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There is exactly one kind of institution in the world whose product is “thinking” — the university. This is an existential challenge for every university, Princeton most definitely included, now that nearly all artificial intelligence is purpose-built to offload the hard work of thinking.
Universities need to return to the foundations of learning with trust — and verification — at the heart of their relationship with students. They also need to be far more prescriptive about what learning looks like so that students who arrive with limited capacity for deep reading have the time and space to develop their critical thinking skills.
Contributions by current Princeton faculty reported to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) show 98% went to Democratic candidates or Democratic affiliated groups; 2% went to independent candidates or affiliated groups; and 0% went to Republicans or affiliated groups. This shows an alarming lack of viewpoint diversity as measured by donations to political candidates. Our findings are in line with similar studies of Yale and Harvard faculty.
The public increasingly sees through the righteous image that American higher education wishes to project. Professors and administrators say that they curtail only injurious and hateful speech despite their tendency to equate injurious and hateful speech with conservative opinions. They maintain that they promote diversity, equity, and inclusion to rectify injustice and enhance education and not, as evidence suggests, to reward minorities and women whose thinking conforms to progressive orthodoxy. And they offer an undergraduate curriculum that allows students to fashion a slate of classes that suits their individual needs, tastes, and skills but which – typically lacking a mandatory and coherent core – leaves graduates destitute of that basic knowledge of America, the West, and other civilizations that informs the judgment of responsible citizens.
Princeton’s austerity program is already well underway. The University calls it a transition “from growth to focus,” but it has meant 5–7 percent cuts to departmental budgets, more than 3 percent of staff positions disappearing through layoffs and unfilled vacancies, and increased employee contributions for benefits such as medical insurance. Fewer people and resources are left to support a recently expanding student body, and more reductions are coming.
In his February letter announcing this “focus,” University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 emphasized Princeton’s financial strength, but pointed to lower expected long-term endowment returns, from 10.2 to 8.0 percent annually, as forcing the University’s response.
Since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, top colleges and universities have faced an onslaught of federal attacks: slashing grant money for research, pressuring schools to end diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, cracking down on visas for international students, and ending graduate program sponsorship for active duty military at top schools. However, some Ivy League universities — the center of many of Trump’s ongoing attacks — have decreased messaging on the potential consequences of these federal directives.
“One thing that’s been clear is that a lot of universities have felt that publicity would bring no advantage or do them no good,” history professor David Bell GS ’91, who has been outspoken about federal actions against universities, said in an interview with The Daily Princetonian.
The good news is that the percentage of colleges and universities earning FIRE's "red light" (bad) rating has reached a low of 13 percent — a 55 percent drop since the "Spotlight" report began in 2006, and a 1.5 percent drop from last year. The bad news is that Princeton is among that 13 percent. Princeton is still found to maintain policies that "clearly and substantially" restrict free expression.
