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Zach Gardner
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: In response to the Trump Administration’s recent efforts to suspend $400 million in federal grants to Columbia University and $210 million to Princeton University, professors and administrators have rushed to the defense of “academic freedom.” In a recent op-ed, University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 charged President Trump with launching “the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare of the 1950s.”
What Eisgruber doesn’t consider, however, is that the threat to academic freedom comes not from the government but from the universities themselves. Rather than focusing on external threats, Princeton should turn the microscope inward and acknowledge the recurring problem of intellectual diversity in its ranks.
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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.
