Academic Freedom at Princeton

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By Princetonians for Free Speech
PFS original content

President Eisgruber and his administration appear to have made a very good start on the new academic year. They conducted a first-year orientation that sent all the right messages on free speech, academic freedom, respect for diverse viewpoints, and the need for the university and its departments to avoid taking institutional positions on controversial public issues. They did the same in a new website on free speech which provides clarity on the free speech rules and where students should go with questions and concerns.

Olivia Sanchez
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: The first Princeton class admitted following the Supreme Court decision banning race-conscious affirmative action has experienced little change in racial diversity, according to enrollment statistics released by the University on Wednesday.

In an emailed statement to The Daily Princetonian regarding how the numbers managed to stay stable, University spokesperson Jennifer Morrill wrote, “We can’t speak to the admissions processes of other institutions, either before or after the Court’s ruling. At Princeton, we are adhering to the limits set by the ruling and continuing to use a holistic admission process that involves a highly individualized assessment of the applicant's talents, achievements and his or her potential to contribute to learning at Princeton.”

Judah Guggenheim
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: In Princeton Israeli Apartheid Divest (PIAD)’s 66-page proposal for divestment, there is not a single mention of Hamas, unless you count the titles of articles in the footnotes (which I don’t). The proposal references “Israel’s response,” but never explicitly mentions the horror of the Oct. 7 attacks that Israel is responding to or the fact that the terrorists who carried them out are deliberately hiding in places of worship, schools, and private homes. Israel is currently fighting a war against a terrorist organization that indiscriminately killed, raped, tortured, and kidnapped over 1400 people of many nationalities. That sentence should break your heart.

But the PIAD proposal gives no indication as to how boycotting or divesting from Israel will lead to a better future for Palestinians, because it never addresses what that future will actually look like.

Jamie Saxon
Princeton Office of Communications

Excerpt: In his third year leading an Orientation session on academic freedom and free expression, President Christopher L. Eisgruber encouraged transfer and first-year students to make the most of the “transformative” opportunity they’ll have at Princeton to meet and learn from others with whom they disagree.

Lexi Boccuzzi
City Journal

Excerpt: By February of this year, my frustration with the biased coverage of the Daily Pennsylvanian, the University of Pennsylvania’s legacy student publication, had become irreconcilable. The paper’s leadership had consistently employed an ideological tilt to shape campus discourse, with their reporting of the protests following the October 7 terrorist attacks on Israel and their strongly discouraging or outright censoring my probes into Penn’s draconian Covid-19 regulations being two prime examples.

The lock-step orthodoxy enforced by many elite-school papers should come as no surprise, given their staffs’ typical ideological makeup. In its 2023 Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) report, the Daily Princetonian found that 90.2 percent of its editors identified as “left-wing.”

Christopher Bao and Miriam Waldvogel
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: The 13 members of the Princeton community arrested for occupying Clio Hall during pro-Palestine protests last semester had their first appearance in Princeton Municipal Court on Tuesday. All the arrestees are charged with defiant criminal trespassing, a petty offense in the state of New Jersey.

The University has indicated it will not interfere with the criminal proceedings. Municipal prosecutor Christopher Koutsouris, who is prosecuting the case, told The Daily Princetonian that the University handed him full control of the case, noting that he consulted with the University’s legal counsel on the matter.