Free Republic

President Obama's top economic adviser, Larry Summers, is leaving the White House at the end of the year, the administration announced Tuesday. Summers will return to Harvard University as a professor.

Every political community includes some members who insist that their side has all the answers and that their adversaries are idiots. But American liberals, to a degree far surpassing conservatives, appear committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions are not just wrong but illegitimate, ideological and unworthy of serious consideration. Indeed, all the appeals to bipartisanship notwithstanding, President Obama and other leading liberal voices have joined in a chorus of intellectual condescension.

A Minnesota college student was suspended and ordered to undergo "mental health evaluation" for his response to campuswide e-mails from school officials concerning the Virginia Tech massacre. The college, Hamline University, a private, liberal-arts institution affiliated with the Methodist Church, has a policy on "Freedom of Expression and Inquiry" that guarantees that Hamline students will be "free to examine and discuss all questions of interest to them and to express opinions publicly or privately." With such a strong guarantee on students' "freedom from censorship and control" by the university, student Troy Scheffler's e-mail must have been horrifically bad to warrant...

In 1997, the National Association of Social Work (NASW) altered its ethics code, ruling that all social workers must promote social justice "from local to global level." This call for mandatory advocacy raised the question: what kind of political action did the highly liberal field of social work have in mind? The answer wasn't long in coming. The Council on Social Work Education, the national accreditor of social work education programs, says candidates must fight "oppression," and sees American society as pervaded by the "global interconnections of oppression." Now aspiring social workers must commit themselves, usually in writing, to a...

Good morning ladies and gentlemen, Eight days ago, I was present in the audience when Tom Brokaw addressed the 2006 Stanford graduating class. After the initial pleasantries and one-liners, Mr. Brokaw said something unexpected. He told the class that they were the children of privilege, fortunate to be attending one of the finest educational institutions in the country, the anointed because they had both the test scores for admittance and parents who were able to afford their tuition. He noted that they could likely expect rapid advancement in almost any endeavor they choose and that they were destined to lead...

The movement for academic freedom has been spurred on by students who have seen bias in the classroom or experienced political discrimination, stood up against it and become activists for their cause. A handful of these students were in Washington, D.C. to publicly share their stories at the recent Academic Freedom Conference held by Students for Academic Freedom on April 6-7. Student Mason Harrison, of University of California-Davis, encountered a political rant on the first day of a women’s studies class he’d enrolled in on a wager. “My professor began the class, not by introducing herself, but by chanting: ‘No...

I might sound a bit conceited with this statement, but to any other person an article about a new SEC rule might have seemed trivial. To me, it was a significant statement about the current American values; and I don't mean a positive statement. In their never ending campaign to create class warfare, the mainstream media, hypocritical wealthy Democrat politicians, Hollywood limousine liberals, and the left in general have regularly expressed a hatred toward corporate CEOs for their "bloated" salaries, benefits, and pensions. There's no rational reason, according to these socialists, for a man to earn in one week what...

T minus Two d, twenty-three h, fifty-five m, and, bah-dumph, the Commander-in-chief shall meet his constitutionally-sanctioned would-be assassin (with a ballot-paper). And, the location of this rendezvous shall be... The University of Miami (Fla.), in Coral Gables, and the chancellor of this school is, indeed, Donna Shalala: Arabiac (she's Lebanese), Clintonista (one of three cabinet loyalists, having served eight years consecutive in the same posting; the vile Janet Reno, and big-government liberal education secretary, Richard Riley, were the others), and (obviously) a liberal. Consequently, we shall know, if events unforeseen untrack the President, as well are used by the challenger...

THE ICONOCLAST WEEKLY RANT ILLIBERAL EDUCATION: THE SAD DECLINE OF OUR SCHOOLS & UNIVERSITIES by Murray Soupcoff According to the cognescenti in academia and the media world, America's universities are the last bastion of free speech and independent thought. As evidence, they proudly remind us that thousands of overpaid professors can't be fired from their jobs thanks to "tenure," a traditional accreditation that protects their right to write and say whatever they want. Hence, the conventional media stereotype of American university campuses as the last shining beacons of free thought, independent inquiry and the unfettered exchange of ideas. Of...

DEMOCRACY AND THE PROBLEM OF FREE SPEECH By Cass Sunstein The Free Press, 1993, 300 pages According to Sunstein, the First Amendment protects many forms of speech that should not be protected -- commercial speech, libelous speech, speech that invades privacy, and certain forms of pornography and hate speech -- while it ignores genuine victims of defamation and in some cases gives the government too much power over speech. These inconsistencies are reflected in the great deal of attention given to free speech issues in recent years. Sunstein maintains that modern economic and technological changes, together with shifting popular attitudes...