Free Republic

On picking up What Snowflakes Get Right: Free Speech, Truth, and Equality on Campus, one might expect a book urging those who dismiss today’s college students’ complaints about institutional racism, persistent sexism, and other societal ills to take them more seriously. To engage with their arguments and to try to empathize with them, rather than ignoring or lambasting them, even when they engage in what seems to many people like unjustified histrionics. What Snowflakes Get Right is not that book. In fact, on completing NYU comparative literature professor (and former vice provost) Ulrich Baer’s book laying out his views on...

Students at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts want some of their tuition money back because they say virtual classes aren't what they paid for — but instead of addressing the situation, the school's dean sent them a video of herself dancing to REM's "Losing My Religion." Following several communications between students and the school administration, Dean Allyson Green earlier this week attached her dance video to an email to students in which she explained that she doesn't have the authority to refund tuition and that it's "challenging" for the school to give students their money back...

A New York University professor is one of the masterminds behind the anarchist group that organized the rampage through the subways last month, destroying turnstiles, stranding thousands of commuters and spray-painting “F–k Cops” on station walls. Amin Husain, 44, is a co-founder of Decolonize This Place, which urged its radical followers in a social media campaign to “f-ck sh-t up” on Jan. 31 in a violent assault on the city’s transit system that concluded with 13 arrests and $100,000 in damage. Mayor Bill de Blasio said he was “repulsed” by the hooliganism, and Police Commissioner Dermot Shea called the so-called...

Margo Kaplan is not very popular today. In the Monday edition of the New York Times, the Rutgers-Camden law professor, an NYU and Harvard graduate, takes to the op-ed pages to argue that we’ve got it all wrong when it comes to pedophilia. She writes that pedophiles don’t necessarily turn out to be child molesters and that pedophilia is not a choice, i.e. a pedophile might be born that way. We reached her in her office in Camden to discuss. pedophilia-not-a-crime-rutgers-margo-kaplanYou really lit up the comments section of the op-ed page today. Yes, but I have to be honest. I...

Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) seized on newly released emails surrounding President Trump's decision to delay aid to Ukraine, arguing they underscored the need for witnesses and documents as part of an impeachment trial. “The newly-revealed unredacted emails are a devastating blow to Senator McConnell’s push to have a trial without the documents and witnesses we’ve requested," Schumer said in a statement. "These emails further expose the serious concerns raised by Trump administration officials about the propriety and legality of the president’s decision to cut off aid to Ukraine to benefit himself," he added. Schumer's comments come after Just...

Given that a large number of the leprosy cases in the United States involve Latinos coming up from Mexico, Dr. Marc Siegel, an internal medicine specialist with NYU Langone Health, said "it seems only a matter of time before leprosy could take hold among the homeless population" in Los Angeles County. There are close to 600,000 homeless people in L.A. County and 75% of those people lack "even temporary shelter or adequate hygiene and medical equipment," Dr. Siegel wrote in The Hill. "All of those factors make a perfect cauldron for a contagious disease that is transmitted by nasal droplets...

Mark S. Zaid, the activist attorney representing the so-called whistleblower at the center of the impeachment movement targeting President Donald Trump, advocated for Robert S. Mueller III to become an anti-Trump whistleblower. On April 25, 2018, while Mueller’s Office of the Special Counsel was investigating ultimately collapsed claims of collusion between Russia and Trump’s presidential campaign, Zaid co-authored an oped in the New York Times calling for Mueller and his staff to become “lawful whistle-blowers.” The scheme outlined by Zaid was an option to be implemented if Trump had moved to fire Mueller and dismantle the Special Counsel’s office. Zaid...

New York University has cancelled a class entitled “Reporting on the Far Right” after only two students signed up for the elective course. The course was scheduled to be taught by former New Yorker fact-checker Talia Lavin. Lavin resigned from the magazine last year after a Twitter dust-up surrounding her mistakenly identifying the tattoo of a wheelchair-bound ICE agent as a Nazi cross. Lavin later deleted the tweet and sort of apologized for her mistake. “Some vets said this ICE agent’s tattoo looked more like a Maltese Cross than an Iron Cross (common among white supremacists), so I deleted my...

New York University has canceled a "Reporting on the Far Right" elective undergraduate class after just two students signed up to take the course. NYU attracted headlines earlier this year after its decision to hire former New Yorker fact-checker Talia Lavin to teach the class. In June 2018, Lavin resigned from the magazine after making a false accusation against ICE agent Justin Gaertner for sporting what she believed was a Nazi tattoo, which turned out to be a 'Titan 2' symbol for former Marine veteran's platoon while serving in Afghanistan. “Canceling the class had nothing to do with Talia’s writings,...

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...

Talia Lavin’s undergraduate course “Reporting on the Far Right” will kick off in the fall semester of 2019 New York University has hired Talia Lavin as an adjunct journalism professor less than a year after the former New Yorker fact checker resigned after falsely accusing an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent of having a Nazi tattoo. Lavin’s undergraduate course “Reporting on the Far Right” will kick off in the fall semester of 2019 at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. In its official faculty bio, the university billed Lavin as an expert in “far-right extremism and social justice.” At least one current NYU...

Talia Lavin, who resigned from the New Yorker in disgrace last year after helping whip up a Twitter mob claiming a disable Marine veteran was a Nazi, has been hired by NYU’s journalism school to teach a class titled “Reporting on the Far Right.” From the Wrap: Lavin’s undergraduate course “Reporting on the Far Right” will kick off in the fall semester of 2019 at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. In its official faculty bio, the university billed Lavin as an expert in “far-right extremism and social justice.”At least one current NYU journalism student questioned the decision to...

Chelsea Clinton tried to attend a vigil at New York University on Friday Students berated her and said her words had inspired attack in New Zealand White nationalist shooter killed 49 people at two mosques in Christchurch NYU students said that Clinton had inspired 'Islamophobic mob' with her words Was referring to Clinton's criticism of Muslim Rep. Ilhan Omar Clinton accused Omar of using 'anti-Semitic tropes' in her language about Israel Muslim students have berated Chelsea Clinton at a vigil for the victims of the New Zealand mosques massacre, saying she is to blame for the attack. Clinton, who is...

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...

New York University student senators passed a resolution Thursday in support of the university divesting from three companies associated with the Israeli government and instituting a “socially responsible” investment policy. Israeli-affiliated companies named in the resolution included Caterpillar, General Electric, and Lockheed Martin. Only NYU students were allowed to attend the senate meeting, each senator's vote remained anonymous, and those who wished to address the room were limited to two minutes when speaking. The meeting, which was expected to last for about two hours, was ultimately extended until it spanned nearly three-and-a-half hours.

NYU student Senator-at-Large Rose Asaf tweeted that student senators would propose a Boycott, Divest, and Sanction resolution (BDS) against the state of Israel at the university senate meeting on Nov. 1. This proposal comes on the heels of a resolution, passed last semester, which urged the university to “review its nondiscrimination policies for Palestinian, Middle Eastern, and other affected students traveling to the State of Israel and attending NYU Tel Aviv,” according to NYU Local. The final vote on the resolution is scheduled for Dec. 6 and votes will be cast anonymously, with only NYU students permitted to attend. During...

New York University researchers have identified visual-acoustic biofeedback as a new tool to assist in voice modification therapy for transgender women. The research, which appears in the latest issue of the Journal of Voice, identifies a new avenue for this technology as a tool to help trans women find a voice that matches their gender identity. “Our voices are so much a part of who we are,” said Deanna Kawitzky, the study’s lead author, who conducted the research as a student in the Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders at NYU Steinhardt’s School of Culture, Education and Human Development. “For...

A Brooklyn man accused of murdering a 66-year-old professor after a war of words over immigration is claiming self-defense, his attorney said Friday.

Former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Sunday warned that “true civil discourse” is under threat around the world while speaking to graduates at NYU Abu Dhabi, an event that the school blocked journalists from filming. While obliquely criticizing President Donald Trump, Kerry did not mention the 2015 Iran nuclear deal he secured with other world powers, an accord of which Trump now has pulled America out. […] While never naming Trump, Kerry began his remarks by saying: “Given what’s going on today, I’m glad to be invited anywhere, folks.” He quickly added that the U.S. “needs to build...

Since it is, unfortunately, SOTU Day, we might as well have a bit of fun while we wait for this tedious, pointless charade to be over with. The Washington Examiner has the coverage of a fun video prank put together by Campus Reform. They went out to interview some students at New York University and find out what they thought about the President’s State of the Union address. (That would be the one which won’t happen until tonight.) As usual, there was no shortage of students who were all too eager to jump in with their own critique of...