Free Republic

Is the pandemic kaput? Clearly, not for some. And if it isn’t over yet, when might it ever be? COVID-19 isn’t going away — it’s part of the planet now. Apropos of its endurance, there’s news at the University of Notre Dame. These days, we’ve gleaned a couple of facts concerning the COVID vaccine: It doesn’t prevent COVID infection. It doesn’t prevent COVID transmission. Hence, contrary to claims by plenty of politicians, the pricks do not protect “other people.” ... Yet, on Tuesday, Notre Dame’s University Health Services reportedly made an injection-requiring announcement. Per an email posted by post-graduate fellow...

Yale University announced it will now require students to get a bivalent COVID-19 vaccine booster by the start of the 2023 spring semester. “Based on recent CDC recommendations, the university will require all undergraduate, graduate, and professional students—other than those with an approved medical or religious exemption—to receive an updated, bivalent COVID-19 vaccine booster by the start of the spring semester, even if they have previously received a monovalent booster,” Stephanie Spangler, Vice Provost for Health Affairs and Academic Integrity, wrote in a message to the Yale Community. She explained that the booster is necessary because “experience and research have...

‘We did not fight a civil war about oboe players,’ Chief Justice John Roberts said, shooting down Harvard’s attorney during oral arguments on Monday.WASHINGTON, D.C. — On Monday morning, I swept through the marbled halls of the Supreme Court of the United States, off First Street NE here in the nation’s capital, to enter the highest room of jurisprudence in the land. The sound of my footsteps muffled atop thick carpeting, the blinds on the massive windows mostly drawn and the room packed with rows upon rows of chairs, slowly filling.A daughter of India who grew up in Morgantown, West...

This school year has seen the most relaxed COVID-19 restrictions since the pandemic began, with optional and self-directed testing, a lift in the mask mandate and an near-full return to in-person instruction. ... “With the university lifting its guidelines and making it up to the individual, they’re making an already not accessible place less accessible,” Karen Wang ’24, who is a Student Accessibility Services peer liaison, said. “I find it really disturbing that people who don’t mask say that they care for their community, but your actions show you’re working within an ableist framework.” ... Colin Loria ’26 told the...

Lower vaccination rates among Republicans could explain the partisan gap, but some researchers say mask use and social distancing were bigger factors. Covid deaths are unevenly distributed among Republicans and Democrats. Average excess death rates in Florida and Ohio were 76% higher among Republicans than Democrats between March 2020 and December 2021, according to a working paper released last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Excess deaths refers to deaths above what would be anticipated based on historical trends. A study in June published in Health Affairs similarly found that counties with a Republican majority had a greater...

A dozen federal judges say they are no longer hiring clerks from Yale Law School, citing a slew of scandals that they say have undermined free speech and intellectual diversity. In addition to Fifth Circuit judge James Ho, who announced on Thursday that he would no longer hire law clerks from the nation’s top-ranked law school, 12 federal judges—both circuit and district court jurists—told the Washington Free Beacon they are joining the boycott. "Students should be mindful that they will face diminished opportunities if they go to Yale," said a prominent circuit court judge, whose clerks have gone on to...

A federal appellate judge confirmed that he will no longer consider graduates of Yale Law School for clerkships, citing the school's alleged penchant for "cancellation of views." Judge James C. Ho of the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit Court of Appeal spoke to the Kentucky Chapters Conference of the Federalist Society last week and openly criticized the so-called intolerant practices trumpeted by Yale Law and its graduates. "Yale not only tolerates the cancellation of views — it actively practices it," said Ho, a University of Chicago School of Law graduate who was nominated to his federal judiciary post by then-President Donald...

U.S. District Judge Sarah Merriam dismissed Dr. Bandy Lee’s wrongful termination lawsuit against Yale University. The lawsuit accused Yale of violating Lee’s free speech and professional obligations when she was not reappointed to her role with the school. She claims she was fired over her public statements criticizing then-President Donald Trump and his inner circle. Lee blames her termination on a letter sent to Yale by Trump’s friend Alan Dershowitz. Dr. Lee was not considered a staff member or employee of Yale University. She was a voluntary, unpaid staff member. She sued Yale last March over breach of contract and...

A Yale medical school professor took to Twitter over the weekend to complain about the White House’s claims that Joe Biden is putting in 8+ hours of work a day while he’s sick with Covid. Dr. Kimberly Sue said Joe Biden working with Covid “epitomizes white supremacy.”

Among those most intently following the House Jan. 6 committee hearings is Stewart Rhodes, the jailed leader of the Oath Keepers militia group, which was on the scene at the Capitol riot. The former Army paratrooper and Yale Law School graduate turned militia leader now spends 22 hours a day in solitary confinement and has had little contact with the outside world since he was jailed in January on charges of seditious conspiracy. He has not been deprived, however, of the panel’s highly publicized hearings, which echo in his otherwise spartan cell. “I’ve watched or listened to all of them,”...

Akhil Amar, the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, “is a self-described liberal, pro-choice Democrat.” Yet he supports the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade because, he said, “Roe just doesn’t cut it as a constitutional opinion.” In an appearance on the podcast Honestly with Bari Weiss, Amar, whose legal scholarship was cited multiple times in the Opinion of the Court that overturned Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, explained why he thinks the Constitution does not provide a right to terminate a pregnancy. “A person, like me, could be...

Campus Watch Research Originally published under the title "Georgetown University Whitewashes Islamism and Smears the West (again)." [Caption] Erdoan Shipoli (l) and John Esposito (r) of Georgetown Univ. use their positions to whitewash Islamism and attack Western civilization. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was former President George W. Bush's "teacher at Yale," stated Erdoan A. Shipoli at an April 27 Georgetown University webinar. While Rice was indeed a child prodigy on the piano, her intellectual prowess was not quite so grand as to land her an Ivy League teaching position as an adolescent. Born in 1954, she was only...

You may have heard somewhere along the way that the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a leftist icon, was a critic of the Court's controversial 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. She was, without question, a strong opponent of legalized abortion -- but believed that Roe itself was "too sweeping and vulnerable to attacks," as a New York Times piece put it last year. More context:Ruth Bader Ginsburg wasn’t really fond of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that in 1973 established a constitutional right to abortion. She didn’t like how it was structured. The ruling, she...

It’s been a rough couple of weeks for students at Yale Law School, who are responding to news that the Supreme Court may overturn Roe v. Wade with calls to accost their conservative classmates through "unrelenting daily confrontation" and toss the Constitution by the wayside.Members of the law school’s conservative Federalist Society, first year law student Shyamala Ramakrishna said in an Instagram post, are "conspirators in the Christo-fascist political takeover we all seem to be posting frantically about." Why, she asked, are they still "coming to our parties" and "laughing in the library" without "unrelenting daily confrontation?"Instagram post by law...

The Yale University Art Gallery has finalized plans to return a sculpture of a Buddhist goddess to Nepal, the university said Friday. The return is the latest in a series of museum repatriations of Nepali artifacts. Yale acquired the artifact in 2015, though the donor has never been disclosed. The decision to bring the work back home to Nepal was a “collaborative one” done in tandem with the country’s government last year, the museum’s director, Stephanie Wiles, said. Bishnu Prasad Gautam, acting consul general for Nepal, said in a statement that the return “will help Nepal preserve its history and...

Yale Divinity School, located in New Haven, ConnecticutTwo centuries after its founding, Yale Divinity School marked its first-ever non-Christian service in honor of Earth Day. Around 80 students gathered on April 22 outside the university’s Marquand Chapel to mark the annual observance with singing and non-denominational prayers, according to The Yale Daily News. A student organizer told the independent student newspaper it was the first time a non-Christian service was held at the Yale Divinity School in its nearly 200-year history. Master of divinity student Tasha Brownfield led the event, which she described as “Indigenous- and Black ecology-based with a...

I’m a college professor, which is one of those jobs that people outside the profession love to ask you about. For the better part of a decade, most of those conversations have been about one thing: free speech. Are universities, once sites of pure, open intellectual discourse, no longer so pure? What is the future of this endeavor I’ve dedicated my life to, if my peers and I are afraid to speak our minds? In one way, this interest makes sense. An enormous amount of high-profile media coverage has been dedicated to what is said, or not said, on certain...

Open letter is the latest and loudest salvo against the Ivy League law school U.S. senators, governors from across the country, and other prominent figures have signed an open letter asking Yale Law School to discipline the "vitriolic mob" that derailed a bipartisan panel on free speech, the latest call for consequences amid the law school's inaction. The letter, sent to the Yale Law administration, included signatures from Sens. Ted Cruz and Mike Lee, nine members of the House of Representatives, and the governors of Tennessee, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Mississippi, and Idaho. It urges the school to punish the "physical intimidation...

The Yale Law School professor who attempted to keep order as protesters disrupted a panel on free speech urged her colleagues in a Thursday letter to recognize the disruption as a "blatant violation of Yale’s Free Expression policy," a statement that contradicts conclusions reached by the law school's dean. "This is an important moment," Professor Kate Stith said in a memo to all tenured faculty at the law school. "Any formal determination that the March protest at Yale Law School did not violate Yale’s policy on Free Expression would set a terrible precedent at Yale and elsewhere." The memo came...

More than 400 Yale Law School students — over 60 percent of the school’s student body — signed an open letter against free speech and a police presence on campus after hysterical woke students shouted down a bipartisan panel about civil liberties featuring the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). Last month, nearly 120 woke Yale Law School students disrupted a bipartisan panel by trying to shout down and intimidate the speakers, who later had to be escorted out of the building by police. One of America’s best and brightest future Ivy League graduates screeched at the ADF representative: “I will literally...