Higher education finally admits it has a free speech problem

Tal Fortgang
'17

The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. For years, the core argument of Princetonians for Free Speech was treated by university administrators as a provocation rather than a diagnosis. The claim that American higher education had drifted from its foundational mission, that a culture of ideological conformity and administrative overreach had corroded the open inquiry that justifies the university’s privileged place in democratic life, was dismissed as politically motivated, answered with defensive boilerplate, or simply ignored. That era appears to be ending. No dramatic reversals have taken shape yet, but something significant is happening. The academy itself—the ivory tower that prides itself on being above and beyond the slings and arrows of the outside world—is beginning to acknowledge that the critics had, and have, a point.

The clearest recent signal came in April 2026, when Yale released a sweeping report on the collapse of public trust in higher education. Produced by a faculty panel of ten professors commissioned by President Maurie McInnis and co-chaired by historian Beverly Gage and sociologist Julia Adams, the report described “widespread uncertainty about the fundamental purpose and mission of higher education” and concluded bluntly that declining trust is not a communications problem. Better messaging will not fix what is fundamentally a substance problem. Rebuilding public confidence, the panel argued, requires “real, substantive action and self-critique.” The report recommended strengthening free speech protections, reducing admissions preferences, expanding financial aid, and restoring academic rigor through grading reform. “Public skepticism and distrust is something that’s built over time and will take some time to reverse,” Gage observed in a New York Times interview. McInnis indicated openness to discussion while stopping short of adopting all the recommendations, a characteristically cautious institutional response but a meaningful one from a university whose credibility lends weight to the entire exercise.

The Yale report matters not primarily for its specific prescriptions, many of which reformers have long advocated. It matters because it represents a shift in premise. The question is no longer whether there is a problem. It is how serious the problem is, and what it will take to fix it. That is precisely the conversation that university leaders, for too long, have refused to have, often while scoffing at the idea that mere American citizens could understand the rarefied world of the academy, much less tell it how to heal itself.

This shift is visible across the landscape. Dartmouth President Sian Beilock offered the most candid formulation in a widely noted New York Times exchange. “As leaders, we lost our mission a bit about what higher education was about,” she said. “We’re educational organizations. We’re not political organizations.” She argued that universities must earn back public trust through genuine change. Even viewpoint diversity, she acknowledged, was neither a Trump administration imposition nor the refrain of cranks and reactionaries, but a legitimate, longstanding institutional obligation, one that should “prevent capture” both from without and from within. Stanford’s “Simplify Stanford” initiative, led by President Jonathan Levin and Provost Martínez, is dismantling administrative layers through which speech-chilling policies tend to proliferate, addressing the structural conditions that make any culture of free inquiry difficult to sustain. Harvard’s Alan Garber has overseen an internal task force producing recommendations to ensure all students can participate in campus life free from harassment, while articulating a personal commitment to “a range of viewpoints on campus.” These are not the statements of administrators who believe there is nothing to fix, nor are they split on the importance of the free and reasoned exchange of ideas to their undertaking.

Against this backdrop, it is worth taking stock of what has actually changed on the specific issues reformers have pressed most directly, including at Princeton. Princetonians for Free Speech has long advocated a specific “Top 10” actions to remedy the problems campus leaders newly acknowledge. With Princeton as bellwether, we can see that imperfect progress combined with the new groundswell of national support for what is essentially PFS’s program signals a unique opportunity to push ahead with further reforms.

On student education, Princeton now runs an annual Orientation program on free expression led by President Eisgruber himself, a program initiated by a former PFS intern that has continued for several years and become a standard feature of Orientation. PFS has applauded this while continuing to push for better ideological balance in how the material is framed. The Yale report’s emphasis on rebuilding institutional trust through substantive educational commitment reinforces the case that this kind of programming, done with genuine intellectual honesty, is a core institutional obligation. Students must know what the expectations are for their time on campus, and there can be no doubt that repercussions are appropriate when those expectations are violated. 

On faculty organizing, the Princeton Council on Academic Freedom (PCAF) is now up and running as an independent faculty group dedicated to defending academic freedom and intellectual pluralism, exactly the model PFS had long advocated by pointing to Harvard’s own Council on Academic Freedom as a template. Faculty-led and independent of the administration, PCAF represents the kind of structural commitment that stands a chance of promulgating policies with the legitimacy it takes to get through the administrative gauntlet. 

On DEI statements in faculty hiring, there is real movement nationally but incomplete progress at Princeton. Heterodox Academy documented that DEI requirements in faculty job listings dropped from 25% to 11% between 2024 and early 2026. Harvard, MIT, the University of Virginia, and Michigan are among institutions that have formally abandoned DEI hiring practices. Princeton’s President Eisgruber has recommended that universities disavow diversity statements for job candidates as part of being visibly open to conservative viewpoints, an important recognition of the fact that wherever such statements are allowed to linger they will set the expectation that candidates toe a particular ideological line. But at Princeton, progress on this front is incomplete. DEI statement use remains optional and departmentally discretionary, in contrast to MIT, where President Kornbluth formally banned them. Does anyone believe that where diversity statements are accepted—and taken seriously—that candidates who choose not to submit them, or use them to advance competing notions of diversity, will get a fair shake? Their very presence shows that departments are captured by a certain ideology, which is by no means the norm in the broader society, but is treated as “normal” within the academy—those who dissent are accordingly treated as deviant. 

On institutional neutrality, Eisgruber’s January 2025 State of the University letter on “Restrained Institutional Speech” moves in the right direction, and a high-profile PCAF roundtable on the topic brought genuine intellectual engagement to a question that universities have long avoided. The Yale report’s emphasis on keeping institutions focused on their core educational mission rather than political positioning is a natural complement. But Princeton and its peers still lack the kind of formal, enforceable commitment that the Kalven Report gave the University of Chicago. The Yale panel’s work suggests such a commitment is increasingly overdue.

Two areas where substantially more progress is needed, and where the Yale report offers important implicit guidance, are administrator reform and admissions reform. These are, in important respects, the same problem. Administrators shape campus culture daily in ways that no presidential letter can fully counter. Without genuine education in free expression principles and real accountability for enforcing them consistently, administrative discretion becomes a standing invitation to enforce ideological orthodoxies in the name of comfort or inclusion. This is precisely what early critics of the contemporary academy (Harvey Silverglate and Alan Kors come to mind) identified as the root of stifling and monocultural campus culture decades ago. Without meaningful changes to hiring, promotion, and training of administrators, this process is fated to repeat. 

Admissions is the upstream variable: who enters the institution, what intellectual dispositions and signals are rewarded in applicants, and whether and how a prospective student engages with disagreement. These choices create cycles, either vicious or virtuous: they can shape the campus culture and set expectations for prospective applicants about what kind of campus they would be joining. An admissions process that actively rewards intellectual curiosity and tolerance for disagreement, rather than implicitly filtering for ideological conformity (if not zealotry), would produce a campus that requires far less policing and far more genuine exchange. How to tease that out of applications is a challenge, but it is one admissions officers should spend time thinking about. 

The broader lesson of the Yale report and of the convergent reform efforts at Dartmouth, Stanford, Harvard, and Princeton is that the debate has moved. Serious people inside these institutions are now saying, on the record, that it was not crankery or conspiracy all along: higher education really has drifted from its mission. The remaining question is whether acknowledgment will produce genuine structural reform or merely a new vocabulary for the same institutional habits. The role of organizations like Princetonians for Free Speech, and of the faculty bodies such as PCAF that have followed in their wake, is keep universities focused. No credit will be awarded for good intentions, nor praise for speech policies that are little more than parchment promises. Enforceable demonstrations of a commitment to open, rigorous, intellectually honest inquiry are within reach. The academy has, at last, begun to admit that they may be necessary after all.

Tal Fortgang ’17 is a Legal Policy Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a regular contributor to PFS and a contributing writer at The Dispatch.