Elite Universities Ranked Lowest for Free Speech, Report Finds

NYU Students

Some of the most prominent elite universities in the nation have been ranked lowest for freedom of speech, according to a report released Thursday.

Harvard, Columbia, New York University (NYU), the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) and Barnard College make up the bottom five in a free speech ranking of 251 universities, according to a report by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and College Pulse. The report cited several incidents of “suppression of free expression” at the schools, including disruption of events and sanctions on students and staff for expressing their views as the reasoning behind the schools’ low rankings.

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Male Students Do Better on ACT, Get Less Financial Aid

Male College Student

The gender gap in higher education is growing – and it may be due to how universities admit students and help them pay for school.

Men earn 42 percent of bachelor’s degrees, 38 percent of master’s, and 44 percent of doctorates, according to the American Institute for Boys and Men.

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Commentary: DEI Litmus Tests Must End

Ideological litmus tests have no place in higher education. They weaponize loyalty and contradict the university’s purpose of fostering academic inquiry and informed debates. Scholars cannot pursue truth or progress if they are denied academic jobs based on their devotion to a specific political ideology or philosophy. 

I applaud states like Florida, Alabama, Wyoming, Tennessee, and Texas that have banned varied Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) requirements that mandate loyalty to its agenda. But we need to go further. Congress can deny federal funding to universities that impose DEI on faculty, administrators, and staff. Conservative lawmakers are already trying to “dismantle” DEI in the federal government and others are currently weighing defunding universities over Title VI violations. They should extend defunding to universities that require DEI. 

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Commentary: Harvard May Never Have to Face Accountability for Claudine Gay’s Actions

Claudine Gay

In an ideal world, wrongdoers face swift and exact justice for their misdeeds. In reality, the legal system is costly. Justice comes at a steep price, one that I, and others whose works were allegedly plagiarized by Harvard’s Claudine Gay and others cannot afford.

After months of turmoil and legal back and forth, it is with a heavy heart that I announce that my intended copyright infringement case against former Harvard President Claudine Gay and the Harvard Corporation — a legal complaint that would have requested a jury trial — cannot be filed as planned in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee. The inability to raise sufficient funds for a trial (a steep minimum of $100,000 to $250,000) and the knowledge that the losing party could be ordered to cover the legal expenses of the victors, to which no limits exist under federal copyright law, gave me pause.

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Nearly a Third of ‘Pro-Palestine’ Campus Protesters Had a Job Offer Rescinded, Survey Finds

Pro-Palestine protesters

A recent survey found that 3 in 10 college students or recent graduates had job offers rescinded as a result of their “pro-Palestine” activism.

Intelligent surveyed 672 students or recent college graduates who have engaged in anti-Israel activism and found that 29% of them had a job offer rescinded in the past six months and 55% believe there was bias against them in the hiring process because of their activism.

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Commentary: The Most Important Trait for Yale’s Next President Is Courage

Yale University campus

On August 31, 2023, Yale’s 23rd president, Peter Salovey, announced he would be stepping down. Since this announcement, much has transpired in the world of American higher education: the resignation of Harvard and UPenn presidents, the creation of campus encampments nationwide, and the cancelation of commencements at Columbia and USC. These developments point to an American higher education system that is malfunctioning. The breakdown we are witnessing at Yale’s peer institutions will continue until leaders are chosen for their courage to apply wisdom to divisive issues.

America’s Founders understood the importance of higher education. Of all his great accomplishments, only three made it onto Thomas Jefferson’s headstone: Author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statue of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and the father of the University of Virginia. Jefferson knew that America’s ability to be great and good – UVA’s motto – depended on the presence of high-functioning universities. America’s first polymath, Ben Franklin, famously said, “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” Framers like Franklin and Jefferson understood the value of academic pursuits, and their example lit a spark that motivated generations of Americans to pursue higher education.

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Commentary: Five Ways Campus Turmoil Hurts Democrats and America

Campus protesters

Higher education is sinking lower and lower. That’s bad news for our country, which has benefited enormously from having the world’s best system of higher education. And it’s bad news for Democrats, who face a tight election. Their party is closely tied to education at all levels, especially at elite universities. It is the party of experts, after all, and the party of the left. Universities are both. Moreover, since the Democrats control the Executive Branch, the public holds them primarily accountable for ensuring social order. Their failures are obvious to the average voter. That’s bound to hurt Democratic Party candidates in November.

Parents with children in college or expected to matriculate soon have every right to expect their kids can learn in peace, hear diverse viewpoints, and speak freely without threats, intimidation, or indoctrination. That’s true whether the parents are Jewish or not. Decent Americans won’t tolerate threats against Jewish students any more than they would tolerate them against blacks, Muslims, Christians, or Asian Americans. Yet they now see those threats against Jewish students every day, and, at many universities, they don’t see administrators standing up for their rights.

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New Plan Offers College Aid in Exchange for Pennsylvania Residency

Scott Martin

As the public awaits more details of Gov. Josh Shapiro’s higher education reform plans, Republican legislators offer some ideas of their own.

During a Wednesday press conference, a gaggle of House and Senate leaders pushed for the creation of a grant program that offers scholarships to students who commit to stay in Pennsylvania. They also want to launch a similar deal for out-of-state students to get in-state tuition if they put down roots in the commonwealth.

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Commentary: The Battle for Higher Education

College Student

Higher education is making news these days.  In Congressional testimony, the Presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn couldn’t tell whether calling for the genocide of the Jews constituted harassment without knowing the context.  The effects of their testimony reverberate.

Days later, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) issued a lengthy report condemning “Political Interference and Academic Freedom in Florida’s Public Higher Education System.”  Prominently featured was a detailed complaint about New College of Florida, where I serve as admissions director.

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Commentary: Let the Donor Revolution Begin

The donor revolts at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and elsewhere are the long-overdue wake up calls that their faculty and administrators needed. The overwhelming majority of politically progressive faculty and administrators have long guarded their right to advance their cherished political causes inside and outside the classroom, while punishment has awaited those who challenge the shibboleths. Instead of the free exchange of ideas and the intellectual capaciousness that ultimately advance social justice, it is now clearer than ever that it is not social justice they have fostered but mindless ideology and hate.

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Commentary: Thales College Restores True Education to the University

I am delighted to say that I will be joining the new Thales College, as a professor of humanities. What that means, I shall try to describe by way of contrast.

Let us suppose I am at almost any other American or Canadian college. I am considering Caravaggio’s painting of Mary Magdalen. Right there, I’m skating on thin ice. That isn’t just because the painting has a religious theme. It’s because I can depend upon almost nothing, among even the brightest college students, when it comes to knowledge of the history of art, or of the Renaissance in particular; no understanding of why such a painting was impossible to be executed two centuries before, or of why no one would have conceived the desire to paint such a figure, alone as she is, in a moment of intense introspection, careless of the baubles of her trade that lie scattered about her on the floor — baubles that yet have considerable dramatic power, because Caravaggio supposes that we know, as she does not, what they signify, and what momentous events are in store for her.

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Gallup Poll: Fewer Americans Have Confidence in Higher Education

On Tuesday, a new Gallup poll suggested that Americans across all demographic groups are less confident in the institution of higher education than they were several years ago.

According to Axios, the Gallup survey in question shows that just 36 percent of Americans report having confidence in colleges and universities. In 2018, that number stood at 48 percent, which itself was a drop from 57 percent in 2015.

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States Are Pushing to Force Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Programs in Higher Education

As Republican-led states fight for laws to cut Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives on college campuses, other state legislatures are pushing to enshrine the programs into law, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported.

At least 29 bills have been filed in 17 states to crack down on DEI programs, but states such as New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey are debating legislation that would do the opposite, the Chronicle reported. DEI has become a point of contention as state lawmakers grapple with the role the programs should have on campus, as Democrats argue that the programs help bolster diversity on campuses while Republicans challenge that they stoke division. 

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Commentary: Success in Education Will Determine Civilizational Order vs Post-Modern Anarchy

There is no subject of greater importance – and controversy – today in America than that of education. And nowhere is the clash between civilizational order and post-modern anarchy on greater display than with New College of Florida, a tiny liberal-arts college in Sarasota. The New York Times recently described the reaction of “students, parents, and faculty members” to Governor Ron DeSantis’s reforms of the college in a curious way: “a political assault on their academic freedom.”

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Commentary: College for Some, Not All

Over recent decades, parents, grandparents, and high school students have been subject to a barrage of messages suggesting that everyone should go to college. Higher education is the pathway to more money and more status, we’re told.

Few have asked, “Is this path best for all young people, and is it best for our country?” Many young people are not cut out for college, but they have other talents. The vast majority of jobs in this country don’t require a college degree, although many do require additional training.

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Pompeo: China Is ‘Inside Every Major American University’

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News that “the Chinese Communist Party’s inside every major American university today with research dollars and with their students.”

“They’re at the University of Pennsylvania, too,” he continued. “And we now know that this Chinese money, these Chinese officials met classified documents in that space.”

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Commentary: Drain the Academic Swamp

Recently, a number of medical schools have joined the anti-European, anti-Christian, pro-Marxist woke bandwagon. According to physicist Lawrence Krauss, “the American Association of Medical Colleges has approved a Diversity-Equity-Inclusion based curriculum, which the AAMC Council of Deans Chair says is as important as teaching the latest scientific breakthroughs.”

Meanwhile, our military leadership continues to push incoherent gender ideology upon a captive audience of young soldiers, sailors, and airmen. And justices at the heights of our judiciary system, because of political correctness, dare not even define the word woman.

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Fewer Students, Bigger Budget Requests for Pennsylvania Higher Education

The pandemic has not been kind to Pennsylvania higher education: Its colleges have seen a 6.4% enrollment drop for freshmen since spring 2020.

The data, from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, is a reminder that Pennsylvania’s shrinking population of college-aged youth has made it harder for colleges to fill seats. The two-year decline means that 22,738 fewer students are on campuses now.

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Nelson Proposes Pennsylvania College Voucher Program

State Rep. Eric Nelson (R-Greensburg) on Wednesday announced a proposal to redirect $580 million previously allotted to three major Pennsylvania universities to a college voucher program.

Under the representative’s measure, students from households with up to $100,000 in annual earnings would receive yearly grants of as much as $8,000 per year for higher education. Those from households earning between $100,000 and $250,000 would get vouchers of $4,000. These payments would be managed via an expansion of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE), an agency Nelson said has demonstrated an ability to efficiently oversee Pennsylvania students’ financial assistance.

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Commentary: Attending a Different Selective Institution

May is National College Decision Month, when 1.2 million Class of 2022 high school seniors must commit to the institution where they’ll spend the next four-to-six years. 

Two of those high school seniors, Bill and Jane, will soon graduate and both will attend a very selective, but very different, institution in the fall. Let’s explore and project the net return on their decisions, six-years from now, based on facts and national averages.

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Commentary: MIT Bucks the Trend and Reinstates Its SAT/ACT Requirement

SAT multiple choice exam with a number 2 pencil

In case you missed it, on Monday MIT announced that they would be reinstating their SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles. Like many universities, MIT had ditched the tests during the pandemic.

Even prior to the pandemic, however, there had been a widespread push to abandon these tests to enhance diversity.

“Data shows tests like the SAT are biased against students from low-income households. Poorer students tend to perform worse on the test,” CNN reported in 2015. “Blacks and Hispanics also consistently score lower on the SAT than whites.” (CNN conveniently left out that Asian Americans score much higher than whites, presumably because it didn’t fit the narrative.)

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Democratic Socialist Student Groups Are Pushing Leftist Policies on College Campuses

group of people protesting, holding megaphone

Following student pushback against a Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) flyer found at the University of California, San Diego, Campus Reform took a deep dive into what other progressive agendas the national student chapters supported.

In doing so, Campus Reform found that YDSA chapters across the country are demanding free tuition and debt forgiveness, advocating for the recognition of student employee unions, and pressing to take “community control” of police departments.

Additionally, these groups have recently hosted rallies, meetings, and book discussions on topics such as abortion, minimum wage, marijuana decriminalization, and Palestine.

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Commentary: Women’s Opportunities Are Being Taken Away by ‘Womxn’

In celebration of Women’s History Month, colleges and universities are hosting events to celebrate womxn, not women.

In an effort to become more inclusive of those that deny biological reality, higher education is in fact erasing women’s opportunities to excel in academics, athletics, and career tracks.

I am proud to be a woman. Women have been pivotal to our society. But making women compete with men undermines females’ ability to achieve success.

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Schweizer: U.S. Institutions of Higher Learning Fail to Report Millions of Dollars from China

TRANSCRIPT: McCabe: Investigative journalist Peter Schweizer, in his new book Red-Handed, reports how the Chinese Communist Party has targeted American institutions of higher learning. Schweizer told The Star News Network how these institutions, after receiving funds from communist China, have worked to suppress criticism of the communist regime there and…

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Texas Lt. Governor Proposes Eliminating Tenure to Rid CRT from Public Universities

Dan Patrick of Texas

The Texas Lieutenant Governor has stated his priority to eliminate tenure in an attempt to stop Critical Race Theory (CRT) from “poisoning the minds of the next generation.”

During a Feb. 18 press conference, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick argued that academia has been infiltrated by “tenured, leftist professors” and called for additional oversight methods to crack down on the controversial curriculum. 

Patrick defined CRT as “an offshoot of critical legal studies, which is an offshoot of a socialist program (which says) that everything that happened in life is based on racism.”

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American Bar Association Requires Law Schools to Educate Students on ‘Bias, Cross-Cultural Competency, and Racism’

Man in a suit writing on paperwork at a table

The American Bar Association House of Delegates has approved new law school accreditation standards at the 2022 ABA Midyear Meeting, of which two amendments were focused on “diversity.”

In order to eliminate bias and enhance diversity, the ABA’s amended Standard 303(c) requires that “a law school shall provide education on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism: (1) at the start of the program of legal education, and (2) at least once again before graduation.”

To fulfill this requirement, “Law schools must demonstrate that all law students are required to participate in a substantial activity designed to reinforce the skill of cultural competency and their obligation as future lawyers to work to eliminate racism in the legal profession.”

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Pennsylvania Professor Files Lawsuit Following Dismissal over Anonymous Tweets

Greg Manco, Ph.D. of St. Joseph University

Professor Gregory Manco has filed a lawsuit against his former employer, St. Joseph’s University, citing undue discrimination after a previous student of his complained to the institution about what she perceived to be racist activity on Manco’s Twitter account. 

Manco had served as the Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics at St. Joe’s for 17 years. In 2017, Hadassah Colber, a student that Manco failed, claimed that she found offensive tweets on the scholar’s anonymous Twitter account, Broad + Liberty reports. 

According to the lawsuit, Colbert learned about his Twitter account on Jan. 22, 2021, and emailed the University to complain about the “racist” and “transphobic” content she saw.

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Professor, ‘Free Black Thought’ Co-Founder Discusses Why He Teaches English, Not ‘Social Justice’

Dr. Erec Smith of York College of Pennsylvania

Erec Smith is an associate professor of Rhetoric and Composition at York College of Pennsylvania. After experiencing cancel culture 2019, he has since become an advocate for viewpoint diversity, especially in the Black community.

In a June 2021 “On the Media” podcast, Smith discussed the incident that led him to be “canceled” in higher education.

He spoke to WNYC Studios’ Shamed and Confused podcast about “Feeling ‘canceled’ in Academia,” and was featured in a December 2021 segment on Reputation.Erec Smith is an associate professor of Rhetoric and Composition at York College of Pennsylvania. After experiencing cancel culture 2019, he has since become an advocate for viewpoint diversity, especially in the Black community.

In a June 2021 “On the Media” podcast, Smith discussed the incident that led him to be “canceled” in higher education.

He spoke to WNYC Studios’ Shamed and Confused podcast about “Feeling ‘canceled’ in Academia,” and was featured in a December 2021 segment on Reputation.

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ANALYSIS: A Look at Universities’ Foreign Contribution Filings

College student studying

Data collected by the US Department of Education show that during 2021, colleges and universities amassed a total of $1.3 billion in contracts and gifts from foreign sources, including $337 million from foreign governments.

The U.S. Department of Education has expressed concern about foreign nations using funds to influence American institutions of higher education. “For at least two decades,” the Department said in a report published last October, “the industry has been on direct notice that at least some of these foreign sources are hostile to the United States and are targeting their investments (i.e., “gifts” and “contracts”) to project soft power, steal sensitive and proprietary research, and spread propaganda.”

Campus Reform has covered how China uses Confucius Institutes to exert influence on American schools. Needs a line about what Confucius Institutes are Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo designated the program as “part of the Chinese Communist Party’s global influence and propaganda apparatus.”

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University Accused of Weaponizing Public Records Law to Harass, Intimidate Faculty

Indiana University campus

Indiana University paid a law firm to file a public records request against itself to search the emails of a law professor who was investigating its presidential search process, the professor claims, citing an invoice for the firm’s services.

Steve Sanders said he learned about the Access to Public Records Act (APRA) request made by Hoover Hull Turner, “presumably to attempt to find out how I’ve learned what I know,” on the eve of publishing his investigation on Medium in October.

The request covered any presidential search-related emails he may have sent or received with trustees, search committee members, former officials and recently departed President Michael McRobbie.

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Commentary: The Pandemic Has Increased the Need for Student Tutoring

Two people writing on a dry-erase board

The first time I caught a plagiarized essay was at the beginning of my career as an English professor over 20 years ago. Two of my students had turned in papers with more than a few suspiciously similar phrases, and a quick Google search revealed that they had lifted whole paragraphs directly from an academic website about American poetry that was, as far as I could tell, honestly trying to help students understand the subject.

The culture of student cheating on the Internet has come a long way since then, and the COVID-19 pandemic has brought it into even sharper focus. One thing that has changed dramatically in the past two decades is that students aren’t turning to crude HTML sites put together by well-intentioned poetry scholars to cheat on their assignments, but to sophisticated “homework help” sites like Chegg.com that grew by almost 70 percent during the pandemic, reaching a current market cap of $8.5 billion.

Chegg is trying to encourage university faculty to partner with it, claiming (accurately) that “90% of college students say they need more help with their studies.” But the solution to helping students with their homework isn’t to move them onto online platforms that could easily be exploited for student cheating. Rather, students need to work with peer tutors on their own campuses.

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University President Calls out Chinese Students He Says ‘Harassed’ Their Dissident Peer

After a Chinese student at Purdue University spoke out against the Chinese Communist Party, fellow Chinese students at the American school allegedly threatened to report him to China for espionage. 

Zhihao Kong told ProPublica that after he posted a letter condemning the Tiananmen Square Massacre, China’s Ministry of State Security began threatening him and his family. 

“His family back home, in this case China, was visited and threatened by agents of that nation’s secret police,” President Mitch Daniels said in an email published by the Purdue Exponent. 

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Commentary: Five Times Campuses Ruined Holidays in 2021

two people with Santa hats looking at Christmas tree

Woke and leftist ideologies often target traditions and celebrations around holidays, particularly those that pertain to Christianity and American identity. 

With 2021 coming to an end, Campus Reform has compiled a list of the top five instances of colleges and universities ruining holidays on campus.

1. Colleges celebrate Valentine’s Day with ‘Sex in the Dark’

Multiple colleges hosted a question and answer “Sex in the Dark,” a virtual Q&A event with health experts, just in time for Valentine’s Day. 

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Commentary: Why I Stopped Donating to Harvard, My Alma Mater

The statue of John Harvard, seen at Harvard Yard

This year, for the first time since graduation some two decades ago, I did not donate to either of my alma maters. Like many of you, I have become disillusioned with the illiberalism on many college campuses and could no longer support them with an annual gift. While higher education has historically tipped to the political left, the gap has widened in recent decades. Analyzing data on faculty ideological leanings, the American Enterprise Institute reported that “in less than 30 years the ratio of liberal identifying faculty to conservative faculty had more than doubled to 5.” 

At Harvard, where I attended graduate school, the faculty political imbalance is particularly striking. According to a 2021 survey by The Harvard Crimson, the college newspaper, out of 236 faculty replies only 7 people said they are “somewhat” or “very conservative,” while 183 respondents indicated that they are “somewhat” or “very liberal.” A similar problem plagues my undergraduate college, Bowdoin. 

The absence of my meager donations won’t matter to the colleges I attended, each of which has billions of dollars in endowment money. But big alumni donors at some leading universities are using their influence to improve free thought and inquiry on college campuses. 

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Commentary: Five Times Campuses Ruined Holidays in 2021

two people with Santa hats looking at Christmas tree

Woke and leftist ideologies often target traditions and celebrations around holidays, particularly those that pertain to Christianity and American identity. 

With 2021 coming to an end, Campus Reform has compiled a list of the top five instances of colleges and universities ruining holidays on campus.

1. Colleges celebrate Valentine’s Day with ‘Sex in the Dark’

Multiple colleges hosted a question and answer “Sex in the Dark,” a virtual Q&A event with health experts, just in time for Valentine’s Day. 

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Commentary: Why I Stopped Donating to Harvard, My Alma Mater

The statue of John Harvard, seen at Harvard Yard

This year, for the first time since graduation some two decades ago, I did not donate to either of my alma maters. Like many of you, I have become disillusioned with the illiberalism on many college campuses and could no longer support them with an annual gift. While higher education has historically tipped to the political left, the gap has widened in recent decades. Analyzing data on faculty ideological leanings, the American Enterprise Institute reported that “in less than 30 years the ratio of liberal identifying faculty to conservative faculty had more than doubled to 5.” 

At Harvard, where I attended graduate school, the faculty political imbalance is particularly striking. According to a 2021 survey by The Harvard Crimson, the college newspaper, out of 236 faculty replies only 7 people said they are “somewhat” or “very conservative,” while 183 respondents indicated that they are “somewhat” or “very liberal.” A similar problem plagues my undergraduate college, Bowdoin. 

The absence of my meager donations won’t matter to the colleges I attended, each of which has billions of dollars in endowment money. But big alumni donors at some leading universities are using their influence to improve free thought and inquiry on college campuses. 

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Commentary: The Flaw in Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying’s Proposal for the Future of Humanity

Bret Weinstein podcast

Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, evolutionary biologists and visiting fellows at Princeton University, have written a fascinating new book, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, which Penguin Random House released in September.

The instant New York Times bestseller is riddled with interesting ideas and clever insights, ultimately arriving at a radical conclusion about how humanity must be governed in the future if we are to avoid civilizational collapse. However, the book’s concluding argument is built upon one fundamental economic fallacy, and to understand the flaw in the proposal is to understand how truly catastrophic the pursuit of Weinstein and Heying’s vision would be.

The Fear of Abundance

Weinstein and Heying’s fundamental claim is about the human propensity to seek economic growth, and the ultimate unsustainability of that goal.

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Stanford Extends Test-Optional Policy for Third Straight Year

Close up of a pencil on top of a multiple choice exam paper

Stanford University has made its admissions process test-optional for the third year in a row.

Following the arrival of COVID-19 in the United States, Stanford previously suspended standardized testing requirements for the 2020-21 undergraduate admissions cycle. Stanford School of Medicine ceased requiring the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT), and physics graduate applicants did not have to submit scores for the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) or the GRE subject test in physics.

Now, according to the university’s admissions site: “For both the current 2021-22 admission cycle and the following 2022-23 cycle,Stanford will not require ACT or SAT scores for first-year or transfer applicants. 

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Frat House Cannot Hang Its Own Christmas Wreath, University Insists

Christmas wreath on an oak door

Fraternity and sorority students at Emory University are not allowed to hang their own exterior Christmas decorations.

That policy was news to members of the Atlanta university’s Alpha Tau Omega (ATO) fraternity when Josh Gamse, assistant director of sorority and fraternity life, informed the chapter Dec. 3 that its wreath was violating school policy.

“Since this is the second violation of the policy, an incident report will be submitted to the Office of Student Conduct,” Gasme wrote in an email obtained by Campus Reform. 

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University Ordered to Pay Almost $2 Million After Students Win Religious Freedom Lawsuit

A federal judge ordered the University of Iowa (UI) to pay $1.9 million in fees and damages after two student groups won a series of religious discrimination lawsuits against the university. 

The Becket Fund, which represents Business Leaders in Christ, will receive $1.37 million while Intervarsity Christian Fellowship will get $533,000, Crux reports. 

Eric Baxter, a senior VP and counsel at The Becket Fund, told Campus Reform targeting students of faith “comes at a price.” 

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Emails Reveal University President ‘Struggled with Supporting Free Speech’ for Christian Activist’s Appearances on Campus

A Christian activist’s appearances at Salem State University prompted the institution to change its free speech policies while being legally compelled to uphold the individual’s First Amendment rights. 

Campus Reform has previously covered the activist, Chike Uzuegbunam during his legal fights to exercise free speech as he publicly promotes his religious views, which have come under scrutiny for their purported anti-LGBTQ messages. 

In October 2020, Uzuegbunam won his Supreme Court case against his institution after Georgia Gwinnett that his speech, which included controversial flyers, “should not be constitutionally protected,” Campus Reform reported in March. 

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Academic Journal Publishes Hoax on Conservative Takeover of Higher Ed

Man speaking in front of crowd

A prestigious academic journal has egg on its face for publishing a hoax paper that claimed to find widespread concerns about “undue” conservative influence in higher education.

“Right-wing money strongly appears to induce faculty and administrators … to believe that they are pressured to hire and promote people they regard as inferior candidates, to promote ideas they regard as poor, and to suppress people and ideas they regard as superior,” according to the abstract in Higher Education Quarterly.

Peer reviewers failed to perform basic due diligence on the paper submitted in April and approved in October, neglecting, for example, to verify that authors “Sage Owens” and “Kal Alvers-Lynde III” were UCLA professors as they claimed. Owens even used an encrypted email service for correspondence with the journal.

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Princeton Students Call out Dean’s Rittenhouse Email for ‘Factual Inaccuracies, Misconstrual, and Virtue Signaling’

Kyle Rittenhouse

Some Princeton university students are pushing back after receiving a politically-charged email from a dean following the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict.

Princeton University students enrolled in the School of Public and International Affairs received a Nov. 20 email, obtained by Campus Reform, titled “Our Moral Duty” from the dean of the school, Dean Amaney Jamal.

“Last August, Kyle Rittenhouse shot and killed two protestors and wounded a third in Kenosha, Wisconsin. During his trial, he emotionally broke down on the stand, saying he was acting in self-defense. Today, he was acquitted of all six charges against him, including three of which were homicide related,” the email read.

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‘Academic Fiasco’: Duke Student Leaders Vetoed Pro-Israel Student Organization

Christina Wang

The Duke Student Government (DSG) recently “chartered” a chapter of Students Supporting Israel (SSI), only to uphold its president’s veto of the organization days later.

The Chronicle reported that the Nov. 10 approval followed SSI’s stated intention to be “clear and confident pro-Israel voice on college campuses and to support students in grassroots pro-Israel advocacy.” 

Five days later, however, the outlet reported that the DSG president, Christina Wang, vetoed the body’s approval of SSI over a now deleted social media interaction reportedly between the group and an individual that did not conform to expected conduct for a student organization.

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Students Meet to Move Campus ‘Beyond Policing’ After Shooting Near Campus

University of Texas at Austin hosts their "#NationalNightOut "

After a shooting involving two non-university individuals occurred near the University of Texas at Austin over Halloween weekend, a segment of the student body is working to realize a vision of campus safety “beyond policing.”

Following the incident, The UT Senate of College Councils hosted an event titled “Campus Safety Beyond Policing” during which students discussed various ways to pursue a supposedly safer campus without needing UTPD. 

The event was led by the Equity and Inclusion Team of the Senate of College Councils, which opened up the meeting by stating that the purpose of the meeting was to “gain insight into what safety means to you beyond policing and how to best advocate for your needs.”

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Commentary: There Is No Room for ‘Privileging Feelings’ in the Marketplace of Ideas

Person holding a phone, group of people taking a photo together

In 2015, the University of Chicago issued a statement, referred to as the “Chicago Statement,” in response to “recent events nationwide that have tested institutional commitments to free and open discourse.”  Through the statement, the University reaffirmed its steadfast commitment to free speech and expression, including its “overarching commitment to free, robust, and uninhibited debate and deliberation among all members of the University’s community.”  

The statement emphasized that:

“[E]ducation should not be intended to make people comfortable, it is meant to make them think. Universities should be expected to provide the conditions within which hard thought, and therefore strong disagreement, independent judgment, and the questioning of stubborn assumptions, can flourish in an environment of the greatest freedom.”  

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Students Behind Viral Arizona State University Video Face Code of Conduct Charges, Faculty Say That Is Racist

Screen cap of student with a laptop that has a "Police Matter" sticker on it.

Faculty members are pushing back against Arizona State University for charging Code of Conduct violations against the female students who attempted to kick out two White men from the school’s Multicultural Community of Excellence Center earlier this year.

Campus Reform obtained a copy of the email asking faculty and staff to sign an “internal letter requesting that the University Administration revoke Code of Conduct violation charges against” the students behind the now viral video from September.

Leah Sarat, an associate professor of Religious Studies, sent the mass email, which was co-signed by 11 other individuals, on Nov. 2.

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Arizona State University Professor Calls Traditional Grading Racist, Suggests ‘Labor-Based Grading’ Instead

Asao Inoue

Arizona State University professor Asao Inoue recently ranted about “White language supremacy in writing classrooms,” during which he called for abolishing traditional grading in favor of “labor-based grading.”

The latter method scores assignments based on the amount of effort students put towards in the work, devaluing quality and accuracy in the grading.

During Nov. 5 lecture at the University of Tennessee titled “The Possibilities of Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies”, Inoue claimed that “White language supremacy in writing classrooms is due to the uneven and diverse linguistic legacies that everyone inherits, and the racialized white discourses that are used as standards, which give privilege to those students who embody those habits of white language already”.

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