Free Republic

"Many Americans, particularly many Southerners, observe academia's agenda-motivated analysis and respond with a collective yawn. This infuriates and frustrates the "professionals." Academic historians then fume, pout, and spout forth even more of what caused the yawn to begin with. While not providing much real value, the whole spectacle does, nonetheless, make for some great entertainment."

American universities tower high above China when it comes to producing human capital, by far America’s greatest comparative advantage.Consider two major news stories prominent in American discourse recently. First, China is rising. Second, American universities have had much abuse heaped upon them: declining standards, “neoliberal” corruption of academia and worries about universities exacerbating class divides.Both of those stories might be overblown. An American only a few years separated from college life and now a lecturer at China’s top university, I suggest that when it comes to higher education, American institutions are leaving China’s in the dust.No ComparisonThe weaknesses of the...

The announcements by Sens. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) that they would not run for reelection reflects what may be the last gasps of the Great Plains Democrats, much as California’s 2010 Democratic landslide assured that Republicans are soon to become endangered species in places like Los Angeles and Silicon Valley. The conventional explanation for these trends centers on culture or ideology, but the real cause may lie with an evolving conflict between two dueling political economies. On one side lies the information or “creative” economy, centered in coastal big cities and university towns. On the other lies...

I first caught wind of this story from our good friend Fausta, and it seems like a suitably silly note to help wrap up an already strange and unusual week. We’ve got a brand spanking new, rootin’ tootin’ study, fresh off the press from a distinguished group of scientists. (And I can tell they were scientists because I checked, and most of them were wearing white lab coats.) In it, we find what we already suspected about the party that hates science, clings to their guns and their God, and disapproves of Barack Obama not because of his damaging policies,...

In a new study, bound to stir controversy, researchers have found that people with low IQ tend to have socially conservative ideals and prejudiced attitudes toward others, including people of different races and homosexuals. The new study published earlier this month in the journal Psychological Science found that British children with lower general intelligence factor (similar to IQ) are more likely to be racially prejudiced as adults. "We found that lower general intelligence in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood, and this effect was largely mediated via conservative ideology," lead researchers Gordon Hodson and Michael A. Busseri of Brock University,...

Philadelphia Archbishop Charles J. Chaput encouraged Catholic universities to rediscover the Church's intellectual tradition and use it to shape society's future. “Catholic higher education is heir to the greatest intellectual, moral and cultural patrimony in human history,” the archbishop said in a Nov. 10 address at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts. The Catholic intellectual tradition, he said, offers a “deeply satisfying answer” to the questions of human life, and is “beautiful because it's true.” “It has nothing to be embarrassed about and every reason to be on fire with confidence and apostolic zeal. We only defeat ourselves – and we...

More than 40 Catholic colleges were represented on Saturday at a conference that was billed as the nation's first on how gays and lesbians fit in at universities guided by a faith that says their sexual orientation is wrong. But rather than lamenting the Catholic Church's stand on homosexuality, the two-day "Out There" conference at Santa Clara University showed that plenty of gay-related scholarship and student affairs planning is going on in Catholic higher education, said co-organizer Linda Garber. "It's important and interesting to know there are Catholic universities that have offices and staff people specifically geared toward LGBT concerns,"...

319 of the nation’s postsecondary schools, 16 of them Catholic, have failed the US Department of Education’s fiscal responsibility test for 2008-09. Four of the schools-- Ave Maria School of Law, Belmont Abbey College, Thomas More College of Liberal Arts, and the University of St. Thomas in Houston-- have been praised by the Cardinal Newman Society for their efforts to promote a strong Catholic identity. (Ave Maria University, unlike Ave Maria School of Law, passed the test with the highest possible rating.) The other Catholic colleges that failed the test are the College of Our Lady of the Elms, Brescia...

What was Tom Emmer thinking when he applied for a faculty position at Hamline University? Surely he knows that our campus intelligentsia generally view conservatives like him as knuckle-dragging Neanderthals. At many campuses, Emmer might have made it to the second round of interviews if he had been a disabled "person of color" or confused about his sexuality. But even then he probably couldn't have overcome the cardinal rule of campus "diversity" -- diversity of political views will not be tolerated. Given his rejection by Hamline (after he thought he had a job), Emmer might be pleased to know that...

In this age of mainstream news reporters ignorant of economics, the media rarely trumpets the power and truth of free markets and the laws of Supply and Demand, very real forces in our daily lives that confound, embarrass and reject socialist politics. The free market communicates important information. This is why socialist and left-leaning politicians, who hate free markets, operate in economic illiteracy. The free market places no real importance on government contrived social measures that lack real-world value. When the free market speaks, socialist economic theories tremble. An example of the free market correcting economic nonsense is the “socially...

One of my superstar former students, writing about his experience at one of our nation's premier law schools, sent me a note after reading my MOJ post on marriage, religious liberty, and the "grand bargain." Here is the text, with names removed to protect the innocent: I had a first-hand experience with this reality in law school. One of my constitutional law professors taught the section of our course relating to same-sex marriage under the "inevitability" banner. I met with him in office hours later to talk to him about something else, but I brought up a question that I...

For Wall Street Occupiers or other decriers of the “social injustice” of college tuition, here’s a curveball bound to scramble your worldview: a totally free college education regardless of your academic performance or background. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) will announce on Monday that they intend to launch an online learning initiative called M.I.T.x,which will offer the online teaching of M.I.T. courses free of charge to anyone in the world.

Recently, Columbia University in New York proposed offering a class in Occupy Wall Street. I suppose the class will teach people how to camp out in a city park. Under a continuation of the Obama administration, this might actually become a good life skill.One facet of the class that I want to point out is its cost. There is an ongoing debate over the cost of a college education and if it is worth it. In general, a typical student completes a degree in four years. Masters students, course of study is compressed, two years. Time and money become a real constraint when selecting...

Following correspondent Andrea Mitchell referring to Iowa as "Too white, too evangelical, too rural" on Sunday's NBC Nightly News, on Monday's Rock Center, correspondent Willie Geist spoke to University of Iowa Professor Stephen Bloom, who similarly fretted: "It's basically a white, very, very Christian state." Geist explained how Bloom has been "in hiding" since writing a scathing article in The Atlantic attacking Iowa as, "An assortment of waste-toids and meth addicts with pale skin and rotted teeth or those who quixotically believe, like Little Orphan Annie, that the sun will come out tomorrow." Bloom also ranted: "Those who stay in...

Author’s Note: The present column was inspired by Jim Nelson Black, author of Free-fall of the American University.From time to time I am asked whether conservative donors should simply boycott leftist universities like my own. The answer is emphatically “no.” If conservative donors all stopped giving, all donations would be liberal donations. That is simply common sense. There is another, better solution born of common sense. It might not have worked a few years ago. But times have changed. The economy has tanked and it really could work today. It is a variation on the idea of directed, or contingent,...

Lori Berenson's parents raged last night against a human rights court ruling that will keep their activist daughter in prison for the next 11 years. Mark and Rhoda Berenson, who live in Gramercy Park, said the ruling marked "a tragic day for human rights in the Western Hemisphere and in the world." They faulted the Costa Rica-based Inter-American Human Rights Court's decision to uphold a Peruvian court ruling that declared their activist daughter a Marxist terrorist who conspired in 1995 to overturn the Peruvian government. Berenson was originally tried by a tribunal of hooded judges. It was later found she...

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (AP) - The Inter-American Court of Human Rights Tuesday refused a request by American Lori Berenson to review its ruling that upheld her 20-year sentence in Peru for terrorism. In a decision issued in November, the Costa Rica-based court - the legal arm of the Organization of American States - rejected Berenson's arguments that Peru violated her rights in a 2001 civilian retrial. It was Berenson's last formal avenue of appeal. The former New York City resident has denied any wrongdoing and maintains she is a political prisoner whose concern for social justice was distorted by...

American conservatives should think long and hard about where they send their kids to college. It’s a serious matter. After all, what can you become these days without a degree? If the Left has their way—if you obtain a college degree in due time—you WILL become a liberal. I fully realize that this has the potential to sound incredibly hypocritical coming from someone who is currently attending college – specifically someone who edits a publication comprised entirely of collegiate writers. But you’ll soon see why the awkward position I am in is entirely necessary.

The American tradition of public education began in one-room school houses when frontier farm families hired dedicated teachers to teach their children. When I attended public schools in the 1950s, I received an excellent education. American schools were rated the best in the world. Those schools prepared me for Caltech, and Caltech prepared me for a wonderful life in science. I owe my career and accomplishments to the great start I received in the public schools. Those public schools were locally controlled and locally funded. Teachers and parents worked together on the content of curriculum, student discipline, and all aspects...

In what might be a record, 22 Obama Administration officials have already left the government for academia. Two cabinet officials are in this mix. Interestingly, both held the same position—chair of the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA). Another interesting note is that of the aforementioned group, seven, or about one-third of the total—decamped for Harvard. Yet and still, there is at least one indication that the exodus continues unabated.

The National Climate Ethics Campaign is pleased to announce that the "Statement of Our Nation’s Moral Obligation to Address Climate Change" will be released Wednesday, November 30 from 1:00-2:30 p.m. in Room 406 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building (The Environment and Public Works Hearing Room). There are now over 1200 signers on the climate ethics statement. Please send the message pasted below to organizations, listservs, and people that might endorse it.

A Tarrant County College professor alleges he was forced to resign for his beliefs, while school officials say they received complaints that he used his classroom as an aggressive pulpit. Ginger Ruiz and Sarah Lara met in their world religion class at Tarrant County College in Arlington. The two wanted to broaden their minds. “I wanted an academic view of the different religions of the world,” says Ruiz from Arlington. Her classmate Lara signed up for the class for similar reasons, saying, “To me, religion defines a person. That’s why I took this class to learn other people’s belief.” But...

A law professor who is serving overseas in Afghanistan has quit his job at a Massachusetts university after a colleague sent out a controversial e-mail declaring it "shameful" to send care packages to U.S. troops. U.S. Army Reserve Maj. Robert Roughsedge cut ties with Suffolk University in Boston in response to fellow law professor Michael Avery's defamatory e-mail regarding troops fighting overseas, Fox affiliate WFXT-TV reports. *** In response to Avery's email, Roughsedge submitted his letter of resignation on Monday, telling WTXF in a telephone interview that the e-mail is "hate speech." "It’s basically like a 5-year-old throwing a temper...

A Massachusetts law professor has created a campus firestorm with an email to colleagues that declares it would be “shameful” to send care packages to U.S. troops “who have gone overseas to kill other human beings.”

A Suffolk University law professor has issued a blistering e-mail calling plans to collect care packages for U.S. troops “shameful.” Professor Michael Avery also questioned the intent of an American flag hanging in the law school’s atrium (snip)“I think it is shameful that it is perceived as legitimate to solicit in an academic institution for support for men and women who have gone overseas to kill other human beings,” Avery wrote in an e-mail to his colleagues. “The United States may well be the most war prone country in the history of civilization.”

Laying the groundwork to revamp higher education in Florida, Gov. Rick Scott has questioned the value of liberal arts degrees, dissed anthropologists, proposed ending tenure for professors and posted salaries of all state university employees on the Internet. Scott also recently sent a letter to state university trustee boards pushing for change on campuses. He included excerpts from a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece by Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder, "Time to Make Professors Teach." Vedder derided much academic research as "obscure" and "trivial," noting there have been 21,000 scholarly articles on Shakespeare since 1980. "Wouldn't 5,000 have been...

Henry Perkins is giving Occupy Wall Street the old college try. The 21-year-old University of Alabama junior has been earning college credits while living in the open-air, crime-riddled frat house of Zuccotti Park.

Tilburg and Groningen universities are to take legal action against one of their professors after an investigation showed he had faked research data in at least 30 scientific papers. The fraud is ‘considerable and shocking’, the committee set up to look into Diederik Stapel’s academic publications said in an initial report into the scandal on Monday. Stapel, who was a professor of social and behavioural sciences at Tilburg, was suspended last month after doubts emerged about research that concluded eating meat makes people anti-social and selfish. 2004 The investigation shows at least 30 academic papers submitted to respected scientific journals...

Beginning Sunday evening,instructors at Seattle Community College campuses are teaching classes in support of Occupy Seattle.SEATTLE — Beginning Sunday evening, instructors at Seattle Community College campuses are teaching classes in support of Occupy Seattle.The classes are scheduled to be held in the plaza of Seattle Central Community College. They will focus on subjects such as legislative lobbying, the art of the protest sign and filming to document human rights violations.According to Occupy Seattle and the Washington branch of the American Federation of Teachers, classes were scheduled throughout the night.

lesbian PhD candidate re-thinks campus sex. Once upon a time, feminists were hot to trot … to ostracize male professors for sex with students. Now women academics have found the benefits of sex between students and faculty is positive and empowering. According to the new dispensation, the entire issue of campus rules against sex between students and faculty gets in the way of “…being generally positive and reasonably friendly, arising out of mutual desire for sex and intimacy rather than an abuse of power by the teacher.” What else can you do with a doctorate in feminism?

Fairfield University’s student newspaper The Mirror reports that Fairfield provided transportation for students to hear openly gay sex columnist Dan Savage bash the Catholic Church in his keynote address for the “Pro-Queer Life” conference on Saturday.The lecture contradicts assurances reportedly made by Fairfield President Fr. Jeffrey von Arx, S.J., to Bishop William Lori that the conference would “not be a vehicle for dissent.�The Jesuit university reportedly bussed students to Union Theological Seminary in New York as part of their “More Than a Monologue: Sexual Diversity and the Catholic Church,� an effort by Fairfield and Fordham Universities along with two non-denominational...

Are students that promote the black panther ideology and the Office of Diversity in league together at the University of Minnesota - Duluth (UMD)? It would would appear so in the video below. The events took place last week as one young man, Phil Cleary, handed out pocket Constitutions on campus in honor of Constitution Day. He had a table with literature promoting Youth for Western Civilization, a group dedicated to traditional values and western civilization, and engaged in students and faculty passing by. Then, the leftists showed up to heckle. The young man in the video, Blair Jordon Moses,...

Some fraternity brothers at the University of Iowa are practicing walking in high heels as they prepare for a march to speak out against sexual assault. The first local “Walk a Mile in Her Shoes” event is set for Saturday in Iowa City. More than 100 people are expected to participate in the event, which was brought to campus by the Greek community and sponsored by UI Student Government and Coca-Cola. While the march is open to women, only men will be wearing high heels as a symbolic way to show support for women...

This Tuesday, I attended a panel discussion called “What I Wish I Knew As A Freshman Girl.” The female upperclassmen speakers talked very frankly about their mistakes as freshmen and offered their warm support to the assembled first-year women. The event seemed highly valuable, and I was left wondering why no similar opportunity existed specifically for first-year men. Female Dartmouth students have access to more support than their male peers. Female advocacy groups at Dartmouth include Women in Business, the Society of Women’s Engineers, Women in Leadership and the Women in Science Program, which provides faculty mentors and paid internships...

On college and university campuses around the country, officials are increasingly using “nondiscrimination” policies to deny religious groups the right to choose prospective members and leaders based on whether they share the group’s religious beliefs. In other words, laws that were originally designed to protect religious groups and persons from institutionalized discrimination are now being used to punish religious groups for exercising their religious freedoms. San Diego State University is the site of the most recent clash between religious student groups and university nondiscrimination policies. SDSU’s policy prohibits discrimination in membership or leadership on the basis of “race, religion, national...

"Although this title would seem to engender a lively competition, the current front runner for the Republican presidential nomination may be where the smart money should gravitate to. Texas governor Rick Perry, in his decade as C E O of the state, actually managed to push through a number of reforms of the state’s higher education system that the state’s academics find anathema."

A group of Columbia University students may be attending a private dinner with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who will be in New York City in September for the United Nations General Assembly, the Columbia Spectator reports. Fifteen members of the Columbia International Relations Council and Association (CIRCA) were invited to the Sept. 21 event in Manhattan, according to the school newspaper. The meeting would reportedly allow for the students to dine and speak with Ahmadinejad and Columbia President Lee Bollinger, who introduced the Iranian leader as "a petty and cruel dictator" when he spoke on campus in 2007.

College graduates are the fastest-growing group of consumers who have filed for bankruptcy protection in the past five years, according to a new study by a financial nonprofit group, which underscores the broad reach of the Great Recession. The survey by the Institute for Financial Literacy, slated for release Tuesday, found that the percentage of debtors with a bachelor’s degree rose from 11.2 percent in 2006 to 13.6 percent in 2010. The group tracked similar but smaller increases in consumers with two-year associate and graduate degrees. Meanwhile, the percentage of debtors with a high school diploma or who did not...

Princeton Professor Paul Krugman's ugly New York Times blog on the post 9/11 environment stopped short of accusing Pres. Bush of masterminding the attacks, but it did accuse Bush and his associates of cashing in on the tragedy, of being "fake heroes." If nothing else, the timing was hateful – the very week when the former President was called on to emerge from relative obscurity to lend gravity to the memorial ceremonies. Krugman's hate cannot hold a candle to retired MIT professor, and radical anti-American, Noam Chomsky's article in Al Jazeera. Chomsky goes a step further to condemn the US...

Styling herself a Christian Cassandra, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann declared Hurricane Irene as God’s warning to Washington. Now that we know she was only joking, we Christians can perhaps shrug our shoulders and leave the victims of Hurricane Irene to deal with its implications on their own. She was serious. She was joking. Maybe it’s her titanium spine that’s giving her the balance to shift positions. Then again, perhaps the titanium spine is a necessary prosthetic given Bachmann’s lack of Christian backbone. If Michele Bachmann actually were serious, she could certainly have drawn upon ample biblical justification. She could have wielded...

Over the weekend, a convention of political scientists met in Seattle. The idiots. The last weekend of summer, all of America celebrating a holiday, and they schedule a meeting. At which, it seems, their prime purpose was to provide political fodder against the tea party. A genuine social phenomenon occurs in our day, it impacts American elections, and those who presumably study such things are so wedded to partisan objective that they don’t study it, they propagandize against it. They are an echo of so-called weather scientists who, living through a global warming cycle, do not study it, but seek...

You've undoubtedly heard the conventional wisdom: Going to college yields a high return on the investment, whatever its cost. Even if college is expensive, it will more than pay off in the end—or that's what everyone says. The College Board claims, for example, that someone who graduates from college with a bachelor's degree can expect to earn about 66% more income over a 40-year working life than the typical high school graduate. The Lumina Foundation goes so far as to say that higher education is a prerequisite to success in today's economy. These estimates of high lifetime earnings levels make...

Academic debates occasionally get pretty ugly, and that is just the way it is. Sometimes they get very ugly. There is one case that has bothered me for several years. James Q. Wilson is now 80 years old, and for decades he has been the most prominent criminologist in the country, responsible for a number of important ideas, such as the Broken Windows theory, which argues that urban disorder and vandalism produce additional crime. Undoubtedly, Wilson has made a number of enemies, as he has taken positions that upset some on the left. One such issue was Wilson’s involvement with...

Cynthia Tucker, one of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s highest-profile columnists for more than 20 years, is leaving the AJC to become a visiting professor at the University of Georgia’s journalism school. Tucker, who won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007, assumes her new role Aug. 12, the AJC and UGA announced Wednesday. They said her position at UGA will be part of a partnership between the AJC and the university’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. Tucker, 56, was editorial page editor of AJC from 2001 to 2009, when she moved to Washington as a political columnist in a...

University of Michigan graduate students will not have to pay dues to a public employee union, the Michigan Employment Relations Commission (MERC) said yesterday, despite efforts by the University Regents board to help the Graduate Employees Organization organize them.

As director of intercultural life at a small Iowa college 12 years ago, Eddie Moore Jr. decided to hold a conference on the advantages white Americans enjoy simply because of their skin color. He called it the White Privilege Conference. Every year since, people have suggested changing the name to something less provocative, Moore said. He stood firm and now points to growing attendance — up from 150 that first year at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, to 3,000 this year in Minneapolis-St. Paul — as a sign the concept is catching on. Authors of a book purchased by...

... CAIR and CRG-IRDP assert that heightened approval for Islam is the only solution to a problem they have defined over-broadly.That very dissonance from American principles has made CAIR, and its constituency of American Muslims indoctrinated in fear, perfect prey for the ideological operators who have guided identity politics on the West Coast for two generations. In a phrase that CAIR might have thought would delight a Berkeley audience, the organization has designated its "vision" as "utopian." On the West Coast, academic Islamist argument gives way to demagogic Islamist propaganda, which will, if history is our guide, soon be employed...

[Snip} ....In a stark demonstration of the failure of campus judicial procedures, the University of North Dakota (UND) has found a student guilty of sexual assault despite the fact that local police refused to charge him with a crime and instead charged his accuser for lying about the incident. Former student Caleb Warner has been banned by UND from stepping foot on any state public campus for three years. Meanwhile, [Snip] [Snip]"Caleb Warner's accuser has been charged with lying to the police about the facts, but if even this isn't enough to reopen the case, what hope does anyone at...

Who killed YIISA? It's a kind of academic murder mystery. YIISA—for those who have not caught the scant coverage of this deeply disturbing development—stands for the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism. Or should I say stood for that, till Yale, in a cowardly, clumsily-executed maneuver, abolished the program in the first week in June.

WASHINGTON, June 23, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the University of California, Berkeley's Center for Race and Gender today released a report based on available data and interviews with experts that documents growing Islamophobia in the United States and offers recommendations about how to challenge the troubling phenomenon. [Dr. Hatem Bazian, founder of the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project at UC Berkeley, spoke at the Washington, D.C., news conference held this morning at CAIR's Capitol Hill headquarters to announce the release of the report.] The groundbreaking report –- titled "Same Hate, New Target: Islamophobia and...