Free Republic

Sometimes a single incident efficiently summarizes a larger trend. So it is with New York University’s selection of its new president, Linda Mills, a licensed clinical social worker and an NYU social work professor. She researches trauma and bias, as well as race and gender in the legal academy. She is a documentary filmmaker and teaches advocacy filmmaking. She serves as an NYU vice chancellor and as a senior vice provost for Global Programs and University Life. In all these roles, Mills is the very embodiment of the contemporary academy. The most significant part of her identity, however, and the...

The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork ... Ambitious media frauds Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair crippled the reputations of the New Republic and New York Times, respectively, by slipping years of invented news stories into their pages. Thanks to the Twitter Files, we can welcome a new member to their infamous club: Hamilton 68. If one goes by volume alone, this oft-cited neoliberal think-tank that spawned hundreds of fraudulent headlines and TV news segments may go down as...

Booking photos of Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman taken on May 30, 2020. In a dramatic hearing on Thursday, a federal judge sentenced a corporate attorney who firebombed a police car during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests to a year in jail, arguing that his prestigious education — boarding school, Princeton, a law degree from New York University — should have rendered him a peacekeeper, not an instigator. “You’re not one of the oppressed. You’re one of the privileged,” senior Eastern District of New York Judge Brian Cogan told Colinford Mattis, even as he expressed admiration for what the...

SCREENSHOT OF NYU SYLLABUSES School's back in session and the hottest topic is ChatGPT. New York University professors are prohibiting the use of the AI tool in the “academic integrity” sections of their syllabuses, and many students were given an explicit warning from professors on the first day of class not to use the bot to cheat on assignments. The popular chatbot created by OpenAI, which can be used to generate everything from academic essays to news articles, has led many professors and teachers to be alert when it comes to the possibility that an essay has been plagiarized by...

As long as college students are considered entitled customers, their complaints about their professors will be taken seriously by administrators. That’s because happy students boost college applications, affect the closely-watched U.S. News & World Report annual rankings, and are part of the corporatization of higher education. The latest example involves Maitland Jones Jr. and his organic chemistry course at NYU. When 82 of the professor’s 350 students signed a petition charging that his course was too hard, the deans terminated his contract and allowed students to withdraw from the class retroactively. This highly unusual step ignited an equal and opposite...

Earlier this month I wrote about organic chemistry professor Maitland Jones. Jones, who is now 84-years-old taught at Princeton until 2007 and then retired and became an adjunct professor at NYU. He’s considered one of the leading teachers in the field and his textbook on organic chem is now in its 5th edition. But his class is not easy. In fact, it had become known as a weed out class for students who wanted to go into medicine. But last spring a group of his students revolted.…as the campus emerged from pandemic restrictions, 82 of his 350 students signed a...

An NYU chemistry professor who claimed he was fired after students complained that his class was too hard said colleges “coddle” students instead of helping them succeed with “tough love.” Maitland Jones Jr. taught at the expensive Manhattan private school for 15 years before he was canned ahead of the fall semester after a student petition alleged that his organic chemistry class was too difficult to pass. “Organic chemistry is a difficult and important course,” he wrote in an op-ed published in the Boston Globe Thursday. “Those of us who teach it aim to produce critical thinkers, future diagnosticians, and...

New York University fired Maitland Jones Jr. because his organic chemistry course was “too hard.” The man wrote the textbook on the subject, now in its fifth edition, and had been a star teacher at Princeton. He went out of his way to tape his lectures, at his own cost, to mitigate some of the attendance problems attributed to the pandemic. Yet students revolted because they feared, according to the New York Times, that “they were not given the grades that would allow them to get into medical school.” The professor, meanwhile, saw a different problem: “They weren’t coming to...

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...

Social media companies have weak policies on misinformation and have failed to enforce them consistently ahead of the 2022 midterms, according to a new report released Monday. The report, from New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, faults Meta, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok for not taking a proactive approach to address misinformation, including a growing trend of election denialism and false claims of fraud. They say the lack of a proactive approach threatens the approaching election. Although social media companies have pledged to tackle election misinformation, the report said the companies’ “flawed policies and inconsistent enforcement result...

To the Antisemites Who Sit Next to Me at School My NYU classmates talk about the 'Zionist grip on the media' and tweet 'death to Israel.' To my law school classmate who tweeted, “my love language is marg bar [death to] Israel”: thank you. To the Students for Justice in Palestine, who explained: “Zionism is, by design, an ideology that promotes violence against, and hatred and delegitimization of Palestinians. Embedded in the Zionist supremacy narrative is the orientalist, Islamophobic idea that Azkenazi [sic] Jewish whiteness is fundamentally superior to Palestinian lives, culture, and identity”: thank you. To the dozen NYU...

We have conducted an in-depth analysis of Obama-era White House visitor logs, and we have learned a good deal about the people who controversial CIA employee Eric Ciaramella met with while assigned to the White House. Ciaramella reportedly was detailed to the Obama White House in 2015 and returned to the CIA during the Trump administration in 2017. Real Clear Investigations named Ciaramella as possibly being the whistleblower whose complaint sparked impeachment proceedings against President Trump. As reported by the Examiner, Fox News’ legal analyst Gregg Jarrett indicated that a key takeaway was the “reported direct relationship” Ciaramella had with...

The Twitter executive responsible for blocking stories about Hunter Biden's laptop is one of several advisers to the Aspen Institute's disinformation commission. Yoel Roth is one of several questionable advisers to Aspen's Commission on Information Disorder, which on Monday released its much-anticipated report. Commission members include Katie Couric, who recently acknowledged that she edited comments on National Anthem protests out of a 2016 interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg to preserve the justice's reputation with liberals. Another commissioner, Rashad Robinson, helped fuel actor Jussie Smollett's hate crime hoax. Commission members' censorship of legitimate news stories could undercut their lofty mission. The...

Surgeons at a New York City hospital have successfully attached a pig’s kidney to a person, whose immune system didn’t immediately reject the organ — a ground-breaking procedure that may one day lead to the use of animals in life-saving transplants. The recipient at NYU Langone Health was a brain-dead woman who received the kidney of a pig whose genes had been altered so its tissues no longer harbored a molecule known to trigger almost immediate rejection, according to Reuters. The family of the patient — who showed signs of kidney dysfunction — consented to the experiment before she was...

From the moment I stepped foot on campus at NYU three years ago, I’ve been taught that there is right-think and wrong-think. Everywhere I look, professors, administrators and peers all fervently parrot the same beliefs. I have sat through orientation events that were highly politicized, assuming “community values” of radical progressivism — values I don’t share. On the first day of the semester, a professor blatantly disparaged conservative politicians and their supporters as uneducated and ignorant. Even Mayor de Blasio intervened in October of 2018 to prevent right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking to a class of about 25 freshmen...

New York Attorney General Letitia James announced Wednesday that former U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch will advise her office's fast-moving probe of the New York Police Department and its clashes with protesters at demonstrations sparked by the fatal arrest of George Floyd. James announced that Lynch and Barry Friedman, a New York University professor who serves as faculty director of the NYU Law Policing Project, will join the investigation as special advisers. "The right to peacefully protest is one of our most basic civil rights, and we are working without rest to ensure that right is protected and guarded," James...

Lawrence Mead, a long-time proponent of welfare reform, is a professor of politics and public policy at New York University. On July 21st this year, an ill-advised article he had written, ‘Poverty and Culture’, appeared in the academic journal Society. The article began by asking, “Why do so many Americans remain destitute… even when jobs are available?” According to Mead, the answer is not “social barriers, such as racial discrimination or lack of jobs,” but rather “cultural difference.” Noting that “the seriously poor are mostly blacks and Hispanics,” he argued that such individuals have not internalised Western norms of individualism....

New York University officials signaled they are open to a student group's demands to create Black residence floors on campus next year, but the petition is already receiving backlash for proposing students segregate themselves. "[Residential] Life staff have reached out to the authors of the petition to discuss how we might move forward with their goals," an NYU spokesperson told Washington Square News, NYU's student newspaper. "Given the COVID-related challenges to the student housing system for 2020-2021, these conversations would be aiming towards 2021-2022.” A "themed engagement floor" for Black students is being pushed by a group called Black Violets...

Congress wrote to the nation’s top universities on Monday demanding they hand over all records of donations they have accepted from foreign governments and rogue regimes, citing concerns that the multimillion-dollar gifts are a growing national security threat, The Post can reveal. The letters obtained by The Post were sent to the presidents of six of the country’s leading colleges — including Harvard, NYU and Yale — after a Department of Education investigation this year found American universities had accepted $6.4 billion of hidden foreign donations. The University of Chicago, the University of Delaware, Harvard University, New York University, the...

NEW YORK - Researchers at NYU's Grossman School of Medicine found patients given the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine along with zinc sulphate and the antibiotic azithromycin were 44 percent less likely to die from the coronavirus. "Certainly we have very limited options as far as what we have seen work for this infection so anything that may work is very exciting," said Dr. Joseph Rahimian, Infectious Disease Specialist at NYU Langone Health. The study looked at the records of 932 COVID-19 patients treated at local hospitals with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. More than 400 of them were also given 100 milligrams of...