Free Republic

Harvard is to law what Winchester is to bolt actions. Powerful, dependable, well engineered and the mark of a serious craft, at least that’s what I was told.These days, Harvard graduates probably don’t know much about bolt actions, unless they are a member of the Harvard Law School shooting club. A stroll through the Harvard Law School course catalog also makes you wonder how much they know about the real practice of law.The course catalog from Harvard Law School hints that the answer might be — not as much as we thought.The Harvard Law School course catalog frequently reads...

But a closer look at these claims of independence raises serious doubts. An online search of EPA’s web site revealed that Syracuse’s Driscoll has previously involved as a principal investigator in studies that received over $3.6 million in research grants from EPA. Co-author Dallas Burtraw, a researcher at the think tank Resources for the Future, had been involved in previous EPA grants totaling almost $2 million. Harvard co-author Jonathan I. Levy had been involved in over $9.5 million worth of grants. Co-author Joel Schwartz, also of Harvard, had been previously involved in over $31 million worth of grants from EPA....

A Syriac scholar at Philipps University in Marburg, Germany, Dr. Kessel was sitting in the library of the manuscript's owner, a wealthy collector of rare scientific material in Baltimore. At that moment, Dr. Kessel realized that just three weeks earlier, in a library at Harvard University, he had seen a single orphaned page that was too similar to these pages to be coincidence. The manuscript he held contained a hidden translation of an ancient, influential medical text by Galen of Pergamon, a Greco-Roman physician and philosopher who died in 200 A.D. It was missing pages and Dr. Kessel was suddenly...

Natural scientists agree that the climate is changing and that humans bear some of the blame. Social scientists are now attempting to assess the economic and political price societies are likely to pay for turning up our planet’s thermostat. The security policy community is especially eager for an answer. In the academy, the debate over climate change and its security implications gained momentum after researchers from Stanford, the University of California Berkeley, New York University, and Harvard observed that civil wars were more prevalent during years that experience hotter temperatures. The chief explanation for this relationship is that higher temperatures...

Asian-Americans are one of the nation's most astonishing success stories. In 1960, they accounted for less than 1 percent of the U.S. population but had a rich history of persecution -- from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Back then, no one could have imagined what lay ahead. Today, nearly 5 percent of Americans have Asian ancestry, tracing to countries from India to Japan. The Pew Research Center reports that they are "the highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States." They are overrepresented in fields like medicine, engineering...

In the final decade of the Cold War, President Reagan urged Americans to “trust by verify” when engaged in arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union. When digesting academic research, it might be a good idea to reverse this formula and verify first, and then, if possible, trust, the information offered. Case in point: Harvard historian Naomi Oreskes. In a chapter in the book How Well Do Facts Travel? Oreskes attempts to unearth a connection between global warming skeptics and the energy industry, specifically a company called Western Fuels. Oreskes asserts that she has in her possession “leaked Western Fuels...

If you’re applying to Harvard and your last name is Wong or Liu, changing it to Lopez or Luciano might just make the difference you need to get in. Harvard routinely rejects “Asian” applicants in favor of whites and sought-after minorities with lower test scores and grades. Enrollment data reveal that Harvard limits Asian-Americans to a flat 15-18 percent of the student body, year after year, though they increasingly dominate the top of the applicant pool. To smoke out ethnicity, Harvard requires applicants to provide their parents’ place of birth, mother’s maiden name and whether their family has ever changed...

Linky only.

Washington — An alliance of Asian American groups on Friday filed a federal complaint against HarvardUniversity, saying that school and other Ivy League institutions are using racial quotas to admit students other than high-scoring Asians. More than 60 Chinese, Indian, Korean and Pakistani groups came together for the complaint, which was filed with the civil rights offices at the Justice and Education departments. They are calling for an investigation and say these schools should stop using racial quotas or racial balancing in admission. "We are seeking equal treatment regardless of race," said Chunyan Li, a professor and civil rights activist,...

... I took two pregnancy tests, just to be certain. I spent the night by myself, crying. The very next day, I skipped class and went to an abortion clinic, where I officially learned that I was almost four months pregnant. My ex-boyfriend had apparently broken up with a girl who was a month and a half pregnant with his child. All I desperately wanted was to have my boyfriend back. I wanted him to hold me and let me cry into his chest, for him to tell me that everything was okay even though it wasn’t. But by the...

Liberals have long wanted you to believe there’s a consensus in America for redefining marriage, but now they are going global! Last month, Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh, along with a team of foreign law experts, submitted an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to join the “emerging global consensus” for same-sex marriage — essentially arguing that since most countries in the world are jumping off this moral cliff, why shouldn’t we? If that philosophy — which most of our mothers warned us against as children — wasn’t weak enough, they also need to dust off their World Book...

Sorry, but a totally “safe space” is actually impossible. A student at Harvard University published an op-ed on Wednesday complaining that her school’s “safe spaces” are just not safe enough. According to Madison E. Johnson, her time spent in the “safe space” was really great at first — there were “massage circles,” “deep conversations,” and “times explicitly delineated for processing and journaling.” But then it all changed.

CAMBRIDGE (CBS) — A group of Harvard University graduate students are looking to unionize, according to one report. The Harvard Crimson reports that some graduate students are in the early stages of forming a union, and advocates say it’ll put students in a better position to negotiate with the university. Organizers of the budding movement told The Crimson that they’d be focused on health care, housing problems and issues important to teaching fellows.

Presidential candidate Ted Cruz loved to argue as a Harvard student and boasted he'd get the best grades in his class, only to lose out to two other classmates. In a series of exclusive interviews with Metro, several of his former classmates painted a complex portrait of the Tea Party's most beloved presidential candidate. Laurence Tribe, a longtime Harvard law professor, said Cruz took his constitutional law class, challenged his teacher in interesting and "invariably right-leaning" ways at every turn. Tribe said Cruz bragged to many of his classmates that he would receive the highest grade in the class, which...

In what was no doubt a rare moment for all involved, Huffington Post editorial director Howard Fineman noted on MSNBC’s “Hardball w/ Chris Matthews” that Harvard Law School professors were “in awe” of Texas Republican Senator and presidential candidate Ted Cruz’s intellect. “At Harvard Law School, he was — the professors were in awe of his intellect,” Fineman noted. “Even if they disagreed with him, which they did vehemently, these people knew that — this guy was trained under the Federalist Society second-generation Republican wave. In other words, not the Reagan years, but these years.” The rare complement from the...

During Barack Obama's recent State of the Union speech, he told America he had no more campaigns to run. But it seems that statement flies in the face of reports that an organization known as “One Voice” has brought in what has been called a "five-man Obama team" to defeat Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Included in that five-man team is Jeremy Bird, the national field director for Obama's 2012 campaign, Dr. Aaron Lerner, Director of the Independent Media Review and Analysis, said Monday, citing a report at Haaretz. That group, Dr. Lerner added, will run the anti-Netanyahu effort out...

Off to try to defeat Nethanyahu, Obama advisor Jeremy C. Bird once worked for an anti-Israel activist condemned by the Anti-Defamation League. Bird, then a student at Harvard’s Divinity School, worked for Edmund Hanauer, one of America’s most prominent anti-Israel activists, in 2002. Bird worked for Hanaeuer while Hanaeuer wrote a virulently anti-Israel op-ed that accused Israel of “state terrorism” and “war crimes,” and called for the arrest and prosecution of Israeli soldiers. Bird and Hanaeur also attacked Israel in speeches. Hanauer showed an anti-Israel film to a Harvard audience and gave a speech at Harvard in 2002. Bird also...

Boston, Mass — Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., son of the late senator and nephew of the late president, told an audience in Cambridge, Mass. Monday that President Bush has brought fascism to America. Kennedy appeared at a forum, "Books, Politics, and the Culture War," sponsored by the Harvard Book Store and the Progressive Book Club. A longtime environmentalist, he delivered an extended criticism of the Bush administration's environmental policies before alleging that the president has, in effect, created a fascist system of government in America. "I was taught that Communism leads to dictatorship and that capitalism leads to democracy," Kennedy...

For generations, books, films, and TV have warned us of the danger of mummies. In their crypts they are relatively harmless, but when they rise from the dead and start strangling people, as they did in the Cotswolds of south central England in “Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars,” they become a much greater threat. But this problem may shortly be solved, thanks to global warming. The world’s oldest mummies are at risk of disappearing because of man-made climate change, according to a group of Harvard University scientists. Bodies mummified about 7,000 years ago in Chile are starting to...

Molly McGaan didn’t reference her proficiency in “dank memes” or her wealth of “$wagg moneyyyy” when she applied to Harvard. But as admissions season ramped up — along with the high school senior’s anxiety level — she tried to imagine what would have happened if she had. McGaan, who attends the Francis W. Parker School in Chicago, created a faux Harvard University rejection letter that was widely circulated online this week, full of references to hip-hop mix tapes and Internet memes. The 18-year-old, who really applied to Harvard, thought the joke was obvious enough. The letter, which has the name...