Free Republic

A former Vermont governor’s estate is suing Middlebury College for removing his family name from the campus chapel he paid for because he advocated for the sterilization of “degenerates and defectives” a century ago. A 79-page complaint filed in Vermont Superior Court alleges the school breached its contract with the estate of Gov. John Mead in 2021 when it removed the Mead name, which was a precondition of the money gifted to the school to build the chapel. The building sits atop the highest hill on the centuries-old campus. James Douglas, a spokesman for the estate of former Gov. John...

A private liberal arts college in Vermont reverted to remote learning until the close of the fall semester due to 50 active COVID cases on campus. Final exams, which were scheduled to wrap up by Sunday, will be administered remotely, and students, 99% of whom are fully vaccinated, are encouraged to leave campus early. Read the Middlebury letter to students…

This spring, visiting professor Ryszard Legutko was prevented from speaking at Vermont's prestigious Middlebury College due to strident opposition by extremist and intolerant students. This was the second such embarrassment for the college: writer Charles Murray and a Middlebury professor were insulted and assaulted there in 2016. Professor Legutko recently related his perspective on the experience, revealing that the college not only caved to the disruptive and disrespectful students, but legitimized their conduct! Further, the students have set out to proscribe future discourse that might again ignite their sociopathic anarchy. Last year, our nation's children walked out of high schools...

On May 22, 2018, the U. S. House of Representatives Government Reform and Oversight Committee examined the free speech crisis on college campuses. Since few universities do not receive federal funding, their interest is not inconsequential. One of the three academic witnesses they called--Brett Weinstein--identified himself as a "professor in exile" from Evergreen State College. Weinstein--like the other two witnesses the committee called on from academe--could distinctly be described as on the left of the political spectrum. Nevertheless, only one member of the trio—Shaun Harper of the University of Southern California—downplayed the free speech crisis. The other--Allison Stranger of Middlebury...

Middlebury College has disciplined 67 students after its investigation into the disruption of a March 2 lecture by controversial author Charles Murray, the school announced Tuesday. The sanctions range "from probation to official college discipline, which places a permanent record in the student’s file," the school said in a statement. Murray attempted to lecture in the McCullough Student Center about his 2012 book, Coming Apart. Murray is better known for his 1994 book, The Bell Curve, which sought to correlate social inequality to genetics. The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled his work "racist pseudoscience."

Two things today: Diversity and Resistance, in reverse order.First, “resistance” (h/t American Digest) No, sorry, you aren’t a resistance, because USA is not a dictatorship. Nobody is persecuting you; none of your rights are being violated; no illegal purges enacted; no tortures and disappearances. You didn’t like the results of an election – and want to pretend it is illegitimate, because you don’t want to do the hard work of rebuilding a constituency alienated, “Because you thought correcting people’s attitudes was more important than finding them jobs. Because you turned ‘white man’ from a description into an insult (…) Because...

There’s nothing like a little violence to focus the mind. I am the Middlebury College professor who ended up with whiplash and a concussion for having the audacity to engage with the ideas of Charles Murray, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Though he is someone with whom I disagree, I welcomed the opportunity to moderate a talk with him on campus on March 2 because several of my students asked me to do so. They know I am a Democrat, but the college courses I teach are nonpartisan. As I wrote on Facebook immediately after the incident, this...

Academia today abounds in ironies, although, more often than not, the irony is lost on the denizens of academe itself. By now, the mobbing of conservative scholar Charles Murray at Middlebury College in Vermont has received widespread attention. I have covered Dr. Murray multiple times: Although he arrives at conclusions that go against prevailing wisdom, he does so painstakingly, always holding out the possibility that missed data may force him to revise his work, something he has always been willing to do. Moreover, he is unfailingly gentlemanly and has never meted out the treatment to those who disagree with him...

The Southern Poverty Law Center, like Snopes, is one of those ridiculously sloppy institutions, that makes claims without bothering to prove them, while skating by on name recognition The Middlebury College attackers who shut down Charles Murray’s talk and assaulted a professor accompanying him drew their argument in part from a familiar source. They cited the Southern Poverty Law Center’s labeling of Murray as a racist. This isn’t the first time that the SPLC’s efforts of supposedly labeling “extremists” has led to violence against its targets. The worst such incident remains the attack on the Family Research Council headquarters by...

<p>MIDDLEBURY, VT. – A Vermont college student who removed American flags set up to commemorate the Sept. 11 attacks has been suspended for a year. Middlebury College students set up about 3,000 flags every year to remember 9/11 victims. This year, a handful of people removed the flags and put them in garbage bags. The college said in an Oct. 11 news release one of the people was a student who acknowledged her participation. Another was a Canadian political activist who was invited to campus by the student. The others weren't known. The college's community judicial board found the student, whose name wasn't released, responsible for violating policies of conduct and respect.</p>

More than 200 colleges and high schools across the nation participated in Young America's Foundation's 9/11: Never Forget Project. Students came together to establish an American flag memorial on campus consisting of 2,977 flags representing each person murdered in the terrorist attacks. Unfortunately, five student protesters at Middlebury College ripped the flags out of the ground before 3:00 pm. The 9/11: Never Forget Project has been an annual nonpartisan event at Middlebury College for the past ten years. By participating in the 9/11: Never Forget Project, students honor the victims of the attacks, as well as honor the American principles...

A 2,977 flag memorial was ripped out of the ground in front of Mead Memorial Chapel shortly before 3 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 11 by a group of five protestors claiming that the flags were on top of a sacred Abenaki burial site. The flags — meant to commemorate each of the 2,977 lives taken in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks — have been posted in the grass between Mead Chapel and the Davis Family Library annually in a joint effort between the College Republicans and Democrats for nearly 10 years. Ben Kinney ’15, president of the College Republicans, spent...

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. - Middlebury College history students are no longer allowed to use Wikipedia in preparing class papers...

ALBANY, May 2 - It did not take long for the editor in chief of the Middlebury College weekly student newspaper, The Middlebury Campus, to resign and apologize for publishing a doctored photograph in the March 17 issue portraying the college's next commencement speaker, Rudolph W. Giuliani, as Adolf Hitler. But if she had the chance to do it over, Andrea Gissing, the former top editor who has taken "full responsibility" for the sardonic portrait of New York City's former mayor, said she might publish the piece again. "I had spent a lot of time thinking about the illustration, going...