Free Republic

Hundreds of college students at one of the largest party schools in America, Florida State University (FSU), dedicated their lives to God on Thursday.Christian author Jennie Allen shared news of the event on her social media pages. Photos and videos show the large group of young people gathered at Wescott Fountain on the school’s campus in Tallahassee, the Stream reported Saturday.“God keeps doing it!! They confessed their sin. They came forward in droves tonight to trust Jesus. We baptized hundreds in a fountain usually used for partying and worse. And it’s all just the beginning,” Allen wrote in a post...

Yale University will once again require standardized testing for students applying for admission in the fall of 2025. The decision, announced today, ends the test-optional undergraduate admissions process that had been in place at Yale since the pandemic. According to the announcement, the past four years of test-optional admissions had given Yale what it described as “an invaluable opportunity to think deeply about testing policy and to generate new data and analyses. With testing availability now fully restored for prospective applicants around the world, we have reevaluated our policy with the benefit of fresh insights.” Yale is describing its new...

Sidney Chalhoub pledged to support 'Palestinian liberation' as part of Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine ... The chairman of Harvard University's history department is a member of a faculty group, Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, that posted an anti-Semitic cartoon over the holiday weekend depicting a hand emblazoned with the Star of David holding a noose around the necks of one black man and one Arab man. In the background, a black arm swings a machete scrawled with the phrase, "liberation movement." The image was posted alongside a message from the faculty group arguing...

Last week, two New York University students died just days apart from each other. Police officials told the New York Post, that Jacqueline Beauzile, 19, was pronounced dead by EMS after she was found unresponsive at Lipton Hall on Thursday. The body of Doreah Salti, 18, was discovered around 7:30 PM outside the Barney building on Stuyvesant Street. She was later pronounced dead at the Bellevue Hospital with trauma on her body that indicated that she had either jumped or fallen from the building. With many speculating that Salti's death was a suicide, her family said they believed her death...

Harvard is among the many U.S. schools that remain committed ... as of February 6, 2024, an astounding 68 American colleges and universities still have Covid shot mandates in place. Yes, you read that correctly. There are 68 schools in the United States that continue to push the mRNA serum on college students across America. ... The list includes historically elite schools like Harvard and Johns Hopkins. It also includes a variety of ultra leftist colleges in California and New York, and elsewhere, coupled with a significant amount of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). ... Speaking of Harvard, they...

Harvard University is obstructing a congressional probe into campus-wide anti-Semitism, leading lawmakers to warn the Ivy League school that it will face a deluge of subpoenas if it continues to stonewall the investigation. "Harvard's responses have been grossly insufficient, and the limited and dilatory nature of its productions is obstructing the Committee's efforts," Rep. Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.), the chairwoman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, wrote to interim Harvard president Alan Garber on Wednesday. Harvard has until Feb. 14 to produce documents outlining its internal response to a growing wave of anti-Semitism on campus, including records...

The Department of Education Office for Civil Rights has opened an investigation into Indiana University over its alleged failure to respond to anti-Semitism on campus. ... The Department of Education Office for Civil Rights has opened an investigation into Indiana University over its alleged failure to respond to anti-Semitism on campus. The complaint, filed by Campus Reform Editor-in-Chief Dr. Zachary Marschall, alleges that the Bloomington, Indiana institution hasn’t properly responded to anti-Semitism on campus, leaving Jewish students “afraid to speak up.” After the October 7, 2023, terrorist attack carried out by Hamas, several pro-Palestinian protests were held at the Indiana...

Some colleges and universities in the United States have been struggling with student performance, particularly since they began spending more time protesting Israel or the police than on the classes they signed up for. And the DEI push concerning who does or doesn't get admitted isn't helping either. But no school wants to go public and say that they are graduating a bunch of sub-par students, right? Western Oregon University has joined the ranks of those who are finding creative solutions to these challenges. They will simply no longer issue failing grades to anyone such as "D-" or "F." They...

‘It is still unknown if any of these six departures are related’ Another diversity staffer at Quinnipiac University left this month, the sixth DEI official in one year, prompting questions about the turnover rate. Sarah Hellyar, the interim Title IX coordinator, resigned in January and began a new job in the same role at Antioch University, the Quinnipiac Chronicle reports. Her resignation follows two others in December and three more since January 2023, all of them in diversity-related positions at the private Connecticut university. Last week, new interim Vice President for Equity and Inclusion David Fryson said in an email...

The University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, has launched a segregated pool activity called “Black Folx Swim,” which expressly excludes participation by non-black swimmers. “The aim is to get more Black Folx into a space where they haven’t always been welcomed, while providing them the opportunity to learn swimming skills,” the school’s website states. Swimming lessons are taught exclusively by “experienced black swimmers/instructors,” the site adds, noting that the segregated pool time “is dedicated to building a better relationship with water for the Black community.”

Student group requested high court block race-based admissions at the academy amid ongoing legal battle.. West Point defended using race in its admissions process in response to a student group's request that the Supreme Court force the military academy to pause the practice while a lawsuit makes its way through lower courts. "For more than forty years, our Nation’s military leaders have determined that a diverse Army officer corps is a national-security imperative," U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote in a Tuesday court filing. "Achieving that diversity requires limited consideration of race in selecting those who join the Army as...

The university's VP of Academic Affairs said the changes will no longer 'mask' students' 'demonstrated abilities'.. An Oregon university announced they will abandon failing letter grades, citing a "GPA fixation" that negatively impacts students. Western Oregon University issued a news release earlier this month that revealed the school would be replacing "D-" and "F" grades with "no credit" to discourage undergrads from dropping out. ... The difference is that the grade of NC will not negatively impact student GPAs, ... the decision came after data from the university showed that 65% of freshman students who dropped out had earned at...

Five prominent U.S. universities have agreed to pay a total $104.5 million to settle a lawsuit accusing them of price fixing. Brown University agreed to pay $19.5 million, Columbia and Duke are each paying $24 million, and Yale and Emory are each paying $18.5 million, according to United Press International. The lawsuit was brought forward by eight former students against 17 universities, alleging they colluded as "a price-fixing cartel" to "fix" price competition when it came to financial aid. It essentially states the schools collectively shared confidential data and information about admissions and financial aid, from which they adopted a...

A team of researchers from Northwestern University says they have developed a cutting-edge, power-generating fuel cell that runs on dirt by capturing the electricity generated by microbes that live in soil. Previous attempts at microbial fuel cells (MFCs) have been stymied by low power outputs and unreliable performance, but the Northwestern system seems to have conquered these issues. The inventors of the dirt-powered fuel cell believe it can revolutionize precision farming, while lessening the use of batteries that often contain toxic chemicals and rely on lithium and heavy metals that are a limited resource and can damage crops and soil....

Here’s another good reason not to plunk down $126,584 (that’s the total for four years of tuition unless it goes up between now and 2027) to send your kid to Rutgers. Long considered to be one of America’s premier universities, the beloved alma mater of Mr. Magoo is now a sinkhole of woke indoctrination, with academic standards sinking lower than Old Joe Biden’s ethics. A professor at Rutgers Law School has lied openly in an academic paper and has refused to back down, knowing that she will face no consequences from an administration that is as corrupt and compromised as...

DEI commitment includes a recent $17 million faculty initiative, ‘identity centers,’ and more Vanderbilt University employs more than one full-time administrator for every two students ... the private Nashville university employed 3,516 full-time administrators and support staff, according to information the school filed with the federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. Administrators and support staff include management, student and academic affairs divisions, IT, public relations, administrative support, maintenance, legal, and other non-academic departments. In 2022, Vanderbilt’s reported full-time undergraduate student enrollment was 6,983. That amounts to 517 full-time administrators and support staff per 1,000 undergrads, or more than one for...

Comparably sized but more prestigious Cornell paid far less this fall, suggesting big payouts could continue into 2024. Cheers from GWU law professor who encouraged students to sue university. Class-action lawyers may have frowned when Cornell University agreed to pay just $3 million last fall to settle a lawsuit seeking tuition refunds from its shutdown of classroom instruction early in the COVID-19 pandemic – a far cry from Ivy League peer Columbia's $12.5 million payout for the same actions two years earlier. They are likely grinning now that a comparably sized but less prestigious private university, blocks from the White...

Faculty said they felt trapped in an ‘alternate reality’ when trying to navigate the college’s ‘toxic’ DEI environment.. College students attending universities with restrictive speech codes are used to walking on eggshells and keeping their heads down on campus out of fear of committing social suicide or experiencing violence. In the disordered world of contemporary higher education, Jewish students receive limited, if any, support from school administrators amid explicit calls for violence against them, while other students face punishment for banal infractions like rolling a “free speech ball” around campus. But if you are shocked at how students are subject...

Academic malfeasance by Harvard's president deserves media coverage and condemnation, not excuses. ... Claudine Gay is the president of Harvard University. In recent weeks, she has come under fire for plagiarizing portions of her 1997 doctoral dissertation, as well as published articles she had authored in recent years. Examples of plagiarism were first identified by the conservative writer and activist Christopher Rufo, following Gay's much-derided congressional testimony regarding antisemitism on campus. Rufo has all but declared war on the Ivy League, which has prompted many academics to ignore his claims on grounds that he is acting in bad faith; Harvard...

These self-styled 'progressives' are in reality trying to reverse four centuries of progress, taking us back to a time when a small cadre of elites ruled the world and everyone else basically lived as a serf. ... However else we might define “wokeness”--using terms like “leftist,” “Marxist,” or “progressive,” all of which are accurate enough—it is without question anti-Enlightenment, an explicit repudiation of Western, Judeo-Christian values. That is unfortunate. We call it the “Enlightenment” for a reason. Humanity emerged (in Europe, at least) from 1500 years of moral, intellectual, and spiritual darkness, where the vast majority of people lived short,...