Free Republic

Today the NY Times published a surprisingly interesting story about the current state of academia. The focus is one professor at NYU, Maitland Jones, who has long been considered one of the top professors in the field of organic chemistry. Jones taught at Princeton until 2007 and then moved to NYU where he had a year-to-year contract. His textbook on the subject is now in its fifth edition. But this year Jones was fired after a group of about 80 students started a petition claiming his class was too hard.…last spring, as the campus emerged from pandemic restrictions, 82 of...

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a historian at New York University, and the author of the book, “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.” She has studied the backsliding of democracy, from the US to Russia, and elsewhere. In a wide-ranging interview, she told Insider that in light of the January 6 hearings, Trump might have to be prosecuted in order to save American democracy ahead of the 2024 election. In that context, she said that DeSantis could take his place as a populist nominee… “Now, if that does happen to Trump — DeSantis has already absorbed all the lessons of Trump”… “He’s clearly...

Ian Bremmer is a political scientist who teaches at New York University. He also apparently works at Time magazine and appears on television occasionally as an expert in foreign affairs. Sunday he created quite a firestorm when he tweeted out a fake quote attributed to President Trump. For a while, Bremmer doubled-down and refused to delete the tweet or apologize, even after other blue-checked progressives began sharing it widely. Today, Bremmer finally apologized: My tweet yesterday about Trump preferring Kim Jong Un to Biden as President was meant in jest. The President correctly quoted me as saying it was...

President Donald Trump rolled out a new immigration plan in a press conference held in the White House Rose Garden on May 16 that focused on addressing the major flaws in America’s current immigration laws and border control system. During his presentation of his new plan, Trump said the following: “We must also restore the integrity of our broken asylum system. Our nation has a proud history of affording protection to those fleeing government persecutions. Unfortunately, legitimate asylum-seekers are being displaced by those lodging frivolous claims—these are frivolous claims—to gain admission into our country. Asylum abuse also strains our public...

Foreign policy expert Ian Bremmer, the president and founder of Eurasia Group and a New York University political science professor, got in big trouble Sunday for tweeting a fake quote attributed to President Trump, then claiming it was “plausible” the president would say it. “Kim Jong Un is smarter and would make a better President than Sleepy Joe Biden,” Bremmer wrote in the now-deleted tweet, attributing it to Trump. North Korea has labeled Biden a “fool of low IQ” and an “imbecile bereft of elementary quality as a human being” after the U.S. presidential hopeful recently called North Korean leader...

While special counsel Robert Mueller has concluded there was no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, some of the key people in creating the Russia-collusion narrative themselves have ties to a foreign nation. Both the Democratic National Committee as well as Fusion GPS—the company hired by the DNC and the Clinton campaign to research the Trump campaign—were using Ukrainian sources in their efforts to discredit Trump. Serhiy Leshchenko, a member of the Ukrainian Parliament, was a common thread involved in Democratic opposition research efforts into former Trump campaign Chairman Paul Manafort. Leshchenko, along with Artem Sytnyk, the...

Henry Kissinger, now 95 years old, was recently interrupted and abused by New York University students as he attempted to have a public conversation with Mervyn King, the former governor of the Bank of England. Before the event, 30 student groups, including NYU Against Fascism and Amnesty International at NYU, had demanded that it be cancelled because Kissinger was “the morally reprehensible poster child of U.S. militarism and imperialism.” They seem to have missed the point that he is one of the rare men in public life who has actually risked his life in the fight against fascism. NYU honorably...

Michael Rectenwald — the PC-bashing, “deplorable” New York University professor behind the Twitter handle @antipcnyuprof — is suing NYU and four of his colleagues for defamation, alleging that he was subjected to a campaign of ostracism and harassment when he criticized campus political correctness. Rectenwald’s suit, filed in Manhattan Supreme Court on Friday, alleges that current and former NYU faculty members used official email distribution lists to defame him in May of 2017, calling him a “right-wing misogynist,” an “asshole” and “Satan” in messages sent to over 100 NYU faculty and administrators. When contacted by The Daily Caller, John Beckman,...

Humanities professors say organization evading moral, professional duties Dozens of humanities scholars cancelled their membership with their field's leading professional academic organization ahead of its annual convention, in retaliation for the group refusing to impose boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel. The defecting professors wrote to the Modern Language Association—published in the days leading up to the conference being held this week in New York City—that they will not be renewing their membership, due to the organization "disgracefully" voting in June against BDS and in favor of a statement denouncing academic boycotts. Timothy Reiss, a professor emeritus of comparative literature...

Dolph Schayes, who polished his game on the Bronx playgrounds, played 15 seasons as a professional and was once voted one of the 50 best players to play in the National Basketball Association, died on Thursday in Syracuse. He was 87. His son Danny Schayes, who played 18 seasons in the N.B.A. as a 6-foot-11 center, said the cause was cancer. At 6 feet 8 inches and 220 pounds, Schayes played the position now known as power forward, becoming a stalwart for the Syracuse Nationals from 1949 to 1963 after earning all-American status at New York University. When the Nationals...

Natural scientists agree that the climate is changing and that humans bear some of the blame. Social scientists are now attempting to assess the economic and political price societies are likely to pay for turning up our planet’s thermostat. The security policy community is especially eager for an answer. In the academy, the debate over climate change and its security implications gained momentum after researchers from Stanford, the University of California Berkeley, New York University, and Harvard observed that civil wars were more prevalent during years that experience hotter temperatures. The chief explanation for this relationship is that higher temperatures...

New York University’s controversial penchant under President John Sexton for doling out real-estate perks to top professors and executives also extended to his son.Jed Sexton, whose sole affiliation with NYU was his status as the president’s son, for years enjoyed a spacious faculty apartment while the university experienced a “severe” housing shortage, The Post has learned. In spring 2002, NYU ordered that a pair of one-bedroom apartments normally reserved for law school faculty be combined into a lavish, two-story spread in the heart of Greenwich Village, property records show.The Harvard-educated Sexton, who was a 33-year-old aspiring actor at the time,...

Occupy Wall Street buys $15 million of Americans' medical debt Tue, Nov 12 2013By Elizabeth Dilts(Reuters) - An Occupy Wall Street spin-off group has bought up $14.7 million worth of Americans' personal medical debt and forgiven it over the last year as part of its Rolling Jubilee project, the group announced Monday.The Rolling Jubilee project, organized by Occupy Wall Street's Strike Debt group, has so far spent $400,000 to buy the debt, in the process relieving 2,693 people of the money they owed for medical services Occupy thinks should be free."Think of it as a bailout of the 99 percent...

A group of New York University (NYU) students are circulating a petition which accuses Chick-fil-A owners of “human rights violations” over their financial support for non-profit pro-family influence groups.The document, which so far has attracted just over 15,000 of 20,000 hoped for signatures, also calls for administrators to use a loophole in school rules to expel the popular chicken sandwich store campus. “NYU prides itself on being a diverse, open and inclusive campus community”, reads the petition, posted in March by student Hilary Dworkoski. “[M]aintaining a contract with an anti-gay vendor like Chick-fil-A undermines what makes this university so great.”View...

The Crazy Department-Wide Emails That Everyone at NYU Is Talking About At around 3:17 on Wednesday morning, every student in NYU's Department of Social and Cultural Analysis received a bizarre "open letter" to NYU President John Sexton, from a student who claimed she'd been "forced" to do an ethnographic assignment on Occupy Wall Street. It was 2,800 words long, oddly typeset, and quickly followed up by another five equally eccentric emails. Someone sent us the full set of emails, which everyone at NYU—and elsewhere—was talking about. Want to read them?

NEW YORK // Crammed with Lenin buttons, dusty memos from the McCarthy period, and crumbling pages of internal briefings dating back a century, the 2,000 cardboard boxes handed over to New York University last month hold secrets about the Communist Party USA that make archivist Peter Filardo's heart flutter. ...Last year, Filardo received a phone call from the Communist Party's national chairman, Sam Webb, who told him the organization wanted to donate its archival collection to the Tamiment Library at NYU. The party planned to renovate its headquarters, Webb said, and it no longer had room for the cache, which...

NEW York University has trumpeted its acquisition of a large cache of materials donated by the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) to its Tamiment Library. A front-page New York Times story noted that the gift includes 12,000 cartons filled with documents and photographs from the party's newspaper. A celebratory conference to mark the event tomorrow is filled with party war horses and includes panels extolling the CPUSA's contributions to American society and culture. ... For nearly 70 years - from shortly after its founding in Chicago in 1919 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in...

The songwriter, labor organizer and folk hero Joe Hill has been the subject of poems, songs, an opera, books and movies. His will, written in verse the night before a Utah firing squad executed him in 1915 and later put to music, became part of the labor movement’s soundtrack. Now the original copy of that penciled will is among the unexpected historical gems unearthed from a vast collection of papers and photographs never before seen publicly that the Communist Party USA has donated to New York University. The cache contains decades of party history including founding documents, secret code words,...

April 16 (Bloomberg) -- Columbia University, New York University and Barnard College, three of Manhattan's most competitive private colleges, are drawing record applications, and the reason goes beyond demographics. New York is increasingly a magnet for students who want corporate internships and a chance to tap the city's deep well of entertainment offerings, students and educators say. Fear of urban crime and terrorism, once barriers for some applicants, has diminished. Major crime in New York is down 66 percent in the past 10 years, according to the city's police department. In March, the Princeton Review Inc., a test-preparation and admissions...

The ombudsman is here because the doctrine against it collapsed. But pride says the Times cannot copy the Post. What's Bill Keller to do?The argument for why an ombudsman would never be needed at the New York Times went like this. Every editor should represent the interests of the reader. That’s what good editors do. No ombudsman. Before you start poking at the logic, appreciate how long it stood and how well it served the authority of the Times. First ombudsman is 1967, Louisville Courier Journal. Thirty six years later, the New York Times agrees: maybe it’s a good...