Hans Bader is a former senior attorney at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Liberty Unyielding on November 1, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. It has been edited to fit Minding the Campus’s style guidelines. Kamala Harris will make campus censorship worse through her judicial appointments as president. Progressive judges appointed by Joe Biden have upheld punishment and investigation of moderate, conservative, and libertarian […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Liberty Unyielding on August 5, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. It has been edited to fit Minding the Campus’s style guidelines. If a university is ordered by the government to investigate each instance of speech that is bigoted to determine if it cumulatively contributed to a “hostile environment” for […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Liberty Unyielding on July 6, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. It has been edited to fit Minding the Campus’s style guidelines. The Education Department is pressuring colleges to restrict speech that denounces pro-Palestine protesters or denigrates Jews or Palestinians—such as speech calling pro-Palestine protesters “terrorists”—under the rationale that such speech […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Liberty Unyielding on May 6, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. When it is ideologically convenient, progressives switch back and forth between being “free speech absolutists” in defense of their own side’s speech, to being avid censors of ugly speech by the other side. A classic example is the […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Liberty Unyielding on May 4, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. You have a right to free speech, but that doesn’t give you a First Amendment right to camp out on my lawn with protest signs. That’s trespassing. But government officials sometimes allow trespassing when they sympathize with […]
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If you are hostile to “western scientific ways of knowing,” such as objectivity and the scientific method, that will help you get a job in the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. As economic historian Phil Magness notes, “This ‘faculty job’ at a tax-funded public institution is nothing […]
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Yesterday, Joe Biden announced a plan to write off $10,000 in student loans for most people who haven’t paid off their student loans — and $20,000 in student loans for people who received Pell Grants. Biden’s plan will increase inflation, inequality, tuition, and the national debt. News articles have estimated the cost of Biden’s plan […]
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America’s colleges are so left-wing that even a progressive doctor who once headed Planned Parenthood is facing calls that she be canceled as a speaker. The College Fix reports on how public-health professors are trying to cancel her speech: More than 400 public health professionals and “allies” wrote a statement calling for the cancellation of […]
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The Minneapolis Public Schools have adopted a race-based layoff provision that violates the Constitution and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. “A Minneapolis teachers union contract stipulates that white teachers will be laid off or reassigned before “educators of color” in the event Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) needs to reduce staff,” reports Alpha News: […]
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The Biden administration has just proposed a Title IX regulation that would redefine sexual harassment more broadly in schools and universities, to restrict speech that some courts have ruled is protected by the First Amendment. The new definition would discard the current definition used by the Education Department, which is based on a 1999 Supreme […]
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In hopes of “reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” “Purdue University officials have begun to explore plans to build nuclear reactors on campus to establish a clean and sustainable energy source,” reports The College Fix. “The plan would include the development of Small Modular Reactors across Purdue’s campus.” University spokesman Tim Doty said that nuclear plants would […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Liberty Unyielding on April 10, 2022, and is republished here with permission. Joe Biden has provided billions of dollars in handouts to high-income people. The most recent example is his administration’s decision last week to suspend student loan repayments yet again, through August 31. It did that even though people with big student loans tend […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Liberty Unyielding on March 28, 2022, and is republished here with permission. Under the Freedom of Information Act, federal agencies are supposed to respond to records requests within 20 working days, and hand over the records “promptly” thereafter, if they aren’t exempt from disclosure. But rather than doing that, they frequently violate […]
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A Virginia State Senator has proposed a bill targeting “hate speech” and “racially insensitive expressions” in academic or athletic competitions between schools — even at private schools. His bill, SB 285, doesn’t define “hate speech,” though. There are many places in society where hate speech is protected by the First Amendment, and thus can’t be […]
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Schools are teaching critical race theory, even as liberal education reporters deny it is taught anywhere, and falsely claim it is not taught in in even a single school system. Detroit’s school superintendent, Nikolai Vitti, says critical race theory is deeply embedded in his school system: “Our curriculum is deeply using critical race theory, especially […]
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In a recent video, filmmaker Ami Horowitz asks students at the University of California, Berkeley to pledge money to the Taliban so that it can mount terrorist attacks inside the United States. The students happily pledge their money to enable that. They belong to a woke, self-hating academic culture that is reshaping our society. “We’re […]
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The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has released 280 records in response to a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act. But it continues to withhold 3,862 more records, as it explained in an October 25 letter releasing the 280 records. The records are emails from the Commission’s former Chair, Catherine Lhamon, who now heads […]
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Colleges are increasingly demanding that students disclose details of their private lives in Title IX training. For example, Campus Reform reported that a “mandatory online course at the University of Southern California (USC) asks students to disclose the number of sexual encounters they have had over the past three months” as part of its “Title […]
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A recent lawsuit illustrates yet again that the Biden administration makes false claims without evidence. On June 4, the Biden administration issued a notice calling for new federal policies about school discipline, in light of the fact that “students of color” are disciplined more often than “their White peers.” It cited a controversial report by […]
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The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights was sued on Monday by the Bader Family Foundation, for illegally refusing to comply with the Freedom of Information Act. The Commission claimed that a FOIA request for the outgoing emails of two Commission officials over a six-month period was too non-specific to qualify as a FOIA request, because […]
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The progressive state of Oregon is getting rid of reading, writing, and math requirements for high-school graduation, in the name of helping “Latinx” and minority students. As Jazz Shaw notes, it’s doing this “based on allegations of racism.” The “governor’s deputy communications director said that dropping the requirements ‘will benefit Oregon’s Black, Latino, Latina, Latinx, […]
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On July 15, a Reuters fact-check claimed that “many Americans embrace falsehoods about critical race theory.” But it is Reuters that embraced a falsehood, not the American people. Reuters denied that critical race theory teaches that “discriminating against white people is the only way to achieve equality,” saying that was a “misconception” promoted by “conservative […]
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“Columbia and other wealthy universities steer master’s students to federal loans that can exceed $250,000. After graduation, many learn the debt is well beyond their means,” notes the Wall Street Journal. The Journal reports on Columbia University’s Master of Fine Arts Film program, one of the worst examples, in an article titled “Financially Hobbled for […]
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Are schools guilty of racism just because they suspend more black students than white students? Federal courts often say no, because it could be the result of a higher rate of misbehavior by black students, rather than racism. Surveys and studies show black students misbehave at higher rates in school. But the Biden administration thinks […]
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The president of George Mason University wants to give minorities a big advantage in hiring until the faculty is as heavily minority as the school’s student body and the future, mostly non-white U.S. population. This is illegal, say lawyers and law professors. Indeed, GMU’s president, Gregory Washington, recognized that objection in an April 15 email […]
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In a misleading email to alumni, the leadership of Harvard University implied, without evidence, that police killed three people out of racism. It cited the “killings of Adam Toledo,” “Daunte Wright” and “George Floyd” in railing against the “evil of racism” and police killings of people “by virtue of the color of their skin.” “The […]
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The Biden administration is using federal money to get states to inject radical racial theories into children’s history classes. As Stanley Kurtz notes in the National Review: The woke revolution in the classroom is about to go federal…President Biden’s Department of Education has signaled its intent to impose the most radical forms of Critical Race […]
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President Biden nominated lawyer Kristen Clarke to run the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, even though she once said that whites are inferior to blacks, and she has long opposed civil rights for white victims of racial discrimination. “Melanin endows blacks with greater mental, physical and spiritual abilities,” while “most whites are unable to produce […]
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Can a state punish its school teachers for not having a progressive ideology? That’s what Virginia’s Board of Education appears to be doing. Its newly adopted “performance standard” for teacher evaluations is whether a “teacher demonstrates a commitment to equity and provides instruction and classroom strategies that result in culturally inclusive and responsive learning environments […]
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Today [article originally published on March 28, 2021] is the 15th anniversary of Duke University’s suspension of its Lacrosse team in response to false allegations that members of the team committed a racist gang-rape of a black stripper. The gang rape turned out to be a hoax. But long after DNA evidence and cell phone […]
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