Abigail Anthony
The College Fix
Jun 12, 2023
Excerpt: A large contingent of parents of graduating seniors who sat through Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber’s recent commencement address described it as hypocritical and a “woke sermon” in interviews with The College Fix.
They scoffed at his claim that the Ivy League institution is a bastion of free speech and bristled at his embrace of all kinds of diversity except intellectual diversity. “President Eisgruber’s commencement speech was a disgrace,” a mother of a graduating senior told The College Fix in an email. “The primary assault on free speech takes place on every campus in this country – including Princeton.”
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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.