By Matthew Wilson
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: On Tuesday, I had the privilege of watching several of my close friends in the Class of 2023 don their caps and gowns and take part in Princeton’s annual Commencement. It was an idyllic day for the occasion — the weather could not have been better, and a joyful, festive feeling filled the air as the ceremony began. All around me, parents, grandparents, relatives, and friends beamed with pride for their graduates and eagerly awaited inspiring and uplifting remarks from the individuals slated to speak at the ceremony.
Then came University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83. While Eisgruber began his remarks by proposing to offer graduates “a few words about your time here,” what followed was an invective tirade delivered with the fervor of a preacher’s sermon, excoriating the sins of those who would dare to disagree with his views on a wide array of highly contestable topics.
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By Khoa Sands ‘26
The idea of decline has always held a certain allure to historians and politicians alike. The high prophet of this declinism was Oswald Spengler, whose 1918 book The Decline of the West has become a motivating treatise for the American New Right. For these modern-day doomsayers, the United States is predestined to ruin, beset by internal crises of spiritedness and domestic politics as well as external threats of rising challengers to the US-led world order. These concerns are not unfounded – a revanchist China will be the largest geopolitical crisis of the twenty-first century and any casual observer of American politics can attest to the sorry state of domestic politics in America today.
Matthew Wilson, Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: As I write this essay, the despicable poison of Jew-hatred has taken a firm hold at so many college campuses, Princeton included. Here at Princeton, activists proudly chant “Intifada” and demand the complete eradication of the world’s only Jewish state; elsewhere, from Cornell, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania to Ohio State and Cooper Union, frightening (and sometimes violent and illegal) exhibitions of anti-Jewish attitudes abound.
For the most part, university responses to these shameful displays have been tepid and restrained. these same universities, despite being so reticent to speak out now, have a prolonged public history of weighing in on a wide array of hotly contested and politically controversial topics. At Princeton, for instance, recent years have seen official statements issued deploring Supreme Court rulings on abortion and affirmative action, condemning a jury verdict, and attacking a professor for his political views. On Hamas’s terrorist attacks? No official statements.