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Angela Smith and Leslie Spencer
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: In a recent Opinion piece, Siyeon Lee and Charlie Yale critiqued a letter from Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS) to entering first-year students that appeared recently in The Princeton Tory, the University’s leading conservative political magazine. In their piece, Lee and Yale questioned why we chose to publish in “a journal that only appeals to a select few on this campus,” and accused us of holding “selective views of free speech.”
To be clear: there is no such thing as free speech for some but not for others. Other than speech that is unprotected by First Amendment law, PFS is committed to defending the widest possible freedom of speech and open discourse for everyone, no matter how unpopular or offensive the point of view.
By Marisa Hirschfield ‘27
On September 17th, Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen delivered the annual Constitution Day Lecture in McCosh 50. The lecture, co-hosted by the James Madison Program and the Program in Law and Normative Thinking, was entitled “Our Civil Rights Revolution.” Professor Gersen discussed the history of affirmative action and the evolving meaning of civil rights.
By Tal Fortgang ‘17
With students returning to campus for the start of the new academic year, and demonstrations from radical groups sure to crop up on quads once again, one question universities face is how to balance robust academic freedom with universities’ competing interests. Schools cannot live on academic freedom alone; the functioning of a university requires standards, rules, and regulations to allow students and faculty to flourish. Yet university leadership, especially at elite schools where abstract thinking is prized and questions are regularly left unanswered as matters of mere intellectual exercise, has not even begun to articulate a principled way of weighing these matters. They can begin to do so by considering an unlikely – and unwitting – source of wisdom: Princeton professor Lorgia García Peña’s recent address to the Socialism 2025 conference, on using one’s academic perch to dismantle the academy.
Charlie Yale
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: During his 2020 campaign for the Democratic nomination, a video of then-Harvard freshman Pete Buttigieg made its way around the internet. In the video, Buttigieg asks Larry Summers — Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton — a question at a talk Summers gave on campus about how American economic policy could hail “a tangible qualitative human improvement worldwide.”
It is a real privilege as a student in a changing world to be able to hear speakers from every walk of political life talk about what they think is important. But, fundamentally, these events do not advance discourse on pressing issues if attendees are not given the opportunity to question the speakers. Students deserve the opportunity to ask questions of political leaders who speak on campus, and not just the questions that are pre-selected by a leader’s staff.
