Viewpoint Diversity

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.”

Peter Berkowitz
RealClear Politics

Excerpt: In “How Liberal College Campuses Benefit Conservative Students,” which appeared online in early July at The Atlantic, Lauren A. Wright, in the spirit of “A Boy Named Sue,” urges “right-wing commentators” to appreciate the benefits of a campus environment that ridicules, condemns, and excludes conservative views.

Wright’s contrarian contention that the politicization of higher education advantages conservatives while harming progressives puts the controversy over the nation’s campuses in an unexpected light. No doubt some conservative students do rise to the occasion. In the face of their professors’ and fellow students’ knee-jerk hostility to conservative opinions, some students who hold them will develop thick skins, acquire the ability to appreciate the other side’s arguments, and improve their skills in fending off denunciation and diatribe and setting forth their own views under pressure. But most students – at Princeton, according to Wright, “conservatives make up just 12 percent of undergraduates” – are imbued with the progressive orthodoxy promulgated by much K-12 education, public and private.

Academic Freedom Alliance

Excerpt: The Academic Freedom Alliance urges federal agencies that fund research in STEMM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine) to desist from demanding that plans to advance DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) be included in their grant proposals.

Widespread requirements for such plans in STEMM grant proposals have been implemented rapidly with far too little attention to their potential misuse, their effects on quality and integrity of funded research, and the threat they represent to academic freedom.

Abigail Anthony
National Review

Excerpt: An anonymous male student is suing the Trustees of Princeton University for breach of contract, violations of Title IX, and negligence. According to the lawsuit, “John Doe” began studying at Princeton University in 2022 and was suspended after the disciplinary proceedings that followed from two women filing separate charges of choking accusations.

Keith E. Whittington
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt:It is not surprising for a boss to think that employees should avoid saying things in public that might damage the organization for which they both work. It is not even surprising for the boss to understand “damage” to include making the boss’s own life more difficult.

Watch here: https://jmp.princeton.edu/events/2024/great-minds-matter-western-civilization-and-liberal-arts-ben-sasse#event-media