Your Cart is Empty
September 18, 2023
Dear President Eisgruber and Board of Trustees:
With the beginning of a new school year at Princeton, we are writing to you on behalf of Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS) to reiterate our strong support for Princeton becoming a leader on free speech and academic freedom issues and to inform you of our efforts to assist in achieving that goal.
PFS is an organization driven by Princeton alumni that works with alumni, students, and faculty to support free speech, academic freedom, and viewpoint diversity at Princeton. Thousands of alumni, as well as students and faculty, follow our efforts through our website. We welcome you to visit ithere.
It is clear that more work needs to be done by Princeton’s leadership on educating students about the meaning and importance of free speech and academic freedom. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the country’s foremost defender of free speech and free thought, has just released its 2024 College Free Speech Rankings. It is based on a survey of over 55,000 students at over 250 colleges and universities throughout the country. As had been the case in previous FIRE surveys, Princeton’s rank is once again very poor -- 187 out of 248. Last year its rank was 169 out of 203. The FIRE rankings are increasingly being used by the media, prospective students and their parents, and faculty. We urge Princeton to undertake an explicit program to improve this poor ranking.
The findings of the 2024 FIRE survey reinforce PFS’s own extensive survey of Princeton students undertaken last spring in collaboration with the premiere student survey authority College Pulse. Please see Princeton’s Free Speech Campus Culture here. Both this survey and the FIRE survey clearly show that there is a large gap between Princeton’s rhetoric about free speech and the sobering reality on campus that most Princeton students neither support nor understand free speech principles. For example, the PFS survey found that:
57% said it is never appropriate to block other students from attending a speech; and 16% said it might at least on rare occasions be appropriate to use violence to block a speaker.
In the 2022 orientation for entering students, which PFS applauded, Princeton included a robust program on free speech, including a strong and well-received speech on the subject by President Eisgruber. The 2023 orientation also included a program on free speech, and we applaud the administration for including it, although it has been criticized for lacking ideological balance, such as in this article in National Review by Princeton senior Matthew Wilson. PFS believes such a free speech program should be included in every orientation.
Clearly much more needs to be done by the University on free speech issues. Other university administrations have in recent months announced initiatives to improve free speech culture and understanding on their campuses. See, for example, this recent report about the presidents of over a dozen colleges, including the presidents of Cornell and Duke, undertaking aggressive programs to educate students on free speech and academic freedom. The PEN America initiative is a good start, and we urge the administration to aggressively promote it.
PFS stands ready to support the Princeton administration in any such efforts. In addition, PFS is engaging in a comprehensive program on free speech and academic freedom for this school year, working with students and faculty. An email has been sent to the entire student body on the importance of free speech that includes links for further education. Posters will be put up around campus promoting this campaign.
We are also providing support for speakers to come to campus to discuss various topics and to model open discourse, working with Whig-Clio, the James Madison Program, the Princeton Open Campus Coalition, and other student groups. On September 13, we held the first of this year’s programs, in conjunction with the James Madison Program, in which George Will was the speaker.
We will be undertaking our student survey again this spring, as well as in future years, in order to provide an objective measure of progress at Princeton on free speech and academic freedom.
We also urge Princeton to establish an ombudsperson to oversee free speech and academic freedom problems and complaints as they arise, and thereby to provide a trusted place for students and faculty to bring concerns about violations of the Princeton free speech rule.
Thank you for considering these views, and we stand ready to support further efforts by Princeton in support of free speech and academic freedom. To further that effort, we ask that a member of the Princeton administration be designated to work with us on free speech programs.
Sincerely,
Stuart Taylor, Jr., PFS President
Edward L. Yingling, PFS Secretary
Todd Rulon-Miller, PFS Treasurer
Leslie Spencer, PFS Vice Chair
Princetonians for Free Speech
Since the beginning of the year, Princetonians for Free Speech has been warning that Princeton and other universities were likely to be hit with a big increase in the current 1.4 % tax on endowment income. Now it is happening.
In the early hours of yesterday morning, the House Ways & Means Committee voted to report out its part of the Reconciliation bill – a.k.a. the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” This massive bill contains numerous tax provisions, including a large increase in the tax rate, now 1.4%, on endowment income. The bill creates a tiered tax rate based on an institution’s “student-adjusted” endowment. There are four rates: 1.4%, 7%, 14%, and 21%. The 21% rate applies to schools with an endowment of at least $2 million per student. It is the same as the corporate tax rate. Princeton qualifies for the 21%. According to one article, others qualifying for the highest rate are Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and MIT. Here is a list of the largest endowments. Princeton is listed at $34 billion. Note that Texas, which has a large endowment, is not covered by the endowment tax because it is a public university.
Christopher Bao and Annie Rupertus
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: Princeton asked all departments and University units to prepare “separate plans for 5 percent and 10 percent permanent budget cuts to be phased in over the next three years, with some actions to start later this summer” in an email sent to faculty and staff on Monday afternoon — the University’s most dramatic budgetary guidance yet following a tumultuous semester for higher education.
The email, sent by Provost Jennifer Rexford and Executive Vice President Katie Callow-Wright, explicitly acknowledged the potential for layoffs to be part of budget reductions. “Cuts of this magnitude to our budget cannot be achieved without changes to some operations and the associated elimination of some staff positions,” they wrote.
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.”
