Free Republic

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Vanderbilt University (search) is giving up its long-running court fight to have the name "Confederate Memorial Hall" removed from the stone front of a campus dormitory. Chancellor Gordon Gee (search) dropped the word "Confederate" from the dorm's name in 2002, citing an effort to create a more welcoming environment. But the United Daughters of the Confederacy (search), which helped finance the building, sued when the school wanted to physically remove the name from the main entrance. The case reached the Tennessee Court of Appeals, which in May ordered Vanderbilt to either leave the chiseled name alone or...

Confederates Defeat Vanderbilt A Tennessee appeals court ruled Wednesday that Vanderbilt University may not drop “Confederate” from the name of a dormitory — unless the university is willing to return a donation it received in 1933 at the value of the donation in today’s dollars. The court’s ruling reverses a lower court’s decision that allowed Vanderbilt to drop “Confederate” from the name. Students and professors at Vanderbilt objected to the name, saying that it suggested university support for slavery and was offensive to black students. Following years of discussion of the issue, Vanderbilt dropped “Confederate” from the name of “Confederate...

As a young doctor in the early 1970s, Paul E. Jarrett, Jr., did a number of legal abortions. He began having doubts, though, after the urea-induced abortion of a mental patient. The child, weighing two pounds, was born alive, and the mother screamed, "My baby's alive! My baby's alive!" Dr. Jarrett later said, "I often wondered what we did for her mental status. That baby lived several days."But it was a 1974 operation that "changed my mind about abortion forever." While doing a suction abortion, Jarrett found that the suction curette was obstructed by a torn-off fetal leg. So he...

RACISM:THE SOFT UNDERBELLY OF AMERICA By Dr Jonathan Farley Shortly after the Guardian published my essay on why blacks should fight against the war, someone e-mailed me.'Dear Swine,' he politely began, 'you will be exterminated.' The message was anonymously signed, 'An American.' The fact that the man's full name and address appeared in the e-mail header tells us two things about this war--namely that it is founded on both ignorance and racism. To stop the war we will need to counter both. I would like to suggest how. The first main myth about the American peace movement is that there...