Free Republic

A vast generational change is underway at American universities and colleges that will radically alter the culture over the next decade. Politically liberal college professors from the baby boomer generation, most of which were hired during the higher education expansion of the ‘60s and ‘70s, are systematically being replaced by younger professors who are less ideologically polarized and more politically moderate, The New York Times reports. “There’s definitely something happening,” says Peter W. Wood, executive director of the National Association of Scholars, which was created in 1987 to counter attacks on Western culture and values. “I hear from quite a...

While the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) has long dominated the field, its highly politicized leadership's inability to withstand criticism, inattention to radical Islam, and apologetic approach towards the West's foes has left many Middle East studies scholars feeling unwelcome by their umbrella professional organization. Enter the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA). Founded last year by Professors Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, ASMEA offers an alternative to MESA's post-colonialist biases and a venue for studying those elements of Islam and the Middle East that MESA's leaders ignore or downplay.ASMEA's emergence is cause for optimism....

...Harvard's endowment posted returns of approximately 9 percent through the first 10 months of this fiscal year, according to data from the University. The increase puts the endowment's value at around $38 billion as of this April, up from $34.9 billion as of last June...During the same period the S&P 500 Index lost 8 percent. So how did Harvard do it? Heavy bets on inflation...a full 24 percent of Harvard's endowment was a bet on inflation...

Scalia's selective historyBy Jack RakoveAppeals to the evidence of history figured prominently in last week's Supreme Court decision in District of Columbia vs. Heller, striking down a sweeping ban on handguns and affirming that the 2nd Amendment protects a fundamentally individual right "to keep and bear arms." Yet read the two main opinions by Justices Antonin Scalia (for the conservative majority) and John Paul Stevens (in dissent), and you will see that different ways of defining and reading what counts as historical evidence expose a fault line between them.One would have to be terribly naive to think that how these...

Academic Morning After Profits by: Bethany Stotts, July 02, 2008 This June the New York Times broke the story that two Harvard Professors, Dr. Joseph Biederman and Dr. Timothy Wilens, had only belatedly reported their considerable external financing from drug makers to their University. The evidence, revealed during a congressional investigation, may also cast suspicion on the dramatic increase in prescribed antipsychotics. As AIA has documented, some groups remain skeptical of the expansive definitions surrounding Attention Deficit Disorder diagnoses. Others are concerned by the rapid expansion of the use of psychotropic drugs among children. The investigation of the Harvard doctors,...

Cold War Amnesia by: Malcolm A. Kline, July 02, 2008 The Cold War between the United States and the former Soviet Union is still being fought, not by unrepentant, unreconstructed anti-communists such as your servant but by campus leftists born too late to be collaborators. “In last month’s undergraduate elections, a cadre of demagogues, in a disgusting publicity stunt, projected the image of a hammer and sickle onto one of Stanford’s most venerable landmarks: Hoover Tower,” Jason Dunkel, the business manager of the Stanford Review writes in a June 2008 fundraising letter. “Their platform called for the detainment of such...

Dinesh D'Souza breaks out the red pen on Michelle Obama's thesis. "To wreak so much havoc on the English language in one sentence, without conveying anything of substance, is perhaps deserving of a prize. Is this what her professors were thinking when they granted her honors?"

Waste Not, Want Not by: Deborah Lambert, June 30, 2008 There’s a new “academic endeavor” coming soon to a campus near you. It’s called “Waste Studies,” and according to Charlotte Allen in mindingthecampus.com, it’s not “the study of sewage systems or waste-processing plants.” Founded by Susan Signe Morrison, an English professor at Texas State University, San Marcos, the field of Waste Studies involves the way “societies are . . . structured around the control and regulation of excrement.” Not surprisingly, this new Marxist-inspired field of study was cooked up by the women’s studies movement. It seems that the dearth of...

Academedia Bias by: Malcolm A. Kline, June 30, 2008 Too often we treat academic and media bias separately when their relationship is much more symbiotic. After all, not only are media elites trained in academia but they frequently return to school to teach and “give something back” to the educational system that spawned them. “I’m combining my journalism career with teaching because journalism is teaching,” George Washington University professor Frank Sesno told student journalist Amy D’Onofrio in an interview that was posted on June 13 in The GW Hatchet Online. “I’m enjoying working in the classroom, helping shape students going...

Last month, Wake Forest dropped the SAT and ACT as an entrance requirement, becoming the only top-30 national university with a test-optional policy. This step away from standardized tests will help us and other institutions of higher education move closer to the goals of greater educational quality and opportunity. Our decision to reevaluate our admissions policy grew out of a close look at the state of higher education and some long, hard thinking about the kind of university we want Wake Forest to be. For several years, a growing body of research has made clear that America's top colleges and...

Thirty years ago this past week, Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. condemned our nation's selective colleges and universities to live a lie. Writing the deciding opinion in the case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, he prompted these institutions to justify their use of racial preferences in admissions with a rationale most had never considered and still do not believe – a desire to offer a better education to all students. To this day, few colleges have even tried to establish that their race-conscious admissions policies yield broad educational benefits. The research is so fuzzy and...

If one of the disadvantages of an elite education is the temptation it offers to mediocrity, another is the temptation it offers to security. When parents explain why they work so hard to give their children the best possible education, they invariably say it is because of the opportunities it opens up. But what of the opportunities it shuts down? An elite education gives you the chance to be rich—which is, after all, what we’re talking about—but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which...

At first sight, the statistics are positively wine-dark. As part of school education, countries may maintain it in theory but rarely in practice. Portuguese pupils have it as an option in their final year; in Sweden fewer than 100 schoolchildren study it, in Belgium around 800. In Britain, of a mere 241 entrants for Greek A-level (typically taken at 18) in 2007, fully 226 were from independent (private) schools... Though some classics departments in the United States have had to close or merge, the number of students enrolled in Greek has been going up since the 1990s. In 2006 fully...

Victim of Noose Incident, Columbia U. Professor Is Fired Amid Plagiarism Charges by Jamal Watson NEW YORK Last October, hundreds of students, faculty and community activists rallied on Columbia University’s campus to protest the hanging of a noose on the office door of a popular African-American professor. Now this same professor, Dr. Madonna G. Constantine, has been fired from her teaching post amid charges that she repeatedly plagiarized the work of two former students and a colleague. Constantine, 45, a tenured professor who has taught psychology and education at Columbia’s Teachers College for the past decade and is an expert...

Leftist ideology may be gaining ground in Latin America. But it will never set foot on the manicured lawns of Francisco Marroquin University. For nearly 40 years, this private college has been a citadel of laissez-faire economics. Here, banners quoting "The Wealth of Nations" author Adam Smith -- he of the powdered wig and invisible hand -- flutter over the campus food court. Every undergraduate, regardless of major, must study market economics and the philosophy of individual rights embraced by the U.S. founding fathers, including "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." A sculpture commemorating Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" is...

There's a splendid controversy brewing at the University of Chicago--at least we'll consider it splendid so long as it has a happy ending, which now seems likely. The U of C may be best known these days as home to the law school where Barack Obama used to lecture on constitutional law (twice a week!), but in simpler times it was most famous as the academic perch of the great free-market economist Milton Friedman, who died in 2006. So when a prestigious university wants to name a research center after its most celebrated (Nobel prize, Presidential Medal of Freedom, etc.,...

The Columbia University professor who gained widespread attention last fall after a noose was found hanging on her office door was fired on Monday after months of wrangling over charges that she plagiarized the work of two former students and a former colleague. Madonna G. Constantine, a professor of psychology and education with a focus on racial issues at Columbia’s Teachers College, was sanctioned in February, after an 18-month investigation into the plagiarism charge, but allowed to stay in her job and to appeal the ruling that she had violated the university’s academic standards. But over the last five months,...

Teachers College at Columbia University is suspending indefinitely Madonna Constantine, a professor who claimed she was the victim of a hate crime after an investigation began into allegations that she committed plagiarism. In a letter sent out yesterday to Teachers College faculty, the college president, Susan Fuhrman, and dean, Thomas James, said the faculty advisory committee had rejected Ms. Constantine's appeal of the plagiarism charges. They said Ms. Constantine was suspended as of yesterday but that she is entitled to appeal the decision or request a hearing before the faculty executive committee. RELATED: The Letter to Faculty (pdf). The letter,...

For years, student activists have demanded environmentally friendly changes, prompting university officials to reevaluate how they heat classrooms, water campus greens and buy light bulbs. Frostburg State University in Western Maryland, for instance, has a wind-powered generating station. Johns Hopkins University is planning to build its own heat and power generator. Students are also driving the academic push that is infusing curriculum and research with an environmental consciousness. For those who are skeptical about global warming and think that the current trend is often too alarmist, the changes carry risk. "It discredits science," said Richard Lindzen, a professor of meteorology...

College girls who turned the tables on builders by wolf-whistling at them have been warned their behaviour is ‘harassment’. The students singled out contractors working on an extension to West Kent College for amorous comments and cheeky remarks.But the joke has become so persistent that the pupils have been threatened with disciplinary action.The tables have turned: Construction workers are renowned for wolf-whistling attractive girlsAn email was sent to pupils which said: 'It has come to the attention of the college that some female students have been making comments to, or whistling at, the builders both whilst on site and...

On Evil Bethany Stotts, June 23, 2008 Is evil the result of human choice or manufactured by social circumstances? Professor Philip Zimbardo, known for his infamous Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971, opted for the latter explanation at a recent CATO book forum. Zimbardo told the audience that he believes Lucifer was expelled from heaven not for sinning, but for disobeying an authority figure. “It’s really a story about what happens when you challenge authority—you go to hell,” said the Stanford University professor. The author of The Lucifer Effect, Zimbardo believes that any person has the capacity for terrible deeds, torture,...

The revamped SAT, expanded three years ago to include a writing test, predicts college success no better than the old test, and not quite as well as a student’s high school grades, according to studies released Tuesday by the College Board, which owns the test. “The changes made to the SAT did not substantially change how predictive the test is of first-year college performance,” the studies said. College Board officials presented their findings as “important and positive” confirmation of the test’s success. “The SAT continues to be an excellent predictor of how students will perform,” said Laurence Bunin, senior vice...

The environmental fervor sweeping college campuses has reached beyond the push to recycle plastics and offer organic food and is transforming the curriculum, permeating classrooms, academic majors and expensive new research institutes. The University of Maryland teaches "green" real estate strategies for landscape architects. The University of Virginia's business graduate students recently created a way to generate power in rural Indian villages with discarded rice husks. And in a Catholic University architecture studio last week, students displayed ideas for homes made from discarded shipping containers. "It should be part of everything we do," said Ligia Johnson, a Catholic student whose...

Blogs bring out the base in us. The medium is primarily anonymous and the people who post or comment feel freer to tell others what they think. For a good example of what academics think about Christians, the Volokh Conspiracy has demonstrated that much of the academic world is inhabited by people who are the mirror image of Fred Phelps, right down to bigoted rants. It’s very revealing, yet the participants on that website keep on exposing the rotten underbelly of academia without any apparent self-consciousness. Theophobia Academics and Hostility to Religion Academia and Religion More on Academics and Hostility...

U.S. District Judge F. Bradford Stillman this morning ruled that the College must turn over the names of 20 students suspected of downloading music illegally to the Recording Industry Association of America. The RIAA plans to sue the students for copyright infringement after they allegedly downloaded music on peer-to-peer music sharing programs such as Limewire. 7 students have already settled independently, paying between $3,000 and $5,000 each. The suit had previously been denied by U.S. District Judge Walter D. Kelley Jr. Kelley recently retired, and the RIAA asked Stillman to overturn his ruling. According to RIAA lawyer Katheryn Coggon, the...

Are There Lessons To Be Learned At USF? By Bill West Today, Ahmed Abdellatif Sherif Mohamed, an Egyptian student in Tampa, Florida, entered a guilty plea in Federal Court in Tampa to one count of providing material support to terrorists. The plea stems from the case wherein he and a cohort, Youssef Megahed, who is another student at the University of South Florida (USF) and whose charges are still pending, were stopped by Sheriff’s deputies near a US Naval facility in Charleston, South Carolina. During the traffic stop, their vehicle was found to contain explosives material and jihadist training materials...

Some Duke professors are challenging the conventional "miles per gallon" terminology employed by the automobile industry. Researchers with Duke's Fuqua School of Business say that posting a vehicle's fuel efficiency in "gallons per mile" rather than "miles per gallon" would help motorists make better decisions when buying a new car. The study will appear in the June 20 issue of Science magazine. It was inspired by a debate professors Richard Larrick and Jack Soll had while carpooling in a hybrid car, according to a Duke press release. The two management professors ran experiments showing current "miles per gallon" terminology led...

As standard-bearer of the Democratic Party, Barack Obama has ended the white-male monopoly on presidential nominations while extending recent domination by an even smaller, more elite minority — holders of Yale and Harvard degrees. Among the 12 nominees of the two major parties in the past 20 years, Obama (Harvard Law, '91) becomes the 10th to have graduated from one of the nation's two oldest, most prestigious major universities. All winners since 1988 have held a degree from Yale (George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush) while their opponents featured a mix of more Yalies (Bush Sr., John Kerry)...

A Memphis entrepreneur's documentary compares high-achieving students from India, China and America. It has drawn mixed reactions from academics. [...]"Two Million Minutes" focuses on high-achieving students from top schools in Bangalore, Shanghai and Carmel, Ind., a suburb of Indianapolis. All are impressive, but the American students come across as slackers by comparison.

An exceptional essay well worth reading. A few excerpts are: "...What the university offered, then, became no different from the fare of a television station, a local movie theater, rap concert, or a government bureaucracy: the more the campus devolved into popular life, the less it had to offer anything of rarity or singular beauty—confirming Plato’s pessimism that the radical egalitarian appeal to mass appetites must lead to arts of a lesser and more accessible quality. If half-educated strippers and sex entertainers are deemed street artists or populist philosophers, then they can now be welcomed to campus, exempt from both...

It's August 1968. Anti-Vietnam War demonstrators have just wrecked the Democratic national convention in Chicago and ruined Hubert Humphrey's chances to become President. So what did these Marxist demonstrators and their cohorts elsewhere do next? They stayed in college. They sought out the easiest professors and the easiest courses. And they stayed in the top half of their class. This effectively deferred them from the military draft, a draft that discriminated against young men who didn't have the brains or the money to go to college. That draft also sparked the wave of grade inflation that still swamps our colleges....

In a recent poll, more than 250 college and university history professors placed former President Bill Clinton as the best president of the last quarter entury, Ronald Reagan as the second best, followed by Jimmy Carter and then the first President Bush. (The current president was excluded since his term of office had not yet ended.) The survey also asked the historians to rank the recent Secretaries of State and Supreme Court justices as well as the relative threat to constitutional liberties posed by presidential actions. Dr. Tim H. Blessing, Professor of History and Political Science at Alvernia College, Reading,...

I was asked recently - by a child porn advocate, no less - why I write books with chapter titles that are so “offensive.” Citing two such chapter titles – “Fag Hags and Rainbow Flags” and “The Liar, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” – the child porn advocate asked what some of my fellow UNC professors had done to make me sound so “nasty.” I think the question is worth answering. Put simply, I use provocative language in chapters (more often in columns) criticizing a small minority of my fellow professors for two reasons: 1) because they are proponents of...

On occasion in this space, I like to keep abreast of our more famous University of Northern Iowa graduates. Since I am an art aficionado, I have tried in the past to keep current on the times and career of Justin Case, UNI's most celebrated art graduate. As the regular readers of this column will recall, Case was concerned about modern art. Most of it is ugly and unskilled, but justified by the art community by three rather loose rules or constructs. First, true art must make us think. Second, true art must create emotion and challenge convention. This is...

Where does all this stuff that you�ve heard about this morning � the victim feminism, the gay rights movement, the invented statistics, the rewritten history, the lies, the demands, all the rest of it � where does it come from? For the first time in our history, Americans have to be fearful of what they say, of what they write, and of what they think. They have to be afraid of using the wrong word, a word denounced as offensive or insensitive, or racist, sexist, or homophobic. We have seen other countries, particularly in this century, where this has been...

LOWELL – The University of Massachusetts Board of Trustees took an unprecedented step today, rescinding an honorary degree awarded to Robert Mugabe in 1986. The vote was unanimous. “Rescinding an honorary degree is a step to be taken in only the rarest and most grievous of circumstances,� said Robert J. Manning, chairman of the UMass Board of Trustees. “After studying this issue for more than a year, the University of Massachusetts Trustees have decided that Robert Mugabe’s performance and policies in Zimbabwe are so egregious as to warrant this ultimate expression of disapproval.� “We have decided to break the link...

American History Recovered by: Malcolm A. Kline, June 13, 2008 Because of the game of teapot that American academic historians have been playing for decades, vital portions of U. S. history are in danger of becoming lost to future generations. Fortunately, scholars just outside the academy, who do tend to be more scholarly, are doing archeological digs, metaphorically speaking, to unearth this country’s past. What the former usually do is quote each other. The latter actually dig up the primary documents that tell the actual story. Hoover Institution scholar Alvin Rabushka has done just that in his epic study of...

HERE WE GO AGAIN, with the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents demonstrating its arrogance and contempt for the taxpayers who foot the bills. The board approved whopping raises for top UW officials. The new UW-Madison chancellor, Biddy Martin, was hired with a salary of $437,000 a year, more than $100,000 higher than her predecessor John Wiley was paid. President Kevin Reilly was granted a raise of nearly $80,000, moving from $342,000 a year to $421,500 nnually by next June. SOME READERS may remember just a few years ago, in 2003, when the regents were ruled in violation of...

Rather Steep Learning Curve by: Bethany Stotts, June 12, 2008 Some might have thought that the 2004 election scandal would have ruined the career of Dan Rather. Instead, he was given his own show at HDNet. Now, four years later, Rather’s show, Dan Rather Reports, offers viewers a glimpse into what the former CBS news anchor considers good reporting: not citing sources, overlooking conflicts of interest, and sensationalizing material to promote marxist class-warfare perspectives. All this is touted as news, even when Rather relies solely on anecdotes and ignores publicly-available statistics. “And college admissions also strike at some of the...

Commencement Celebrities by: Deborah Lambert, June 12, 2008 According to USA Today, it appears that students are having more of a say in determining who will give the annual commencement address. This year’s list of luminaries—and others— who will give the class of 2008 a sendoff include: Oprah Winfrey—Stanford University J.K. Rowling—Harvard University Jon Stewart—William and Mary Craig Newmark of Craig’s List—Case Western Reserve Jessica Lange—Sarah Lawrence College Brian Williams—Ohio State University Michael Bloomberg—University of Pennsylvania David McCullough— Boston College Meredith Viera—Tufts University Al Gore—Carnegie Mellon University Sandra Day O'Connor—Gettysburg College Carl Bernstein—University of Maryland...

Three Harvard psychiatrists facing a US Senate inquiry got a vote of confidence from their hospital as "beloved and trusted by thousands of grateful children and families." Senator Charles Grassley is looking into the doctors' failure to report payments of more than a million dollars in consulting fees from drug makers from 2000 to 2007. A memo from top officials at Massachusetts General Hospital obtained by the Globe praised Drs. Joseph Biederman, Timothy Wilens, and Thomas Spencer as "pioneers in the field of child mental health" while also endorsing "closely managed" collaboration with industry and promising a review of conflict-of-interest...

With fatal terrorist attacks on the decline worldwide and al Qaeda apparently in disarray, it would seem a time for optimism in the global war on terrorism. But the war has simply shifted to a different arena. Islamists, or those who believe that Islam is a political and religious system that must dominate all others, are focusing less on the military and more on the ideological. It turns out that Western liberal democracies can be subverted without firing a shot. Nowhere is this more evident than in the educational realm. Islamists have taken what's come to be known as the...

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Oregon wrestlers have gone to court to save their program from being eliminated so the university can restore its baseball team. "We don't want to see this program go away," said Ron Finley a former Oregon wrestling coach and now director of the Save Oregon Wrestling Foundation. The foundation is one of the main supporters of a lawsuit filed last Friday in Marion County Circuit Court in Salem by Equity in Athletics Inc., a nonprofit coalition of athletes, coaches, parents, alumni and fans. The complaint seeks a preliminary injunction to maintain the wrestling program while hearings...

Think it's hot outside? "Good Morning America" wants you to think it is your fault - at least that's why an expert featured on the June 9 show told viewers it is hotter outside. Stanford University professor Dr. Stephen Schneider said that methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are making hot temperatures even hotter. "While this heat wave like all other heat waves is made by Mother Nature, we've been fooling around by turning the knob and making a little bit hotter," Schneider said. "[W]e've already increased by 35 percent the amount of carbon dioxide which traps heat. We've...

I was asked recently - by a child porn advocate, no less - why I write books with chapter titles that are so “offensive.” Citing two such chapter titles – “Fag Hags and Rainbow Flags” and “The Liar, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” – the child porn advocate asked what some of my fellow UNC professors had done to make me sound so “nasty.” I think the question is worth answering. Put simply, I use provocative language in chapters (more often in columns) criticizing a small minority of my fellow professors for two reasons: 1) because they are proponents of...

America continues to grow in stature as the most-favoured destination for Indian students with the last seven months showing a 38% increase in the number of candidates going there. What's more, Chennai seems to be one of the largest exporters in the country. Sample this: 38,274 student visas were issued from across the country in fiscal year 2006-07 (October 2006 to September 2007), of which the Chennai consulate gave out 19,973. Correspondingly, between October 2007 and April 2008, 50,316 student visas were issued from across the country, of which the Chennai consulate alone accounted for 24,975. With a rising middle...

Updated List of Schools Planning V-Monologues PerformancesThe University of Notre Dame has been remved from the list of schools planning V-Monologues performances. Updated February 15, 2007 (according to www.vday.org or confirmed by theschools)   MORE Bellarmine University Dr. Joseph J. McGowan, 2001 Newburg Road, Louisville, KY 40205 (800) 274-4723@bellarmine.edu Boston College Rev. William Leahy, S.J., 18 Old Colony Rd., Chestnut Hill, MA 02467   (617) 552-8000William.leahy.1@bc.edu College of the Holy Cross Rev. Michael McFarland, S.J., 1 College St., Worcester, MA 01610  (508) 793-2011mmcfarla@holycross.edu College of Mount Saint Vincent Dr. Charles Flynn, Jr., 6301 Riverdale Ave., Riverdale, NY 10471  (718) 405- 3233charles.flynn@mountsaint vincent.edu College...

West Virginia University President Mike Garrison says he is resigning effective September 1. [Funny how these perps always get to hang around long enough to get another year's pension, huh?] Long story short, the university manufactured an MBA degree for the GOVERNOR's DAUGHTER. This is such a sordid tale: How political insiders get plum profitable positions and the power to cover up malfeasance. This is how our government works today. The bureacracy no longer works for you. It works for it's members and the pols and vendors who provide the money.

Books | Review of: The Great Transformation Karl Polanyi's "The Great Transformation" (1944), published in the same year as Friedrich Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom," is as sacred a text to the opponents of free-market capitalism as Hayek's is to the Chicago School. To his devotees, Polanyi showed the free market to be the enemy of humanity in "The Great Transformation." It was an alien form of social organization, he argued, created in 18th-century England only by state action propelled by ideologues. By displacing the natural social state — an idyllic system of mutual obligations that bound and protected individuals...

Some of the nation’s biggest banks have closed their doors to students at community colleges, for-profit universities and other less competitive institutions, even as they continue to extend federally backed loans to students at the nation’s top universities. Citibank has been among the most aggressive in paring the list of colleges it serves. JPMorgan Chase, PNC and SunTrust say they have not dropped whole categories, but are cutting colleges as well. Some less-selective four-year colleges, like Eastern Oregon University and William Jessup University in Rocklin, Calif., say they have been summarily dropped by some lenders. The practice suggests that if...