Academic Freedom at Princeton

Megan Cameron
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: With Election Day just over a month away, Princeton’s politically active student groups are gearing up for a surge of campus engagement. Both the Princeton College Republicans and Princeton College Democrats are planning a series of events aimed at mobilizing students ahead of the Nov. 5 election. These groups are finding ways to encourage political engagement despite University restrictions on political activities, which are enforced by the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students (ODUS), the office under which these groups are registered.

Robert P. George
New York Times

Excerpt: As a professor who is known to dissent from progressive ideologies that are dominant at universities such as Princeton, where I’ve taught for nearly 40 years, I’m frequently asked by students for advice about how to navigate a campus they worry will be hostile to them. Some are pro-Israel, or politically and socially conservative, or religiously observant.

My advice to students who fear that they will be subjected to discrimination and double standards is this: Don’t hide and don’t be silent. Exercise and, if necessary, defend your right to think for yourself and to dissent from campus orthodoxies. But even as you push back against ideological bias and discrimination, remember that as a university student you are one of the luckiest — most privileged — people on the planet. So do not think of yourself as a victim.

Bill Hewitt
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: In 1970, Princeton University created the CPUC as a culmination of two years of work by the Special Committee on the Structure of the University. In the preface to its final report, that committee said of the new body: “Both directly and through representatives, more people will participate in decisions on a wider range of issues, and it will be easier to raise issues, to get a hearing, to win the support of others, and to gain access to those formally responsible for making decisions.”

We, the undersigned members of the Princeton University community, earnestly petition for the CPUC to adopt this revised version of its annual “Resolution on the Order of Business” for the 2024-2025 academic year. The reforms proposed here will enable the CPUC to better fulfill its aforementioned founding goals of broad participation in University governance.

Eleanor Clemans-Cope
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: In a recent feature in The Atlantic, Princeton Lecturer Lauren Wright charges that conservative students on elite liberal college campuses like Princeton’s are constantly challenged and thus better prepared for real-world discourse, while liberal students are coddled and unwilling to engage. She backs this up with interviews from 43 college students — 28 conservatives and 15 liberals at “competitive schools.” But her framing reflects a misunderstanding of what truly constitutes meaningful intellectual and community dialogue on campus. I should know — I was one of her interviewees.

Wright misunderstands a critical aspect of campus dialogue. Liberals do interact with opinions that challenge their own, but they do so on issues that are typically grounded in productive, forward-looking dialogue, like criminal legal system reform, geo-engineered climate solutions, diplomatic engagement between the United States and China, and the morality of consulting jobs.

Abigail Rabieh
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: As first-years lined up outside Richardson Auditorium to hear President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 and Vice President Rochelle Calhoun speak about the importance of maintaining open dialogue on campus, older students stood outside and handed them pieces of paper with QR codes that linked to a PDF of the “Princeton Disorientation Guide 2024.” This document explains that “protest theory” teaches us how to build moral authority in two ways: by “increasing the number of people and increasing the sacrifice of the participants.”

This short claim demonstrates well the extent of the wrongness and impropriety that self-proclaimed “leftists” associated with the Princeton Progressive Coalition bring not only to interactions with their peers, but with the University itself. After all, since when has morality been determined by crowd behavior? What ever happened to being right?

Miriam Waldvogel
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: The Department of Public Safety (PSAFE) is investigating small flyers found on campus reading “Nuke Gaza” and “Kill Roaches” as a bias incident, the University told The Daily Princetonian on Friday.

The pile of approximately 30 paper cutouts was first discovered by a fourth-year graduate student around noon on Friday outside entryway six of Spelman Hall. The individual gathered up the flyers and called PSAFE. Princeton’s daily crime log shows that PSAFE officers responded to the incident shortly after the call, and logged the interaction as a “harrassment/bias incident.” According to the graduate student, PSAFE collected the flyers from them at the scene.