Free Republic

A professor at a New Jersey university is blaming President Trump and his supporters for the impact of the coronavirus outbreak, claiming it’s their fault African-Americans have been dying at a disproportionate rate. “F--- each and every Trump supporter. You absolutely did this. You are to blame,” was among the comments – several of them containing profanity -- posted on Twitter this week by Brittney Cooper, an associate professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University. In another post, Cooper wrote that she and other African-Americans suspect that recent efforts to reopen the country following...

A Georgetown University professor who wished for violence against white Republican men went after conservatives again last week on Twitter.C. Christine Fair, who is on administrative leave after the first violent tweet, called Fox News employees “terrorists” on Oct. 28, according to the Washington Free Beacon.“When your plane lands late, you and your colleagues are met on the tarmac, and ferried to the Presidential Palace for an intimate dinner with the president,” Fair wrote on Twitter. “Thanks Fox News Terrorists!” When your plane lands late, you and your colleagues are met on the tarmac, and ferried to the Presidential Palace...

Our Dying Universities Msgr. Charles Pope • February 5, 2017 • The last vestiges of the once impressive institution known as the “university” are disappearing as our culture continues to crumble. Perhaps it is poetic justice, since the universities themselves have been a central cause of the cultural collapse that is burying them.The recent riots at the University of California at Berkeley and on other campuses are the result of a decades-long process that has increasingly sought to silence opinions or facts that are at odds with liberalism. Most universities have become indoctrination centers that tolerate little if any...

When Catholic colleges and universities embrace diversity, Catholics should worry. “Loyola University Chicago recently christened a new pagan student club, with its student organizer saying the group aims to help pupils at the private Catholic college find the God they seek, not just the one featured in the Bible,” Dominic Lynch, a student there, wrote on The College Fix on October 23, 2014. I’ll bet they didn’t have a hard time finding a faculty adviser. “The Loyola Student Pagan Alliance was granted official recognition by the university earlier this month by its Student Activities and Greek Affairs board,” Lynch reported....

Has America spent the last few hundred years misunderstanding the Declaration of Independence? That's what Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, believes. According to Allen, the paragraph beginning 'We hold these truths to be self-evident' has been misinterpreted thanks to a rogue period that was not in the original document. And that could completely transform our understanding of how the Founding Fathers viewed the role of government, The New York Times reported.

Students at Stanford University, inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, are attempting to scrub names and symbols that honor people who are historically connected to slavery and colonialism from the college campus. The move echoes a series of colleges across the nation whose students have attempted to do the same. The latest target in this battle is Saint Junipero Serra, an 18th-century Spanish, Roman Catholic priest and missionary who was canonized last September. His name is on two dorms, an academic building a street and the mall that is the school's official address. It is "important for the university...

On Saturday, January 3 in Kansas City, Georgia Walker attempted to do what no woman had done before:  She tried to become a Roman Catholic priest.And she’s got the pictures to prove it:  Georgia smiling, arms raised in triumph, vested in red and white, processing down the aisle at St. Mark Hope and Peace Lutheran Church.  Her friend, “Bishop” Bridget Mary Meehan, smiles proudly at her side.  Attending the ceremony were members of the Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests, a group of similarly deluded women who imagine themselves to be ordained.Here’s the thing, though:  WOMEN CAN’T BE PRIESTS.No, really!  Women...

MICHAEL KARAS/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER Attendees recently sat around Kean University's custom-made oak conference table. Breaking News: Legislator calls for investigation into Kean University's $219K conference tableIt costs more than $44,000 in tuition to attend Kean University for four years, and many of the school’s students struggle to pay the bill.  But the taxpayer-supported school in the township of Union spent $219,000 so far and has authorized up to $270,000 — about the average price of a house in the nearby working-class neighborhood — for a custom-made, circular conference table that seats 23 and features data ports, microphones and an illuminated...

"Tony McDonald, a member of the University of Texas Young Conservatives, sets up a protest anti- American Civil Liberties Union nativity scene, dubbed a 'solstice barn,' on the university's campus in Austin December 4, 2006. The display features a 'Nancy Pelosi' angel, a 'suicide bomber' shepherd, and Marx, Lenin and Stalin as the Three Wise Men." "Josh Perry, a member of the University of Texas Young Conservatives, spreads hay as he sets up a protest anti-American Civil Liberties Union nativity scene, dubbed a 'solstice barn,' on the university's campus in Austin, Texas December 4, 2006. The display features a...

Two gay seniors at George Washington University say they feel alienated because the chaplain at George Washington’s Newman Center rejects homosexuality, and they aren’t going to take it anymore. The seniors, Damian Legacy and Blake Bergen, have announced a coordinated campaign to rid the campus of the Roman Catholic priest, reports The GW Hatchet, the school’s independent student newspaper. They also assert that 12 or more students have quit the Newman Center in recent years because they can’t tolerate Father Greg Shaffer’s ardent anti-gay and, for the record, anti-abortion — beliefs. Shaffer has worked for five years at George Washington’s...

"Catholic" schools showing the Vagina Monologues: Loyola Marymount St. Mary's College of California Georgetown University DePaul University Saint Xavier University Loyola University-Chicago University of Notre Dame Loyola University-New Orleans St. Mary's College of Maryland Holy Cross Mount Holyoke Boston College Saint Louis University College of Saint Mary-Nebraska (Where is Abp. Bruskewicz?) Marymount College of New York College of St. Rose University of Detroit/Mercy Marist College Mt. Saint Vincent Fordham University Marymount Manhattan College St, John Fisher University of Dayton Lehigh University St. Francis University of Penna. Providence College St. Benedict College There are several other school son the list which...

Before class last Tuesday morning, Oct. 30, Seth Gruber stood outside his school's dining hall with a sign showing a tiny pair of red, severed hands. Some students who walked by him during the next four hours stared down at their feet as they passed. Others shot him dirty looks. Several told him the graphic pictures of aborted babies were inappropriate and disrespectful. Gruber, a junior at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, Calif., knew his pro-life activism wouldn't make him the most popular guy on campus. But he didn't expect to meet with so much opposition. Westmont is an evangelical...

The Worcester Telegram & Gazette is reporting that: "Two national religious organizations today will formally ask Bishop Robert J. McManus to reinstate Victoria Reggie Kennedy as the commencement speaker at Anna Maria College. The small Catholic liberal arts school in Paxton withdrew its invitation last month after the bishop raised concerns with college officials about positions taken by the widow of former U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy on abortion, gay marriage, contraception and other social issues of interest to the church. The school has yet to announce a new speaker. Representatives of Catholic Democrats are expected to deliver a petition...

Geraldine Ferraro, the 1984 candidate for the vice presidency whose position on abortion repeatedly put her at odds with New York’s late John Cardinal O’Connor, will soon be memorialized at Fordham Law School, according to a report in Fordham magazine. Ferraro’s husband, John Zaccaro Sr., and their son, John Zaccaro Jr., who are pictured in the magazine, recently made a “leadership gift” to Fordham in honor the late Queens congresswoman who rose to national prominence. Ferraro died of multiple myeloma in 2011. The gift, whose amount is not disclosed in the article, reportedly will go to support a new Law...

Naomi Schaefer Riley, the only Conservative blogger at The Chronicle of Higher Education, was fired after thousands of readers complained about her post "The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations." J.S. Tobin writes a vigorous defense. Per copyright issues, Ms. Riley's post can be accessed only by link in Comments.

The trade paper of the academic industry just fired a writer who dared express skepticism about the academic worth of a number of doctoral dissertations in the field of black studies. Liz McMillan, editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education wrote a "Note to readers" explaining why Naomi Schaefer Riley's blog posting on Brainstorm last week ("The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations" merited her dismissal and an abject apology from the editorial honcho.Reactions are mostly predictable, from both leftists and conservatives.Riley is, of course, being widely termed a racist. She summarized  her critics in...

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...

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...