Free Republic

With ominous rumblings about vaccine passports, perpetual contact tracing, and other means of government and corporate surveillance, totalitarian spying on U.S. citizens seems closer than we could have imagined. Now the Senate has stepped in – again – to ramp up surveillance in the realm of higher education.For several years, even so-called conservative Republican senators have pushed bills to allow the feds to track and compile data on any student from any institution of higher education (IHE) for the rest of his or her working life. The excuse for this startlingly intrusive initiative is twofold. First, lifetime tracking will allow...

College students are not adults. There. I said it.To be clear, I am not referring to "re-entry" students, those who enroll after working for some years, or after serving in the military. I am referring to the "traditional" college student -- i.e., the 18- or 19-year-old who attends college right out of high school.They are adults in a legal sense. As such, they have certain legal rights (for example, the right to vote) and responsibilities (such as serving in the military if the draft is ever reinstated). And, certainly, many will appear to be physically mature. But in what should be...

The English department at Rutgers University, the eighth-oldest university in America, recently went woke. In an email obtained by The College Fix, Rebecca Walkowitz, English department chair, announced to faculty, staff and students that the department would implement a set of "anti-racist" initiatives. Lest the gullible be led astray by such anodyne phraseology, these initiatives include "limit(ing) emphasis on grammar/sentence-level issues so as to not put students from multilingual, non-standard 'academic' English backgrounds at a disadvantage." A pedagogical insistence on proper English grammar and syntax, you see, is now racist. Once upon a time, in those halcyon days before America's...

A recent Pew Research Center survey finds that only half of American adults think colleges and universities are having a positive effect on our nation. The leftward political bias, held by faculty members affiliated with the Democratic Party, at most institutions of higher education explains a lot of that disappointment. Professors Mitchell Langbert and Sean Stevens document this bias in "Partisan Registration and Contributions of Faculty in Flagship Colleges." Langbert and Stevens conducted a new study of the political affiliation of 12,372 professors in the two leading private and two leading public colleges in 31 states. For party registration, they...

A U.S. Department of Education investigation has revealed the extent of foreign influence at America’s universities. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told reporters in December that six universities received $1.3 billion in foreign funds from hostile nations aiming to undermine American interests, including China and Russia. DeVos confirmed that these numbers are just "scratching the surface," and countless other universities likely have entered into similar agreements with foreign governments. China is exploiting the university system in part through their "Thousand Talents program," which has turned legions of Americans in privileged positions throughout the public and private sector into spies. This is...

The American male is caught in the maelstrom of cultural change. Once the heroic images of World War II faded from bright colors into the darker tones of sepia, "the greatest generation" began a slow fade into history. Barely 500,000 of the 16 million men who fought in World War II are now alive. What has followed the greatest are several not-so-great generations (including my own). The #MeToo movement, for all of the good it does in righting wrongs, has taken its toll on both innocent men and new standards of masculinity. When villainous men were rightly called to account...

Jessica Rosales recalls plunging into a downward spiral after discovering that her birth control had failed and she was pregnant. A financially unstable third-year student at UC Riverside, she immediately sought an abortion — something the campus student health clinic did not provide. Instead she was referred to private medical facilities off campus. One wouldn’t accept her insurance; the other didn’t provide abortions. Her grades slipped, she said, and she frequently slept the days away to escape her circumstances. Eventually she traveled six miles to a Planned Parenthood clinic that performed the procedure. Ten weeks had passed. “My situation could...

Our college-age population consists mostly of 18- to 30-year-olds, and likewise our armed forces. I wonder whether they shared common responses to the 2016 presidential election. Many college administrators provided students with therapy dogs, play dough, coloring books, bubbles, videos of frolicking kittens and puppies, and soft music. They even canceled classes and postponed exams so that their 18- to 30-year-old snowflakes could better cope with the election results. There are numerous internet photos and videos of these youngsters screaming and in outright grief and panic. Here's my question: Were our military leaders as accommodating as college administrators? Did commanding...

Intolerance, at times exploding into violence, is spreading throughout our society. And it's coming from the political left. It's happening on college campuses. Most recently, students walked out on Vice President Mike Pence's commencement address at Notre Dame University. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was interrupted by boos and jeers at her commencement address at historically black Bethune-Cookman University. Conservative scholar Charles Murray was met with violent protests and physically assaulted at Middlebury College. Another conservative scholar, Heather MacDonald, was violently shut down in a presentation she was giving at Claremont McKenna College. These are just a couple examples. Now...

This is extraordinary. Since Left-fascists screamed at me for an hour and a half, I barely got a word in at the University at Buffalo, but university officials and the local Muslim Brotherhood MSA chapter are apparently so shaken nonetheless by my appearance that they have featured not one, but two events featuring lying Islamic spokesmen to make sure that campus Left-lemmings stay on message and remember that Islam is a religion of peace that has nothing to do with terrorism, despite the ever-growing amount of evidence to the contrary. Ahmadi spokesman Qasim Rashid is a professional liar, or as...

WASHINGTON -- Well, she did not show up. I am talking about Ann Coulter, the svelte conservative firebrand who was invited to speak at the University of California, Berkeley, and, inadvertently, to show the assembled coeds how a stylish blond dresses. But then, she was disinvited. Hold on -- she was, of a sudden, re-invited but only under certain university conditions. Confusion ensued. Then the speech was lost in the swelling controversy. According to Coulter, "I looked over my shoulder, and my allies had joined the other team." Her allies were presumably members of the Young Americas Foundation. Honestly, I...

Professor Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He recently wrote an article titled "The hypocrisy behind the student renaming craze." Students, often with the blessing of faculty, have discovered that names for campus buildings and holidays do not always fit politically correct standards for race, class and sex. Stanford students have demanded the renaming of buildings, malls and streets bearing the name of the recently canonized Junipero Serra, an 18th-century Franciscan priest who was often unkind to American Indians. Harvard Law School is getting rid of its seal because it bears...

The foundations of American Jewish life are under assault today in ways that were unimaginable a generation ago. Academia is ground zero of the onslaught. The protest movements on campuses are first and foremost anti-Jewish movements. For the past decade or so, Jewish communal leaders and activists have focused on just one aspect of this anti-Jewish campaign. Jewish leaders have devoted themselves to helping Jewish students combat the direct anti-Semitism inherent to the anti-Israel student movements. Despite the substantial funds that have been devoted to fighting anti-Israel forces on campuses, they have not been diminished. To the contrary, with each...

Remember the campus unrest in the 1960s? Whether or not you agreed with the students, they were protesting about things of great consequence -- civil rights, the military draft, the Vietnam War. They had chants such as "Hell no, we won't go." Those were the good old days. Now we are witnessing whiny college kids marching in the streets, screaming obscenities or taking over the university president's office, and for what? Feeling slighted? Having their feelings hurt? Talk about rebels without a cause. I've traveled to many campuses in recent weeks and experienced the melodrama of student grievances firsthand. To...

Students at Yale University, a bastion of wealth and privilege, are angry because an employee at the university dared suggest that if white children want to dress up as the Disney character Mulan for Halloween, it would not be inappropriate but instead would be children dressing up as a favorite character. Clearly, this person is a white, privileged, racist bigot. Or at least she is in the minds of the college students as Yale. Never mind that an Ivy League university had people engaged in a debate on the appropriateness of Halloween costumes to ensure people were not offended. Students...

This country is awful. I know that because I read it in the paper and heard it on the news. The reasons for our being awful didn't make much difference. They change every day because there's always something new for which we're awful. And when there aren't fresh pickings the media hops in the way-back machine and re-animates a greatest hit. But what would this "awful" country look like were it magically transformed into New York Times Utopia? This week gave us a peek. The city of Houston decided it didn't want to replace gender-specific bathrooms with a communal hole...

You need a girl’s consent, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo tells rapists. If she says “yes,” it’s not rape—it’s “affirmative consent.” “Affirmative consent” is pivotal to Cuomo’s new plan to stop college rape. His plan consists of giving a legislative PowerPoint to rapists that defines rape in crystal clear terms. Cuomo maintains that once rapists understand what rape is—ta da!—they will never rape again. It works like this: Cuomo introduces a law defining “affirmative consent” as a “knowing, voluntary and mutual decision among all participants to engage in sexual activity.” Now, for the first time ever, any man seeking sexual...

In my last column, I made the case for establishing First Amendment Centers on public university campuses. I argued that such centers should focus on eight goals, four of which would be corrective measures, and four of which would be proactive measures designed to enhance respect for divergent opinions. In the last column, I elaborated on the corrective measures. This column will focus on the proactive measures: 1. First Amendment Sensitivity Training for Students. When students make politically incorrect comments they often face punishment in the campus judiciary. This sometimes involves putting them through re-education programs, which are often referred...

Like Chris Rock and Larry the Cable Guy, Jerry Seinfeld avoids doing shows on college campuses. And while talking with ESPN’s Colin Cowherd on Thursday, the comedian revealed why: College kids today are too politically correct. “I hear that all the time,” Seinfeld said on The Herd with Colin Cowherd. “I don’t play colleges, but I hear a lot of people tell me, ‘Don’t go near colleges. They’re so PC.’” Seinfeld says teens and college-aged kids don’t understand what it means to throw around certain politically-correct terms. “They just want to use these words: ‘That’s racist;’ ‘That’s sexist;’ ‘That’s prejudice,’”...

If Shakespeare were alive and invited to give the commencement address at a major American university, the favorite spring sport on campus would explode with loud and shrill protest. Blacks could object to Othello, the angry, "erring barbarian" wife-murderer. Jews could protest Shylock, the stereotypical Jewish moneylender demanding his pound of flesh. Ageists would decry a senile Lear. Feminists would despise Lady Macbeth, the Bard's most powerful woman, as a power-seeking termagant. And besides all that, he's a very dead white man. Of course, taking offense would require the students to have a modest familiarity with Shakespeare. The Bard is...