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Elisabeth Stewart and Luke Grippo
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: Princeton will freeze most faculty and staff hiring, citing uncertainty around federal funding and a potential increased endowment tax, according to a memo sent to faculty and staff Wednesday morning. The letter, from Provost Jennifer Rexford and Executive Vice President Katie Callow-Wright, follows many other universities adopting hiring freezes in response to funding uncertainty. It represents the University’s most significant response to date to recent federal actions.
The ideological partisanship, dogmatism and bigotry on display in our society today are to some degree the fruit of our educational system. Too many college classrooms have become indoctrination camps. Some students buy into the leftist ideology they’re taught and become its enforcers. Others react by embracing opposing forms of extremism. Either way, radicalism and animus replace knowledge and wisdom.
So what should we do? The answer isn’t complicated, but acting on it will take determination and courage. Colleges and universities must return to offering a rigorous liberal arts education that refuses to engage in indoctrination and challenges groupthink. College courses must actively cultivate the virtues of curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual humility, analytical rigor and, above all, dedication to the pursuit of truth.
Before declaring my major in the School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), I had considered many majors such as classics, history, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. I settled on SPIA because it offers a disciplinary breadth through which I can narrow down my tentative interests.
Early into the major, I was sympathetic to the political orthodoxy through which many Princetonians operate which I would summarize as characterized by critical theory (i.e. neo-Marxist concepts of group identity and power struggle). However, I soon found myself increasingly in misalignment with the prevailing narrative and the deep grievance and resentment my fellow classmates seemed to feel toward the current state of the country.
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.
