Trajan Hammonds
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: A couple of weeks ago, at 1 a.m., I found out the National Science Foundation (NSF) Postdoctoral Fellowship I applied for was being canceled because it did not comply with Trump’s new executive order on federal funding for DEI initiatives. I did what anyone from my generation would do in a moment like this: I took to X to share my experience. It’s clear that the Trump administration’s assault against academia has begun — and ultimately students, researchers, and our country are on the losing end.
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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.