Alumni & Student Advocacy

Thomas Buckley
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: This year, 27 seniors declared their candidacy for Young Alumni Trustee (YAT). The high number of candidates is hardly a surprise: As members of the 40-person board of trustees, Young Alumni Trustees have significant influence over the University’s governance, budget, and $34 billion dollar endowment.

Disallowing the YAT candidates from campaigning on issues abridges their freedom of speech and stifles campus discourse, issues that President Christopher Eisgruber and the University care a lot about in every other context — just not this one.

Princetonians for Free Speech
Khoa Sands ‘26

Over the past months, the response to the Israel-Hamas war in academia has triggered a necessary rethinking of what the university is for, and its proper role in society. Many scholars have advocated for the longstanding model of liberal education as the pursuit of truth as the model for the telos of the university. In this view, which I share, the goal of academia is the pursuit of truth and the preservation of the life of learning, not civic engagement or social change. Certainly, positive social change and civic engagement can come from genuine liberal education, but to center those goals within academia is to distract and compromise from the central goal of the liberal university as an institution.

Bill Hewitt
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Too many of Princeton University’s leaders have sought to run and hide from their duties. In response, I have filed a three-part petition for the Feb. 19 public Council of the Princeton University Community (CPUC) meeting. The purpose of this petition is to enlist the CPUC’s authority to bring an end to ongoing flights from responsibility by certain decision-makers at Princeton who have failed to sufficiently address my previous formal grievances.

Victoria Davies
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Following a Jan. 25 letter from the free speech group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Princeton updated the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page for No Communication Orders and No Contact Orders (NCOs) a day later on Jan. 26. The new FAQ page reflects the Dec. 2023 change in NCO policy, which narrowed the circumstances under which NCOs can be obtained.

Christopher Eisgruber ‘83
Princeton University

Excerpt: Some people, however, have seized upon public outrage about antisemitism as a stalking horse for other agendas, including, most notably, attacks upon the efforts that we and others make to ensure that colleges and universities are places where students, faculty, researchers, and staff from all backgrounds can thrive.

Some of these arguments are nakedly partisan jeremiads, but others come from centrist voices. These attacks are wrong. America’s leading universities are more dedicated to scholarly excellence today than at any previous point in their history, and our commitment to inclusivity is essential to that excellence.

Matthew Wilson
National Review

Excerpt: As Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and other elite universities have lately languished in unwanted public attention, Princeton and its president, Christopher Eisgruber, have largely avoided the spotlight. While Penn president Liz Magill was forced from office soon after a disastrous congressional hearing on antisemitism on December 5 — with Harvard’s Claudine Gay following her out the door just last week -- Eisgruber remains, and Princeton has emerged more or less unscathed.

But the past several years at Princeton have been troubled — indeed, political controversies have plagued the university for nearly my entire time as a student.