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By Michael Camp
Princetonians for Free Speech
Excerpt: Recently members of the senior class at Princeton University were asked to respond to an opinion survey. Among the many questions asked, one was “How would you describe your political persuasions?” Another question asked, “On a scale from one to five, how comfortable do you feel sharing your political views on campus?” Of the total population of 1296 seniors 542 answered both of these questions. The results are shown in [a table in the full article, linked below]: . . .
There is a remarkably clear pattern. If you compare any two political categories, the respondents in the more liberal category are also more comfortable expressing their views. Another way to look at it is that 71% of those in the three most liberal categories rate themselves as 4 or 5 in terms of comfort, while 60% of those in the three most conservative categories rate themselves as 1 or 2. Why is it that liberal students are more comfortable than conservative students in sharing their political views on campus? I can think of three explanations.
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Prestigious universities and leading state schools across the nation have embraced viewpoint diversity by building new institutions—civic education centers and the like—which are simultaneously on yet apart from the campus. Harvard has quietly taken a different tack. Over the past several months, the university’s top brass have been asking major donors for $10 million gifts to endow new professorships under the banner of “viewpoint diversity.” Provost John Manning, a scholar often associated with the conservative legal movement, has led the effort, aiming to place between 20 and 30 new faculty across schools and departments rather than siloed in a standalone institute.
Why Harvard would need additional funding for this is an open question, but putting that partly aside, we ought to ask what to make of this unique initiative. It stands a chance of being either the most consequential reform attempt in elite higher education this decade, or a sophisticated piece of reputation management serving double duty as a clever fundraiser. Which one it turns out to be depends on whether Harvard has thought carefully about what viewpoint diversity means, and whether it intends to execute in line with a considered answer.
Are some schools better at fostering intellectual diversity than others? The study clearly reveals that the most elite universities are among those with the least ideological diversity. Princeton is ranked 13 out of the 55 in the study, with its faculty slightly more ideologically diverse than, for instance, UC Berkeley, Brown, Dartmouth and Harvard, and slightly less diverse than Stanford, Cornell, UCLA or Georgetown.
There is little doubt that this study provides another opening for politicians and critics to attack higher education, perhaps in unfair ways. Princeton could help neutralize this by joining those reform-minded university leaders in the now burgeoning effort to regain the public’s trust in higher education.
A federal judge ruled last month that the National Endowment for the Humanities’ (NEH) termination of more than 1,400 grants in April 2025 had violated the Constitution on several counts. Princeton researchers await the effects of the verdict, which ordered that the NEH must rescind its termination notices.
