PFS Editorial in Response to Daily Princetonian Editorial published on September 10

Dear Charlie Yale, Siyeon Lee and the Daily Princetonian,

In Class of 2029: Reject selective views of free speech, you critique the letter from Princetonians for Free Speech to entering first-year students that appeared recently in the Princeton Tory. 

Thank you in advance for the opportunity to respond.

To answer your question as to why The Princeton Tory published our letter: we were given the opportunity to address issues of free speech, academic freedom and Princeton’s campus culture in the Tory. Antonio Settembrino’s experience as recounted last spring in Tigertown Blues: A Conservative Princetonian’s Freshman Year, was a starting point that seemed appropriate for Tory readers.

We welcome the opportunity to be published in any student publication, so we are delighted that Daily Princetonian editor Jerry Zhu ’27 responded positively to our request to publish a guest contribution that fits the Prince’s editorial criteria.

At PFS we try to exemplify and uphold our core principles of non-partisanship and viewpoint diversity – not always easy. We count a wide range among our ranks. Our board members are both Democrats and Republicans and include a former counsel to a Democratic Senator, a former member of a Democratic Administration, and a former nominee to a high-ranking position by a Democratic president. Our friends and advisors are national leaders in campus free speech advocacy, including the former ACLU executive director and renowned author Nadine Strossen, Jonathan Rauch, author of The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, John Tomasi of Heterodox Academy and Greg Lukianoffof FIRE, all of whom recognize the threat to academic freedom and viewpoint diversity arising both from internal illiberal norms that discourage dissent, and from authoritarian external political pressures, and all of whom PFS has helped bring to Princeton to speak. 

We suspect that you did not mean to imply that the Tory should not publish a letter from PFS addressed to the class of 2029 because the Tory’s point of view leans right-of-center and is therefore only for a “select few”, while the Daily Princetonian’s point of view leans left-of-center and therefore represents “the entire class of 2029.” 

PFS has over 16,000 subscribers, the great majority of whom are Princeton alumni whose viewpoints no doubt vary widely. We post articles relevant to our mission that respects and challenges this wide range. The fact that you take strong objection to some of our editorial choices while approving of others, including several posts from the Daily Princetonian, means we must be doing something right. 

One thing unites our readership: they tend to be very interested in student voices. This is why PFS has a student writing fellow program, and why we take a special interest in posting relevant articles that appear in the Daily Princetonian, the Princeton Tory and in any other publication in which student writing appears. We are interested in all student experiences, including the international students you mention, when their free speech or academic freedom rights have been threatened. We welcome posting articles about the plight of Princeton’s international students from the Daily Princetonian, as we did with Commentary: for undocumented students, choosing to protest is a privilege, or from elsewhere, as we did with PAW’s powerful recent article about the impact of government policies on international graduate students.

Whether domestic or international, we care deeply about the large numbers of students who report in many polls, including our own, that they regularly self-censor on important controversial subjects. Their reasons center around fear of offense, reputational damage, negative academic consequences and doubts that their universities would defend them. They report a culture that rewards conformity and discourages dissent. No matter where you stand, a university culture that encourages self-censorship is, we believe, not conducive to a true education.

In light of Charlie Kirk’s murder at Utah Valley University and the recent national student survey showing a 50% increase in support for political violence among America’s college students in the last five years, perhaps the Daily Princetonian would welcome an article from PFS on the subject of student attitudes towards campus political violence and what it means for both Princeton and the nation.