Free Republic

Updated: April 8, 2008 05:26 PM EDT ALFRED, N.Y. (WIVB) - - Alfred University has cancelled all classes and closed the library per police request. ALFRED, N.Y. (WIVB) - - Police are on campus at Alfred University, investigating a report of a Hispanic male, possibly carrying a gun. He is described as wearing a green hoodie sweatshirt and carrying a back pack. Faculty and students are being advised to remain inside where they are, not to go outside. Update: The following email has been sent out to the campus: Alfred State College has been advised that the description of the...

Feb. 21 issue - Turhan Canli has an odd photo collection. It includes several shots of people's faces. He flashes photos of the words "death," "happiness" and others printed in various colors. He also has images of fanged snakes and snarling dogs, babies and white supremacists. Canli, a psychologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, recently showed several of the pictures to Robert Sheiman, 22, a theater manager from New Haven, Conn. Before viewing them, Sheiman was put in an fMRI scanner, and as each photo flashed up, he indicated his reaction—positive, negative or neutral—by pressing...

In an article in Science magazine, SUNY Downstate researchers describe erasing memory from the brain by targeting a molecular mechanism that controls memory. Finding may be applied to chronic pain, memory loss, and other conditions.Scientists at SUNY Downstate Medical Center have discovered a molecular mechanism that maintains memories in the brain. In an article in Science magazine, they demonstrate that by inhibiting the molecule they can erase long-term memories, much as you might erase a computer disc.Furthermore, erasing the memory from the brain does not prevent the ability to re-learn the memory, much as a cleaned computer disc may be...

As readers of this space know, we frequently subject academics to what we view as constructive criticism. As travelers through the blogosphere may have noticed, they sometimes answer those critiques. “Someone named Candace de Russy (on the usually unbearably dreadful National Review blog on the university situation 'Phi Beta Cons') cites someone else named Laura Ventura at Accuracy in Academia to the effect that the fact that the journal Critical Inquiry has more citations of Derrida and Marx than of C. S. Lewis and Thomas Jefferson is an indication of the journal’s ‘anti-American, anti-war, and anti-Christian’ stance,” Bucknell sociologist Alexander...

jhorrigan@th-record.com New Paltz - A group of four student leaders here have declared their support for a student militia that should be allowed to carry guns on campus. Not handguns, mind you. But shotguns. And not now, but later, maybe years later, as part of an effort to protect students' rights. It's taken a generation, but you can safely kiss the image of SUNY New Paltz as a hippie haven goodbye. It's been replaced by a whole new brand of expectation-bending politics. The students cite years of general abuse by administrators, campus and local police toward students - including profiling...

Professors are never more revealing than when they are trying to deny that higher education and those who deliver it have any bias whatsoever. Dr. John Doolittle of American University offered several such insights in a debate with me at the AU campus earlier this month. Dr. Doolittle pointed out that when he studied at the University of Wisconsin in the early 1970s, “I knew for a fact that three professors voted for Richard Nixon.” He did not say what happened to the political balance on the university faculty when that Republican trio retired. Moreover, UWI has hundreds of professors...

Hello everyone, Bear with me on this vanity, as I don't post many. I'd like some personal opinions based on freepers experience, attending the following institutions: Clemson, Virginia Tech, Binghamton University, and University of Vermont. These are the final choices we're making regarding college for my son next year. We have to make a decision as to which one, by the end of the month. There is also a possiblity that he will transfer out of one of these colleges for his junior year to an Ivy. Any insights to these schools would be appreciated. You can only learn so...

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) - State University of New York Chancellor Robert King has requested a leave for personal and professional reasons, according to a letter he wrote to the SUNY Board of Trustees. "The time seems right - to get reacquainted with my family, to recharge my inner batteries, and to reflect on the future of this great university," King stated in the letter obtained by The Associated Press. "I expect to return to the university re-energized, and better prepared to meet the great future that awaits this marvelous institution." SUNY spokesman David Henahan said the leave is for six...

ALBANY, New York (AP) -- The State University of New York at Albany returned to No. 1 on the list of party schools, while Brigham Young University kept its title as top "stone-cold sober" school in an annual survey of American college life. The Princeton Review's report ranked Albany seventh in the use of hard liquor and marijuana, ninth in beer drinking and first in "students (almost) never study." -snip- It is the ninth time the University at Albany -- a state-run school with an undergraduate enrollment of 12,000 students -- has been on the party school list. It was...

Making its break from reality official, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) named as its new chief a college administrator who is famous for sponsoring conferences on sex at a state university. Last year, the AAUP objected when the University of South Florida dismissed a professor that the U.S. government arrested for working with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Additionally, the AAUP has consistently opposed the Academic Bill of Rights constructed by Students for Academic Freedom. “The danger of such guidelines is that they invite diversity to be measured by political standards that diverge from the academic criteria of the...

roups of legal advocates and students protested the arrest and expulsion of a State University of New York Maritime College student yesterday, claiming the college singled out the student, a Muslim from Nigeria, after he argued with a college official to lower his tuition. The Bronx-based college denied it had called the authorities, citing privacy laws that prohibit academic institutions from disclosing information about their students. The case has become a rallying point for immigrant advocacy groups, who say it is an example of the heightened scrutiny immigrants have received since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Under federal...

Even as war rages in Iraq, federal agents have begun to unlock the secrets of an unlicensed, unregistered Islamic charity in upstate New York that allegedly pumped millions of dollars into Baghdad. Flouting U.S. economic sanctions, the group shipped cash out of Syracuse, laundered it in banks in Jordan and then illegally funneled it into Iraq, according to an unsealed federal indictment. Operating under the name Help the Needy, the organization described itself as a tax-exempt nonprofit that provided food and humanitarian assistance to the "starving children and suffering Muslims of Iraq." But it lacked charitable status, misrepresented itself in...

*note* original thread can be found below This letter is in response to Jamie Lynn Perna's (column) on affirmative action. From the way you have put your (column) together, is it obvious that you are (an) average white girl and you are definitely special. Let me let you know that you have just committed a gross sin, for you know nothing about what you speak. Through those minuscule eyes of yours, you have only seen the tip of the iceberg about what is it to be black or to be a person of color. Affirmative action will continue to be...