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April 30, 2026
A Special Feature
On April 15 the President of Yale University released the Report of the Committee on Trust in Higher Education, a 55-page faculty-led blockbuster, astonishing for its candor, self-reflection and boldness. In her introductory letter to the report,Yale President Maurie McGinnis did not mince words: “We believe the issue of declining trust is real, urgent, and must be addressed. We focused our recommendations on Yale, but we hope they may prove useful to others in higher education as well.” Princeton’s leadership would do well to act on this report’s 20 recommended reforms, which focus on serious issues such as free speech and self censorship, politics and intellectual pluralism, undergraduate admissions, rising costs and declining classroom standards, grade inflation and university governance – all with the aim of rebuilding the public’s confidence.
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.
Viewpoint Diversity
In February our featured article The Next Campus Battle after Free Speech: Viewpoint Diversity at America’s Elite Universities by Ed Yingling and Leslie Spencer sparked a lot of interest.
On April 23 - 24 the country’s leading faculty-centered higher education reform group, Heterodox Academy, held its West Coast Regional Conference at Berkeley: The Value of Viewpoint Diversity: Why it Matters and How to Practice it Well.
Vanderbilt’s Chancellor Daniel Diermeier, who is among the most outspoken university leaders urging reform, kicked off the event with a call to action for the assembled faculty: “The need for faculty like you to get involved, to get organized, to have a clear principles, and to advocate courageously is essential. Without that it won’t happen.” Read “This is a Generational Opportunity” to find out more about this important HxA conference and about Daniel Diermeier’s leadership among college presidents.
Articles of Interest
Yale Report Finds Colleges Deserve Blame for Higher Education’s Problems
A 10-member committee offered a brutal assessment of academia’s role in creating the forces challenging American colleges and universities.
By Alan Blinder, New York Times, April 15
American colleges and universities bear significant responsibility for plunging public trust in higher education, a Yale University committee suggested in a report released on Wednesday. … High costs, murky admissions practices, uneven academic standards and fears about free speech on campuses, the committee said, are among the reasons for widening discontent over higher education’s worthiness.
Yale Takes Itself to Reform School
A faculty study agrees with many of its critics, believe it or not.
The Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal, April 9
Most encouraging is a full-throated endorsement of free inquiry and “enhancing open and critical debate on campus.” It urges each department, starting in 2026-27, to examine its “intellectual and methodological commitments” as well as the “range of scholarly approaches represented on its faculty” and “the diversity of perspectives in its curriculum.”
How to Stop Ivy League Decay
Rep. Elise Stefanik’s new book exposes institutional rot and outlines how to restore the Ivy League’s commitment to Truth
By Danielle Shapiro ‘25, April 24, City Journal
Bureaucracies have a way of normalizing the absurd. For two years after October 7, I navigated a Princeton campus replete with rule-breaking protests, defaced buildings, and courses more interested in ideology than truth. I was called an inbred swine and a facilitator of a Palestinian genocide, and my friends were told to “Go back to Europe.” Yet Princeton and its peer institutions convened countless board meetings, expended millionson crisis management and legal fees, forced custodial staff to scrub away evidence of vandalism, and issued frequent statements—all to convince students like me thateverything is fine, nothing to see here.(Author Danielle Shapiro from the class of 2025 is a member of the PFS Board of Directors.)
Universities have a new mantra. Democrats, take note.
By (Princeton professor) Greg Conti and Aaron Sibarium, Washington Post, April 23
If “diversity, equity and inclusion” were the watchwords of higher education in the 2010s, “viewpoint diversity” is the mantra of the moment. Public universities have set up “civics centers” that, in one way or another, aim to bring moderates and conservatives onto the faculty while promoting the study of the Western canon. Harvard isasking donors to endow $10 million professorships as part of a viewpoint diversity initiative. And Alan Garber, the university’s president, has argued thatfaculty activism chills speech, a tacit admission that the Trump administration, with which Harvard has repeatedly locked horns, has a point.
A Memo to Reform-Minded Campus Leaders
By Frederick M Hess, James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, AEI, April 17
A year ago, I penned amemo to college presidents sketching the changes wrought by Trump 2.0 and how they might productively respond. Today, I’m struck by the uncertainty and frustration among leaders whowant to tackle college costs, campus culture, ideological bias, grade inflation, and bureaucratic bloat.
Book of the Month
Goetting’s book vividly demonstrates that most people, includingpoliticians of all stripes, tend to support “freedom of speech for me,but not for thee.” Correspondingly, he makes a compelling case forthe obverse approach, which has also been espoused by otherleading lights of the left, including Thomas I. Emerson and Eugene Debs. Goetting aptly summarizes the rationale for this preferredapproach as follows: “Until the First Amendment protectseverything, we can’t be completely confident that it will protectAnything.”
From the Forward to Free Speech Absolutism, by Nadine Strossen.
Yale University President Maurie McGinnis
Today, universities nationwide are facing a historic wave of calls for change. Trust in institutions is waning, and that’s not a problem we can brush aside. For higher education to serve the public good, we need the public’s trust. We need the American people to believe fully in the power and purpose of higher education.
I have been committed to earning that trust from the moment I took this job. That’s why, last spring, I formed the Committee on Trust in Higher Education. I asked ten faculty members to undertake a project of thorough self-examination. …
In its report, the committee calls on Yale to reflect on and take responsibility for our role in the erosion of public trust. I accept this judgment fully. This decline did not come out of nowhere, nor did it happen overnight. And we were certainly more than mere bystanders. We must acknowledge how we have fallen short. That means welcoming as comprehensive a panorama of perspectives as possible—even, and especially, those that may be critical—and facing such criticism with humility and curiosity.
Reunions
Are you attending Reunions? Join us for a lively breakfast with fellow alumni who care about free expression on campus and beyond on Sunday, May 24 from 8:30-10am at the Nassau Inn. Guests are welcome (feel free to bring a spouse, partner, or classmate; RSVP here). We’ll share updates on PFS’s work — and then, in what promises to be the highlight of the morning, hear directly from a current Princeton student and recent graduates about what free speech looks and feels like on campus today, and in the real world. Come ready to listen, ask questions, and engage.
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.
February 2, 2026
Dear PFS Subscribers and Friends,
2026 has started with a bang. “Viewpoint diversity” is in the news. What is its role in protecting the knowledge-generating and truth-seeking mission of America’s universities? Please see our Special Feature, an original article by PFS’s Edward Yingling and Leslie Spencer, The Next Campus Battle after Free Speech: Viewpoint Diversity at America’s Elite Universities.
Also see an important new book Viewpoint Diversity: What It Is, Why We Need It, and How to Get It, forthcoming next month from Heresy Press. It is a collection of essays by some of the country’s leading heterodox thinkers who confront the rise of orthodoxy on both the left and the right.
And our Quote of the Month is from a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Is a Four-Year Degree Worth It? by the President of Dartmouth Sian Leah Beilock, who makes an urgent call for university leaders to take action now to “reform ourselves.”
Happy New Year from PFS!
