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By Danielle Shapiro
Excerpt: Watching the Class of 2023’s Commencement, I felt grateful, nostalgic, and pensive. Liminal periods implore us to consider our place within the world and the decisions we’ve made at each stage. Speaking before the graduating class, President Eisgruber offered his own commentary, praising the work of political activists for their commitment to Princeton’s motto, “In the Nation’s Service and the Service of Humanity.”
But Eisgruber’s departing message was misguided for its substantial focus on political activism and its departure from the core purpose of Princeton and universities like it: truth-seeking and the production and dissemination of knowledge. Moreover, though he extolled freedom of speech, he crucially neglected how freedom of speech ought to operate within the University’s mission.
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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.
