The Editorial Board
Wall Street Journal
Excerpt: President Trump keeps flexing the government’s power over elite universities, with Cornell and Northwestern the latest to have federal funds withheld. After Princeton received the same treatment last week, it’s now facing a test of its principles. On Monday students disrupted a campus talk by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.
Princeton’s rules of conduct, drawing from the University of Chicago’s statement on free speech, say students “may not obstruct or otherwise interfere with the freedom of others to express views they reject.” Who pulled the fire alarm? Who was yelling antisemitic taunts at Jewish students? If they were students, why would Princeton want them?
Princetonians for Free Speech
The political violence that has ravaged America for too many years has now led to the horrifying assassination on September 10, on the campus of Utah Valley University, of conservative firebrand Charlie Kirk, a champion of free speech whose attacks on the left helped win him a big following among young conservatives while infuriating many on the left. He was planning to debate all comers at the campus event, as was his custom.
Leela Hensler
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: The Princeton Police Department has stepped up patrols of the town’s Jewish Center on Nassau Street. The shift comes in the wake of half a dozen reported incidents of graffiti around town beginning in mid-August that are being investigated as “bias intimidation incidents.”
“All of these investigations remain active, [and] our detective bureau is following up on any possible leads,” said Captain Matthew Solovay of the Princeton Police Department in an interview with The Daily Princetonian. He also confirmed that patrols around parks and the Jewish Center had increased.
Maximillian Meyer
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: Members of the far-left have spent years talking down to the American people from a position of self-styled moral superiority. They have scolded that it is racist to support the police, transphobic to seek to keep biological men out of women’s sports, and emboldening of Nazis to dare to support President Trump.
Rhetoric reducing political opponents to “Nazis” excuses people from ever having to engage with the other side. And when the core values of honest dissent and earnest dialogue slip out of the political arena, it’s all too easy for violence to fill the void.