Free Republic

Young people who smoked marijuana in the 1960s were seen as part of the counterculture. Now the cannabis culture is mainstream. A 2022 survey sponsored by the National Institutes of Health found that 28.8% of Americans age 19 to 30 had used marijuana in the preceding 30 days—more than three times as many as smoked cigarettes. Among those 35 to 50, 17.3% had used weed in the previous month, versus 12.2% for cigarettes. While marijuana use remains a federal crime, 24 states have legalized it and another 14 permit it for medical purposes. Last week media outlets reported that the...

At nearly all American colleges and universities, the “soft” disciplines have been overrun by “progressives” who insist that their beliefs alone must be taught, whether or not they’re pertinent to the subject. They are determined to turn students into ideological clones of themselves. Will this indoctrination help students succeed after graduation? That question never arises. My recent Martin Center article about a lawsuit brought by a professor in UNC’s School of Social Work prompts a look into the politicization of that field. Part of the background to that case was the School’s overwrought reaction to the death of George Floyd...

When postal manager José Belloso put his Paris apartment up for sale this year he was required to have an inspector grade the home for energy efficiency under strict rules designed to fight climate change. Belloso’s building was built in the early 1900s from millstone, a porous sedimentary rock that was popular among architects of France’s Belle Époque. His apartment flunked the inspection—and under a regulation that came into force this year, the property was barred from the rental market until costly renovations are made. Belloso was ultimately forced to knock 50,000 euros, equivalent to $54,000, off his asking price...

A wave of bills combating “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) efforts on college campuses have made their way into several state legislatures this year. Bills introduced in states such as Utah, West Virginia, Arizona, Kentucky, Iowa, and South Carolina all aim to quell an agenda of racial discrimination and political litmus testing antithetical to higher education’s purpose. But not all of the bills are created equal. While each is designed to curb DEI practices, some articulate the restrictions with greater clarity and specificity. Additionally, some have superior mechanisms of oversight and accountability. A few institutions include provisions upholding viewpoint diversity,...

More university professors are joining the demonstrations roiling college campuses, both to voice support for Gazans and to defend their students’ right to protest. Faculty, many of whom are in their 60s and 70s and came of age during the era of Vietnam War protests, are pushing back against university presidents, accusing the leaders of heavy-handed and inconsistent crackdowns on free speech, and warning against a wave of authoritarianism some say has been creeping onto campuses for years. Professors in leadership positions are guiding calls for votes of no-confidence, spearheading classroom walkouts and visiting encampments alongside students. Many are facing...

Mohamed Abdou is a pro-Hamas “anarchist interdisciplinary activist-scholar of Indigenous, Black, critical race, and Islamic studies, as well as gender, sexuality, abolition, and decolonization” at Columbia University. Now, I don’t mean to pick on Abdou; it’s just that he happens to teach virtually every trendy pseudo-intellectual identitarian twaddle concocted by modern man. Ultimately, we make Abdou’s job possible. Nearly every student loan taken in the United States is either given by the government or fully guaranteed by taxpayers. This sounds wonderful in the abstract, since it allows every student a chance at higher education. The reality, however, is that we...

American federalism is struggling. Federal rules are an overwhelming presence in every state government, and some states, due to their size or other leverage, can impose their own policies on much or all of the country. The problem has been made clearer by an under-the-radar plan to phase out diesel locomotives in California. If the federal government provides the state with a helping hand, it would bring nationwide repercussions for a vital, overlooked industry. Various industry and advocacy groups are lining up against California's costly measure, calling on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to deny a waiver needed to...

It’s hardly front-page news that trust in higher education is at an all-time low. But what is overlooked is just how dire the situation is for small, private colleges with meagre endowments. Last year, for example, 14 of these institutions closed, the victims of plummeting enrollment. In the New York metropolitan area, some institutions have been forced to sell off portions of their real estate to stay alive. Such colleges’ plight is partially attributable to the falling birthrate since the Great Recession, but the far more important cause is the disconnect between what these colleges offer and what students want....

Maryam Alwan figured the worst was over after New York City police in riot gear arrested her and other protesters on the Columbia University campus, loaded them onto buses and held them in custody for hours. But the next evening, the college junior received an email from the university. Alwan and other students were being suspended after their arrests at the “ Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” a tactic colleges across the country have deployed to calm growing campus protests against the Israel-Hamas war. The students’ plight has become a central part of protests, with students and a growing number of faculty...

Over the past few years, numerous plagiarism scandals have rocked the world of higher education. Prominent public intellectuals and university scholars have been caught improperly citing passages or even straight-up wholesale copying from other scholars’ works in their academic writing. The most high-profile of these scandals involved Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard University. She resigned her position under pressure due to her academic misconduct, which involved lifting quotes from other authors and not attributing other writers’ work. Many of Claudine Gay’s supporters were quick to minimize her actions. For example, D. Stephen Voss, associate professor of political science...

JASPER COUNTY, INDIANA - Dave Duttlinger's first thought when he saw a dense band of yellowish-brown dust smearing the sky above his Indiana farm was: I warned them this would happen. About 445 acres of his fields near Wheatfield, Indiana, are covered in solar panels and related machinery – land that in April 2019 Duttlinger leased to Dunns Bridge Solar LLC, for one of the largest solar developments in the Midwest. On that blustery spring afternoon in 2022, Duttlinger said, his phone rang with questions from frustrated neighbors: Why is dust from your farm inside my truck? Inside my house?...

Earlier this month, the U.K.’s National Health Service released the Cass Review, a report that urged Great Britain to pump the breaks on the experimental, sterilizing treatments marketed as “gender affirming care.” By contrast, earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Education issued its new Title IX regulations, which require public schools to facilitate a school-to-sterilization pipeline. According to the Biden administration, Title IX of the Civil Rights Act now requires schools to treat students who suffer, or claim to suffer, from gender dysphoria as though they were the opposite sex. As the Cass Review argues, this is essentially a...

The Biden Administration’s regulations are coming so fast and furious that it’s hard even to keep track, but we’re trying. On Thursday the Environmental Protection Agency proposed its latest doozy—rules that will effectively force coal plants to shut down while banning new natural-gas plants. “With the announcement today, the power sector can make planning decisions with a full array of information,” EPA’s press release declares. Translation: Get moving with the green-energy transition because we’re determined to eliminate fossil-fuel power. Barack Obama’s regulation spurred a wave of coal plant closures. Now President Biden is trying to finish the job by tightening...

If you are up on the latest trends in academia, you’ll know that “institutional neutrality” is in the news as more universities consider or adopt it. In my view, this is a good thing, as it maintains the role of the university as a neutral arena in which faculty and students can freely express and debate a wide range of viewpoints constructively rather than feel stifled when their university takes a public stance on a political or social issue. However, there is confusion within academia on what institutional neutrality means and how to implement it. The free-speech organization FIRE (Foundation...

It was the dreaded Moms’ Night Out at my son’s exorbitantly expensive Montessori preschool. There were a few aged rock stars and insufferable list B-actors with children at this school, but that wasn’t going to stop me from providing my firstborn with excellence in developmental education that mainly seemed to involve depositing smooth pebbles into various bowls using hand-hewn stone implements. We were just digging into pizza and our third bottle of Chianti when a stylish, glossy-haired mother of two started talking about her daughter, who was three. In a voice filled with breathless anticipation, she described her plans for...

The Center for Collegiate Mental Health (CCMH) recently issued its 2023 Annual Report. It presents an abundance of dire information about the therapy-addicted young people now trying to make their way through the wasteland of undergraduate education. I have read it so you don’t have to. But before I turn to its diagnostic particulars, let me indulge with the broader picture that appears nowhere in CCMH’s report. Virtually everyone, including CCMH, agrees that American college students are suffering an epidemic of mental illness. But why? Among the recent books on the topic is The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring...

West Virginia has no time to lose. Its 55-percent labor-force participation rate is better only than Mississippi’s. Life expectancy is under 73 years, again placing West Virginia in second-to-worst place among U.S. states. Median family income is also near the bottom, whatever family size we compare. Economic development is our best way out, and the surest path to that result is education reform. It’s not a matter of sending more high schoolers to a four-year college program. While it’s true that completing college—indeed, having any college education regardless of completion—is positively correlated with higher income, artificially increasing access is not...

In the aftermath of Hamas’s attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, campuses across the country erupted with intense, heated protests. Except the protests weren’t against the brutality of Hamas’s massacre of innocent civilians. No, students had come to the conclusion that such actions were justified, and it was Israel’s military response to the attacks that needed to be stopped. In one of many such instances, pro-Palestinian student groups at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill used a paraglider, one of Hamas’s modes of attack, in fliers promoting the event. As UNC provost Chris Clemens said: “There is no doubt...

“Why Inflation Is Biden’s Most Stubborn Political Problem” by Andrew Restuccia and Sam Goldfarb at WSJ was one of those coffee-spilling articles that gave Grumpy his nickname. Not the article, which was well written, but the contents. In response to rising inflation, 'Biden and his senior aides aren’t planning any major policy or rhetorical shifts. They plan to continue talking about the president’s proposals to lower the cost of housing and prescription drugs, while slashing student-loan debt and eliminating surcharges tacked on to everything from concert tickets to banking services.' The most simple and pleasurable lessons of economics show you...

JACUMBA HOT SPRINGS, CA —About a mile north of the U.S.-Mexico border, a makeshift collection of multicolored blankets and tarps blooms in the desert. The people waiting there are migrants from around the world, most of whom snuck through a gap where an 18-foot steel wall meets a rocky hill outside this desert town []. The camp has a name, hand-painted on a plywood sign and lit with a solar-powered light for people arriving at night: Campo de Asilo, or Asylum Camp. Run by an aid group, it’s a destination for migrants planning to turn themselves in to U.S. border...