Free Republic

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)...

EXCLUSIVE: The influential House Committee of Education and the Workforce on Thursday launched an investigation into the role of a former Iranian official, Seyed Hossein Mousavian, at Princeton University. It is claimed that he is suspected of advancing the interests of Iran, a state sponsor of terrorism. Twelve Republican committee members sent a letter to Princeton President Christopher L. Eisgruber with detailed questions about the influence of the Islamic Republic of Iran via Mousavian’s activities on the campus of the New Jersey-based Ivy League institution. Rep. Lisa McClain, R-Mich., who along with Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., spearheaded the letter to...

…and hollow women, too.I’ve been writing for years about the rise of toxic ideologies on America’s college campuses – totalitarian, anti-Israel, outright anti-Semitic – but still have been surprised by what has happened in these places since October 7. We need to discuss the reasons why it’s gotten so bad.A few days ago, someone republished an essay, written in 2016, by a professor who has taught at several ‘elite’ colleges. Excerpt:My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be...

Hussein Mousavian headlined STRATCOM's Deterrence Symposium U.S. military leaders earlier this month hosted a former top Iranian official who came under fire last year for bragging about the hardline regime’s efforts to assassinate American leaders. U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) tapped 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, to headline its 2023 Deterrence Symposium, a high-level powwow that brought the former Iranian official shoulder-to-shoulder with America’s top military brass. Mousavian’s appearance at the mid-August gathering, which came to light on Monday after STRATCOM posted...

Today is the 247th anniversary of the mysterious, Providential fog that covered the evacuation of the Continental Army from Long Island to Manhattan in 1776. The term Providence was very common in this era. The president of Princeton College, John Witherspoon, defined Providence as the operation of God’s presence. After the evacuation on August 29, 1776, one soldier sent a report to a Boston newspaper that said: “Providence favored us. The night was remarkably still. The water as smooth as glass, so that our boats got all over. At sunrise a great fog came up. The enemy did not discover...

Earlier this year, in a landmark action, the Kansas legislature passed the Donor Intent Protection Act, which helps ensure that donors’ wishes are respected when they make a charitable gift as an endowment. This is a significant step forward for philanthropy, as it will help to build trust between donors and beneficiaries, on campus and elsewhere. Donor-intent protections are intended to uphold the details of an explicit written agreement between a donor and a charitable organization. Such agreements typically specify how the endowed funds will be used, such as for a specific program or purpose. When a donor makes a...

Jon Wang, an Asian-American, achieved a nearly perfect sore of 1590 out of 1600 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test and attained 4.65 grade-point average in high school — well beyond perfect. Most folks likely would assume that waves of red carpets would come rolling in from elite colleges that would love nothing more than to scoop up a student boasting such numbers. Indeed, Wang told Fox Nation he applied to six "top-tier" institutions of higher learning — Harvard, Princeton, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the California Institute of Technology, Carnegie-Mellon, and the University of California, Berkeley. But the verdict —...

Abortion activists have moved into the realm of trying to make killing unborn babies seem funny. Some are blatant about it, such as Princeton University senior Jenni Lawson. She named her musical comedy, “To All the Babies I’ve Killed Before: A Love/Hate Letter to Storytelling,” according to Campus Reform. The student performance took place April 21 and 22 on campus. The play “investigate[s] the challenges of being heard and cultivating self-empowerment as a queer, cognitively-disabled (ADHD) woman in artistic spaces that traditionally center archaic, western, patriarchal narratives grounded in firm structures of storytelling and comedy,” the program states. But throughout...

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...

In a world where hard work and rational thinking are conflated with “whiteness,” it makes sense that prohibitions on cheating would be characterized as systemically racist. That’s precisely the “anti-racist” hill one Princeton University sophomore chose to proverbially die upon. In an article for Princeton’s college newspaper, The Daily Princetonian, sophomore Emilly Santos argues that “American systems of legal administration enact violence against minority populations,” which includes the criminal justice system. “Princeton’s Honor Code, tasked with holding students accountable and honest in academic settings, mirrors the criminal justice system in its rules and effects.” Santos then outlines that the disciplinary...

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...

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...

A handful of colleges around the country are clinging to COVID-19-related protocols, including mask mandates for indoor areas and vaccine mandates for students and staff. Pandemic-related restrictions on some college campuses persist as most public health guidelines have relaxed and mask and vaccine mandates have receded from most areas of daily life. But in some cases, the mandates are going beyond COVID-19. At the University of California, Berkeley, students are mandated to get vaccinated against coronavirus, as well as the flu. The university's guidance says students who are not vaccinated against the flu will be required to wear a mask...

Presidents of prestigious universities often make outrageous decisions inconsistent with such bedrock values as freedom of expression and providing the accused with traditional American due process. The shameful manner in which Princeton University fired Joshua Katz, a distinguished scholar and winner of several teaching awards, leads me to consider Christopher Eisgruber to be the worst Ivy League president, eclipsing even the earlier shenanigans of Yale’s Peter Salovey. Princeton’s invidious ousting of Katz is objectionable on at least six grounds: For those unfamiliar with the case, Prof. Katz was fired over alleged improprieties related to an offense—having consensual sexual relations with...

University’s approach to Kevin Kruse provides stark contrast to its treatment of Joshua Katz.. Princeton University learned in December about plagiarism allegations against one of its star progressive professors, emails obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show, but it does not appear to have taken action against him in the intervening six months. On Dec. 6, the economic historian Phillip Magness emailed Princeton's dean of faculty, Gene Jarrett, with evidence that Princeton historian Kevin Kruse plagiarized several passages of his 2015 book One Nation Under God. "I am sharing this information in the interest of academic integrity," Magness wrote. The...

The president of Princeton University recently recommended that the school fire a tenured professor over sexual misconduct issues, but those issues were already adjudicated in 2018. It appears the real reason they want to get rid of him is for the crime of questioning the university’s new anti-racism policies.Here’s the playbook: person expresses thoughtcrime. The Puritans and the bureaucrats go digging. Then they caricature and smear the person based on their worst moment or mistake. They pretend it’s about that, but the thoughtcrime was always the thing.https://t.co/rhn3gFgfqR— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) May 20, 2022Here’s the timeline: in 2006, tenured classics Professor...

Last week, as Palestinian psychopaths murdered three more innocent Israeli civilians in Tel Aviv in an escalating campaign of terror, activist students at two American universities voted on repulsive resolutions to urge their respective universities to divest from companies doing business with Israel. On April 5th, the undergraduate student government at Ohio State University passed what it categorized as an “emergency resolution,” asking the university to divest from Hewlett Packard and Caterpillar, Inc., and claiming that “by investing in such companies, The Ohio State University implicitly condones and profits from the decisions and actions of these companies, and, as...

I’m a college professor, which is one of those jobs that people outside the profession love to ask you about. For the better part of a decade, most of those conversations have been about one thing: free speech. Are universities, once sites of pure, open intellectual discourse, no longer so pure? What is the future of this endeavor I’ve dedicated my life to, if my peers and I are afraid to speak our minds? In one way, this interest makes sense. An enormous amount of high-profile media coverage has been dedicated to what is said, or not said, on certain...

In 2019, the Society for Classical Studies, a non-profit North American scholarly organization devoted to all aspects of Greek and Roman civilization, held a rather memorable conference in San Diego. Titled “The Future of Classics,” panelists were asked for their opinions on “the diminution of our future role” in society. One of the panelists, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, an associate professor of classics at Princeton who researches and teaches the Roman Republic and early Empire, wasted no time in making his point, calling for all Classics to die “as swiftly as possible.” Peralta, a black academic, criticized Classics for their failure...