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Annabel Green
Princetonians for Free Speech
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s debut 1920 novel, This Side of Paradise, follows protagonist Amory Blaine, who enjoys a particularly affluent life as an undergraduate at Princeton. Fitzgerald writes of Princeton:
Long after midnight the towers and spires of Princeton were visible, with here and there a late-burning light – and suddenly out of the clear darkness the sound of bells. As an endless dream it went on; the spirit of the past brooding over a new generation, the chosen youth from the muddled, unchastened world, still fed romantically on the mistakes and half-forgotten dreams of dead statesmen and poets. (p. 249)
Through Fitzgerald’s protagonist, Fitzgerald grapples with the tension between the reality and the ideal of paradise. What is paradise? What is the ideal? What is the source of beauty? What is heaven on Earth? The root of the word paradise is from the Old Iranian word pairi-daēza, meaning walled enclosure or enclosed garden.
The modern progressive pretext views freedom as the ideal and situates freedom as something akin to spontaneity of choice. This language is present in the political construction of values. Perhaps the most current and notable example of such a construction is the freedom of choice, which seems to have a progressive bent, although it is not an exclusively progressive phenomenon. The erosion of self-constraint as well as the duties which undergird the freedoms we enjoy, is disordered and chaotic. There is no freedom without constraint, and no paradise without enclosure.
Dr. Jordan Peterson interprets the walled garden as the paradisal Garden of Eden, wherein Adam and Eve, the archetypal man and woman, are presented with the tension between chaos and order. Paradise is ordered and cultivated by way of its confrontation with chaos. Idyllic freedom is not reveling in a lack of constraint but is, rather, established through order.
G.K. Chesterton wisely remarks on the importance of understanding boundaries. A principle, coined Chesterton’s fence, asserts one ought not to get rid of a fence (i.e., a preexisting law, custom, institution, etc.), unless the reasoning for its being there is known, or else one is acting as a reckless reformer.
Modern perception often sees fences as mere obstacles however, it is often those very fences which underpin freedom. When one goes beyond the fence, one is really trespassing against oneself.
Annabel Green '26, is a senior from Boulder, CO majoring in Public and International Affairs and minoring in Global Health & Health Policy. She is a PFS student writing fellow.
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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.
As a professor who is known to dissent from progressive ideologies that are dominant at universities such as Princeton, where I’ve taught for nearly 40 years, I’m frequently asked by students for advice about how to navigate a campus they worry will be hostile to them. Some are pro-Israel, or politically and socially conservative, or religiously observant.
They fear being treated unfairly by faculty members who are hostile to their beliefs. Many are afraid of being regarded as outcasts by their more liberal or progressive peers. They worry about being excluded from academic opportunities or not treated equitably in social or other extracurricular activities. To these students I say, with regret: You’re right to worry. I’ve seen these things happen.
Universities may be tempted to treat these capabilities as inevitable improvements in education. Students will be able to consume vast amounts of information, more than ever before. But like AI writing itself, such consumption would be vast but shallow. The more interesting possibility, then, is that AI will force universities to rediscover the value of intellectual work that cannot be outsourced.
