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Guillermo Molero
Bloomberg
Excerpt: A crowd of about 20 people assembled at Bobst Hall on Princeton University’s campus, as they do every Tuesday morning, to hear from Robert P. George, the founder of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.
George was there on a mission to combat the indoctrination of American youth with progressive values. As he sees it, illiberalism had spread rapidly in recent years, culminating in the campus culture wars that roiled quads from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Los Angeles last year amid protests over the war in Gaza and the rollback of diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
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Faith in higher education continues to plummet, and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)—the nation’s leading organization representing faculty interests and a longstanding voice on academic freedom and university governance—has decided to train its guns on the growing movement to establish civic education centers at public universities. The AAUP’s objections amount to a single, unlovely demand: we get to decide what students learn, and nobody else gets a vote.
Six days after the report went online, the AAA fired back with a full-throated defense. “Anthropologists welcome rigorous critique of the discipline,” wrote its president, Carolyn M. Rouse. “What we cannot accept is a sweeping verdict about anthropology’s intellectual culture, scholarly practices, and professional norms built on selective evidence and issued without consultation.
Since faculty voted in may to proctor in-person exams, national news outlets and some alumni have decried the end of Princeton’s 133-year-old tradition of unsupervised testing, but students, faculty, and recent graduates say the conversation within the campus community has been mild.
