Free Republic

DULUTH, Minn. - Students taking English classes in a Minnesota city will no longer have to read two American classics or write reports about them, the Duluth News Tribune reported. “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which contain racial slurs, will no longer be required reading for students in the Duluth Public School district’s English classes next fall. However, the books are not banned: They will be available in the school as optional reading for students, the News Tribune reported. The decision comes two months after a Virginia school temporarily banned the two novels after a...

A Staten Island elementary school scrapped its traditional father-daughter dance this coming Friday because of the Department of Education’s new gender guidelines.The DOE ordered schools to “eliminate” any “gender-based” practices like the dance in a March 2017 policy update unless they serve a “clear” educational purpose.The PS 65 shindig, set for Feb. 9, was abruptly postponed until next month after the school’s PTA realized the dance would run afoul of the rules.“Until we understand what we are legally permitted to do, we need to table this event,” PTA president Toni Bennett wrote to a private school-parents group on Facebook.Some parents...

The College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts announced its decision Saturday about whether to keep Crusader as its mascot and nickname or ditch it so as not to offend Muslims.

A student group formed to address “white privilege” at Ohio’s Kenyon College bars white members from asking questions of a person of color as part of a process to combat racism. “Racism is a white people problem,” said the group’s student founder, Juniper Cruz—a self-described “Queer Afro-Latinx Muslim”—at the first meeting, which drew about 50 students. The Whiteness Group, run through the school’s multicultural center, “works to educate students on whiteness, what it means to be white, and ways to deconstruct whiteness to work towards anti-racist actions,” Cruz said in an interview with The Thrill. “The discussions explore what it...

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) now boasts of student-led chapters at more than 100 colleges and universities across the United States. The SPLC on Campus program, founded in 2011, encourages students to start clubs to advance the SPLC’s agenda by fighting “hate and extremists groups” and promoting an “atmosphere of acceptance and respect” within their campus community. The organization now claims to have a presence at more than 100 colleges and universities, including the University of Northern Colorado, Florida Atlantic University, Virginia Commonwealth University, and many more, according to a map on its website. Chapters are encouraged to promote...

Back in December (just in time for the Christmas break), George Mason High School in Falls Church, Virginia held a school assembly with a special guest speaker. Washington Post columnist, author and Pulitzer Prize winner Amy Ellis Nutt arrived to lecture the children on a number of subjects, particularly transgender issues. That’s not surprising since she’s still pushing her 2015 book, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family. Cathy Ruse at The Daily Signal has a long, well developed breakdown of the speech given at the assembly as well as the question and answer session which followed. (Be warned...

A September 11th memorial poses peculiar problems for the modern American university. In the typical college of today, the “intellectual” vogues are anti-Americanism and sympathy for America’s enemies. By contrast, patriotism and support for our national defense are embraced about as strongly on college campuses as are capitalism and Dick Cheney. Anything that portrays America as under attack by Islamic terrorists, as even the most purely apolitical 9/11 memorial inevitably will, challenges the university dogma. And so it is often left to students properly to mourn and remember that tragic day when its anniversary arrives. But what if students wanted...

The president of Ithaca College in upstate pleaded no contest to sexually abusing a patient when she worked at a psychiatric hospital... Shirley M. Collado..., was accused of having a five-month sexual relationship with a female patient who was undergoing therapy for post-traumatic stress in 2000.... The patient, who was receiving treatment ... after she suffered the abuse of another doctor, alleged she and Collado kissed after a therapy session on May 20... Collado fondled her on at least two occasions and the two kissed after most individual therapy sessions in the following weeks... Collado received a 30-day suspension, 18...

Last year Cornell University undergraduate Neetu Chandak appeared on “Fox and Friends” to share her objection to a course description that seemed overly critical of President Donald Trump while glorifying former President Barack Obama. Now, in an essay in The College Fix, Chandak says her remarks on Fox expressing concerns about liberal bias at the college and the explicit agenda of the course led to threats on her life and such constant harassment that she sought therapy and was afraid to leave her apartment. “It is difficult to express conservative views as a college student without being called names, attacked...

Since my last column on academic hypocrisy several readers have written to express the view that intolerance toward conservative Christians is the only form of intolerance that academics are willing to tolerate. Such a view seems reasonable at first glance. Upon further reflection it misses the mark. Tolerance presupposes a) a moral judgment against something and b) the choice to permit it. Hence, my readers’ views are overly charitable. In order to elaborate, I ask my readers to imagine the following thought experiment:The Dean of Journalism at a large public university refuses to sponsor a speaker as a part of...

Academia turns a blind eye to the reality of actual socialism, the ideology practiced by Marxists while they sought the perfection of communism...someday. Socialism is ruining Venezuela today, and the whitewash pervades elite culture, even when the evil strikes close to home for an elite American small college. I attended Kenyon College (Gambier, Ohio) in the mid-1970s. I enjoyed my time there, made some great lifelong friends, and graduated with a sincere appreciation of the benefits of having a liberal arts education as it was practiced at the time. Over the years, my political perspective has moved well away from...

The sad thing is, this might be the only way to get academics interested in the Good Book. "Swarthmore College is offering a course next year that will survey 'queer and trans' readings of biblical texts' by using 'queer and trans' theoretical approaches,' with faculty staying silent on the specifics of the course material," Bethany Torstenson reports in The College Fix. "'Queering the Bible' is set to launch next fall and will be instructed by Gwynn Kessler, an associate professor of religion, according to Swarthmore’s course catalog." "The course, which is being offered through Swarthmore's Religion Department, promises to '[introduce]...

A large southern university hosts a total of 12 different LGBTQ organizations as well as an LGBTQ resource center, an arrangement that has led it to receive high marks by a national gay campus watchdog group. Campus officials, however, remain silent on how much of the school’s budget goes to fund these groups, and not a single one of the groups responded to repeated inquiries from The College Fix.

A Drexel University professor who asked for “White Genocide” for Christmas last year is finally resigning. George Ciccariello-Maher, now a former professor from Drexel, has a history of controversial tweets targeting conservatives and white people. “All I want for Christmas is White Genocide,” he tweeted, followed up by, “To clarify: When the whites were massacred during the Haitian Revolution, that was a good thing indeed.” In addition to targeting white people and conservatives, Ciccariello-Maher has also made controversial posts about soldiers. Ciccariello-Maher even went as far as blaming the “white supremacist patriarchy” for the Las Vegas shooting, going on to...

Merrimack College is offering undergraduates an opportunity to earn a degree in social justice and experience “real-world learning in the field.” According to the program description, the school “offers majors the chance to turn their passion for change, human rights, and a more just world into a career.”

Semester after semester, year after year, tensions on college campuses have escalated, with intolerance of dissent climbing to darkly censorious levels. Facing Trump-fueled rage and censorship from campus leftists, conservative students reacted by bringing in the most offensive speakers possible, such as Milo Yiannopoulos. At the University of California, Berkeley, this rhetorical bomb thrower's opponents lit real fires and smashed the place. Then at Middlebury College in March, protesters against Charles Murray, the conservative social scientist, disrupted his event so that he simply could not speak. They did not want debate. He was obliged to give his address on video...

The course, which will launch in the fall of 2018 through Swarthmore’s religion department, will examine the Bible through a queer lens. It will examine issues of sex, gender, and identity as they present themselves in one of human history’s most influential texts. “This course surveys queer and trans* readings of biblical texts. It introduces students to the complexity of constructions of sex, gender, and identity in one of the most influential literary works produced in ancient times,” the course description reads. “By reading the Bible with the methods of queer and trans* theoretical approaches, this class destabilizes long held...

According to a press release issued Monday, “Bunker Hill Community College" has eliminated its unconstitutional restrictions on free speech that prevented Navy veteran Jeff Lyons from passing out copies of the U.S. Constitution...... Additionally, the Massachusetts Community College System, which includes Bunker Hill, has agreed to review similar problematic policies at 6 of its other campuses.” This was the modern battle at Bunker Hill where a Navy veteran was told he needed permission to hand out copies of the very document he risked his life for,” said YAL President Cliff Maloney. “Free Speech does not require a permit and we...

The University of Virginia says it will not recognize a conservative club because the organization limits its membership to those who affirm conservative principles. In a letter on Friday, lawyers for Young America’s Foundation said the university’s policy is both “unconstitutional” and a violation of Virginia state law. “A pro-choice club may deny leadership positions to pro-life students, and a gun control group may determine that it does not wish to extend membership to NRA members,” Casey Mattox, senior counsel at the Alliance Defending Freedom, wrote in the letter. “Yet, by the terms of this policy — and its application...

Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey shuttered their world-famous Clown College in 1997, twenty years before America’s largest circus closed for business this year, after almost a century and half of entertaining us. But, fortunately for connoisseurs of the absurd, America’s progressive academics have stepped into the breach, beclowning themselves with fields of study so deranged that they seem comic, at best. The endless search for new reasons to declare personal oppression has met the infantile fascination with private bodily functions, and the results are as absurd as any sideshow attraction. However, the impetus behind the lurch leftward is grim...