Free Republic

As a current college student, I can attest that attending college today is expensive and, for many students, impossible without taking out a loan. Borrowing money means taking on the responsibility of repaying it. Multiple student loan forgiveness plans have been proposed by Democrats, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and President Joe Biden, which would allow students to forgo their financial responsibilities. President Biden plans to forgive at least $10,000 worth of loan debt for every student making less than $125,000 per year after college–more than $1 trillion total. But there are no other details yet. How does...

The administration and board of regents at Concordia University Wisconsin has been deathly silent about this widely reported transgression against academic freedom.Today’s academic landscape is littered with the dry bones of academic freedom. This is true of my own religious university, Concordia University Wisconsin (CUW), from which I have been suspended and put under threat of termination for publishing an academic essay critiquing identity politics. As reported by The Federalist in March, soon after I published that essay, I was banned from campus and put on administrative leave. There I remain three months later, with no clear path to restoration...

"Observing Whiteness in Introductory Physics: A Case Study" was published last month in Physical Review Physics Education Research. "Whiteboards can be racist like how housing, employment, and the judicial systems were found to contain racist practices," the co-author told Campus Reform. Article image Stevie Gibbs '23 | Arkansas Campus Correspondent Monday, April 25, 2022 1:44 PM Did a recent physics study argue that whiteboards are racist? "Observing Whiteness in Introductory Physics: A Case Study" was published last month in Physical Review Physics Education Research. The study observed three students as they worked to solve a physics problem and analyzed how...

Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah, offers a class on pornography in which students watch raunchy films as a group. “Hard core pornography is as American as apple pie and more popular than Sunday night football,” the course description reads.

Academia is so far in the leftist tank, it is both appalling and laughable. The Chronical of Higher Education recently posted this on its website, for which I receive periodic updates, a decision I now regret, but it does allow me to observe developments in higher ed. The very title of the article is right from the talking points of the Democrat party. Consider the subtitle: "A new surge in voter suppression laws is once again targeting people of color. In history and today, many educators have stood up for democracy." Really? Preventing fraud and assuming that blacks are not...

Two Stanford administrators, Dean of Students Mona Hicks and Vice Provost for Institutional Equity, Access and Community Patrick Dunkley, sent a panicked email to students and faculty Monday night. They reported grim news: “Two cords with loops that may represent nooses were found in a tree near the intersection of Campus Drive and Junipero Serra Boulevard, along the Lake Lagunita walking trail… The Office immediately contacted the Stanford University Department of Public Safety (DPS), which promptly investigated the incident with a campus arborist.” Cords with loops that may represent nooses? That could be concerning. I wonder, is there any reason...

Dozens of Howard University students are sleeping outdoors in a tent encampment on campus grounds to protest what they describe as "poor" and "unlivable" conditions in the college dormitories. Students told ABC News that portions of the university living quarters have mold and insect and rodent infestations, as well as leaky ceilings and flooding -- all of which they say put their health at risk. ...The sit-in, organized by the Young Democratic Socialists of America and The Live Movement, has gone viral under the hashtag #BlackburnTakeover....Students at other historically Black colleges and universities have also shared videos and pictures on...

Colleges have begun hiring student hall monitors to enforce mask and distancing restrictions, a move that has given students authority over their peers for their obedience to the state's COVID diktats.How much would you have to be paid to commit social suicide? What if a paycheck wasn’t the only perk, but it also entitled you to a sickening sense of self-righteousness and an air of superiority? This appears to be the tradeoff many college students have made this semester as universities’ “Student Health Ambassadors,” paid adult hall monitors whose job is to patrol their campuses and enforce mask policies and...

A university is encouraging students to stop using the words manmade, mastercopy and civilisation because it believes they have sexist or racist connotations. Sociology undergraduates at Aston University in Birmingham have been advised to find replacements for words that could be seen to reinforce prejudices. Offending words include immigrants, third world, tribe, civilised and, in some contexts, native, all because of their colonialist or racist overtones. Language deemed to be sexist includes one-man show, old masters, forefathers, seminal and masterful....

A group of Point Park University students in Pittsburgh launched a petition to have their fellow classmate banned from campus after he criticized the school's pronoun policy. Campus Reform Correspondent and Point Park University student Logan Dubil was met with a petition from his classmates to school administrators that demanded his removal from campus for criticizing the university's "Misgendering, Pronoun Misuse, and Deadnaming Policy," which Fox News previously reported. The petition, which has now been deleted and was created by "Max," appeared on Change.org and claimed "Dubil and others like him are the scum of the Earth," according to Campus...

We told you a few weeks ago about a battle at Amherst College over heavy-handed, anti-science restrictions imposed on a nearly universally-vaccinated community. Among other things, the school closed dining halls and severely limited students' freedom of movement, including going into town. Mask mandates remained in place for all, regardless of vaccination status. We noted that Duke University also decided to force vaccinated members of its community to wear masks, even at outdoor events. Duke appears to have relaxed their rules a bit, but not much, while the status quo at Amherst is unclear (the administration had pledged to start...

It was nice work if you could get it. And one woman allegedly got it. A former Yale University Medical School employee has been charged with fraud and money laundering for allegedly stealing $31 million worth of computer equipment over more than a decade, then reselling it.... ...While acquisition was part of her job, reselling the equipment was not. Pedrone-Codrington in 2013 “engaged in a scheme whereby she ordered, or caused others working for her, to order millions of dollars of computer hardware from Yale vendors using Yale Med funds and arranged to ship the stolen hardware to an out-of-state...

Universities are to be forced to to deduct marks for poor written English in students' work - and will face tough sanctions if they fail to do so. Under proposals by the Office for Students (OfS) regulator, universities will be required to teach students 'relevant skills', assess them 'effectively' and ensure that any qualifications they issue are 'credible'.... ...The move is intended to tackle poor quality courses and comes three months after The Mail on Sunday revealed the use of 'inclusive assessment' at some institutions under which technical ability in written English was not assessed.... ...'If UK Universities are to...

Bowing to left-wing pressure, the Department of Justice will not even commit to defending religious colleges from a lawsuit that would force them to act contrary to their beliefs about sex and gender.The Biden Department of Justice briefly instigated outrage from progressives recently when it filed a routine legal brief promising to defend Title IX’s statutory exemption for religious colleges. The DOJ filed the brief to fend off efforts by religious colleges, some of whom are represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, to intervene in a lawsuit brought by 40 past and present LGBT college students who claim the exemption violates...

Since public schools are spectacularly successful leftist recruitment centers, weakening public attachment to them through lockdowns was a dangerous move for Democrats.Between May and October 2020, homeschooling more than doubled among U.S. households with school-age children, from 5.4 percent that spring to 11.1 percent that fall, according to new Census Bureau data. Black and Hispanic Americans were the most likely to switch to homeschooling, while white and Asian Americans were the least likely. This could be due to the fact that African-American children are the most likely to be financially locked into poor-quality school districts, or that black Americans have...

The governing bodies of faculty and undergraduate students at Cornell University have voted against a proposed partnership with China’s Peking University (PKU), citing the state-run institution’s poor record of academic freedom and human rights. In a 16-39 vote with 20 abstentions, the Cornell Faculty Senate on Wednesday rejected a non-biding resolution endorsing a proposed dual-degree program between Cornell and PKU, one of the 76 top-tier universities directly administered by the Chinese Ministry of Education. The proposed two-year program, according to the website of Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration (pdf), would allow graduates to obtain a master of management in hospitality...

American colleges and universities pose an existential threat to our nation that hosts and so lavishly supports them. In fact, they are the single biggest threat to Western civilization, now over 2,000 years old. If you are like most people, you probably think the previous two sentences were overly bold, hyperbolic, preposterous. Maybe even crazy. And you would be wrong. The rot emanating from institutions of higher learning in the United States is more dangerous even than the coronavirus. The virus of wokeism eats away its hosts’ mental capacity and renders them ignorant, bitter, hostile, unstable, overly emotional and intellectually...

One of the immutable rules when it comes to Washington politicians addressing important policy issues, is that they consistently ignore the law of unintended consequences.A recent example is the little noticed effort by congressional Democrats to change a key component of federal funding regulations for higher education called the “90/10 rule.”Under the rule, proprietary colleges and universities may derive no more than 90 percent of their revenues from federal student aid programs, with 10 percent coming from non-federal funding.Liberal activists who are determined to drive proprietary colleges out of business want to change the equation. They claim that student veterans...

People To Have More Babies Republicans must become not just the party of workers but also the party of families. They should do it by upping Joe Biden’s proposed child tax credit into something bigger.As the Republican Party charts its path during a Joe Biden presidency, there will undoubtedly be calls from the corporate wing to return to the neoliberal orthodoxy that defined it under the Bushes, Mitt Romney, and Paul Ryan. This would be a profound mistake.President Donald Trump has repositioned Republicans as the party of workers with his focus on trade, industrial, and immigration issues. By crafting an...

The enrollment and financial woes of the State System of Higher Education (PASSHE) are well known. And fixing the mess will be a monumental challenge, concludes an analysis by the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy. The 14-school system’s enrollment has plunged by 21 percent from its 2010 peak of 119,513 students. But while the student census has, on net, fallen precipitously, commensurate reductions in faculty, other staffing and standalone institutions that kept costs unacceptably high were not considered. Until recently, that is. The terrible financial picture at PASSHE reflects two major causes, notes Jake Haulk, president-emeritus of the Pittsburgh think...