President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 is “very proud” of University students’ commitment to free speech, he said at an event hosted on Saturday by the Princeton Progressive Law Society.
“I want to, among other things, urge progressives to embrace free speech as an ideal and as a practice and to take pride in the progressive heritage of that concept,” Eisgruber said during the presentation. “I don’t mean to say that free speech is only for progressives. I certainly don’t believe that. I regard free speech as a universal human right, as an American ideal.”
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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.