Free Republic

College campuses can be political hotbeds. And that has some members of Congress thinking they should get involved. Some Republicans are pushing a measure through the House of Representatives meant to ensure that students hear "dissenting viewpoints" in class and are protected from retaliation because of their politics or religion. Colleges say the measure isn't needed, but with Congress providing billions of dollars to higher education, they are worried. The measure's chief promoter, Marxist-turned-conservative activist David Horowitz, says an academic bill of rights will protect students from possible political "hectoring" and discrimination by their professors.... The federal government provides loans...

A Brooklyn College professor says Ebonics is superior to the tongue of White Devils --Assistant Professor of Adolescence Education at Brooklyn College --Teaches that rap music is an effective tool for teaching English literacy to schoolchildren, and that proper English is language of white "oppressors" --Required students to view Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911 Priya Parmar is an Assistant Professor of Adolescence Education at Brooklyn College's School of Education in New York, where she teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses to aspiring teachers. Of special interest to Parmar, whose doctoral dissertation is titled "KRS-One Going Against the Grain: A Critical Study...

For certain enlightened liberals on university faculties, the lesser intellectual stature of Christians and conservatives is so much taken for granted that they do not hesitate to write about them in terms dripping with condescension and contempt. An example I encountered this week is especially odious, and I am happy to bring it to the attention of a wider, non-academic audience. The authors are four political scientists at the University of Pittsburgh - Barry Ames, David Barker, Chris Bonneau and Christopher Carman. Their paper is a critique of a study, published earlier this year, examining the statistical evidence that not...

The sea is far from full, but the current still can serve. The tide, ebbing for decades, has begun to flow. It is time to seize the initiative lest we miss the moment and lose our ventures.   "After the Vietnam War, a lot of us didn't just crawl back into our literary cubicles; we stepped into academic positions. With the war over, our visibility was lost, and it seemed for a while — to the unobservant — that we had disappeared. Now we have tenure, and the work of reshaping the universities has begun in earnest."  — Jay...

Thomas Klocek, the DePaul professor who lost his job without due process after arguing with several students about the Middle East at a student activities fair, has now sued DePaul. Much of the suit focuses on claims that DePaul defamed Klocek, in part by providing the public with false and misleading information about his health. Klocek also claims breach of contract. In this case, DePaul has shamefully taken a single encounter where the facts are in dispute (the students and professor present radically different versions of the event), and has transformed it into a veritable festival of repression. First, DePaul...

Concerned that public schools are becoming sites of liberal indoctrination, activists have generated a wave of efforts to limit what teachers may discuss and to bring more conservative views into the classroom. After all, they say, if related campaigns can help rein in doctrinaire faculty on college campuses, why not in K-12 education as well? So far this year, at least 14 state legislatures have considered bills aimed at colleges that would restrict professors and establish grievance procedures for students who perceive political bias in teaching. None have become law, but the movement has momentum: Four state universities in Colorado,...

Brooklyn College's School of Education has begun to base evaluations of aspiring teachers in part on their commitment to social justice, raising fears that the college is screening students for their political views. The School of Education at the CUNY campus initiated last fall a new method of judging teacher candidates based on their "dispositions," a vogue in teacher training across the country that focuses on evaluating teachers' values, apart from their classroom performance. Critics of the assessment policy warned that aspiring teachers are being judged on how closely their political views are aligned with their instructor's. Ultimately, they said,...

While American universities may proclaim diversity as an exalted value, a recent study shows that the only freedom of thought that really exists on campus is "to believe the dominant political ideology. Other ideologies are marginalized." (Klien and Western. For full text of study, follow links below.) But Phil Mitchell doesn’t need a study to validate what he has experienced for over 20 years. "The truth is, universities are the most hostile, narrow-minded and intolerant environment in society," Mitchell said. Mitchell, 57, is a former history professor at the University of Colorado (CU) and a deeply committed Christian. He was...

Nowhere is the orthodoxy of political correctness more firmly established than on college campuses. Woe betide the unwary student who runs afoul of a certified victim group. While it's OK to pillory males, Christians, corporations or the military, any slight - real or imagined - that gives offense to women, minorities or homosexuals, for example, can bring on severe consequences. In this kind of environment, College Republicans at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island displayed remarkable courage in taking on the PC establishment. Their target was V-Day. No, not Valentine's Day, but Vagina Day, which has replaced, in feminist circles,...

Tenure in our universities is simply unlike any other institution in American society. Take the case of Ward Churchill at the University of Colorado. Because of his inflammatory slander of the September 11 victims, the public turned its attention to his status. We discovered that he did not have a Ph.D., created a Native-American identity, and appropriated the intellectual property of others — but was promoted to a tenured full professorship, protected by a lifetime contract. No equivalent for CEOs or for dishwashers exists. Journalists, politicians, lawyers and others who take unpopular stands also lack guaranteed jobs. Doctors do no not...

Today, former graduate student Scott McConnell filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York, because it expelled him from its education master’s program based on his personal beliefs. In January 2005, administrators summarily dismissed McConnell because he had expressed views that opposed "multicultural education” and had stated in an academic assignment that "corporal punishment has a place in the classroom.” Story Continues Below The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) took up McConnell’s case, reminding Le Moyne, a Jesuit college, that its actions breached its own promises to respect students’ academic freedom and due process....

Let us consider politics in terms of the two types of beer. It would be perfectly logical to proclaim that all beer is bad. But it would be idiotic to proclaim, for example, that lager is evil while ale is morally sound. It would be similarly illogical to proclaim ale evil and lager good. Let us now apply that logic to the two systems of totalitarian government jointly responsible for killing off 100 million or so innocent people in the 20th century. It is perfectly logical to argue that all totalitarianism is evil. But it's silly to argue that Nazism...

Jonathan Bean is a popular professor at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale — even though his libertarian politics don’t always coincide with his students’ views. A historian, he was just named Teacher of the Year in the College of Liberal Arts. But in the last two weeks, he has found himself under attack in his department — with many of his history colleagues questioning his judgment for distributing an optional handout about the “Zebra Killings,” a series of murders of white people in San Francisco in the 1970s. His dean also told his teaching assistants that they didn’t need to...

DePaul’s Jihad against academic freedomApril 18th, 2005 DePaul University in Chicago is one of the fastest growing universities in the country. It has become the largest Catholic-affiliated university in America. Muslim and Arab students are one of the segments of DePaul's student population that has seen the greatest increase in numbers in recent years. Although no figures are available, these students are an important source of revenue for the University, and many may well pay full tuition, making their attendance particularly lucrative. Perhaps in recognition of this market segment, the University hired Norman Finkelstein to teach in its Political Science...

Freedom of speech on many university campuses is being exercised with an increasingly liberal bias that is staking a worrisome monopoly on the free marketplace of ideas. Evidence of this bias is a new study published in the March issue of Forum, which showed that—by their own description—72 percent of professors in American universities and colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative. Hence, it is reasonable to question whether students are receiving a fair and balanced education. The concern is understandable. As stated by one of the study’s authors, Robert Lichter, “In general, even broad-minded people gravitate toward other...

Six weeks ago, a teacher named Phil Mitchell reluctantly spoke to me about his unjust and forced exit from the history staff at the University of Colorado after 21 years in the classroom. All the evidence, notwithstanding the tortured spin of CU and its defenders, was that Mitchell, a reliable and well-regarded instructor, was being "let go" because of conservative political and evangelical Christian beliefs. Mitchell, who by the time I spoke with him was exploring job opportunities in more hospitable environs, decided to come forward with his complaints about the lack of diversity that hampered any true ideological debate....

KALAMAZOO (NEWS 3) - The man accused of dousing former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan with salad dressing has pleaded not guilty in a Kalamazoo court. Samuel John Messick was arraigned on charges of disturbing the peace Thursday. He reportedly tossed a cup of salad dressing on the conservative commentator at a speech he was giving at Western Michigan University on March 31st. Buchanan decided not to press felony assault charges against the man. Messick will be back in court at the end of the month.

Security will be tight at University of St. Thomas on Monday when conservative author and commentator Ann Coulter speaks at 12:30 p.m. in O'Shaughnessy Educational Center auditorium, one block north of Summit and Cleveland avenues. Her topic will be "Liberal Lies About the American Right.'' Coulter's speech is open to the public, but audience members will be asked to check coats and book bags during the program.

After the University of Colorado's Ward Churchill scandal, you might think it's nearly impossible for U.S. universities to get rid of faculty members. It's not so. While it's true that faculty members can embrace terrorists, demean their victims, plagiarize the work of others, lie about their ethnic backgrounds for better positions and generally hold America and Americans in contempt, there is something they can say on the college campus that will get them fired. In fact, I can tell you very easily and succinctly what a college professor can do to get the ax on nearly any university campus across...

A speech about academic freedom turned into a "violation of First Amendment rights," according to Dana Cloud, a member of the International Socialist Organization. Six people, including one juvenile, were arrested Wednesday night after protesting David Horowitz's speech at Townes Hall at the UT School of Law. The Texas Federalist Society hosted the meeting and invited Horowitz, a right-wing advocate and author of the Academic Bill of Rights, to speak. Opposition groups were holding signs and speaking out during Horowitz's speech on Wednesday, but when they were told to stop speaking, some took out noisemakers to mark their disapproval of...