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Joseph Anthony Gonzalez '28
The specter that the “chilling” of free speech has replaced official administrative suppression is real. I have experienced it, and if empirical evidence is not enough, then the data will corroborate it. It has been recorded in college polls, surveyed, and yet still appears to be a mystery to the people in charge, as they change their tune and beat the drum of “Free Speech.” Maybe it is time that they give up the ghost.
Case in point. It was Wednesday, November 6th, 2024, and the classroom in which I sat was a somber setting. Internally I was pleased, but I found myself surrounded by melancholy. The professor presiding over these events was Dr. Eddie Glaude, better known outside the University for his MSNBC (MS NOW) punditry. Dr. Glaude would go on to give an interview, called “The threat the second Trump term poses to Democracy”on that network on November 10th. The class (Black Intellectual Thought and The Philosophy of Race) ended early after he shared his personal feelings about the election (reflected in the interview above) that had just taken place. I welcomed it, exhausted as I was, after staying up through the night to watch my preferred candidate, Donald J. Trump, became the 47th president of the United States, sweeping all 7 swing states en route to victory.
I did not discuss this with my classmates; many were crying, some seemed legitimately scared that Trump had won. The professor did not tell me not to speak my mind; in fact, I have taken two more classes with Professor Glaude since then (Black Rage and Black Power and Malcolm, Martin, and Ella) classes where I have also kept my conservative views in check for obvious reasons. I enjoy his classes. I love history and I want to look at it from every lens. But I did not feel comfortable testing to see if my fellow classmates shared the same point of view. It was not due to lack of courage. I had served as an infantryman in Iraq. It was the fact that I knew there would be little to no civil discourse about the election. I felt that there would be no productive conversation that could possibly come out of it. My conservative values were clearly in contention with the beliefs of my professor. I just did not share the same worldview as my fellow classmates.
That was enough to find myself outside of the groupthink. I wanted to avoid being castigated as a supporter of some “White … (fill in the blanks and consider some invectives while you do so, you have heard it all before). Even though I am a minority and I have had many disadvantages in this life: I was a high school dropout, my mother died from a drug overdose, and I went to community college before I transferred to Princeton University. I did not fear the incoming administration; I welcomed it, and that would have been considered beyond the pale.
This trend has been consistent since I was part of the Freshman Scholar Institute (FSI) during the summer of 2024. A program designed to help incoming first-generation/low-income students (FLI) prepare for the rigors of Princeton, since FLI students lack many of the advantages, educational backgrounds, and cultural capital that most Princeton students possess. It’s there, at our introduction to Princeton. We read Dr. Ruha Benjamin's “Race after Technology: Abolitionist tools for the new Jim Code” in a class titled “Ways of Knowing”. This is a Princeton professor who recently received the MacArthur “Genius” Grant , while on probation for protesting Israel, turned around and then called into question integration in the United States on Trevor Noah’s podcast . Honest discourse cannot take place if minds are not willing to be changed. I simply ask, how do you engage in exchange in the currency of ideas and begin to reason with someone who holds that view? These are the ideological leaders on campus, professors with devoted acolytes instead of basic note-taking students, and media personalities in their own right. When it comes to opposing the dogma, I, as a simple student, just say to myself… Don’t.
Joseph Gonzalez ‘28 is a History major. He is a veteran and transfer student, having served as both a Marine and Army infantryman. After he retired from the military, he attended community college and was then fortunate enough to be accepted to Princeton. He is a PFS Writing Fellow.
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Free speech is usually described as a right one either has or does not have, relative to the laws of one’s residence. But a right, like a muscle, is only as strong as its use. When my family flew to the United States in 2018, I naively thought that I had escaped the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) systematic suppression of free speech. I believed that I would access Google, YouTube, and Winnie the Pooh without any need for a VPN to circumvent the “Great Firewall of China,” a term used to describe the CCP’s firm control on online content. But I was clueless: I unknowingly carried a part of the repression within me.
In April 1995, University maintenance crews spent two days cleaning “walkways, benches, plazas and walls on campus,” working to remove not dirt or debris, but simple sidewalk chalk. The chalk drawings, according to a report from The Daily Princetonian, consisted of “pro-gay messages” written by hand during Pride Week. After the removal, advocates were rightly in uproar. Following the incident, the University, claiming that the discrepancy had transpired because of “cross-office confusion,” clarified its chalking policy — it was henceforth banned, in all cases.
Three decades on, chalk at Princeton has found itself relegated to dusty trays in classrooms and lecture halls. Hardly anyone — students, activists, artists, campus organizations, candidates, schoolchildren — chalks University grounds anymore. Simply put, the University’s ban has worked. But the question remains: Why is Princeton so afraid of chalk?
There is exactly one kind of institution in the world whose product is “thinking” — the university. This is an existential challenge for every university, Princeton most definitely included, now that nearly all artificial intelligence is purpose-built to offload the hard work of thinking.
Universities need to return to the foundations of learning with trust — and verification — at the heart of their relationship with students. They also need to be far more prescriptive about what learning looks like so that students who arrive with limited capacity for deep reading have the time and space to develop their critical thinking skills.
