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Two-thirds of grades awarded in Princeton undergraduate coursework in the 2024–25 academic year were A-plus, A, or A-, according to a Monday report distributed to faculty, a dramatic increase over the past decade.
Dean of the College Michael Gordin briefly discussed the report at Monday’s faculty meeting, expressing concerns about grade inflation and the allocation of A-plus grades. However, Gordin noted that grading is under the jurisdiction of departments.
In his recently released book “Terms of Respect,” Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 presents a strong defense of free speech on college campuses. He locates the roots of contemporary free speech doctrine in the Civil Rights Era and ultimately concludes that “students are getting free speech right.”
This is a commendable analysis consistent with Eisgruber’s public defenses of student speech. But his framework is often unfairly paternalistic.
Robert P. George, the conservative legal scholar and moral philosopher, has spent the past four decades at Princeton University assiduously cultivating an ever-widening network of influence. For parts of the religious right, he’s an intellectual lodestar on issues including gay marriage, abortion, and stem-cell research. The Catholic journal Crisis once quipped that “if there really is a vast right-wing conspiracy, its leaders probably meet in George’s kitchen.”
Over the course of two interviews — the first conducted from his home and the second from his office on the Princeton campus — George discussed the risk of indoctrination from the left and the right, the need for a more ideologically diverse professoriate, and how academe made itself vulnerable to attack by the Trump administration. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The ideological partisanship, dogmatism and bigotry on display in our society today are to some degree the fruit of our educational system. Too many college classrooms have become indoctrination camps. Some students buy into the leftist ideology they’re taught and become its enforcers. Others react by embracing opposing forms of extremism. Either way, radicalism and animus replace knowledge and wisdom.
So what should we do? The answer isn’t complicated, but acting on it will take determination and courage. Colleges and universities must return to offering a rigorous liberal arts education that refuses to engage in indoctrination and challenges groupthink. College courses must actively cultivate the virtues of curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual humility, analytical rigor and, above all, dedication to the pursuit of truth.
Before declaring my major in the School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), I had considered many majors such as classics, history, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. I settled on SPIA because it offers a disciplinary breadth through which I can narrow down my tentative interests.
Early into the major, I was sympathetic to the political orthodoxy through which many Princetonians operate which I would summarize as characterized by critical theory (i.e. neo-Marxist concepts of group identity and power struggle). However, I soon found myself increasingly in misalignment with the prevailing narrative and the deep grievance and resentment my fellow classmates seemed to feel toward the current state of the country.
The specter that the “chilling” of free speech has replaced official administrative suppression is real. I have experienced it, and if empirical evidence is not enough, then the data will corroborate it. It has been recorded in college polls, surveyed, and yet still appears to be a mystery to the people in charge, as they change their tune and beat the drum of “Free Speech.” Maybe it is time that they give up the ghost.
