Search

The medical school at the University of California, Los Angeles, allegedly gave preference to Black and Hispanic applicants over the last three admissions cycles, in violation of federal law and a 2023 Supreme Court ruling, the Justice Department said Wednesday as it released the results of a yearlong investigation into the institution.

The findings, outlined in a seven-page letter, mark the first time that the Justice Department has publicly claimed that a university discriminated based on race during the admissions process.

A week before colleges must report years of admissions data to the federal government, a group of Democratic state attorneys general sued the Trump administration to block what they say is an unlawful demand. 

In recent weeks, colleges and the institutional research offices tasked to collect and report the data have been sounding the alarm about the looming deadline. An association recently requested a three-month extension. The Education Department responded with a conditional three-week extension.

In a blistering report released Tuesday, Republicans on the House Education and Workforce Committee say campus antisemitism didn’t begin with the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and isn’t confined to a handful of universities.

“Instead, antisemitism in higher education is a systemic problem that affects a broad swath of America’s colleges and universities,” the report states. “The evidence demonstrates that antisemitism on campus is driven by persistent leadership failures and radical faculty and student groups that legitimize and foment antisemitism in classrooms and on campus grounds. Meanwhile, universities with satellite campuses overseas are failing to stop antisemitism and live up to their stated goals of spreading Western values.”

A Minnesota judge dismissed the federal government’s challenge to a state law in Minnesota that makes some undocumented students eligible for in-state tuition.

This is the first ruling against the Trump administration’s campaign to end in-state tuition for undocumented students—a policy that the government’s lawyers have argued violates federal laws. In three of the seven lawsuits so far, the states agreed with the administration and scrapped their state laws. But Minnesota challenged the Justice Department in court and sought to dismiss the lawsuit altogether.

Almost 10 months after the Trump administration temporarily froze all student visa interviews in spring 2025, the State Department has released data showing the impact of that pause.

According to Inside Higher Ed’s analysis of the data, which was released Friday and covered the months from June to August, the number of student visas issued in summer 2025 declined by more than 100,000 from the previous summer, to 186,160. While the sharpest drop was in F-1 visas, which are for international students studying at a college or university and is the largest category of student visa, the number of J-1 and M-1 visas also declined.

In having a truly diverse group of students share their perspectives, Princeton makes known that there exists a home for every viewpoint. However, as much as I believe this claim to be true, there are unfortunately those who do not. It is easy to dismiss the Princeton administration and culture as entirely polarizing and ideologically biased. In fact, it is true that many here hold the same dominant perspective . But to focus on this fact alone, to rest our entire judgement on one such observation, runs the dangerous risk of neglecting the clear and persistent efforts of this University to encourage every student—even the conservative ones—to share the beliefs that he or she so earnestly pursues. 

Berkeley has long been viewed as one of the most viewpoint-intolerant universities in the United States. Conservatives and those with opposing views are rarely invited and often face protests or cancellations. Some of us have long accused the Berkeley administrators and faculty of fostering this culture of intolerance. That culture was again on full display in the cancellation of an event with Jeffrey Dean, Chief Scientist at Google, in Jarvis Auditorium on Friday, May 1.

Roughly twenty masked protesters entered the event with the intention of preventing others from hearing from Dean and discussing these issues. Soon after the event began, they reportedly disrupted it with megaphones and yelling.

Each year, the undergraduate college at Harvard awards the Sophia Freund Prize to the graduating senior with the highest GPA. For decades, the prize went to one student, sometimes two if there was a tie. In 2025, there was a 55-way tie. The top students all had a perfect GPA. Hundreds more were nearly perfect. Last year, flat A’s accounted for 66 percent of grades. A’s and A–’s accounted for 84 percent.

Grade inflation is about more than numbers. Putting a perfect GPA in reach of so many students perversely deters them from taking classes that could threaten it. It’s as if students start college with a shiny new car and hope to go four years without a scratch. Who would dare go off-road?

The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. For years, the core argument of Princetonians for Free Speech was treated by university administrators as a provocation rather than a diagnosis. The claim that American higher education had drifted from its foundational mission, that a culture of ideological conformity and administrative overreach had corroded the open inquiry that justifies the university’s privileged place in democratic life, was dismissed as politically motivated, answered with defensive boilerplate, or simply ignored. That era appears to be ending. No dramatic reversals have taken shape yet, but something significant is happening. The academy itself—the ivory tower that prides itself on being above and beyond the slings and arrows of the outside world—is beginning to acknowledge that the critics had, and have, a point.

Joseph Kahn, the executive editor for The New York Times, spoke at Princeton on Wednesday as part of the Dean’s Leadership Series at the School of Public and International Affairs. Before his talk, Kahn sat for an interview with The Daily Princetonian, where he emphasized the role of student journalism and how the Times has adapted to the modern media landscape. 

Over the past few years, higher education institutions have adopted emerging artificial intelligence tools in an effort to enhance nearly every aspect of campus life—not just teaching and learning but also admissions, alumni networks, fundraising and advising. Now some are even experimenting with AI’s ability to advance one of the hottest trends on college campuses: fostering constructive dialogue among students, who are more divided over politics now than at any point in the past 40 years. 

Admiral Andrew Cunningham once said of the British Royal Navy, “It takes the Navy three years to build a ship. It will take 300 years to build a new tradition.” Gaining trust is harder than breaking it, and public trust, in particular, should not be trifled with. Over the last decade, trust in science, and academia more generally, has eroded substantially, partly if not largely due to internal problems.

Two-thirds of Princeton course grades are in the A range, according to the most recent annual Undergraduate Grading Report, published in December. While several peer institutions have recently faced scrutiny for climbing GPAs — including Harvard, where flat A’s dropped from 60% to 53% in the fall semester after instructors were urged to curb grade inflation — Princeton has largely stayed out of the spotlight. But the numbers show that the University is no exception to trends elsewhere.

A federal judge has granted an additional tranche of colleges a delay before they must submit newly required data to the U.S. Department of Education on their applicants, admits and enrollees broken down by race and sex.

Institutional members of two higher education groups — the Association of American Universities and the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts — will now have until April 14 to submit the data.

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. 

On Feb. 28, U.S. and Israeli forces launched joint attacks on Iran, starting a war that has now lasted nearly four weeks. 

Despite the 6,000-mile distance between New Jersey and Iran, many University community members have expressed concerns about the destruction happening in the Middle East, as well as confusion about American motivations for entering the war.

The U.S. Department of Education’s top ranking higher education official sent letters to two accreditors Monday directing them to eliminate their diversity, equity and inclusion standards that he contended were in violation of civil rights law.

In his letters, Kent said the Education Department would continue to recognize the two accreditors but warned that officials could take action against them — including pulling that recognition — if they enforce any of their suspended DEI standards before formally eliminating them. His letters escalate the Trump administration’s crackdown on DEI standards at accrediting agencies.

Every so often, the complexities of the world break through the orange bubble that is Princeton University. There are occasional reminders of the world outside, like the pro-Ukraine flag-waving event outside FitzRandolph Gate, reminding us that a major conflict in Europe is still ongoing four years later. Even as a veteran, it still feels like something happening in a remote place.  It was only when I attended the European Cultural Studies (ECS) Faber Colloquium, a requirement for the European Studies minor I am pursuing, that I reflected on Europe’s significance and the debt Princeton as an institution owes to Europe, from its architecture to its precept system. 

In the recently published piece, The Next Campus Battle after Free Speech: Viewpoint Diversity at America’s Elite Universities, Edward Yingling ’70 and Leslie Spencer ’79 offer three “green shoots” to the ideological monolith that is America’s elite universities: civics centers, faculty reform, and the banning of diversity statements. I would like to offer a student perspective on these proposals. In my view, these reforms vary widely in their practical viability. Student civic programs offer the most promising path toward intellectual renewal, faculty reform appears the least promising, and hiring reforms, particularly the elimination of diversity statements, serve as a necessary precondition for genuine intellectual honesty.

I regularly teach a freshman seminar at Sarah Lawrence College. And every semester, without fail, the same scene plays out. A student lingers after class, or appears at my office door, or sends a carefully worded late-night email, sharing a view they would never dream of voicing to their peers. Sometimes it’s a defense of Israel, or abortion rights, or gun control, or simply to confide that they are not extremely liberal.

I thought about those students when I read the new Gallup and Lumina Foundation report, “The College Reality Check: What Students Experience vs. What America Believes.” Its central message is reassuring: the critics of higher education are exaggerating. But before accepting that reassurance, it helps to know who’s offering it. The Lumina Foundation is one of the most influential funders in American higher education, with an endowment of roughly $1.4 billion and a mission organized explicitly around equity and increasing college access and graduation rates.

The U.S. Department of Defense will end sponsorship for graduate students at Princeton and other Ivy League institutions beginning in the 2026–27 academic year, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ’03 announced in a video on social media Friday.

Hegseth said the Pentagon would stop funding active military students’ attendance in graduate programs, fellowships, and certificate programs at dozens of “elite” universities, which he characterized as incompatible with military training priorities.

In recent weeks, there has been much discussion over Harvard’s proposed grading policy, which would cap A grades at 20 percent in classes across the board. The policy also stipulates that, instead of using grade point averages for awards and prizes, Harvard would use a percentile rank. We asked our writers to share their reflections on grading at Princeton, the proposed Harvard policy, and what it all means for higher education.

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.

On Friday, January 23, 2026, several students from Princeton University marched to the top of Capitol Hill, joining tens of thousands of Americans in the National March for Life. Originating just months after the legalization of abortion in Roe v. Wade (1973), the National March for Life inaugurated the first major public conversation on the sanctity of life and a constitutional protection of the unborn. Today, four years after the overturn of Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), the march still serves as a platform for individuals to express their hopes and visions for the future of the Pro-Life movement.

Having experienced the tangible and transformative power of free speech evident in the march, four Princeton students have graciously agreed to share thoughts both about their participation in the march and also about the overall experience with pro-life dialogue on campus.

89 years ago, the pages of the ‘Prince’ featured a series of lively debates in the “To the Editor” section about the future of the humanities curriculum at Princeton. One of the central issues of the debate, as Wallace Irwin Jr. ’40 wrote in his letter to the editor on Feb. 22, 1937, was striking a balance between the breadth of humanistic disciplines and the realistic limit of students’ time.

Irwin’s letter was a direct response to Temple Fielding ’39, who, just a few days prior, wrote a proposal for a drastic curricular change and published it in the ‘Prince.’ Fielding suggested a course combining content from different academic departments, offering undergraduates an interdisciplinary exploration of various cultural fields. 

On Feb. 19, the University of Texas System’s Board of Regents approved new rules governing how faculty members can and cannot teach about “controversial” topics. FIRE is concerned that the guidance’s vague language, as well as the backdrop of censorship in Texas, will cause faculty to self-censor.

Over the past year, President Donald Trump’s administration has targeted international students in a series of restrictions, citing concerns about national security. Fear has spread among international students at Princeton, where 13% of undergraduates — and 45% of grad students — come from abroad. “This is not the safe haven that it was supposed to be,” B. ’27, a Princeton student from Latin America, told PAW.

Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, is the sort of highly selective institution that jockeys for the unofficial title of Harvard of the South. Recently, the university’s chancellor had a new idea: What if Vanderbilt was also in San Francisco? Maybe it could become the Harvard of the West too.

This new tactic, pioneered by Northeastern University a few years ago, is taking the satellite-campus concept to its logical extreme: the national-chain model of undergraduate education. If it works for Vanderbilt, other selective institutions are likely to follow.

At the Sunday Undergraduate Student Government (USG) senate meeting, University administrators spoke about the purpose of campus free expression facilitators, while student groups presented new mental health and menstrual product initiatives.

Associate Dean of Undergraduate Students Garrett Meggs spoke about the University’s free expression facilitators. Meggs explained that the University’s purpose behind the facilitators is to allow students to engage in civil and respectful dialogue on campus. Free expression facilitators are assigned to campus events in order to ensure that speakers and audiences are protecting expression and following the University’s time, place, and manner restrictions.

University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 presented his annual State of the University letter and answered questions about various student concerns at the first 2026 meeting of the Council of the Princeton University Community (CPUC). 

Eisgruber spent the majority of his presentation reviewing the University’s strategic shift in endowment spending priorities amid diminishing long-term endowment return projections. This includes a 10-year estimated $11.3 billion deficit in endowment growth relative to previous growth projections, according to the Princeton University Investment Company (PRINCO).

In his 2026 “State of the University” letter sent to students on Monday, University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 previewed major upcoming changes to University finances. The letter, titled “From Growth to Focus,” described a move away from expansion, citing long-term economic factors.

The changes will come in addition to the 5–7 percent departmental budget cuts over the last year, alongside the hiring freeze instituted last March. “The long-term endowment trends described in this memorandum are likely to require more targeted, and in some cases deeper, reductions over a multiyear period,” Eisgruber wrote. “The change that I am describing … goes beyond the pace of construction. It will affect everyone on campus.”

The recent news about plummeting math preparation among University of California, San Diego, students was startling: Over five years, the number of incoming students deemed to need remedial math courses before taking calculus had risen from 32 in 2020 to more than 900 last fall. 

Math achievement declines across the country are real, but data from a single campus is not representative, even if it makes national news. In fact, UCSD offers a poor reference point for policy discussions in California and most other states, given how unique its approach to math proficiency has been.

Northwestern University’s “Black Friday” agreement to pay $75 million to the Trump administration in exchange for regaining access to about $790 million in federal research funding raises free speech concerns, experts say.

“Northwestern has allowed its institutional judgment in terms of academic freedom, in terms of student speech, in terms of admissions criteria... to be overriden by the demands of the federal government, and that raises serious First Amendment problems,” said Northwestern law professor Heidi Kitrosser, a constitutional law expert.  

From congressional hearings to donor revolts to headlines about campus protests, American universities are being told—loudly—that they’ve lost the public’s trust. But beneath the noise, there’s a quieter question that rarely gets asked: when Americans criticize universities, what do they actually want them to do instead?

A new study published in Science Advances by economists at Cornell University and the University of Regensburg examines what societal roles Americans believe universities should engage in beyond their core mission of education and research.

The University of Arkansas’ shameful capitulation to political pressure betrays its commitment to Professor Suski and threatens the rights of all who teach, study, and work there. The message to every dean, professor, and researcher is unmistakable: Your job hinges on whether politicians approve of your views. 

Political interference in academic decision making must be rejected. When universities make hiring decisions based on politics, left or right, academic freedom gets weaker and campuses grow quieter.

If ever a case made plain the clash of values between freedom of speech and the desire of college administrators to compel everyone to support their “progressive” beliefs, Reges v. Cauce is it. This is an important First Amendment case, one in which the Martin Center joined in an amicus brief in support of a professor who was targeted with official retaliation because he spoke out against his university’s “land acknowledgement” policy and substituted his own views for the school’s.

What nerve!

A Buckley Institute report last month on the predominance of Democrats on the Yale faculty sparked criticism from conservatives about political imbalances in higher education — and prompted an apparent response from Yale.

On Dec. 1, the organization released its Yale Faculty Political Diversity Report, which reported that 82.3 percent of the 1,666 faculty members examined are registered Democrats or primarily support Democratic candidates. Of the remaining faculty, 2.3 percent were found to be Republicans with the remaining 15.4 percent not affiliated with either major party. Of 43 departments that grant undergraduate degrees, 27 had no Republican faculty members at all, according to the report.

Duke’s fight against the Trump administration has a new front: employee speech. After the White House accused the school of maintaining unlawful racial preferences and cut millions of dollars in research funding as punishment, the University ordered its employees to keep silent.

In late August, Jenny Edmonds, Sanford School of Public Policy’s associate dean of communications and marketing, emailed faculty members that all requests about “Duke and current events” must go through the University’s PR office. She cited increased scrutiny on universities and their policies and admonished faculty to stay in their lanes, discussing only their research with the media. While Edmonds’s message was limited to the public policy school, faculty across the university got similar messages.

Virginia Tech governing board member John Rocovich has refused to resign after Gov. Abigail Spanberger removed him last week after 16 years. Rocovich stated in a four-page letter addressed to the Secretary of the Commonwealth that he will not resign before his term ends on June 30, 2027. There was no sign of him at the board’s committee meetings on Monday in Blacksburg.

Spanberger’s decision is the latest effort by her administration to shake up governing boards at Virginia’s colleges and universities, amid concerns within the higher education community about the politicization of public university governing bodies. She recently appointed four new members to Tech’s governing board.

More than 1,100 University of California math and science professors are urging UC regents to reinstate college-entrance exams, saying that unprepared students are lowering academic standards and draining teaching resources.

The request, delivered in a two-page letter last week, cites a sharp decline in readiness among students studying science, technology, engineering and math. Nearly one-third of students taking first-semester calculus at UC Berkeley “displayed severe preparation deficits,” the letter said.

Two years after protests over the Israel-Hamas war roiled college campuses, resulting in the arrests of more than 3,000 students and faculty, a new study finds that students generally oppose punishing “objectionable speech,” unless they consider it “highly harmful.”

The study, conducted by researchers from the Universities of Pennsylvania and Colorado and Stanford and Columbia Universities and published in April in Science Advances, also found that students’ views of objectionable speech depend largely on whom it is targeted at.

University commencement ceremonies occupy a distinctive place in academic life. At once celebratory, ceremonial, aspirational, and institutional, they mark the culmination of years of study and the transition of students to the next stage of citizenship and professional life. At institutional events — organized, sponsored, and symbolically endorsed by schools and universities — speakers chosen to address graduates at commencements should respect the purpose of these events by not politicizing them.

Princeton will not have to pay any net investment income tax on returns from its $36.4 billion endowment, a University investment official said at a private event in January, after a recent expansion of its undergraduate financial aid program left the University below a 3,000 tuition-paying student threshold to qualify for taxation. 

Experts had projected that the new tax on wealthy university endowments — enacted under H.R. 1, the omnibus tax and spending bill passed by congressional Republicans in July 2025 — would have cost Princeton roughly $180 million annually.

 On a rainy March afternoon, a half-filled lecture hall in the basement of East Pyne became an unlikely forum for questions about teaching and something much larger: fear, not just about what can be said in the classroom and on campus, but how it can be perceived in the public eye.

At an American Association of University Professors (AAUP) event on political pressure and faculty governance led by Joan W. Scott, a professor emerita of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a Princeton professor of African American studies, the two situated the campus climate as increasingly shaped not only by internal debates over speech, but by growing federal government scrutiny and political intervention.

Thus far, Princeton has left decisions on AI use in the classroom to individual faculty members. It is currently weighing a proposal to require proctoring for in-person examinations, a good start if adopted. Should it commit to a broad set of solutions and generate the institutional energy required to implement them, the University would model positive change for educational institutions at all levels.

The fixes are obvious. Yet obvious fixes are often not made thanks to apathy and inertia, resistance to change, torpidity, investment in the status quo, lack of imagination, and defeatism. Meaningful change requires energy and commitment for the long haul, on the part of a sufficiently large number of people.