Free Republic

The phrase is just one of many that faculty were advised not to use. A University of California faculty leader-training handout instructed professors not to say that “America is the land of opportunity” because that’s a racist, sexist microaggression. According to the handout, called “Tool: Recognizing Microaggressions and the Messages they Send,” the statement “assert[s] that race and gender [do] not play a role in life successes” — despite the fact that saying opportunities exist and saying that opportunities are more easily attainable for some people than others are not mutually exclusive assertions. Other microaggressions listed on the document include...

The demographic groups most underrepresented on law faculties include white Christians and Republicans, according to research by Northwestern University School of Law professor James Lindgren. His working paper, “Measuring Diversity: Law Faculties in 1997 and 2013,” challenges the notion that women and minorities are underrepresented in teaching the law. Those groups actually have made significant gains.... But viewpoint diversity did not improve. For example, 59 percent of lawyers in 2013 identified as white Christians, and that group comprised nearly 57 percent of the working population. Yet white Christians made up just 34 percent of law professors. Republican men comprised 23...

To its undying credit, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has questioned whether the academic freedom of a Catholic professor at a Jesuit university was violated. “Dr. John McAdams, associate professor of political science at Marquette University, has sought the assistance of the American Association of University Professors as a result of having been informed, by letter of December 16, 2014, that the university was suspending him with pay ‘until further notice’ from his teaching responsibilities ‘and all other faculty activities’ and banning him from campus,” Gregory F. Scholtz of the AAUP wrote in a letter to Marquette’s president....

During the press briefing at the White House this afternoon, Josh Earnest was questioned about President Obama’s former colleagues at Harvard who are now complaining about the ACA they once supported. Harvard released a statement that the law is raising health insurance costs and therefore the university would have to change the plans for their staff. Ed Henry asked Earnest if it was “hypocritical” for these professors to claim that Obamacare was good for the country until they, themselves, had to pay more because of it. Earnest, for his part, seemed stumped by the question. He stuttered and stumbled through...

Academia is hell. In the latest higher-education fad, students want "trigger warnings," according to The New York Times. It appears that some students are so fragile that they want university staff to protect them from big bad ideas. Students around the country say they want "explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them or, as some students assert, cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in victims of rape or in war veterans." An Oberlin College draft -- now "under revision" -- for trigger warnings suggested faculty "be aware of racism,...

U.S. teachers are nowhere near as diverse as their students. Almost half the students attending public schools are minorities, yet fewer than 1 in 5 of their teachers is nonwhite. New studies from the Center for American Progress and the National Education Association are calling attention to this “diversity gap” at elementary and secondary schools in the United States. The groups want more to be done to help teachers more accurately mirror the students in their classrooms. …

Four public colleges and universities: Florida’s Palm Beach State College, Pennsylvania’s Community College of Allegheny County, Ohio’s Youngstown State University, and New Jersey’s Kean University, are all planning to move adjunct and “contingent” faculty members to part-time status in order to avoid an Obamacare provision requiring businesses with 50 or more full-time employees to provide health coverage for at least 95 percent of their workers. **SNIP** Teachers’ associations like AAUP and AFT are bracing for the shift. Next week, AFT will host a webinar for its members addressing “the implications of the Affordable Care Act for contingent faculty.” In the...

via Quran verse posted at US Harvard varsity – Emirates 24/7. Harvard University has posted a verse of the Holy Quran at the entrance of its faculty of law, describing the verse as one of the greatest expressions for justice in history, a Saudi newspaper reported on Sunday. Verse 135 of Sura Al Nisa (women chapter) has been posted at a wall facing the faculty’s main entrance, dedicated to the best phrases said about justice. A Saudi student who studies at Harvad published a picture of the poster in his Twitter page, according to the Saudi Arabic language daily Ajel....

Americans for Peace and Tolerance (APT) today released a 30 minute video showing how Northeastern Professor Denis Sullivan and other Northeastern faculty abuse academic freedom to promote anti-Israel lies and anti-Semitism as defined by the U.S. State Department. Sullivan is a tenured professor and director of the Northeastern Middle East Center for Peace, Culture and Development. The video examines Professor Sullivan's lectures, invited guests, reading lists and student trips to the Middle East, all of which seem designed to provide students with a one-sided view of the Arab-Israeli conflict. "It seems clear that Professor Sullivan has built his department to...

Iowa Republicans are taking aim at the state's top law school for denying a faculty position to a conservative law professor, who an assistant dean once said embraces politics the rest of the faculty "despises." Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/04/05/iowa-republicans-blast-law-school-over-refusal-to-hire-conservative-professor/#ixzz1rH2eeqcX

After 34 years of teaching sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, I recently retired at age 64 at 80 percent of my pay for life. This calculation was based on a salary spiked by summer teaching, and since I no longer pay into the retirement fund, I now receive significantly more than when I “worked.” But that’s not all: There’s a generous health insurance plan, a guaranteed 3 percent annual cost of living increase, and a few other perquisites. Having overinvested in my retirement annuity, I received a fat refund and—when it rains, it pours—another for unused sick...

Why Campuses Are Blue Sheila Archambault, February 17, 2010 A key reason why few conservatives go into the teaching profession is that the job of a professor does not fit the image many conservatives have of themselves, two scholars argued. “The professoriate, along with a number of other knowledge work fields, has been ‘politically typed’ as appropriate for and welcoming of people with broadly liberal political sensibilities, and as inappropriate for conservatives,” Ethan Fosse and Neil Gross said in a working paper, entitled “Why Are Professors Liberal?” Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University was in agreement with Fosse’s...

CSULB: Academic Senate distances itself from Kevin MacDonald's controversial works.LONG BEACH - The Cal State Long Beach Academic Senate has voted to disassociate itself from the writings of a controversial psychology professor who has been accused of having anti-Semitic and white ethnocentric views. "While the Academic Senate defends Dr. Kevin MacDonald's academic freedom and freedom of speech, as it does for all faculty, it firmly and unequivocally disassociates itself from the anti-Semitic and white ethnocentric views he has expressed," according to the resolution Thursday. Responding to the resolution, MacDonald, a tenured professor, said "everyone has ethnic interests." "This is an...

Scandalous Decoys by: Malcolm A. Kline, April 22, 2008 When legendary director Alfred Hitchcock wanted to build suspense and throw off moviegoers he would distract them with what he called a MacGuffin, which Webster’s defines as “an object, event, or character in a film or story that serves to keep the plot in motion despite usually lacking intrinsic importance.” Arguably, some of the wayward college presidents fired by boards of directors in recent years fit this description. For example, the former president of American University, Benjamin Ladner, racked up about half a million dollars a year in expenses that included...

Stanford Crackdown on Hoover by: Malcolm A. Kline, April 02, 2008 There’s only one thing that a politically correct university hates more than hosting a conservative think tank on its campus and that is when the guest scholar accumulates more prestige than the host institution. Then the institution of higher learning might make a hamfisted attempt to regulate the wayward scholars, applying discipline it would never dream of inflicting on its own faculty. Such a situation may be transpiring at Stanford. “You may have heard that former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was offered a one-year visiting fellowship at the...

A study by two conservative researchers attempting to determine why conservatives are underrepresented on college and university faculties. The conclusion is while some portion of this imbalance can be traced to "bias" and "discrimination", a large part results from a decision by students with conservative values not to pursue a career with limited economic potential that also requires sacrifice of family commitments to achieve academic advancement. "Since conservatives place an especially high priority on financial security and raising a family, the academy needs to make efforts to adopt more family-friendly policies... "As graduate school is not financially lucrative and pre-tenure...

All Princeton faculty members who have given to 2008 presidential candidates so far have donated to Democrats, according to federal records of donations to presidential campaigns from Princeton University employees. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is the runaway favorite candidate among those donors, having received $12,050 from Princeton employees. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) drew the second-highest total contributions from Princeton faculty and staff with $5,600. Other donations have gone to candidates including former Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), Gov. Bill Richardson (D-N.M.) and Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.). In total, donors who listed the University as their employer have given $23,700 to presidential...

When college administrators talk about their students and faculty, you can be sure the word “diversity” is used often and favorably. However, diversity only means skin-color, not a diversity of opinions. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that Yale University employees favor Democratic candidates over Republicans by a margin of 45 to one. The Yale Daily News looked over the Federal Election Commission reports and noted that the university faculty and staff have given $45,000 to Democratic candidates – mostly to Barack Obama – and only $1,000 to Republicans

In 1997, the National Association of Social Work (NASW) altered its ethics code, ruling that all social workers must promote social justice "from local to global level." This call for mandatory advocacy raised the question: what kind of political action did the highly liberal field of social work have in mind? The answer wasn't long in coming. The Council on Social Work Education, the national accreditor of social work education programs, says candidates must fight "oppression," and sees American society as pervaded by the "global interconnections of oppression." Now aspiring social workers must commit themselves, usually in writing, to a...

Last spring, 88 Duke faculty members signed a public statement stating unequivocally that something “happened” to the accuser in the Duke lacrosse case. They promised to “turn up the volume” regarding the “social disaster” the lacrosse players had unleashed. And the professors said “thank you” to widely publicized protesters who had put up “wanted” posters with the lacrosse players’ photos while carrying signs reading “Time to confess” and “Castrate” outside the lacrosse players’ house. The “Group of 88” included Kim Curtis, who before late March had compiled a lengthy if unspectacular tenure as a longtime visiting political science professor. Then...