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Frances Brogan
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: In his 2017 book “On Tyranny,” an analysis of America’s anti-democratic shift under Trump, Yale historian Timothy Snyder implores his audience, “Do not obey in advance.” “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given,” he writes, arguing that those who adjust their behavior to fit the demands of an oppressive regime are “teaching power what it can do.”
But this week, Snyder and two other Yale professors, Marci Shore and Jason Stanley, announced that they are leaving Yale and joining the University of Toronto’s faculty. While Snyder and Shore, a married couple, attributed their departure to personal reasons, they accepted the positions at Toronto after the November presidential election.
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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.
