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On December 5, leaders of the Alumni Free Speech Alliance (AFSA), including AFSA president and PFS co-founder Edward Yingling, participated in an important congressional roundtable on free speech on college campuses. AFSA participants also including John Craig, AFSA Treasurer; students from W&L and UVA who are very involved with AFSA members there; and Raj Kannappan of Young America’s Foundation (YAF) and a member of AFSA’s Cornell alumni group member. Other participants were from the Foundation on Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA).
Republican House Members, including Rep. Greg Murphy, the organizer, Rep Virginia Foxx, the next chair of the Education and Labor Committee, and other free speech champions, led the discussion. This is the second of these annual free speech roundtables.
The link to the video of the Roundtable is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_AMvnjHq0I
Note: The Alumni Free Speech Alliance is a formal alliance of alumni free speech groups of which PFS was a co-founder. PFS co-founders Edward Yingling and Stuart Taylor serve as president and vice-chair, respectively, of AFSA. AFSA has fifteen member alumni groups, including groups from Harvard, Yale, MIT, Cornell, Stanford and UVA. It is growing rapidly as more and more alumni groups are forming for their universities.
On November 12, former ACLU Legal Director David Cole delivered the annual Tanner Lecture on Human Values. His talk, entitled “A Defense of Free Speech from Its Progressive Critics,” drew a crowd to the Friend Center. Cole has litigated several major First Amendment cases and currently serves as a law professor at Georgetown. A self-identified progressive, Cole explicated an argument in favor of the First Amendment.
Cole outlined the main progressive critiques of the First Amendment. “What unites these critiques is the sense that the First Amendment is too protective at the cost of another very important value in our society: equality.” He also acknowledged the progressive skepticism of free speech’s “core demand” of neutrality – the idea that the government “must be neutral as to the content and viewpoint of speech when it is regulating private speakers.”
On Jan. 2, the Office of the Vice President for Campus Life released a set of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) regarding a new University policy regulating audio and visual recording. The policy classifies any recording made at events deemed private — where not all participants have consented — as “secret or covert,” placing such recordings in violation of University rules.
However, recording at public events, such as advertised public speaker events, is permitted unless the speaker, performer, or party hosting the event explicitly states otherwise. “The policy does not cover meetings open to all current members of the resident University community or to the public,” according to the FAQ website.
Last month’s issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly (PAW) fawns over Michael Park ’98, a right-wing lawyer and, since 2018, a U.S. circuit judge. Park’s portrait commands the cover, while the accompanying long-form profile, titled “The Contender,” speculates that he could become Donald Trump’s next nominee to the Supreme Court. The author is P.G. Sittenfeld ’07.
But Sittenfeld is not just any old journalist. Last May, President Donald Trump pardoned Sittenfeld, a one-time rising star in Cincinnati politics, following his conviction on federal bribery and extortion charges in 2022. Sittenfeld, a Democrat, owes his freedom to Trump — the man who nominated his subject Park to his judgeship, and the man with the power to elevate Park further to the nation’s highest court. Nowhere does PAW disclose this striking conflict of interest.
