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Frannie Block and Maya Sulkin
The Free Press
Excerpt: In 2024, David Piegaro attended a pro-Palestine rally on Princeton University’s campus as a self-described “citizen journalist.” After watching all this from a distance, Piegaro began to follow and videotape Princeton professor Max Weiss, who Piegaro recognized as a leader of a pro-Palestine faculty group, and another man wearing a suit. When Piegaro tried to enter a building with them, the man with the suit essentially shoved him down the stairs, alleges Piegaro.
In April, a New Jersey judge found Piegaro not guilty of all the charges, concluding that he might “have been unwise, or even defiant, but it does not amount to reckless disregard.” On Wednesday, Piegaro filed a lawsuit against Princeton and Strother in a federal court in New Jersey, alleging violations of his First and Fourteenth Amendment rights, use of excessive force, wrongful imprisonment, fabrication of evidence, and more.
The shooting at Brown is deeply tragic. But it is not the time for mere thoughts and prayers. It hasn’t been for decades. As another Ivy League university, this moment calls for Princeton to stand in solidarity with the victims of the Brown shooting by pushing for significant reform to fight violence. University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 is uniquely equipped as the past chair and active board member of the Association of American Universities (AAU) — an organization with a precedent of condemning gun violence — to lobby for gun reform policies on the national and state level.
A discussion about Fizz and the role of social media in our discourse took place at Princeton University on December 3rd, 2025, hosted by the Princeton Open Campus Coalition (POCC) and funded by Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS), While the discussion has been lauded as an example of what can come about through open and civil exchange of ideas, several questions remain worth considering. What is the place of anonymous speech in our society? Should someone take responsibility for the things they say? Or has our public discourse been hollowed out by social media to the point where online commentary should be considered performative?
Tal Fortgang ‘17
When Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber spoke at Harvard on November 5, 2025, he expressed what to his detractors may have sounded like an epiphany. “There’s a genuine civic crisis in America,” he said, noting how polarization and social-media amplification have made civil discourse uniquely difficult. Amid that crisis, he concluded, colleges must retain “clear time, place, and manner rules” for protest, and when protesters violate those rules, the university must refuse to negotiate. As he warned: “If you cede ground to those who break the rules … you encourage more rule-breaking, and you betray the students and scholars who depend on this university to function.”
