Free Republic

Once this is in place, hopefully it will serve as a model for other states. The Texas Tribune reports: Texas lawmakers find consensus on bill banning diversity, equity and inclusion offices in public universities Texas public universities’ diversity, equity and inclusion offices likely have six months left before they’re banished. State lawmakers came to an agreement Saturday on legislation that would ban DEI offices, programs and training at publicly funded universities, largely adopting the version that the Texas House approved a week ago, with some minor changes.

American higher education is undergoing several revolutions at the same time. The DEI revolution, ongoing for decades, has reached a tipping point. The professorial class and campus administrations are close to cementing it as the official ideology of American universities. However, a rearguard action, led by Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida, finds its state legislature aiming to eliminate the DEI offices that symbolize and spearhead this radicalization, pointing toward an education that emphasizes professional competence and reasonable patriotism. Soon, shrinking enrollments and a demographic cliff will strain many colleges and universities to the breaking point. Enrollments, 20.5 million in 2011,...

There was a time when conservatives told themselves that safe spaces, trigger warnings and speech bans would stay on campus. “Just wait until those kids get out into the real world and discover that they can’t get jobs studying critical race theory,” they would snicker. Not only can they get jobs, but their job in government and corporate DEI is purging you. There’s no real world anymore. We live in a giant totalitarian campus in the University States of America whose administrators are government officials and corporate leaders in which elections matter much less than catering to the whims of...

Student enrollment is continuing to decline at the University System of Georgia. Overall enrollment for the spring semester at the system’s 26 institutions fell to 311,484, down 0.9% from last spring, Angela Bell, the system’s vice chancellor of research and policy analysis, told members of the Board of Regents Tuesday. The system’s enrollment grew steadily from 2014 through 2021, Bell said during the regents April meeting on the campus of the University of North Georgia in Dahlonega. But enrollment has declined during the last couple of years to the point where it stands only about 500 students above 2019, she...

Campus Reform Correspondent Emily Sturge reports on professors breaking silence about the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), LSAT requirements, and Florida universities accused of under-reporting DEI spending. First, Sturge discusses dozens of American professors signing a letter asking universities to break their silence on CCP human rights violations. The letter exposes ties between U.S. higher education institutes and the CCP, citing that universities are silent about the CCP due to fear of losing funding. Following that discussion, Campus Reform Senior Correspondent Alexia Bianchi joined the program to discuss the American Bar Association (ABA) voting to uphold LSAT requirements. Bianchi is happy...

In August 2014, ISIS tried to secure the release from a U.S. federal prison of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui -- a Pakistani neuroscientist educated in the United States -- formerly known as the "most wanted woman alive," but now referred to as "Lady al Qaeda", by exchanging her for American war correspondent James Foley, who was abducted in 2012 in Syria. When the proposed swap failed, Foley was beheaded in a gruesome propaganda video produced and released by his captors, while Siddiqui remained in jail serving an 86-year sentence. Part of an FBI "seeking information" handout on Aafia Siddiqui -- formerly...

Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) joined Maria Bartiromo on Sunday Morning Futures this morning. Gallagher told the FOX News audience that President Trump required universities to disclose their CCP donations. There were over $6.1 billion in donations discovered that were not previously disclosed due to Trump policies. According to Rep. Gallagher, who will head the House Select Committee on China, President Trump started enforcing Section 117 of the Higher Education Act which requires disclosure of gifts in excess of $250,000. Joe Biden dropped it. Why was that? The Biden Center at UPenn received over $50 million from China after they set...

MADISON, Wis. — Most students who responded to a survey about free speech on University of Wisconsin campuses said they’re afraid to express their views on controversial topics in class because they fear other students won’t agree or it could hurt their grades, according to findings released Wednesday. A third of respondents, meanwhile, said they’ve felt pressure from an instructor to agree with a certain viewpoint. Almost half said they at least somewhat agree that administrators should bar controversial speakers if some students find the message offensive. “I want the University of Wisconsin System to be looked upon as a...

As students recover from a ‘hangover from virtual high school,’ some Pittsburgh-area universities are responding with shorter tests and looser policies around attendance and deadlines. Some instructors lower expectations for students’ mental health and as a response to generational differences, but others say that continuing remote learning habits does a disservice to students. ... Recent interviews with students and instructors in the Pittsburgh area reveal that some colleges and universities responded to the pandemic by lowering expectations. A PublicS ource article described a “hangover from virtual high school” at Point Park University, the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt), and other Pittsburgh...

More than half of Britain's universities are teaching students a "woke ideology", a new league table has claimed.The table, put together by right-wing think thank Civitas, found that many students were being given "trigger warnings" for upsetting material, and were being taught about "white privilege" in "a new moralism that reeks of hypocrisy". Top universities dominate the list, with eight Russell Group institutions in the top ten. Cambridge and Oxford are first and second respectively, with "unconscious bias" events for freshers. Bristol is third, having discouraged the word "mankind" to be more inclusive. A Conservative MP and former education the...

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) is proposing a state-funded scholarship program, with $40 million in taxpayer money, to help illegal aliens attend state universities and colleges. In her inaugural address, Hobbs vowed to expand the Arizona Promise Scholarship Program — which helps low-income students pay tuition and fees to attend universities — while creating the “Promise for DREAMers Scholarship Program” that will “cover all students, regardless of immigration status, who attend a public university.” In effect, Hobbs’ initiative would spend $40 million to help funnel illegal aliens into limited spots at state universities and colleges. An estimated 2,000 illegal aliens...

Oklahoma State University (OSU) violated students’ First and Fourteenth amendment rights by enforcing policies which police speech concerning political and social issues, according to a lawsuit filed by legal group Speech First on Tuesday. OSU enforces policies which “deter, suppress, and punish speech about political and social issues of the day,” according to the lawsuit filed in the United States District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma. It specifically challenges three issues Speech First alleges violates student speech rights: the harassment policy, the computer use policy and the Bias Incident Response system. “This lawsuit not only holds OSU accountable...

When it comes to fighting the power, Prof. Mark J. Perry is doing it. He’s been filing complaints for civil rights violations against universities that discriminate on the basis of race and sex – for example, establishing all-women or all-minority scholarships or programs – because doing so, even if it’s for fashionable reasons, is against the law. I asked him a to talk about what he’s doing and why, and at the end he has some advice on how you can help, and an offer of assistance. I chime in with some other things you can do. 1. Please describe...

Following up on his comments about "trendy ideology" and partisan interest groups in higher education, Governor Ron DeSantis has named six people with ties to conservative institutions to the Board of Trustees at New College in Sarasota. The appointments are subject to confirmation by the State Senate. The most prominent of the six nominees is Christopher Rufo, a Senior Fellow at the New York-based Manhattan Institute. Rufo has recently led the fight, according to a release from the governor, against critical race theory in American institutions, resulting in legislation in fifteen states. Rufo said in a tweer, "my ambition is...

Russell Jacoby, Professor Emeritus, Department of History, UCLA, admits that in the late 1980s, “I argued that the conservatives should awake from their nightmare of radical scholars destroying America and relax; academic revolutionaries preoccupied themselves with their careers and perks. If they made waves, they were confined to the campus pool.” Today he writes, “Only now do I see I got something wrong—as did my critics. … I missed something, the dawning takeover of the public sphere by campus denizens and lingo.” Indeed, Jacoby’s December 19, 2022 article in The Tablet is titled, “The Takeover. Self-righteous professors have spawned self-righteous...

The Taliban have banned women from universities in Afghanistan, sparking international condemnation and despair among young people in the country. The higher education minister announced the regression on Tuesday, saying it would take immediate effect. The ban further restricts women's education - girls have already been excluded from secondary schools since the Taliban returned last year. Some women staged protests in the capital Kabul on Wednesday. "Today we come out on the streets of Kabul to raise our voices against the closure of the girls' universities," protesters from the Afghanistan Women's Unity and Solidarity group said. The small demonstrations were...

Kansas universities may soon dispense with their algebra graduation requirement because too many students fail the courses.NPR Kansas recently reported: “About one in three Kansas students fails college algebra the first time around. Some take it several times before they pass. Others get so frustrated that they drop out altogether. And that cuts into university graduation rates.” NPR added that this prompted the Kansas Board of Regents to consider alternative requirements under what’s called “Math Pathways program.”Regent Wint Winter (yes, that's his name) said the new Pathways program is critical as a way to fight declining enrollment.He stated: “It’s incumbent...

In the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, academic-freedom disputes routinely took a particular shape. In a small town, somewhere in the heartland, there would be a college campus on which a young academic loudly voiced his opinions on controversial matters—mostly political, but sometimes also on sexual morality, or even on legalizing drugs. This would offend the sensitivities of some local townspeople. Someone like the local mayor would lean on the college president (probably a personal friend), the president would then lean on the department chair, and the young professor was soon gone. The American Association of University Professors would then...

We have been discussing the virtual elimination of Republican and conservative scholars from many faculties despite the fact that roughly half of the country regularly votes for Republicans or conservative causes. Now a new survey by The College Fix of 65 departments in various states found that 33 do not have a single registered Republican. For these departments, the systemic elimination of Republican faculty has finally reached zero, but there is still little recognition of the crushing bias reflected in these numbers. Others, as discussed below, have defended the elimination of conservative or Republican faculty as entirely justified and commendable....

Roughly one century ago, “progressives” set out to take over American education. They wanted to extirpate the individualism that had always been the hallmark of the people’s character, so that they would be receptive to the collectivism and central control that progressivism calls for. The best way to make that happen would be to instill their precepts in young minds. The progressives (I will not call them “liberals” even though that’s common parlance today; the progressive project is the exact opposite of true liberalism) have been extraordinarily successful in their goal of dominating our educational institutions. For many decades, they...