Free Republic

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A former researcher at Amgen Inc has found that many basic studies on cancer -- a high proportion of them from university labs -- are unreliable, with grim consequences for producing new medicines in the future.

There's no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.SNIPLow-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found.

Students occupy UCSC academic building overnight, plan next stepsUpdated: Nov 29, 2011 2:29 PM EST By Matt de Nesnera SANTA CRUZ, Calif. -- About 50 students spent the night sleeping in cubicles or on the floor of an academic building at the University of California Santa Cruz as part of a protest against rising tuition costs and university police, but they could be preparing to leave. Monday, students responded to a call from the Occupy University of California Davis movement for a strike across the 10-campus University of California system. Demonstrators prevented the roughly 100 staff members from entering the...

Education: As if Occupy Wall Street and its parasitic protesters weren't a bad enough example for children, now teacher unions and their enablers are getting into the act with disturbing ideas about "teaching" its tenets. Little noticed in the protest army sitting in against Wall Street, the educational establishment is more involved than you might think. From teachers disrupting school board meetings to classroom use of lesson plans about the "Occupy" protests to "teach-ins" that aim to educate the public about protest demands, we are witnessing a vast spread of economic illiteracy for political purposes. It started early this month...

This is Georgetown University. Is it any wonder we are raising a moronic, violent, jackbooted generation? And we pay for this, through the nose. There ought to be a national outcry. Instead. our nation's fine young minds are marinating in the toxic ooze. We are the big school donors, and I do not mean the Saudis. Is everyone is a coma? Look at the picture they are using to promote this Islamic supremacist garbage to our children. Note the flag -- it's not Egyptian (it's the flag of the Jewish genocidists). (pic hat tip Urban Infidel) CENTER FOR THE STUDY...

A disgraced academic forced to resign after publicly mocking a sex assault victim has landed a £50,000 job at a prestigious London university. Nir Rosen was handed the positon at the renowned London School of Economics a month after he made 'cruel and insensitive remarks'about CBS correspondent Lara Logan, who was beaten and molested while covering the Egyptian revolution. Mr Rosen, 33, announced at the weekend he is to start work as a research fellow at the university's global governance centre.

Professor Kaukab Siddique of Lincoln University thinks the Jews have "taken over America" by "devious and immoral means. What are the limits to academic discourse? Are lies and calumnies from academics protected speech outside the classroom, as well as inside? Does “protected” mean immune from criticism or from direct consequences? Are there distinctions between statements made within one’s “field of expertise” and those made outside? When do such distinctions become hairsplitting rationalizations or mere defensiveness, as opposed to valuable exercises in reasoning and in defense of a noble enterprise? Consider the case of Kaukab Siddique, professor of literature and communications...

You've never heard of me, but there's a good chance that you've read some of my work. I'm a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can't detect, that you can't defend against, that you may not even know exists. I work at an online company that generates tens of thousands of dollars a month by creating original essays based on specific instructions provided by cheating students. I've worked there full time since 2004. On any day of the academic...

When college presidents and academic administrators pay their usual obeisance to "diversity" you know they are talking first and foremost about race.

It is news to no one that our educational system sucks. American students are consistently out-performed by students in other countries year after year. Why? Liberals, progressives, socialists, communists, “compassionate” conservatives (i.e., neocons, RINOs, liberal Republicans) , teacher unions, and other leftist groups would like you to believe that it is some combination of bad schools, teachers, and financing. The solution, as they see it, is to engage in a game of Three Card Monty where students are shuffled from schools that are “failing” them, to schools that will allow them to “succeed” –as though success is a magical elixir...

Last month, students at a Southern California high school were caught playing a late-night on-campus game of tag called "Beat the Jew." On the popular social networking site Facebook, a user named Alex Cookson launched an open invitation to an event called “Kill a Jew Day.” It was the fourth time that a call to murder Jews had been put on Facebook within recent days. In D.C., White House press doyen Helen Thomas was captured on tape nonchalantly opining that all Jews should go back to Germany. Implicit in her statement was her assumption that everyone felt the same way, so what's the...

Many Americans who elected Barack Obama thought George W Bush was too much the cowboy. After eight years of Texas swagger and a shoot-first-ask-questions-later foreign policy, voters craved the more considered, cerebral and often inspirational persona of a big city law professor. Now, in the midst of a real crisis, they are having second thoughts.

President and First Lady are partying like rock royalty. The same hypocrite who says our energy costs must “necessarily skyrocket” to fund his political ambition, is giving Marie Antoinette a run for her money when it comes to spending national treasure on personal luxuries. While much of the country is struggling to pay their bills, the President and First Lady are partying like rock royalty. The collection of talent that has made the pilgrimage to the White House to entertain Obama and friends is nothing less than amazing: Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Tony Bennet, Paul Simon, Marc Anthony, Herbie Hancock,...

<p>From his lower school years at St. Albans to his incomplete effort at Vanderbilt law school, Gore was often an underachiever...</p>

Ezra Cornell, a generous man concerned deeply about his country and its culture, when he created his eponymous university in 1868 said, “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.” Professors at Cornell (my grad school alma mater and partial source of rent) have stretched old Ezra’s words to the limit. How? The “English department will begin offering a new concentration in cultural studies to English majors. The concentration will allow students to study different mediums and forms of culture, including literature, film, the Internet and music in terms of ‘historical, social, and political...

A prominent US climate scientist at the centre of the "climategate" leaked email controversy has been virtually cleared of professional misconduct by an internal university enquiry. Michael Mann, of Penn State University, featured regularly in the more than 1000 emails that were hacked from the University of East Anglia in the UK last November. His emails and comments have since then featured in countless blogs and news articles. Some have claimed the emails reveal that mainstream climate scientists have massaged data in order to demonstrate that climate change is caused by human activities. The scientists in the emails, including Mann,...

Stories appearing on several Ukrainian Web sites claim Israel has brought around some 25,000 Ukrainian children into the country over the past two years in order to harvest their organs. The claim, which was made by a Ukrainian philosophy professor and author at a pseudo-academic conference in Kiev five days ago, is the latest expression of a wave of anti-Semitism in the country. It comes a few months after a Swedish tabloid ran an article alleging that Israel Defense Forces soldiers have killed Palestinian civilians for their organs. Jews, Israel and anti-Semitism have become a major motif of the presidential...

Tenure Deconstructed by: Brittany Fortier, July 10, 2009 A system can truly be considered broken when evaluators of hiring decisions are the ones that need to be evaluated. A panel hosted by the Center for American Progress on June 25, 2009, discussed why the American educational system has struggled in keeping itself accountable to students and parents, while at the same time creating a tenure system that critics claim gives teachers jobs for life. Many critics say that evaluation systems for teachers have been a huge reason for this discrepancy. Morgaen Donaldson, Assistant Professor at the Neag School of Education...

Darwinism as Religion in a Holy War Feb 19, 2009 — It might be expected that media attention on Darwin would be exceptionally high this month because of his bicentennial, but some of it seems downright religious. The adulation he has been receiving is almost embarrassing sometimes. It is only exceeded by the righteous indignation frequently expressed against intelligent design. In any other context, the fighting words of the Darwinians would be described as hate speech. Here are some recent examples: 1. Shrine to Darwin:...

In the wake of Operation Cast Lead, a group of American university professors has for the first time launched a national campaign calling for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel. While Israeli academics have grown used to such news from Great Britain, where anti-Israel groups several times attempted to establish academic boycotts, the formation of the United States movement marks the first time that a national academic boycott movement has come out of America. Israeli professors are not sure yet how big of an impact the one-week-old movement will have, but started discussing the significance of and possible counteractions...

This is the full movie divided in only 3 parts plus a deleted scene bonus video Indoctrinate U is a feature-length documentary film written by, directed by and starring Evan Coyne Maloney, on ideological conformism and political correctness in American higher education. Among other things, the film examines the use of institutional mechanisms such as speech codes, which it claims are used to punish students who express political views that are unpopular within the leftist academia.

(IsraelNN.com) Dr. Uri Davis, who has often termed Israel an "apartheid state" and refused to serve in the IDF, converted to Islam about a week ago and married a Fatah activist in Ramallah. The conversion ceremony involved two oaths in which Davis recognized Allah and the Muslim prophet Mohammed. Davis said he plans to follow the laws of Islam, but not devoutly. The conversion took place in a Moslem religious court in Baka el-Garbiye, an Israeli-Arab town just outside northwestern Samaria (Shomron). Davis's lawyer explained that the Arabs of the Palestinian Authority know him for his great sacrifices on behalf...

"If you can't beat 'em, subvert 'em with subterfuge."--RE Bierce 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. --Cinnamon Stillwell, San Francisco Chronicle If you're an Islamist, it's time for Plan B. Islamists aren't dummies: even as al-Qaida is destroyed on the...

Mocked and belittled Interview: Ben Stein’s new documentary may give macro-evolutionary theory a deserved hard time, and he plans to have fun with it along the way | Megan Basham Bebeto Matthews/AP Though audiences probably know Ben Stein best as the economics teacher from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, the actor had a distinguished career preceding the classic '80s movie—just not in the entertainment industry. Long before ad-libbing the world's most famously boring free-market lecture, Stein was a Yale-trained trial lawyer, a professor at Pepperdine University, an economist, and a speechwriter for presidents Nixon and Ford. Even today, along with his...

Turkey academics defy scarf law The headscarf issue has divided opinion in Turkey A number of Turkish universities have defied a new law allowing women students to wear Islamic headscarves. Local media reported students wearing headscarves being turned away from some premises - although exceptions included the Bosporus University in Istanbul. It follows constitutional amendments passed by a huge majority in parliament and signed into law last week. Opposition parties want the law quashed amid fears that Turkey's strictly secular state could be undermined. The main opposition party has said it will ask the Constitutional Court to quash the law,...

British universities are coming under the spotlight in the country's fight against terrorism, with critics calling them a hotbed of extremism while lecturers say any clampdown threatens their freedom of speech. Prime Minister Gordon Brown recently highlighted universities as one of the key areas where authorities needed to act against extremist influences. However, a row is brewing over how officials can clamp down on radical groups recruiting students for militant causes without infringing on genuine academic debate. The issue of campus extremism came to the fore in the aftermath of the London suicide bombings by four young British Islamists which...

Alger Hiss, Academic Vampire by: Malcolm A. Kline, August 28, 2007 The liberal cadres that defended him for decades have thinned since career diplomat Alger Hiss was convicted of perjuring himself against accusations that he spied for the Soviet Union. In large part, this turnaround stems from mounting evidence of his guilt as can be seen in: • Declassified congressional hearings originally held in executive session; • Federal agency reports once classified that were unsealed when they hit 50 years of age; and • Communist International and KGB files in the Soviet Union and its former satellite nations opened to...

Iran admits detaining US academic Haleh Esfandiari is one of the leading US authorities on Iran Iran's foreign ministry has confirmed that the government has detained a leading Iranian-American academic. Spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said the arrest of Haleh Esfandiari was lawful and she would be treated like other Iranian nationals.Ms Esfandiari, one of Washington's best known Iran experts, was visiting Tehran to see her 93-year-old mother. The incident comes at a time of continuing tension between the United States and Iran. "It is natural if there is any problem, it will be handled by authorities," said the spokesman. Iran...

Academic: Extremism debate is being stifled By Graeme Paton, Education Correspondent Last Updated: 2:13am GMT 16/03/2007 An academic at the centre of a row over censorship last night accused Britain of being the worst country for stifling debate on Muslim extremism. Matthias Küntzel, a German author and political scientist, was due to give a lecture at Leeds University on Islamic anti-Semitism but it was cancelled after complaints from Muslim students. As disclosed by The Daily Telegraph yesterday, a number of protest emails were received, although the university insisted the event was axed because of safety fears. Last night the academic,...

PRAGUE, Czech Republic (UPI) -- Earlier this year, a group of 'small-l' liberals, left-wingers and progressives came together in Britain to produce a document called the Euston Manifesto. It was a statement of principles in support of democracy, freedom of speech and ideas, and firm opposition to terrorism, all forms of totalitarianism and all soft-headed apologies for it. Now it has found an echo in the United States, where a number of leading academics and intellectuals have signed the Euston Manifesto, and issued their own statement on American liberalism that endorses it. The original British document was the work of...

Title Can the internet ever produce a purity of consent? A case study of Rathergate. Introduction On September 8th 2004, memos by the late Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian purporting to show that a subordinate of his, one George W. Bush, had a less than perfect war record during the Vietnam conflict, were aired by CBS show 60 Minutes II. I believe no academic study on this topic exists. A search of the Proquest dissertations database reveals no existing work. There are several books extant which subjectively cover the episode from various points of view. I will utilise these as...

"I mean, this is a person who, not too many years from now, we may be seeing in front of a war crimes tribunal."Juliet Schor is a professor of sociology at Boston College. She has written a number of books analyzing the American labor market. What I have quoted is an obvious acknowledgement by an extensively trained, well executed professional of academe, providing her insight on the future of Saddam Hussein or Usama bin Laden. However, I would be lying. The person Ms. Schor refers to is United States Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice. Madamn Secretary is slated to receive...

US academic attacks Britain's hidden 'white supremacy' By James Langton (Filed: 30/04/2006) White supremacy is "alive and well in Britain", according to one of America's leading black academics. Speaking before next week's local elections, which could see an unprecedented surge of support for the far-Right British National Party, Prof Cornel West said that white people in Britain have failed to embrace the black community. 'You have a legacy of white supremacy tied to colonial history' In an exclusive interview, the best-selling author, who is a household name on race relations in the United States, said: "Britain is a paradoxical place...

Sam Dillon, The New York Times Ernie Chambers is Nebraska's only African-American state senator, a man who has fought for causes ranging from the abolition of capital punishment to the end of apartheid in South Africa. A magazine writer once described him as the "angriest black man in Nebraska." He was also a driving force behind a law passed by the Nebraska Legislature on Thursday and signed by the governor that calls for dividing the Omaha public schools into three racially identifiable districts, one largely black, one white and one mostly Hispanic. The law, which opponents are calling state-sponsored segregation,...

David Horowitz - Ward Churchill Debate From George Washington University to Air on C-SPAN Saturday, 8 EDT. The topic was Politics in the Classroom.

THE career of President Vladimir Putin of Russia was built at least in part on a lie, according to US researchers. A new study of an economics thesis written by Putin in the mid-1990s has revealed that large chunks of it were copied from an American text. Putin was labelled a plagiarist yesterday after a pair of researchers at the Brookings Institution, a Washington DC think tank, established that the Russian president’s academic credentials were based on a dissertation he had lifted in part verbatim from the Russian translation of a management study written by two professors at the University...

On April 6-7, 2006, Students for Academic Freedom will host its First National Academic Freedom Conference featuring a debate between Students for Academic Freedom Chairman David Horowitz and University of Colorado-Boulder Professor Ward Churchill. The topic for debate will be: “Can Politics Be Taken Out Of The Classroom, and Should It Be?” The debate will be held Thursday evening on the campus of George Washington University in Washington, DC. Young America’s Foundation and the Center for the Study of Popular Culture are the co-hosts of the debate. Seating for the debate is limited and will be determined by George Washington...

Two prominent Pennsylvania universities, Penn State and Temple, were sued Wednesday by the Alliance Defense Fund on behalf of PSU student Alfred Joseph (A.J.) Fluehr and Temple student Christian M. DeJohn. Both legal complaints were filed at the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia.

That Old Red Menace Has Me in its Spell… In the 1950’s , it was not unusual to see articles in mainstream magazines with titles like : “The Red Menace Must Be Stopped !” Were you to try and publish such an article anywhere today – including the Internet – you would be greeted with rudely worded suggestions you were in dire need of psychiatric care ; because we all know there is no “Red Menace” ! How do we know this ? If we’re under the age of 50, we probably learned it in school. Those of us who...

The liberal bias that permeates American college campuses isn’t news. Repeated polls show convincingly that that faculty members with liberal views or affiliations far outnumber their relatively few conservative colleagues. No problem here, you might say, so long as they keep their political and social biases out of the classroom. But, of course, they do not as many students whose grades have suffered because they vocally challenged an instructor’s biases can tell you. Beyond the challenges posed to students who try to maintain conservative perspectives, problems arise when faculty members and students try to suppress opposing viewpoints. Sadly, this has...

ABOR Bill Referred to Higher Ed Committee in Albany AN ACT to amend the education law, in relation to creating an academic bill of rights The People of the State of New York, represented in Senate and Assembly, do enact as follows: 1 Section 1. The education law is amended by adding a new section 224-b...

Parents of daughters are more likely to be left-wing, whatever the feminists claim FATHERS WILL DO anything for their little princesses. They turn a blind eye as the house becomes a palace of pink fluff. Later on they play a pivotal role in their daughters’ social development — that of chauffeur. Dads will even, we learnt this week, shift political allegiance for their daughters. Andrew Oswald, from Warwick University, and Nattavudh Powdthavee, of the Institute of Education at London University, have discovered that how parents vote is linked to the gender of their children. The more daughters there are in...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: November 17, 2005 Jill Minette, CASE, 202-478-5666 Professor Lawrence Roberge, 413-547-8448 NATIONAL HONORS FOR TOP PROFESSOR IN CONNECTICUT (Washington, DC)-The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education have named Lawrence F. Roberge at Goodwin College the 2005 Connecticut Professor of the Year. Professor Roberge was selected from among nearly 400 top professors in the United States. Professor Roberge was the Chair of the Science Dept and Associate Professor of Science at Goodwin College from 2003 until 2005. During his tenure, he organized the construction of science labs...

Profs get warned of freedoms By MENSAH M. DEAN deanm@phillynews.com Words such as "McCarthyism" and "chill" buzzed through a group of Temple University professors and students who gathered on campus yesterday to discuss a state legislative committee's investigation of political diversity at state-run colleges. The "teach-in," sponsored by the Temple Association of University Professionals, drew an audience overwhelmingly convinced that the committee's very existence is a threat to academic freedom. "I think that there is a concern that people are going to start coming in and say, 'You can do this, but you can't do this.' If we are teaching...

ITHACA, N.Y. - Urie Bronfenbrenner, a Cornell University psychologist who pioneered an interdisciplinary approach to the study of child development and helped create the federal Head Start program, has died. He was 88. Bronfenbrenner, a member of the Cornell faculty since 1948, died at his home Sunday from complications from diabetes, the school announced Monday. The Russian-born Bronfenbrenner was credited with creating the interdisciplinary field of human ecology and was widely regarded as one of the world's leading scholars in developmental psychology and child-rearing. Before Bronfenbrenner, child psychologists studied the child, sociologists examined the family, anthropologists the society, economists the...

The first academic study into the sweaty pursuit of air guitar playing is to use the work of French philosophers to explain why men and women do it differently. Doctoral research has begun under the supervision of Britain's first professor of pop music, who is also overseeing a PhD into the art of "moshing", the vigorous head-shaking dance popular among concert crowds.

In December of 2001, I experienced the second most anxiety-evoking event of my professional career. It came in the form of a stern (but friendly) warning from the UNCW police to avoid all contact with another professor in my department. I was advised not to be caught in the same room with this woman because she was, in the opinion of (numerous) school officials, both delusional and potentially dangerous.

PORTLAND — An early draft of a five-year "diversity plan" for the University of Oregon has drawn a firestorm of criticism from faculty, prompting administrators to distance themselves from the proposal. The draft plan, billed as a "long-term vision for diversity," called for the university to hire up to 40 faculty members by 2012 to teach courses in a "cluster" of diversity-related topics, including race, gender, gay and disability studies. Under the plan, academic departments that hew closely to the university's diversity goals when hiring would be given "priority in the funding of new positions." The plan also would mandate...

In violation of its promises to faculty of academic freedom and due process, DePaul University has suspended Professor Thomas Klocek without a hearing for engaging in a controversial out-of-class debate with students. After Professor Klocek and several pro-Palestinian students engaged in a heated argument over Middle East issues at a student activities fair, students complained to administrators who immediately suspended the professor, denying him the rights normally afforded to professors accused of wrongdoing. Statements from university administrators indicate that the professor was disciplined because of his harsh criticism of the students’ viewpoint. For full details, please read below. Sincerely, David...

The packed room crackled with anticipation, and the man with a career-long penchant for drama and confrontation must have relished this opportunity. The cadence of a ceremonial drumbeat and American Indian chanting heralded his arrival. The introduction given him was fiery, stoking anger for the opposition, real and imagined. And then, cameras flashing, Ward Churchill stepped to the podium, words of defiance ready on his lips, his black-leather-clad security entourage shoulder-to-shoulder on the stage behind him. "Hello, my relatives," Churchill greeted the crowd, using his usual speech opener. It reflects the spirit of Mitakuye Oyasin, a Lakota Indian phrase meaning...