Free Republic

It is unclear whether or not disgraced former UPenn President Liz Magill was invited to participate in the trip to show solidarity to Israel after her disastrous performance during a congressional hearing. A group of about thirty faculty members of the University of Pennsylvania went to Israel this week on a three-day solidarity visit. They arrived on Tuesday. They have met with President Isaac Herzog and they have taken a group photo inside a bomb shelter during their visit to Kibbutz Kfar Aza in the south of Israel. The photo was taken after the all-clear siren alerted the community. Their...

If you don’t like the pro-Hamas demonstrations by American college students, then you won’t like American higher education, which is the garden in which these flowers were grown. Within hours of the atrocities committed by Hamas operatives who invaded Israel on October 7, groups of American college students had organized to express their support for the terrorists. This caught many Americans by surprise. How could college students at some of America’s best universities sympathize with the perpetrators of gruesome attacks on unarmed civilians? The surprise, however, was not universal. Those of us who pay close attention to American higher education...

Truer words have never been spoken

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has released a new survey of nearly 1,500 faculty members at four-year colleges in the US. Ideologically, the survey was more diverse than some other recent surveys of college faculty:Overall, half of the faculty surveyed identified as liberal, 17% identified as moderate, and just over one-quarter (26%) identified as conservative. The percentage of professors who identified as conservative was somewhat higher than the percentages found in other recent surveys of faculty. This could reflect the associations made by respondents. The survey recruitment email specifically mentioned FIRE, an organization that some academics consider...

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...

The average 12-year-old student at a yeshiva has more wisdom than almost any student at Harvard or most other universities. (A yeshiva is an Orthodox Jewish school with an emphasis on religious studies. About half the school day is devoted to religious studies -- taught from the original Hebrew sources.) This is probably true for many 12-year-olds in traditional Christian schools as well. College students do have more knowledge than almost any 12-year-old in religious school. But they have much less wisdom.I know this because I was a yeshiva student from the age of 5 until 19. To appreciate how...

Researchers say that is a conservative estimateA new report from the American Enterprise Institute found that nearly 20 percent of university faculty job listings require a pledge of support for diversity.“Across all 999 jobs [reviewed by the think tank], we find that 19 percent require diversity statements, while 68 percent include the terms ‘diversity’ or ‘diverse’ in some fashion, often as a way of describing the university environment,” the report said.And the researchers told The College Fix that the number is a conservative estimate and they were not surprised with the results.“I was not surprised to learn that 1 in...

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...

Public concern about higher education is clearly widespread. The causes are many: ugly treatment of visiting speakers, a stifling political uniformity resulting in ideological extremism and hatred, and fringe radical ideas seeping out of the campuses into the wider world. Less publicly visible are numerous recent studies that tell us how little most recent graduates have benefited from higher education. They record astonishing deficiencies in reasoning, writing, reading, basic knowledge, and civics. But with all this, the public is still uncertain. Most see the symptoms but don’t quite know what to make of them, and so continue to send their...

In a piece published today in The Atlantic, John McWhorter writes that he is getting as many as 50 emails a week from academics who are living in fear that their careers could end at any moment. Their fear isn’t the coronavirus it’s the creeping leftist orthodoxy which treats any disagreement as cause to hound someone out of their job. McWhorter labels it a new form of Maoism on campus, complete with struggle sessions straight out of the Cultural Revolution: A statistics professor says:"I routinely discuss the fallacy of assuming that disparity implies discrimination, which is just a specific way...

It all started in June 2018, when Quillette published my article, “Why Women Don’t Code,” and things picked up steam when Jordan Peterson shared a link to the article on his Twitter account. A burst of outrage and press coverage followed which I discussed in a follow-up piece. The original article was one of the ten most read pieces published by Quillette in 2018, and continues to generate interest. A recent YouTube video about it has been viewed over 120,000 times, as of this writing: In his tweet promoting my article, Peterson took issue with one of my claims. I...

The New York Times today publishes an extraordinary column, titled: What ‘Snowflakes’ Get Right About Free Speech. In it, Ulrich Baer, the vice provost for faculty, arts, humanities, and diversity at New York University argues at length that what liberal snowflake students who want to censor “offensive” ideas get right about free speech is, basically, everything. The gist of his argument is that some propositions are so dehumanizing to the affected people that they are impossible to rebut with equal humanity and legitimacy. He invokes such clashes a Holocaust deniers, racists, or opponents of illegal immigration confronting Holocaust survivors or...

A University of Arizona classroom dialogue guide encourages professors to use the “Oops/ouch method,” where students who are offended in class say “ouch” and the offender responds with “oops.” The guide, published by the Office for Diversity and Inclusive Excellence, provides outlines for how to encourage discussion about diversity in the classroom, explaining that “diversity poses both challenges and opportunities for a college campus.”

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. (AP) - Nearly 600 faculty and staff have taken a voluntary retirement package from Penn State University, including more than 400 employees on the main campus. The Centre Daily Times (http://bit.ly/2mvKKvq ) reports 419 main campus employees took the offer, while 168 others did on satellite campuses. Forty-six percent of employees eligible for the early retirement took it, more than the university anticipated. Faculty 62 and older and staff 60 and older were eligible for a year's lump sum pay if they had at least 15 years' service.

Disgusting! More than 100 UC Berkeley faculty signed a petition to prevent Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking! More than 100 UC Berkeley faculty members signed a petition to prevent Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking.This is absolutely disgusting.They ought to be ashamed of themselves.Here is the petition and the faculty members who signed it. (The document continues after the first set of signatures, and there are other signatures after that first set.)

Faculty at 14 Pennsylvania state universities went on strike Wednesday morning, affecting more than 100,000 students, after contract negotiations between the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education and the faculty union hit an impasse. The Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties announced on its website that its members went on strike at 5 a.m. because no agreement could be reached. The union represents more than 5,000 faculty and coaches across the state, and a walkout was expected to halt classes midsemester. […] This is the first strike in the system’s 34-year history. The union includes faculty from Bloomsburg,...

New videos have surfaced of a Yale professor being protested and yelled at by students for sending an email telling them to ignore people dressed in offensive or racist Halloween costumes. The fallout of the email saw Nicholas Christakis, the master of Silliman College at Yale, and his wife Erika, a faculty member, resign from their positions at the university. The new videos, which appeared on The Federalist, give a greater insight into what the students were demanding from Christakis, and his defense that cultural appropriation on Halloween is permissible. Many students in the mob of almost 100 can be...

Usually affirmative action diversicrats are sneaky enough to disguise their efforts to discriminate against targeted racial groups – almost always whites (because they are the majority) and Asians (because they study and work hard and achieve). They use code word language like “goals” and “diversity,” and avoid giving the impression that certain groups are ruled out from consideration. That’s what makes the honesty of a job posting at the state-funded University of Louisville so unusual.  Inside Higher Education (hat tip: Legal Insurrection) reports: can a department specifically reserve a position for an underrepresented minority candidate? That’s what some are...

He may not be getting as much attention as The Donald but Governor Scott Walker’s higher education reforms in Wisconsin are having a real world impact there. “Who wants to work in a state where tenure is an abstraction?,” Kelly Wilz, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Marshfield/Wood County, writes in a column which appeared on the Academe Blog maintained by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Apparently, not many of her colleagues, even the tenured ones. “The emails keep rolling in,” Wilz writes. “More colleagues leaving–not for better pay, not because they didn’t love their jobs, but...

Tenured faculty may make up an increasingly smaller proportion of the professoriate than in days gone by but they are hanging onto their jobs with both fists. “Tenured faculty age 50 or older can be divided into three groups—35 % expect to retire by normal retirement age; 16 % would prefer to retire by normal retirement age, but expect to work longer (i. e., they are ‘reluctantly reluctant’ to retire); and 49 % would like to and expect to work past normal retirement age (i.e., they are ‘reluctant by choice’),” economist Paul Yakoboski found. Yakoboski is a senior economist at...