Free Republic

25 December 2009 BROTHER: BEWARE OF WOMEN!

Defunct Republican Club Limits Oxy's Political Discourse After a dwindling presence on campus, the Republican club ceased to exist two years ago and has not been restarted, to the dismay of several students and faculty. Devon Puglia '08, a registered Democrat, was the President of the Republican club from '06 - '08. He said, "[The club] was very small and informal during my time, and by my senior year it was just me." He described Oxy professors and students being hostile to political opinion that didn't conform to the school's prevailing liberal ideology. "I'm sure there are plenty of...

College Thought Police Enforce Global Values By Mary Ann Collins December 7, 2009 "The way to redefine a word is to get the new definition repeated as often as possible.... This, so far as words are concerned, is the public opinion battle for belief in your definitions, and not those of the opposition. A consistent, repeated effort is the key to any success with this technique of propaganda." (L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology)[1] "A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all...

Late this afternoon the federal government move to seize the assets of the Alavi Foundation, a "charitable front" for Iranian terror activities. The Alavi Foundation claims that its goals are to "promote understanding and harmony among people of different religions"; "promote the study of the humanities, arts, and pure and applied sciences"; "giv[e] assistance to public charitable organizations during times of hardship and deprivation caused by war or natural disasters"; and "provid[e] financial assistance to not-for-profit organizations that are involved in the teaching of Islamic culture and the Persian language." Former FBI official Oliver Revell has stated that the Alavi...

I had a somewhat disturbing conversation yesterday with Steve Fussell, the senior VP of human resources at pharmaceutical maker Abbott. His basic message, which I may pursue in a column down the road, was that Abbott is going to be hiring tons of people for high-paying jobs over the next decade, but not many of them will be Americans because we study the wrong things in college and we're not willing to work overseas. The key quotes: 1) "I hate to say we don't have the world's best universities. We may have the best minds, the best liberal arts education....

InsideHigherEd.com writes: In the last few years, a conservative legal organization [Ed. -- Mark Levin's Landmark Legal Foundation] has filed complaints and extensive information requests to at least 11 colleges and universities with regard to labor centers that conduct research about and offer programs for unions. ... The [American Association of University Professors'] statement questioned the basis for the Landmark actions and said that the association was trying to undercut the labor centers by waging an ideological attack on them. Further, the statement noted that colleges and universities have a range of offerings for different organizations in society, and that...

Denton (WBAP News) - The University of North Texas has announced that it will soon be offering something unique to students, faculty and visitors, unisex bathrooms.

Sorry but taking off on an old thread from 2001. My 17 year old is a senior and going off to college next september. We live in the Rio Grande Valley Texas and we are visiting Hillsdale College in Southern Michigan in 2 weeks. Does anyone have any other Suggestions for a conservative College? Thanks in advance.

The world’s most prestigious universities have begun posting entire curricula on the Web—for free. Is there such a thing as a free higher-education lunch? I enrolled to find out. I was not screwing around. When I took the first physics class of my life, at age 35, it was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and my professor was Walter Lewin, one of that institution's most respected instructors. Lewin is a man so comfortable with his vectors that he diagrams them in front of a classroom audience while wearing Teva sandals. OK, I wasn't really "at" MIT. And "took" the...

I am looking for a list of conservatives colleges in Texas, specially states universities around the San Antonio area, any recommendations? My daughter will be ready for college in about 3 yrs, and I am doing my research and planning to start visiting them. I also would like to know what colleges are the ones we should avoid at all costs.

The next generation of online education could be great for students—and catastrophic for universities.Like millions of other Americans, Barbara Solvig lost her job this year. A fifty-year-old mother of three, Solvig had taken college courses at Northeastern Illinois University years ago, but never earned a degree. Ever since, she had been forced to settle for less money than coworkers with similar jobs who had bachelor’s degrees. So when she was laid off from a human resources position at a Chicago-area hospital in January, she knew the time had come to finally get her own credential. Doing that wasn’t going to...

SANTA PAULA -- Thomas Aquinas College is one of the country's best institutions for undergraduate education, according to The Princeton Review, and it ranks #1 in the country for “most religious students.” The education services company features the 4-year, Catholic school in the new 2010 edition of its popular guidebook, The Best 371 Colleges (Random House / Princeton Review, July 28, 2009, $22.99). Of special note in this year’s report on Thomas Aquinas College is that the school is one of only 13 in the country to be named to the first-ever “Financial Aid Honor Roll,” receiving a highest possible...

When I began examining the political affiliation of faculty at the University of Oregon, the lone conservative professor I spoke with cautioned that I would "make a lot of people unhappy." Though I mostly brushed off his warning – assuming that academia would be interested in such discourse – I was careful to frame my research for a column for the school newspaper diplomatically. The University of Oregon (UO), where I study journalism, invested millions annually in a diversity program that explicitly included "political affiliation" as a component. Yet, out of the 111 registered Oregon voters in the departments of...

In the wake of the Notre Dame commencement scandal, Catholic college leaders representing some of the worst violators of the U.S. bishops’ 2004 ban on honoring public opponents of fundamental Catholic teachings are lobbying the bishops to withdraw their policy. Yesterday the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities (ACCU), which represents more than 200 Catholic institutions, released its summer 2009 newsletter, including a report on the ACCU’s board of directors meeting last week. The ACCU directors concluded “that it would be desirable for the [U.S. bishops] to withdraw” their 2004 policy, according to the newsletter. The policy in question is...

SPY UNIVERSITIES: EX-FOREIGN ESPIONAGE OPERATIVE REVEALS HOW PROFS., STUDENTS, AND OTHERS, ARE RECRUITED TO UNDERMINE AMERICA International News Analysis Today Updated June 10, 2009 By Toby Westerman U.S. universities are important recruiting grounds for foreign spies, according to a former intelligence operative who has defected to the United States, and issued a report giving a rare glimpse into the intelligence operations of one of America's most determined espionage foes. Jose Cohen Valdes was a Cuban intelligence officer employed in several areas of information acquisition and analysis in Havana, and has documented his nation's penetration of U.S. universities in a report...

Forty years ago the major Catholic universities in the U.S. decided that the Catholic Church needed to reform her teachings, especially that of sexual morality, to conform to the times, and that they should lead that reform. In 1967, at Land O'Lakes, Wisconsin, they declared their independence from the Church, exchanged the faith of their founders for an evolutionary heresy, proclaimed themselves to be an alternate magis­terium, and transferred control from their founding religious orders to secular boards of trustees. Not coincidentally, by these actions they qualified themselves for lucrative financial grants from foundations controlled by leaders of the Culture...

A pro-life organization that serves as a watchdog for Catholic colleges and universities says the number of commencement scandals involving pro-abortion graduation speakers and honorees rose in 2009. The Cardinal Newman Society says 11 Catholic colleges joined the University of Notre Dame in violating the guidelines of the nation's Catholic bishops. The pro-life group says the figures mark a "troubling reversal" of the recent decrease of Catholic commencement scandals form the seven that took place in 2008, which itself was down from 24 in 2006. “It is a very sad development, to see so many Catholic colleges and universities joining...

As disgusting and disgraceful as Father Jenkins and the board of Notre Dame have been over the whole Obama commencement speech fiasco, it now seems clear that this invitation is part of a larger trend among dissidents within Catholic academia in America. Fordham University, a Jesuit institution in New York is hosting pro-abortion mayor Michael Bloomberg. St. Joseph's University, another Jesuit university in Philadelphia, is hosting pro-abortion media talking-head Chris Matthews. Yet another Jesuit institution, Georgetown Law School, is honoring pro-abortion vice-president Joe Biden. What does all this mean? According to the NCR article linked above, it means that certain...

Donor Intent Denied...To Jane Fonda by: Malcolm A. Kline, May 01, 2009 Believe it or not, the cavalier attitude that colleges and universities take towards donors can bite the left too. “On most issues, Robert Novak and Jane Fonda have nothing in common,” author Martin Morse Wooster writes in the Foundation Watch newsletter. “But on the issue of donor intent in universities, they are on the same side.” Foundation Watch is a publication of the Capital Research Center, where Wooster is a senior fellow. “In 2001, Fonda donated $6.5 million and pledged an additional $6 million to the Harvard...

Note: The following text is a quote: Two Missouri Brothers Among Those Indicted in $4 Million Nationwide Spamming Conspiracy Millions of E-Mail Addresses Illegally Harvested from Computers at 2,000 Schools KANSAS CITY, MO—Two Missouri men and their company are among those indicted by a federal grand jury in a nationwide e-mail spamming case that victimized more than 2,000 colleges and universities in a scheme that sold more than $4 million worth of products to students, announced Matt J. Whitworth, Acting United States Attorney for the Western District of Missouri. Amir Ahmad Shah, 28, of St. Louis., his brother, Osmaan Ahmad...

I will admit it. I am a subscriber to the Claremont Review of Books. Whatever you make of that, don't imagine that I am one of those pointy-headed, University types that sit about in tweed jackets with leather elbow patches, drawing on a pipe, and pontificating about the Greek Classics. On the other hand, I ain't no anti-intellectual neither. Just consider me one of those fellows that knows just enough to be dangerous. In any case, one thing that always strikes me about The CRB is that I always find at least one article that proves to me that while...

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced a partnership Wednesday with three local universities aimed at positioning the city to compete for hundreds of thousands of federal dollars for clean technology research and a proposed state institute to study climate change. The partnership with Caltech, UCLA and USC is part of the agenda Villaraigosa outlined in his State of the City speech Tuesday to lure and retain companies that focus on green endeavors such as solar, wind, battery and hydrogen fuel cell technologies. Villaraigosa said the CleanTech LA alliance, which also includes the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, Los Angeles Business...

As they hosted factually challenged programs to coincide with “Israel Apartheid Week,” college campuses across North America achieved new heights of intellectual vacuity and sophistry. On campus after campus, malicious ideologues were given license to demonize Israel by advancing the canard that the Jewish State engages in apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. That such claims cannot be supported by a shred of objective evidence and could constitute libel and slander if hurled against nonpublic figures and entities is irrelevant to the hate mongers who utter them. Instead, these thugs and bullies are secure in the knowledge that the institutions providing...

Eugenics … death of the defenceless The legacy of Darwin’s cousin Galton By Russell Grigg Few ideas have done more harm to the human race in the last 120 years than those of Sir Francis Galton. He founded the evolutionary pseudo-science of eugenics. Today, ethnic cleansing, the use of abortion to eliminate ‘defective’ unborn babies, infanticide, euthanasia, and the harvesting of unborn babies for research purposes all have a common foundation in the survival-of-the-fittest theory of eugenics. So who was Galton, what is eugenics, and how has it harmed humanity?...

Here’s the question: When does theft become an unfortunate mistake, or asset liberation, or a temporary change of possession, or an alternate utilization of private property, or wealth sharing, or nothing more than an act of a modern Robin Hood? That’s a question faced by University of South Florida administrators and lawyers in the local state attorney’s office over the past several days as they looked into the strange case of Abdul Rao, soon-to-be former senior associate vice president for research at the USF College of Medicine. Here’s what happened. Last week, according to published reports, Rao drove his minivan...

Let me begin by reproducing a short-but-powerful article: University of Vermont President Engages in Double-Speak and Double-Standards When It Comes to Disavowing Pro-Intelligent Design Commencement Speaker Ben Stein“In today’s academic double-speak, invitations to far-left revolutionaries and race-baiting Congressmen are apparently ‘inclusive,’ while inviting a speaker who favors free speech on the issue of evolution is beyond the pale,” says Discovery Institute’s John West. today’s academic double-speak, invitations to far-left revolutionaries and race-baiting Congressmen are apparently ‘inclusive,’ while inviting a speaker who favors free speech on the issue of evolution is beyond the pale,” says Discovery Institute’s John West. Apologizing for...

Fresh off last fall’s historic push to help elect Barack Obama, the University of Colorado’s College Democrats have set their sights on a new target: the school’s plans to bring a professor of conservative thought to campus. CU leaders last year announced plans to create a $9 million endowment to fund the Visiting Chair in Conservative Thought and Policy on the Boulder campus, which long has been derided as a liberal bastion. regardless of how long it may take the university to fully fund the conservative post, College Democrats say they’re not going to wait to launch a campaign against...

Our colleges and universities have not only become centers of anti-Americanism but are also becoming centers facilitating the stealth jihad - the gradual transformation of America into a theocracy subject to sharia (Muslim law). As they have already almost succeeded in doing, the Muslims are now in the process of taking over America without a shot being fired or a bomb going off. Yesterday, I wrote about the stealth jihad, which has already turned Europe into Eurabia and destroyed its Judeo-Christian basis. And now it looks like America is starting down that same path to civilizational suicide. This conclusion is...

This is what our nation's universities have come to. A professor at Rochester University, New York, was warned to destroy evidence of his kiddie porn collection stored on university computers ahead of a raid on his workstations staged by the State Police. And who was the informant? A university dean gave him a tip off causing the pervert prof to attempt to destroy the evidence of his criminal behavior. On October 10 university instructor Gilbert Kirton, 26, was charged with possessing child pornography after a raid on his workstation was authorized by prosecutors and the courts. Authorities had been...

SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) — Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin attended five colleges in six years before graduating from the University of Idaho in 1987. Federal privacy laws prohibit the schools from disclosing her grades, and none of the schools contacted by The Associated Press could say why she transferred. There was no indication any of them were contacted as part of the background investigation of Palin by presidential candidate John McCain's campaign. "Our office was not contacted by anyone," said Tania Thompson, spokeswoman for the University of Idaho in Moscow. Palin, the governor of Alaska, was born in Idaho....

Islam is using the ideological approach to acculturate its belief system into main stream America. Of course, like most ideologies, Islam is using America’s public schools as its springboard for indoctrinating America’s children. By introducing Islam to students in their mandated curriculums, the next generation of Americans could possibly be pro-Islam in their belief system. However, since Islam is a religion and a political ideology, why is the United States government permitting this indoctrination to occur in America’s public schools? Even though some people promote the idea of the separation of church and state in America, the concept is not...

The Nebraska Legislature approved in-state tuition for illegal aliens in 2006. The University of Nebraska reported that about 3 dozen students participated in the program last year. According to the msm and the University everything is great, of course the students "fear" of deportation distracts them from getting straight-As. Does anyone have research or results from other states on how these programs have worked?

It's springtime, and all God's creatures are ready for mating, but psychobabble killjoys are warning: Don't have kids. They'll make you miserable, and you'll deserve taxation for environmental abuse. On May 8, just as the songbirds were readying nests for their offspring, a Harvard professor tried to put a damper on the joys of human procreation by declaring that having children strips happiness from their parents. Professor Daniel Gilbert announced to the Happiness and its Causes conference in Sydney, Australia, that with each child the barometer of happiness plummets.

College students and their families are rightly outraged about the bankrupting costs of textbooks that have nearly tripled since the 1980s, mainly because of marginally useful CD-ROMs and other supplements. A bill pending in Congress would require publishers to sell “unbundled” versions of the books — minus the pricey add-ons. Even more important, it would require publishers to reveal book prices in marketing material so that professors could choose less-expensive titles. The bill is a good first step. But colleges and universities will need to embrace new methods of textbook development and distribution if they want to rein in runaway...

A closed meeting called by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) about Islamic studies will take place today amid fears that Saudi and Muslim organisations exert too much influence over UK universities as a result of donations that dwarf government funding. Private donations, mostly to Islamic study centres, are much greater than government funding for Islamic studies and academics are said to be nervous of the threat to their academic freedom. The conference will discuss how to improve Islamic studies in UK universities after the government earmarked £1m in funding following the publication of Dr Ataullah Siddiqui's report...

If your kid comes home from college one day and tells you that your Christian faith is stupid, welcome to the world in which I live. The college environment does that to our kids. It makes good Christian students stupid. By that I mean it turns them into liberals, atheists, or both. Three out of four Christian kids (that’s 75% for those of you who attend UNC-Wilmington) abandon the church when they go to college and only about a third of them return by age 30. In other words, most stay stuck on stupid. Christians and conservatives could simply whine...

Kingdom Come [Kathryn Jean Lopez] From the Arab News: Al-JOUF, 10 April 2008 — US Ambassador Ford Fraker said in Sakaka that his country aims to double the number of student visas issued to Saudis. “Currently there are 15,000 Saudi students in the US,” he said during an event on Sunday with local business leaders to an audience at the Al-Jouf Chamber of Commerce and Industry. “We aim to increase their numbers to 30,000 over the next five years.” Fraker said Saudi Arabia should bolster its English-language programs because it is generally required for Saudis seeking to pursue higher studies...

USC is eliminating the study of German as a major over the next three years and dismantling the department except for some basic language courses, officials said. Faculty and students are protesting the move, saying it will harm the university's national reputation for scholarship. The German department at the Los Angeles campus is relatively small, with three full-time professors, three lecturers, 10 undergraduate majors and 10 minors, said its chairman, Gerhard Clausing. He said the university has starved the department of funds and new hires in recent years and is now making a serious mistake in reducing it further.

Can the blogosphere [And Freerepublic] really do things big media can’t? Let’s find out. I have a project I think is perfect for just the sort of folks who read The Corner and other political blogs. This project is way too big for me to do all by myself. What’s needed to make it work is an informal alliance of local bloggers, student newspapers, and concerned citizens across the country. Through Freedom of Information Act requests and discussions with officials at the Department of Education, I recently obtained a comprehensive list of large gifts to American universities originating in foreign...

This is the state of our academia today. If you're conservative then you must be shouted down, not allowed to speak, rush the stage or throw pies in your face. Former top Bush aide Karl Rove didn’t get the friendliest of receptions at the University of Iowa Sunday, CNN affiliate KCRG reports. Rove, who was paid $40,000 to speak at the University, was confronted with an at-times hostile crowd of 1,000, and was interrupted on several occasions.At one point during the speech, Rove reportedly lashed out at some of the students, saying, “You got a chance to ask your questions...

One expert said some productions made by the terror group were 'good enough to put on the Discovery Channel' PESHAWAR, PAKISTAN In an Internet age, al-Qaeda prizes geek jihadis as much as would-be suicide bombers and gunmen. The terror network is recruiting computer-savvy technicians to produce sophisticated Web documentaries and multimedia products aimed at Muslim audiences in the US, Britain and other Western countries. Already, the terror movement's al-Sahab production company is turning out high quality material, some of which rivals productions by Western media companies. The documentaries appear regularly on Islamist Web sites, which al-Qaeda uses to recruit followers...

MUSLIM university students want lectures to be rescheduled to fit in with prayer timetables and separate male and female eating and recreational areas established on Australian campuses. International Muslim students, predominantly from Saudi Arabia, have asked universities in Melbourne to change class times so they can attend congregational prayers. They also want a female-only area for Muslim students to eat and relax. But at least one institution has rejected their demands, arguing that the university is secular and it does not want to set a precedent for requests granted in the name of religious beliefs. La Trobe University International chief...

MUSLIM university students want lectures to be rescheduled to fit in with prayer timetables and separate male and female eating and recreational areas established on Australian campuses. International Muslim students, predominantly from Saudi Arabia, have asked universities in Melbourne to change class times so they can attend congregational prayers. They also want a female-only area for Muslim students to eat and relax. But at least one institution has rejected their demands, arguing that the university is secular and it does not want to set a precedent for requests granted in the name of religious beliefs. La Trobe University International chief...

Wafaa Bilal, video artist West Hall Auditorium, RPI Campus, Mar 5 2008 7:00PM The Department of the Arts / iEAR Presents! at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will feature the work of Iraqi-born video artist Wafaa Bilal. The opening of “Virtual Jihadi” and Bilal’s lecture will be March 5, 2008 in the West Hall Auditorium of the RPI Campus in Troy, NY. The exhibit opens at 7:00 p.m., and the lecture is at 7:30 p.m. A reception with the artist will follow. Refreshments will be served. The event is free and open to the public. For directions or more information, please visit...

DOHA, Qatar — On a hot October evening, hundreds of families flocked to the sumptuous Ritz Carlton here in this Persian Gulf capital for an unusual college fair, the Education City roadshow. Qataris, Bangladeshis, Syrians, Indians, Egyptians — in saris, in suits, in dishdashis, in jeans — came to hear what it takes to win admission to one of the five American universities that offer degrees at Education City, a 2,500-acre campus on the outskirts of Doha where oil and gas money pays for everything from adventurous architecture to professors’ salaries. Education City, the largest enclave of American universities overseas,...

For those who feel they missed out on an Ivy League education, there's this: The University of Maryland is bringing leading professors from Harvard, Yale and other top schools to teach classes, and students won't need SAT scores or prerequisites to get in. With an eye on the booming boomer interest in lifelong education, U-Md. officials are announcing a partnership today that will marry talent from the country's best-known schools with the university's own. Professors will lead a day of seminars March 29 geared toward alumni and local residents long out of school, officials said. Excerpt

The Five Most Expensive Colleges * George Washington University * Kenyon College * Bucknell University * Vassar College * Sarah Lawrence College This may surprise you: The world’s most expensive universities are not haute institutions in the Swiss Alps or on the balmy shores of the Persian Gulf. Nor are they the Ivy League citadels of America’s elite like Harvard or Princeton, or ancient halls of learning like Cambridge or Oxford in the United Kingdom. No, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, the most expensive four-year university in the U.S. (and most likely the world) is Washington, D.C.’s George...

Common Learning Agenda Blues by: Malcolm A. Kline, January 08, 2008 Those who argue that colleges and universities lack standards may be incorrect but only technically. “Under the current curriculum guidelines, students must take four humanities and two social science classes that could include history and political science,” Bucknell’s Nick Mozal writes of that Pennsylvania university’s “Common Learning Agenda.” “However, there is no course requirement to teach students the core history and cultural heritage of the United States.” “Students have difficulty even finding such a course.” Mozal presides over the Bucknell University Conservatives Club, which publishes The Counterweight newspaper, in...

Almost all of the HBCUs were created at a time when Southern blacks were excluded from other schools (only four of the HBCUs are outside the South). They turned out doctors, lawyers, ministers and politicians. W.E.B. Du Bois graduated from Fisk in 1888, Thurgood Marshall from Lincoln (Chester County, Pa.) in 1930, and Martin Luther King Jr. from Morehouse (Atlanta) in 1948. ...In fact, a remarkable 40% of all African-Americans with a bachelor's degree in the physical sciences, and 38% of those who majored in math or the biological sciences, attended HBCUs. Conversely, almost no students at HBCUs gravitate to...

The Academy Fails Again By Lori Lowenthal Marcus When professors hijack their students' efforts to suit their own political agendas, and the students' agenda is obliterated by a professor's implied directive, and a university blames the entire mess on the students, what do you have? The University of Delaware. A close examination of recent events there reveals the leadership's dismal failure to capitalize on positive, mature efforts by students, and to instead hoist them in front of the firing line. In late September some University of Delaware students chose not to participate in the official country-wide Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. Instead,...