Free Republic

"The obvious … and the true has got to be defended.Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid worldexists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water iswet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth's center.… If that is granted, all else follows."-- George Orwell, 1984 Editor's note: What follows is the Kneller Lecture delivered to the North American Philosophy of Education Society meeting in Toronto, Canada on 27 March 2004. Thank you very much for the honor of inviting me to address this distinguished assembly. Because you guide the direction in which higher education in North America will go, the...

A UNC-Chapel Hill instructor has apologized after a student said during a class discussion that he opposed homosexuality -- and found himself singled out by the teacher for hate speech. In an e-mail message sent Feb. 6 to her "Literature and Cultural Diversity" students, the lecturer, Elyse Crystall, wrote, "[W]hat we heard [T]hursday at the end of class constitutes 'hate speech' and is completely unacceptable. [I]t has created a hostile environment." Crystall went on to name the student, identified as Tim, and said he was a perfect example of the topic of discussion during class: privilege. She referred to Tim...

(CNSNews.com) - A government watchdog group says it knows who wrote an incriminating memo to Sen. Ted Kennedy, recommending that he delay the confirmation of one of President Bush's judicial nominees -- apparently to influence the outcome of an important pending case. According to The Center for Individual Freedom, two of Sen. Kennedy's former aides -- in a memo dated April 17, 2002 -- recommended that he delay the confirmation of Judge Julia Smith Gibbons to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. The reason? To influence the outcome of the University of Michigan affirmative action cases, then...

Capitol Hill (CNSNews.com) - U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) appeared flustered Wednesday when confronted with allegations that two of his former aides plotted to delay the confirmation of one of President Bush's judicial nominees solely to influence a high-profile affirmative action case. The former Kennedy aides -- Olati Johnson, his judiciary counsel, and Melody Barnes, his chief counsel -- were responsible for an April 17, 2002, memo that recommended Kennedy delay the confirmation process of Julia Smith Gibbons to the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, according to a report released Tuesday by the Center for Individual Freedom. Gibbons was...

"Hostile Environment" Blowback: A few weeks ago, as part of a lecture on academic freedom at Emory University, I noted that censorious campus feminists have been the leading force behind campus speech restrictions masquerading as "hostile environment" rules, and stated the following: One does not need much of an imagination to come up with examples of how antidiscrimination law could be used to silence left-wing academics.... Consider how the concept of “hostile educational environment” could be applied to Women’s Studies classes taught by radical feminists. Students from traditional, white middle-American Christian backgrounds are often told that they are inherently racists,...

FREEDOM OF SPEECH by Radu Costinescu, '02 The First Amendment and College Campuses - Theory and Practice Inspired by Professor Charles Alan Kors I. Introduction The first amendment is undoubtedly one of the main pillars of American democracy. Thus, the extent to which the country’s institutions of higher learning stay true to its principles represents an issue of significant public interest. In this paper I will attempt to shed some light on this issue by dealing with three pivotal questions: to what extent are universities legally bound by the first amendment? Do they respect it in practice? And what avenues...

Earlier this year, I spoke at the 11th Annual Hugo Black Lecture on Freedom of Expression at Wesleyan University. During my lecture, "The Twilight of Free Speech," I told students that it was Justice Hugo Black who expanded the scope and range of the First Amendment to include local and state governments, as well as the federal government. Part of my lecture concerned the dismaying attacks on freedom of expression for more than a decade by students at many college campuses. Student newspapers, usually of a conservative bent, have been stolen in large quantities, sometimes burned. And students with dissenting...

Campuses not LGBT friendly, study says By Randy Winder Collegian Staff Writer Many students from the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered community believe college campuses across the nation are "homophobic," according to a recent study by a Penn State official. Senior diversity planning analyst Sue Rankin presented her research last night to about 35 students and faculty members on "Campus Climate" for members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) community. Rankin recently completed a comprehensive study of more than 1,600 students and faculty from 14 colleges and universities across the nation. The study assessed the climate for...

David Horowitz thinks that anybody who cares about the future should confront the fact that U.S. colleges and universities are the fountainhead of financing for the radical movement in America. He has personally taken up the challenge to do something about this. Horowitz was a left-wing campus activist in the 1960s, but he says that men who were too radical even for him and Ramparts, the magazine he edited in the 1960s, now hold tenure at major universities. During the 1970s, these hardcore leftists achieved critical mass on university faculties, took control of hiring committees, and then saw to it...

Critiques of the global academic march to the left tend to focus on classroom antics, silly statements to the press, articles with incomprehensible titles, and efforts to punish students who have the temerity to disagree with their radical professors. But books are more important than all of this. Books make up the heart of the scholarly enterprise. Articles disappear, media analyses vaporize, and classroom lectures effervesce; books endure. They build the edifice of knowledge and potentially acquire an influence across the generations. What sorts of books, then, are being written by today's top scholars? For a representative sample, I looked...

What's the cost of reverse discrimination? College students across the country have been cooking up some clever satire to demonstrate the answer. The guerrilla theater takes the form of a bake sale. Cookies are sold at varying prices depending on the buyer's race and gender. White males may pay $1 for a cookie while white females are charged 75 cents, Hispanic students 50 cents and African-Americans 25 cents. The price list makes the political statement that certain groups don't have to meet the same academic standards to gain college admission. Whatever you might feel about affirmative action, these bake sales...

It is said of Woodrow Wilson that when asked what the purpose of a liberal education is, he replied "To make a person as unlike his father as possible." He was, at the time, merely the president of Princeton University, and had not yet become schoolmarm-in-chief of the United States or waged the war that ended all wars and made the world safe for democracy. But as with his better-known schemes of social uplift and gauzy internationalism, so too with his philosophy of education, Wilson was the very model of the progressive academic. Whatever bland official statement of purpose might...

The hegemony of the Left over the universities is so overwhelming that not even Leftists deny it. Whether the institution is public or private, a community college or an Ivy League campus, you can with absolute confidence predict that the curriculum will be suffused with themes such as: capitalism is inherently unjust, dehumanizing, and impoverishing; socialism, whatever its practical failures, is motivated by the highest ideals and that its luminaries -- especially Marx -- have much to teach us; globalization hurts the poor of the Third World; natural resources are being depleted at an alarming rate and that human industrial...

THE PERSECUTION OF SCHOLARS for gender bias, on even the flimsiest evidence, has long been a fact of life in academe. Should one professor write, "Mary entered the kitchen," another boils over with feminist indignation, convenes a panel to investigate, and soon the whole campus is sucked into a tedious speakathon on the evils of sexism. But more than just the hobbyhorse of a few discontented radicals, heightened scrutiny for potential offense to preferred political groups has become policy within most disciplines. So it comes as an unexpected pleasure to see the practice of telling scholars what to write and...

With Liberty and Comfort for AllMike S. Adams (archive) March 29, 2004 | Print | SendWell, I suppose it had to happen. After eleven years of teaching at a public university, I finally got a call from one of my superiors informing me that I had made one of my co-workers feel “uncomfortable” in the workplace.  For those who may not know, the right to feel “comfortable” at all times trumps the First Amendment at most public universities.Naturally, when I found out that I made a co-worker feel “uncomfortable,” I wanted to know what I had said or done to...

I hate to admit it, but all those well-paid opinion makers are right: There is a war of sorts on dissent in this country, and America's young people are on the frontlines. Only the enemy is not John Ashcroft; it's the former student radicals turned autocratic college administrators and professors who stifle debate and dissent in the name of "sensitivity" and "tolerance." Every day on college campuses across the nation, conservative students find themselves under siege for daring to deviate from the dominant liberal orthodoxy. Conservative newspapers are routinely stolen by leftist agitators, right-wing speakers are often shouted down at...

SAN FRANCISCO - Tensions over the role of race in University of California admissions erupted as members of the governing Board of Regents sharply rebuked their own chairman for criticizing the way students are selected at the flagship Berkeley campus.Voting 8-6, the board passed a resolution Thursday endorsing their admissions process and disavowing the views expressed by regents' Chairman John Moores in a Forbes magazine opinion piece.The censure, a highly unusual move, came after a lengthy and occasionally passionate debate."This isn't right. This makes no sense," said Regent Ward Connerly, who opposed the resolution. "I don't think it's appropriate for...

The National Association of Scholars is undertaking a campaign to use state open-records laws to force selective public colleges to reveal exactly how they are considering race and ethnicity in admissions. The association is conducting the campaign, which it plans to announce today, in tandem with two organizations that also have been highly critical of affirmative action: the Center for Equal Opportunity and the Center for Individual Rights.As of today, 20 of the association's state affiliates have sent requests for information dealing with race-conscious admissions policies to selective public colleges in their states. The requests, in letters addressed to each...

College Lite: less filling, tastes great?Andrew Grossman (archive) October 17, 2003 | Print | SendListening to talk radio could get you expelled from Bucknell University. Really. Students at Bucknell, in Pennsylvania, are prohibited from engaging in "bias-related behavior," that is, "any action that discriminates against, ridicules, humiliates, or otherwise creates a hostile environment for another individual or group because of race, religion, ethnic identity, sexual orientation, gender, language, or beliefs." Few radio shows, even on NPR, could pass that standard. Forget about music, too, although classical and jazz could be OK. Just not Wagner, of course. Although especially stringent, Bucknell's...

Well we had our bake sale today and I'm happy to say it was a success. Our stand was right were most students passed by to go to eat so many of the students here (Univ. of Rochester) were exposed to out message. I'm also happy to say there was no violence and we were not threatened in any way, in fact my throat is hoarse now from all the debate we had. We where there for about four and a half hours but we didn't make much money but of course that really wasn't the point (as far was...