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By Tal Fortgang ‘17
With students returning to campus for the start of the new academic year, and demonstrations from radical groups sure to crop up on quads once again, one question universities face is how to balance robust academic freedom with universities’ competing interests. Schools cannot live on academic freedom alone; the functioning of a university requires standards, rules, and regulations to allow students and faculty to flourish. Yet university leadership, especially at elite schools where abstract thinking is prized and questions are regularly left unanswered as matters of mere intellectual exercise, has not even begun to articulate a principled way of weighing these matters. They can begin to do so by considering an unlikely – and unwitting – source of wisdom: Princeton professor Lorgia García Peña’s recent address to the Socialism 2025 conference, on using one’s academic perch to dismantle the academy.
Charlie Yale
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: During his 2020 campaign for the Democratic nomination, a video of then-Harvard freshman Pete Buttigieg made its way around the internet. In the video, Buttigieg asks Larry Summers — Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton — a question at a talk Summers gave on campus about how American economic policy could hail “a tangible qualitative human improvement worldwide.”
It is a real privilege as a student in a changing world to be able to hear speakers from every walk of political life talk about what they think is important. But, fundamentally, these events do not advance discourse on pressing issues if attendees are not given the opportunity to question the speakers. Students deserve the opportunity to ask questions of political leaders who speak on campus, and not just the questions that are pre-selected by a leader’s staff.
Christofer Robles
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: The Trump administration and its lackeys have used the recent assassination of far-right activist Charlie Kirk to hide its own suppression of free speech. But conservatives, nationally and at Princeton, are crying wolf.
The death of Kirk is not symptomatic of some leftist guerrilla psyop. American political violence has long been a tool of the right, and the attempt to pin Kirk’s assassination on the left is symptomatic of the real free speech problem at Princeton: dishonesty. Members of the campus right have misrepresented the status of free speech on campus, drawing on a few isolated incidents to paint themselves as the real victims in the debate.
Sena Chang
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the Heritage Foundation, one of America’s most prominent right-wing think tanks, abruptly canceled a lecture at Princeton scheduled for Sept. 16, citing security concerns. The event was originally scheduled to feature Wilson Beaver, the Heritage Foundation’s Senior Policy Advisor for Defense Budgeting and NATO Policy, but was pulled just days before it was set to take place.
“Heritage made this decision out of an abundance of caution as it reviews its personnel security policies following the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk,” the American Whig-Cliosophic Society (Whig-Clio) said in a statement online.
Princetonians for Free Speech
The political violence that has ravaged America for too many years has now led to the horrifying assassination on September 10, on the campus of Utah Valley University, of conservative firebrand Charlie Kirk, a champion of free speech whose attacks on the left helped win him a big following among young conservatives while infuriating many on the left. He was planning to debate all comers at the campus event, as was his custom.
Leela Hensler
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: The Princeton Police Department has stepped up patrols of the town’s Jewish Center on Nassau Street. The shift comes in the wake of half a dozen reported incidents of graffiti around town beginning in mid-August that are being investigated as “bias intimidation incidents.”
“All of these investigations remain active, [and] our detective bureau is following up on any possible leads,” said Captain Matthew Solovay of the Princeton Police Department in an interview with The Daily Princetonian. He also confirmed that patrols around parks and the Jewish Center had increased.
