Free Republic

A sophomore at Brown University is facing the school's wrath after he sent a DOGE-like email to non-faculty employees asking them what they do all day to try to figure out why the elite school's tuition has gotten so expensive. "The inspiration for this is the rising cost of tuition," Alex Shieh told Fox News Digital in an interview. "Next year, it's set to be $93,064 to go to Brown," Shieh said of the Ivy League university. Brown's website estimates the total charges to attend the school for the 2025-2026 school year is even higher at $95,984. "‘And I think...

Lefties lie. That isn't an accusation. It is a statement of fact. A truth as solid as "gravity is a thing" and "men landed on the moon." It should be no more controversial to state this as a fact than the assertion that Joe Biden is a corrupt, kleptocratic moron or that communism is a failed economic and political system. Leftists deny those facts, liberals pretend not to believe them, but the truth is as obvious as the nose on your face. So imagine my shock and horror to discover that the President of Columbia University, AWFL Katrina Armstrong, held...

A group of people continued marching and circling around the main gate of Columbia University on Monday afternoon, banging loud drums and chanting, "Long live the intifada." Their actions come shortly after Columbia University professors held what they called an "emergency vigil" in response to the college's agreement to implement a host of policy changes, including overhauling its rules for protests and conducting an immediate review of its Middle Eastern studies department following demands from the Trump administration. The group gathered outside the university's gates on 116th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, holding signs that read "defend democracy," "defend teaching" and...

I previously criticized the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) for selecting Todd Wolfson as its new president. Wolfson is a controversial voice within the teaching academy and immediately doubled down on the bias against conservatives and those calling for greater intellectual diversity. He is now decrying the election and publicly joining the resistance to the Trump Administration. Some of us have been writing for years about the decline in viewpoint diversity and the rise of an academic orthodoxy in higher education. It is one of the focuses of my new book, The Indispensable Right. Wolfson personifies the intolerance for...

Hundreds of "Wanted" posters targeting members of the University of Rochester community were found glued to campus buildings and classrooms, according to the Department of Public Safety. The university launched an investigation after discovering the posters targeted Jewish faculty, and staff, including Hillel leaders, with the words "Wanted: Connection to War Crimes" and "Racism. Hate Speech. Intimidation."... "University facilities immediately began working to remove the posters and return the spaces to their usual state," Chief Quchee Collins said."This process is painstaking because of the strong adhesive used to affix the posters, which in some cases caused damage to walls, floors,...

The student unrest that roiled the nation’s campuses in the first half of this year was most often associated with the “encampment,” a visible tent-manifestation of scruffy, keffiyeh-swaddled support for the governing of Gaza by the terrorist group Hamas, as well as many other expressions of rank anti-Semitism. But was it really “student” unrest? niversity administrators might be surprised (or perhaps not) that much of today’s campus chaos originates, as it always has, with the employees. Both faculty and staff have for decades mobilized students for protest, activism, and, at times, illegal activity. Today’s pro-Hamas student movement, as with so...

A Columbia professor was quickly shut down after warning her colleagues that the Morningside Heights campus had been infiltrated by outsiders with “known ties to terrorist organizations.” Professor Carol Ewing Garber immediately had her mic muted after speaking out about campus security at the May 3 Zoom meeting of the university’s faculty senate — which was held hours after the school’s Hamilton Hall was overrun by a mob of Hamas-supporting students. “There really is a need for good security on campus and it was very clear . . . that the university was unable to do that given the number...

NYPD was seen mobilizing near Columbia University’s anti-Israel protest on Tuesday evening, video shows. Columbia students who took over Hamilton Hall are now facing expulsion, according to a memo sent out by the Ivy League school. NYPD also laid out possible charges for Columbia protesters on campus grounds in encampments and those who have taken over Hamilton Hall.

It is unclear whether or not disgraced former UPenn President Liz Magill was invited to participate in the trip to show solidarity to Israel after her disastrous performance during a congressional hearing. A group of about thirty faculty members of the University of Pennsylvania went to Israel this week on a three-day solidarity visit. They arrived on Tuesday. They have met with President Isaac Herzog and they have taken a group photo inside a bomb shelter during their visit to Kibbutz Kfar Aza in the south of Israel. The photo was taken after the all-clear siren alerted the community. Their...

If you don’t like the pro-Hamas demonstrations by American college students, then you won’t like American higher education, which is the garden in which these flowers were grown. Within hours of the atrocities committed by Hamas operatives who invaded Israel on October 7, groups of American college students had organized to express their support for the terrorists. This caught many Americans by surprise. How could college students at some of America’s best universities sympathize with the perpetrators of gruesome attacks on unarmed civilians? The surprise, however, was not universal. Those of us who pay close attention to American higher education...

Truer words have never been spoken

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has released a new survey of nearly 1,500 faculty members at four-year colleges in the US. Ideologically, the survey was more diverse than some other recent surveys of college faculty:Overall, half of the faculty surveyed identified as liberal, 17% identified as moderate, and just over one-quarter (26%) identified as conservative. The percentage of professors who identified as conservative was somewhat higher than the percentages found in other recent surveys of faculty. This could reflect the associations made by respondents. The survey recruitment email specifically mentioned FIRE, an organization that some academics consider...

In the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, academic-freedom disputes routinely took a particular shape. In a small town, somewhere in the heartland, there would be a college campus on which a young academic loudly voiced his opinions on controversial matters—mostly political, but sometimes also on sexual morality, or even on legalizing drugs. This would offend the sensitivities of some local townspeople. Someone like the local mayor would lean on the college president (probably a personal friend), the president would then lean on the department chair, and the young professor was soon gone. The American Association of University Professors would then...

The average 12-year-old student at a yeshiva has more wisdom than almost any student at Harvard or most other universities. (A yeshiva is an Orthodox Jewish school with an emphasis on religious studies. About half the school day is devoted to religious studies -- taught from the original Hebrew sources.) This is probably true for many 12-year-olds in traditional Christian schools as well. College students do have more knowledge than almost any 12-year-old in religious school. But they have much less wisdom.I know this because I was a yeshiva student from the age of 5 until 19. To appreciate how...

Researchers say that is a conservative estimateA new report from the American Enterprise Institute found that nearly 20 percent of university faculty job listings require a pledge of support for diversity.“Across all 999 jobs [reviewed by the think tank], we find that 19 percent require diversity statements, while 68 percent include the terms ‘diversity’ or ‘diverse’ in some fashion, often as a way of describing the university environment,” the report said.And the researchers told The College Fix that the number is a conservative estimate and they were not surprised with the results.“I was not surprised to learn that 1 in...

Two Rutgers University faculty groups have come out in support of “Professor Crunk,” aka Brittney Cooper, who said in a recent interview that “white people are committed to being villains” and as such “we gotta take these mf's out.” On Friday, the Rutgers branch of the American Association of University Professors said in a statement that after the interview Cooper had been subjected to a “renewed wave of racist attacks for her public scholarship.” “We wish to express our unequivocal solidarity with Dr. Cooper,” the statement reads. “[We] affirm our support of her academic freedom, and […] decry the harassment...

Public concern about higher education is clearly widespread. The causes are many: ugly treatment of visiting speakers, a stifling political uniformity resulting in ideological extremism and hatred, and fringe radical ideas seeping out of the campuses into the wider world. Less publicly visible are numerous recent studies that tell us how little most recent graduates have benefited from higher education. They record astonishing deficiencies in reasoning, writing, reading, basic knowledge, and civics. But with all this, the public is still uncertain. Most see the symptoms but don’t quite know what to make of them, and so continue to send their...

In a piece published today in The Atlantic, John McWhorter writes that he is getting as many as 50 emails a week from academics who are living in fear that their careers could end at any moment. Their fear isn’t the coronavirus it’s the creeping leftist orthodoxy which treats any disagreement as cause to hound someone out of their job. McWhorter labels it a new form of Maoism on campus, complete with struggle sessions straight out of the Cultural Revolution: A statistics professor says:"I routinely discuss the fallacy of assuming that disparity implies discrimination, which is just a specific way...

It all started in June 2018, when Quillette published my article, “Why Women Don’t Code,” and things picked up steam when Jordan Peterson shared a link to the article on his Twitter account. A burst of outrage and press coverage followed which I discussed in a follow-up piece. The original article was one of the ten most read pieces published by Quillette in 2018, and continues to generate interest. A recent YouTube video about it has been viewed over 120,000 times, as of this writing: In his tweet promoting my article, Peterson took issue with one of my claims. I...

The New York Times today publishes an extraordinary column, titled: What ‘Snowflakes’ Get Right About Free Speech. In it, Ulrich Baer, the vice provost for faculty, arts, humanities, and diversity at New York University argues at length that what liberal snowflake students who want to censor “offensive” ideas get right about free speech is, basically, everything. The gist of his argument is that some propositions are so dehumanizing to the affected people that they are impossible to rebut with equal humanity and legitimacy. He invokes such clashes a Holocaust deniers, racists, or opponents of illegal immigration confronting Holocaust survivors or...