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Marisa Warman Hirschfield ‘27
I worry that many progressives are abandoning free speech as a core value of our movement, endorsing it only when politically advantageous. “We believe in a diverse set of thoughts,” a University of Wisconsin student told the Associated Press earlier this year. “But when your thought is predicated on the subjugation of me or my people, or to a generalized people, then we have problems.” FIRE president Greg Lukianoff told the New York Times that in the current era, libertarians and conservatives are more often the champions of free speech.
There is undoubtedly tension between free speech and progressive causes. Consider, for instance, how permitting racist speech might hinder our fight for racial justice, or how reposting sexist jokes about Kamala Harris might empower opponents of gender equality. There are real costs to protecting all speech, but, importantly, there are numerous benefits too. Free speech is a double-edged sword – it hurts as well as helps us – and progressives must fully embrace it if we are to reap its rewards.
Legal protections that span political causes, no matter the cause, make us all safer and more free. Take one of the ACLU’s most controversial and consequential cases: Brandenburg v. Ohio.In 1969, Ku Klux Klan leader Clarence Brandenburg told a rally in Ohio that he desired “revengeance” against Jews, Black people, and the federal government. After he was convicted of violating the state’s Criminal Syndicalism statute, the ACLU represented him before the Supreme Court and successfully reversed his conviction. The per curiammajority opinion articulated new legal language that is now essential for discerning what speech is constitutionally protected: seditious speech can be censored or punished only if it is likely and intended to incite “imminent lawless action.”
Decades later, the Brandenburgprecedent protects a wide range of beliefs. In 2021, the ACLU invoked Brandenburgto advocate on behalf of a Black Lives Matter protester. How remarkable that case law used to protect the repugnant speech of a white supremacist was later adopted to defend an activist protesting police violence.
For precisely the Brandenburgreason, ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero ‘87 insists that it’s critical to protect free speech regardless of the speaker. “When we defend clients with positions with which we disagree, or even abhor, it’s because we are defending values crucial to the work of civil rights advocates in the past and present.”
Indeed, most major milestones in the progressive movement were only possible because dissidents could express unpopular viewpoints without fear of retribution. Free speech was the engine that made abolition, women’s suffrage, and civil rights advocacy feasible. The First Amendment allowed for radicalism, for reimaginings of our country, and for movers and shakers to realize their visions.
Frederick Douglass was a major proponent of free speech. In 1860, he delivered a lecture in Boston and declared: “Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power. Thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, founded in injustice and wrong, are sure to tremble.”
Alice Paul, the founder of the National Woman’s Party, echoed similar sentiments in her fight for the franchise. Along with thousands of other suffragists, she picketed outside the White House. When she was arrested, she pleaded to be granted political prisoner status.
Many of the Supreme Court decisions born of the Civil Rights era, Brandenburgincluded, are the basis of free speech protections today.
Given this history, progressives should be stronger advocates for First Amendment rights than anyone; they made progress possible. We should speak up not only when our own expression is threatened, but when conservative speech is silenced.
Let us reclaim free speech as a progressive principle. Let us partner with our partisan opponents to uphold the value that, for centuries, has propelled our causes. Take it from Frederick Douglass: principalities and powers are sure to tremble.
Marisa Hirschfield ’27, a PFS Writing Fellow, is the Education and Social Action Chair for the Center for Jewish Life, an editor for the Nassau Weekly and a writer for the Triangle Club.
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Prestigious universities and leading state schools across the nation have embraced viewpoint diversity by building new institutions—civic education centers and the like—which are simultaneously on yet apart from the campus. Harvard has quietly taken a different tack. Over the past several months, the university’s top brass have been asking major donors for $10 million gifts to endow new professorships under the banner of “viewpoint diversity.” Provost John Manning, a scholar often associated with the conservative legal movement, has led the effort, aiming to place between 20 and 30 new faculty across schools and departments rather than siloed in a standalone institute.
Why Harvard would need additional funding for this is an open question, but putting that partly aside, we ought to ask what to make of this unique initiative. It stands a chance of being either the most consequential reform attempt in elite higher education this decade, or a sophisticated piece of reputation management serving double duty as a clever fundraiser. Which one it turns out to be depends on whether Harvard has thought carefully about what viewpoint diversity means, and whether it intends to execute in line with a considered answer.
Are some schools better at fostering intellectual diversity than others? The study clearly reveals that the most elite universities are among those with the least ideological diversity. Princeton is ranked 13 out of the 55 in the study, with its faculty slightly more ideologically diverse than, for instance, UC Berkeley, Brown, Dartmouth and Harvard, and slightly less diverse than Stanford, Cornell, UCLA or Georgetown.
There is little doubt that this study provides another opening for politicians and critics to attack higher education, perhaps in unfair ways. Princeton could help neutralize this by joining those reform-minded university leaders in the now burgeoning effort to regain the public’s trust in higher education.
A federal judge ruled last month that the National Endowment for the Humanities’ (NEH) termination of more than 1,400 grants in April 2025 had violated the Constitution on several counts. Princeton researchers await the effects of the verdict, which ordered that the NEH must rescind its termination notices.
