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Below is a link to our first podcast, a 52-minute interview of Jonathan Rauch, a Brookings scholar and journalist who is one of America’s sharpest and most original thinkers, by Stuart Taylor Jr., president of Princetonians for Free Speech. The subject is Jonathan’s highly acclaimed new book, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. It is a deep dive into how Western thinkers have used evidence and logic since the enlightenment to determine what is true and what is false, making possible enormous progress in science, medicine, philosophy, politics, law, and other human affairs.
Most important for today’s world, Rauch explains the threats to all this progress, to the health of what he calls the reality-based community, and even to our way of life, from the Trumpist “firehose of falsehoods” on the far right and the totalitarian cancel culture that is coming to dominate academia, the news media, and other educated elites on the left. The book includes a muscular defense of free speech, which is vital to the constitution of knowledge.
The many glowing reviews include those of columnist George Will, who calls Rauch “a James Madison for this era,” and former American Civil Liberties Union president Nadine Strossen, who says: “Starting from first principles and applying them to headlines as recent as the storming of the U.S. Capitol in 2021, The Constitution of Knowledge provides the map we've been waiting for.”
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.
