By Princetonians for Free Speech
On September 15, 2026, Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS) posted on our website astudy of Princeton faculty political contributions, along with a lengthy article providing context. (The study and article were corrected on October 5 to fix an error in the list of faculty used; the correction increased the percentage of contributions to Republicans and Republican-aligned groups from 0% to 2.16%.) The study clearly showed that, by this measure and consistent with similar studies at Yale, Harvard, and other universities, the Princeton faculty has a glaring lack of viewpoint diversity.
Several days later, PFS was contacted by reporters fromThe Daily Princetonian (thePrince) who were writing an article on the study. PFS provided the information the reporters requested in a telephone interview and several email exchanges. It quickly became clear that thePrincereporters had little interest in the important fact that the study reveals this lack of viewpoint diversity among faculty. Instead, they seemed interested in finding ways to discredit the study.
The resulting article did report on the study’s findings, but most of the article was spent questioning why a very few individuals who gave to Republicans were not included. We had fully explained to the reporters why those few individuals were not included: either they were not in the Federal Election Commission’s bulk file of contributions, which includes those who gave more than $200 to a candidate or certain political organizations in an election cycle, or they did not qualify as Princeton faculty. We told them that the methodology of our study is widely used in studies of campaign contributions. We also noted that you cannot cherry-pick a few Republican contributors; if you were going to change the criteria of the study to include those contributors, you would also have to include independents and Democrats who met the new criteria. Finally, we emphasized that changing the criteria would not change the core finding of the study.
Importantly, the headline of thePrincearticle contained a statement, repeated in the first paragraph, that was false and seemed to be a further attempt to discredit the study. ThePrinceheadline said that PFS “retracts” the study. We did not. We temporarily removed the study and the related article from our website while we corrected both. There is a significant difference. ThePrince, in response to our letter to the editor, attempted to downplay its use of this word. Our leadership has significant journalism experience, and we know, as thePrinceshould know, that in journalism “retract” applies to articles that are formally withdrawn or disavowed because they are substantially false. We expressly issued a correction and labeled it as such; we did not issue a retraction.
On October 18, we sent thePrincea letter to the editor pointing out that the word “retracts” was inaccurate and again explaining why our criteria were sound.
The Princeaccepted the letter for publication, subject to editing. A week later, we received proposed edits raising several issues with our letter. While we did not agree with all of the proposed edits, we considered them reasonable and offered to revise our letter to address those points. But a few days after that, we received another email from a different editor that was an attack on our original study and contained numerous questions about, and requests to change, our letter. Publications have full discretion over which letters they print and what edits they ask for, but this email went well beyond suggesting reasonable edits. Again, given our journalism experience, we know this is not how reputable publications handle letters to the editor. At that point it was clear that thePrincewould not print anything we wrote without gutting it.
Since thePrincewould not act responsibly on our letter to the editor, we are posting it below.
Your October 14 article on the faculty contributions study by Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS) had a headline that was grossly misleading. PFS did not “retract” the study and article about it. “Retract” is a term used in journalism to mean the formal public withdrawal of an article because it is fundamentally flawed. All that happened in this case was that the PFS study and article were temporarily unavailable on our website while the percentages in the original study were corrected and related changes to the article were made. There absolutely was no retraction; there was an announced correction, which is routine in journalism.
The corrected numbers did not change the fundamental points we made: Princeton has an obvious lack of political diversity in its faculty (Only 2.16% of faculty contributors gave to Republicans.) and Princeton, unlike other leading universities – such as Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Vanderbilt, Washington University, and Johns Hopkins – has neither publicly acknowledged there is a problem nor moved to address it. It is noteworthy that the Princeton administration refused to reply to your request for comments on this diversity issue.
The article spends a great deal of time on two faculty members who were not included in the study and even on one Princeton “practitioner” (the term the University, itself, used) who does not meet the definition of “faculty.” This is an obvious attempt to undermine the credibility of our study. As you did state, those three did not meet the criteria of our study. What you did not state is that the criteria were fully justified. The study was of contributions made by current faculty in the last full election cycle, 2023 - 2024. As we told you, using an incomplete election cycle would be misleading because many contributions are made at the end of a cycle.
The study was based on the FEC’s searchable bulk data file. This is the data file that is almost universally used in studies of contributions. You went into another data file that is almost never used. Furthermore, you cherry-picked only Republican contributions. As we told you, if you change the criteria to include the second data file or a different definition of faculty, you would have to also include independent and Democrat contributions that met the new criteria; the result would not materially differ from the result of our study.
Finally, you quote a neuroscience professor as stating a study of voter rolls (presumably meaning voter registrations) would have been better, but you failed to include our explanation that using voter registrations raised important issues on accuracy. Those include that not all jurisdictions make party affiliations public, that some faculty may not be registered in Mercer County, and that where party affiliation is public, some people register as independents even though they are not. Also, as our article states, there were two recent studies of faculty contributions at Yale, one using the same FEC data file we used and one based largely on voter registrations, and they had very similar results (respectively, 0 and 2.3% Republican) that also showed an alarming lack of faculty viewpoint diversity.
Edward Yingling, Chair of Princetonians for Free Speech
Todd Rulon-Miller, President and CEO of Princetonians for Free Speech
Leslie Spencer, Vice Chair and Chief Content Officer, Princetonians for Free Speech