this is a bad thing. The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Government Takeover Engineers between 19 and 24, most linked to Musk’s companies, are playing a key role as he seizes control of federal infrastructure. WWW.WIRED.COM https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-government-young-engineers/ "Elon Musk's Government Takeover" Gotta love the pea-sized brains over at Wired. Elon Musk's takeover of federal government infrastructure is ongoing, and at the center of things is a coterie of engineers who are barely out of — and in at least one case, purportedly still in — college. Elon isn't taking over anything. He's...

As universities across the U.S. seek to deal with protests, polarization, and the presidential election, many have focused on how to foster civil-discourse skills in students. As this tweet (below) from Professor Robert “Robby” George illustrates, civil-discourse programs are popping up across the nation. Of course, UNC has its own version with its School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL). What Is Civil Discourse? Since this is an essay about AI, I’ll use an AI-generated answer from Google Search for the definition (Google Search AI collects data from websites on a topic, in this case “civil discourse,” and summarizes the...

Higher education seemingly played an important if largely negative role in the recent presidential election. Exit polls showed that non-college-educated voters overwhelmingly favored Donald Trump. Many voters associated Kamala Harris unfavorably with progressive trends and ideas prevalent on elite campuses, such as pro-Hamas protests and gender ideology. The election’s outcome has sparked introspection in some typically left-leaning publications, such as the Chronicle of Higher Education, where William Deresiewicz opined bluntly, “The politics of the academy have been defeated. Its ideas … have been rejected.” But what any of this means for likely post-election policy is unclear. Trump’s lengthiest statement on...

Well, well, well: We have reported previously about the race-hustling academic fraud Ibram X. Kendi (here and here, for starters), whose lavishly funded Center for Anti-Racist Research at Boston University came under scrutiny for not producing any research, and being mismanaged in the extreme leading to massive staff layoffs. An audit by Boston University found “no wrongdoing,” though it is hard to resist the ironic suspicion that this was a whitewash.And now the other shoe drops: Kendi, who was seldom seen on the Boston University campus and apparently taught no classes, is leaving BU for Howard University, and—surprise—starting a new...

Accreditors often claim to be neutral arbiters who merely measure whether accredited universities meet their own standards. Yet a not-so-deep dive into actual accreditation standards reveals a stacked deck, whereby accreditors ask certain questions and do not ask other questions. The Trump administration promises to challenge the current accreditation system’s transparent political bent with some politics of its own. Reverberations are already being felt across the accreditation system. During his campaign, President Trump promised to fire, in his inimitable words, “the radical Left accreditors that have allowed [America’s] colleges to become dominated by Marxist Maniacs and lunatics.” Changing accreditation standards...

The newly inaugurated second Trump administration has arrived, and among the changes that the president and his allies have proposed is large-scale simplification and elimination of government regulations. President Trump stated in a press conference in December that he wants 10 old regulations eliminated for every new regulation added. The arguments for deregulation are not new. Regulations function as an indirect tax that slows economic growth: Compliance costs money, and the expense is often passed on to the consumer. Regulations also cost the government (and, therefore, the taxpayer) money to promulgate, revise, and enforce. Deregulation, thus, is a win for...

The Three Investigators is a series of children’s mystery novels that many members of Generation X, including myself, grew up with. They’ve been out of print in the U.S. for decades. But now, all 10 of the books that were written by series creator Robert Arthur are back in print, in paperback.

People often ask me how, as an outspoken conservative professor at a large state university, I can get away with some of the things I say on social media and in essays for the Martin Center, Campus Reform, Minding the Campus, and other “right-wing” publications. Why, they want to know, hasn’t my institution already canceled me? The answer is that a group of my colleagues, along with a couple of rogue (now former) administrators, did try to cancel me several years ago, but they failed. That was mostly because I have tenure and didn’t actually do anything wrong, but it...

A common refrain among observers of American higher education is that it changes at a glacial pace—if even that fast. The structure of our colleges and universities serves largely to protect faculty and administrators who are comfortable doing things pretty much the same way they were done a century ago. Many argue that our colleges desperately need to make changes but cannot. One of those observers is Brian Rosenberg, former president of Macalester College in Minnesota. He has written an engaging, informative, and sometimes frustrating book entitled Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education. In...

Harvard University is offering students a course that teaches modern-day conceptions of sexuality and gender identity in the context of colonialism. The course, titled “The Sexual Life of Colonialism,” will consider “the role of colonialism and neocolonialism in racial imaginations of gender and sexuality and how these histories shape contemporary understandings of LGBTQ politics, reproductive and sexual rights, and anti-colonial resistance around the world.” Students will also examine “queer” and “trans sexualities” that supposedly exist in “colonial and postcolonial spaces.” The class will also “cover many forms of sexuality, including interracial relationships between colonizer and colonized peoples, questions of sexual...

The word "prig" isn't very common now, but if you look up the definition, it will sound familiar. Google's isn't bad: A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others. This sense of the word originated in the 18th century, and its age is an important clue: it shows that although wokeness is a comparatively recent phenomenon, it's an instance of a much older one. There's a certain kind of person who's attracted to a shallow, exacting kind of moral purity, and who demonstrates his purity by attacking anyone who breaks the rules. Every society has these people....

The scale of support on college campuses for militant antisemitism and even for Hamas barbarism has alarmed most Americans, but there’s something else here that ought to trouble us, too: a startling ignorance of the most basic facts of Middle Eastern history. These are college students being educated on renowned campuses—yet they know virtually nothing about the matter they are protesting. How can that be? Let’s begin by asking what a serious education about the conflict in the Middle East would look like. At a minimum, we would expect students to have a basic grasp of the case made by...

Much of medical education is careening into an ideological ditch. Following the directives of the “health equity” movement, med schools have veered off the course of teaching future doctors the basics of anatomy and various medical procedures to instead discuss how systemic racism causes back pain or how doctors can raise their own “critical consciousness.” That being said, there are a few medical schools, such as NYU’s Grossman School of Medicine, that are heading in a new, surprisingly promising direction: They’ve crammed the traditional four-year course of study into three years, trimming the electives and carrying classes through the summer....

Proposition: Human flourishing will not be advanced at the upcoming meeting of the Modern Language Association, which begins next Thursday in New Orleans. Evidence: The conference program includes among its listed sessions the following gibberish, gossip, and complaint: “Contemporary Astrological Media of Minoritarian Self-Making”; “The Queer Conspiracy of Illegibility”; “Against Resilience: Laziness as Refusal”; “How to Be a Woman Though Male: On Uncertainty and Trans Pedagogy”; “Embracing the Low Road? Hating ‘Men’ in Manifestos”; “The (In)Visibility of Claudia Rankine’s and Donald Glovers’s Public Responses to the 2015 Charleston Shooting”; “‘Just a Young Boy in the Hood’: Imaginative Cartographies of the...