Princeton Orientation 2026: Why Viewpoint Diversity Is Still Missing

Tal Fortgang
‘17

Maryanne Wolf is a neuroscientist of reading. Princeton asked her to teach the Class of 2030 how to reckon with difficult language. Little could be more necessary at a moment of vanishing attention spans and visceral intolerance for language upsetting to its audience. Which makes it surprising that at Opening Exercises Wolf had a hard time finishing a sentence. She collapsed into her armchair, announced that she could not say “his name,” and spelled “T-R-U-M-P” to 1,300 first-years. Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber, sitting across from her, smiled and said nothing.

Some criticism has come for Eisgruber, but who knows what his snap reaction really means. What’s shocking is that ten years after his first election victory, the name of the sitting president of the United States is treated as some kind of hex. The university that assigned incoming freshmen Wolf’s Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World — meant to foster courage in encountering challenging sentences — somehow failed once again to display a modicum of maturity when it counted. A decade on, is it possible that we’re still not ready to speak about the president without hyperventilation—or treating his name as a curse, or a trigger?

Princeton freshman Simon Riley (who, I must brag, was my student in extracurricular seminars when he was in high school) skewered the incident in a Daily Princetonian column. Orientation, he argued, presented an institutional left-leaning perspective: sustainability as intersectionality, sex education that does not mention children, two hours of diversity programming and zero hours of disagreement. That’s all true, and the fact that universities are still struggling to break out of such indoctrinating programming is baffling.

Yet an appreciation for the virtues of viewpoint diversity should lead us to level a deeper criticism. Somehow, Donald Trump’s name is still ineffable, even among people hand-selected to teach new college students the importance of encountering difficult words. 

Yes, political donations are lopsided and progressive ways of understanding the world are treated as normal. But there is more to fix, clearly. You can park a Federalist Society table at the activities fair and still have demonstrated, as a matter of university priority so high that it’s the first thing you encounter on campus, that one party is led by Voldemort—that they are the force of evil. Wolf hating Donald Trump is no scandal. The immature, quasi-religious certitude with which political opponents are treated as being against what the university is for—that’s a profound problem. It speaks to the ways a deep culture shift will be necessary for universities to uphold their commitments to letting truth and error collide.  

Last month I argued that classroom environments suffer when students outsource difficult thinking to a machine. The orientation debacle shows that not by technology alone do the humanities wither. President Eisgruber chose to have students read a book urging the class to read “deeply,” with “courage and effort.” What is deep reading if not the refusal to flinch at a sentence? Now we have seen its limits; the author of that book came to campus and displayed that this is how a sophisticated person, a model for all Princetonians, deals with disagreement. 

At risk of rehashing statistics familiar to readers, 96.4 percent of reported Princeton faculty federal contributions in the 2023–24 cycle went to Democrats, 1.44 percent to independents, 2.16 percent to Republicans. A one-party faculty develops norms, culture, and etiquette. Those norms signal to everyone from a distinguished scientist to a first-year student that they can be confident in which behaviors will be seen as serious and sophisticated. Refusing to say certain “bad words” is an important part of establishing and reinforcing those norms. What does this say about the code that governs the academy?

Quotas or affirmative action for conservatives hardly solve this challenge. A faculty that is more balanced on the surface but maintains the cultural imbalance evident at orientation still has almost no viewpoint diversity in the sense that matters. But it doesn’t take a massive hiring spree to change for the better, which is cause for optimism. Even a single scholar can make a difference. What universities need is scholars who can buck the culture without fear of repercussion, supervise controversial research, and sit on committees while being willing to say the unsayable. That is worth more than token dissenters or superficial balance. 

As ever, universities will reach for procedural responses to these cultural challenges—if they acknowledge them at all. Such efforts are destined to come up short. They are not geared to address deeply rooted cultural problems shaped by years of rules, norms, and expectations. Formal changes to speech codes, DEI commitments, and other black-letter rules are the beginning of the solution, but cannot be treated as comprehensive responses to deep-seated uniformity. 

That is what the Wolf incident exposes. There is so much work to do to reshape campus culture in a way that understands what viewpoint diversity entails—much less treats it with the seriousness it deserves.