Your Cart is Empty
April 30, 2024
To Princetonians for Free Speech Subscribers, members and friends,
A major PFS event will occur at Reunions 2024: “You Can’t Teach That! The Battle over University Classrooms.” On Saturday, May 25, at 10 am, Princeton’s leading First Amendment scholar Keith E. Whittington, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics, will appear in conversation with Jonathan Rauch, prize-winning author and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. See the description and details for this event in the Special Feature below. We hope to see you there!
Who controls what is taught in American universities — professors or politicians? The answer is far from clear but suddenly urgent. Unprecedented efforts are now underway to restrict what ideas can be promoted and discussed in university classrooms. Why do universities live or die by free speech? The answer to this question can help guide students, faculty, administrators and alumni when faced with unpopular, hateful or dangerous speech. Co-sponsored with the student group the Princeton Open Campus Coalition, Princetonians for Free Speech brings to Reunions 2024 Keith E. Whittington, a leading constitutional scholar and author of Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech, in discussion with Jonathan Rauch, prize-winning author, most recently of The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. They will discuss the most pressing free speech and academic freedom issues facing private and public universities today, with a focus on Whittington’s path-breaking new book, You Can’t Teach That! The Battle Over University Classrooms.
If you are attending Reunions 2024, we hope you can join us at this important event! Please share this newsletter with friends and classmates. For those who can’t make it, we will provide a link to view it on YouTube soon afterwards.
Princetonians for Free Speech Letter to Vice President Calhoun
By Stuart Taylor Jr. ‘70, president, Edward Yingling ‘70, secretary, Todd rulon-Miller ‘73, treasurer, Leslie Spencer ‘79, vice chair, Princeton Alumni Weekly, April 26, 2024
Reactions: Guests respond to Eisgruber and Calhoun’s statements on protesting - The Daily Princetonian “Free Speech Can Only Go So Far”
by Edward Yingling, The Daily Princetonian, April 28, 2024
“The rules laid out governing protests at Princeton in Vice President of Campus Life W. Rochelle Calhoun’s email to students and President Christopher Eisgruber ’83’s statement in the ‘Prince’ are entirely appropriate. Those who argue that these rules and their enforcement violate protesters’ free speech rights are simply wrong about free speech.”
The Popular University Versus Truth
By Khoa Sands ‘26, The Princeton Tory, April 29, 2024
PFS student Writing Fellow Khoa Sands comments on student protests, old and new.
“Across the country, students are occupying university campuses and decrying their own schools. Chaos has unfolded at numerous universities. As authorities attempt to control the protest, criticism has mounted over perceived excessive force. The upcoming Democratic Party Convention in Chicago promises to be marked by radical demonstrations. The year was 1968.”
On encampments, free speech, and ‘time, place, and manner’ rules on university campuses
By Christopher L. Eisgruber, The Daily Princetonian, April 25, 2024
“Our success also depends on the consistent application of our policies protecting free speech. Princeton will continue to enforce those policies resolutely, including both this University’s expansive protections for the expression of controversial ideas and the time, place, and manner regulations that enable us to engage in thoughtful dialogue, debate, and deliberation about those ideas.
Protest and Civil Disobedience Are Two Different Things
by Keith E. Whittington, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 23, 2024
“Students too often imagine that protests and civil disobedience are indistinguishable, and it is part of the college’s educational mission to provide clarity on such matters. Students are free to express themselves within the confines of neutral rules designed the coordinate the activities of the many members of the campus community, each of whom have their own purposes to pursue and their own ideas to advance and each of whom is equally entitled to enjoy the benefits and use of the campus. Students who instead wish to commandeer campus spaces to impose costs on others and prevent them from pursuing their own activities should expect to face discipline and potentially be removed from campus, whether temporarily or permanently.”
A group of Princeton faculty have come together to create The Princeton Council on Academic Freedom. It mirrors the new faculty groups at peer institutions, like the academic freedom councils at Harvard and Columbia, Faculty for Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Vision for a New Future.
Classics professor Emmanuel Bourbouhakis, who is coordinating the effort, says the Council plans a major launch event in the Fall of 2024. He spoke at length with PFS Vice Chair Leslie Spencer ‘79 about the importance of the Council’s mission for the long-term health of the university. You can read the Q and A on the PFS Website: A New Faculty Group at Princeton brings a common-sense approach to restoring Academic Freedom.
Progressives failed a lesson in free speech - The Daily Princetonian
Anais Mobarak ‘25, April 19, 2024
“As a liberal and near free speech absolutist, I was hopeful that free speech defenses of pro-Palestine advocacy would prompt campus progressives to reckon with the value of free speech. Perhaps, in a situation where progressive voices were on the receiving end of censorship of expression, then free speech might become more widely accepted as an apolitical principle. Unfortunately, the recent controversy surrounding Charter Club has demonstrated that progressive voices on campus have failed to recognize the value of free speech beyond its usefulness as a political instrument. Thus, as a community, we must work to foster an ideologically-free understanding of free speech.”
Letter from President Saller and Provost Martinez to Stanford’s Class of 2028, April 3, 2024
“Freedom of expression does not include the right to threaten or harass others and prevent them from engaging as equal participants in campus life. But the freedom of expression necessary for fulfilling the mission of a university – and for a democracy – does require allowing speech that some may find offensive or wrong. Many of humanity’s greatest advances have come from ideas that offended conventional wisdom and seemed heretical at first. In a university, the remedy for ideas that you think are wrong is not to seek to silence them but to counter them with better ideas, evidence, and arguments.”
Columbia Is Beyond Reform | City Journal
By Liel Liebowitz, City Journal, April 23, 2024
“It’s time we approached our elite universities not as critical institutions we must repair but as national security threats.”
Emmanuel Bourbouhakis, Associate Professor of Classics and the Stanley J. Seeger ’52 Center for Hellenic Studies
Speaking to PFS about the nascent faculty group The Princeton Council on Academic Freedom:
“At the core of the Council’s purpose is that academic freedom is not the kind of thing you want to delegate exclusively to the administration. As faculty, we should see academic freedom not just as an individual privilege, but as a collective responsibility to protect colleagues even, or especially, when they have said something that some may find controversial or abhorrent. What if a President bows to political pressure, whether internal, perhaps from some students, or external, from alumni or politicians? We as faculty really ought to have amongst ourselves some sense of our collective responsibility for each other’s academic freedom, as awkward or uncomfortable as that may prove, at times….
The real challenges will come when the principles in question are debated and tested. This is why we want to make academic freedom itself an object of ongoing vigorous inquiry and discussion on campus. We want people to be reminded of why academic freedom is not something you take for granted. You must be constantly vigilant. You must have it on top of mind, you must debate it and understand what it means, otherwise it becomes a dead letter.”
PFS’s featured editorial this month is Yale Issues clarion call for change, joining other leading universities. Where is Princeton? We put Yale’s report in the context of the growing consensus amongst a widening circle of University Presidents that President Maurie McGinnis is correct. University leaders must take responsibility for their role in reaching this critical point. President Eisgruber is not among this list of reformers.
If you want to know more about why Princeton is not leading this movement to restore trust in higher education,link here to a comprehensive Five-Part Review of President Eisgruber’s book, Terms of Respect, How Colleges Get Free Speech Right, written for PFS by Tal Fortgang ‘17.
Can universities be reformed? Princeton’s Professor of Mathematics Sergiu Klainerman is a pessimist. In the absence of powerful external pressures, reform from within is “very close to zero” due to what he sees as the deep corruption of the universities’ core mission.
Klainerman was born in Romania and graduated from the University of Bucharest in 1974. He earned his PhD in Mathematics at NYU in 1978 and has taught at Princeton since 1987. A MacAurther Fellow (1991) and Guggenheim Fellow (1997) he was awarded the Bôcher Memorial Prize by the American Mathematical Society in 1999 "for his contributions to nonlinear hyperbolic equations."
Klainerman presented his bleak perspective on the state of higher education in an address at the recent opening of the University of Iowa’s Center for Intellectual Freedom, a new institution dedicated to the study of civics.
In PFS Supports Two Student and Faculty Events that Advance Free Expression, Executive Director Angela Smith highlights PFS support for two important on-campus events that happened in February, one organized by students, the other by faculty.
“Free speech and open inquiry are not abstract ideals – they are the lifeblood of a healthy university community. At Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS), we strive to advance those principles through practical, tangible support for students and faculty who put them into action. As such, we are pleased to tell you about two recent events at Princeton, supported by PFS, that reflect this mission in powerful ways.”
Read more about these events, why PFS supports them, and why you should support PFS.
And read coverage of these two events in the Student Corner below, written by our writing fellows Annabel Green ‘26 and Joseph Gonzalez ‘28.
