Commentary: Will Bardenwerper: The elite students and the professor they wouldn’t eat with

April 18, 2024 1 min read

Will Bardenwerper
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Excerpt: The article was so bizarre I thought it might be an April Fool’s hoax, given the April 1 byline. The author of “We must not let eating clubs be ideological safe spaces” in The Daily Princetonian had invited a prominent Princeton professor to join him as a guest for lunch at his “eating club” (essentially a private club serving as hybrid dining hall and fraternity/sorority for Princeton juniors and seniors). He later learned that a “group of membership” felt “caught off guard” when they saw the professor, and they were deeply upset by his presence.

If our future leaders are coddled to the point that they cannot share a dining room with an accomplished professor with whom they disagree, where does that leave us as a country? What good comes from four years spent reinforcing the ideas one arrived on campus with?

Click here for link to full article

Leave a comment


Also in National Free Speech News & Commentary

USC Leaders Censured for Handling of Anti-Israel Protests, Commencement Cancellation

May 09, 2024 1 min read

David Zimmerman
National Review

Excerpt: University of Southern California faculty censured their president and provost on Wednesday over the administration’s handling of anti-Israel protests and the decision to cancel the main commencement ceremony for graduating students.
Read More
UC Berkeley Investigates Pro-Palestinian Dinner Protest Fracas

May 09, 2024 1 min read

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: The University of California, Berkeley, is investigating whether a law professor harassed a Muslim student when the student interrupted a dinner last month at the professor’s house with a pro-Palestinian speech and the professor attempted to stop her, NBC News reports.

Catherine Fisk, according to viral video on social media, touched the graduating law student, Malak Afaneh, as Afaneh was speaking during a dinner hosted by Fisk and her husband, Law School dean Erwin Chemerinsky, at their home. Chemerinksy, a free speech scholar, has written that the presidents of the third-year law school class had asked him and Fisk to have graduating law students over for dinner last month.
Read More
President Alivisatos explains why he ended our Encampment

May 08, 2024 1 min read

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Paul Alivisatos, the President of the University of Chicago, explained why he ordered the University cops to dismantle our encampment of pro-Palestinian protestors after eight days.  There are good parts and not so good parts, but it’s clear that the basis for dismantling the enclave was to uphold our principle of institutional neutrality—the Kalven principle).
Read More