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Annabel Green
'26
In the recently published piece, The Next Campus Battle after Free Speech: Viewpoint Diversity at America’s Elite Universities, Edward Yingling ’70 and Leslie Spencer ’79 offer three “green shoots” to the ideological monolith that is America’s elite universities: civics centers, faculty reform, and the banning of diversity statements. I would like to offer a student perspective on these proposals. In my view, these reforms vary widely in their practical viability. Student civics programs offer the most promising path toward intellectual renewal, faculty reform appears the least promising, and hiring reforms, particularly the elimination of diversity statements, serve as a necessary precondition for genuine intellectual honesty.
Civics Centers
Civics centers, such as the James Madison Program, seem to be the most promising of these green shoots. Many campus programs, especially those of a more obvious political nature, operate with a clear ideological framework. Because of this, political programs can feel insular or recursive. One response to this problem is the reintroduction of programs which educate students in civic virtue while grounding them in the Western canon. These programs lack a spirit of activism and instead, they form students intellectually through the pursuit of knowledge and truth. Civics centers support engagement with foundational thinkers in philosophy, law, and political thought.
This approach also offers a constructive path for students strongly attached to a particular ideology. Attempting to challenge students’ ideological commitments directly, seems to be unfruitful. Instead, by encountering major thinkers in philosophy, law, and aesthetics, their ideological assumptions can be tested and gradually give way to deeper intellectual and moral questions and commitments.
Reform from within the Faculty
Faculty reform appears to be the least promising of the three green shoots because it assumes that transformation must occur within a highly homogeneous group. Initiatives such as the Heterodox Academy Campus Community Network are encouraging, but they do not fully address the depth of ideological uniformity within faculty culture.
There is a deeply entrenched belief in academia, often defended by the observation that educated people tend, on the whole, to vote Democratic. From this, some conclude that Republicans are too uneducated to be professors. The late English philosopher and social critic Sir Roger Scruton, pointed out the consequences of this assumption. In many elite institutions, conservatism is not treated as a serious body of thought to be confronted through civil argument and instead, it is dismissed as a moral defect. Once a political view is treated this way, it is rejected outright.
Another related issue I addressed in my essay, The Ideal of the University, is that professors have increasingly overreached the bounds of their authority. Many now see themselves as possessing authority over the moral formation of students. The difficulty is in abandoning these already deeply embedded assumptions, especially within a culture that is itself highly homogeneous. How such a change can be achieved in such an environment, I am not sure.
Diversity Statements
Banning diversity statements is a necessary precondition for restoring honest academic discourse. As Yingling and Spencer note, the requirement of diversity statements has functioned as a “de facto litmus test” for faculty applicants and has produced a niche industry dedicated to helping candidates craft the appropriate statement. Such requirements pressure faculty members to conform to prevailing ideological preferences. Faculty should not feel that they must virtue-signal or express allegiance to a political cause in hiring and promotion. Eliminating these statements is necessary to address ideological conformity at universities.
Conclusion
Drawing on my experience as a student, I believe civic centers most directly foster proper intellectual formation and foster the deepest intellectual and moral commitments, faculty reform is least likely to succeed given existing homogeneity, and banning diversity statements is a necessary precondition for restoring honest academic discourse.
Annabel Green '26, is a senior from Boulder, CO majoring in Public and International Affairs and minoring in Global Health & Health Policy. She is a PFS student writing fellow.A Student Perspective on Reviving America’s Elite Universities
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Free speech is usually described as a right one either has or does not have, relative to the laws of one’s residence. But a right, like a muscle, is only as strong as its use. When my family flew to the United States in 2018, I naively thought that I had escaped the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) systematic suppression of free speech. I believed that I would access Google, YouTube, and Winnie the Pooh without any need for a VPN to circumvent the “Great Firewall of China,” a term used to describe the CCP’s firm control on online content. But I was clueless: I unknowingly carried a part of the repression within me.
In April 1995, University maintenance crews spent two days cleaning “walkways, benches, plazas and walls on campus,” working to remove not dirt or debris, but simple sidewalk chalk. The chalk drawings, according to a report from The Daily Princetonian, consisted of “pro-gay messages” written by hand during Pride Week. After the removal, advocates were rightly in uproar. Following the incident, the University, claiming that the discrepancy had transpired because of “cross-office confusion,” clarified its chalking policy — it was henceforth banned, in all cases.
Three decades on, chalk at Princeton has found itself relegated to dusty trays in classrooms and lecture halls. Hardly anyone — students, activists, artists, campus organizations, candidates, schoolchildren — chalks University grounds anymore. Simply put, the University’s ban has worked. But the question remains: Why is Princeton so afraid of chalk?
There is exactly one kind of institution in the world whose product is “thinking” — the university. This is an existential challenge for every university, Princeton most definitely included, now that nearly all artificial intelligence is purpose-built to offload the hard work of thinking.
Universities need to return to the foundations of learning with trust — and verification — at the heart of their relationship with students. They also need to be far more prescriptive about what learning looks like so that students who arrive with limited capacity for deep reading have the time and space to develop their critical thinking skills.
