Free Republic

The situation unfolding across college campuses in the United States is a complicated one, and bears reflection. I do not propose anything definitive, but I wanted to share a few thoughts. A Very Brief History of the University: The first question we must ask is “What are universities even for?” It is not an easy one. They began as institutions to train clerics in theology and philosophy, and evolved gradually into places for training gentleman scholars. Oxford and Cambridge in the 19th century did not live up to the model St. John Henry Newman describes in The Idea of a...

If you are up on the latest trends in academia, you’ll know that “institutional neutrality” is in the news as more universities consider or adopt it. In my view, this is a good thing, as it maintains the role of the university as a neutral arena in which faculty and students can freely express and debate a wide range of viewpoints constructively rather than feel stifled when their university takes a public stance on a political or social issue. However, there is confusion within academia on what institutional neutrality means and how to implement it. The free-speech organization FIRE (Foundation...

As the pro-Hamas protests rage on at universities across the nation, some of our enemies are laughing at us and encouraging the protesters to wreak even more havoc. It’s been a crazy period as mobs have taken over a number of campuses and are making tent cities, chanting hateful messages, committing vandalism, and causing Jewish students to feel extremely unsafe. Militias backed by Iran, however, are enjoying our plight and our mocking the U.S., condemning Israel, and egging on students to keep it up:The Sabereen News, a Telegram channel affiliated with Iran-backed Iraqi militias is inciting American students to escalate...

When you let a crazed, genocidal maniac talk long enough, they will always expose themselves. That happened on Thursday when two videos were released of a pro-Hamas protest leader suggesting Jews should be murdered. Shockingly, this is the same person Columbia University officials have been "negotiating" with over the last few days. Kymani James can be seen ranting about how "Zionists," which are Jews, do not deserve to live and should be exterminated like "nazis." A fair warning. This guy's words are extremely violent and disturbing.One of the Columbia students leading the “protest” posted this video stating that “Zionists do...

Things are getting out of hand in NY with campuses being taken over at places like NYU and Columbia by leftist extremists setting up encampments, like Occupy 2.0. Now a viral video has emerged that shows just how out of control it's getting. The video is from Monday night when the police descended on NYU and arrested dozens of students and even some of the professors after the students pelted the police with bottles and hit an officer with a chair. These were the folks that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) claimed were "peaceful." READ MORE:Chaotic Scene As NYPD Descends Upon...

Once again, choose accurate language. That is not “demonstrators.”I have previously written about the importance of accurate language to inform the American public about what is going on. See “Covid” Didn’t Destroy Businesses and Lives; the Government Did. Language shapes the terrain on which the political debates are fought. Many of our supposedly “elite” commentators, however, do not appear to understand this. I see constant references, even on outlets like Fox News, to the “demonstrators” when describing the pro-Hamas supporters who are shutting down freeways, blocking bridges illegally, and occupying campuses while assaulting and preventing Jewish students from attending classes.Referring...

Rep. Ilhan Omar's (D-Minn) daughter Isra Hirsi was one of 108 students arrested at the request of Columbia University President Nemat "Minouche" Shafik. "I took this extraordinary step because these are extraordinary circumstances. The individuals who established the encampment violated a long list of rules and policies. The vile and overt anti-Semitism has made many other students feel unsafe." Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich) called the arrests "an unjustified suppression of freedom of speech. These students are protesting Israel's indiscriminate massacre of Palestinians in retaliation for Hamas' heroic October attack against the Jews' illegal occupation of Palestine. Instead of removing these...

The Center for Collegiate Mental Health (CCMH) recently issued its 2023 Annual Report. It presents an abundance of dire information about the therapy-addicted young people now trying to make their way through the wasteland of undergraduate education. I have read it so you don’t have to. But before I turn to its diagnostic particulars, let me indulge with the broader picture that appears nowhere in CCMH’s report. Virtually everyone, including CCMH, agrees that American college students are suffering an epidemic of mental illness. But why? Among the recent books on the topic is The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring...

Isra Hirsi, a pro-Hamas protester who participated in protests at Columbia University, has been suspended from Barnard College. Hirsi happens to be the daughter of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), a member of the Hamas Caucus in Congress, which further shows that the proverbial apple does not fall far from the tree.In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Hirsi complained “in my 3 years at [Barnard College], I have never been reprimanded or received any disciplinary warnings,” and explained that she “just received notice that [she is] 1 of 3 students suspended for standing in solidarity with Palestinians facing genocide.”i’m an...

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) went on the Late Show where she and host discussed a little known potential benefit of shifting the burden of paying off college debt from the students who borrowed the money to taxpayers. "One of my greatest regrets after I got out of college is that I had to go to work to pay off my student loans," the Congresswoman lamented. "This seemed so unfair when many of my rich classmates had the money to go abroad to experience the world and all its wonders. If my loans had been forgiven I could've used the payments...

West Virginia has no time to lose. Its 55-percent labor-force participation rate is better only than Mississippi’s. Life expectancy is under 73 years, again placing West Virginia in second-to-worst place among U.S. states. Median family income is also near the bottom, whatever family size we compare. Economic development is our best way out, and the surest path to that result is education reform. It’s not a matter of sending more high schoolers to a four-year college program. While it’s true that completing college—indeed, having any college education regardless of completion—is positively correlated with higher income, artificially increasing access is not...

In the aftermath of Hamas’s attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, campuses across the country erupted with intense, heated protests. Except the protests weren’t against the brutality of Hamas’s massacre of innocent civilians. No, students had come to the conclusion that such actions were justified, and it was Israel’s military response to the attacks that needed to be stopped. In one of many such instances, pro-Palestinian student groups at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill used a paraglider, one of Hamas’s modes of attack, in fliers promoting the event. As UNC provost Chris Clemens said: “There is no doubt...

U.S. innovation fuels our economic strength and is vital for our national security. Released last earlier this month, the National Science Board’s congressionally mandated State of U.S. Science and Engineering Indicators report shows that an accelerating science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) talent crisis is imperiling America’s economy and security.Let’s start with a bit of perspective. The U.S. STEM workforce is now one quarter of the total U.S. workforce – 38 million people at all degree levels who use STEM skills in their jobs, including 19 million skilled technical workers without a bachelor’s degree. That number will only rise as...

Not only are you being lied to, your own tax dollars are being used to accomplish the deception. For all of the left’s faux concern about ‘misinformation and disinformation’ they’ve got their own sordid little information laundering scheme going on. It’s an incestuous little circle of politicians, bureaucrats and media who all share the same political goals (big government) for their various, and sometimes conflicting reasons, but each works hand in hand to push the same agenda: push a public narrative that puts the Biden administration in the best possible light, so that Dems can keep control of government and...

Democrats' belief that raising the minimum wage for fast food employers would benefit them is being undermined by businesses closing down and/or laying off portions of their labor force. Loren Wright, owner of a Fosters Freeze franchise in Lemoore, said "my employees told me they'd rather have a job at the old wage than be laid off, but the new law doesn't give us that option. Gov. Newsom's restaurant does have that option." Newsom hastened to point out that "I'm only one of the owners of the PlumpJack Cafe. The law exempted this kind of restaurant from the required minimum...

It may not be to everyone's taste, but kombucha tea may be able to deliver the benefits of fasting, without the hardest part – the fasting itself. Researchers found that when the yeasts and bacteria from the fermented, sweetened tea colonized the gut, they altered fat metabolism, without any other dietary changes, resulting in lower fat stores. At the center of these findings is the flora found in kombucha tea's SCOBY (Symbiotic Cultures of Bacteria and Yeasts), the gelatinous starter, rich in microbes, found floating near the surface of the fermented liquid. The probiotic microbes, including species of Acetobacter, Lactobacillus...

On January 5, 2024, Western Oregon University (WOU) announced a bold change to its grading regime: “The letter grades of D- and F” have been axed in favor of a mark of “No Credit (NC)” for undergraduates. WOU’s provost, Jose Coll, clarified that this new system will not lower the university’s academic standards but, rather, “increase retention and graduation rates.” The university will no longer “mask” students’ “demonstrated abilities” with a slew of poor marks, following the likes of Brown University and Hampshire College, which have already exchanged letter grades for alternative measures in some instances. By removing troublesome grades,...

American Jews are in a strange predicament. On the one hand, following Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, radical-left partisans learned that antisemitism is an increasingly important and effective part of their racialist ideology. On the other hand, holdovers from the Left’s tolerant but distant past are not prepared to abandon the party that has abandoned them. They still feel the need to distract the public from the inroads made by antisemitism deep within the Democratic party. They do this by pointing to the so-called epidemic of white supremacy on the right—an epidemic that is more imagined than real. This...

Many Americans realize that our higher-education system is decaying, its standards in decline while costs continue to rise. Is this situation like a tooth with a cavity that can readily be fixed? Or is the decay so deep that we need something far more serious, such as a root canal? David Barnhizer’s new book, Conformity Colleges, strongly suggests that we must have the latter. His subtitle explains that we suffer from “the destruction of intellectual creativity and dissent.” That’s an accurate diagnosis. An emeritus professor of law, Barnhizer has written a no-holds-barred exposé of the tragic fall of our institutions...