Free Republic

Graham Greene’s observation has lost none of its salience in 50 years: innocence remains “like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.” The latest illustration comes from Wisconsin, where the state’s Department of Public Instruction website devotes a page to “Power and Privilege.” Caucasians who volunteer in the state’s AmeriCorps VISTA antipoverty programs are instructed to “set aside sections of the day to critically examine how privilege works”; “put a note on your mirror or computer screen as a reminder to think about privilege”; and, in order to underline white guilt, “find a...

Wayne State University officials say the state's right-to-work law helped the university get a better deal from its faculty union. However, university officials don't specify what they actually got in return. Last month, WSU reached an agreement with the union on an unprecedented eight-year contract. The deal was struck as the clock was ticking toward the state's right-to-work law going into effect. At stake for the American Association of University Professors-American Federation of Teachers was the ability to keep collecting dues and fees from all members through 2021. The state's right-to-work law goes into effect March 28 and gives union...

Dan Meyer, writing (Warning: link contains offensive images) for Boston’s homosexual publication the Edge, reports that the homosexual community is making gains on Catholic college campuses. As examples, he cites changes to the student handbook, providing protection for people based on sexual orientation and gender identity, at San Antonio’s Our Lady of the Lake University, as well as examples from Boston College, The Catholic University of America, and Fordham University. An increasing number of Catholic colleges and universities have seen the addition of student-run homosexual advocacy and support groups and resource centers. “The Jesuits, who have been historically regarded as...

Conservatives should welcome the decline of academia as we know it. I, for one, will celebrate its death by engaging in the same activity that characterized my four years at what some call its pinnacle– drinking a lot of Coors Light. There is still nostalgia among conservatives, especially older ones who have forgotten what college is really like, for the idea of higher education as a rigorous venue for intellectual growth, an environment of exciting and vibrant ideas shared by wise, caring educators dedicated to the pursuit of truth. Today, it is nothing of the sort. For the vast majority...

We’ve heard a lot about the “higher education bubble” recently, and for good reason: the higher education establishment is on a path of gaseous unsustainability. College fees have been rising at a rate far above the cost-of-living for decades — currently, all-in fees at many elite institutions top $60,000. Think about that the next time you look at your paycheck and contemplate paying for little Johnny’s tuition a few years hence.But the bubble is not only fiscal. It is also intellectual, social, and moral. As rich and prestigious and powerful as American universities are, they have, in aggregate, lost...

Remember when the mainstream media mocked a politician who had to attend five colleges to graduate, whose academic record was less than outstanding, and whose subsequent success was proof of nothing? Remember how that was supposed to be a threat to national security, the economy, and so much else? That was so 2008, so Sarah Palin. It turns out that former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE), who is now awaiting confirmation as Secretary of Defense, attended five colleges and was a "D" student. He volunteered to serve in Vietnam,

With a year left on its contract, the Western Michigan University's professors' union is trying to get a 9-year extension done by the March deadline that would give union members the right to not pay dues or fees as a condition of employment at the school. That would lock everyone represented by that union into paying dues or fees until 2023. Michigan Capitol Confidential obtained a draft of the proposal of the plan, which was verified by union members. It was drafted Jan. 23. The agreement would be a collective bargaining agreement known as a “union security agreement” (USA) that...

With a surplus of middle-tier state universities offering four-year degrees whose value is coming under increasing scrutiny by students and families, Michigan is ripe for a revolution described by an article in the current American Interest online, “The End of the University as We Know It” by Nathan Harden. If it hasn't already, this broad overview of a higher education system on the cusp of a transformation brought about by online learning should be sending chills up the spines of high-paid university presidents and their legions of administrators. "The higher-ed business is in for a lot of pain as a...

Four public colleges and universities: Florida’s Palm Beach State College, Pennsylvania’s Community College of Allegheny County, Ohio’s Youngstown State University, and New Jersey’s Kean University, are all planning to move adjunct and “contingent” faculty members to part-time status in order to avoid an Obamacare provision requiring businesses with 50 or more full-time employees to provide health coverage for at least 95 percent of their workers. **SNIP** Teachers’ associations like AAUP and AFT are bracing for the shift. Next week, AFT will host a webinar for its members addressing “the implications of the Affordable Care Act for contingent faculty.” In the...

The last of the college applications have been rewritten, tweaked and polished, and at last entrusted to the tender mercies of the U.S. Mail or the Internet. Fretting over deadlines morphs into waiting, and yearning, wishing and praying for coveted letters of acceptance. This is the annual crisis in thousands of homes with ambitious high school seniors -- the high school seniors and their parents who still believe that college is the route to the American Dream. But wait. While they play the conventional game of aspiration, certain scholars and economists, and hundreds of thousands of "concerned citizens" have initiated...

Moody's Investors Service now has a negative outlook for the entire U.S. higher education sector, the rating agency said on Wednesday, citing "mounting fiscal pressure on all key university revenue sources." Since 2009, Moody's had had a stable outlook for market-leading, research-driven colleges and universities and a negative outlook for the rest of the higher education sector. "The U.S. higher education sector has hit a critical juncture in the evolution of its business model," said Eva Bogaty, Moody's assistant vice president, in a statement. "Even market-leading universities with diversified revenue streams are facing diminished prospects for revenue growth." The agency...

Nearly three thousand U.S. college students went online in the search for a 'sugar daddy' to fund their education last year. Georgia State University and New york University were the top two schools for female students to seek out men willing to fund their tuition, with Pennsylvania's Temple University following closely behind for third place. According to the website SeekingArrangement.com, 2012 saw a 58per cent growth in female students signing up to be 'sugar babies,' which the site describes as 'attractive, intelligent, ambitious and goal oriented' women seeking 'financial pampering.'

U.S. history courses at American colleges and universities downplay the nation's economic, military, and political history and dramatically overemphasize the role of race. So finds a new study by the Texas Association of Scholars (TAS) and Center for the Study of the Curriculum at the National Association of Scholars (NAS). The study focused on the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M as representative institutions because Texas law requires all students at public universities to take a year of American history and for universities to post course syllabi and faculty credentials online. The researchers found that many important topics...

Some call it the Edifice Complex. Others have named it the Law of More, or the Taj Mahal syndrome. A decade-long spending binge to build academic buildings, dormitories and recreational facilities — some of them inordinately lavish to attract students — has left colleges and universities saddled with large amounts of debt. Oftentimes, students are stuck picking up the bill. Overall debt levels more than doubled from 2000 to 2011 at the more than 500 institutions rated by Moody’s, according to inflation-adjusted data compiled for The New York Times by the credit rating agency. In the same time, the amount...

Rankings of AmericaÂ’s best colleges exist all over the web, so why is TheBestSchools.org offering yet another? Because we have a ranking thatÂ’s interesting and useful.Most rankings of AmericaÂ’s best colleges list the usual suspects: Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, in the East. In the West, Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech. In the Midwest, the University of Chicago and a few Big Ten schools. In the South, Duke, Vanderbilt, and Emory.To round out such a list, most rankings also throw in a good number of small, elite, liberal arts colleges. Our list will also include some of these colleges. But it will go...

MOUNT PLEASANT (AP) — Central Michigan University has decided to add two women's sports, saying it's an effort to strengthen sexual equality in athletics. The Mount Pleasant school's trustees voted Thursday to add women's golf in 2014-15 and women's lacrosse in 2015-16.

The vast majority of faculty and staff members from the nation’s top Catholic universities donated to President Barack Obama’s campaign over Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s this cycle, according to a new report. Ninety-one percent of the employees at 23 different Catholic schools gave to Obama, according to Federal Elections Commission data available on OpenSecrets.org and analysed by the conservative college site Campus Reform. Much has been made of Obama’s Affordable Care Act mandate requiring employers to provide contraception coverage, a requirement that church officials say conflicts with Catholic religious doctrine,

College is hard enough without having to worry about serious crime. Yet crime is a reality on and around many college campuses. The FBI's Unified Crime Report identified 2,696 violent crime incidents and 87,160 property crime incidents on and around college campuses in 2011. We ranked the most dangerous colleges by averaging FBI crime data per capita from 2008 to 2011 for schools with enrollment over 10,000. Schools were ranked based on a combination of violent crime rank and property crime rank, with violent crime weighted four times higher. NOTE: Some people have objected to our use of FBI data...

A Christian university blocked conservative students from forming a Young Americans for Freedom chapter on campus last week.Azusa Pacific, a private Christian university near Los Angeles, California, took issue with “divisive language” on the website of YAF, an advocacy group for college-aged conservatives. University officials also feared that replacing the existing conservative student club with a YAF-affiliated one would limit membership options for students.A spokesperson clarified that while students were free to associate with YAF, no official relationship would be permitted to exist. “They can associate with YAF, we’re just not wanting a formal chapter on our campus,” said Rachel...

It's a dilemma that many working moms face: What do you do when your child is too sick to go to school but you have a can't-miss obligation at the office? For Adrienne Pine, a single mom and an assistant professor of anthropology at American University in Washington, D.C., the choice seemed clear. When her infant daughter woke up with a fever on August 28, the first day of Pine's class on Sex, Gender and Culture, Pine decided to bring her baby along. Everything went smoothly for the first part of the 75-minute long lecture.