August 2025 Newsletter

August 29, 2025

Dear PFS Subscribers, Members and Friends,

Big news! PFS now has over 10,000 subscribers, representing 14% of the undergraduate alumni population. 

“Resist vs. Reform” is this month’s Special Feature: President Christopher Eisgruber ‘83 was in the spotlight, forcefully defending his leadership role in the now publicly acrimonious divide. Some university presidents, including Eisgruber, urge their colleagues to present a united front against the Trump administration and refuse to admit a need to reform longstanding problems. The opposing camp, led by Chancellors Daniel Diermeier of Vanderbilt University and Andrew D. Martin of Washington University St. Louis, argues that “de-wokification” reform from within is the only way to resolve what is needed to restore public confidence in elite higher education.

Another highlight this month: Results of a major survey of 1,452 students at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan are shocking and get to the heart of the harmful aspect of current university culture. ”Between 2023 and 2025, we conducted 1,452 confidential interviews with undergraduates. We asked, have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically? An astounding 88 percent said yes.” See Performative virtue-signaling has become a threat to higher ed extract and comment, below.

A Special Feature

An August 11 Atlantic article, The Elite-University Presidents Who Despise One Another, draws the “resist” vs. “reform” camps in higher education, with President Eisgruber leading the “resist” camp.

Extract:

The leaders of America’s elite universities are required, by the borderline-masochistic, semi-impossible nature of their job, to be skilled in the art of performative comity. So it was a bit of a shock when, at the end of an April panel discussion, Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber turned on the chancellors of Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis, all but accusing them of carrying water for the Trump administration.

Eisgruber argued that higher education was facing a politically motivated attack, and that the two men were inadvertently making matters worse by agreeing with President Donald Trump, against the evidence, that the sector had grown illiberal and out of touch with mainstream America. The chancellors, taken aback by the public confrontation, countered that the struggles of a handful of Ivy League schools were dragging down the reputation of America’s heavyweight research institutions. Perhaps, they suggested, it was time for the Ivies’ leaders to step back and let new figures – such as themselves – represent the country's top universities. 

Chancellors Daniel Diermeier of Vanderbilt and Andrew D. Martin of Washington University then claimed in an August 20 Chronicle of Higher Education article, that the conflict between the two camps is exaggerated but that reform from within, not simple resistance to external pressure is vital: The (Not So) Quiet Schism Between Academic Leaders.

Can Universities Reform Themselves?

To quote the famous line in Hamlet, “something is rotten” in the state of elite higher education – something that long predates Trump. Most higher education watchers, including PFS, agree that serious internal problems have unmoored universities from their core purpose and have brought on the Trump sledgehammer reform efforts. Meaningful, lasting reform must come from within.

Heterodox Academy Four Point Agenda for Reforming Colleges and Universities constitutes a blueprint for reform that could become the gold standard for resolving the crisis and restoring trust in elite higher education. Its purpose is to equip university leaders, faculty and staff “to build a stronger academic culture—one that honors the ideals of scholarly integrity, pluralism, and free thought."

Outside pressure from governments, courts, employers and alumni groups like PFS have a role to play. See, for instance, PFS’s Top Ten reforms which we advocate Princeton's leadership take, and many of which echo HxA’s agenda. But university presidents, trustees, faculty and staff must lead. PFS will be applying the HxA agenda to Princeton. Stay tuned!

 

In the meantime, see What the Manhattan Statement Gets Wrong on University Reform, HxA’s response and challenge to the Manhattan Institute’s July Statement on Higher Education. The latter champions Federal government reform, while HxA challenges it.

 

A Student Survey

Performative virtue-signaling has become a threat to higher ed
By Forest Romm and Keving Waltman, The Hill, August 12, 2025
The authors are two researchers at Northwestern University who conducted a survey of 1,450 undergraduates between 2023 and 2025. Their conclusion:

 

On today’s college campuses students are not maturing – they are managing. Beneath a facade of progressive slogans and institutional virtue-signaling lies a quiet psychological crisis, driven by the demands of ideological conformity.”

 … We were not studying politics, we were studying development.Our question was clinical, not political: “What happens to identity formation when belief is replaced by adherence to orthodoxy?”

 

We asked  “Have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically?” An astounding 88 percent said yes.

These students were not cynical, but adaptive. In a campus environment where grades, leadership, and peer belonging often hinge on fluency in performative morality, young adults quickly learn to rehearse what is safe.

The result is not conviction but compliance. And beneath that compliance, something vital is lost.

PFS has conducted surveys of Princeton students for the last three years. They revealed widespread self-censorship, and hand-in-hand, a seeming lack of comprehension about what a culture of academic freedom and free speech should look like in practice. Read our analysis HERE. The recently published Northwestern study reinforces our PFS survey results and points to an urgent national problem – the high psychological and emotional costs of elite campus culture.

 

Podcast of The Month

The Psychic Costs of Campus Progressivism: How Woke Campus Culture Degrades Mental Health
The Glenn Show with Ted and Courtney Balaker, August 2025
The Balaker’s created the film The Coddling of the American Mind. It is inspired by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s book of the same name.

The film isn’t a simple retread of the book. Courtney and Ted … speak with students whose experiences with progressive activism and attempts to abide by progressive dogma left them in dire frames of mind. It’s a grim irony. Progressive activists’ stated concerns about the harms caused by microaggressions are so knotted, variform, and impossible to consistently obey that they can end up truly harming some of those most committed to them.

Articles of Interest

Why Democrats Aren’t Loudly Defending Universities Against Trump
America’s campuses find themselves without a full-throated defense from moderates or progressives
By Greg Conti, Princeton University associate professor of politics and Manhattan Institute senior fellow, City Journal, August 14, 2025

In its critical moment, then, the university finds itself with few vocal allies in the Democratic Party—itself plummeting in popularity. In a cruel irony, the university’s reward for having involved itself so closely with liberal and progressive prioritieshas been to receive a far more tepid defense than most observers could have imagined eight years ago when Trump first came to office.

Princeton President Melts Down, Rejects Responsibility for Campus Anti-Semitism

By Samuel J. Abrams, Minding the Campus, August 13, 2025

When Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber turned on his fellow university leaders atan April panel discussion, all but accusing Vanderbilt and Washington University chancellors of “carrying water for the Trump administration,” he revealed the dangerous delusion gripping elite academia. His outburst at the Association of American Universities (AAU) meeting wasn’t just poor form; it was a symptom of institutional rot: the inability to acknowledge that federal intervention became necessary precisely because universities failed their most basic obligations.

Universities, Free Speech, and Trump: Columbia’s Settlement is a Watershed Moment
By Tal Fortgang ‘17, Princetonians for Free Speech, August 19, 2025

One Out of Five Faculty Jobs Still Require DEI Statements. Universities Just Ditched the Term "DEI' | National Review
By Abigail Anthony, ‘23, National Review, August 26, 2025

The Elite-University Presidents Who Despise One Another
Inside the civil war between the Ivy League and the South
By Rose Horowitch, The Atlantic, August 11, 2025

The (Not So) Quiet Schism Between Academic Leaders
Two chancellors insist that reform, not resistance, will save academe. Are their colleagues listening?
By Megan Zahneis, The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 20, 2025

Student Corner

We are proud to announce our student writing fellows for Fall 2025:

Quote of the Month

 

Often university administrations indulge students who think that it’s a legitimate form of expression to occupy buildings and eject deans form their offices, to obstruct passageways, to invade classrooms chanting slogans over bullhorns. Even if you are a First Amendment advocate, there are legitimate restrictions on time, place and manner of expression of speech. I’m fully in favor of public expression of opinions, but that doesn’t mean that I want someone invading my bedroom chanting, you know, build the wall at 3 a.m. There are legitimate grounds for preserving private spaces, and universities ought to have a consistent policy of not allowing students to shut down the university, invade classrooms, take over libraries, and so on.

 

From The Future of Free Inquiry: Steven Pinker in Conversation with Alice Dreger, Heterodox Academy