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Douglas Schleicher
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: In thinking about the complex problem of academic freedom, the Princeton community must take care to avoid false dichotomies that could be harmful and restrict free speech. One such dichotomy is the idea that we can have either controversial academic inquiry or allow those impacted by that inquiry to speak up and be heard — but not both.
In a guest contribution published on Thursday in The Daily Princetonian, Joan Scott falls into this precise trap. While defending the right to host this past Friday’s conference, entitled “The Anti-Zionist Idea: History, Theory, and Politics,” she simultaneously seeks to delegitimize and silence Rabbi Gil Steinlauf ’91 for expressing concern about its framing and impact, suggesting that his advocacy on behalf of Jewish students is somehow a threat to academic freedom rather than an exercise of it.
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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.
