Your Cart is Empty
January 3, 2025
To Princetonians for Free Speech Subscribers, Members and Friends,
Happy New Year! At PFS we are delighted to welcome our inaugural Executive Director; you can see below our introduction to Angela Smith. Our Special Feature includes two original articles by our PFS student writing fellows Marisa Hirschfield ‘27 and Khoa Sands ‘26. And nationally, we feature an event of particular importance to anyone interested in the state of academic freedom and free speech on America’s college campuses, held by the University of Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression. It is presented virtually as well as in person on January 31, 2025, and features Princeton professor and New York Times columnistZeynep Tufekci. See below for details.
And PFS momentum is building! As 2024 came to a close, over 1,200 hundred new subscribers signed up with PFS. Please help to build awareness by asking your alumni and other friends to join us HERE. And for those who may have missed it, here is our 2024 Annual Report.
As PFS Writing Fellows, Marisa Warman Hirschfield ‘27 and Khoa Sands ‘26 continue to shed light on free speech culture both on and off campus.
Why Political Life at Princeton is Relatively Placid
Khoa Sands ‘26, Princetonians for Free Speech, December 21, 2024
… It is not that the student body at Princeton is more overwhelmingly conservative than peer institutions (despite the outsized presence of conservative institutions on campus) nor that Nassau Hall is uniquely hostile to activism. I believe the answers are far more mundane. Rather than any institutional suppression of ideological homogeneity, Princeton’s compressed schedule and isolated locale are the primary reasons why Princeton remains a relatively uneventful campus. ...
… This is not a weakness, but a strength of Princeton’s culture. While small college-town life may feel stifling at times, it forces us to focus for these four years before we enter the world with more mature and astute perspectives. We should celebrate our Orange Bubble, where activism can take quieter, more intellectual forms, such as debates, lectures, or written commentary, rather than loud protests or physical occupations. Princeton may seem quiet without the loud ostentatiousness that so often characterizes college life but our campus is as lively enough; that dynamism is expressed in the halls of Firestone, the pages of the Prince, and at Eating Club dining halls instead of Cannon Green. It’s not that nothing ever happens in Princeton – you just have to look closely to notice.
We Must Make Free Speech a Progressive Value
By Marisa Warman Hirschfield ‘27, Princetonians for Free Speech, December 10, 2024
There is undoubtedly tension between free speech and progressive causes. Consider, for instance, how permitting racist speech might hinder our fight for racial justice, or how repostingsexist jokes about Kamala Harris might empower opponents of gender equality. There are real costs to protecting all speech, but, importantly, there are numerous benefits too. Free speech is a double-edged sword – it hurts as well as helps us – and progressives must fully embrace it if we are to reap its rewards.
On January 31, the University of Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression is hosting The Chicago Principles at Ten Years. You can join in person or virtually to attend this day-long event to recognize the tenth anniversary of the Chicago Principles. One of the participants isZeynep Tufekci, the Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University and a columnist for The New York Times.
We are delighted to welcome PFS’s first Executive Director, Angela Smith.Angela has over 20 years’ experience in the private and nonprofit sectors with expertise in philanthropy, organizational leadership, marketing and events. She is responsible for driving strategic growth and impact to promote free speech and academic freedom at Princeton, as well as other universities. She has served as Executive Vice President of the Badger Institute, where she built brand awareness and financial resources, and led communications, events, philanthropic relationships and strategy to help facilitate charitable giving. Prior to this, Smith spent 10 years in the private sector, executing business-to-business marketing strategies in banking, manufacturing and software services. She earned her Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse. She is a Southeastern Wisconsin native where she lives with her two children. "I want to help create a world where my children can freely speak their minds at school, on their university campus, or in the world -- without fear of retribution or censorship." Angela can be reached at Angela@Princetonfs.org.
Confessions of a campus moderate
By Abigail Rabieh, The Daily Princetonian, December 19, 2024
(See our quote of the month below.)
Princeton Doubles Down on DEI Amid Nationwide Attacks
The University has been expanding and fortifying investments in inclusive programs while adjusting to evolving laws.
By Julie Bonette, Princeton Alumni Weekly, December 11, 2024
I’m an Ivy League Undergrad – here’s why my [Princeton] campus sides with Luigi Mangione
By Maximillian Meyer, New York Post, December 19, 2024
“[H]ere at Princeton, a poll of nearly 1,500 students on the Fizz social network revealed that 25% found Mangione’s action “completely justified,” with another 22% saying Thompson’s death was “deserved.” … Only 13% managed to say the killer was purely ‘in the wrong.’”
Majority of Students Fear Sanctions for Their Speech, New Heterodox Academy Report Finds December 20, 2024, Heterodox Academy
“The report finds that of the students who are reluctant to speak up on controversial issues in the classroom, 96.2% of them reported that they feared suffering at least one sanction (informal or formal) if they were to discuss a controversial topic. When students were asked if they had ever been sanctioned, in any manner, for their speech in class, 13.3% of respondents said ‘yes’. This is equivalent to at least 10.2% of the total CES sample reporting actually being sanctioned for discussion of a contentious issue on campus. If we extrapolate this figure to the population of US college students (researchers estimate that about 8.5 million students were enrolled at four-year colleges or universities in fall 2023), then somewhere around 867,000 college students have potentially suffered some sanction for discussing a controversial topic on campus.”
Dartmouth’s Bottom Up Approach to Institutional Neutrality
Our principles of restraint apply to academic departments as well as the administration. Other schools should follow suit.
By Sian Leah Beilock, The Wall Street Journal, December 20, 2024
Students’ Thoughts on Campus Speech, In Five Graphics
A New Student Voice Poll gauges how students are thinking about campus speech climates after a tumultuous calendar year.
By Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed, December 13, 2024
Abigail Rabieh ‘25 History Major and Public Editor at the Daily Princetonian
…As both a self-described and derogatorily-deemed moderate, I am interested in resolving issues with the tools of thorough examination and engagement in the establishment. I hold strong opinions, certainly, and am constantly coming up with new ones, but I aim to approach problems without an allegiance to a particular conclusion. However, few seem to be interested in this approach: the moderate rarely gets featured in a national publication or dramatically photographed for an international one.
I cannot imagine that the phenomenon of students trying to attract attention is a modern one. But the level of success they manage to achieve in the contemporary world is perhaps unprecedented. The “ivory tower” is no longer an accurate description of the modern Ivy League school: connecting to and elevating oneself in the outside world is now its prevailing design.
An incredible amount of national attention is expended on college campuses, to the point that they are blamed for tearing our society apart. Universities are no longer treated as institutions of education, but microcosms of America’s political landscape — the fight over student opinion is presented as the fight over the nation. Never mind the fact that the college-educated vote is a poor indicator of political outcomes, or that a university is in no way a microcosm of the nation; a college campus is an attractive stand-in for a wider community because of its unreality. Students and external actors alike are able to fight a culture war, or pretend to engage in a real one, without worrying about consequences: a college community can always be left behind.
Obsessive interest in university life harms the learning that goes on within. When student opinions are given outsized attention, we start to believe that they have something meaningful to say and forget that they are, in fact, still very much in the process of learning how to think. Moreover, when partisanship and zeal are rewarded with fame, students are pushed towards extremism and away from careful and deep inquiry that can elucidate truth.
An excerpt from Confessions of a Campus Moderate by Abigail Rabieh, ‘25, December 19, 2024, her last column for The Daily Princetonian
To Princetonians for Free Speech Subscribers, Members and Friends,
Happy Giving Tuesday from PFS! We are grateful for the support we've received over the past 4 years from alumni like you and many others. As our Special Feature this month, we are proud to present the PFS 2024 Annual Report, which showcases our achievements over this year. We hope you will continue to help us grow our reach and impact during this season of giving!
To Princetonians for Free Speech Subscribers, Members and Friends,
PFS hosted two events this month, one in Santa Barbara, California, and the other on campus. See details in the Special Feature below.
Additionally, our next PFS Inner Circle event is coming up. On November 21 at 4 pm EST Abigail Anthony '23, journalist and graduate students at Oxford University, will discuss free speech in journalism, her experience as a student activist, and more. You can event this event and all of our Inner Circle events by joining the Inner Circle subscription.
To Princetonians for Free Speech Subscribers, Members and Friends,
As the academic year begins at Princeton and on campuses throughout the country, an extraordinary array of newsworthy events has already occurred. In the wake of last semester’s sustained campus disruption and a contentious national election around the corner, this may be just the beginning. We start not with the usual one, but three Special Features.
