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Khoa Sands
Princeton Tory
Excerpt: While democracy emphasizes a particularized government consciousness that reflects the collective awareness and identity of a specific demos, liberalism prioritizes the universality of individual rights and freedoms shaped by historical consciousness. The tension between these forms of consciousness underlies key debates in contemporary political philosophy regarding which political regime is most preferable.
By Marisa Hirschfield ‘27
On September 17th, Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen delivered the annual Constitution Day Lecture in McCosh 50. The lecture, co-hosted by the James Madison Program and the Program in Law and Normative Thinking, was entitled “Our Civil Rights Revolution.” Professor Gersen discussed the history of affirmative action and the evolving meaning of civil rights.
Angela Smith and Leslie Spencer
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: In a recent Opinion piece, Siyeon Lee and Charlie Yale critiqued a letter from Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS) to entering first-year students that appeared recently in The Princeton Tory, the University’s leading conservative political magazine. In their piece, Lee and Yale questioned why we chose to publish in “a journal that only appeals to a select few on this campus,” and accused us of holding “selective views of free speech.”
To be clear: there is no such thing as free speech for some but not for others. Other than speech that is unprotected by First Amendment law, PFS is committed to defending the widest possible freedom of speech and open discourse for everyone, no matter how unpopular or offensive the point of view.
By Tal Fortgang ‘17
With students returning to campus for the start of the new academic year, and demonstrations from radical groups sure to crop up on quads once again, one question universities face is how to balance robust academic freedom with universities’ competing interests. Schools cannot live on academic freedom alone; the functioning of a university requires standards, rules, and regulations to allow students and faculty to flourish. Yet university leadership, especially at elite schools where abstract thinking is prized and questions are regularly left unanswered as matters of mere intellectual exercise, has not even begun to articulate a principled way of weighing these matters. They can begin to do so by considering an unlikely – and unwitting – source of wisdom: Princeton professor Lorgia García Peña’s recent address to the Socialism 2025 conference, on using one’s academic perch to dismantle the academy.
