Free Republic

Three and a half years have passed since the onset of the financial crisis, and the public hasn’t changed the way it talks about Wall Street and its future. Journalists, politicians and even the Occupy movement have shaped our discussion by analyzing — and often attacking — the bankers at the helm. Again and again we read about the forces driving the industry today, when we should be looking to the people who will lead Wall Street tomorrow. Though recent media reports suggest that elite students are growing disillusioned by Wall Street, the numbers are unconvincing. Among the class of...

This year's GOP Presidential Primary and General Election have exposed a serious and dangerous demographic among the voting public, the media pundits, party leaders and graduating students. There appears to be a strong inability and unwillingness to openly and objectively discuss, debate and consider political policy ideas for improvemnet and reform of the government. The 2 most obvious pieces of evidence are the voting public and media's shallow coverage of the Energy, Social Security Big Ideas of a smart candidate like Newt Gingrich in favor of heavy coverage of stay-at-home mom coverage, shallow Romney business background bragging point, etc. The...

(MoneyWatch) If you agree with Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum that colleges are too liberal, take heart. There are institutions of higher learning that pride themselves on their conservatism. In response to frequent requests by families, the Young America's Foundation has released a list of its top conservative colleges, which includes schools from Virginia to California. In alphabetical order, here are the foundation's 15 favorite conservative colleges and universities: 1. Christendom College (Va.) This small Catholic institution with just 400 students happens to enjoy Santorum's stamp of approval. The presidential candidate, who is Catholic, serves on the advisory board of...

The White House announced today that colleges and universities will also be forced to join religious employers in instituting the new HHS mandate that requires them to provide coverage for birth control and drugs that may cause abortions. The Health and Human Services Department released information Friday afternoon saying college student health care plans will be treated like employees’ plans — making them subject to the mandate the Obama administration put in place that has upset pro-life groups for its violation of religious liberties. The decision means college students — who already get abortions at the highest rate compared with...

Ohio State football coach Urban Meyer sent an apology letter to a lesbian and gay advocacy group on campus for his plans to use lavender football jerseys as a form of punishment to players in practice according to 10TV.com and the OSU campus newspaper, The Lantern. The lavender jersey would be given to a player caught "loafing" - or a moment of deceleration - for the second time during a conditioning drill. The concept was created by Ohio State strength and conditioning coach Mickey Marotti. The school will now use a different color.

Do you think college students should be allowed to carry guns on campus? yes no

If you think privacy settings on your Facebook and Twitter accounts guarantee future employers or schools can't see your private posts, guess again. Employers and colleges find the treasure-trove of personal information hiding behind password-protected accounts and privacy walls just too tempting, and increasingly, they are demanding full access from applicants and students. In Maryland, job seekers applying to the state's Department of Corrections have been asked during interviews to log into their accounts and let an interviewer watch while the potential employee clicks through wall posts, friends, photos and anything else that might be found behind the privacy wall.

With unemployment at record levels, guess what academic economists from coast to coast are devoting their energies to studying? In The Chronicle Review on December 11, 2011, Rachel Shteir, an associate professor at the Theatre School at DePaul University, helpfully separates the scholars from the crackpots in the burgeoning field of sexonomics. “In the law corner is Daniel S. Hamermesh’s Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful, which calls people who aren’t beautiful ‘The Ugly’ or ‘Looks-Challenged’ and argues that they merit affirmative action,” Shteir wrote. “In the exploit-the-marketplace corner is Catherine Hakim’s Erotic Capital: The Power of Attraction...

Colleges pay presidents millions while raising tuitionBy Blake Ellis @CNNMoney December 20, 2011: 5:22 AM ET NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Some private colleges are paying their top executives millions of dollars, at the same time they're hiking tuition prices for students. Vanderbilt University paid its chancellor, Nicholas Zeppos, $1.9 million in 2009, according to the school's most recent tax filings -- enough for up to 43 students to attend Vanderbilt at current prices. His total pay includes a base salary of $673,002, as well as bonus and other compensation. That same year, Vanderbilt's tuition jumped 4.3%. Since then, the college...

CINCINNATI — Eighth-ranked Xavier beat crosstown rival Cincinnati 76-53 Saturday in a game that featured a steady stream of trash talking and was called with 9.4 seconds left when the teams got into a brawl on court. Words escalated into shoving and swings as the final seconds ticked down. Both benches cleared and coaches pulled their players away. The referees called it.

This (Spenser For Hire) novel was written almost 40-years ago. Within the first 20-pages, at an unidentified college, we find: SCACE - Student Committee Against Capitalist Exploitation Questions: ...tell me about SCACE, then." Answer: "We're a revolutionary organization. We are trying to develop a new consciousness; we're committed to social change, to redistribution of wealth, to real liberty for everyone, not just for the bosses and the rip-off artists." Question: "How you go about getting these things instituted?" Answer: "By continuous social pressure. By pamphleteering, by marching, by demonstrating our support for all causes that crack the establishment's united front....

Virginia gun-rights group plans protests at two local universities Do you think guns should be banned from college campuses? Yes No It depends where the campus is located

Universities, colleges "may be liable for massive damages" if they fail to prevent anti-Semitism on campus, Israel Law Center warns. Hundreds of US college and university presidents were set to receive warning letters on Thursday morning, instructing them of their legal obligations to prevent anti-Semitism on campus. The letters also remind universities it is their legal duty to prevent university funds from being diverted to unlawful activities directed against the State of Israel. Civil rights group the Israel Law Center (Shurat HaDin) is carrying out the legal campaign in response to “an alarming number of incidents of harassment and hate...

This ought to send a chill through every freedom loving person in this country -- especially anyone with a college-aged young man. The Obama administration strikes again; and the war against men continues....

“Bianca Laureano, a professor at College of Mount Saint Vincent is under fire for contributing to a pro-abortion blog and promoting criticism of the pro-life work of the nation’s Catholic bishops,” Steven Ertelt wrote on LifeNews.com on August 5, 2011. “A conversation about Latinas choosing abortion and what the rates are, as well as a focus on Rosie Jimenez was provided,” Dr. Laureano wrote of a presentation that she gave at her alma mater, the University of Maryland, this year. “It’s not often that I get choked up during presentations, but this time I teared up and my voice cracked...

Higher education with a higher calling: Kevin O'Brien Published: Thursday, May 19, 2011, 5:10 AM Updated: Thursday, May 19, 2011, 7:55 AM By Kevin OBrien, The Plain Dealer The Plain Dealer Until last Saturday, I had successfully avoided quite a string of college graduation ceremonies. Neither my wife nor I attended our own, because we went to a huge university where the proceedings consisted of a speech or two and a series of commands along the lines of, "OK, accounting majors, stand up. Congratulations. Sit down. Biology majors, stand up." And so on. I went in and worked my shift...

The Campus Sexual Violence Elimination (SaVE) Act, introduced in the Senate by Pennsylvania Democrat Bob Casey requires schools to include incidents of alleged sexual violence in their annual crime reports and to develop and distribute (to students and federal authorities) policy statements outlining their sexual violence prevention programs and procedures for addressing allegations of assault, stalking, and other violent acts. The SaVE Act implicitly assumes the guilt of students accused of sexual violence or stalking and ensures that guilt is fairly easy to establish. It requires schools to employ the lowest possible standard of proof -- a preponderance of evidence...

Linked from BenjaminShapiro.com because the link at Drudge has crashed FrontPageMag.com's servers. Two days ago, Matt Drudge linked to a new book by Jerome Corsi, unflinchingly titled Where’s the Birth Certificate? The book immediately leapt to number one on Amazon.com, where it has remained ever since. The media has shown its usual incredulity at the "indisputable" stupidity of the American people. How could so many people question President Obama’s birthplace? How could they wonder about his origins? Are they all simply racist? The answer, of course, is that Americans are desperately seeking an answer to a simple question: why does...

Senator Bernie Sanders added a new victim to the long list in his most recent column -- college students. Sanders complained that the Republican budget proposal would reduce the average Pell higher education grant by 17 percent at a time when the cost of a college education is "soaring." Having just sent the last of my three children off to college, I cannot argue with Sanders’ description of college tuition costs -- they are, indeed, soaring. Statistics confirm personal observation as, according to the Measuring Up 2008 report by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, tuition and...

Colleges and universities are promising graduates “green jobs” at the end of their education, secure in the knowledge that if they fail to materialize, schools won’t be liable for damages under Truth in Advertising laws. Google the phrase “college programs for green jobs” and you get more than four million results. “Green Jobs are a growth industry,” the University of Maryland promises in a recent advertisement. “Today’s fastest growing job opportunities are green.” “Companies need professionals who can improve corporate safety, efficiency and compliance with government regulations. Be ready, with a bachelor’s or master’s degree or a certificate in environmental...

What Students Learn and Don't Learn By Phyllis Schlafly If you are attending college to get teacher certification, you will probably be required to attend classes on "multicultural education." This is supposed to bring diversity to the classroom and prepare teachers to teach pupils of various ethnic or national backgrounds. The textbooks in these courses typically include Teachers as Cultural Workers by Paulo Freire, a Brazilian socialist who preached that society is divided into oppressors and oppressed. Other required readings teach that Americans are an institutionally racist society and are designed to train teachers to create political radicals to...

By Kevin “Coach” Collins The importance of learning real world practical skills from a college degree program has never been more obvious. College undergraduate courses that should more accurately be named, “Hating Conservatives 101” “Being Ashamed of America” “White Guilt” and “Radical Chic” are even less useful now than ever before. The garbage radical professors have been cramming into our young generation’s heads, for so many years, has finally caught up to them and it is doing appalling damage.

TAMPA - Westwood College representatives questioned Becky Loring about her hopes for the future. And when she wavered — worried about whether she could afford the $45,000 program — the recruiter used Loring's own words to seal the deal. "If you don't do this," she recalled the representative saying, "you're never going to get what you've always wanted." Loring, 32, now owes the government and private lenders more than $100,000. Working in sales, she is far from the graphic design job she studied for, barely able to make her college loan interest payments. "When I think about it, I just...

The North Dakota Senate voted today to approve legislation ordering UND to retain its controversial Fighting Sioux nickname and Indian-head logo. The vote was 28-15 with four senators absent and not voting, and came after a massive e-mail lobbying campaign that senators said heavily favored approval. The bill, passed earlier by the House on a 65-28 vote, goes now to Gov. Jack Dalrymple, who said he will sign it.

The last two years have been another reminder that education is not equivalent to competence, intelligence or experience, let alone wisdom, as an administration of people who have hardly held actual jobs outside of academia have proven that they are very good at assigning blame and conducting internal rivalries, and absolutely terrible at everything else. William F. Buckley famous opined that he would "sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University". We have spent the last two...

When it comes to choosing a college, there are a lot of factors to weigh: athletics, social scene, and of course safety. From a parent's point of view, the safety comes high on the list. Using data from the FBI's Crime in the United States reports, specifically for crimes on university and college campuses, we compiled a ranking of the most dangerous colleges campuses in the country. Certain elite colleges make the list, including MIT, Duke and Amherst -- a reminder that quality of students bears little on the neighbood. Methodology: We used FBI data from 2005 to 2009. Schools...

Several times during my tenure in the House of Representatives, then-Speaker Newt Gingrich found reason to illustrate a point he was making, by recounting a story attributed to Albert Einstein. According to Newt, when the famed physicist was asked what he considered “the most powerful force in the universe,” he replied “compound interest.” While I hesitate to take issue with one as renowned as Albert Einstein, I think he was wrong. In my view, the most powerful force in the universe is not compound interest, or even the forces of atomic particles the study of which won Einstein the Nobel...

In an age of limits, colleges and universities are expanding, with the aid of taxpayers with increasingly limited resources. “Colleges stand to lose billions of dollars for research, facilities, and other purposes if Congressional leaders hold firm in their pledge to ban earmarks, the spending that individual members direct to their home states and favorite projects outside of the competitive processes,” Kevin Kiley reported in the December 17, 2010 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. “Some of the biggest losers would be colleges in states whose lawmakers in Washington hold top positions on appropriations committees, and which have traditionally...

A recent article in The Times described the fears in France of a brain drain to the United States, as top French scholars move to American universities to teach and do research. A study by the Institut Montaigne found that academics constitute a much larger percentage of French émigrés to the United States today than 30 years ago..Why would France's leading scholars and researchers want to leave a place that reveres intellectuals? More money, more freedom, more competitive energy -- what really drives the global academic marketplace? Brain drains to U.S. universities are nothing new. The globalization of universities means...

Dr. Bradley Schaeffer is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. This video of his "astronomy class", which is actually an indoctrination session on global warming, was posted to YouTube Monday.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Most students seeking degrees at California's community colleges neither complete them nor transfer to a four-year university within six years, according to a study that spells trouble for the state's economic future. Nearly 70 percent of degree-seeking students who enrolled in community college during the 2003-04 school year did not transfer nor earn a degree or certificate by 2009, according to the report released this week by the Institute for Higher Education Leadership & Policy at Sacramento State University. It found that most of the students who didn't complete degrees or transfers dropped out. The study, which...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Getting a degree used to be a stepping stone to limitless career opportunities. Now it's more of a hiatus from living under your parents' roof. Stubbornly high unemployment -- nearly 15% for those ages 20-24 -- has made finding a job nearly impossible. And without a job, there's nowhere for these young adults to go but back to their old bedrooms, curfews and chore charts. Meet the boomerangers.

In yet another attempt to avoid being judged by tangible standards like everyone else, some colleges are fighting legislation designed to hold them accountable for their efforts. “For-profit colleges, under attack in Congress and faced with regulation that could ravage their revenues, are staging an aggressive, but increasingly hopeless, campaign to ward off legislation and defeat a proposed rule,” Kelly Field reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education on September 10, 2010. “In recent weeks, their representatives have filed thousands of comments criticizing the Education Department’s ‘gainful employment’ rule, which would cut off federal student aid to programs whose graduates...

For years, America has bought into the idea that college degrees are not only badges of honor but must-have tickets that miraculously open doors for the recipients and practically guarantee lucrative careers. Of course, they were told, you’ll have to pay off your student loans, but consider this as “good” debt – investment debt that creates value – as opposed to “bad” debt,” i.e. those car payments or travel expenses. If that’s true, then we’re on the verge of suffocating from good debt these days. “From where I’m sitting, the buildup of the national student loan balance looks like a...

Undercover testing, done using a hidden video camera by Government Accountability Office (GAO) employees, shows that for-profit colleges encouraged fraud and went one step further by engaging in deceptive and questionable marketing practices. The findings were published in the GAO report, For-Profit Colleges: Undercover Testing Finds Colleges Encouraged Fraud and Engaged in Deceptive and Questionable Marketing Practices. The footage and information was gathered by visiting 15 for-profit schools. The results showed that 4 colleges encouraged fraudulent practices and all 15 made deceptive or otherwise questionable statements to the undercover GAO operative. According to the GAO website:

ATLANTA — The University of Georgia won a national title this year — top party school. The Princeton Review announced Monday that Georgia is the No. 1 party school on its now infamous annual ranking. The school of about 30,000 students has been on the list 10 times since the ranking was created in 1992, but this is the first time the university has taken the top spot. For the campus — surrounded by nearly 100 bars in tiny downtown Athens — parties are just part of life from August to May each year. Many students gear up for the...

OXFORD, Ohio – Sorority spring formals call up visions of young women in colorful dresses dancing the night away — not vomiting on tables, urinating in sinks or having sex in closets. The drunken shenanigans of three sororities at Miami University in southwest Ohio sound like something out of "Animal House" and were especially startling for a school that frequently makes the top 50 in a U.S News & World Report academic ranking but never makes lists of big-time party schools. The school suspended two of the sororities and put the third on probation. A task force is reviewing discipline...

Democratic senators sharply questioned Thursday whether for-profit colleges reaping huge amounts of federal aid dollars are delivering on promises to students and taxpayers. The fast-growing for-profit college industry has faced increased scrutiny in recent months and is fighting greater government regulation, which it says will cut off access to education at the worst possible time. The first in a series of congressional hearings on for-profit colleges raised more questions than it provided answers about possible steps Congress or the Education Department might take.

Professor Ross Forman, who earned his doctorate in comparative literature at Stanford, had a tough time finding work in American universities, but found an inviting atmosphere in Asia, where his education and skills were valued despite his being male. More and more American academics – most of them male – have been traveling far afield to find work in the better environment provided outside of the United States, where higher education has increasingly come to resemble a ladies’ book club. In addition to the ideologically-rooted hostility against men standard in American universities, skyrocketing tuition costs and bloated budgets for the...

Conceal and Carry legislation in the United States has grown from 8 states issuing permits to January of 2011, there will be 37 states that issue conceal and carry permits allowed. With shootings at Virginia Tech and the University of Alabama, there has been continued discussions about whether or not conceal and carry permit holders should be allowed to “pack” on campus. There are 9 steps according to “MissouriCarry.com” to obtain a conceal and carry permit in Missouri. It’s not cheap either, an initial $100, and a $50 renewal fee every three years. Craig I think the conceal and carry...

"Like many middle-class families, Cortney Munna and her mother began the college selection process with a grim determination. They would do whatever they could to get Cortney into the best possible college, and they maintained a blind faith that the investment would be worth it. Today, however, Ms. Munna, a 26-year-old graduate of New York University, has nearly $100,000 in student loan debt from her four years in college, and affording the full monthly payments would be a struggle. For much of the time since her 2005 graduation, she’s been enrolled in night school, which allows her to defer loan...

Imagine for a moment you are an idealistic liberal functionary within Obama’s Department of Education. Since Inauguration Day, you’ve been part of a massive expansion of subsidies for higher education, and you’re proud of your work. The stimulus bill enlarged the higher-education tax credit and increased spending on Pell grants. The education bill that was tucked into the health-care reconciliation also expanded Pell aid and created a loan-forgiveness program for students who go into non-profit or government careers. Not bad. Now imagine your dismay when you learn that all this new student aid is fueling a boom in enrollment, not...

CHICAGO, April 16 /PRNewswire/ -- For only the fifth time in its 57-year history, Playboy magazine has released its list of America's Top 10 Party Schools. The much-talked-about rankings, featured in the magazine's May 2010 issue (available on newsstands and at www.playboydigital.com on Friday, April 16), were determined by Playboy's editors, with input from the magazine's campus representatives, models, photographers, online voters, and student readers.

ollege campuses have become the most intolerant environment for free speech in America over the last few decades, with conservative students, speakers, and ideas in the crosshairs of hostile leftist professors and administrators who use their resources to advance a radical political agenda while suppressing the opposition. For years this was treated as a problem that was isolated to the campus community, but during the 2008 presidential campaign, the country learned that this problem breached the campus wall without a single sandbag laid down to reinforce it. In Jason Mattera’s Obama Zombies: How the Liberal Machine Brainwashed My Generation, he...

It's been said that any publicity is good publicity. But Florida A&M University was not amused when the name of its teams — the Rattlers — the FAMU log and the school colors appeared in a video featuring what appeared to be eight students having an orgy. On Wednesday, the Tallahassee university settled a lawsuit it filed last month in U.S. District Court against the operator of a sexually explicit Web site that posted the video. In the settlement, the company acknowledges that people in the video were not students and they were not filmed on campus.

Tennessee's six historically black colleges and universities will receive an estimated $34.5 million over 10 years in badly needed assistance as part of the student loan reform legislation President Barack Obama signed into law last week.

The notion of objective truth has been abandoned and the peer review process gives scholars ample opportunity to reward friends and punish enemies. Last fall, emails revealed that scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England and colleagues in the U.S. and around the globe deliberately distorted data to support dire global warming scenarios and sought to block scholars with a different view from getting published. What does this scandal say generally about the intellectual habits and norms at our universities? This is a legitimate question, because our universities, which above all should be...

BERKELEY, Calif. – Students carried out raucous rallies on college campuses nationwide Thursday in protests against deep education cuts that turned violent as demonstrators threw punches and ice chunks in Wisconsin and blocked university gates and smashed car windows in California. At least 15 protesters were detained by University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee police after as many as 150 students gathered at the student union then moved to an administrative building to deliver petitions to the school chancellor. University spokesman Tom Luljak said campus police allowed one person inside, But when she emerged, she encouraged everyone to rush the building, he said....

While most of us do not see the threat, or just do not want to admit the problems that Islam brings to non-Islamic countries, Islam continues to advance in America. In this latest stage of Islam on the move, this school is offering only two majors. Arabic language and Islamic law and theology. The last thing that this country needs are more pro-Sharia Muslims. Sharia needs to be officially banned, and then any Muslim that calls for it afterwards shall be arrested or deported if possible. Those that want Sharia do not belong here, and are to be looked upon...

PHOENIX — Saying it would protect students and staffers, a veteran state lawmaker wants to let some faculty members carry their weapons onto university and community college campuses. Sen. Jack Harper, R-Surprise, said existing restrictions in state law keep everyone but police from legally having a gun on campuses. The problem, he said, is those who want to harm someone else are not going to be deterred by that restriction. "It's a long-time goal of mine to make sure there are no defense-free zones where criminals know they can go into an establishment and there'll be no law-abiding citizens there...