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David Montgomery ‘83
Princeton Alumni Weekly
Excerpt: For the first time in memory, Princeton is inviting alumni, faculty, students, and allies to lend their voices to a broad campaign of political advocacy and public affirmation in response to the Trump administration’s unprecedented attacks on research funding and academic freedom in American higher education. “To my knowledge, this is a new kind of initiative for the University,” President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 told PAW in an early May interview about the campaign, which is called “Stand Up for Princeton and Higher Education.”
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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.
