The Next Campus Battle after Free Speech: Viewpoint Diversity at America’s Elite Universities

The last two years have seen a dramatic increase in the scrutiny of free speech and academic freedom on university campuses, largely in response to the protests that followed the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel and the Israeli invasion of Gaza. There has been important progress during this period that bolsters awareness of the importance of free speech and academic freedom principles.

However, progress on these core values will mean little if there is not a major effort to address a pressing long-term and deeply embedded problem – the almost total lack of viewpoint diversity among faculty at many universities.

At the Sunday Undergraduate Student Government (USG) senate meeting, University administrators spoke about the purpose of campus free expression facilitators, while student groups presented new mental health and menstrual product initiatives.

Associate Dean of Undergraduate Students Garrett Meggs spoke about the University’s free expression facilitators. Meggs explained that the University’s purpose behind the facilitators is to allow students to engage in civil and respectful dialogue on campus. Free expression facilitators are assigned to campus events in order to ensure that speakers and audiences are protecting expression and following the University’s time, place, and manner restrictions.

Last Wednesday, I sat in Green Hall having an “ordinary” but peculiar experience: listening to my professor read aloud from her private set of lecture notes, while the class sat and stared at a bare-bones slideshow of historical quotes. Around me, dozens of my classmates were dutifully typing out summaries of every slide. 

But, as my professor narrated her questions about the origins of the peculiar ideas of sovereignty, my attention was more focused on the origins of the peculiar idea of the lecture.

For many years now, conservative and centrist critics have claimed that elite American universities suffer from a lack of “viewpoint diversity.” Even as these institutions made recruiting women and underrepresented minorities a priority, the charge goes, their faculties remained almost exclusively liberal and progressive.

Nearly all these critics reflexively dismiss “woke” scholarship as political claptrap. They don’t read seriously the people they are criticizing, and they don’t look seriously into the question of why the humanities and social sciences have developed such a strong left-wing political profile. I find most of their arguments weak and unpersuasive. But this doesn’t mean that there are not some better arguments to be offered.

Speaking at the American Whig-Cliosophic Society on Feb. 5, J Street founder Jeremy Ben-Ami acknowledged that many people who come to his events are already “his people” — they agree with him and are excited to hear their position reaffirmed. J Street is a nonprofit and lobby that self-describes as “pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy.” Although Ben-Ami took questions from students who, in turn, considered his positions too supportive of Israel or not supportive enough, Ben-Ami is correct that, in general, political speakers preach to their own choirs.

This phenomenon does not stop at FitzRandolph Gate, and it undermines the value of inviting acclaimed speakers to Princeton.

University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 presented his annual State of the University letter and answered questions about various student concerns at the first 2026 meeting of the Council of the Princeton University Community (CPUC). 

Eisgruber spent the majority of his presentation reviewing the University’s strategic shift in endowment spending priorities amid diminishing long-term endowment return projections. This includes a 10-year estimated $11.3 billion deficit in endowment growth relative to previous growth projections, according to the Princeton University Investment Company (PRINCO).