Your Cart is Empty
Annabel Green
'26
On February 19, the Princeton Council on Academic Freedom hosted Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the Berkeley School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, to discuss his forthcoming book Campus Speech and Academic Freedom: A Guide for Difficult Times, co-authored with Howard Gillman. Chemerinsky described universities as operating in a moment of political pressure, as debates over Israel–Palestine, race, gender identity, and other charged issues intensify scrutiny of campus speech.
Throughout the talk, Chemerinsky argued that free speech is truly tested when we defend free expression we detest. Resisting the impulse to legislate egregious ideas is essential to preserving free expression. In his book, Chemerinsky and Gillman seek to clarify how established legal principles apply in this environment, particularly at public universities, and he warns of conflating colloquial understandings of, for example, hate speech, with the rigorous standards which apply to the legal expression of terms.
He outlined four central points. First, all ideas and viewpoints may be expressed on a college campus. At public institutions, the First Amendment prohibits the government from suppressing speech because of its content or viewpoint, even if that speech is offensive. While public universities are directly bound by the First Amendment, most private universities, including Princeton, adopt free speech rules and policies which align with First Amendment principles.
Second, the First Amendment is not absolute. Certain categories of speech are unprotected, including incitement to imminent illegal activity, true threats, and harassment. Notably, “hate speech” as such remains protected, unlike in many European countries, and attempts to define it too broadly risk granting the government authority to censor.
Third, universities may impose content-neutral time, place, and manner restrictions. Institutions can regulate when and where protests occur, so long as policies do not discriminate based on viewpoint and leave open adequate alternative channels for expression. This principle is especially relevant to contemporary issues, such as campus encampments. Questions arise when invited speakers generate extraordinary security costs and courts have not provided definitive answers.
Fourth, Chemerinsky argued that government efforts to dictate what may be taught at public universities, such as anti-critical race theory (CRT) or “Stop W.O.K.E.” laws, violate the First Amendment and threaten academic freedom. Chemerinsky described the relationship between academic freedom and the First Amendment as a venn diagram; while academic freedom overlaps with the First Amendment, it is not coextensive with it. Academic freedom is governed by professional academic standards, and courts typically defer to schools to establish these standards.
Chemerinsky warned that giving the government the ability to legislate ideas poses a far greater danger than tolerating even deeply unpopular speech.
Annabel Green '26, is a senior from Boulder, CO majoring in Public and International Affairs and minoring in Global Health & Health Policy. She is a PFS student writing fellow.
Comments will be approved before showing up.
Prestigious universities and leading state schools across the nation have embraced viewpoint diversity by building new institutions—civic education centers and the like—which are simultaneously on yet apart from the campus. Harvard has quietly taken a different tack. Over the past several months, the university’s top brass have been asking major donors for $10 million gifts to endow new professorships under the banner of “viewpoint diversity.” Provost John Manning, a scholar often associated with the conservative legal movement, has led the effort, aiming to place between 20 and 30 new faculty across schools and departments rather than siloed in a standalone institute.
Why Harvard would need additional funding for this is an open question, but putting that partly aside, we ought to ask what to make of this unique initiative. It stands a chance of being either the most consequential reform attempt in elite higher education this decade, or a sophisticated piece of reputation management serving double duty as a clever fundraiser. Which one it turns out to be depends on whether Harvard has thought carefully about what viewpoint diversity means, and whether it intends to execute in line with a considered answer.
Are some schools better at fostering intellectual diversity than others? The study clearly reveals that the most elite universities are among those with the least ideological diversity. Princeton is ranked 13 out of the 55 in the study, with its faculty slightly more ideologically diverse than, for instance, UC Berkeley, Brown, Dartmouth and Harvard, and slightly less diverse than Stanford, Cornell, UCLA or Georgetown.
There is little doubt that this study provides another opening for politicians and critics to attack higher education, perhaps in unfair ways. Princeton could help neutralize this by joining those reform-minded university leaders in the now burgeoning effort to regain the public’s trust in higher education.
A federal judge ruled last month that the National Endowment for the Humanities’ (NEH) termination of more than 1,400 grants in April 2025 had violated the Constitution on several counts. Princeton researchers await the effects of the verdict, which ordered that the NEH must rescind its termination notices.
