Free Republic

The recent flap about tenured University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, the wacky white man pretending to be of American Indian heritage, may not seem to have much in common with federal employees or federal judges. Upon closer examination, we see that all three suffer from the same mindset: Arrogance and insolence as a result of a failed system of lifetime tenure, a system that also guarantees plush retirement benefits. Tenure ensures that professors can never be fired for incompetence, and the retirement benefits ensure that only a few will leave the profession on their own. Not coincidentally, the good...

Get ready for even more of the ultimate spring break intellectual experience! You won’t believe the academic insanity as Iowahawk’s Dave Burge and his inquiring camera crew catch real live college faculty getting their freak on at the beach…  in the clubs…. even the hot transgressive action back in their hotel symposia! From Rocky Mountain ski lodges to the beaches of Florida and Cuba, to the hot sun of Texas and across the border to Mexico where anything goes, this all-new video is the biggest, craziest, most blazing Profs Gone Wild spring break video yet! Profs Gone Wild: Extreme Ultimate...

My last column, "Forget Free Speech, Liberals Don't Tolerate Campus Conservatives," drew the ire and attention of thousands. Published online by GOPUSA and the Washington Times, it sparked still more debate on the issue of liberal bias on campus. Conservative professors from North Carolina, Wisconsin and across the country e-mailed their support. One celebrity endorsement came from former U.S. House Historian Christina Jeffrey, who currently presides over the South Carolina Association of Scholars. In her words, this past column was my "best ever." Still more students, parents and alumni stepped up, sending e-mails and notes, while weighing in on countless...

A recent proposal in the Tennessee General Assembly has caused a great deal of angst on college campuses in our state over the past couple of weeks. The bill (HB0432), proposed by State Rep. Stacey Campfield of Knoxville in the House and Raymond Finney of Maryville in the Senate is known as the “Academic Bill of Rights.” To hear some tell it, you’d think it was an effort to repeal the First Amendment. Professors at this and other institutions strongly oppose it. Some label it a “witch hunt.” It has been editorialized against on this page. Let’s examine it. So...

One should remember that Philip Jessup, a diplomat and a liberal Republican was also attacked by McCarthy and as the domestic cold war escalated there were people who had nothing to do with the any group on the left or even liberal New Deal Democrats who got caught in the harassment. ... Even the comical ones usually end with major injustice, for example, a NLRB employee . . . was finally fired and had his career destroyed by a more rightwing dominated loyalty board in the early Eisenhower administration. . . ... the names of people who signed Communist party...

A look at recent cases of professors being disciplined, criticized or let go for unpopular statements: -The University of Illinois fired biology professor Leo F. Koch in 1960 for a letter to the editor of the campus newspaper that read: "A mutually satisfactory sexual experience would eliminate the need for many hours of frustrating petting and lead to much happier and longer lasting marriages among our younger men and women." -Leonard Jeffries Jr. lost the chairmanship of African-American studies at the City College of New York in 1992 after saying in a speech that "Russian Jewry had a particular control...

This author maintains that contemporary liberalism has devolved into little more than a pose. It has become a stance, an attitude -- self flattering and insistent on its intellectual and moral superiority. Furthermore, its childish utopianism, and its adolescent craving for excitement, require scapegoats to explain the failure of the real world to match its utopian longings. And the Jews are the always available, anti-utopians. For today's liberals, George Bush is the functional equivalent of the universal scheming and nefarious, Jew--the dreaded Neo-Con (after all, hasn't Dubyah surrounded himself with a cabal of Jewish foreign-affairs advisors). Therefore, it should come...

Perk from regents: The ex-commissioner is paid $117,600 annually for teaching a college class She teaches at the University of Utah, but gets paid through Utah State University. She was Utah's longest-serving commissioner of higher education, all the while getting her check through USU. She took a sabbatical last year and once again collected her six-figure salary through the Logan school. Why does Cecelia Foxley continue to get paid by a university she hasn't taught at since 1985? It's part of the perks that Utah higher-education officials offer their top administrators.

As soon as Mark (pseudonym) walked into his Women in Literature class, his professor handed him a note stating the following: It has come to my attention that your comments to other students sitting near you in our Women in Literature (sic) have been both critical of the class subject matter, derogatory of the ideas other students are contributing to class discussion, and crudely dismissive of issues I have raised. At first, Mark could not believe he was being described as “crudely dismissive” by his professor. After all, she talked about her private life in class and published a book...

From Yale to the University of North Carolina, liberal academia is being challenged by a new generation of conservative leadership. Credible tales of professors grading down conservative students have always run rampant. Biased lectures remain the unremarkable norm. One variable has changed, however. Liberal academia lacks its traditionally receptive audience. During the opening weeks of the Iraq war, professors were shocked by the absence of antiwar fervor among their pupils. Leading up to the 2004 elections, record numbers of undergraduates joined the College Republicans and other conservative organizations. Ingenious student protests, such as Berkeley’s affirmative action bake sale and Duke’s...

At the University of North Carolina, three incoming freshmen sue over a reading assignment they say offends their Christian beliefs. In Colorado and Indiana, a national conservative group publicizes student allegations of left-wing bias by professors. Faculty get hate mail and are pictured in mock "wanted" posters; at least one college says a teacher received a death threat. And at Columbia University in New York, a documentary film alleging that teachers intimidate students who support Israel draws the attention of administrators. The three episodes differ in important ways, but all touch on an issue of growing prominence on college campuses....

Traditionally, clashes over academic freedom have pitted politicians or administrators against instructors who wanted to express their opinions and teach as they saw fit. But increasingly, it is students who are invoking academic freedom, claiming biased professors are violating their right to a classroom free from indoctrination. For example, at the University of North Carolina, three incoming freshmen sued over a reading assignment they said offended their Christian beliefs. In Colorado and Indiana, a national conservative group publicized student allegations of left-wing bias by professors. Faculty received hate mail and were pictured in mock "wanted" posters; at least one college...

The left-wing takeover of American universities is an old story. As far back as the 1930s, Irving Kristol recalled in "Memoirs of a Trotskyist," City College of New York was so radical that "if there were any Republicans at City -- and there must have been some -- I never met them, or even heard of their existence." Soon the virus had spread to the nation's most elite institutions. In 1951, William F. Buckley Jr. created a sensation with "God and Man at Yale," which documented the socialist and atheist worldview that even then prevailed in the classrooms of the...

Prior to the Louisiana Tech game Saturday, UT students and community members were passing out stickers that read "Vols for Bush." Among the groups involved in this were the UT College Republicans, UT Vols for Bush, UT Students for Bush, and the Knox County Republican Party. Apparently, these stickers posed a problem for the UT administration, who claim the stickers were produced illegally. Mike Young, from the Office of Trademark Licensing, approached CRs Jerod Hollyfield, Nathan Fortner, and myself, and confiscated our stickers. They then met with Knox GOP officials at the tailgate party near Neyland Stadium, and informed them...

SUPPOSE you were doing a little research into the history of Supreme Court nominations, and you learned from one book that Grover Cleveland "bested Benjamin Harrison by almost 100,000 votes in the election of 1888, but the vagaries of the electoral college caused him to lose the election" (p. 130). And then, browsing through a later book on the topic, you read that Harrison is remembered for "losing the popular election in 1888 by 100,000 votes and still managing to take the Oval Office from incumbent President Grover Cleveland through the vagaries of the Electoral College" (p. 63). Perhaps you'd...

On left-leaning campuses around the country, professors on the right feel disenfranchisedRobert G. Natelson, a full professor at the University of Montana's law school, wants to teach constitutional law. Four times he applied to teach the course when there was a vacancy. Four times he was denied. Next spring he will get to teach the course on a temporary basis, but only because of recommendations from an outside mediator. Mr. Natelson says the university's reluctance has nothing to do with his scholarship and teaching -- and everything to do with his conservative political views. "The law school apparently views this...

Professors fund liberal candidates Melisa Gao Princetonian Senior Writer More than 90 percent of donations from University employees this election cycle have gone to liberal causes, as Princeton joins peer institutions in reinforcing the image of a left-leaning ivory tower. After effectively clinching the Democratic nomination on Super Tuesday, Kerry secured $40,950 from donors identifying themselves as employees or affiliates of Princeton University. President Bush received a sole donation of $250, according to FEC records through June. One of the most active donors is physics professor Chiara Nappi, who together with her husband, a professor at the Institute for Advanced...

As incoming college freshmen fret about roommates and rosters this month, incoming faculty may be glancing back warily at their own college days, hoping that certain youthful indiscretions - or worse - will remain forgotten. Criminal background checks, standard practice for new hires in much of the working world, have invaded the upper echelons of higher education. Now the professors, once vouched for by clubby collegial networks, increasingly undergo scrutiny all too familiar outside academia. They are not happy. Cheap technology is pushing aside good judgment, says Jonathan Knight of the American Association of University Professors. While conceding that security...

Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ opened Wednesday, and, as expected, most of the average columnist’s pre-release complaints were bunk. Yes, the Jews are portrayed rather harshly. But so is everyone else, and I’m pretty sure that’s the point. I haven’t been to Sunday school since second grade, but I think all the merciless beating of that guy on screen was because of our sins. Maybe that’s just my self-loathing Roman Catholic background, right? The movie’s details were unimportant for those looking to bash conservative Christianity. Dartmouth Professor Nancy Crumbine sent an e- mail warning her students the day...

Scholar to scrutinize JFK presidency By BETSY COHEN of the Missoulian Was John F. Kennedy really a great president? Allen Matusow, a scholar of U.S. presidents, will give his answer Monday night in the next installment of the University of Montana's President's Lecture Series. Matusow will discuss Kennedy's tenure in office, his political legacy and recently released documents that shed more light on his presidency. Although it has been 40 years since Kennedy was assassinated, there has been no president - no person - in the past 50 years who has grabbed the public's attention and held it like John...