Free Republic

Shocked? I sure am. I thought they’d just give him a quiet slap on the hand or ignore him altogether. I never expected he’d receive real consequences for leftist tirade: CAMPUS REFORM – Michigan State administrators have suspended Prof. William Penn for the remainder of the semester, after he was caught on video going on an anti-Republican tirade on the very first day of his literature class. In an email to students Thursday morning, Dean Karen Wurst of the College of Arts & Letters, cited his “inappropriate, disrespectful and offensive” comments. “On Aug. 29, during your Literatures, Cultures, Identities course,...

If you come from a broken or dysfunctional family, or bad neighborhood, how enticing and deceptive this indoctrination is… Via The Blaze: Fourth-grade students in Illinois are learning that “government is like a nation’s family” because it sets rules and takes care of needs such as health care and education. So says a worksheet for social studies homework that was distributed to students at East Prairie School in Skokie, Ill, complete with a drawing of Uncle Sam cradling a baby that represents the citizens. Students are then prompted to answer 10 questions comparing government and families, including how their family...

(Newser) – Do you send your kids to private school? Then congratulations: "You are a bad person," Allison Benedikt argues in Slate. "Not bad like murder bad—but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad. So pretty bad." Her reasoning is simple: if everyone were invested in public schools—and not just monetarily invested, "but real flesh-and-blood-offspring" invested—they would get better. Involved parents can make a huge difference. Yes, your kid may not get as excellent an education. "Take a deep breath and live with that." "If you can afford private school," even just barely, "chances are that your spawn will be perfectly fine...

This week begins my 34th year serving on George Mason University's distinguished economics faculty. You might imagine my surprise when I received a letter from its Office of Equity and Diversity Services notifying me that I was required to "complete the in-person Equal Opportunity and Prevention of Sexual Harassment Policies and Procedures training." This is a leftist agenda for indoctrination, thought control and free speech suppression to which I shall refuse to submit. Let's look at it. Ideas such as equity and equal opportunity, while having high emotional value, are vacuous analytical concepts. For example, I've asked students whether they...

One conservative college professor’s support for traditional marriage was enough for one online commenter to brand him “the biggest embarrassment to higher education in America.” How the professor responded was pretty fantastic.

Steven Salaita, an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech, argues in a column posted this morning at Salon.com that Americans should stop saying "support the troops," calling it "trite and tiresome." He argues that patriotism and voicing support for the troops is merely a cover for American "imperialism" and likens American soldiers to murderers and ignorant individuals who "act like an Adam Sandler character."

MADISON – Parents, do you know your elementary school’s masturbation education policy? OLD ENOUGH?: Some Wisconsin school districts have authorized sexual education, including topics such as masturbation, at elementary schools. The Oak Creek School District developed a booklet for parents of elementary students to help them “understand how staff and outside resource people will handle these sensitive topics.”Sensitive topics, indeed.The elementary school booklet covers masturbation, sexual intercourse, sexual orientation, abortion and contraception.The booklet is a complement to the Human Growth and Development curriculum that takes various forms throughout public school districts across the state.It’s unclear how prevalent the Human Growth...

Dear Chancellor Miller: On May 9, you announced that you were initiating a process to "rethink" our university's approach to diversity and inclusion. Then, on August 16, you announced that eleven individuals agreed to serve on your Chancellor’s Committee on Diversity and Inclusion. For the following reasons, I find the composition of the committee to be deeply problematic. 1. Your inclusion committee is 0% white male. I have written three books dealing with campus diversity issues. I have been invited to speak on issues of diversity (largely ideological) at 78 college campuses. Over the last ten years, I have written...

<p>Is a cartoon-like college mascot reminiscent of Daniel Boone -- right down to the legendary coonskin cap -- racist, sexist or otherwise offensive?</p> <p>Officials at the University of Denver seem to think so. They’ve announced they won’t reinstate “Denver Boone,” who was retired in 1998 as mascot for the UD Pioneers, despite calls to bring him back.</p>

UPENN PROFESSOR SAYS GOD IS A WHITE RACIST I didn't think it could get any more bizarre, rediculous...or ultimately dangerous...and then you have this. A University of Pennsylvania Professor, Professor Anthea Bulter (shown above), who is an associate professor of Religion at the University of Pennsylvania, blogged the following to her readers and students regarding her thoughts after the George Zimmerman not guilty verdict: "God ain’t good all of the time. in fact, sometimes, God is not for us. As a black woman in an nation that has taken too many pains to remind me that I am not a...

Thanks to everyone for your thoughtful suggestions on what the elementary school in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) to be named after Lady M should be called. Unfortunately the school board has already chosen the name “Michelle Obama Elementary” so we’ll have to save the “Lady M Preparatory School of Fashion and Design” for a later date. And I’m sure you can see why “MOO U” was inappropriate for a grade school. Ditto “MOO U2.” “This name was selected by the school-site council because Michelle Obama supports active living and eating healthy, and the school models itself on...

The logic works like this: If homosexual acts are moral, as so many now insist, then they should be normative. If they are normative, they should be taught in our schools as a standard. If they are a standard, they should be enforced. And so it has come, and is coming, to be. Education is an essential part of the drive to universalize the rationalization for homosexual behavior; so it must become a mandatory part of the curriculum. What began as a plea for diversity ends with a demand for conformity.The infiltration of higher education by LGBT studies is well known....

Elementary educators trying to discourage children from settling pretend beefs with pretend guns is nothing new. But in the aftermath of the Connecticut school shooting, and with the grownups increasingly polarized over the Second Amendment, rules for recess, on the bus and in the classroom have become stricter than ever. Some say too strict. “These zero-tolerance policies are psychotic, in the strict sense of the word: psychotic means ‘out of touch with reality,’” Dr. Leonard Sax, a Pennsylvania psychologist and family physician, and author of “Boys Adrift,” told FoxNews.com. *** “Out-of-touch policies such as these, which criminalize behaviors which have...

Conservatives have long suspected there is discrimination against conservative professors in academia, and now there is evidence to prove it. Sociology professor Neil Gross, a self-described liberal, reveals the results of surveys showing this bias in his new book, Why Professors are Liberal and Why do Conservatives Care? Sociologist George Yancy asked professors if they would be more or less likely to hire someone if they were a Republican, evangelical or fundamentalist. Three-quarters said political affiliation would not affect their hiring decision. But the one-quarter that did say it would influence their decision virtually all said they would favor a...

A senior boy at Middleborough High School in Middleborough, Mass. -- who started coming to school dressed as a girl during his sophomore year -- became the school's "prom queen" last week. Fox News in Boston did the first report on this, and it was a gushing pro-transgender puff piece -- referring to the boy as "she" -- with no contrasting opinion included at all. The Fox anchorwoman was totally "with the program." Fox News began its report describing the boy the "a girl whose growing achievement is the end of a journey that she started years earlier." Fox went...

An Alabama teenager was denied her high school diploma and fined $1,000 for wearing a feather on her graduation cap to celebrate her Native American heritage. Escambia Academy High School in Atmore, Ala., makes its students and staff sign a pre-graduation contract agreeing not to wear "extraneous items during graduation exercises unless approved by the administration." Chelsey Ramer, 17, tried in vain to get approval to attach an eagle's feather to her graduation cap as a symbol of her Native culture. "They told me that if I wore it that they would pull me off the field," Ramer, a member...

Last Friday’s cross-dressing day at a Milwaukee elementary school proved contentious. The school-sponsored event was one of the theme days during school spirit week at Tippecanoe School for the Arts and Humanities. While the themes for each of the other days were sufficiently milquetoast, Gender Bender Day — as it was originally named — raised a few parental eyebrows. Members of the school’s student council chose the transvestite theme, reports WITI-TV. The idea was straightforward: boys were encouraged to dress like girls and girls were encouraged to dress like boys. Deidri Hernandez, the mother a second-grader at Tippecanoe, found out...

In the latest incident of anti-gun hysteria to erupt in a school setting, a kindergarten boy has been suspended from school for 10 days because he showed a friend his cowboy-style cap gun on the way to school.

(edit) Some experts predict that views on gender will evolve in much the same way they have for sexual orientation, since homosexuality was removed as a mental illness nearly four decades ago. Today, the gender spectrum includes those who are transgender, who see themselves as the opposite gender, and those who are gender variant, or gender nonconforming, whose gender is more "fluid." For kids, it means they identify part of themselves as boy and part as girl. (edit) In Colorado, for instance, the parents of a 6-year-old transgender girl are suing their school district for trying to make her use a...

From the time they are born, we put our boys in blue beanies and our girls in pink ones. It’s a societal norm, an expectation even, that you just are what you are born—a boy or a girl. From early on, we divide toys and activities by very distinct gender lines, with superheroes and trucks and muck on one side and princesses and dolls and all things frilly on the other. Many children land, enthusiastically, on the expected side. Others dabble in both “girl” and “boy” things. But what if your kid, even from an early age, mostly showed interest...