Institutional Governance & Accountability

Keith E. Whittington
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: Barnard College has become the site of the latest flare-up in an ongoing struggle between faculty and university leaders for the control of university communication platforms. On October 23, the department of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies posted a statement of solidarity: “We support the Palestinian people who have resisted settler colonial war, occupation, and apartheid for over 75 years, while deploring Hamas’s recent killing of Israeli civilians.”

Shortly afterward, the university removed the statement from the departmental website. The move was in pursuit of the university’s “website governance policy” (established in November, after the department’s initial statement), which specifies that all subdomains of barnard.edu Internet domain are property of the college. Barnard is hardly alone in debating such issues. Princeton University recently tabled a policy aimed at formalizing procedures for units of the university to issue political statements.

January 25, 2024
Christopher L. Eisgruber
Office of the President
Princeton University
1 Nassau Hall
Princeton, New Jersey 08544
Sent via U.S. Mail and Electronic Mail (eisgruber@princeton.edu)

Dear President Eisgruber:
FIRE and the Anti-Defamation League write to express our collective concern about Princeton University’s improper use of no-contact orders to censor students.

Ramesh Ponnuru
Public Discourse

Excerpt: I went to a nearby college in the early 1990s at a time when debates were raging about a phenomenon then called “political correctness.” An editorial cartoon at the time featured three left-wing professors expressing their outrage at the debate. As I recall it, one was saying, “There’s no such thing as political correctness!” “There’s no climate of intolerance here,” said another. The third added, “And anyone who says there is should be kicked off campus!”

Justus Wilhoit and Rebecca Cunningham
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 released his eighth annual State of the University letter on Jan. 18. In the letter, he addresses recent public discourse surrounding the conflict in Israel and Palestine, distinguishing the University from peer institutions. He also emphasizes freedom of speech, commitment to diversity, and pursuit of academic excellence.

“The campus climate at Princeton has been healthier than at many of our peers,” Eisgruber wrote. “That is a credit to faculty, students, and staff who have searched for ways to communicate civilly about sensitive issues, to support one another, and to comply fully with Princeton’s policies that facilitate free speech in ways consistent with the functioning of the University.”

Abigail Rabieh
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: In Claudine Gay’s resignation letter from her role as president of Harvard University, published in the New York Times on January 2, she expresses hope that the Harvard community remembers her short term as one characterized by “not allowing rancor and vituperation to undermine the vital process of education.” But in her op-ed, published a day later, she claims that her resignation was the result of the work of “demagogues” to “undermine the ideals animating Harvard since its founding: excellence, openness, independence, truth.”

Though Gay paints her removal from office as a tactic to stop such a campaign from gaining further traction, her refusal to admit any guilt and the Harvard Corporation’s failure to note any particular reason for the resignation suggests that her presidency should be defined by a clear abandonment of the tenets to which she and Harvard claim to have committed.

Christofer Robles
The Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: To the political right, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is the beginning of the end. The Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board warns of DEI officers who “enforce ideological conformity.” Abigail Anthony ’23 claimed that DEI initiatives “divide, exclude, and ostracize students of all political affiliation.” The freedom of speech, some people argue, will be obliterated by DEI-obsessed bureaucrats.

But no one seems to be satisfied. While the right shames DEI for rejecting intolerance and correcting historic systems of oppression with perceived threats to free speech, many on the left, too, have turned against DEI. Rather than rejecting the right’s continued ridiculing of their initiatives or responding to progressives’ calls for a more revolutionary and effective DEI, Princeton has done neither.