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        A comprehensive summary of the free speech culture at Princeton University from the eyes of students.

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        • A comprehensive summary of the free speech culture at Princeton University from the eyes of students.

          Read Here

        • PARTNERS
          • American Council of Trustees & Alumni
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          • The Princeton Open Campus Coalition
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        Watch: George Will "Consciousness as the Political Project: A 21 st Century Echo of the 19 th Century"

        Watch

        Letter Urging Princeton to Become a Leader on Free Speech

        Read

        Watch: Free Speech Rights of Students with Keith Whittington and Myles McKnight

        James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions hosted Keith Whittington, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton University, and Myles McKnight '23, Public Discourse Fellow at the Witherspoon Institute

        Watch

        August 9, 2023

        Princeton Principles for a Campus Culture of Free Inquiry

        A Project of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions

        Read

        July 17, 2023

        The Unsocial Network: How Administrators Hijack the College Experience

        An ACTA's panel featuring Princeton gradtuate Francesca Block '22

        Watch Now

        June 21, 2023

        PFS Reunion Panel

        Hear from PFS founders, students and staff about our effort to restore academic freedom at Princeton

        Watch Now

        Princeton Free Speech News & Commentary

        In wake of Robert George event shoutdown, Washington College vows to improve response to disruptive protests

        September 28, 2023 1 min read

        Graham Piro
        Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression

        Excerpt: Earlier this month, Princeton professor Robert George’s appearance at Washington College provided yet another example of what’s known as the “heckler’s veto.” Protesters entered the event and drowned out George’s speech, eventually forcing him to leave — while security officers stood by and watched as the protesters shouted and played loud music to prevent George from speaking and those in attendance from hearing him. While the college publicly denounced the disruption, FIRE called on it to do more by educating its security officers on their responsibility to intervene and remove disruptive protesters.

        In response to FIRE’s letter, Washington College President Michael J. Sosulski told us that part of the school’s post-incident analysis “will include ensuring that [its] Public Safety officers are prepared to engage in ways that will not permit events to be disrupted or abruptly canceled.”
        Read More

        A Speech About Free Speech Is Shouted Down

        September 27, 2023 1 min read

        Ryan Quinn
        Inside Higher Ed

        Excerpt: A conservative Princeton University professor tried to give a speech this month at Washington College centering on the need for campus free speech. Students disrupted his talk and succeeded in ending it.

        It was another example of what are often called student shoutdowns or “heckler’s vetoes”—though the meaning of that phrase is contested—disrupting conservative speakers. Perhaps most prominently this year, in March, Stanford University students disrupted a talk by Judge Kyle Duncan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
        Read More

        George Will on How a "Magnificent Legacy Can Be Squandered"

        September 25, 2023 1 min read

        Ethan Hicks, ‘26
        Princetonians for Free Speech Original Content

        Excerpt: George F. Will, the legendary Washington Post columnist, delivered a lecture on September 13 that nearly filled Friend 101 to its 250-person capacity with a diverse audience of students, faculty, and community members. His most trenchant message was that “the magnificent legacy” of the great research universities can “be squandered in a generation, destroyed from within, not by outside forces.”
        Read More
        Click Here For More Princeton News

        National Free Speech News & Commentary

        More Free-Speech Recognition for UNC Schools

        September 28, 2023 1 min read

        Jenna A. Robinson
        James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

        Excerpt: Last week, UNC-Chapel Hill and UNC Charlotte won Heterodox Academy’s “Institutional Excellence Award” for having “done the most to advance or sustain open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement either on its own campus or nationally.”

        UNC-Chapel Hill trustee Perrin Jones told the Martin Center, “The Carolina Community—our students, administrators, trustees, and faculty—is in agreement about the important role that freedom of thought, conscience, and speech play within both the university and our broader society.” Jones, who spearheaded trustee efforts on free expression and institutional neutrality, added, “UNC, as it has done before, is proud to lead the way in protecting, and advancing, these freedoms.”
        Read More

        Anti-free speech trends on campus threaten freedom but can be reversed

        September 27, 2023 1 min read

        Adam Goldstein
        Washington Examiner

        Excerpt: There has always been illiberalism on campus — at least, that’s what critics looking to hand-wave away concerns about cancel culture in higher education claim. But the insight that illiberalism predates cancel culture is as useful as saying that fire predates gasoline: It is both correct and astonishingly naive.

        At the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, we collect a great deal of data about the higher education system, and our findings should alarm everyone.
        Read More

        A Clash Over Student Journalism

        September 26, 2023 1 min read

        Johanna Alonso
        Inside Higher Ed

        Excerpt: Last February, reporters on the Ashland University student newspaper set out to cover a town hall on campus. Seven months later, their adviser was dismissed and the administration began seeking increased oversight of the paper, The Collegian. How did the relationship between the student journalists and Ashland administrators fall apart so fast?
        Read More
        Click Here For More National News

        Newsletter Archive

        September 2023 Newsletter

        September 2023 Newsletter

        September 29, 2023 5 min read

        September 29, 2023


        To Princetonians for Free Speech subscribers, members and friends,

        Welcome to our PFS Monthly Newsletter! Here you will find our most important features and updates, articles you don’t want to miss, and more.  Please let us know what you think

        August 2023 Newsletter

        August 2023 Newsletter

        September 05, 2023 8 min read

        Welcome to the third PFS Monthly Newsletter.  August may be quiet on campus, but a great deal has happened this month in the movement to restore free speech and academic freedom on Princeton’s campus and throughout the country.  Here we give you our most important updates, events and top news, articles you don’t want to miss, and more.

        Princeton FIRE Rankings
        Princeton Flops in FIRE Free Speech Rankings

        187 out of 248. A “red light” institution has at least one red light policy that both clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech.

        GET FULL REPORT

        Words of Wisdom:

        Great Thinkers on Why Free Speech is Vital

        Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

        “We read of tortures in jails with electric devices, suicides among prisoners, forced confessions, while in the outside community ruthless persecution of editors, religious leaders, and political opponents suppress free speech—and a free press…

        Words of Wisdom:

        Great Thinkers on Why Free Speech is Vital

        George Washington

        “If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”

        Words of Wisdom:

        Great Thinkers on Why Free Speech is Vital

        Nadine Strossen, former ACLU president

        “In the long run, an open airing of discriminatory ideas, and an ensuing debate about them, may well be more effective in curbing them than censorship would be.”

        Words of Wisdom:
        Great Thinkers on Why Free Speech is Vital

        Ira Glasser

        “[A]fter [a] panel discussion [at a prestigious law school], person after person got up, including some of the younger professors, to assert that their goals of social justice for blacks, for women, for minorities of all kinds were incompatible with free speech and that free speech was an antagonist. . . . [W]hen I came to the ACLU, my major passion was social justice, particularly racial justice. But my experience was that free speech wasn't an antagonist. It was an ally. It was a critical ally. – 2020 interview (Photo Courtesy of "Mighty Ira")

        Words of Wisdom:
        Great Thinkers on Why Free Speech is Vital

        Hannah Arendt

        “If someone wants to see and experience the world as it ‘really’ is, he can do so only by understanding it as something that is shared by many people, lies between them, separates them, showing itself differently to each and comprehensible only to the extent that many people can talk about it and exchange their opinions and perspectives with one another, over against one another. Only in the freedom of our speaking with one another does the world, as that about which we speak, emerge in its objectivity and visibility from all sides.” - The Promise of Politics, written in latter half of 1950s

        Words of Wisdom:
        Great Thinkers on Why Free Speech is Vital

        Justice Louis Brandeis

        “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence." – concurring opinion in Whitney v. California, 1927

        Words of Wisdom:
        Great Thinkers on Why Free Speech is Vital

        Henry Steele Commager

        “The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion. In the long run it will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience.” – 1954

        Words of Wisdom:
        Great Thinkers on Why Free Speech is Vital

        Benjamin Franklin

        “Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.”

        Words of Wisdom:
        Great Thinkers on Why Free Speech is Vital

        Barack Obama

        “The purpose of college is not just... to transmit skills. It’s also to widen your horizons, to make you a better citizen, to help you to evaluate information, to help you make your way through the world, to help you be more creative. The way to do that is to create a space where a lot of ideas are presented and collide, and people are having arguments, and people are testing each others’ theories... and over time, people learn from each other because they’re getting out of their own narrow point of view and having a broader point of view... When I went to college, suddenly there were some folks who didn’t think at all like me... And sometimes their views would be infuriating to me. But it was because there was this space where you could interact with people who didn’t agree with you, and had different backgrounds than you, that I then started testing my own assumptions. And sometimes I changed my mind...

        Words of Wisdom:

        Great thinkers on why free speech is vital:

        Barack Obama

        " ...Sometimes I realized, you know what, maybe I’ve been too narrow minded. Maybe I didn’t take this into account. Maybe I should see this person’s perspective... I’ve heard of some college campuses where they don’t want to have a guest speaker who, you know, is too conservative, or they don’t want to read a book that has language that is offensive to African-Americans, or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women. And you know, I’ve got to tell you, I don’t agree with that either. I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view.” - September, 2015

        Words of Wisdom:
        Great Thinkers on Why Free Speech is Vital

        Salman Rushdie

        “What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.” – 1990

        Words of Wisdom:
        Great Thinkers on Why Free Speech is Vital

        United States Constitution

        “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” – first amendment

        Words of Wisdom:
        Great Thinkers on Why Free Speech is Vital

        Justice William Brennan

        “[A]cademic freedom... is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned. That freedom is therefore a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom... The classroom is peculiarly the marketplace of ideas. The Nation's future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth out of a multitude of tongues, [rather] than through any kind of authoritative selection.” – Keyishian v. Board of Regents (1967)

        Words of Wisdom:
        Great Thinkers on Why Free Speech is Vital

        Václav Havel

        "Courage in the public sphere means that one is to go against majority opinion (at the same time risking losing one's position) in the name of the truth." – 2000

        Words of Wisdom:
        Great Thinkers on Why Free Speech is Vital

        John Lewis

        “Without freedom of speech and the right to dissent,
        the civil rights movement would have
        been a bird without wings.” – 2017

        Words of Wisdom:
        Great Thinkers on Why Free Speech is Vital

        John Stuart Mill

        “The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error... [E]very age [has] held many opinions which subsequent ages have deemed not only false but absurd; and... many opinions, now general, will be rejected by future ages.” – On Freedom, 1859

        Words of Wisdom:
        Great Thinkers on Why Free Speech is Vital

        Jonathan Rauch

        “History shows that the more open the intellectual environment, the better minorities will do.... [G]ay people know we owe our progress to freedom of speech and freedom of thought.... The best society for minorities is not the society that protects minorities from speech but
        the one that protects speech from minorities
        (and from majorities, too).” – 2013

        Words of Wisdom:
        Great Thinkers on Why Free Speech is Vital

        Margaret Chase Smith

        "The right to criticize; the right to hold unpopular beliefs; the right to protest; the right of independent thought. The exercise of these rights should not cost one single American citizen his reputation or his right to a livelihood nor should he be in danger of losing his reputation or livelihood merely because he happens to know someone who holds unpopular beliefs. Who of us doesn’t? Otherwise none of us could call our souls our own. Otherwise thought control would have set in." – 1950 speech against McCarthyism

        Words of Wisdom:
        Great Thinkers on Why Free Speech is Vital

        Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

        "A constitution, as important as it is, will mean nothing unless the people are yearning for liberty and freedom.” – 2012 interview

        Words of Wisdom:
        Great Thinkers on Why Free Speech is Vital

        Jonathan Rauch

        “The greatest idea in the history of human civilization is the idea that we are better off, personally and as a society, if we not only tolerate but actively protect speech and thought that is wrong-headed, offensive, bigoted, seditious, blasphemous, critical of the authorities, or just in dissent.” –2016

        Words of Wisdom:
        Great Thinkers on Why Free Speech is Vital

        Donald Downs

        “Punishing evil or bad thoughts amounts to thought control, which is the quintessential First Amendment sin and a hallmark of an authoritarian or totalitarian state. It is no accident that polities that coerce their vision of a new and perfect form of human nature end up erecting their own versions of gulags.” – 2020

        Words of Wisdom:
        Great Thinkers on Why Free Speech is Vital

        Frederick Douglass

        "Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thought and opinions has ceased to exist." – 1860

        Words of Wisdom:
        Great Thinkers on Why Free Speech is Vital

        George Orwell

        “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right
        to tell people what they do not want
        to hear.” – 1945; Preface to Animal Farm

        Words of Wisdom:
        Great Thinkers on Why Free Speech is Vital

        Frederick Douglass

        “No right was deemed by the fathers of the Government more sacred than the right of speech. . . the great moral renovator of society and government. . . . Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thought and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down.” – 1860 speech

        Words of Wisdom:
        Great Thinkers on Why Free Speech is Vital

        James Madison

        “I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." – 1788 speech

        Words of Wisdom: Great Thinkers on Why Free Speech is Vital

        Thurgood Marshall

        “The First Amendment means that government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas,
        its subject matter, or its content.”
        – Police Dept. of City of Chicago v. Mosley (1972)

        See All Words of Wisdom

        Princetonians for Free Speech

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