Free Republic

Acting Columbia University President Claire Shipman on Wednesday bizarrely chose to stoke the flames by acknowledging arrested ex-grad student Mahmoud Khalil at the Ivy League school’s chaotic graduation. Hordes of graduating students in the riled-up audience began chanting Khalil’s name and nearly booed Shipman off the stage throughout her remarks at the embattled university’s commencement. “We firmly believe that our international students have the same rights to freedom of speech as everyone else, and they should not be targeted by the government for exercising their right,” Shipman told the crowd of nearly 37,000. “I know many in our community are...

Cornell University has invited Jew-bashing entertainer Kehlani to perform on campus May 7 — defending the move as just giving its students what they want. Kehlani has a music video that starts with, “Long live the Intifada” — an inflammatory phrase that critics say promotes violence against Israelis and Jews — shared a map online that eliminates the state of Israel and refused to condemn Hamas for the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre. The invite to the multi-Grammy Award-nominated R&B artist comes after the Trump administration froze $1 billion in federal funding to the upstate Ivy League school amid a civil-rights...

Leaders of elite schools disgrace themselves before Congress—and expose the rot at the core of American higher education. Forget Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, now in theaters: if you want to watch an epic drama of vanity and failed leadership that ends in catastrophe, just tune in to the hearing held this week by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Summoned to account for the surging anti-Semitism on their campuses, the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania delivered a masterclass in obfuscation. When New York representative Elise Stefanik asked them whether calling for the genocide of the...