Free Republic

After smooth confirmation hearings, Judge Amy Coney Barrett looks poised to break the ivy ceiling at the Supreme Court of the United States. All other eight justices on the court have Ivy League law school degrees on their walls, but Barrett's is from Notre Dame, the current capital of conservative Catholic academia, where she also served as a professor before being tapped for the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals by President Donald Trump. The White House touted Barrett's Notre Dame pedigree in appointing her, but it also bragged about her undergraduate alma mater, Rhodes College, with a verbal faux pas...

1,513 alumni of Rhodes College in Nashville, Tennessee signed a letter opposing Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court. As you probably guessed, it’s about abortion. Past nominations of conservative judges also brought out the same vitriol so this is now expected behavior.Amy Coney Barrett graduated magna cum laude in 1994, was a member of the Honor Council, and named to the Student Hall of Fame. Rhodes College is a small private liberal arts college historically affiliated with the Presbyterian Church. The student population is about 2,000. The Princeton Review reports that the college is “academically very...

Amy Coney Barrett’s former classmates and even sorority sisters signed a letter to the president of her alma mater, Rhodes College, resorting to some far-left smear tactics to oppose President Donald Trump’s nomination of Barrett to the Supreme Court. Among other things, the alumni’s letter savages ACB for speaking at an event sponsored by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), citing the far-left scandal-plagued smear factory the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) accusation that ADF is a “hate group” worthy of inclusion on a list with the Ku Klux Klan. The letter’s signatories say many of them were “contemporaries of, friends of,...

How are mere conservatives to keep up with the latest in PC etiquette if the politically correct cannot even do so? Hypatia, a feminist academic journal, issued an apology for publishing a journal article on 'transracialism,' per Inside Higher Ed. Transracialism is the concept that a person can self-identify as a member of a different race. Inside Higher Ed referred to the Rachel Dolezal case, where the former NAACP chapter president identified as a black woman, but was born as a white woman. The journal editors said that the piece should not have been published and admitted that they did...

MEMPHIS — " We must not be afraid to be free," Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black famously said in a dissent defending free expression. That appeal is germane today, especially on college campuses, professor Daniel Cullen argues. Cullen, a professor of political science at Rhodes College, is working to engage liberal arts college students on the critical importance of the First Amendment and free speech. It's part of a program at 30 colleges and universities across the country who will be marking Constitution Day on September 17, the 231st anniversary of its signing. “It is a critical moment in American...

In late March, Hypatia, a feminist-philosophy journal, published an article titled “In Defense of Transracialism” by Rebecca Tuvel, an assistant professor of philosophy at Rhodes College in Memphis, as part of its spring 2017 issue. The point of the article, as the title suggests, is to toy around with the question of what it would mean if some people really were — as Rachel Dolezal claimed — “transracial,” meaning they identified as a race that didn’t line up with how society viewed them in light of their ancestry. Tuvel structures her argument more or less as follows: (1) We accept...