PFS Monthly Newsletter

October 1, 2025

Dear PFS Subscribers, Members and Friends,

On September 25, PFS Vice-Chair Leslie Spencer ‘79 and Executive Director Angela Smith attended the third annual conference of the MIT Free Speech Alliance, an affiliated alumni group. The conference focussed on this fraught moment in higher education, with threats posed by both left and right and by the federal government.

Panelists discussed the vital role that trustees, alumni, faculty and students play in promoting open discourse and restoring universities’ core mission. A  lively debate about the efficacy of President Trump’s assault on elite universities featured John Tomasi, President of Heterodox Academy and Jeffrey S. Flier, former Dean of Harvard Medical School, in sharp disagreement with Peter Wood, President of the National Association of Scholars and Omar Sultan Haqueof the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. We will link to the conference when it is posted.

A Special Feature

Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber has a new book, Terms of Respect, How Colleges get Free Speech Right. Previews indicate that President Eigruber has come out against mandatory diversity statements as a requirement of hiring and promotion in higher education. This is a big deal. It is a recognition that such statements act as ideological loyalty oaths and serve to encourage self-censorship and threaten academic freedom. It signals that President Eisgruber, who serves as chair of the Association of American Universities (AAU), may be suggesting that this practice is anathema to a university’s core mission. However, it has led some people to assume that Princeton has abolished the use of diversity statements in hiring and promotion. This is not the case. Unlike MIT’s President Sally Cornbluth, who banned the use of these statements last year, at Princeton their use is optional and up to the departments. So at Princeton, nothing has changed. 

What next? Will there be a faculty motion to push for university-wide abolition of diversity statements?  We will have to wait and see.

In the meantime, see The Death knell for diversity statements in this month’s Chronicle of Higher Education. And see Heterodox Academy’s data-rich report documenting the prevalence and characteristics of mandated diversity statements: What’s Going On With DEI Statements in Faculty Hiring? Analysis of Faculty Job Ads from Fall 2024.

Statements on the Assassination of Charlie Kirk

The September 10 assassination of the conservative political activist Charlie Kirk that took place at Utah Valley University was an assault on freedom of speech and debate, and therefore, on the core mission of America’s universities. We have selected a few statements in response to the assassination, starting with our own, which highlights a contribution from Princeton professor Robert P. George and his friend, ideological rival and former Princeton professor Cornel West *80.

Turning Tragedy into Dialogue: After Charlie Kirk’s assassination, can America move beyond violence?
Princetonians for Free Speech, September 19, 2025

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.

AFA Statement on the Assassination of Charlie Kirk
Academic Freedom Alliance, September 15, 2025

It is critical that the impact of Mr. Kirk’s assassination not be that the threat of violence looms over anyone who speaks his or her mind on a college or university campus. It should be remembered that the murder of Mr. Kirk followed numerous attempts at institutions around the country to deplatform him or use other means to prevent his voice and the voices of others from being heard. All attempts to shut down debate and the airing of diverse opinions at colleges and universities should be deplored by friends of higher education. … The issue is not whether one agrees or disagrees with a speaker, be it Charlie Kirk or anyone else. What unites true friends of learning is the conviction that words rather than force, reasons rather than violence or intimidation, are the proper and best way to deal with disagreement.

Charlie Kirk's assassination
Violence must never be a response to speech. 
By Nico Perrino, Expression, Substack, September 11, 2025

… [A]n assassin’s veto silenced Charlie Kirk, just as it silenced the journalists and cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo a decade ago, and just as it attempted to silence Salman Rushdie in 2022. But we cannot let the censors win. We cannot let violence prevail. We can and must come together in defense of our rights to be who we are and to speak our minds.

Articles of Interest

 

PFS’s September 23 article in the Daily Princetonian, Princetonians for Free Speech defends free speech for all, is our response to a September 10 critique of PFS that we could not let go unchallenged. The critique, that appeared in the Daily Princetonian, Class of 2029: Reject selective views of free speech, was in response to A Letter to the Class of 2029 from Princetonians for Free Speech, that the Princeton Tory published on September 8.

 

Princetonians for Free Speech defends free speech for all
By Leslie Spencer and Angela Smith, the Daily Princetonian, September 23, 2025

To be clear: there is no such thing as free speech for some but not for others. Other than speech that is unprotected by First Amendment law, PFS is committed to defending the widest possible freedom of speech and open discourse for everyone, no matter how unpopular or offensive the point of view.

 

A Letter to the Class of ’29 from Princetonians for Free Speech
By Leslie Spencer and Angela Smith, The Princeton Tory, September 8, 2025

This letter comes to you from the alumni organization, Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS). We have existed since you started high school four years ago. We were founded in response to a growing concern that Princeton has drifted from its core mission of the pursuit of knowledge and truth, and towards a narrow activism that threatens free speech, academic freedom, and viewpoint diversity.

 

The death knell for diversity statements
 By Len Gutkin, The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 2, 2025

Princeton’s president, Christopher L. Eisgruber, has fiercely defended DEI initiatives initiatives in the face of pressure to disavow them from the Trump administration. But in his forthcoming book, Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right, he recommends that colleges jettison at least one such initiative, namely “politically loaded practices like mandatory diversity statements for job candidates.” Given that Eisgruber has accused other college leaders, as The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch put it, “of carrying water for the Trump administration,” his concession on diversity statements matters. If even the Ivy League’s biggest defender of the status quo ante Trump has turned against diversity statements, it seems likely that they’re on the way out.

 

Analysis of DEI Statements in Faculty Hiring During Fall 2024
Heterodox Academy, August 3, 2025

Critics have noted that such statements infringe upon academic freedom, amount to requiring an illegal loyalty oath from faculty job applicants, constitute an objectionable political litmus test, and invidiously discriminate against applicants whose views about DEI depart from the typical “progressive” stance. Requiring these statements pressures applicants to align with specific ideological views regardless of their personal beliefs, effectively functioning as compelled political speech. … Importantly, requiring these statements has not been shown to improve student experiences.

Efforts to silence scholars hit record high
We’ve seen 309 in 2025 so far, up from 80 in 2024
By Sean Stevens and Chapin Lenthall-Cleary, Expression, Substack, September 23, 2025

In 2025, the U.S. government escalated its role in the war on academic speech. What used to be scattered pressure from students and faculty on campus, or from outside activist groups, has morphed into something far more chilling: a coordinated campaign, led by government officials, to punish scholars for their protected expression.

Student Corner

Marisa Hirschfeld ‘27, a PFS writing fellow, reports this month on the Constitution Day lecture, Our Civil Rights Revolution, delivered on September 17 by Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen and co-hosted by the James Madison Program and the Program in Law and Normative Thinking.  Gersen’s subtitle: “We are in the midst of a civil rights revolution involving all the branches of government and major institutions of civil society including universities. What does the transformation portend?”

 

Harvard Professor Delivers Constitution Day Lecture on Affirmative Action
By Marisa Hirschfield ‘27, Princetonians for Free Speech, September 29, 2025

Quote of the Month

Jonathan Rauch Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and

 author of The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of the Truth

The  postmodern right is not the same as the postmodern left; but they share a family resemblance. Like the postmodern left, the postmodern right subverts truth, traduces norms, and mocks and abuses opponents, achieving success by steamrolling its ideological rivals—both on the left and, no less important, within the conservative coalition.
Notably similar, for example, is the postmodern right’s opportunistically cynical attitude toward truth. What people call true (in the postmodern paradigm) is really whatever narrative, or metanarrative, achieves social dominance. Thus the way to establish what is true is not by reason, evidence, and objectivity, but by winning the narrative. …

From The Woke Right Stands by the Door, by Jonathan Rauch, author of The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of the Truth. He delivered the keynote address at the MIT Free Speech Alliance's third annual conference on September 25, 2025