Since 2020: campus and national free speech coverage, plus original commentary, to keep alumni in the know.
By Simon Riley, The Daily Princetonian
By Suheyla Akman '28
By Abigail Readlinger '27
Maryanne Wolf is a neuroscientist of reading. Princeton asked her to teach the Class of 2030 how to reckon with difficult language. Little could be more necessary at a moment of vanishing attention spans and visceral intolerance for language upsetting to its audience. Which makes it surprising that at Opening Exercises Wolf had a hard time finishing a sentence. She collapsed into her armchair, announced that she could not say “his name,” and spelled “T-R-U-M-P” to 1,300 first-years. Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber, sitting across from her, smiled and said nothing.
Some criticism has come for Eisgruber, but who knows what his snap reaction really means. What’s shocking is that ten years after his first election victory, the name of the sitting president of the United States is treated as some kind of hex. The university that assigned incoming freshmen Wolf’s Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World — meant to foster courage in encountering challenging sentences — somehow failed once again to display a modicum of maturity when it counted. A decade on, is it possible that we’re still not ready to speak about the president without hyperventilation—or treating his name as a curse, or a trigger?
Tal Fortgang ’17 is a Legal Policy Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a regular contributor to PFS and a contributing writer at The Dispatch.
This call for near unanimity is inconsistent both with the University’s previous divestment decisions and the University’s role as a liberal arts institution. To be a liberal arts institution, as then-President Harold Shapiro GS ’64 wrote in a 1999 article to the Princeton Alumni Weekly, the University “needs to prepare us for an independent and responsible life of choice,” give us “a capacity to make moral and political choices,” and provide us a moral education. Equating consensus with near unanimity and disposing of politically contentious petitions abandons the University’s commitment to this moral education.
The University must resolve this contradiction: Either turn away from moral education and cease to divest at all, or make divestment a component of that moral education, letting go of the notion of complete consensus.
In my freshman seminar at Harvard on "Morality, Leadership, and Gray-Area Decisions" our professor asked us to debate: Should President Truman have dropped the two atomic bombs on Japan? We had two hours to discuss one of the most consequential moments in human history. Yet after 10 minutes the class had come to unanimous agreement: no.
My seminar was no aberration. The same frictionless dynamic pervaded student life beyond the classroom. My dorm had students from a dozen countries and every kind of upbringing. The college assigns such rooming groups in the belief that the big existential questions will follow, argued over cold pizza at 2 in the morning. Instead, the early-morning hours of our first months on campus were spent in solitude, poring over consulting-club slide decks and internship applications.
Does a university protect free speech by staying neutral, or silence it? In this Heterodox Conversation at Indiana University–Bloomington, Tom Ginsburg of the University of Chicago and John Wilson, co-editor of the American Association of University Professors’ Academe Blog, take up the question.
The two agree on more than you might expect: neutrality is there to hold back administrators, not to silence faculty or students. They split on whether it should reach academic departments, on whether professors should hold back outside their expertise, and on how to read the pressure on universities now.
Questioning the prevailing narrative about the "Cornell seven" case is bound to create controversy. And at Columbia University, two student journalists drew condemnation for their views on the case from the unlikeliest of places: a college free speech group.
On October 13, Barnard junior Christina Ma and Columbia junior Nikos Mohammadi published an article called "The 'Cornell Seven' Is Really About Liberalism" in the Columbia Sundial, an independent student publication. The piece argued that the discourse surrounding the alleged rape at Cornell University infantilizes women by omitting the possibility that in a post–sexual revolution, liberal society, women may make regrettable but consensual choices.
