Free Republic

A CUNY Law professor who has previously complained about the university's alleged anti-Semitism says the entire place is being run by a faculty of 'far left, Marxist lunatics.' The comments come after a shocking commencement speech on May 12 by pro-Palestine law graduate Fatima Mousa Mohammed, who accused Israelis of 'settler colonialism' and called for 'rage' to tackle the 'fascist NYPD'. It was the second year in a row the school - one of the largest in New York City, which receives more than half its funding from government - allowed such pro-Palestine, anti-Israel remarks at the graduation ceremony.

When it comes to fighting the power, Prof. Mark J. Perry is doing it. He’s been filing complaints for civil rights violations against universities that discriminate on the basis of race and sex – for example, establishing all-women or all-minority scholarships or programs – because doing so, even if it’s for fashionable reasons, is against the law. I asked him a to talk about what he’s doing and why, and at the end he has some advice on how you can help, and an offer of assistance. I chime in with some other things you can do. 1. Please describe...

Following up on his comments about "trendy ideology" and partisan interest groups in higher education, Governor Ron DeSantis has named six people with ties to conservative institutions to the Board of Trustees at New College in Sarasota. The appointments are subject to confirmation by the State Senate. The most prominent of the six nominees is Christopher Rufo, a Senior Fellow at the New York-based Manhattan Institute. Rufo has recently led the fight, according to a release from the governor, against critical race theory in American institutions, resulting in legislation in fifteen states. Rufo said in a tweer, "my ambition is...

We keep hearing about how the slightest critique of woke ideology is a call to violence and “stochastic terrorism,” and we see just as often these activists call for actual violence against critics of the woke religion. While not actually calling for violence, in this case a college trustee called for taking recalcitrant faculty to the metaphorical “slaughterhouse” due to their concerns with DEI ideology. Ironically, the controversial comments came after several students and professors complained to the Kern Community College District Board of Trustees that a conservative group of professors who promote free speech on campus made them feel...

Russell Jacoby, Professor Emeritus, Department of History, UCLA, admits that in the late 1980s, “I argued that the conservatives should awake from their nightmare of radical scholars destroying America and relax; academic revolutionaries preoccupied themselves with their careers and perks. If they made waves, they were confined to the campus pool.” Today he writes, “Only now do I see I got something wrong—as did my critics. … I missed something, the dawning takeover of the public sphere by campus denizens and lingo.” Indeed, Jacoby’s December 19, 2022 article in The Tablet is titled, “The Takeover. Self-righteous professors have spawned self-righteous...

In the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, academic-freedom disputes routinely took a particular shape. In a small town, somewhere in the heartland, there would be a college campus on which a young academic loudly voiced his opinions on controversial matters—mostly political, but sometimes also on sexual morality, or even on legalizing drugs. This would offend the sensitivities of some local townspeople. Someone like the local mayor would lean on the college president (probably a personal friend), the president would then lean on the department chair, and the young professor was soon gone. The American Association of University Professors would then...

School is starting, but don't count on getting answers about what your child is being taught. School administrators commonly lie or give parents the runaround. That explains the fireworks over Jeremy Boland, a Greenwich, Connecticut, elementary school assistant principal, bragging about how the school pushes kids to think in a "progressive" way that he hopes will make them Democratic voters.

I have always admired the tag corruptio optima pessima: the corruption of the best is the worst. Take the Ivy League. These super-rich, super-prestigious institutions are so wealthy and so beguiling because, once upon a time, they represented and — more to the point — successfully transmitted to their students the prime civilizational values of our culture. We’re told, and I have no reason to disbelieve it, that the light we see from distant stars is very old and, in some cases, is light from stars that were long ago extinguished. It is same with the Ivy League and their...

I find myself thinking a lot lately about the deficit of imagination among people who consider themselves savvy and sophisticated. Here’s what I mean: Let’s say you work for a prestigious company or organization that professes to care about a certain set of values: open-mindedness, curiosity, excellence, hard work. And let’s say you watch as a colleague, previously held up as a paragon of those values, is ostracized and smeared for a thought crime that was not considered a thought crime until about five minutes ago. Maybe he made a bad joke. Or maybe he used the phrase “guys” instead...

The P.C. culture of the '80s and '90s didn't decline and fall. It just went underground. Now it's back. The 1994 movie PCU, about a rebellious fraternity resisting its politically correct university, was a milestone. Not because the movie was especially good—it wasn't. It was a milestone because it showed that political correctness had officially become a joke. The derisive term "P.C." had referred to a genuine and powerful force on campus for the previous decade. But by the mid-1990s, it had become the butt of jokes from across the political spectrum. The production of a mainstream movie mocking political...

"By choosing your courses carefully, you can avoid the progressive sermonizing that passes for scholarship in some departments, but everyone has to undergo the orientation and first-year programs. You may have come to study computer science or literature or biochemistry, but first you’ll have to learn about social justice, environmental sustainability, gender pronouns, and microaggressions. You may have been planning to succeed by hard work, but first you’ll have to acknowledge your privilege or discover your victimhood. If you arrived at college hoping to broaden your intellectual horizons, you’ll quickly be instructed which ideas are off-limits." Read it and weep

We graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 50 years ago. Though it was a tough place academically, MIT taught us our crafts and the essence of problem-solving and enabled us to thrive in our chosen careers. We owe much to ”the ‘tute,” as it is fondly known, and have demonstrated that financially over the years. But no more. Today, the 160 year-old-institution, once a bedrock of science and innovation, has caved to the demands of “wokeness.” In autumn of 2020, MIT sent an email to students, including those already registered and attending, informing them that if they failed to...

A “non-binary” associate professor at Old Dominion University has called for the “stigma” of pedophilia to be ‘delegitimized’.Yes, really.The Prostasia Foundation, a registered 503c which has called for child-like sex dolls to be legalized, posted an interview with Allyn Walker, a female-to-male transgender, who outlined her views on “minor attraction.”Walker, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, is the author of a book called ‘A Long, Dark Shadow: Minor Attracted People and Their Pursuit of Dignity’.In the interview, Walker insists that the term “minor attracted people” should be used in preference to...

A prominent Yale Law School professor on Friday blasted the administration’s treatment of law student Trent Colbert and the Federalist Society, calling it "dishonest, duplicitous, and downright deplorable." Akhil Amar, one of the most frequently cited legal scholars in the country, called on the administration to apologize for its actions toward Colbert, the Yale Law student who invited classmates to his "trap house." "I am not and have never been a member of the Federalist Society," Amar said, adding that he is a life-long liberal Democrat. But "ideological diversity" is important for challenging "implicit bias"—not just against members of other...

Two Rutgers University faculty groups have come out in support of “Professor Crunk,” aka Brittney Cooper, who said in a recent interview that “white people are committed to being villains” and as such “we gotta take these mf's out.” On Friday, the Rutgers branch of the American Association of University Professors said in a statement that after the interview Cooper had been subjected to a “renewed wave of racist attacks for her public scholarship.” “We wish to express our unequivocal solidarity with Dr. Cooper,” the statement reads. “[We] affirm our support of her academic freedom, and […] decry the harassment...

Peter Boghossian has taught philosophy at Portland State University for the past decade. In the letter below, sent this morning to the university’s provost, he explains why he is resigning.Dear Provost Susan Jeffords, ​​I’m writing to you today to resign as assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University. Over the last decade, it has been my privilege to teach at the university. My specialties are critical thinking, ethics and the Socratic method, and I teach classes like Science and Pseudoscience and The Philosophy of Education. But in addition to exploring classic philosophers and traditional texts, I’ve invited a wide...

There was one major reason why I dropped out of a prestigious grad school this past fall. It wasn’t the economic insecurity, the poor wages, or the need for geographical flexibility: Journalism isn’t much better. The simple fact I learned after half a semester studying sociology is that the discipline isn’t very tolerant. Americans were reminded of this when sociology professor Sam Richards of Penn State University picked an “average white guy” and treated him like a dissected biology specimen in a packed lecture hall. “I just take the average white guy in class, whoever it is, it doesn’t really...

A Minnesota student has claimed she and her classmates were told to keep the content of a so-called “equity survey” — including questions about gender identity — from their parents during this past school year. Haylee Yasgar, a student at Riverview Intermediate School in the St. Cloud suburb of Sartell, told the local school board during a July 19 meeting that she was “very confused” by the survey. “My teacher said that I could not skip any questions even when I didn’t understand them. One question asked us what gender we identify with,” Haylee told the board, according to...

There may be a different regime in Cuba now, but the murderous dictatorship of Fidel Castro is still being felt, while the people there protest for their freedom from Communism. And while it will be taken down, a quote from Castro remains at Penn State. The effort to expose and remove it was thanks to Erik Suarez, a 22-year old student there who escaped Venezuela, as Luca Miraldi with Campus Reform reported. The quote attributed to the dictator appears in the Paul Robeson Cultural Center, which according to the school website describes itself in part as: The Paul Robeson Cultural...

“You think that we’ll corrupt your kids. Funny, just this once, you’re correct. We’ll convert your children happens bit by bit, quietly and suddenly and you will barely notice it.” VIDEO AT LINK............................