Free Republic

Former Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson has withdrawn as commencement speaker at Vassar College following student backlash over his border policies — a decision that has stirred division at the elite "Little Ivy" school in upstate New York.

Here's the problem with the "victim mentality": Those who have it generally ignore genuine victims. "Since the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation began publishing its annual audit of hate crimes in 1997, crimes targeting Jews have constituted the majority of all religiously motivated crimes every single year," according to the AMCHA Initiative, a human rights group in Santa Cruz, California dedicated to protecting Jewish Students. Arguably, college campuses are at the epicenter, as AMCHA puts it in their annual report on anti-Semitism on campus, of this trend. AMCHA looked at incidents at the 113 U.S. schools Jews were most likely...

Conservatives have long accused academics of shredding the Constitution, figuratively speaking, but a Project Veritas sting operation recently caught them doing it literally. Undercover video released last week showed administrators at Yale, Cornell, Syracuse, Vassar and Oberlin agreeing to rip up copies of the Constitution handed out off campus after an investigator posing as a student described the document as “triggering” and “oppressive.” “Well, I think that the Constitution means things to different people; like you said it is a flawed document and the people who wrote it are certainly flawed individuals in my mind,” Cornell lead Title IX investigator...

Video from investigative journalism outfit Project Veritas (PV) released Thursday morning shows a Cornell administrator shredding a copy of the U.S. Constitution after a PV journalist posing as a student told the administrator the document is triggering. Elizabeth McGrath, Cornell’s Lead Title IX Investigator, is seen in the video feeding pages from a pocket-size Constitution through a paper shredder after the undercover journalist says it would be therapy for her. McGrath asks the journalist if she would like to participate, an offer she declines. I have my own personal reasons why the Constitution is very triggering for me, the PV...

California is the lifestyle incubator of the nation. And now the trendy anti-Semitic thuggery that debuted at California’s public universities has metastasized across America, all the way to the elite halls of Vassar. Before we discuss the fashionable pogrom that just took place on the Vassar campus where Jackie Kennedy once strolled in pearls, let’s look back at May 7, 2002. On that day, Professor Laurie Zoloth, Director of the Jewish Studies program at San Francisco State University, attended a “Peace in the Middle East” campus rally, where they prayed for peace in Israel. Wrote Zoloth: “As soon as the...

Academics, the very people who claim they want “progress” “going forward,” frequently want to turn back the clock a half century or so. “Without hope—the fervent, animating kind—the 60s would have had no fuel to feed the engines of change,” Paul Kane wrote in The Chronicle Review on March 7, 2014. “To have seen our causes as hopeless would have drained them of force.” “No civil-rights movement, no antiwar protests, no feminism, no gay and lesbian rights, no counterculture and commune movement, no Woodstock, no environmentalism. Whatever we might think of that period now, we believed then in what we...

"Why could we not expel a student based on an allegation?" That astonishing question was posed at a conference on how colleges respond to sexual assault issues by Amanda Childress, Sexual Assault Awareness Program coordinator at Dartmouth. According to Inside Higher Ed, Childress continued: "It seems to me that we value fair and equitable processes more than we value the safety of our students. And higher education is not a right. Safety is a right. Higher education is a privilege." Give Childress credit for candor--even the campus spokespersons for increasing the number of guilty findings in campus tribunals usually aren't...

A string of offensive graffiti messages were made by the transgender student who was tasked with leading the investigation group, according to Vassar College officials. One of the two known culprits was revealed as Genesis Hernandez, a transgender student in charge of the Bias Incident Reporting Team, and officials said that the offending pair were the ones behind some of the graffiti. The school's director of media relations told MailOnline that they have only been able to pinpoint two of the six incidents to the pair, and the investigation into the other incidents is ongoing...... ...The student-led group was designed...

http://blogcritics.org/politics/article/the-15-percent-solution-adapting-to/ Why is healthcare tied to employment? One of the smartest decisions the federal government made was compelling employers to collect insurance, taxes, unemployment, and Medicare/Social Security contributions through the employee’s paychecks. We all have had the same reality check when we received our first paycheck. You remember…you worked at a fast food place in high school, and you received $5 per hour. You worked 20 hours, and realistically believed you would receive $100. That’s the first time you learned about taxes, and the thrill of the moment, receiving your first paycheck, is tempered by the reality of FICA, or...

Biased Middle East studies professors are nothing new, but what about a professor who actually states in his course syllabus that he has no intention of presenting a scholarly, balanced approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict? This is how Vassar College history professor Joshua Schreier introduces the syllabus for his fall 2008 course, "The Roots of the Palestine-Israel Conflict": Students should keep in mind that this course is NOT designed to present "an objective" account of a "two-sided" conflict. The fact that there are supposedly two sides does not obligate us to portray each as equally right and/or equally wrong. The...

Fiddler Virtuoso Vassar Clements Dies By JOHN GEROME Associated Press Writer August 16, 2005, 2:21 PM EDT NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Vassar Clements, a fiddle virtuoso and A-list studio musician who played with Paul McCartney and an array of others, died at his home Tuesday after a battle with lung cancer, his daughter said. Clements, 77, was hospitalized for 18 days earlier this year, receiving chemotherapy and other treatment. Copyright 2005 Newsday Inc.

Kerry Supporters Few In Mid-Michigan Town Email to a Friend Printer Friendly Version (TV5) Vassar-- This time of year the talk of the town in Vassar is usually the upcoming pumpkin roll. But judging from the yard signs that line the road as you drive into town, pumpkins have been replaced by politics. The latest buzz is the new Kerry-Edwards campaign headquarters that has opened up downtown. In a city that is largely Republican; many Vassar residents are not taking to it very well. At Betty Lou’s Restaurant TV5 was able to find only one Kerry supporter. Lyla Fabro says...