Free Republic

As college students across the country prepare to convene in the nation’s capitol to discuss college gun bans on August 8th, two more states have expanded the right to carry concealed weapons on campus. Wisconsin became the 49th state to decriminalize bearing arms for defense when Governor Scott Walker signed SB 93 into law on July 8. The law, which goes into effect in November, removes the state prohibition on concealed carry, limiting possession of firearms on K-12 institutions but excluding college campuses. “Carrying a concealed weapon for protection is no longer a criminal offense in Wisconsin,” said David Burnett,...

Fallout from the Texas budget cuts is starting to hit home. Public colleges are losing about 15 percent of state funding for financial aid, roughly $140 million statewide, and they're sending out award notices for the start of school next month. No surprise that the price of college is going up sharply for many students who can least afford it. In addition to less aid, enrollments are climbing for students who qualify for Texas grants, which usually translates to family incomes of less than $40,000 annually. For many, the only option is to borrow more money. "Private alternative loans --...

Autum Ashante, a highly academically accomplished 13-year-old from the Bronx, N.Y., planned to start her freshman year at the University of Connecticut this fall. Now, her father says, the school has rescinded her acceptance, the Daily News reports. Batin Ashante said that his daughter was "devastated" after university officials called him yesterday to deliver the bad news. "They said they now feel she's not academically ready," he said. "That's BS!" When the story was first reported in mid-June, UConn spokesman Richard Veilleaux confirmed that Autum had been accepted to the school but said university officials were still waiting for the...

SB 185 was introduced by Sen. Ed Hernandez (D-Los Angeles) ...This bill would authorize the University of California and the California State University to consider race, gender, ethnicity, and national origin, along with other relevant factors, in undergraduate and graduate admissions... The bill would require the trustees, and request the regents, to report in writing to the Legislature and the Governor by November 1, 2012, on the implementation of the bill. The bill would require these reports to include information relative to the number of students admitted, disaggregated by race, gender, ethnicity, national origin, geographic origin, and household income, and...

Absolutely brilliant! Please check my comments below. From today's Wall Street Journal:Why We're Going Back to Single-Sex Dorms Student housing has became a hotbed of reckless drinking and hooking up. By JOHN GARVEY My wife and I have sent five children to college and our youngest just graduated. Like many parents, we encouraged them to study hard and spend time in a country where people don't speak English. Like all parents, we worried about the kind of people they would grow up to be. We may have been a little unusual in thinking it was the college's responsibility to worry...

The U.S. Department of Education is pressing schools to reduce their due process protections for people accused of sexual harassment or misconduct, and to eliminate people’s opportunity to cross-examine their accusers, under the premise that schools have been too slow to credit accusations. This will make an already bad situation on campus even worse. As Harvey Silverglate, the former head of the Massachusetts Civil Liberties Union, points out at Minding The Campus, many schools already find students and teachers guilty even when they are clearly innocent. As attorney Silverglate notes, many universities, such as Stanford, the University of Virginia, Brandeis...

Did Peter Thiel pop the bubble? That was the question on the minds of parents, taxpayers and higher education leaders late last month when the co-founder of PayPalannounced that he was offering $100,000 to young people who would stay out of college for two years and work instead on scientific and technological innovations. Thiel, who has called college “the default activity,” told USA Today that “the pernicious side effect of the education bubble is assuming education [guarantees] absolute good, even with steep student fees.” He has lured 24 of the smartest kids in America and Canada to his Silicon Valley...

Ann Coulter speech at DePaul divides students Ann Coulter speaking at DePaul University on Wednesday, June 1, 2011. (Jeremy Mikula photo for RedEye) BY Jeremy Mikula, DePaul reporter · Thursday, June 2, 2011 9:09 a.m. Ann Coulter comes to DePaul University and talks about Illinois’ new civil union law … that might sound like the start to a bad joke, but that’s really what happened Wednesday night.The outspoken conservative addressed some 150 students, faculty and staff at a lecture titled “What Your Professors Will Never Tell You,” part of the Young America’s Foundation Reagan 100 Lecture Series.Suzanne Kilgannon, director of...

Illinois is on the verge of becoming the first state to create a private college scholarship fund for the children of undocumented immigrants. The Illinois House, which on Thursday passed a state version of the DREAM Act by a 61-53 vote, sent a bill to Gov. Pat Quinn that would set up a state fund that would route privately funded college scholarships to as many as 95,000 children of undocumented immigrants. The children would be able to obtain private college scholarships and enroll in state savings programs. The measure, which Quinn, a Democrat, has said he plans to sign, had...

College is a scam — so let’s make money off it Commentary: Debt creates generation of indentured servants By James Altucher NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — We can’t deny it anymore: College is a scam and a bubble — and the reasons why appear below. But I’ll be the first to admit it’s going to take years for that bubble to burst. And while college tuitions are still skyrocketing and student-loan debt is creating a generation of indentured servants, we might as well benefit from it. Many stocks will continue to go up from the multidecade college bubble, even as it...

We can’t deny it anymore: college is a scam and a bubble (see the reasons why below). But I’m the first to admit it’s going to take years for that bubble to burst. And while college tuitions are still skyrocketing and student-loan debt is creating a generation of indentured servants, we might as well benefit from it Many stocks will continue to go up from the multi-decade college bubble, even as it eventually bursts: The Washington Post Co. , which owns Stanley Kaplan, gets all of its earnings from the education side of its business. Blackboard , which is the...

DEERFIELD, Ill., May 2, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- One hundred colleges and universities out of some 2,000 U.S. schools that offer four-year degrees have been ranked as the top values by Consumers Digest. The rankings are based on attributes that validate or define the institutions' academic prowess factored against annual cost of tuition, fees and room and board. Among 50 public institutions cited, Truman State University, Kirksville, Mo., ranked No. 1. Among 25 private institutions, Yale University took top honors. Among 25 private liberal-arts schools, Grove City College, Grove City, Pa., held the first slot. The rankings, published in CD's June...

In late April, Johnathan Perkins, a third-year law student at UVA, wrote a letter to the editor that was published in Virginia Law Weekly, the law school’s student newspaper. In his letter, Perkins claimed that he was harassed by UVA university police while walking home from a party, purportedly on account of his race (he’s African-American). Perkins said he was moved to share the story “because it is important for my classmates to hear a real-life anecdote illustrating the myth of equal protection under the law.” The trouble is, it was anything but a “real-life anecdote,” as Perkins himself recently...

If your sister were among the nearly 3,000 people murdered in the World Trade Center on 9/11, how would you react to Osama Bin Laden's death? More specifically, if you were to write an opinion piece on the subject for a major newspaper, what would you most want to communicate?One would think that anyone who had lost a loved one on 9/11 would write about bin Laden's guilt, about evil and about experiencing some degree of moral and emotional satisfaction that the loved one's murderer had been killed by American forces.But not Robert Klitzman, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia...

In April, a University of Virgina third-year law student, Jonathan Perkins, wrote a letter to the editor of the Virgina Law Weekly where he described how he was harassed by university police while walking home one night, due to being African American. The account is long and richly detailed, complete with dialogue between him and the officers and descriptions of his thought process during the events. He concludes this account with the statement that: I am writing this column because it is important for my classmates to hear a real-life anecdote illustrating the myth of equal protection under the law....

Manhattan real estate mogul Donald Trump suggested in an interview Monday that President Barack Obama had been a poor student who did not deserve to be admitted to the Ivy League universities he attended. Trump, who is mulling a bid for the Republican presidential nomination, offered no proof for his claim but said he would continue to press the matter as he has the legitimacy of the president's birth certificate. "I heard he was a terrible student, terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?" Trump said in an interview with The Associated Press. "I'm...

For the second year in a row, the University of Iowa College Republicans hosted "Conservative Coming Out Week." For those of you who have been holed up in the library studying for finals, here's a quick recap. On Monday, the College Republicans sent out an approved e-mail to the entire university community and received more than 105 responses. This is normal for one of these e-mails; however, one response was quite different. It came from tenured UI Professor Ellen Lewin. Her message was, quite simply, "FUCK YOU, REPUBLICANS," with her credentials listed below. Despite this hateful rhetoric, the next day...

ON September 2nd 2010 I wrote a mischievous column ("Declining by degree") likening America's universities to its car companies in about 1950: on top of the world and about to take an almighty fall. Since then I have heard the argument dismissed and denounced by the presidents of Harvard, Princeton and New York University. John Sexton, NYU's affable president, even likened me to a member of the tea party, for which there is no more damning condemnation in academic circles. So I am particularly delighted to read Peter Thiel's latest thoughts on the higher-education bubble. Mr Thiel, the co-founder of...

"Therefore, scientific inquiry of the natural world may not be interpreted as inconsistent with Creation by a Divine Master, nor a basis for challenging or negating those truths which the Church accepts as Revelation." Can anyone find anything doctrinally wrong with the following statement? Can anyone find a way of improving it, including simply stating it better or more succinctly? Maybe even another source for a similar assertion? I welcome the help of non-Catholics, providing its consistent with the purpose of reconciling scientific research with Catholic doctrine, and explaining that reconciling to secular and Catholic audience. The Bible is the...

If you think that academia is not the exclusive playground of the academic left, consider the fate of UCLA epidemiologist James Enstrom. In 2008, Enstrom thought that a report on the health effects of diesel emissions presented by the California Air Resources Board was faulty. As it turns out, CARB's nitrous oxide emission estimates were overstated by 340 percent. Enstrom and others had trouble believing that a Ph.D. statistician would make some of CARB's findings. They dug around and found that CARB researcher Hien Tran had falsely claimed to have a doctorate in statistics from UC Davis. In fact, Tran...