Your Cart is Empty
Mark Bernstein ’83
Princeton Alumni Weekly
Excerpt: All in all, campus tension has been as high in recent weeks as it has been in several years. Furthermore, not in recent memory has a political issue so publicly and vocally divided the student body. On a campus that leans heavily toward the political left, fractures have emerged between people who until recently considered themselves progressive allies, only to find that, on this issue, they are bitterly divided.
And yet. It may be grading on a curve, but at least as of mid-November when this issue went to print, Princeton had avoided the uglier incidents that had taken place at other schools.
Comments will be approved before showing up.
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.
