Free Republic

IRAN 2015 Scenario One: Containment U.S.-Led Coalition Contains Iran By 2012, the United States has organized a regional coalition to contain Iran,  modeled to some degree on experience gained dealing with the Soviet Union.  Isolation and external pressure towards the emergence of an Iranian  “Gorbachev”—someone the West can do business with—is the long-term goal.  page 6 Scenario Two: Balance of Power U.S. Drawdown from Iraq Triggers  Middle East Balance of Power Dynamic Acknowledging that the Iraq experiment has failed, the U.S. withdraws the  majority of its troops and accepts a diminished military and political presence  in the region.  Regional players...

NYU president John Sexton has been promised a blank check to duplicate his university on a desert island in Abu Dhabi. The expansion will leave both campuses flush with petrodollars. But to many faculty, the deal amounts to a sellout. John Sexton’s office, which sits on the top floor of NYU’s Bobst Library and boasts an impressive view north to Washington Square Park, has recently begun to resemble a shrine to Abu Dhabi. The university president has installed a massive Oriental rug, a gift from the crown prince, on one entire wall. On another hangs a framed portrait of the...

The poster advertising New York University’s “Academic Freedom in the Age of Permanent Warfare” conference featured a scolding Statue of Liberty pointing an accusatory finger and stating: “YOU! Stop Asking Questions. You’re Either With US or You’re With the TERRORISTS!” The speakers and attendees gathered around the pastry-laden table at NYU’s new Frederic Ewen Academic Freedom Center last week didn't appear to be oppressed or under attack. But once they wiped the sugar from their mouths and stood up to speak, they assured the audience that they were, in fact, victims in an “age of permanent warfare.” According to keynote...

The proliferation of dubious conferences on "academic freedom" continues unabated. And, in each case, biased and politicized Middle East studies academics are a major component.In October, 2007, the University of Chicago hosted, "In Defense of Academic Freedom," an event whose unifying theme was "the notion that Jewish groups have degraded the quality and breadth of discussion in the media and in Washington." Hardly the stuff of self-described progressives, but such is the state of discourse in the corridors of academia today. Then there was the "DePaul Academic Freedom Conference" earlier this month. It featured the usual suspects, all alleging "academic...

PC WC by: Deborah Lambert, January 29, 2008 If you think the level of academic conferences can’t sink any lower, read on. Last fall, New York University offered a day-long seminar titled “Sex, Gender and the Public Toilet: Outing the Water Closet.” Cultural commentator/author Roger Kimball reported that it took four departments to tackle this weighty topic: the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, the Department of Media, Culture and Communication, the Center for Religion and Media, and the Council on Media and Culture. Kimball noted that the gathering “brought together pioneering scholars of sex and gender with...

Most at NYU say their vote has a price By: Lily Quateman - Washington Square News November 14, 2007 07:29 PM EST Two-thirds say they'll do it for a year's tuition. And for a few, even an iPod touch will do. That's what NYU students said they'd take in exchange for their right to vote in the next presidential election, a recent survey by an NYU journalism class found. Only 20 percent said they'd exchange their vote for an iPod touch. But 66 percent said they'd forfeit their vote for a free ride to NYU. And half said they'd give...

The beautiful daughter of two NYU professors was killed inside her mother's university apartment - and left to decompose behind the locked door of her bedroom for several days, police sources said. Cops were searching for Boitumelo McCallum's "jealous" boyfriend, according to police sources who described him as the prime suspect in the grisly murder of the intelligent 20-year-old student. -snip- "Everyone is calling, asking for information about this young woman - except her boyfriend. The sense is that he's not calling because he knows what happened," a source said.

NEW YORK // Crammed with Lenin buttons, dusty memos from the McCarthy period, and crumbling pages of internal briefings dating back a century, the 2,000 cardboard boxes handed over to New York University last month hold secrets about the Communist Party USA that make archivist Peter Filardo's heart flutter. ...Last year, Filardo received a phone call from the Communist Party's national chairman, Sam Webb, who told him the organization wanted to donate its archival collection to the Tamiment Library at NYU. The party planned to renovate its headquarters, Webb said, and it no longer had room for the cache, which...

Here's one ally that most people opposed to the airing of Cho's material would surely just as soon do without. In an MSNBC column, Siva Vaidhyanathan claims that NBC News' decision to air the material was unfair to, that's right, Cho the mass murderer. In Material from Killer Should Not Have Aired, Vaidhyanathan does note en passant that the airing "ultimately was disrespectful to the victims and their families." But the lion's share of his column is devoted to complaining that NBC was unfair to Cho and "all severely mentally ill people." We will see sick attempts at humor,...

NEW York University has trumpeted its acquisition of a large cache of materials donated by the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) to its Tamiment Library. A front-page New York Times story noted that the gift includes 12,000 cartons filled with documents and photographs from the party's newspaper. A celebratory conference to mark the event tomorrow is filled with party war horses and includes panels extolling the CPUSA's contributions to American society and culture. ... For nearly 70 years - from shortly after its founding in Chicago in 1919 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in...

Does Karen Greenberg believe the United States is involved in a war with Islamist terrorists? Judging by her column in today's Los Angeles Times, The military's Gitmo script, you really have to wonder. Greenberg is executive director of the Center on Law and Security at NYU law school. Her bio there [from whence her photo here comes] indicates that she is a former Vice-President of George Soros' Open Society Institute. Her colleague at the Center, NYU prof Stephen Holmes [pictured here], lists as one of his areas of specialization: "the disappointments of democratization after communism." Ah, remember the good...

Lawyers for an American citizen facing execution in Iraq appealed Friday in U.S. federal court to keep the man in American custody — preventing his death — while another case is being appealed. The citizen, Mohammad Munaf, was convicted and sentenced to death by an Iraqi judge earlier this week on charges he helped in the 2005 kidnapping of three Romanian journalists in Baghdad, court papers show. Iraqi-born Munaf, a naturalized U.S. citizen since 2000, was working as their translator and guide. He maintains his innocence. In an emergency request filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Washington, Munaf's attorneys...

The NYPD hate-crimes unit is probing a report that a white NYU student killed by a car in Harlem was fleeing a gang of black teenagers screaming "Get whitey!" sources said yesterday. If the report proves true, the violence could turn out to be an eerie replay in reverse of the infamous 1986 Howard Beach murder, where a black man was chased into traffic and killed by a group of white bigots. The 20-year-old student, John Broderick Hehman, died yesterday, six days after the attack.

National Gallery, LondonWhistler's portrait of his mother is not included in the new "Janson's History of Art." Top, Tate, London; bequeathed by Arthur Studd, 1919; above, Dawoud Bey/"Janson’s History of Art," Seventh Edition THEY MADE IT Now appearing in "Janson's History of Art": Whistler's "Symphony in White No. 2," top, which replaces the portrait of his mother and shows the Japanese influence on his art; and David Hammon's "Higher Goals," above. In some ways, art history is like an episode of "The Sopranos." A relatively small number of artists are welcomed into the family of the famous, their works...

New York University has set a deadline for its striking graduate student teaching and research assistants to return to work or risk losing their stipends. The university has told its striking students they must return to class and other assignments by next week. If they don't, they will lose their financial stipends and their eligibility to teach next semester. Graduate teaching assistants went on strike November 9th to force NYU to recognize their right to bargain as part of the United Auto Workers Union... For students whose teaching assistants walked out of class, NYU is offering options like taking classes...

New York University is facing a strike next week... on Nov. 9... ...From 2000 until August of this year, about 1,000 teaching and research assistants had been members of local 2110 of the United Automobile Workers. But when their contract expired in August, N.Y.U. said it would no longer recognize a graduate student union. The university's decision followed a policy reversal by the National Labor Relations Board in Washington about whether private universities like N.Y.U. had to allow graduate student workers to unionize... In 2000, as other universities and union organizers watched closely, the national labor board - controlled at...

The personal, commercial and civic desolation left by Hurricane Katrina has inevitably bred comparisons to another scene of unthinkable loss and ruin: lower Manhattan after 9/11. While the recovery effort on the Gulf Coast is unique, one area in which New York's experience provides an example is its support for small business reconstruction. Like Hurricane Katrina, the 9/11 attacks destroyed or crippled thousands of the smallest local businesses and nonprofits... the "soft" infrastructure of any commercial or industrial district.... After 9/11, Seedco became the primary organization assisting these businesses. We tailored a specific response to the challenges faced... Our approach...

...In April, the IFC designated nine universities to provide initial programs, with the goal of "[making] the Center a... 'Public Square' on hallowed ground." "The character of a university," the IFC intoned, "allows for this form of 'sacred space'... in which sensitive, controversial and provocative subjects can be candidly explored, yet in a manner that does not generate political distraction."... [NYU] President... [extolled] today's campuses "as 'modern sanctuaries [committed to] free, unbridled and ideologically unconstrained discourse.'" Hello. Campuses today are indeed "sanctuaries"— but almost exclusively for scholars of liberal-left-radical persuasion. Their "unconstrained discourse" is overwhelming that of rank ideologues— neo-Marxists,...

New York University formally notified the union representing its graduate students yesterday that it would no longer bargain with it. In June, the university said it was moving toward severing its relationship with the five-year-old union when its contract expires on Aug. 31. In a memorandum distributed late yesterday to N.Y.U. students and faculty and in a letter to the union, university officials said they decided not to negotiate a new contract. Jacob J. Lew, N.Y.U.'s executive vice president, said in the memo that grievances filed by the union over issues like who would be assigned as graduate teaching assistants...

Leave it to the New York Times. On the eve of Pentecost, the birthday of the church, this Catholic-baiting newspaper opened its op-ed page to a venomous anti-Catholic rant by Arthur Hertzberg, "a visiting professor of the humanities" at New York University. Hertzberg slandered no fewer than three popes. Not only did the church of Pius XII remain "silent while Europe's Jews were murdered," he alleges, the church of John Paul II taught Catholics that the "sin of letting the Holocaust happen at its doorstep need not haunt the church ..." As for Benedict XVI, formerly Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he...

......a mysterious whiz kid charged in a massive check-kiting scheme was denied bail after prosecutors said a counterfeit $8.78 million check ......was found at his home....authorities discovered the same paper stock Hakan Yalincak allegedly used to make another counterfeit check for $25 million. The check stock was mailed to the Yalincaks' Pound Ridge, Westchester, home under his alias, "John Sahenk," Kurimai said. "Mr. Yalincak is an economic danger to the community," said Kurimai, who revealed that in recent weeks, two Chicago investors had invested $2.75 million in Yalincak's purported hedge fund and now are complaining that he refuses to give...

NEW HAVEN, May 6 (AP) - A New York University senior was arrested on Friday and charged with concocting a $43 million scheme to shuffle bogus multimillion-dollar checks between banks in Switzerland and Greenwich, Conn. Hakan Yalincak, 21, whose parents are major donors to N.Y.U., wept in court as Magistrate Judge Joan G. Margolis of the United States District Court ordered him held at Wyatt Detention Center in Rhode Island until a hearing on Thursday. "I have a graduation on Wednesday," Mr. Yalincak said. Mr. Yalincak, a mathematics major from Pound Ridge, N.Y., whose parents donated $21 million to the...

Close to 50 NYU law students and members of the New York community lined the sidewalk outside of Vanderbilt Hall yesterday afternoon to protest Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who was being honored by a student-run law journal. Scalia visited NYU to receive an honor from the members of the NYU Annual Survey of American Law , which is dedicating their 2005 issue to Scalia. Scalia is the subject of controversy for his dissenting opinion in Lawrence v. Texas, in which he criticized the decision to overturn a law that criminalized sodomy. While on the court he voted for the...

The CIA may be accustomed to working under "deep cover" in hostile areas, but one college campus is proving too dangerous for the company's men and women. The campus that makes America's spies tremble is New York University (NYU). As reported by the University of Wisconsin's newspaper, the Badger Herald, out of fear of causing a potential disturbance at New York University, representatives from the United States Central Intelligence Agency declined to visit the campus March 31 because of the likelyhood of ... student protests! Scheduled to appear as part of a project for a marketing class, the CIA declined...

April 14, 2005 -- WHEN U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia spoke Tuesday night at NYU's Vanderbilt Hall, "The room was packed with some 300 students and there were many protesters outside because of Scalia's vitriolic dissent last year in the case that overturned the Texas law against gay sex," our source reports. "One gay student asked whether government had any business enacting and enforcing laws against consensual sodomy. Following Scalia's answer, the student asked a follow-up: 'Do you sodomize your wife?' The audience was shocked, especially since Mrs. Scalia [Maureen] was in attendance. The justice replied that the question...

WHEN U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (above) spoke Tuesday night at NYU's Vanderbilt Hall, "The room was packed with some 300 students and there were many protesters outside because of Scalia's vitriolic dissent last year in the case that overturned the Texas law against gay sex," our source reports. "One gay student asked whether government had any business enacting and enforcing laws against consensual sodomy. Following Scalia's answer, the student asked a follow-up: 'Do you sodomize your wife?' The audience was shocked, especially since Mrs. Scalia [Maureen] was in attendance. The justice replied that the question was unworthy of...

Close to 50 NYU law students and members of the New York community lined the sidewalk outside of Vanderbilt Hall yesterday afternoon to protest Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who was being honored by a student-run law journal. Scalia visited NYU to receive an honor from the members of the NYU Annual Survey of American Law , which is dedicating their 2005 issue to Scalia. Scalia is the subject of controversy for his dissenting opinion in Lawrence v. Texas, in which he criticized the decision to overturn a law that criminalized sodomy. While on the court he voted for the...

The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters awarded its Abel Prize in mathematics to an American professor at New York University on Thursday. The prize honors the memory of Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel. Peter D Lax, age 78, won the prize "for his groundbreaking contributions to the theory and application of partial differential equations and to the computation of their solutions," according to the academy. The Hungarian-born professor has been called the most versatile mathematician of his generation. The academy said he has had "a profound influence" through his research, writings, a lifelong commitment to education and generosity to...

The Bush administration's policy of withholding aid from overseas groups that perform abortions is hurting women and forcing clinics to close, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton said Sunday. Clinton, speaking at a New York University forum to mark the 10th anniversary of the United Nations' fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, said 20 million women worldwide risk unsafe abortions every year, 68,000 die and many more are injured. "Many of these deaths and these injuries can be prevented by providing women with the information and means to choose the size and spacing of their own families, and yet I regret...

Plucky "Baby Jordan" — his tiny new heart beating beautifully just two weeks after a lifesaving transplant — is going home to Brooklyn today, hospital officials said. Jordan Trimarchi was born at NYU's Downtown Hospital on Jan. 18 with a heart tumor, which was removed by surgeons at Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital of New York-Presbyterian three days later. After a desperate search for a donor turned up a new heart, surgeons performed the delicate transplant on Jan. 26. Jordan was moved to the cardiac floor of Children's Hospital after spending five days on a ventilator in intensive care.

Even Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen can't escape the scrutiny of student activists at NYU. A student group will march today in Washington Square Park to ask that the Gallatin freshmen guarantee paid maternity leave to workers in Bangladesh who work in the factories that make their clothing line. The NYU chapter of Students Against Sweatshops and the National Labor Committee charged that 95 percent of the women who work in Bangladeshi sweatshops for major companies - including Wal-Mart and the Olsens' Dualstar Entertainment Group - don't receive three months of maternity leave mandated by Bangladeshi law. "I don't want my...

The earnings of many top university presidents are spiraling up toward $1 million a year, according to an annual survey by The Chronicle of Higher Education, rising far more quickly than faculty salaries. Forty-two presidents of private universities were paid $500,000 or more in the 2003 fiscal year, the most recent for which figures are available, compared with 27 presidents the previous year. Just two earned half a million in 1994. The highest-paid private university president, William R. Brody of Johns Hopkins University, earned $897,786 in university compensation, not counting at least $100,000 in annual pay for membership on several...

WASHINGTON, Sept. 20 /U.S. Newswire/ -- The following are remarks of Senator John Kerry, as prepared for delivery, at New York University: Monday, September 20, 2004 I am honored to be here at New York University -- one of the great urban universities, not just in New York, but in the world. You have set a high standard for global dialogue and I hope to live up to that tradition today. This election is about choices. The most important choices a President makes are about protecting America... at home and around the world. A president's first obligation is to make...

This month, we passed a cruel milestone: more than 1,000 Americans lost in Iraq. Their sacrifice reminds us that Iraq remains, overwhelmingly, an American burden. Nearly 90 percent of the troops – and nearly 90 percent of the casualties – are American. Despite the President’s claims, this is not a grand coalition.

NEW YORK -- A graduate student at New York University jumped to her death Monday from the rooftop of its prestigious Tisch School of the Arts, police said.

New York University students plan to stage a "live" Pac-Man game on Saturday in the streets of Greenwich Village, as part of a project exploring how computer games work when transplanted into real-world settings. "Pac-Man" was a hugely popular 1980s game that became a cultural icon. Pac-Man itself was a yellow circle with a wedge removed for its mouth. The character gobbled up dots while evading ghostly rivals Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde, which also try to gobble up Pac-Man. This weekend a man in a yellow costume will weave through the streets collecting dots while being pursued by people...

<p>NEW YORK (CNN) -- As Republicans, Democrats and anti-Bush activists gear up for New York City's first Republican National Convention, New York University students are getting into the mix.</p> <p>"As Republicans in the city of New York, your voice is somewhat more muted than others," Michael Allegretti, the host committee's volunteer services director, told NYU College Republicans while trying to recruit volunteers for the August 29 to September 2 event.</p>

Some extremists, leftists, and Islamists and NYU have begun a petition asking the board of NYU to divest all funds invested in Israel. This is a bigoted piece of anti-Semitism, IMHO. Friends and faculty have established a website where people can sign a counter-petition. I believe Freepers who read the petition will find it completely unobjectionable. The website for the petition may be found at the link above. The wording of the petition follows, FYI. Signers of the petition already include members of the "community," Yeshiva students from New York, NYU students and faculty (not many of those yet, but...

Keep the Sex R-Rated, N.Y.U. Tells Film Students By DANIEL J. WAKIN In October, a film student at New York University pitched an idea for her video-making class: a four-minute portrayal of the contrast between unbridled human lust and banal everyday behavior. Her professor approved. The student, Paula Carmicino, found two actor friends willing to have sex on camera in front of the class. The other students expressed their support. But then the professor thought he should double-check with the administration, which immediately pulled the plug on the project. What's more, university officials said they would issue a written policy...

A 19-year-old New York University student who plunged to her death from a sixth-floor window Saturday night appeared to have committed suicide, the police said yesterday. The student was identified yesterday by the police as Michelle Gluckman of Brooklyn.

The ombudsman is here because the doctrine against it collapsed. But pride says the Times cannot copy the Post. What's Bill Keller to do?The argument for why an ombudsman would never be needed at the New York Times went like this. Every editor should represent the interests of the reader. That’s what good editors do. No ombudsman. Before you start poking at the logic, appreciate how long it stood and how well it served the authority of the Times. First ombudsman is 1967, Louisville Courier Journal. Thirty six years later, the New York Times agrees: maybe it’s a good...

Congress Weighs Anti-U.S. Biases At Key Colleges: Columbia, NYU Cited in Testimony New York Sun, June 20-22, 2003 (Front page) By Timothy Starks - Staff Reporter of the Sun WASHINGTON -A House subcommittee yesterday held a public hearing to investigate whether anti-American views pervade federally funded international-studies programs on college campuses -- including Columbia and New York University -- and to get ideas for what, if anything, should be done about it. . The hearing came as Congress moves to renew the Higher Education Act, and as a key group of Senate Republicans considers whether Congress should intervene in an...

We need your help!!! We have posted e-mail addresses of university officials that have engaged in a pattern of harassment and censorship against our new student newspaper organized by conservative and libertarian students. We need help organizing an e-mail campaign of conservatives and libertarians to put pressure to let them know it's not acceptable. Here's the link: http://www.collegestandard.net/csweb/mod.php?mod=userpage&menu=90001&page_id=46 Thank you Scott Barea