The National Endowment for the Humanities—after losing in court over the termination of more than 1,400 grants, totaling over $100 million—began offering this month to reinstate those awards.
December 18, 2023
To Princetonians for Free Speech Subscribers, members and friends,
The chaos on elite university campuses since the massacre in Israel on October 7 has been a wake-up call. Presidents of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and MIT answered questions by the House Committee on Education during what is now the most viewed hearing ever. It revealed lawyer-prepped obfuscation and the glaring double standards that are the norm in higher education on free speech protections. Donors and trustees forced the resignation of Penn’s president Liz Magill and its board chair Scott L. Bok. Harvard’s board came out in defense of President Claudine Gay while many called for her ouster. Alumni and donors are realizing the true nature of the institutional transformations of their alma maters’ core principles and are demanding change. This is no surprise to us: For three years PFS has watched and reported on this transformation at Princeton and at other universities throughout the country. Join us to keep informed and learn more.
American higher education is at a consequential moment. New initiatives devoted to civic education, academic freedom and intellectual diversity are taking root at universities across the country, creating opportunities for philanthropists seeking to strengthen institutions central to American civic life.
Building on this work, the Roundtable recently welcomed Robert P. George as its distinguished fellow for American institutions. George is the McCormick professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University and founder and director of its James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. Micah Sagebiel, senior vice president at Philanthropy Roundtable, met with George to explore promising developments in higher education, where targeted philanthropic investment can make a real difference, the qualities reform-minded leaders need, and why honoring donors’ charitable intentions remains essential.
It’s been a blue-wave midterm election, which will surely dampen Republicans’ efforts to overhaul public colleges across the country. But even in the months leading up to the vote, Republicans seemed to have decided that the college culture wars had outlived their usefulness as a campaign issue.
Democrats swept seats critical to higher-ed policy this Tuesday, including in the North Carolina House, and the governorships of Iowa, Ohio, and Texas. Republican lawmakers in all of those states have made major changes to their public colleges, including banning diversity programs, establishing civics centers, and appointing conservatives to boards.
But beyond the difficult conversations this tragedy has encouraged me to have, I’ve been struck by how this story unfolded: through the determined reporting of student journalists, working primarily through the Sun’s editorial pages, who actively challenged their administration’s silence. The Sun’s efforts to unmask the defendants demonstrate how independent newspapers hold their institutions accountable — particularly amid declining trust in traditional media outlets.
Now, more than ever, student journalists have a responsibility to challenge institutional failure within their campus’ gilded walls. Despite both newspapers being independent from their universities, it is difficult to imagine our paper taking a firm position should a similar event happen on our own campus.
Sociology has long taken on society's biggest questions — inequality, social movements, declining birth rates — questions Pamela Paul notes shape political and cultural fault lines. But according to one sociologist quoted in the piece, the field has drifted from producing "intellectuals who think deeply and insightfully about the world" toward producing technicians and activists instead — prompting him to wonder aloud whether the discipline should simply be liquidated. The essay ties this to a critical spring report from Vanderbilt and Washington University describing a pattern of politicization across the social sciences.
Johns Hopkins University is undertaking an ambitious push toward ideological pluralism, most visibly through its new School of Government and Policy, opening in Washington, D.C. around 2027-28 under dean William Howell, who has recruited heterodox scholars like economist Peter Arcidiacono, whose empirical findings on affirmative action provided evidence in the 2023 Supreme Court ruling against Harvard.
July 27, 2023
To Princetonians for Free Speech Subscribers, Members and Friends,
Welcome to the second PFS Monthly Newsletter. Below you will find our most important updates and top news for the month, articles you don’t want to miss, and other news and links of special note.
But the higher ed politics conversation has come to a screeching halt. On the one hand, Trump seemingly lost his focus; on the other, no groups on the left have put forth an agenda on the issue for a theoretical Democratic-controlled Congress.
The Brookings Institution, for example, neglected to even use the words “college” or “university” in its new series of essays examining the potential policy effects of a blue wave. This inattention is a serious misstep that could have negative implications for students and colleges in the years to come. Republicans used their power to discredit higher ed: Democrats cannot miss this opportunity to begin rebuilding it — and institutions like Princeton need to help.
AI arrived on campus as a crisis but has since become banal. Students can now do basically all their schoolwork automatically with AI—answering scientific problem sets, writing computer code, and drafting essays. Professors like me have no idea whether we are really teaching or just LARPing for students who are also pretending to occupy their role.
I’ve come to the conclusion that something bigger, stranger, and more damaging has been taking place for a long time. AI has combined with two other recent campus crises—the coronavirus pandemic and the research-funding cuts of the second Trump administration—to amplify a deeper truth: American college is incompatible with itself. Americans speak of “college” as if it is one coherent thing. That’s wrong.
Rep. Elise Stefanik’s withering questioning of presidents of prominent colleges during a congressional hearing on antisemitism became a flashpoint in the national debate over campus speech. Then the New York Republican wrote a book about it.
In Poisoned Ivies, published earlier this year, Representative Stefanik decries the “academic rot” at prestigious institutions like Columbia and Harvard Universities and the University of Pennsylvania, whose leaders eventually resigned amid criticism of their handling of 2024 protests over the war in Gaza. But Stefanik levies her critique more broadly at “American colleges and universities,” “campuses across the country,” and a “broken system.”
This report presents findings from a national survey of 1,959 law school faculty at 192 American Bar Association (ABA) approved law schools in the United States, conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). As one of the largest surveys of law faculty on free expression and professional norms, the data reveal a profession that strongly endorses free speech principles while struggling to live them out in practice.
America’s colleges have had a rough go of it in recent years. After the Great Recession sent students flooding back to campus, schools have faced one evolving crisis after another: COVID, government interference, protests, and the chaos of AI tools in the classroom. Despite some positive enrollment trends, schools are also staring down a very near future where there will simply be fewer 18-year-olds to fill their seats.
Is the purpose of college just to get a good job, or is there more to it? And though the nation’s colleges and universities have been in rough spots before, is it finally time to start rethinking their entire model? On this week’s Radio Atlantic, the Atlantic contributing writer Ian Bogost and I sift through the fraught landscape of American higher education.
Higher education advocacy groups and institutions excoriated a proposed rule that threatens private, nonprofit institutions’ tax-exempt status. If enacted, the Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service proposal would allow officials to revoke that exemption if they determine a private college or university has discriminated based on race or ethnicity.
But colleges argued in public comments on the plan that it’s unclear and unlawful, and they criticized the agency’s sweeping language in explaining the rule’s intent.
I have two boys in college, and their university experiences are very different from the one I had in the 1990s. While many of those changes are for the better, some are for the worse. And on the whole, I would be reluctant to trade my experience for theirs.
But fixing something requires having a good handle on the problem. If you don’t know why a system broke down, it will be difficult to bring it back online. Neil Gross, a sociology professor at Colby College, has an answer: universities have been caught in the crosshairs of political polarization.
House Republicans have now formally backed President Donald Trump in fulfilling his campaign promise to dismantle the Department of Education, voting Wednesday to advance 10 bills that would codify the White House’s efforts to disperse numerous education programs and offices to other federal agencies.
Yale University is discussing a potential voluntary resolution with the Department of Justice over allegedly discriminatory admissions practices, President Maurie McInnis announced Monday.
To Princetonians for Free Speech Subscribers, members and friends,
This month PFS spotlights an exciting event on campus. On April 22, a new film, The Coddling of the American Mind, based on the best-selling book of the same name by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, is showing on campus as part of a college campus national tour. See below for details.
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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.
The Iowa Board of Regents voted Tuesday to hire the first permanent director for the civics center at the University of Iowa, despite the interim director’s call to suspend the search. The board offered the position leading Iowa’s Center for Intellectual Freedom to Carson Holloway, currently the chair of the political science department and interim chair of the philosophy department at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
This year, the conservative publisher Encounter Books published his No Liberty to Libel: The Constitutional Case Against New York Times v. Sullivan, in which Holloway argues the Supreme Court should throw out that landmark case, which increased journalists’ defenses against defamation lawsuits. He’s also authored and co-edited books on Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.
Colleges and universities occupy a special place in American life, but when stripped down to their legal studs, they are nothing more than nonprofit corporations incorporated by the laws of the states they sit in.
The University of California at San Diego’s medical school discriminated on the basis of race in admissions decisions over the course of three cycles, the Justice Department claimed this week.
Drawing attention to such suppression would seem to fall squarely within the mandate of this watchdog group, whose motto is “the freedom to write.” And yet, publication of the article—which makes no policy recommendations and is written in a mournful, rather than accusatory, tone—was enough to make PEN America’s president, the novelist Dinaw Mengestu, decide to resign in protest within hours.
A House Democrat who serves on the education committee plans to launch an effort to impeach Education Secretary Linda McMahon.
Rep. Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon said Wednesday that McMahon violated her oath of office as well as federal law by transferring dozens of programs at the Education Department to other federal agencies without Congress’s consent. Bonamici’s announcement comes after the Trump administration said Tuesday it was shifting civil rights enforcement to the Justice Department and management of special education programs to the Health and Human Services Department.
The National Science Foundation has reversed its recent freeze on new grant funding for Duke, Harvard and Yale Universities, Nature reported. Limitations on new grants for Princeton University, however, remain in effect.
The reversal took place on May 28, one day after Nature published a story detailing a funding pause for all four institutions. An NSF database showed that on April 9 the accounts of the four universities had been marked with a note that said, “Future Awards to Organization on Hold,” Nature reported. As of Thursday, the note had been removed from every account except Princeton’s.
Yesterday, we discussed how UCLA medical school has been accused of racial discrimination in admissions. Now Yale School of Medicine has also been accused of “intentionally select[ing] applicants based on their race” in knowing circumvention of Supreme Court precedent.
The Justice Department announced that “Yale’s documents reveal that they studied how to use racial proxies to circumvent the Supreme Court’s prohibition on using race to select students…admissions data demonstrate that Black and Hispanic students have a much higher chance of admission to Yale than White or Asian students with the same test scores.”
Feeling comfortable sharing your opinions is one thing. Allowing others to express opinions you oppose is another. Our new survey of 1,999 students at 439 colleges and universities finds that three-quarters of students are at least somewhat comfortable sharing their opinions on controversial or sensitive topics in class. That sounds encouraging, but it doesn't fully capture openness to different points of view.
Of students who say they are comfortable sharing their opinions, 44 percent say they feel comfortable because their views align with most other students and professors. Moreover, 76 percent of students who are not comfortable sharing their opinions say they worry others would not consider their views acceptable.
The public increasingly sees through the righteous image that American higher education wishes to project. Professors and administrators say that they curtail only injurious and hateful speech despite their tendency to equate injurious and hateful speech with conservative opinions. They maintain that they promote diversity, equity, and inclusion to rectify injustice and enhance education and not, as evidence suggests, to reward minorities and women whose thinking conforms to progressive orthodoxy. And they offer an undergraduate curriculum that allows students to fashion a slate of classes that suits their individual needs, tastes, and skills but which – typically lacking a mandatory and coherent core – leaves graduates destitute of that basic knowledge of America, the West, and other civilizations that informs the judgment of responsible citizens.
A day after winning election to represent Pennsylvania’s 3rd congressional district in the House of Representatives, Chris Rabb ’92 appeared in a video on Instagram bashing Yale’s negotiations with the Trump administration.
Rabb, a Democrat and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, is one of a host of alumni who have rebuked Yale’s decision to pursue a voluntary agreement with the Department of Justice over investigations into its admissions processes. In the Wednesday night video, which was posted from the accounts of several progressive organizations based on college campuses, Rabb noted Yale’s billions of dollars in endowment money and posed a question to his alma mater.
Does a university protect free speech by staying neutral, or silence it? In this Heterodox Conversation at Indiana University–Bloomington, Tom Ginsburg of the University of Chicago and John Wilson, co-editor of the American Association of University Professors’ Academe Blog, take up the question.
The two agree on more than you might expect: neutrality is there to hold back administrators, not to silence faculty or students. They split on whether it should reach academic departments, on whether professors should hold back outside their expertise, and on how to read the pressure on universities now.
The American Association of University Professors has endorsed 11 more Democrats running in U.S. House and Senate races this November, further cementing its evolving role as a political organization.
The association made its first-ever political endorsement in July, throwing its weight behind Abdul El-Sayed during Michigan’s Democratic U.S. Senate primary. The endorsement—an opening gambit from the AAUP, which resolved in June to get more aggressive in its defense of higher ed—drew backlash from some members and critics who say the association should maintain political neutrality. But Todd Wolfson, president of the AAUP, has said for months that getting more politically involved is necessary to protect higher education from an onslaught of federal and state attacks.
The academy has been battered by the turbulence inherent to the digital age. A feudal institution reformed along rigid German lines more than a century ago, the university confronts an environment of instant communication and collapsed categories, defined by a deafening cacophony of voices and a near-infinite supply of information. This development, more even than concerns about “wokeism” and the like on campus, poses the greatest threat to the future of higher education.
Higher education today is reeling from multiple crises. From the incursion of artificial intelligence into the classroom, to the crackdown on research funding by the Trump administration, the skyrocketing cost of college, and the decline in trust from the American public, it is hard to know what university leaders can do to restore their institutions to their former status as pillars of the country’s progress and prosperity.
Following up on last year’s roundup of convocation speeches and welcome addresses, we took another look at what campus leaders are saying to their communities at the start of the 2026-2027 academic year. Across a non-exhaustive set of speeches at influential universities, several themes stood out. Like last year, civil discourse and constructive disagreement appear to be top of mind for many university leaders, alongside curiosity, uncertainty, and the growing presence of artificial intelligence.
In a move that I find completely and utterly shocking, but not truly unexpected, the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education staff list is now offline. Try to access it and you get a simple message: “You are not authorized to access this page.”
When university researchers started to receive notice last year that the Trump administration was canceling their grants, they often didn’t get a clear explanation why beyond that their project “no longer effectuates agency priorities.”
Among the strengths of America’s higher education sector has been an uncanny ability to change and remake itself in the face of social, economic, political, artistic and intellectual changes—not just superficially and marginally, but significantly and even teleologically.
While the aspirational aesthetics of our universities—a pastiche of the ancient British and European institutions by way of pre-revolutionary New England and the mid-Atlantic—remain largely unchanged over the past century, their activities, outputs, constituencies, and funding sources have changed dramatically. This adaptive ability redounds to the benefit of universities and to the so-called higher education “system” as a whole, ensuring resilience and a (sometimes begrudging) willingness to change in response to internal and external challenges.
Harvard faculty voted to impose a roughly 20 percent cap on A grades beginning in fall 2027, approving the College’s most aggressive attempt in decades to reverse grade inflation and reshape academic standards.
Faculty voted 458 to 201 for the first plank of the three-part proposal, which will limit A grades in undergraduate courses to 20 percent of enrollment, with flexibility for up to four additional A’s. Faculty also approved a companion measure to use average percentile rankings, rather than GPA, to determine internal awards and honors. That measure passed 498 to 157, with 76 percent of participating faculty in favor.
All in-person examinations at Princeton will be proctored starting July 1, representing the most significant change to the honor system since it was established in 1893. The faculty passed a proposal requiring instructor supervision at Monday’s faculty meeting, with one opposing vote.
The historic vote was the culmination of months of deliberation within the administration and student governing bodies about how to address increasing concerns over academic integrity violations, including the proliferation of AI usage. The proposal cleared a full faculty vote as the final of three required rounds of approval, having already been passed unanimously by the Committee on Examinations and Standing and the Faculty Advisory Committee on Policy.
Some 15 years after the No Child Left Behind Act promised to close the racial achievement gap, it looked as if charter schools were making real progress toward that goal. Using data from 2015 to 2019, Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes reported that more than 200 charter networks were closing or even reversing racial disparities in reading, math, or both.
Then, just as the charter sector was posting striking results, many school networks strayed from their commitment to academic excellence. Staff-led demands for social justice convulsed the schools. “Anti-racism” and “equity” displaced effective instruction as their top priority.
Yesterday in London, Jason Arday, the controversy-plagued British academic and author, was found dead. Made famous as the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s more than 800-year history, Arday had been dogged by weeks of scrutiny amid accusations of plagiarism, fake qualifications, and a fabricated backstory filled with hard-to-believe details.
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), AFT Connecticut, Yale AAUP and the national AFT sent a letter to the Yale University Board of Trustees, urging them to reject any negotiated, closed-door settlement with the Trump administration regarding its admissions practices. The coalition warns that making concessions under political pressure would compromise Yale’s academic freedom, shared governance, and institutional independence.
Court rules that Florida professors are not mouthpieces for the government and that the ‘Stop WOKE Act’ violates the First Amendment. Ruling rejects Florida’s attempt to enact a “speech ban on all public college and university professors,” protects academic freedom and free inquiry on campus.
Since faculty voted in may to proctor in-person exams, national news outlets and some alumni have decried the end of Princeton’s 133-year-old tradition of unsupervised testing, but students, faculty, and recent graduates say the conversation within the campus community has been mild.
