Free Republic

The New School of Social Research—a graduate school in Lower Manhattan—is currently offering a course dedicated to exploring economics through a feminist lens. “Feminist Economics” is a small seminar currently taught by Sheba Tejani, an assistant professor of international affairs at the New School whose research agenda focuses on how various international economic policies impact women and men differently.

At a recent forum, Marquette University faculty members declared that the school’s seal is a “microaggression” because it depicts a white explorer being guided by a Native American. The Marquette University Intercultural Center, which is funded through a combination of tuition and student activity fees, hosted the March 23 event, titled "Men to Men: Responding to Microaggressions and Why They Matter."

A statue of Thomas Jefferson has raised the ire of student activists at Hofstra University, who are demanding that administrators remove his visage from campus. JaLoni Amor, a Hofstra student and Black Lives Matter activist, released a petition calling for the statue’s removal on March 17, proclaiming that Jefferson has been embraced as an “icon” by “white supremacist and neo-nazi organizations” like the Ku Klux Klan.

This year’s annual “Sex Week” at Northwestern University will feature a Chicago-based dominatrix named “Lady Sophia” who will teach the students various BDSM practices. “What better way can you learn about the basics of BDSM than from a professional domme in Chicago? Sophia the Dominatrix runs Chicago Dungeon Rentals and is an established sex educator,” student organizers of the event stated on Facebook.

We are suffering from a large-scale culture clash in the United States. Strains of anxiety and vitriol pervade our daily discourse where we’d be better served with laughter and congeniality. So why are we so divided? What is feeding it? A good touchstone for where we are and where we are heading as a society is our college campuses. This May, Boston’s streets will be clogged with U-Haul trucks driven by the parents of newly minted college graduates packing up and heading home. Honest-to-goodness adults, ready to take on the world

The City of Miami Beach in Florida is so annoyed by the army of spring breakers descending on its beaches for wild parties fueled by alcohol and drugs that it’s considering a drastic, if a little bizarre, countermeasure. One elected city official suggested playing classical music, such as Mozart, at loud volumes to break up parties on the beach. That's according to a report in The Miami Herald, which said the city's commissioners were juggling ideas on how to tackle spring break partygoers after a chaotic weekend.

“Higher education” is terrible.Please note the quotation marks, you doofy liberals who will no doubt fill the comments with high-pitched typing about how “Conservatives hate knowing stuff.” What passes for “education” today is nothing of the sort, and what calls itself “academia” is really just a venal trade guild packed with mediocrities desperately trying to keep fooling people into forking over $60,000 a year – usually obtained via ruinous borrowing that ties a financial anchor around the defrauded grads’ necks for the rest of their lives.Today, academia’s product is largely garbage – gender studies, twisted history, and pointless sociology spin-offs...

CAMBRIDGE, MA—Responding to consumer demand, Ivy League bellwether Harvard University announced Monday its new four-year Bachelor’s degree in Feeling Oppressed. “For those lucky enough to be able to afford the quarter-million-dollar cost of attending our prestigious school, we are offering a comprehensive program that will prepare you for a lifetime of convincing yourself that you are a perpetual victim and nothing that happens in your life is your own fault,” Harvard president Drew Faust announced in an afternoon press conference. “It doesn’t matter who you are, where you’re from, what your background is, whether or not you’re by far the...

An underground conservative newspaper at Taylor University was recently pressured into temporarily suspending publication for striking “fear in some students.” The anonymous paper, called Excalibur, was launched in February by a group of professors as a means to articulate “conservative stances boldy, extensively, and without fear of editorial filter,” according to a copy of the print edition obtained by Campus Reform.

The editorial board of The Hoya, the school newspaper at Georgetown University, has called upon the institution to legitimize a pro-abortion group on campus, claiming that the school should “protect the free exchange of ideas” and formally recognize the student organization even though it stands directly opposed to core Catholic teaching. “Georgetown University should prioritize free speech over religious policy by recognizing H*yas for Choice, a pro-reproductive rights student group,” the board wrote this week.

The University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point has proposed dropping 13 majors in the humanities and social sciences — including English, philosophy, history, sociology and Spanish — while adding programs with “clear career pathways” as a way to address declining enrollment and a multimillion-dollar deficit. Students and faculty members have reacted with surprise and concern to the news, which is being portrayed by the school’s administration as a path to regain enrollment and provide new opportunities to students. Critics see something else: a waning commitment to liberal arts education and a chance to lay off faculty under new rules that...

Incoming freshmen at Washington University in St. Louis risk academic sanctions if they fail to attend an event on sexual-assault prevention or write a two-page essay on the topic. The event, an “interactive performance” called “#Rewind Blurred Lines,” is the second in a two-part program required for all first-year students, who are “expected” to complete a written reflection if they do not attend.

A student Resident Advisor (RA) at Providence College has reportedly been threatened with rape after posting a flyer that expressed a traditional view on marriage. According to LifeSiteNews, RA Michael Smalanskas has faced severe student backlash since displaying the poster on a bulletin board in early March, with upset classmates gathering outside of his dorm room and endangering his safety.

Black Lives Matter is sometimes criticized for using illiberal methods to advance its goals. The movement’s top leader in Pennsylvania, Asa Khalif, isn’t shying away from that reputation. He threatened to “begin disrupting classes and other campus activities with a wave of protests” starting Friday if the University of Pennsylvania doesn’t fire a professor it has already punished for comments about black student performance, The Philadelphia Tribune reports.

A newly published academic journal article argues that science educators must do more to combat “whiteness” and “White ideology” in the classroom. In their research essay titled “Towards a truer multicultural science education: how whiteness impacts science education,” University of Colorado at Denver scholars Cheryl E. Matias and Paul T. Le seek to “have the field consider the theoretical frames of whiteness and how it might influence how we engage in science education such that our hope for diversity never fully materializes.”

Faced with a steep drop in student enrollment, Essex County College will eliminate 34 positions by next year as it remains under close watch -- and probation -- by its accrediting agency. The layoffs of 20 full-time staff and elimination of 14 vacant positions will save $2.76 million, college officials said. Included on the list: A top-ranking administrator who was placed on paid leave after a vocal group of clergy called for her ouster. Joyce Wilson Harley, vice president of administration and finance, lobbed allegations of wrongdoing against President Anthony Munroe, who in turn, accused Harley of undermining his authority....

A controversial Florida Gulf Coast University professor who drew national media attention for his “white racism” course recently gave a lecture equating conservative students to Nazis. Professor Ted Thornhill delivered the comments during a guest appearance at Minnesota’s St. Olaf College, his former employer, where he called the institution “a violent place for people of color.”

Subsidies reduce motivation, distort the education market, and often end up reducing students’ motivation. The “free college” movement, fueled to a large degree by Bernie Sanders during his 2016 presidential bid, is a response to concerns about increasing college-tuition rates, concomitant stagnation in state and federal grants, and a corresponding student-loan debt load that has ballooned to roughly $1.4 trillion. Indeed, inflation-adjusted data provided by the College Board shows that the average sticker price of higher-education tuition (excluding room and board) over the past ten years has increased 32 percent for two-year public colleges, 37 percent for four-year public colleges,...

The cost of college has risen at more than twice the rate of inflation for decades, and the increasing availability of federal student loans is a principal cause. But even as demands grow daily to do something about student debt and loan defaults, hardly anyone laments the demise of a once-proud American aspiration: working your way through college. In 1956, as a freshman at Yale, I waited tables in a student dorm for about $1 an hour, 10 hours a week, over the 30-week academic year. I received a full scholarship, but even if it had ended, I recall that...

At Everest College in Everett, nearly 30 percent of borrowers who started repaying student loans in 2014 defaulted on those loans by the end of 2016, according to the latest disclosure from the U.S. Department of Education. The data includes students at schools receiving federal student aid who entered repayment on selected federal loans in 2014 and defaulted before the end of the second fiscal year. In Colorado, 82 institutions reported 100,449 students entered repayment on student loans. And 11,204 – or 11.2 percent – defaulted on those loans.