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Enzo Baldanza
Princeton Tory

Excerpt: We hear it all the time: we live in the age of disinformation. Social media users all contain biases and omit/distort truths that make it difficult to know who and what to trust. Our commitment to the right of free expression exacerbates this problem by hindering potential attempts at regulation. 

However, free speech boasts an interesting duality as both a solute and a solvent. If free speech can be used to spread disinformation, then it can be used to spread truth as well: counteracting disinformation by using your platform to clarify and promote the whole truth is an ability in all of our wheelhouses. 

Christofer Robles 
Daily Princetonian 

Excerpt: The Trump administration and its lackeys have used the recent assassination of far-right activist Charlie Kirk to hide its own suppression of free speech.  But conservatives, nationally and at Princeton, are crying wolf. 

The death of Kirk is not symptomatic of some leftist guerrilla psyop. American political violence has long been a tool of the right, and the attempt to pin Kirk’s assassination on the left is symptomatic of the real free speech problem at Princeton: dishonesty. Members of the campus right have misrepresented the status of free speech on campus, drawing on a few isolated incidents to paint themselves as the real victims in the debate.

David Montgomery ‘83
Princeton Alumni Weekly

Excerpt: The federal government has recently restored about half of the research grants to Princeton scientists that were disrupted this year, including a large batch suspended in early April, University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 told PAW in an interview. The multi-year grants suspended in April totaled approximately $200 million when they were initially awarded, though some of the money had already been disbursed by the time they were suspended. 

Most of the several dozen grants that were frozen in April came from the Department of Energy, but they also included funding from other agencies, such as NASA and the Department of Defense. About half of the grants and half the funding have been restored, Eisgruber said. The University has never learned the full rationale for why the grants were suspended.

Keith E. Whittington
Reason Magazine

Excerpt: A health sports instructor at the University of Kansas is out of a job after a video clip of his in-class behavior went viral. The university's statements do not inspire confidence, even though the professor might well have been out of bounds.

Bill Hewitt
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: In 1970, Princeton University created the CPUC as a culmination of two years of work by the Special Committee on the Structure of the University. In the preface to its final report, that committee said of the new body: “Both directly and through representatives, more people will participate in decisions on a wider range of issues, and it will be easier to raise issues, to get a hearing, to win the support of others, and to gain access to those formally responsible for making decisions.”

We, the undersigned members of the Princeton University community, earnestly petition for the CPUC to adopt this revised version of its annual “Resolution on the Order of Business” for the 2024-2025 academic year. The reforms proposed here will enable the CPUC to better fulfill its aforementioned founding goals of broad participation in University governance.

Bill Hewitt
Princeton Tory

Excerpt: About Kafka’s great story, “A Hunger Artist,” Richard A. Posner observed, “The hunger artist is tormented by his inability to convince an indifferent world of his artistic integrity.” So, too, Princeton’s recent hunger artists’ professed anguish that the University had not endorsed their cause.   

Princeton’s hunger artists have decamped their recent performance protest on Cannon Green, but their hunger strike created a void that lingers still. In hopes of bending the University to their will, 13 Princeton students had deployed a public hunger strike. Further, 70 or so of Princeton’s faculty signed an open letter of clarion support for these students’ self-flagellating efforts to impose their demands. Rather than urge these students not to harm themselves, the faculty letter histrionically condemned the unmoved University administration.

Solveig Lucia Gold
First Things

Excerpt: One thing is clear: Our universities are failing to unite political enemies and forge common identities now. The keffiyeh-clad students who run around campuses shouting “Intifada!” while celebrating the cancellation of in-person classes are activists first and students a very distant second.

Those of us who remember cheerfully spirited political debates around college dining tables in the not-so-distant past may find it hard to believe that our institutions have fallen so far, so fast. How did we get here?

Campus Reform

In a Dec. 13 letter, Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber echoed the sentiments expressed by Harvard President Claudine Gay, MIT President Sally Kornbluth, and since-resigned University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill during their disastrous congressional testimonies, in which all three refused to state that “calling for the genocide of Jews” is unequivocally unacceptable on their campuses. The three university leaders asserted that the acceptability of such calls for violence would depend on context, with appeals to the value of free expression.

Julian Hartman-Sigall
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Earlier this month, in advance of a number of state-wide elections, Princeton political groups took part in canvassing and outreach efforts to get out the vote. Notably absent from these groups — which included the College Democrats, the Princeton chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America — was the College Republicans, which, unlike its left-leaning counterpart, did not organize any programming.

The group has historically had difficulty sustaining consistent activity levels, being reliant on strong personalities that occasionally cycle through the University to revive it at recurring nadirs on a campus that has a strong conservative ecosystem.

Zach Kessel
National Review

Excerpt: Just days after Hamas's brutal terror attack on Israeli civilians, the Princeton University chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine used a school-wide email listserv to send a statement excusing the rape and murder of innocent people to the inbox of every student on campus, in apparent violation of university policy.

Under Princeton policy, “mass electronic mailings are permitted only as authorized by appropriate University offices." Those same rules include a prohibition on distributing “malicious, harassing, or defamatory content through university channels.” A Princeton spokesman would not say whether SJP received permission to send the email from any university authority.

Cynthia Torres and Benedict Hooper
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: The Council of the Princeton University Community (CPUC) voted overwhelmingly on Monday to prohibit any recording of a broad category of campus activities without the permission of all participants, with few exceptions. 

“Princeton prohibits the installation or use of any device for listening, observing, photographing, recording, amplifying, transmitting or broadcasting sounds or events occurring in any place where the individual or group involved has a reasonable expectation of being free from unwanted surveillance, eavesdropping, recording or observation without the knowledge and consent of all participants subject to such recordings,” the policy reads.

Bridget O'Neill and Miriam Waldvogel
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 appeared on C-SPAN on Wednesday for a 30-minute segment as part of his role as the newly-elected chair for the board of the Association of American Universities (AAU), a group representing 70 top research universities.

In a wide-ranging conversation, Eisgruber discussed the state of higher education, sharing his views on the boycott, divest, sanction (BDS) movement, the price of college, and the function of financial aid.

Emma Pettit
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: Over the past several years, Republican state lawmakers have filed bill after bill meant to restrict how certain topics can be discussed in public college classrooms. A common conservative complaint — that leftist academics promote flimsy ideology rather than teach hard facts — became more than rhetoric. In some states, it became law.

But what about the First Amendment? What about academic freedom? How much control can a state really impose over professors at public colleges?

Christopher L. Eisgruber
Oct. 10, 2023

Even in a world wearied and torn by violence and hatred, Hamas’s murder and kidnapping of hundreds of Israelis over the past weekend is among the most atrocious of terrorist acts.  This cruel and inhumane attack has provoked a bloody war that has already claimed the lives of thousands of Palestinians and Israelis and will tragically take many more as it continues.

Princeton is a community that embraces many Israelis and Palestinians among its cherished members, as students, faculty, staff, and alumni. Even more have friends or relatives directly experiencing this awful violence.  The nightmare underway in Israel and in the Palestinian territories is being deeply felt on this campus.  That pain will inevitably continue in the months ahead.  My heart goes out to everyone personally affected.

Karin Fischer
Chronicle of Higher Education 

Excerpt: The U.S. Department of Homeland Security set up a special unit to scrutinize international student and scholar activists for possible violations of visa or immigration law, pulling analysts from investigations in areas such as counterterrorism and cyberterrorism to handle the workload.

Sean Stevens and Greg Lukianoff 
The Eternally Radical Idea 

Excerpt: We’ve both written a lot about how hostility to freedom of expression on college and university campuses has grown and intensified over the past decade. One thing that tends to go unacknowledged is that, during this time period, a tacit unholy alliance between administrators and students has emerged. In this piece, we’ll explore how this alliance has contributed to a record-breaking surge in deplatforming attempts on American college and university campuses over the past two years.

Sean Stevens
The Eternally Radical Idea

Excerpt: This past spring, FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings survey was in the field when the encampment protests began. This gives FIRE the ability to analyze how student attitudes about free speech changed in response to the encampment protests. FIRE also conducted a separate survey on the encampment protests at 30 of the 251 ranked schools during the months of May and June.

The data from these two surveys offer incredible insight into how students reacted to the encampment protests. Among other things, they reveal that administrators on many campuses across the country have lost the trust of their students when it comes to free speech on campus.

Carlett Spike, Peter Barzilai s'97
Princeton Alumni Weekly

Excerpt: The 13 Princeton students who were arrested during the pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus are unlikely to face penalties greater than probation, the University said in a statement Monday night.

The students will be able to participate in end-of-year activities and graduation, according to the statement. Hours earlier, faculty members voted 154-136 in favor of granting amnesty to the students at a special meeting held at Richardson Auditorium.

Haeon Lee and Nico David-Fox
Daily Princetonian

Two-thirds of grades awarded in Princeton undergraduate coursework in the 2024–25 academic year were A-plus, A, or A-, according to a Monday report distributed to faculty, a dramatic increase over the past decade.

Dean of the College Michael Gordin briefly discussed the report at Monday’s faculty meeting, expressing concerns about grade inflation and the allocation of A-plus grades. However, Gordin noted that grading is under the jurisdiction of departments.

Associated Press/NPR

Excerpt: The Trump administration cannot fine the University of California or summarily cut the school system's federal funding over claims it allows antisemitism or other forms of discrimination, a federal judge ruled late Friday in a sharply worded decision.

Isaac Barsoum 
Daily Princetonian 

Excerpt: On Friday, Nov. 7, 2025, Sunrise Princeton, alongside the Princeton Progressive Coalition, organized a rally of more than 100 demonstrators. We called on the University to act as a leader by defending life-or-death climate research, divesting from weapons manufacturers to end the genocide in Palestine, protecting immigrants and international students, and safeguarding academic freedom in a time when rising authoritarianism threatens progress across the world.

As a lead organizer for this rally, I learned an important lesson: Princeton students care a lot about progressive change, and are willing to publicly display their support because they’re optimistic that their actions can make a difference on a policy level. They just feel like they’re too damn busy.

Robert Shibley
FIRE 

Excerpt: This Wednesday, the Texas A&M System Board of Regents will vote on whether to give university presidents sweeping veto power over what professors can teach. Hiring professors with PhDs is meaningless if administrators are the ones deciding what gets taught.

Under the proposal, any course material or discussion related to “race or gender ideology” or “sexual orientation or gender identity” would need approval from the institution's president. Faculty would need permission to teach students about not just modern controversies, but also civil rights, the Civil War, or even ancient Greek comedies.

Catherine E.F. Previn
Harvard Crimson 

Excerpt: Harvard students have gotten too comfortable.

Last week, Harvard released its report on grade inflation. Among several concerning metrics was the statistic that 60.2 percent of all grades in all courses are now solid A’s. Administrators have pledged to confront this trend, and the report offers several explanations.

But one line stood out to me above all: The College noted that one faculty member described the shift as instructors offering “emotional support” instead of “critical feedback.” This sentiment captures the cultural zeitgeist driving academic complacency: Harvard’s post-pandemic culture of well-intentioned leniency.

Amy Lai
Academe Blog

Excerpt: Academic freedom is generally defined as the freedom to engage in activities involved in the production of knowledge, without unreasonable interference or restriction from law, institutional regulations, or public pressure. Interferences with academic freedom can come from within the academy, such as in the form of institutional pressures, but may also come from hostile foreign powers that are not content with countries mutually learning from and shaping one another’s cultures and instead aggressively extend their influences in Western democracies and force democratic institutions to abide by their rules.

Len Gutkin
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: Last week, I wrote about the most recent dust-up between the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), two organizations that understand their shared commitment to academic freedom in somewhat different ways. The inciting incident was a post on X in which the AAUP’s official account responded to charges of liberal bias in academe by insisting that “fascism generally doesn’t do great under peer review.” 

Josh Moody 
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: The University of Virginia has reached a settlement agreement with the Department of Justice that will pause pending investigations in exchange for assurances from the public flagship that it will not engage in unlawful practices around admissions, hiring, programming and more.

As part of the deal, UVA agreed to follow a July memo from U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi that bars the use of race in hiring and admissions practices as well as scholarship programs. UVA will be required to provide “relevant information and data” to the DOJ, according to the news release.

Dylynn Lasky Bobby Ramkissoon
FIRE

Excerpt: After the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, universities faced a dilemma that has become grimly familiar in the age of social media: what to do when a member of the campus community says something online that others find intolerable.

Within days, institutions moved with visible urgency. Some suspended employees. Others terminated them outright. A few launched “investigations” whose conclusions seemed preordained. The message these colleges sent was unmistakable: offensive speech is not merely offensive, it is an assault on human dignity itself. And that, in the eyes of administrators, makes it punishable.

Vimal Patel
New York Times

Excerpt: M.I.T. became the first university to reject an agreement that would trade support for the Trump administration’s higher education agenda in exchange for favorable treatment.

Letitia James, William Tong, Kathy Jennings, Kwame Raoul, Keith Ellison, Matthew Platkin, Charity Clark and Nick Brown
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: The Supreme Court, even in striking down diversity initiatives, still made clear that universities could explore race-neutral alternatives to achieve equity. The use of socioeconomic and geographic factors is exactly such an alternative. Despite U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi’s recent nonbinding guidance warning against the use of geographic indicators as “proxies” for race, make no mistake: Abandoning consideration of these elements of an applicant’s background is not a legal requirement but a political choice, reflecting fear rather than courage.

George Packer
The Atlantic 

Excerpt: Kirk was killed on a college campus in Utah, seated under a tent with the slogan “Prove Me Wrong,” facing a crowd of several thousand people, debating anyone who wanted to approach and challenge him. He kept up this practice—part recruitment, part provocation, part entertainment—throughout his years as Turning Point USA’s leader. 

He was using his freedom of speech, and if his style was aggressive, divisive, sometimes mocking, losing his life this way was no less an assault on everything that democracy’s remaining believers should hold dear. Those who disagreed with Kirk ought to be able to deplore what he stood for and also the violence that killed him.

Tyler Austin Harper 
The Atlantic 

Excerpt: Since the release of ChatGPT, in 2022, colleges and universities have been engaged in an experiment to discover whether artificially intelligent chatbots and the liberal-arts tradition can coexist. Notwithstanding a few exceptions, by now the answer is clear: They cannot. AI-enabled cheating is pretty much everywhere. As a May New York magazine essay put it, “students at large state schools, the Ivies, liberal-arts schools in New England, universities abroad, professional schools, and community colleges are relying on AI to ease their way through every facet of their education.”

University of Austin, Substack

Excerpt: Two hundred and fifty years ago this week, King George III formally declared Americans to be rebels and traitors. This dashed the colonists’ hopes for a peaceful reconciliation. And set the path to declare a new nation based on the proposition that all men are created equal. But on the heels of America’s quarter-millennium since the Declaration of Independence, I want to do something a bit unfashionable: I want to defend inequality.

Of course, all men are created equal. But all men are not the same. We have unequal curiosity, unequal intellect, unequal talent, unequal courage, unequal drive, unequal achievement. I want to defend this kind of inequality because I believe it is the most important way that UATX distinguishes itself. And because being honest about inequality is the most important way that UATX can help you be extraordinary.

Rose Horowitch 
The Atlantic 

Excerpt: Even before the Ivy League upheavals of the past two years, Jewish students had been slowly drifting away from the elite campuses of the Northeast. Now, as some seek respite from the protest movement that erupted after the Israeli response to the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion of southern Israel, the drift has become more like—sorry—an exodus. And selective colleges outside the Northeast, sensing an intensifying disdain for Ivy League schools among Jewish teens and their parents, are tripping over one another to recruit these students.

Sarah McLaughlin 
The Next Move, Substack

Excerpt: For years, I’ve been sounding the alarm about foreign authoritarians’ pernicious influence on higher education in America and other countries. Especially concerning are the Chinese government’s efforts, which have harmed students and academics and incentivized universities to put their core values on the backburner.

But now, the call is coming from inside the house, too. Over the past six months, the Trump administration has undertaken efforts, ranging from illiberal to blatantly unconstitutional, to exact punishment on students, academics, and the universities they attend.