RocaNews is one of those new platforms growing by the seemingly simple acts of building trust and conducting on-the-ground reporting in the places the New York Times promised to do. They believe their readers are smart enough to form their own opinions. At least that was being claimed on February 19th in McCosh Hall at an event entitled RocaNews, Non-Partisan Reporting, and the Fight against Legacy Media organized by the Princeton Open Campus Coalition (POCC). RocaNews currently has 2 million instagram followers, 651,000 YouTube subscribers, and a daily newsletter sent to over 200,000 subscribers. If that growth is not enough to convince you that they are doing something right, you can see for yourself through a myriad of ways, all focused on ease of access and user experience. Roca uses Instagram and newsletters to build a go-to news community based on factual, on-the-ground reporting.
The Trump administration wants to streamline its existing higher education accountability measures with a new earnings test, holding all postsecondary programs to the same standard—regardless of the certification level or institution type involved. But doing so could water down an existing accountability measure for certificates and for-profit programs.
Under a new policy proposal, released by the Department of Education late last week, undergraduate programs would be required to show that on average their graduates earn more than a working adult with a high school degree. Programs that fail to meet those standards for multiple years could lose access to all federal loans.
Attorneys with the US Department of Justice have reportedly said they felt pressured to accuse the University of California of discriminating against Jewish students and faculty, at the urging of the Trump administration, in what one lawyer described as a “hit job”.
Nine attorneys, some of whom requested anonymity, shared insider accounts with the Los Angeles Times of the federal government’s investigation into California’s research university system. The attorneys said they felt pushed to conclude the UC had violated the law before they had determined the facts. All of the attorneys eventually resigned.
A group of students and professors at public universities across Alabama are asking an appeals court to halt a state law that bans diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in public schools and prohibits the endorsement of what Republican lawmakers dubbed “divisive concepts” related to race and gender.
The Alabama measure, which took effect in October 2024, is part of a wave of proposals from Republican lawmakers across the country taking aim at DEI programs on college campuses.
Josh Moody
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: Six months into his second term, President Donald Trump has forced changes at many of the nation’s wealthiest universities, some of which have shed hundreds of jobs amid federal funding issues and investigations.
While sector layoffs are so frequent that Inside Higher Ed has dedicated monthly coverage to rounding up such reductions, those actions are more common at small, cash-strapped colleges or state institutions reeling from budget cuts. But universities with multibillion-dollar endowments have been among those making the deepest cuts in the first half of 2025, often driven by freezes on federal funding that the Trump administration imposed with minimal notice.
Johanna Alonso
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: More than three months after a federal court struck down an Education Department directive that barred any practices that consider race at colleges across the country, the Department of Justice declared Wednesday that diversity, equity and inclusion practices are unlawful and “discriminatory.”
But the agency’s memo goes even further than ED’s guidance, suggesting that programs that rely on what they describe as stand-ins for race, like recruitment efforts that focus on majority-minority geographic areas, could violate federal civil rights laws. The directive applies to any organization that receives federal funds, and DOJ officials warned that engaging in potentially unlawful practices could lead to a loss in grant funding.
Chris Cooper
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: It is worth noting that most DEI initiatives and offices on campus offer noncontroversial services like tutoring, mental health counseling and accessibility services like sign language interpreters. But the public and politicians were forming their opinions of DEI based on the voices of those with the megaphones and lucrative book contracts.
Current legislation targeting DEI upholds the most radical media-amplified voices as representative of the whole, even though these voices have been largely unsuccessful on many public campuses. Our university is not Columbia or Harvard, yet it seems as if legislators are attempting to punish our institution for the sins of its private counterparts. But when there are no loud moderate voices, how can we expect the public to see anything other than the extremes?
Jennifer Ruth
Academe Blog
Excerpt: Yesterday, the Department of Education announced investigations into Columbia University, Northwestern University, Portland State University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, explaining that “widespread antisemitic harassment has been reported” at these five institutions.
Given the confusion that reigns in and over higher education today, it’s worth trying to think this through a bit.
Khoa Sands ‘26
Elite academia has been dominated by the question of free speech and free expression over the past year. 2024 has seen the explosion of pro-Palestine campus protests, throwing institutions into disarray. At Harvard, UCLA, Columbia, and other universities, administrators struggled to respond as activists occupied campus and harassed other students. Scenes of chaotic fighting at UCLA were played on televisions across the country.
Can faculty lead the reform of higher education from the inside — and if so, who checks whom?
Ten years ago, Princeton University’s Board of Trustees published a strategic framework to guide the institution into the future. As I prepared this annual letter to the community—the tenth in a series that began in 2017—I reread the framework and the mission statement included in it.
The strategic framework and the values expressed in it have shaped a period of remarkable, mission-driven growth. As I describe in the paragraphs that follow, those values will be equally crucial in the months and years to come, when changed political and economic circumstances require that we transition from a period of exceptional growth to one defined by steadfast focus on core priorities.
Princeton is an undemocratic place. Its premier open deliberative body, the Council of the Princeton University Community (CPUC), is fraught with attempts to filter legitimate dialogue and debate between various campus interests. Indeed, as my colleague Siyeon Lee argued last fall, CPUC meetings “mostly functioned as a Q&A, the decision already made, and the damage already done.”
However, in just under two weeks, at the upcoming Feb. 9 CPUC meeting in the basement of Frist Campus Center, the University community — students, faculty, and staff — will have a rare opportunity for unfettered access to University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83.
Daily Princetonian Editorial Board
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: Earlier this month, University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 introduced a new policy in front of the Council of the Princeton University Community (CPUC) that prohibits the “covert/secret recording” of any “conversation or meeting” occurring in many University contexts without obtaining the consent of all participants. The University omitted many important details of the policy, which, as currently written, is shockingly broad.
Isaac Barsoum
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: At the Council of the Princeton University Community (CPUC) meeting on Monday, Vice President for Campus Life Rochelle Calhoun unveiled a new policy on recording events that prohibits the recording of public events or meetings “when it has been explicitly stated that recording is prohibited,” and prohibits disseminating any such recordings.
With this policy, the University retreats even further from the democratization of its decision-making processes.
Abgail Anthony
National Review
Excerpt: Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber recently published a book with an undeniably contrarian title, Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right. In his promotional media tour, he appeared on an NPR podcast hosted by Meghna Chakrabarti. During their discussion, Chakrabarti challenged Eisgruber by questioning whether universities have consistently promoted free expression.
Julia Steinberg
The Atlantic
Excerpt: College campuses today have a reputation for being hostile to right-leaning students. As a recent graduate who became a conservative in college, I can’t say I entirely agree. Yes, we’re outnumbered, and yes, our ideas often get disregarded. Being a conservative might be socially disadvantageous. But if you want to know where the real political energy is on campuses, it’s on the right.
Miriam Waldvogel
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: On Wednesday, The Daily Princetonian signed an amicus brief in support of The Stanford Daily in Stanford Daily Publishing Corporation et al. v. Rubio, a lawsuit in federal court that challenges the Trump administration’s revocation of international student visas for constitutionally protected speech. An additional 54 student newspapers and newsroom leaders from universities across the country have also signed on.
Eric J. Weiner
Academe Blog
Excerpt: Although Lisa Siraganian’s recent article ”Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity” includes important considerations for the heterodox academic community, her theses do more to distort the intentions and purposes of heterodoxical teaching and learning than to illuminate its potential conflicts and contradictions. Siraganian’s general critique of “viewpoint diversity” is that it is a thinly veiled ideological cover for radically “conservative” ideas—rather than, as advocates argue, a concerted attempt to democratize curriculum and pedagogies.
Cynthia Torres
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: Princeton will require undergraduate applicants to submit SAT or ACT test scores beginning with the 2027–28 admission cycle, the University announced Thursday. The decision will end a seven-year stint of test-optional undergraduate admissions that began during the pandemic.
Several peer institutions including Harvard, Penn, and Brown, have announced in the past year and a half that they would require standardized tests, with changes set to take place in the application cycles during the 2024–25 or 2025–26 school years. Yale, meanwhile, has adopted a test-flexible policy allowing students to choose from SAT, ACT, Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate scores to submit. Columbia has become permanently test-optional.
Christopher L. Eisgruber
The Atlantic
Excerpt: A few weeks ago, I welcomed Princeton’s newly arrived undergraduates to campus with what has become an annual tradition: a presidential lecture on the importance of free speech and civil discussion. This semester, I will host small seminars with first-year and transfer students to impress upon them my view that free speech is essential to the research and teaching mission of American universities.
Christofer Robles
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: Superficially, Princeton has remained steadfast in its defense of the value of diversity. The word “diversity” is ubiquitous in Eisgruber’s lexicon. But the percentage of Black students in an incoming class after 2020 never reached or surpassed the national proportions of Black young adults nor Black college students. After two years of affirmative action, this year’s 3.9 percentage point reduction in Black first-years makes the class even less diverse.
In 2020, Eisgruber committed to creating a more diverse and inclusive Princeton, and the University is certainly not in a wholly worse place than it was five years ago. But growing racial consciousness and institutional self-reckoning were de rigueur following the summer of 2020. Now the winds have changed, and Princeton will need to try harder.
Leela Hensler
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: The Princeton Police Department has stepped up patrols of the town’s Jewish Center on Nassau Street. The shift comes in the wake of half a dozen reported incidents of graffiti around town beginning in mid-August that are being investigated as “bias intimidation incidents.”
“All of these investigations remain active, [and] our detective bureau is following up on any possible leads,” said Captain Matthew Solovay of the Princeton Police Department in an interview with The Daily Princetonian. He also confirmed that patrols around parks and the Jewish Center had increased.
Greg Arzoomanian
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: Ten years ago, Princeton’s Board of Trustees established a special committee to consider the usage of Woodrow Wilson’s name at Princeton. That work resulted in the ultimate removal of Wilson’s name from the School of Public and International Affairs, and the creation of a “Committee on Naming” of the Council of the Princeton University Community to consider similar future issues.
One naming that especially deserves consideration has to be Princeton’s “Atatürk Professorship in Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies,” which is named for Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey and anti-Armenian figure that inspired Nazi ideology. Just as Princeton exempted Wilson’s name from celebration due to his racist ideologies, it must do the same for the Atatürk Professorship: It must be retired.
Rose Horowitch
The Atlantic
Excerpt: The leaders of America’s elite universities are required, by the borderline-masochistic, semi-impossible nature of their job, to be skilled in the art of performative comity.
So it was a bit of a shock when, at the end of an April panel discussion, Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber turned on the chancellors of Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis, all but accusing them of carrying water for the Trump administration.
Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: The Oversight Project, a spinoff of the conservative Heritage Foundation known for deluging government agencies with public records requests, has set its sights on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
According to Chapel Hill’s open records request database, Mike Howell, the Oversight Project’s president, submitted a sweeping request to the university on July 2, asking for syllabi and class materials presented to students in roughly 70 courses that contain “any of the following search terms, whether in titles, body text, footnotes, metadata, or hyperlinks.” He then listed 30 search terms he wanted Chapel Hill to use, including “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging”; “gender identity”; “intersectionality”; “white privilege”; “cultural humility”; “racial equity”; “implicit bias”; “microaggressions”; “queer”; and “sexuality.”
Betsy Klein
CNN
Excerpt: The Trump administration has frozen $108 million in federal funding for Duke Health, according to a senior administration official, after asserting a day earlier it was investigating “systemic racial discrimination” in the university’s healthcare system.
Joel Ibabao
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: The data is stark: 70 percent of Class of 2025 alumni who expect to earn above $120,000 next year say that they will not be working in the service of humanity, while 77 percent of those making under $90,000 say they will. However, the idea of working “in the service of humanity” reflected in these numbers is too narrow — earning to support one’s family and earning to give are both noble, service-oriented goals in themselves.
I agree that deciding on a career path in college means weighing different values, such as ambition, service, and the pursuit of self-understanding. While Shen acknowledges the need for students from low-income households to earn to give back to their families, by writing that “overlooking our responsibility to the public is no small error,” he shows the stigma still faced by students who are just trying to help their families and inadvertently reveals an elitist bias.
Daniel J. Solomon
Chronicle of Higher Education
Excerpt: Ever since the change of administration in Washington, campus conservatives have been snared in a novel predicament. Once academe’s outcasts and eccentrics, those on the right now elicit suspicion and rage. Our cries against the left’s capture of the humanities have risen to the ears of the White House, and the Department of Education has put an ultimatum to the universities: acquiesce to state interference in curriculum, hiring, and internal governance, or lose billions in federal funding.
Bill Hewitt
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: I write as a concerned alum with a long Princeton memory to openly and ardently oppose a dangerous proposal to amend the Council of the Princeton University Community Charter. University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 charged the Committee on Rights and Rules to “review the role and procedures of the Judicial Committee.” Their ensuing recommendation would strip the CPUC Judicial Committee of its jurisdiction to hear and decide initial complaints of serious University rule violations, as well as severely curtail the right of appeal of University community members at large.
