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by George F. Will
Excerpt: Squalls of indignation gust across campuses so frequently that they seem merely performative — synthetic, perfunctory, uninteresting. Princeton’s current contretemps, however, fascinatingly illustrates how wokeness, which lacks limiting principles, limits opposition to itself. Since 2001, a statue of John Witherspoon (1723-1794), the Presbyterian minister recruited from Scotland to be the then-college’s president, has adorned a plaza adjacent to Firestone Library.
Now the woke, who subordinate everything to “social justice” as they imagine it, demand its removal because he owned two slaves and did not advocate immediate abolition. As Princeton’s president, this “animated son of liberty” (John Adams’s description of the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence) assured the precarious institution’s survival. His students included future congressmen, senators, Supreme Court justices and a president — James Madison stayed an extra year to study with Witherspoon. . . . Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS), an alumni organization much more devoted than the university’s administration and trustees are to viewpoint diversity, notes that “the atmosphere on campus greatly inhibits students, faculty, and others from stating their true views” on “highly politicized issues,” which nowadays most issues become.
In an age of social media, access to news and information can seem less like a privilege than a tidal wave. What we end up seeing isn’t fully objective: It’s composed, in large part, of opinions and biased perspectives that arise in the aftermath of striking or unsettling events. As long as you have a device and an internet connection, you can share and consume opinions on any given subject with minimal vetting.
There’s no shortage of editorialized content in the world today. So why would you specifically seek out the opinion page of a newspaper, and why ours in particular? What do we, as a student newspaper, have to offer you as a member of the Princeton community?
“When it comes to getting free speech right,” writes Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber in the introduction to Terms of Respect, “America’s young people deserve higher marks than they get.” This is a central contention of Eisgruber’s new book, and it is, as those young people say, big – if true.
It also begs the question twice over, in the way that is all but inevitable when we talk about higher education and speech, two goods contemporarily treated as goods of themselves, if not the highest goods. Whether Eisgruber’s contention is correct depends on what is meant by free speech, then again on what is meant by getting it right.
On November 12, former ACLU Legal Director David Cole delivered the annual Tanner Lecture on Human Values. His talk, entitled “A Defense of Free Speech from Its Progressive Critics,” drew a crowd to the Friend Center. Cole has litigated several major First Amendment cases and currently serves as a law professor at Georgetown. A self-identified progressive, Cole explicated an argument in favor of the First Amendment.
Cole outlined the main progressive critiques of the First Amendment. “What unites these critiques is the sense that the First Amendment is too protective at the cost of another very important value in our society: equality.” He also acknowledged the progressive skepticism of free speech’s “core demand” of neutrality – the idea that the government “must be neutral as to the content and viewpoint of speech when it is regulating private speakers.”
