Campus Events & Enforcement

Stuart Taylor Jr. & Edward Yingling
National Review

Excerpt: Princeton University is tiptoeing toward canceling its greatest president and a founder of our nation in a process that its trustees and president Christopher Eisgruber accelerated on October 2 by announcing that they would leave the statue of John Witherspoon in its prominent place on Firestone Plaza — but probably only for now. The issue has been punted to the “Campus Art Steering Committee” to decide whether the statue should be moved, or removed.

Miriam Waldvogel
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: An art installation on Wednesday, Oct. 8 sponsored by Tigers for Israel (TFI) and Chabad House on the Frist North Lawn, which was meant to draw awareness to the Israeli hostages held in Gaza and Hamas’ attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, may be the first test case of the University’s policy on symbolic structures following last spring’s ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment.’

Flora Champy, Stephen Macedo, Leora Batnitzky, Jonathan Mummolo, Sanjeev Kulkarni, Eve Krakowski, and Emmanuel Bourbouhakis
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: The freedom of each Princeton faculty member to speak candidly on all manner of issues is indispensable. If faculty cannot express a broad range of intellectual views, including controversial ones, then the University’s mission to further human knowledge and educate students to become discerning, thoughtful citizens cannot be fully realized.

That is why we are supporting a proposal to modify the Rules & Procedures of the Faculty at Princeton to limit faculty meeting votes to matters directly concerning University governance. By extension, this measure would preclude votes that force faculty to take stances on political issues that lie outside of the faculty’s jurisdiction. We urge all our colleagues to vote in favor of this measure at the upcoming faculty meeting on Oct. 21.

Annie Rupertus, Nikki Han, and Miriam Waldvogel
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Several pro-Palestine student organizations held sparsely attended demonstrations on campus on the days leading up to Monday, Oct. 7, which marks one year since Hamas’s attacks on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza.

While most of this week’s actions occurred near Firestone, some University employees arriving to work Monday morning were greeted by pro-Palestine graffiti at the entrance to 22 Chambers St., where the Princeton University Investment Company (PRINCO) is headquartered.

Bill Hewitt ‘74
Princeton Alumni Weekly

Excerpt: The Board of Trustees’ recent decision regarding the John Witherspoon statue merits both praise and criticism. Their refusal to remove or alter the statue is commendable. Dedicated by predecessor trustees in 2001 to honor Witherspoon, the statue should remain unchanged, regardless of artistic considerations. Recent scholarship has provided a more favorable historical understanding of Witherspoon’s relationship with slavery than was available in 2001, further justifying this decision.

Regrettably, the Trustees erred in delegating the fate of the Witherspoon statue to the Campus Art Steering Committee. Any alteration of the statue would constitute a damnatio memoriae of Witherspoon. An ominous portent in the Committee on Naming report is the troubling conflation of judgments about Witherspoon’s historical relation to slavery with those about the statue’s artistic merit.

By Leslie Spencer ‘79

The Daily Princetonian recently reported that President Eisgruber has rejected the idea of adopting the principle of institutional neutrality.  

At a time when universities throughout the country, including Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, USC, and Cornell, have flocked to adopt the principle to protect them from the myriad pressures to take stands on controversial issues such as the war in Gaza, President Eisgruber remains resolute against it.