Free Republic

The chief diversity officer of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, LaVar Charleston, who also teaches at the university’s school of education, has a decades-long track record of research misconduct, according to a complaint filed with the university on Wednesday and a Washington Free Beacon analysis. That misconduct includes presenting old studies as new research, which he has done at least five times over the course of his career. FreeBeacon At Columbia, an Israeli-Designated Terror Group Teaches 'Palestinian Resistance 101'—And Lauds Plane Hijackings Read more The complaint, which was filed anonymously, implicates eight of Charleston’s publications, many of them coauthored, and accuses...

On February 28th, the Supreme Court heard arguments on President Biden’s plan to extinguish an estimated $400 billion in student debt. Biden deserves credit for highlighting a debilitating federal program in desperate need of reform. His proposal, however, would make the problem far worse, not better. Any serious reform would force academic institutions to take some responsibility for the education they provide—and to show some responsibility to the many young Americans they induce to go deeply into debt. The problems run deep. American higher education has become a hollow bubble of an industry coasting on brand equity and past glory....

On Tuesday, Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced several reforms to the state's higher education system.

The administration and board of regents at Concordia University Wisconsin has been deathly silent about this widely reported transgression against academic freedom.Today’s academic landscape is littered with the dry bones of academic freedom. This is true of my own religious university, Concordia University Wisconsin (CUW), from which I have been suspended and put under threat of termination for publishing an academic essay critiquing identity politics. As reported by The Federalist in March, soon after I published that essay, I was banned from campus and put on administrative leave. There I remain three months later, with no clear path to restoration...

Colleges have begun hiring student hall monitors to enforce mask and distancing restrictions, a move that has given students authority over their peers for their obedience to the state's COVID diktats.How much would you have to be paid to commit social suicide? What if a paycheck wasn’t the only perk, but it also entitled you to a sickening sense of self-righteousness and an air of superiority? This appears to be the tradeoff many college students have made this semester as universities’ “Student Health Ambassadors,” paid adult hall monitors whose job is to patrol their campuses and enforce mask policies and...

Bowing to left-wing pressure, the Department of Justice will not even commit to defending religious colleges from a lawsuit that would force them to act contrary to their beliefs about sex and gender.The Biden Department of Justice briefly instigated outrage from progressives recently when it filed a routine legal brief promising to defend Title IX’s statutory exemption for religious colleges. The DOJ filed the brief to fend off efforts by religious colleges, some of whom are represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, to intervene in a lawsuit brought by 40 past and present LGBT college students who claim the exemption violates...

Since public schools are spectacularly successful leftist recruitment centers, weakening public attachment to them through lockdowns was a dangerous move for Democrats.Between May and October 2020, homeschooling more than doubled among U.S. households with school-age children, from 5.4 percent that spring to 11.1 percent that fall, according to new Census Bureau data. Black and Hispanic Americans were the most likely to switch to homeschooling, while white and Asian Americans were the least likely. This could be due to the fact that African-American children are the most likely to be financially locked into poor-quality school districts, or that black Americans have...

The left's failed attack on the Hoover Institution was a victory against the academy's intolerance. Yet most conservatives lack the same protection.Cancel culture is successful because of two basic assumptions. One is that all enlightened people within a certain community believe in the same things and that anyone who disagrees with any of the current leftist orthodoxies about politics, race, or sex is a heretic who must be shunned, shamed, and driven out of polite society. The other is that the cultural consensus is so strong that no individual or group of individuals can resist it.Armed with these factors, outrage...

'After adjustment for demographic and socioeconomic factors, the group most likely to attend selective colleges were students in male breadwinner-female homemaker families.'Teens whose mothers worked part-time or not outside the home were significantly more likely to be admitted to and attend a highly selective college or university than teens whose mothers worked full time, finds a study out today from the Institute for Family Studies. The study controlled for external factors including family income, parental education, the child’s sex, race, and family composition.“Students are more likely to be accepted by and attend highly competitive colleges when their mothers are at...

If people are only racist or 'antiracist,' your ideology is easy to enforce after a certain point of proliferation because people believe it's bad for business to be on the side of alleged racism. “If you voted for Donald Trump, you are a racist. You have no wiggle room,” tweeted Jemele Hill on July 19. Hill is a writer at The Atlantic and the daughter of a Trump voter. While her contention might puzzle the average American, it would raise few eyebrows on college campuses, where racism and bigotry have been defined differently for years.Those expanded definitions, so broad they...

To understand just how normalized radical ideas are on college campuses, look at the curriculum for which students pay thousands and thousands of dollars. From their first steps on campus for orientation to walking across the stage on graduation day, students are usually bombarded with leftist propaganda. College campuses facilitate the perfect environment for indoctrination, providing a platform for radical professors to teach their opinion as fact. As a young woman in college, I know firsthand how difficult it can be to stand behind conservative values in the face of leftist campus culture.Conservative parents are in a catch-22. While still...

Whenever liberals – specifically white, Fabian democratic-socialists and white cultural Marxists – have a weak argument, they prostitute the lie that if what they are advocating isn't done, blacks will suffer. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, this demonic reasoning doesn't apply when it's noted that white Democrats fought to retain human bondage. The documented fact that abortion has murdered more than one-third of the total populace of Americans who are black is met with demands to keep the industrialized extermination of blacks unabated. The problem with those who espouse such Erebusic fatuity is their amoral duplicity. To shield against the prolepsis...

“While we write and print millions of words about race in America, why is it still so hard to have a truly respectful, decent, and humble dialogue about perhaps the most complicated and contentious issue in American life?” asks David French in his Dispatch article “American Racism: We’ve Got So Very Far to Go.” Yet he does not mention in his story of personal change the elephant in the room: the Black Lives Matter movement’s radical cultural hegemony.Establishment Republicans made the same mistake by ignoring the movement’s radical premise: that at its core, America is rotten and systemically racist, and...

Public money should never be used to support a political agenda. Yet, that’s exactly what’s happening at the University of Idaho, which decided to explicitly provide backing for the most radical elements of the controversial Black Lives Matter program. A university vice provost emailed students this week to announce the school’s “series of Black Lives Matter events” “where discussions surrounding systems of oppression will occur.” That’s what tipped me off to the fact that the school also created a website containing “ways to get involved and support the Black Lives Matter movement.” The university’s “resources” page contains more than 100...

A Boise State University assistant professor used her publicly-funded email account and access to students’ contact information to raise funds for a group that seeks to end capitalism and defund police nationwide. The assistant professor, Les Hutchinson Campos, also offered students tips for protesting without getting caught or injured. She promised additional help to students if they asked. “I’m just an email away. And, if you want to talk on the phone or video chat about what’s going on, please email me. I have an open schedule to talk with you,” Hutchinson Campos wrote in a June 11 email. “You...

Woke students are using meaningless language, having a meltdown over facts, and 'canceling' people whose ideas they don't like — all in the name of equality. Students are demanding the firing of two University of California, Los Angeles lecturers for doing their jobs, bringing the quest for conformity and identity politics to an absurd new level.One of the lecturers is Gordon Klein, who teaches accounting at the Anderson School of Management. A UCLA student emailed Klein recently, telling him that in light of George Floyd’s tragic death, black students “are struggling to focus on their educations when there is massive...

Than Asian Americans Artificially diversifying universities through quotas does not help to close the very real racial achievement gap in education. CaliforniaÂ’s legislature is trying, yet again, to bring back racial preferences in college admissions. Never mind that its residents overwhelmingly approved a ban against such discrimination in a referendum. If lawmakers succeed, they will penalize Chinese Americans, a growing force in the state. So why such dogged determination that could backfire politically?Several forces are at work here. One is that without such inducements as the racial preferences of affirmative action, the whole structure of identity politics eventually collapses. Those...

It’s absurd to claim Cotton was saying Shakespeare was American simply because he said Chinese students should learn about the playwright 'from America.' Shakespeare understood ordered liberty. To repurpose words from “Macbeth,” social media and politics are “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” For proof, look no further than the response to Sen. Tom Cotton’s claim that Chinese students who study in American universities should not be taught quantum computing.Instead, Cotton said, “If Chinese students want to come here and study Shakespeare and the Federalist Papers, that’s what they need to learn from America.” He called it a scandal that American...

Any tax-funded bailouts for higher ed need to be contingent upon urgent structural reforms, and a new paper from the National Association of Scholars provides the blueprint. Should universities receive taxpayer-funded bailouts? The answer depends on who you ask. According to Universities U.K., the lobby group for British universities, the answer is an unequivocal yes, even when the suggestion has caused some dithering and calls for a further probe into the Conservative-led government.The Russell Group Universities, the British version of the American Ivies, will be the hardest hit due to the latest crisis, according to one study. In the United...

'Even a phenomenon as menacing as COVID-19 is one of the inevitable risks of life,' writes Purdue President and former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels. While other education leaders are waiting for politicians to release their students from the lockdowns suspending their futures, former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, now head of Purdue University, is making plans to reopen his campus for fall.“We have every intention of being on campus this fall,” he told the faculty senate on April 20, according to USA Today. “We are sober about the challenges that will bring. We believe in the value of the on-campus experience,...