Free Republic

In May, three young progressive women running for the state Legislature in Pennsylvania, each endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, won decisive primary victories over men heavily favored by the political establishment. Two of the women, Summer Lee, 30, and Sara Innamorato, 32, ousted incumbents, the distant cousins Dom Costa and Paul Costa, members of an iconic Pennsylvania political family. Elizabeth Fiedler, 37, announced her run three months after giving birth to her second child, and she had a nursery in her Philadelphia campaign office so other parents could drop off their kids before canvassing shifts. Talking to voters,...

Video at link. Fidel Castro’s recent death evoked conflicting assessments of his legacy from world leaders, but college students are no more prepared than prime ministers to justify their support for the Cuban dictator. A number of students at American University acknowledged the brutality of Castro's regime, but insisted that he was a better leader than Trump because he did "good things" for the Cuban people. Fidel Castro’s recent death evoked conflicting assessments of his legacy from world leaders, but college students are no more prepared than prime ministers to justify their support for the Cuban dictator. President-Elect Donald Trump,...

Barnard College, the all-women college affiliated with Columbia University, is considering slashing its foreign-language and science requirements while requiring students to complete a new requirement on “diversity,” the Columbia Spectator reported Friday. Barnard is conducting an ongoing review of its core curriculum, which is expected to be fully implemented for the 2016-17 school year. Just what would qualify for fulfilling the diversity requirement is unclear, although the Spectator said it would be “focused on local, global, and social issues.” It would also replace the more limited Cultures in Comparison requirement.While diversity is on the ascent, hard sciences and foreign languages...

He may be the president who governed during the Civil War, freeing the slaves, but under a new curriculum proposal for North Carolina high schools, U.S. history would begin years after President Lincoln, with the presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877.

This month, almost 2 million first-year students will head off to college campuses around the country. Most of them will be about 18 years old, born in 1990 when headlines sounded oddly familiar to those of today: Rising fuel costs were causing airlines to cut staff and flight schedules; Big Three car companies were facing declining sales and profits; and a president named Bush was increasing the number of troops in the Middle East in the hopes of securing peace. However, the mindset of this new generation of college students is quite different from that of the faculty about to...

Students at a California public school have written a series of letters to Chicago's Heartland Institute, which works to discover and develop free-market solutions to society's problems, attacking its members for "destroying our planet" by refusing to endorse the politics of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" film. According to students in the sixth-grade class of teacher Michael Steria at David A. Brown Middle School, the institute consists of "fools" and "horrible people." "I think your (sic) fools for denying G.W. you know it could kill us all & you're just adding to it. I want you to help stop G.W....

Conservatives, welcome back to campus, that bastion of hostility toward your faith, politics and lifestyle, where Marx is revered, common sense eschewed, and multiculturalism matters more than mathematics. Are you ready for the semester—ready to stand up for those principles, to fight for your right to express opinions that are unpopular, and ready to make a difference for the conservative movement? Brendan Steinhauser, a former executive director of the Young Conservatives of Texas at Austin, wants you to fight and win battles against liberals on your campus and in order to help you he has some advice. His advice is...

CRANSTON -- The School Department is not happy that some middle school students were asked to write their views on same-sex marriage and that their work was published in a local newspaper as letters to the editor. M. Richard Scherza, assistant superintendent of schools, said yesterday that the topic -- on which Park View Middle School eighth graders expressed their views in this week's edition of the Cranston Herald -- was not appropriate for that age group and he will take up the matter with administrators and teachers. "I don't know exactly how this came about, but it is a...

D A L L A S, Dec. 13— University of Texas journalism professor Robert Jensen is an unapologetic liberal who openly expresses his strong views, both in and out of the classroom. "My political views are left," Jensen said. "Some people would call me a radical." In the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, student Austin Kinghorn felt Jensen crossed the line. "We walked in, and he had the overhead projector turned on, and on there was a sentence, 'What is terrorism?' " Kinghorn said. "And Jensen took the next hour and 15 minutes of class to basically make his point,...

What does it mean to be an American? In a recent Gallup Youth Survey*, Gallup posed this question to U.S. teens (aged 13 to 17). Asked on an open-ended basis, the question allowed respondents to offer whatever answer came to mind. While some people might expect disinterested replies, teens' responses reveal a deep and sincere appreciation of the implications of their status as Americans.Teens frequently mentioned freedom, or some aspect of it, in their responses. One 17-year-old boy said being an American means having "freedom to choose what school I want to attend, what church I want to go to,...