Free Republic

If a university were to state that it will not hire people applying for a faculty position because of their race, sex, or religion, that would be clearly illegal. No school would dare to disregard applicants simply because “people of their kind” were not wanted. But what about an applicant’s philosophy and political beliefs? Can schools discriminate on that basis? A case that arose years ago at the University of Iowa has finally ended with the apparent result that ideological discrimination is not illegal. Back in 2006, Teresa Wagner (now Manning) was employed part-time at the University of Iowa College...

Four Otterbein University professors suggest that women may be averse to STEM fields because they feel they work harder than male students without earning higher grades. After conducting a study of 828 students in STEM classes, the professors discovered that while women felt they put more effort into their classes than men, they received approximately equivalent grades, which “indicates that women's higher perceived effort levels are not rewarded."

There is no doubt that the human costs of this rise are severe: Some 44 million Americans currently carry nearly $1.5 trillion in student loan debt, and the delinquency rate is 11 percent. There are various reasons for surging costs, but the primary one is the remarkable expansion of university administration in recent decades. As Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado, wrote in the New York Times a few years ago: “According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was...

This is a story of a rape accusation that would not die and a misshapen version of college justice meted out in three chapters. Let’s begin with two Michigan State students looking to hook up in March 2015, mess around and perhaps have sex. Soon after, the woman accuses the man, Keith Mumphery, who would become a pro football receiver, of sexual assault in her dorm room. The police investigate. Mumphery turns over the text messages from his phone and provides a DNA swab. Prosecutors conduct interviews. The accuser does not return calls. They decline to prosecute.

The University of New Mexico is hosting a social justice conference this week with speakers discussing racism, colonization, and white “anti-racism” in education. According to the event flyer, the focus of the conference is to discuss “colonization being endemic in society and its connections to anti-indigeneity, antiblackness, anti-brownness, anti-immigration, anti-LGTBQ and anti-dis/ability rhetoric; discourses deeply rooted in the social fabric of the U.S.”

Black students are far more likely to have their university applications flagged for potential fraud or errors than any ethnic group, it has emerged. More than half the applications flagged by the university application service Ucas between 2013 and 2017 were from students from black backgrounds. But because only a tenth of all applications come from black youngsters, this means that they are selected disproportionately for fraud probes. On average, one in 100 black applicants is flagged by Ucas's verification service, compared with one in 2,000 white ones. Ucas, which published the statistics, said the reason was unclear because its...

Today, all Americans are told, "Go to college!" President Obama said, "College graduation has never been more valuable." But economist Bryan Caplan says that most people shouldn't go. "How many thousands of hours did you spend in classes studying subjects that you never thought about again?" he asks. Lots, in my case. At Princeton, I learned to live with strangers, play cards and chase women, but I slept through boring lectures, which were most of them. At least tuition was only $2,000. Now it's almost $50,000. "People usually just want to talk about the tuition, which is a big deal,...

Today, all Americans are told, "Go to college!" President Obama said, "College graduation has never been more valuable." But economist Bryan Caplan says that most people shouldn't go. "How many thousands of hours did you spend in classes studying subjects that you never thought about again?" he asks. Lots, in my case. At Princeton, I learned to live with strangers, play cards and chase women, but I slept through boring lectures, which were most of them. At least tuition was only $2,000. Now it's almost $50,000. "People usually just want to talk about the tuition, which is a big deal,...

The University of Memphis will not longer charge tuition to the children and spouses of fallen service members.The school becomes the first to offer the national Folds of Honor scholarship as a payment-in-full scholarship, The Memphis Commercial Appeal reported on Monday, Memorial Day. The university already accepts the scholarship, which provides a $5,000-year-year payment to undergraduate students under the age of 24 who had a parent severely injured or killed while on active duty. Spouses of any age can also receive it if they have not remarried. Etc...

As many as one in four students at some elite U.S. colleges are now classified as disabled, largely because of mental-health issues such as depression or anxiety, entitling them to a widening array of special accommodations like longer time to take exams. Under federal law, students can be considered disabled if they have a note from a doctor. That label requires schools to offer accommodations depending on the student’s needs. A blind student, for example, would have access to specialized software or a reader for an exam. The rise in disability notes for mental-health issues has led to a surge...

Evergreen State College is eliminating dozens of staff positions as it struggles to cope with plummeting enrollment in the wake of the protests that engulfed campus last year. John Carmichael, the chief of staff and secretary to the Evergreen State College Board of Trustees, announced in a memo to staff and faculty members on Tuesday that the school has already cut 24 faculty lines and eliminated 19 vacant staff positions, and warned that up to 20 additional staff members could seen be laid off.

After months of clashes with angry students, the university decided that the young professor it hired had to go. From the day of his first class on campus, protesters had disrupted his lectures. Police had to clear angry students out of the room each day. Officials feared for the professor’s safety and appealed to students to respect his freedom to teach, but the students responded with a manifesto declaring that the offending professor must be dismissed and “a new university of a political nature built up.” They said they were entitled to the teachers they wanted, not someone like him....

Last week I wrote about Evergreen State College’s decline in enrollment which is expected to blow a $5.9 million hole in the schools budget for the coming year. A memo outlining the school’s response said some vacancies would remain unfilled and a number of layoffs would be necessary. Today, a piece published by the Wall Street Journal reveals some additional detail on what is coming for Evergreen, including a lawsuit which will be filed this week:

The second comes from The Atlantic’s Emma Green. Detailing the findings of a survey conducted by her magazine and the Public Religion Research Institute, she notes that 61 percent of white working-class men view college as a “risky gamble.” Green’s report contained this explanation: “The enduring narrative of the American dream is that if you study and get a college education and work hard, you can get ahead,” said Robert P. Jones, the CEO of PRRI. “The survey shows that many white working-class Amer­icans, especially men, no longer see that path available to them. . . . It is this sense of economic fatalism,...

Tufts University is offering a course this fall examining “queer spatial aesthetics” and “queer world-making” in places like “bathhouses, nightclubs, [and] cruising grounds.” According to the course syllabus, “Queer Space: Explorations in Art and Architecture” will address questions such as: “What is ‘queer space’? How have works of art and architecture shaped queer understandings and experiences of space?”

California State Senator Kevin de Leon introduced himself to the DASB Senate on Wednesday, April 18. He formerly served as President pro tempore of the California State Senate, and is running to unseat incumbent U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein in the 2018 election. De Leon expressed his support for protecting undocumented immigrants and making college free. After Attorney General Jeff Sessions said he was going to deport 11 million criminal violent felons, de Leon said he decided to author Senate Bill No. 54, also known as the California “Sanctuary State” Bill. He called Sessions’ comment “fake news,” and said Sessions was...

The movement to reform higher education is finally entering prime time. Although major news outlets have previously aired interviews and television segments about various aspects of higher education, the coverage seems to be reaching an all-new level. Last month, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson announced a month-long series dedicated to answering the question “is college worth it?” In the ensuing weeks, Carlson discussed hot-button topics such as grade inflation, affirmative action, and towering student-loan debt—issues that those in the reform movement have long been debating. Interestingly, a few weeks later, NBC Nightly News decided to join the conversation with its own...

Evergreen State College has announced that it is planning to cut $5.9 million from its budget in an effort to offset a rapidly declining enrollment rate. The cuts were outlined by President George Bridges in a May 8 memo to the Board of Trustees, and are accompanied by plans to raise various student fees by hundreds of dollars, The Olympian reported last week.

Michigan State will spend at least $500 million to settle hundreds of lawsuits with surviving victims of Larry Nassar's sexual abuse, according to the Detroit Free Press. Nassar abused about 300 victims, according to court records observed by the Free Press. Nassar was sentenced up to 175 years on Michigan state charges of sexual assault, to go along with a sentence of 40 to 125 years in prison on three counts of sexual assault with another 60–year sentence on federal child-pornography charges.

Students at the embattled Evergreen State College, which made national headlines last year after it hosted an event that asked white people not to come on campus for a “Day of Absence,” have organized a new iteration of the controversial event despite administrators’ efforts to shift gears. Students at the Olympia, Washington-based public school have organized a three-day “Day of Absence” observance that includes a mix of events on and off campus. Some gatherings are advertised as open to all skin colors and others ask that only POC, or People of Color, attend. A poster hung at the school obtained...