Princeton Free Speech News & Commentary

Sena Chang, Christopher Bao, and Charlie Roth
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Throughout Election Day, The Daily Princetonian conducted exit interviews from 3 p.m. to 8 p.m. as voters, including students and community members, left the polling locations. Almost all told the ‘Prince’ they voted for Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris won in N.J. by approximately five points over former President Donald Trump.

Isaac Barsoum
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Trump’s second rise represents a dramatic and pointed failure of American institutions — with universities among them — to stand against fascism. And now, we are left to deal with the fallout.

In the coming days, we — as an institution and as individuals — must drastically rethink our role in American society. Get ready, Princeton: in a nation backsliding toward authoritarianism, universities like ours must stand as bastions of democracy. Silence in the face of fascism is not neutrality, it is acquiescence. So, what should we do? How do we become that bastion of democracy?

Ronen Shoval
Algemeiner

Excerpt: Universities were once celebrated as arenas of free thought, where diverse ideas could challenge one another, and truth could emerge from debate. However, a new form of intolerance has gripped campuses worldwide, stifling intellectual diversity and turning academic institutions into echo chambers.

My experience at Princeton University illustrates the extent of this culture of suppression and the dangerous consequences it poses for education.

Valentina Moreno
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: At 1:45 p.m. on July 21, history and public affairs professor Julian Zelizer sat at his desk in his home office, working on his latest books and enjoying a hot Sunday summer afternoon. At 1:46 p.m., President Joe Biden shocked the nation with his Instagram announcement that he would be withdrawing from the presidential race and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate. Before Zelizer could even finish reading Biden’s letter, he was inundated with phone calls from news outlets and radio shows seeking his expert analysis of the situation. With no time to prepare notes, he powered up his computer and addressed the nation live on CNN.

Throughout this close election season, Zelizer and other Princeton professors have been extending their political expertise beyond the classroom, regularly submitting articles for a host of publications.

Gregory Conti
City Journal

Excerpt: As the broad American consensus in favor of free speech erodes, we have seen a similar unsatisfactory form of disputation proliferate. Critics of “free speech absolutism,” as it is condescendingly dubbed—we don’t refer to “rule of law absolutists” or “separations of powers absolutists,” for example—highlight all manner of alleged deficiencies with the status quo and trace them to an alleged excess of free speech.

In this asymmetrical theoretical comparison, implicit in much of today’s fashionable attacks on free speech, the alternative is hardly laid out at all. Somehow, we are led to believe, falsehoods and hurtful talk will vanish without truths getting caught in the dragnet, and no one, it appears, will be left any the worse off.

Siyeon Lee
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: There is a specter haunting Princeton’s campus — the specter of free speech. It’s a perennial topic that inserts itself into most social, cultural, and political events on campus, and one that’s been exhaustively reiterated as a core value of this University. Its loudest proponents often present it as a fully apolitical idea: a set of sacred rules all parties should uphold in all circumstances, regardless of ideological differences.

While conservatives often present “absolute free speech” as an apolitical neutral, its defense is often ideologically charged. The posing of free speech as a champion against “leftist dogmatism” not only detracts from the importance of truly effective free speech, but also rests on a fundamental contradiction: It relies on the perpetual existence of the leftist dogmatism it so despises.