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Tal Fortgang
Law & Liberty
Excerpt: It’s back to the future on campus free speech. But this time, so much more hinges on what Princeton does next. Universities failed to investigate and punish these dime-a-dozen instances before their supposed conversion to free-speech principles. Yet we have been told that something has changed for the better. This is the perfect test case.
Princeton has announced that it will investigate this serious breach of basic free-expression rules. Videos from the event make it clear enough who had to be escorted out after trying to shout Bennett down. And since the main campus anti-Israel group took to social media to claim credit for the disruption, its leadership should also be in the administration’s crosshairs. The question now is not whether Princeton is capable of identifying a violation of its rules—it is whether it is prepared to enforce them.
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Faith in higher education continues to plummet, and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)—the nation’s leading organization representing faculty interests and a longstanding voice on academic freedom and university governance—has decided to train its guns on the growing movement to establish civic education centers at public universities. The AAUP’s objections amount to a single, unlovely demand: we get to decide what students learn, and nobody else gets a vote.
Six days after the report went online, the AAA fired back with a full-throated defense. “Anthropologists welcome rigorous critique of the discipline,” wrote its president, Carolyn M. Rouse. “What we cannot accept is a sweeping verdict about anthropology’s intellectual culture, scholarly practices, and professional norms built on selective evidence and issued without consultation.
Since faculty voted in may to proctor in-person exams, national news outlets and some alumni have decried the end of Princeton’s 133-year-old tradition of unsupervised testing, but students, faculty, and recent graduates say the conversation within the campus community has been mild.
