Free Republic

Embattled Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, who is facing congressional outcry and calls to resign over security lapses leading to President Donald Trump’s near-assassination Saturday, landed her role thanks largely to a close relationship with Jill Biden.. Cheatle, 53, is the first woman to lead the presidential protection agency and secured the non-Senate-confirmed role in August 2022 after a three-year stint as senior director of global security at Pepsi. ... Four sources close to President Biden’s family, including people who interacted with Cheatle during the Obama-Biden administration, said she was well liked by the future first lady and her most...

After Thursday's disastrous CNN debate, President Joe Biden and the First Lady Jill tried to get ahead of the inevitable backlash, glossing over the debacle with a flurry of soft-ball publicity appearances. A quick stop off at a debate viewing party held by ardent Biden-loyalists was followed by a midnight visit to an Atlanta Waffle House. As the President – still looking stunned after his televised humiliation – greeted fellow diners who awkwardly remained seated, Jill swept up to the counter and giggled: 'Order for Biden.' But, for all her slick attempts to paper over the cracks, what happened next...

Ivy League schools face a multi-million dollar dip in funding after being blasted for failing to condemn Hamas' terrorist attacks against Israel. Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania have been hit hardest by the backlash – with a host of alumni calling on the colleges to do better as some revoke their funding entirely. Billionaires Ken Griffin and former US Ambassador Jon Huntsman Jr have stripped their support for both prestigious universities after slamming their stance on the conflict between Israel and Palestine.

Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk spoke with Breitbart News Daily host Alex Marlow on Thursday, where he explained why college is a scam. “These are hedge funds with schools attached. These are not colleges,” Kirk affirmed. “I think the de-stigmatization of people that don’t go to college is necessary,” Kirk told Marlow, before offering a few statistics that he reveals in his newly released book, The College Scam. The Turning Point USA founder explained that “forty percent of people that enter a four-year college drop out,” which means that “only 60 percent of people that actually enroll will end...

Billionaire philanthropist and left-wing megadonor George Soros is donating $500 million to Bard College a small liberal arts college in New York. According to a Bard College press release, the grant — “which is among the largest ever made to higher education in the United States” — will facilitate “Bard’s exemplary educational and social initiatives, establish the College’s most substantial endowment ever, and set the stage for a $1 billion endowment drive.” The college announced that it raised $250 million for its endowment and is seeking to raise another $250 million going forward. Bard College President Leon Botstein stated that...

No excerpt allowed from Bloomberg, store here.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson floated the idea Monday on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” that universities and their large endowments should shoulder the burden of repaying student loans, not students and their families. Carlson opened the segment discussing a recent poll showing communism’s widespread popularity among millennials, calling it a “huge problem” that needs fixing. “Believe it or not, it’s not the main problem,” he added, gearing up for his main point. “The main problem — the reason that capitalism increasingly is discredited and socialism is increasingly popular — is that our current system is making young people poor.” ... Instead,...

The University of California is dumping fossil fuel investments from its nearly $84 billion pension and endowment funds, calling them a financial risk. An opinion article in Tuesday’s Los Angeles Times says UC will make its endowment fund “fossil free” by month’s end and its pension fund will soon follow. The pension fund covers 320,000 people. …

Massachusetts is home to some of the best colleges and universities in the world—and some of the worst traffic jams. A Democratic gubernatorial candidate is betting residents of the Bay State will be willing to tax the former to alleviate the latter. Jay Gonzalez is building his long-shot campaign around a levy on the endowments of nine private schools that would create revenue to invest in public transportation and relieve Boston-area congestion, among other things. Boston drivers spend 14% of their time driving in congestion, the worst of any U.S. city, according to the INRIX, a transportation analytics company. The...

Universities that cry poor while entertaining themselves lavishly are finding it harder to keep up their public service facade, even in publications that would normally be sympathetic to them. "When Congress asked dozens of schools to report on their spending in 2016, for instance, Harvard declined to say exactly how much of its $37 billion endowment is paid to the people who manage it.," Neena Satija wrote in The Washington Monthly. "While most colleges did tell Congress what percentage of their annual endowment payout goes to financial aid, they generally didn't elaborate further--such as on the proportion of aid that’s...

House GOP leaders released sweeping tax legislation on Thursday. Colleges and universities will pay a 1.4% excise tax on their endowment investment income if the "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act" is passed. It's a big change from the current system, where college endowments are not taxed.........

Normally, professors and college administrators see no end to their ever-expanding list of things that are "too important to be left to the free market." Apparently, even they have their limits. When two professors from the University of Illinois at Chicago and Northeastern Illinois University suggested that universities could share and redistribute their own wealth, Brian C. Mitchell of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) used the Academe blog maintained by the AAUP to dissect the idea. "These professors decry the University of Chicago’s endowment as 'wealth hoarding,' arguing that if the government seized the University's endowment and spread...

Or at minimum, ending “wealth hoarding” by forcing “well-endowed private institutions [to] share their assets” Remedying individual wealth and income inequality is the central rallying cry of the Democratic Party and candidates, and progressive activists. Bernie Sanders has made wealth redistribution a centerpiece of his campaign, which is inspiring college students. Even Hillary Clinton, who along with her husband amassed a fortune in the tens of millions of dollars through speaking fees on campuses and for Wall Street, is singing the same tune. One overlooked area of wealth inequality is at the college level — some schools have amassed billion...

...FOR FAITHFUL LATTER-DAY SAINTS, the temple endowment ceremony is one of the most...powerful ordinances received in mortality. One authoritative source called it the temporal stepping stone which all people must pass to achieve exaltation with God the Father and Jesus Christ...1 ... 1 Gospel Essentials, rev. ed., sunday school manual (Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), 1979, 247. [SNIP] Another element of literalism disappeared in 1927 when kissing over the altar during vicarious sealings for the dead was abolished.129 Probably the greatest twentieth-century catalyst to increase the number of vicarious endowments was Heber J. Grant's emphasis...

A look at the latest education news seems to show that academia’s left hand doesn’t know what its far left hand is doing. From the Chronicle of Higher Education we learn that “As students confront rising college costs and a labyrinthine financial-aid process, some are turning to crowdfunding websites like Go-FundMe to cover their expenses.” “While the approach is still novel and hardly widespread, financial-aid officials say, enthusiasm for online campaigns is very much a reflection of the times,” Libby Sander wrote in the Chronicle. “Students are frustrated with the aid process, eager to avoid student-loan debt, and worried over...

The Church completes 100 million endowments for the dead (August) Ezra Taft Benson urges members to flood the earth with the Book of Mormon [Source: Madsen, Truman G., The Presidents of the Church]

What happened to so many once-Christian colleges in the United States? Two fine books describe the decline. George Marsden's 462-page The Soul of the American University shows how once-Protestant universities became secular look-alikes. James Burtchaell's The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from Their Christian Churches uses 868 pages to show not only how schools moved from liberal theism to secularism but how, before that, they moved from theologically conservative to liberal I'll try to give the high points of 1,330 pages in fewer than 1,330 words: Three central messages are (1) Follow the money, (2)...

Single until your dying day? Want to be married for eternity beyond death? Perhaps you could contact a temple Mormon who could arrange a “matchmaker” religious temple ritual for you "for eternity." “Perhaps the most unique thing about our temple ordinances," wrote BYU professor Daniel H. Ludlow, “is that they can be performed for the dead…Such ordinances as…temple marriage are performed in our temples for the dead and the living. The ordinances for the dead are performed by proxy-a person living on this earth stands as a proxy and receives these ordinances ‘for and in behalf’ of the deceased person....

A man who Accuracy in Academia rarely sees eye-to-eye with nonetheless makes a good point in the October 8, 2010 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. “As for costs, universities typically spend only one-third of their budgets on faculty salaries,” Cary Nelson of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) writes. “Despite more than 10 years of education after high school, most people standing in front of a college classroom earn less than $60,000 a year, considering that contingent faculty members, who are not eligible for tenure, make up two-thirds of the faculty work force.” “Most earn less than...

The last redoubt of concern for the common man is ridiculously awash in the cash that keeps eluding the object of its affections but then, maybe that’s where it comes from. The Almanac of Higher Education shows us that colleges and universities took in about a trillion dollars this year and spent roughly that amount. Most of these institutions have multi-million dollar endowments, even some community colleges. Most parents do not. Professors make about $100,000 a year with tenure while the untenured lecturers and associates range between $45-80,000 a year. Ironically, this is where most share-the- wealth schemes originate. The...