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To Princetonians for Free Speech Subscribers, members and friends,

First, an exciting announcement: PFS has just launched an Inner Circle program.  For just a minimum annual donation of $100 you can join our PFS Inner Circle and will receive access  to insider-only virtual and in-person events including virtual cocktail hours with our founders, current students and special guests, invitation-only reunion receptions, and honorary insider gifts, with a bonus gift for subscribers over $500.  Please fill out the form at the link below to join!

To Princetonians for Free Speech Subscribers, members and friends,

This month PFS turns a spotlight on the faculty movement at America’s private elite universities, and we urge President Eisgruber to endorse and lead this growing movement. 

We are eager to hear what you think of this newsletter and our other communications so if you have a minute please fill out our subscriber survey if you have not yet done so.  

And consider joining our Inner Circle for insider-only events with students, guest speakers, and our founders.

Last summer, a former student journalist asked the University of Michigan’s student paper The Michigan Daily to take down or anonymize an article they had written more than 10 years ago. The article mentioned their involvement in a movement calling for the school to divest from companies associated with the Israeli government. In the email, they explained that their partner was a green card holder, and they were about to travel abroad with their young child. They worried they would not be allowed back.

If you’re looking for a reason to despair over the state of American education, there are many places you could start. Something that deserves more attention is damage to free expression—not in the classroom but in the public sphere of high school: the realms of student newspapers, student government, and other aspects of everyday life. School is meant to prepare students for the real world, but too many institutions are training kids to be silent.

Anonymous sources told The New York Times that Yale has sought a deal with the federal government to end an investigation into its undergraduate and graduate admissions, and has hired the law firm that helped the University of Virginia settle last fall.

We now assess Eisgruber’s peculiar take on the relation of the university to the nation that has treated it with increasing hostility in recent decades. Critics may wail that the universities have to be brought to heel for producing fanatics, snowflakes, and crybullies, but Eisgruber turns their argument on its head: it’s actually the nation that could afford to learn from the campus, he argues; to the extent universities are struggling with civility norms, they are simply a dirty mirror for broken civil discourse. Otherwise they are a model for balancing speech and other values with a “more vigorous” culture of speech than “most sectors of society.”

This thesis has two component parts, which can be asked as distinct questions. Are critics wrong to identify a free-speech crisis on campus? And, to the extent such issues arise, are universities merely replicating national problems of polarization in microcosm?

Now we can get to the heart of the book. Eisgruber’s novel approach to campus free speech issues builds on this foundation, to argue that campus free speech issues aren’t really campus issues, and aren’t really about free speech. Rather, campuses reflect national divisions in microcosm, and the division is not about speech and its discontents, but about “the meaning of respect and, ultimately, what it means to treat people as equals.” He ultimately concludes that while speech has to foster constructive dialogue and truth-seeking, the controversies making waves are about the terms on which that constructive dialogue occurs—which is a good thing, as Eisgruber and his critics alike agree—and that universities are closer to being models (albeit imperfect ones) than sources of the problem. It’s this surprising take that gives Terms of Respect its punch and has made Eisgruber a minor folk hero among academia’s defenders.

I contend that the narrow, politicized curatorial approach of the new Princeton Art Museum’s American wing turns our nation’s vibrant story into a muted tapestry. Like a quilt losing meaning when its unique patches are made uniform, the exhibit elevates grievance over achievement, division over unity, and progressive ideology over historical accuracy. The overall structure, deliberate additions, and obvious omissions dull the nation’s artistic vibrancy and overlook Princeton’s remarkable place in the American experiment.

Wokeness, campus protests, and the instruction of leftist ideas within universities do not erode civil discourse or violate free speech norms. Or so President Christopher Eisgruber argues in his new book, Terms of Respect. Overall, I agree with Eisgruber’s assessment, but there are some conceptual nuances that I will offer in order to refine his argument. This review will not provide a comprehensive summary of the book nor will it recount every minor personal agreement and disagreement I have. Rather, it will present Eisgruber’s most important arguments and my opinions on his larger takeaways.

What the series has not yet addressed, however, are the genuinely difficult legal and cultural questions that Terms of Respect has evaded. By seemingly resolving tensions between speech and equality, and reframing what appears to be a free-speech debate as an ongoing push-and-pull about civility norms, Eisgruber avoids discussing ways in which our laws, norms, and culture already treat, and sometimes curtail, expressive freedom, and how universities can apply their obligations and stated commitments faithfully. Relatedly, he relies upon an underexplored approach to chilling effects, the phenomenon recognized in First Amendment doctrine that certain policies or social realities are suspect because they place an informal prior restraint on expression. Eisgruber’s unequal concern with chilling effects — sometimes equating it with censorship, sometimes overlooking it entirely – demonstrates an incomplete theory of how universities get free speech right. 

Higher education in the United States and the faculty members central to its mission are under unprecedented, destructive, and sustained attack, part of a larger assault on democratic governance, civil society, and knowledge itself. 

Alumni possess wisdom and perspective that current students do not yet possess. They also have something that current students don’t: money that can be used to get the attention of university leaders. Sometimes alumni can make the greatest contribution to their alma maters by not contributing. For me, four decades after graduating from MIT, this is one of those times.

President Christopher L. Eisgruber introduced transfer and first-year students to the University’s expansive commitment to academic freedom and free expression during his fifth annual Orientation session on the topic.  

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. 

In PFS Supports Two Student and Faculty Events that Advance Free Expression, Executive Director Angela Smith highlights PFS support for two important on-campus events that happened in February, one organized by students, the other by faculty.

“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.”

Read more about these events, why PFS supports them, and why you should support PFS. 

And read coverage of these two events in the Student Corner below, written by our writing fellows Annabel Green ‘26 and Joseph Gonzalez ‘28.

To PFS Subscribers, Members and Friends, 

On March 10 the Department of Education’s office of Civil Rights sent letters to 60 universities, including Princeton. Theseletters warned of potential “enforcement actions” if institutions do not protect Jewish students. 

On March 20, in reaction to the Trump administration’s threat to cut $400 million in Federal funding from Columbia University, 18 law professors with a range of views from liberal to conservative, signed a public letter in The New York Review arguing: “the government may not threaten funding cuts as a tool to pressure recipients into suppressing First Amendment-protected speech.”  The next day, Columbia conceded to government demands. Other thanBrown University’s President Christina Paxson, who detailed what Brown would do under similar threats, Princeton’s President Eisgruber was a lone voice amongst the leadership of these universities – in The Cost of Government Attacks on Columbia, published by the Atlantic on March 19.

This week in The Chronicle of Higher Education, three of the 18 public letter signatories, all first amendment scholars, discuss what Columbia and other universities threatened with funding cuts should do. It is worth reading “It is Remarkable How Quickly the Chill Has Descended.” with Michael C. Dorf, of Cornell University; Genevieve Lakier, of the University of Chicago; and Nadine Strossen, of New York Law School.

To Princetonians for Free Speech Subscribers, Members and Friends,

Whoa. January certainly was a month of explosive change for higher education! Three executive orders that could impact funding of universities prompted President Eisgruber’s January 28 letter, which rightly admits “there is much we do not know.” See the Daily Princetonians coverage of Eisgruber’s letter: Eisgruber says U. is “exploring measures” in wake of Trump orders, stops short of specific guidance. 

Most importantly, take a close look at our special feature, written by PFS cofounder Ed Yingling, 2025: A Breakthrough Year for Free Speech on Campus. It is a grand synthesis of the many ways 2025 could be a year of dramatic change at US Universities, change that could critically impact free speech, academic freedom and viewpoint diversity at Princeton and elsewhere. Yingling’s article helps to make sense of the radical changes that lie in store. 

College students want to debate but are afraid to do it, according to a recent report from Banjo, an online platform “dedicated to the civil, peaceful exchange of ideas.”

The survey of 1,019 students across more than 600 institutions found that 92 percent of students were “slightly” to “extremely” interested in engaging in debates with their peers. Yet 66 percent of the students surveyed reported avoiding debates to prevent conflict in the past two weeks, and 64 percent reported feeling anxious when discussing controversial topics during that time period.

Feroce and his co-founders believed that the chapter, while certainly not the only conservative group on campus, would fulfill a unique need. “There’s a lot of conservatives on campus, a lot of groups,” Feroce notes. But, he added, many of them are focused primarily on “academia and intellectual thought.” The mission of TPUSA, however, as evidenced by Wold’s lecture, revolves around common sense and plain speech. This is a mission, Feroce argued, that would “fill a space for students on campus” and appeal to an untapped group of conservatives seeking to express themselves.

May 30, 2025

PFS Subscribers, Members and Friends,

Reunions ‘25 is the focus of this month’s PFS Newsletter. While Princeton and other elite institutions of higher education are under intense and unprecedented scrutiny from the federal government, on campus PFS held a highly successful Reunions ‘25 event featuring John Tomasi, President of Heterodox Academy, in conversation with Princeton Professor of Politics John Londregan.

See an excerpt and a link to a YouTube recording of the entire event below.

To PFS subscribers, members and friends,

April saw a major campus protest, one that disrupted and cut short an April 7 event featuring former Israeli Prime-Minister Nefthali Bennett. This disruption was by far the worst we have seen on Princeton’s campus. In response,PFS issued two letters to President Eisgruber and the administration. The first letter was sent on April 9 in the immediate aftermath of the event. It makes specific recommendations for swift action to sanction those responsible for breaking university rules. Anticipating a possible recurrence at an April 22 event with Yechiel Leiter, the new Israeli Ambassador to the US, PFS sent the second letter on April 18, outlining measures not taken at the first event, that are critical to preventing more disruption.

Are some schools better at fostering intellectual diversity than others? The study clearly reveals that the most elite universities are among those with the least ideological diversity. Princeton is ranked 13 out of the 55 in the study, with its faculty slightly more ideologically diverse than, for instance, UC Berkeley, Brown, Dartmouth and Harvard, and slightly less diverse than Stanford, Cornell, UCLA or Georgetown.

There is little doubt that this study provides another opening for politicians and critics to attack higher education, perhaps in unfair ways. Princeton could help neutralize this by joining those reform-minded university leaders in the now burgeoning effort to regain the public’s trust in higher education.

Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS) today announced a landmark achievement: its email subscriber list has officially surpassed 26,000 verified subscribers, approximately 80% of which are alumni, representing one of the most significant milestones in the organization's history since its founding in late 2020. This high number represents a highly engaged network of supporters committed to preserving the fundamental value of free speech at Princeton.