Free Republic

Amid the ongoing showdown between the Trump administration and the Ivy League, one university president has positioned himself as a leader of the academic resistance: Princeton’s Christopher L. Eisgruber. Earlier this month, the Trump administration suspended hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded grants to Princeton as part of its investigation into racial discrimination and anti-Semitism at the New Jersey campus. Eisgruber, though, was defiant, telling the New York Times that he’s “not considering any concessions” and calling for other university presidents to follow his lead. This isn’t Eisgruber’s first bid for the spotlight. After the death of George Floyd...

The Journal of Architectural Education (JAE), the field's premier scholarly journal, has dedicated past issues to topics like the "various nuances through which water and design mix" and the "relationship between stories and architecture." Last year, the journal landed on a different topic for its fall 2025 issue: The "ongoing Israeli genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza." The journal's "call for papers"—a prompt for essay submissions—was littered with anti-Semitic rhetoric. It lauded "siege and prison breaks" as methods of "anti-colonial life- and land-protection" and justified Hamas's Oct. 7 attack as "the rupture of settler containment." The fall issue, the journal...

*** For decades, American institutions of higher education have benefited from extraordinary taxpayer largesse. Federal government grants and other forms of direct taxpayer subsidizations of universities are legion. The federal government itself also has a near-monopoly on the market for economically ruinous student loans -- the very loans that are themselves disproportionately responsible for abetting the modern four-year college's misbegotten status as a necessary rite of passage to achieve the American dream. Capital gains of major university endowments are also taxed at the miniscule rate of 1.4% -- a fraction of the taxation rate to which the endowments would be...

An alleged sushi-slinging spy is in ICE custody. Ming Xi Zhang, known as “Sushi John,” the 61-year-old owner of Ya Ya Noodles in Montgomery Township, NJ, was arrested March 24 by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Newark. Zhang was convicted in April 2024 of acting as an unregistered agent of the Chinese government and sentenced to three years’ probation. In May 2021, he pleaded guilty to having served as an agent of China in 2016 without notifying the U.S. Attorney General. ICE says he legally entered the U.S. in 2000 but later “violated the terms of his lawful admission.”...

The federal government has frozen over $1 billion in funding for Cornell, according to members of the Trump administration. This comes amid an ongoing investigation by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. The move follows the slashing of more than $3.3 billion in federal funding from several Ivy League universities, including Columbia, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Brown and Princeton. The Trump administration also froze $790 million in funding for Northwestern, according to The New York Times. ... A Monday evening statement from Cornell administrators explained that the University was “aware of media reports suggesting that more...

The Department of Education warned 60 colleges and universities Monday that they could be next to have federal funding taken away over antisemitic discrimination and harassment. Those named and shamed included six of the eight Ivy League institutions — Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Princeton and Yale — and local schools Rutgers, Rutgers-Newark, Sarah Lawrence, three branches of the State University of New York, The New School and Wellesley. Monday’s announcement comes three days after the Trump administration’s federal antisemitism task force pulled back $400 million in grants and contracts from Columbia following monthslong Jew-hating demonstrations following the Oct. 7, 2023,...

Obit Professor Thomas Eugene Kurtz, co-inventor of the BASIC programming language, has died aged 96. Along with his colleague, John Kemeny, Kurtz's work revolutionized computing, operating systems, and programming language design.Kurtz was born in Illinois in 1928, and died last week in a hospice in New Hampshire, the home of Dartmouth College where he worked and taught.Kurtz is most famous as the co-inventor of the BASIC programming language, but almost as influential was the operating system on which BASIC first ran, which he also co-designed: the Dartmouth Timesharing System or DTSS.Kurtz co-designed both DTSS and the BASIC language alongside his...

“Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action’.” - Goldfinger, Ian Fleming (1959) On the eve of America’s election, Democrats and their media wing are putting in overtime suppressing stories that are unflattering to Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. As this newsletter just reported, Walz has longstanding ties to the People’s Republic of China which are highly concerning from a counterintelligence perspective. Just don’t expect the mainstream media to investigate any of this, especially so close to the election. However, when...

‘We expected Hamas to kill Jews. We didn’t expect Americans to celebrate it.’Someone asked me the other day how I planned to commemorate October 7. I found myself speechless, befuddled by the question. How do you offer an elegy when the war is not yet over—and 101 hostages, those still alive and the bodies of the murdered, are not yet home? How do you remember a catastrophe when it is still unfolding? How do you mark a past event that feels as though it was a prelude to a much deeper darkness, whose dimensions we are still discovering? How do...

University Middle East expert Hussein Mousavian was a former Iranian official A former Iranian official who is a faculty member at Princeton University recently bragged in an interview about how his hardline government’s death threats against a former top Trump administration official had him and his family "trembling" with fear. Hussein Mousavian, a former member of Iran’s nuclear negotiating team who works as a Middle East security and nuclear policy specialist at Princeton University, said in a recent interview that the Iranian regime’s threats to murder Brian Hook, the Trump administration’s special envoy for Iran, have heavily impacted Hook’s family...

group of Princeton University graduates stood up and turned their backs on the Ivy League school’s president while he spoke at commencement Tuesday amid ongoing tensions on campus over Israel-Hamas war protests. More than 30 members of the university’s Class of 2024 — including many wearing keffiyehs, the traditional Middle Eastern headdress often worn by pro-Palestinian protesters — turned their backs to Princeton President Christopher L. Eisgruber as he closed out commencement with his address. About ten students sitting near the front row of the graduation ceremony also quietly walked out midway through Eisgruber’s speech in a pro-Palestinian demonstration similar...

Students at Princeton University protesting Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza have called an end to their hunger strike after just 10 days. Princeton Divest Now, the student protest group that is calling for the New Jersey Ivy League university to divest from America’s Middle Eastern ally due to the high civilian death toll in the Gaza Strip, said additional strikers would be continuing their efforts.

VIDEOBe honest. Does this Princeton hunger striker look like he's been fasting for eight days? I've never seen a hunger striker look so well fed. Obviously this guy has been hiding snacks in his Keffiyeh. Snickers? Cocoa Puffs? Gummi Bears? And now he wants others to join in with his Solidarity Hunger Strike Picnic. Yes, those Keffiyehs make great tablecloths to serve pizza slices on the sly.

Three things are certain: antisemitism is on the rise; hatred of Muslims is increasing; and everyone – but especially those at universities with time to reflect – should be very, very troubled by this. Without taking account of the hate waves, it is impossible to understand why the seemingly mundane act of pitching a tent on campus has become so high stakes: is it announcing a desire to annihilate Israel, or is it a perfectly legitimate way to protest against particular US (and university) policies

WEST (Credit: CEA-IRFM). A new record in fusion has been achieved using a device internally clad in tungsten, a development that could set the pace for helping make fusion energy viable at the commercial scale. Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) facility, reports that the device was able to sustain hot fusion plasma nearing temperatures of 50 million degrees Celsius for a record-breaking six minutes. Relying on 1.15 gigajoules of power, the latest achievement saw a 15% increase in energy, as well as twice the density of previous experiments. The new milestone was set using...

Pro-Palestinian protesters taking part in an encampment at Princeton University began a hunger strike to raise awareness for starving people in Gaza.The Princeton Israeli Apartheid Divest (PIAD) student organization posted a series of photos on Instagram announcing that pro-Palestinian protests would be launching a hunger strike “in solitary with Gaza.”“PRINCETON STUDENTS LAUNCH HUNGER STRIKE IN SOLIDARITY WITH GAZA!!” the group wrote.PIAD explained that as part of the hunger strike, protesters would “abstain from all food and drink” except for water until their demands were met.“We commit our bodies to their liberation of Palestine,” the group continued. “PRINCETON, hear us now!...

Princeton students dressed in Islamic attire announce they are going on HUNGER STRIKE. “We will abstain from all food and drink except water until the following demands are met.” Demands: • Divest from Israel • Cultural Boycott • Complete Amnesty from all criminal charges

Princeton University students took over an administrative building at the Ivy League school Monday afternoon, according to the Princeton Gaza Solidarity Encampment, while Rutgers University protestors have set up an encampment of at least a dozen tents on Voorhees Mall in New Brunswick. The escalating protests come five days after Princeton arrested two students Thursday for starting to put up tents. Protestors there have continued their presence on McCosh Courtyard, with teach-ins and visiting poets, as they called on the university to divest its investments from firms profiting from the Israel-Hamas war. Similar encampments have led to weeks of tensions...

An LGBTQ activist with top degrees from Harvard, Yale and Princeton is facing up to five years in jail on charges of downloading child porn. Roy 'Trey' Farmer, 53, was arrested at his home opposite the gates of Princeton in New Jersey on Friday after a tip-off from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) The former 'piano prodigy' sits on the board of the New York Philharmonic and is president of Queer Princeton Alumni, but it has since had his details removed from their website. A successful banker and entrepreneur, he is a former president of the...

Migration and free trade impose huge unrecognized costs on ordinary people, says a Nobel-awarded Princeton economist who previously supported the unpopular, elite-backed policies. “I used to subscribe to the near consensus among economists that immigration to the US was a good thing,” Professor Angus Deaton wrote in a post for the International Monetary Fund. He continued: Longer-term analysis over the past century and a half tells a different story. Inequality was high when America was open [to migration], was much lower when the borders were closed [to migrants], and rose again post Hart-Celler (the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965)...