Nothing says education quite like butt plugs, vibrators, dildos, edible underwear, and artificial female genitalia. At least that’s what they think over at the [regionally accredited] North Carolina State University, where the Union Activities Board shelled out approximately $300 for such enlightening items for their “Dirty Bingo” event.
What’s the point of the event? Says Lauryn Collier, president of the college’s UAB, “The certified educators plan to use some of the items (those that are appropriate) to demonstrate healthy sex practices.” Which ones are appropriate? No answer from Collier. The university refused to tell Campus Reform whether there would be age restrictions for the event.
Unsurprisingly, the most famous alumnus of NCSU is a local politician … John Edwards.
As massive open online courses (MOOCs) continue to soar in popularity, some administrators continue to assert that MOOCs lack the high quality and credit-worthiness of traditional college courses. But soon, all that may change.
“A rigorous evaluation of these courses showed that they meet ACE’s standards for college credit recommendations,” said Molly Corbett Broad, ACE president. “This is an important first step in ACE’s work to examine the long-term potential of MOOCs and whether this innovative new approach can engage students across the country and worldwide while helping raise degree completion, increasing learning productivity and deepening college curricula.”
Starting Feb. 7, students who meet all the necessary requirements and wish to sign up for one of the five approved courses can do so through Coursera’s Signature Track, which requires that students create a personalized profile with thorough identification measures. Signature Track profiles will cost students anywhere from $30 to $99, though there is a financial aid option for students who are unable to meet these cost requirements.
In order to become eligible for credit, students also must also take an online, proctored final exam once they complete the course. The online proctoring concept is a relatively new one, and Coursera is working with ProctorU to enable worldwide proctoring through webcams. Coursera plans to charge students $60 to $90 to take the proctored exam.
Students who complete one of the five approved courses can request a transcript with the credit recommendations outlined from ACE, and present it to their colleges. For now, it remains the individual college’s decision to either grant or withhold credit for the ACE CREDIT approved Coursera MOOCs.
“We are delighted to now offer students more avenues for academic success and achievement, particularly at a time when rising higher education costs mean, for many, an incomplete degree, or no degree at all,” said Andrew Ng, co-founder of Coursera. “The possibilities that will come from allowing our students to receive transferable college credit are great, and we look forward to expanding this option to more courses and subjects in the coming months.”
Multiple representatives from the Course MOOC host universities expressed their happiness and anticipation for the future.
“As educators at UC Irvine, it is exciting to be a part of an online education milestone,” said Sarah Eichhorn, Assistant Vice Chair of Undergraduate Studies at UC Irvine’s mathematics department. “The two classes we’re offering through Coursera are the foundation for success in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. My colleague Dr. Rachel Lehman and I are thrilled that students around the world will not have the opportunity to view math as a doable, beautiful, powerful tool.”
Duke University’s Provost, Peter Lange agreed. “We are excited by this opportunity to experiment with new ways of using our MOOC courses to extend our educational reach and provide credit for students who would not otherwise have access to our faculty,” he said. “MOOCs, often in combination with the creativity of individual universities, have much potential to open and enrich the educational offerings available to students across the United States and the globe. We are pleased to be part of these efforts.”
At a recent event, a bigwig at McGraw-Hill, the textbook publisher, urged the audience to take an online course so that we'd have a sense of the future. As a journalist who covers online education, I was embarrassed not to be enrolled in one.
So, a couple weeks ago, when a dear friend in Washington D.C. asked if I would take an online course with her about how to make online courses, I jumped at the chance. She'd assembled a fancy study group of people with PhDs and impressive employers, from the World Bank to the Smithsonian. Some of them wanted to use online education to solve big global health problems. It felt important to be emailing with them.
The class, entitled "Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application," was delivered through Coursera, one of the largest purveyors of massive open online courses or MOOCs. And like Coursera's other courses, it was free.
The six-week course launched a week ago Monday, January 28th. The instructor, Fatimah Wirth, was from The Georgia Institute of Technology. She had worked with NASA. The course promised to be hands-on; we'd be producing our own online class as a final project.
Within hours, things were going awry. Neither the "Getting Started" tab nor the "syllabus" tab offered much direction on how to begin the class. I wasted an hour taking surveys on my personal learning style. (One said I was a visual learner. The other said I wasn't).
The biggest problem was breaking our class of more than 41,000 students into discussion groups. Dr. Wirth asked us to sign up using a Google spreadsheet. The only problem was Google's own support pages clearly states that only 50 people can edit and view a document simultaneously. I was one of the thousands who kept clicking, but was locked out. When I finally got in, it was a mess. Classmates had erased names, substituted their own and added oodles of blank spaces.
My little group of nine stayed intact, but it was disappointing (in a snobbish sort of way) that we were forced to include 11 strangers who typed their names alongside ours. How can you really have a good small group discussion with 20 people anyway? (I remember a professor once telling me that positive effects of small class size evaporate once you exceed 15 students).
With Google Docs imploding, the teacher suggested that some people randomly start a discussion thread and then asked that 19 others randomly jump on that thread to form a group. But, apparently, the small group discussion technology didn't cap the participants at 20. More students could barge in and did.
In the meantime, the video lectures were mind-numbing laundry lists of PowerPoint bullet points. A survey of educational philosophies left me no more enlightened than before I watched it. The readings were a bit better. One of my favorites, Teaching with Technology: Tools and Strategies to Improve Student Learning, linked to a hilarious PowerPoint comedy sketch about the stupidity of reading PowerPoint bullet points.
No one missed the irony that this online class about how to create online classes was failing miserably. Discussion forums full of venom were popping up everywhere on the course site.
This is a disaster! And where is the professor? I am so excited to learn about this topic, but this online course, teaching us how to make online courses, is totally bunked. Google spreadsheet? For thousands of people? Really? I'm a little nervous about the validity of this course right now.
By day six, a Saturday, the professor shut the course down. All the reading materials, videos, assignments were erased.
The professor's email to me:
Dear Jill Barshay,
We want all students to have the highest quality learning experience. For this reason, we are temporarily suspending the "Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application" course in order to make improvements. We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause. We will inform you when the course will be reoffered.
Yours,
Fatimah
I telephoned and emailed the professor to understand what caused her to pull the plug. She did not get back to me. The story was already hitting the blogosphere, including this exhaustive blog post at Inside Higher Ed.
What did I learn in six days? Not everyone should try to be an online teacher. One of the great ideas behind online education is that there performers who can deliver riveting lectures, who are masters of explication. Wouldn't it be great if the internet could deliver them to millions of people around the world? That's what's marvelous about some of Sal Khan's mathematical videos. The problem is that almost anyone can set up an online course and thousands of people will enroll. Unfortunately, there's no guide to tell you who's good and who isn't.
In case you missed the Fall 2012 edition of the Oberlin College Institute for Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies newsletter, here are some of the many highlights.
Yes, it's the Year of the Queer at Oberlin. Somehow I think you would be safe in assuming that every year is the Year of the Queer there, but it's nice to have an official pronouncement.
Quote: Year of the Queer is an interdisciplinary series of academic courses, distinguished speakers, amazing performances, and engaging social events organized to inspire and support a campus- and community-wide conversation about queer life today.
Students, faculty, staff and community members participate in a variety of ways, through academic study, engaging with leading scholars, discussing lectures and performances, dancing and performing, and reflecting on the meaning of queer, both locally and globally.
Thus far, Oberlin has hosted Judith Jack Halberstam, Dean Spade, Andrea Ritchie, Joey Mogul, and David Halperin. Stephen Motika and Esther Newton will also deliver lectures this fall. In Spring 2013, the following will visit campus, meet with students, faculty and staff, and deliver lectures: Sarah Schulman, Holly Hughes, Larry LaFountian, Urvashi Vaid, and Mari Matsuda.
Year of the Queer is a collaborative effort. The faculty committee (Ann Cooper Albright, Harry Hirsch, Greggor Mattson, Meredith Raimondo and Patrick O’Connor) works with the student liaisons/assistants/YoQ Grrrrls, A.D. Hogan ’13 and Lexie Sharabianlou ’13, to organize and publicize the series. YoQ also includes student activism. Hogan, along with Becca Kahn Bloch ’13 also organized the Queering the Law series, an ongoing lecture, discussion, and film series about the role of the state, the law, disciplinarity and queer embodiment.
Further, the YoQ has collaborated with a number of departments and institutes, including GSFS, Comparative American Studies, Politics, Sociology, Dance, Hispanic Studies, Anthropology, English, as well as
Offices and Centers on campus, including Shansi Oberlin, the Multicultural Resource Center, the Office of the Dean of Students, the Office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences, the Office for Religious and Spiritual Life, among many others, to make the series truly interdisciplinary.
Attendance at all events has been remarkable, with hundreds of students, faculty, and staff, and members of the community coming to each lecture, and hundreds of students doing “queer”/Year of the Queer-related coursework. Please check out the website: https://sites.google.com/a/oberlin.edu/y...queer/home
Email contact: yoqueer@oberlin.edu
And look who is featured among the illustrious alumni. How proud dear old dad must be of his little darling.
Quote: Cordelia Loots-Gollin
I graduated with a double major in GSFS and Comparative American Studies in May 2011. In September, I started my second year as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant at the University of Szczecin in Szczecin, Poland where I teach writing to master's students and conversation classes for first-year bachelor's students. I'm having a great adventure learning Polish and traveling in my free time.
Grand Canyon University is used to playing unexpected roles. A for-profit, Christian university investing heavily in a physical campus and a newly anointed Division I athletic program, the college has few precedents to follow. But over the past year, Grand Canyon has found itself in another seemingly contradictory situation: in a state whose political leaders are staunchly opposed to illegal immigration, Grand Canyon’s undocumented student population has been booming.
Just over 300 students on Grand Canyon’s Phoenix campus lack legal documentation to reside in the U.S. Most were brought across the border by their parents when they were young. The 300 students make up 5 percent of the student body -- a proportion that far exceeds undocumented students’ representation at public colleges and universities and could be among the highest at any four-year college in the state.
Grand Canyon didn’t set out to recruit those students or encourage them to attend. But a combination of state laws and institutional policies made the for-profit college the least expensive option for many undocumented students with good grades and test scores. And the growth of that student population has led the college to mull playing a larger lobbying role for the DREAM Act or other legislation to give young undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship.
In 2006, Arizona voters approved a law requiring undocumented students to pay out-of-state tuition at public colleges and universities and barring them from state financial aid programs. Under federal law, the students also can’t receive Pell Grants or student loans. In 2011, the state’s community colleges tripled tuition for part-time, nonresident students. A year at Arizona State University now costs $23,000 for out-of-state residents in tuition and fees alone; at community colleges, tuition is $317 per credit hour.
As a result, the number of undocumented students at public four-year colleges dropped precipitously. In 2010, of the more than 100,000 students enrolled at Arizona’s three major public universities, only 106 could not provide proof of citizenship.
As undocumented students were seeing options elsewhere in the state diminish, Grand Canyon was investing in its physical campus and in financial aid for its traditional undergraduates. Investors bought the college, formerly a struggling nonprofit Christian college, in 2004; it has grown steadily since, and unlike for-profit competitors, puts its Phoenix campus at the center of its strategy.
The college’s sticker price of $16,500 for a year on its physical campus is about the national average for a for-profit college. But unlike many of its peers, Grand Canyon offers a substantial amount of grants and scholarships -- the average undergraduate on the Phoenix campus pays an average of $7,800 per year.
“The word started to get around that if you had good grades, you could go to Grand Canyon for a very reasonable amount of money,” said Brian Mueller, the college’s president and CEO. “We started to get applications.”
Mueller stressed that undocumented students don’t get any extra financial help, but receive the same aid based on academic achievement that all other Grand Canyon students can receive. The discount rate for those students is slightly higher than the rest of Grand Canyon’s student body -- they pay an average of $7,000 per year, he said -- because their mean grade-point average from high school, 3.46, is slightly higher than the 3.4 GPA of all admitted students.
Arizona has gained national attention for its laws intended to discourage illegal immigration. Part of the state’s landmark immigration law was overturned by the Supreme Court in May. The state’s governor, Jan Brewer, a Republican, opposed the Obama administration’s efforts to allow some young undocumented immigrants to avoid deportation and apply for work permits, calling the measure -- which would help many of Grand Canyon’s undocumented students -- “back-door amnesty.”
Brewer has also been a Grand Canyon booster. When the college joined the Western Athletic Conference in November, Brewer was there to celebrate, calling the move “the next step in this university’s climb to prominence.”
Grand Canyon officials emphasize that they don’t see admitting qualified undocumented students, and offering them financial aid using the same standards they apply to citizens, as a political move. But they acknowledge the politics of appearing to help illegal immigrants can be tricky in Arizona.
“We’re not making this a political issue. We’re an educational institution that’s committed to educating people and making it as cost-effective as possible,” Mueller said. “We think those students, if they’ve got the grades, if they’ve got the financial resources — we’ve got to give them every opportunity to be successful.”
Still, he said, he’s been surprised many times in the past year, since word of Grand Canyon’s relatively affordable prices began spreading by word of mouth in downtown Phoenix. While prospects for working in the U.S. were dim for those students until the president's executive order in May, many excelled academically in high school, and their families have enough savings to pay the discounted annual tuition.
The college has also begun working with a nearby high school, where about 98 percent of students are Latino, in a college readiness partnership. Many of the students there are undocumented, and Mueller said he hoped the work could be a national example.
At Grand Canyon, undocumented students’ retention rates are good -- about 90 percent return after the first semester, he said -- and many are majoring in science or health fields. “That’s a hugely encouraging thing,” Mueller said. “That means they’re going to get jobs -- that’s where the jobs are.”
But whether the students will be able to work legally is another question. Obama has said he wants Congress to make comprehensive immigration reform a priority in the upcoming session. Given the legislative deadlock, it’s unclear whether anything will get done in the next two years. Still, Mueller said Grand Canyon plans to lobby for the DREAM Act, or for other legal provisions that would give young, educated undocumented students a path toward citizenship or naturalization.
In doing so, Grand Canyon could find itself in unusual allegiances. As a single campus, it’s spent less than other publicly traded for-profits -- like Apollo Group, parent company of the University of Phoenix, or Education Management Corp. -- for lobbying clout on Capitol Hill. Still, Senator Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, criticized the college in his voluminous report last year on for-profit higher education. And it’s found more natural allies among Congressional Republicans -- who are less opposed to for-profit higher education in general, and many of whom like the college’s Christian bent -- than among Democrats.
So far, Grand Canyon hasn’t begun pushing for the DREAM Act. But Mueller -- who said the college has become a “hotbed” of undocumented students in the past 12 months -- believes it’s only a matter of time.
“It takes a lot of character to go through high school and stick with it and get the kind of grades they get, not knowing it’s going to work out from them to go to college,” he said. “It takes a lot of character for them to come here... We just need to get the legislation passed.”
Part of the reason that online courses can transform American higher education, according to advocates, is that they offer the potential to offer a low cost education to many, many students. It's an economy of scale thing. While traditional courses might top off at 300 students, in an online course one professor could potentially teach thousands.
But could he teach them effectively? What do good online programs look like? U.S. News & World Report, America's major college ranking guide, has now released a ranking of onlinebachelor's degree programs. And they're mostly small.
The top ten schools in the rankings, "based on factors such as graduation rates, indebtedness of new graduates, and academic and career support services offered to students," are, in order, the online programs of Pace University, Daytona State College, St. John's University, Westfield State University, Graceland University, Lawrence Technological University, Colorado State University, Brandman University, Bellevue University, and Regent University.
The publication gives scores to schools in various categories. Pace gets an 81.3 for "faculty training and credentials." Graceland gets a 69.9 for "student engagement." Brandman gets a 48 for "student services and technology."
U.S. News also notes graduation rates. While few of the schools boast anything particularly high--Pace is 49 percent, Westfield State is 60 percent, Colorado State University is 31 percent--those grad rates appear pretty high for online programs, and not notably lower than those of many real colleges. But when attempting to generalize or lean anything from these rankings, however, it's notable that most of these programs are tiny.
Pace University's online program might have a 3-year graduation rate of 49 percent, but it also only has 212 students. Graceland University (number five) has 132. Lawrence Technological University only has only 50 students. St. John's University's online program (the third best program in America!) only enrolls 37 people.
So yes, these schools might technically be the "best" online academic programs in the country, but the reality is that most of these programs are so tiny as to be statistically meaningless. No wonder they have high student engagement and can boast extensive personal interaction; the programs themselves are smaller than the introductory lecture courses offered to most college freshmen.
ATLANTA -- Everyone knows there's a reason the most expensive colleges in the country -- generally private residential institutions -- charge so much. The money they spend on hiring the best faculty members (full-timers of course) and on keeping student-faculty ratios low results in a higher-quality education. Right?
The crowd gathered here for a standing-room-only session at the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities certainly wanted to believe. From a show of hands at the start of the session, the vast majority of attendees were administrators at those institutions. And the researchers who presented new data on the economics of liberal arts education threw cold water all over that conventional wisdom.
Research presented here by researchers from Wabash College -- and based on national data sets -- finds that there may be a minimal relationship between what colleges spend on education and the quality of the education students receive. Further, the research suggests that colleges that spend a fraction of what others do, and operate with much higher student-faculty ratios and greater use of part-time faculty members, may be succeeding educationally as well as their better-financed (and more prestigious) counterparts.
The research did not rule out some impact from higher spending at some institutions, but suggested that, in many cases, the gains are small -- and the costs (in higher tuition) are large. Charles Blaich, one of the researchers and director of the Center of Inquiry at Wabash College and the Higher Education Data Sharing Consortium, said that the study raised the question of whether those who attend a regional public master's university might be getting 90 percent of the value of an education at an elite private for 20 percent of the cost. And that, he said, could lead to a lot of very difficult questions for those trying to persuade prospective students and their families to spend $50,000 or more a year for an undergraduate degree.
The research goes like this:
The Wabash National Study (also done by the center Blaich leads) tracks 45 colleges and universities, most of them liberal arts colleges, but also other kinds of institutions. The study is designed to identify measures of good practice that result in students at all educational levels learning more. Four such practices (for which there are scales) are "good teaching with high quality interactions with faculty," high expectations and academic challenge, interaction with ideas and people different from one's own, and "deep learning" through characteristics identified by the National Survey of Student Engagement.
For the new study, the 45 colleges were examined based on their spending on educational purposes while also looking at their scores on the measures that are correlated with increased student learning.
The result was that there was only a very small relationship between spending on education and the quality of the educational experience as measured by those four factors. The relationship is so small that Blaich said that a college would have to spend an additional $5 million per 1,000 students to increase the "good practice" score (on a scale of 100) by a single point.
But the finding that really caused visible discomfort in the room was a scatterplot Blaich shared showing the colleges on axes of educational spending per student and points on the scale of good teaching. Blaich isolated 10 colleges (he said later that most but not all were liberal arts colleges) that had very similar scores on the good practices related to teaching. Their spending per student, however, ranged from $9,225 to $53,521 (with corresponding tuition rates). Others at the high end of per-student spending were at $44,429 and $34,172. Three other colleges, however, were achieving the same educational impact with spending per student of about $15,000. And yet all of these colleges were showing similar levels of good practice with regard to education.
Most of those listening -- with growing discomfort -- were private college administrators. But faculty members might not have been comfortable either. Slides by Blaich suggested that spending on faculty members is where the differences exist between the colleges at the low and high ends of the spending spectrum among those 10 institutions.
Average faculty salaries ranged from the $50,000s to the $90,000s. The percentage of the faculty that was employed full-time ranged from 40 percent to 87 percent. Student-faculty ratios ranged from 21:1 to 8:1. And yet all of these institutions were reporting similar scores on the educationally valuable practices.
Audience questions seemed to express concern about the findings. One person asked if the data said anything about faculty morale at the institutions that paid more, and the possible impact on the student experience. In not-for-attribution comments after the session, several senior administrators at colleges said that the data made sense to them, but that they would face widespread faculty criticism if they proposed saving money by increasing courseloads. Others said that as they were listening to the presentation, they thought that the more expensive institutions were simply charging more for prestige -- and that everyone knew that but didn't want to say that in public.
Aside from the question about faculty morale, no one in the full room defended the idea of low courseloads.
Blaich said that he wasn't saying his criteria were perfect, but he said that they showed the colleges could achieve similar educational gains without the low courseloads favored by the most elite institutions.
"I know of a college with a 4-1-4 teaching load and lots of part-timers with lots of good scores on everything," he said. (A study last year -- based only on three private colleges -- reached similar conclusions.)
He also said that he wasn't suggesting that every college replace full-timers with part-timers and add courses to each faculty member's duties. But he said that his data suggest that the quality of instruction from part-timers can be just as high as from full-timers, so maybe the issue is finding the best way to hire and retain them. (He suggested full-year contracts over course-by-course.)
When data show that some colleges rely on those off the tenure track "we all hush because we think it corresponds with poor teaching, but it doesn't," he said.
Right now, many private colleges market themselves based on low student-faculty ratios. Asked if he thought colleges that let those ratios grow to cut costs could be hurt, Blaich said that this could "undercut their brand." But he added that "we have to figure out how to do high touch education in a way that is really more cost-effective."
The session here was at the end of the day, and by the end of the panel, Blaich quipped that he thought many in the room wanted to go out and get a drink.
The excited grins we saw in the sea of faces at Barack Obama’s second Inauguration told us we lost and the socialists won. They made sure we understood that. Liberal talking heads on television and radio as well as in print and in the blogosphere have been taunting us since November, and there is no reason to think they will stop any time soon. Their jobs are now safe for as far as the eye can see. Nevertheless, at least one large segment of Obama supporters are learning that elections have consequences; and being on the winning side doesn’t guarantee good times ahead. America’s college professors, especially adjunct (part-time, non-tenured) professors are “getting it” now.
Harvard University’s Center for Responsive Politics has compiled data on the political leanings of those who teach at America’s colleges. It reports that on average, college faculties donate to Democrats over Republicans by a rate of 4 to 1; but in some schools, that rate goes up to 99% (i.e. the College of William and Mary.)
It’s been just two months since Obama received their money and their votes; but already, many of these professors are learning real-life economic lessons courtesy of the provisions of Obamacare.
The stories of colleges beginning to cut back teaching hours for their adjunct professors (the foot soldiers of America’s higher education industry) are making their way to public knowledge.
In December, only a month after he most likely voted for Barack Obama, an adjunct professor at an Ohio school opened a letter telling him that “in order to avoid penalties under the Affordable Care Act… employees with part-time or adjunct status will not be assigned more than an average of 29 hours per week.”
The cut will cost him $2,000.00 a year, and this guy is crying that he can’t afford the cut. Gee, ain’t that a terrible thing?
He and the rest of the pipe-smoking, elbow patch crowd at the faculty lounge loved the results of the election. They had such a wonderful feeling of superiority at being able to vote for a Black progressive, even if he is a terrible president, because he is a fellow liberal Democrat. Alas, reality has given them a rude awakening.
They have destroyed our country. All we have left is the schadenfreude we can feel looking at these people. Let’s enjoy it.
Note that Young Americans for Liberty is a libertarian (i.e., Ron Paul) organization. If it was the Young Marxists for Jihad do you think he would have gotten the same treatment?
A graduate student at New Jersey’s [regionally accredited] Montclair State University is facing a semester-long suspension and a permanent note on his transcript based on some Facebook comments not unlike what almost everyone has said at some point in his or her life.
The story began a few months before the suspension, when Joseph Aziz commented on the weight of a heckler at a Young Americans for Liberty event.
He has since apologized for the comments, explaining they were made out of frustration “with what I perceived as an attack on the speaker whose appearance my group sponsored.”
After the comments, which were posted on YouTube and included the allegation the heckler’s legs looked like a “pair of bleached hams” became public, school administrators disciplined Aziz and prohibited him from making any other social media comments about the heckler.
Recently, Aziz made a seemingly innocuous comment about the same individual on the page of a private Facebook group. When a group member sent the comment to the university, officials jumped at the chance to suspend him and forever sully his college transcript.
“Are you so focused on non-productive activities such as Facebook and ‘trolling’ that you have misplaced your priorities?” asks a college administrator in a letter to the student.
The college is relying on New Jersey’s rather strict anti-bullying “bill of rights,” though equating any impolite comment with bullying in need of punishment is completely outrageous.
At its worst, this appears to be nothing more than an inconsiderate act by a young man.
Unfortunately, his school wants to make sure a relatively minor lapse in judgment follows him for the rest of his life.
A molecular biology student, Aziz said “the ability to advance in my career is severely hindered without a graduate degree,” adding that a transfer to another school “is also difficult since a disciplinary suspension is noted on my transcript.”
We now live in a brave new world of constant government intrusion as individuals face punishment for private speech that should unquestionably be protected by the First Amendment.
Though I often criticize groups like the ACLU for actually arguing for limitations on our freedom, one civil liberties group has rightly come to the student’s defense.
“As an agency of the government, Montclair State has no power to order students not to discuss any topic or person on independent social media sites like Facebook,” argues an official with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
So far, the school has shown no signs of reversing this foolish decision and likely won’t – at least without constant pressure from freedom-loving patriots fed up with this vast overreach of power.
![[Image: Buttplug.png]](http://cdn.breitbart.com/mediaserver/Breitbart/Big-Government/2013/02/08/Buttplug.png)
![[Image: Wirth.png?itok=UOZAV9JL]](https://c21u.gatech.edu/sites/default/files/styles/profile_smaller/public/faculty/Wirth.png?itok=UOZAV9JL)
highlights.![[Image: CordeliaLootsGollinYearoftheQueer.jpg]](http://www.dltruth.com/gollum/CordeliaLootsGollinYearoftheQueer.jpg)
![[Image: CordeliaLootsGollinYearoftheQueer02.jpg]](http://www.dltruth.com/gollum/CordeliaLootsGollinYearoftheQueer02.jpg)
