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Paul Mirengoff
Ringside at the Reckoning 

Excerpt: This article by Stanley Kurtz describes how two giants of 20th century American conservatism -- William F. Buckley and Russell Kirk -- viewed academic freedom. The very short version is that Buckley was against it and Kirk was for it. Kirk viewed academic freedom as a vital part of our Western heritage. He saw it as an enabling condition of the quest for truth. But Kirk was not an academic freedom absolutist. Instead, says Stanley, he insisted that professors have duties along with liberties.

What would Kirk make of today's Princeton University? Princeton can't match the raw anti-Semitism so manifest at Columbia. But Princeton takes a backseat to no elite institution when it comes to promoting leftist orthodoxy and discriminating against whites and other groups disfavored by the woke.

Luke Grippo 
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Professor of Civil Engineering Peter Jaffé began researching industrial cleaning chemicals 20 years ago. In 2016, he decided to focus his research on developing ways to biodegrade perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). These chemicals are widely used in everyday consumer and industry products — although we are also exposed to them in our food, water, and air.

After six years of federal funding, Jaffé says that he and his team have found a way to biodegrade these chemicals. An almost $2 million grant for a field demonstration was the next step. However, this funding was lost on April 1, when several dozen grants awarded to University researchers from NASA, the DOD, and the Department of Energy (DOE) were suspended, reportedly worth at least $210 million.

David Gura and Alexander Sugiura
Big Take Podcast, Bloomberg

Excerpt: The Trump administration is targeting higher education. Colleges and universities across the United States are faced with the threat of funding freezes over their handling of free speech, anti-semitism and transgender issues, among other topics, on campus.

Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber joins host David Gura to discuss the newly announced freeze on some federal grants, the role of academic research, Princeton’s commitment to free speech and more.

Good Kid Productions

Iran, a country of enforced Islam, state-sponsored terrorism, and a brutal gender apartheid regime, has found an unusual ally here in America, a place willing to house and promote its propagandists.

That place is Princeton University, which has gladly let its prestige to people who do things like: defend Iran's record on women's rights; called the Iranian revolution a glorious moment of utopian possibilities; and claim the country is not, in fact, a dictatorship. 

Peer under the prestige and you'll find a place that's so drenched in academic jargon and reflexive anti-Americanism that it's willing to support defenders of a patently evil regime.

Featuring an interview with Michael Doran, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

Doug Schwartz
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: The University’s provost, Jennifer Rexford ’91, submitted a declaration supporting a lawsuit against the National Institute of Health (NIH). The lawsuit, filed on Monday, seeks a temporary halt of a Feb. 7 order that slashed research funding. The plaintiffs in the suit are the Association of American Universities (AAU), the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), and American Council on Education (ACE), alongside 13 universities.  

Cynthia Torres and Luke Grippo 
Daily Princetonian 

Excerpt: University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 advised the campus community to “Keep Calm and Carry On” and offered other World War II-era words of advice at the Council of the Princeton University Committee (CPUC) meeting on Monday, as the University grapples with challenges posed by the Trump administration.

Sena Chang
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Concerns and confusion persist among students, researchers, and education advocates, who remain apprehensive about the future of science funding and the broader impact Trump’s actions are having on academic research. The Daily Princetonian spoke with community members and education nonprofit leaders about the turbulence of the past two weeks and the challenges that may lie in the next four years.

Sasha Malena Johnson 
Daily Princetonian 

Excerpt: Donning “Butler Bee” antennae, I joined the many students fighting for camera attention as I waited for Opening Exercises to begin. After a long orientation, I was excited to take part in a seemingly monumental and ancient rite of passage at Princeton. What I did not expect was the level of religiosity.

While Princeton was founded by Presbyterian pastors, it has always been a secular institution — a legacy best upheld by secular Opening Exercises. According to the most recent Frosh Survey from The Daily Princetonian, around 45 percent of the Class of 2028 identifies as agnostic or atheist. In consideration of the significant numbers of Princeton students who do not identify as religious, the University should move towards secular Opening Exercises.

Julie Bonette
Princeton Alumni Weekly

Excerpt: The pressure on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives at colleges across the nation has been building, and the campaign and subsequent reelection of President Donald Trump has only intensified concerns of many DEI advocates.

But Princeton administrators have voiced steadfast support of DEI initiatives. Michele Minter, the University’s vice provost for institutional equity and diversity, has “seen the national climate get much more complex around some of these issues,” and she acknowledges that “many other campuses are facing some very significant attacks.” She credits the support of University presidents Shirley Tilghman and Christopher Eisgruber ’83 for Princeton’s commitment to and expansion of DEI work despite necessary adjustments to accommodate evolving legal and regulatory requirements.

Alex Norbrook
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: A broad swath of researchers employed by the federal government are set to be forced out of their jobs — and Princeton can do something about it.

Across the board, President-elect Donald Trump plans to bring a hatchet to the federal civil service. He has spoken about slashing positions from key government departments, scattering federal agency headquarters across the country to trigger resignations, and potentially driving more federal employees out by weaponizing government institutions for his benefit. As these actors begin to dismantle public research infrastructure, Princeton must position itself as a sanctuary institution for displaced researchers.

Judah Guggenheim
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Unfortunately, the tragic reality is that encouraging Princeton to divest from defense companies will not end global conflicts. Referendum No. 5 fails to provide evidence directly linking the named defense companies to human rights violations or to demonstrate how weakening American defense companies will promote peace or justice. For this reason, I raised opposition to Referendum No. 5 and encourage every student to join me in voting “No.”

Olivia Sanchez and Achilleas Koukas
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Following the establishment of a pro-Palestine “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on campus at the end of April, a group of faculty formed the Princeton Council on Academic Freedom (PCAF) to “foster and defend academic freedom and intellectual pluralism” at Princeton. After a recent flurry of activity from the council following its official launch this fall, The Daily Princetonian spoke to some of its members to learn more about the organization’s formation and goals.

Gregory Conti
City Journal

Excerpt: As the broad American consensus in favor of free speech erodes, we have seen a similar unsatisfactory form of disputation proliferate. Critics of “free speech absolutism,” as it is condescendingly dubbed—we don’t refer to “rule of law absolutists” or “separations of powers absolutists,” for example—highlight all manner of alleged deficiencies with the status quo and trace them to an alleged excess of free speech.

In this asymmetrical theoretical comparison, implicit in much of today’s fashionable attacks on free speech, the alternative is hardly laid out at all. Somehow, we are led to believe, falsehoods and hurtful talk will vanish without truths getting caught in the dragnet, and no one, it appears, will be left any the worse off.

Siyeon Lee
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: There is a specter haunting Princeton’s campus — the specter of free speech. It’s a perennial topic that inserts itself into most social, cultural, and political events on campus, and one that’s been exhaustively reiterated as a core value of this University. Its loudest proponents often present it as a fully apolitical idea: a set of sacred rules all parties should uphold in all circumstances, regardless of ideological differences.

While conservatives often present “absolute free speech” as an apolitical neutral, its defense is often ideologically charged. The posing of free speech as a champion against “leftist dogmatism” not only detracts from the importance of truly effective free speech, but also rests on a fundamental contradiction: It relies on the perpetual existence of the leftist dogmatism it so despises.

Hope Perry ’24
Princeton Alumni Weekly

Excerpt: Princeton students and community members engaged in heated arguments with Francesca Albanese, an Italian human rights expert, during an event hosted by the School of Public and International Affairs on Tuesday.

Albanese was appointed to her position, United Nations Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, in 2022. She has been criticized for attending a conference hosted by Hamas’ Council on International Relations in 2022 and was condemned by the United States, France, and Germany for a 2014 comment that resurfaced in 2022 in which she characterized the U.S. as “subjugated by the Jewish lobby,” playing into an antisemitic trope.

Nate Tenhundfeld
Free the Inquiry, Heterodox Academy, Substack

Excerpt: Our friends over at FIRE keep a running list of incidents in which scholars have been targeted for something they have said or done. Helpfully, not only do they catalog cases by year and university but also by who initiates the targeting and what ideological direction they are coming from (relative to the position or issue at hand).

But do these targeting mobs always look the same? Are threats from the left mirrored in frequency by threats from the right? One thing that becomes immediately apparent looking at the data is that the ideological motivation for targeting of scholars on college campuses does not originate from just one side of the political aisle.

Flora Champy, Stephen Macedo, Leora Batnitzky, Jonathan Mummolo, Sanjeev Kulkarni, Eve Krakowski, and Emmanuel Bourbouhakis
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: The freedom of each Princeton faculty member to speak candidly on all manner of issues is indispensable. If faculty cannot express a broad range of intellectual views, including controversial ones, then the University’s mission to further human knowledge and educate students to become discerning, thoughtful citizens cannot be fully realized.

That is why we are supporting a proposal to modify the Rules & Procedures of the Faculty at Princeton to limit faculty meeting votes to matters directly concerning University governance. By extension, this measure would preclude votes that force faculty to take stances on political issues that lie outside of the faculty’s jurisdiction. We urge all our colleagues to vote in favor of this measure at the upcoming faculty meeting on Oct. 21.

Campus Reform
Patrick McDonald

Excerpt: Princeton University, Yale University, and Duke University have each been threatened with lawsuits for allegedly not complying with recent Supreme Court precedent banning race-based affirmative action in college admissions.

Featured
By Princetonians for Free Speech
PFS original content

President Eisgruber and his administration appear to have made a very good start on the new academic year. They conducted a first-year orientation that sent all the right messages on free speech, academic freedom, respect for diverse viewpoints, and the need for the university and its departments to avoid taking institutional positions on controversial public issues. They did the same in a new website on free speech which provides clarity on the free speech rules and where students should go with questions and concerns.

Jonathan Turley
Jonathan Turley's Blog

Excerpt: For years, many of us have been writing about the decline in viewpoint diversity and the rise of an academic orthodoxy in higher education. It is one of the focuses of my new book, The Indispensable Right. Despite the calls for greater tolerance, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) just elected a new president who has been criticized for being overtly hostile to conservative viewpoints and candidates.

Peter Berkowitz
RealClear Politics

Excerpt: In “How Liberal College Campuses Benefit Conservative Students,” which appeared online in early July at The Atlantic, Lauren A. Wright, in the spirit of “A Boy Named Sue,” urges “right-wing commentators” to appreciate the benefits of a campus environment that ridicules, condemns, and excludes conservative views.

Wright’s contrarian contention that the politicization of higher education advantages conservatives while harming progressives puts the controversy over the nation’s campuses in an unexpected light. No doubt some conservative students do rise to the occasion. In the face of their professors’ and fellow students’ knee-jerk hostility to conservative opinions, some students who hold them will develop thick skins, acquire the ability to appreciate the other side’s arguments, and improve their skills in fending off denunciation and diatribe and setting forth their own views under pressure. But most students – at Princeton, according to Wright, “conservatives make up just 12 percent of undergraduates” – are imbued with the progressive orthodoxy promulgated by much K-12 education, public and private.

Tim Carpenter

Kansas Reflector

Gov. Laura Kelly and top legislative leaders voted Tuesday to allocate $35.7 million to public higher education after the Kansas Board of Regents certified campus administrators complied with a state law forbidding employment and admissions decisions to be based on diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

The 2024 Legislature made distribution of the university operating grants contingent on affirming DEI no longer dictated faculty or staff hiring nor influenced whether a student was admitted.

Thomas Buckley
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: This year, 27 seniors declared their candidacy for Young Alumni Trustee (YAT). The high number of candidates is hardly a surprise: As members of the 40-person board of trustees, Young Alumni Trustees have significant influence over the University’s governance, budget, and $34 billion dollar endowment.

Disallowing the YAT candidates from campaigning on issues abridges their freedom of speech and stifles campus discourse, issues that President Christopher Eisgruber and the University care a lot about in every other context — just not this one.

The Economist

Excerpt: Thoughtful insiders acknowledge that, for some years, elite universities, particularly those within the Ivy League, have grown dangerously detached from ordinary Americans, not to mention unmoored from their own academic and meritocratic values.

University boards appear especially weak. They have not grown much more professional or effective, even as the wealth and fame of their institutions has soared. Many are oversized. Prestigious private colleges commonly have at least 30 trustees; a few have 50 or more. It is not easy to coax a board of that size into focused strategic discussions. It also limits how far each trustee feels personally responsible for an institution’s success.

Bill Hewitt
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Too many of Princeton University’s leaders have sought to run and hide from their duties. In response, I have filed a three-part petition for the Feb. 19 public Council of the Princeton University Community (CPUC) meeting. The purpose of this petition is to enlist the CPUC’s authority to bring an end to ongoing flights from responsibility by certain decision-makers at Princeton who have failed to sufficiently address my previous formal grievances.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: The article below, by the President of Princeton, just appeared in the Atlantic.  (Christopher Eisgruber has been Princeton’s President for 11 years.)  The title clearly implies that college diversity (and the implication is “racial diversity”) is not at all in conflict with excellence

It’s hard to imagine how the Atlantic could accept an article whose arguments are explained by the conflation of causation with correlation, as well as with cherry-picked examples or recent trends in grade inflation and selectivity. But let’s look at the argument.

Abigail Rabieh
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: The Daily Princetonian released its 2023 Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) report last week, which publicly shares internal statistics on staffers’ identities, feelings of inclusion within the ‘Prince’ community, and satisfaction with the extent of ‘Prince’ coverage.

This report, which includes a multitude of analyses on the problems the ‘Prince’ faces and goals for improvement, could be read as suggesting that the utmost priority of internal Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts is to increase the diversity of staffers. This would be a poor takeaway from an interesting and insightful report, and leave the paper open to common criticisms that shallow DEI programs face.

Victoria Davies
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Following a Jan. 25 letter from the free speech group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Princeton updated the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page for No Communication Orders and No Contact Orders (NCOs) a day later on Jan. 26. The new FAQ page reflects the Dec. 2023 change in NCO policy, which narrowed the circumstances under which NCOs can be obtained.

January 25, 2024
Christopher L. Eisgruber
Office of the President
Princeton University
1 Nassau Hall
Princeton, New Jersey 08544
Sent via U.S. Mail and Electronic Mail (eisgruber@princeton.edu)

Dear President Eisgruber:
FIRE and the Anti-Defamation League write to express our collective concern about Princeton University’s improper use of no-contact orders to censor students.

Abigail Rabieh
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: In Claudine Gay’s resignation letter from her role as president of Harvard University, published in the New York Times on January 2, she expresses hope that the Harvard community remembers her short term as one characterized by “not allowing rancor and vituperation to undermine the vital process of education.” But in her op-ed, published a day later, she claims that her resignation was the result of the work of “demagogues” to “undermine the ideals animating Harvard since its founding: excellence, openness, independence, truth.”

Though Gay paints her removal from office as a tactic to stop such a campaign from gaining further traction, her refusal to admit any guilt and the Harvard Corporation’s failure to note any particular reason for the resignation suggests that her presidency should be defined by a clear abandonment of the tenets to which she and Harvard claim to have committed.

Robert P. George, Joan Frawley Desmond
National Catholic Register

Excerpt: A leading Catholic public intellectual, George serves as the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. A staunch defender of free speech and academic freedom and inquiry, George had closely followed the developing controversy at Harvard and weighed in on X, formerly Twitter.

In his conversation with the Register, he examined the essential role of free speech and academic freedom in the mission of U.S. universities. But he also noted that many elite institutions are grappling with two competing visions of academic life: the “social-justice model” that endorses progressive values and the “classical, truth-seeking” model.

Jessie Appleby and Graham Piro
Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression

Excerpt: Free speech fallout continues from the disastrous congressional testimony on campus anti-Semitism given earlier this month by the presidents of Penn, MIT, and Harvard. Now, at least three other elite universities have announced that calls for genocide would violate their policies. Last week, FIRE wrote Stanford University, Columbia University, and Yale University, urging them to forgo revising their policies to punish speech that allegedly calls for genocide, because such an overbroad rule risks prohibiting protected speech including hyperbole, satire, or ambiguous language.

Lia Opperman
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: A post on X (formerly known as Twitter) gained traction on Dec. 7, sharing the names and positions of those in Princeton University’s Office of Diversity & Inclusion.

In response to Rufo’s tweet, the University expressed its commitment to protecting those in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) spaces and the work of DEI on campus. “We have been in touch with those affected by this incident to offer [our] support,” Vice Provost for Institutional Equity and Diversity Michele Minter wrote in a statement to The Daily Princetonian.

Keith Whittington
The Volokh Conspiracy, Reason

Excerpt: The presidents' bad hand in the hearings did not stem from a lack of hate speech regulations. Rather, it was due to the terrible track record that American universities have regarding principled free speech positions on campus. Harvard ranked dead last in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression's (FIRE) annual campus free speech rankings, and Penn was just one slot above them. Universities all too often have a double standard when it comes to protecting free speech

Christopher Bao and Elisabeth Stewart
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Changes to admissions and the state of open discourse on campus were two big topics of discussion at the second Council of the Princeton University Community (CPUC) of the 2023–2024 academic year on Monday, Nov. 13. The CPUC meeting is the primary venue for different stakeholders of the University to engage in open discussion and present progress reports.

Julie Bonette
Princeton Alumni Weekly

Excerpt: Though the speakers at the second Committee on Naming symposium on Princeton’s John Witherspoon statue were specifically asked not to make recommendations for the future of the statue, one presenter advocated for the destruction or permanent storage of monuments with ties to racism, and others alluded to adding contextual information, displaying it in the University’s new art museum, displaying an empty pedestal, and toppling the statue, which one presenter described as “a bad work of art.”

The two recurring themes of the afternoon were the broader reckoning of art with connections to racism in the country and the impermanence of art, despite a widely held public perception that art is permanent.

 

Excerpt: On July 4, 2020, a few hundred of my then-colleagues at Princeton University signed an open letter endorsing a number of student demands made in the name of “anti-racism” and proposing such alarming policies as the creation of a faculty committee to police “racist behaviors.” Four days later, I published a lone dissent in which I acknowledged the signatories’ right to express their views. I also suggested—and a month later, Conor Friedersdorf came to a similar conclusion—that most of them probably didn’t believe all the things to which they were putting their name or maybe hadn’t even read the document.

Jump to October 7, 2023. In the days after Hamas invaded Israel and committed unspeakable acts of brutality, I was pleasantly surprised that Princeton faculty didn’t issue another such letter. Perhaps, I thought, they had learned that it was unwise to support groups like Princeton’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which had scheduled a pro-Hamas “teach-in” for the same time as a previously announced vigil for the Israelis whom Hamas had slaughtered and issued a screed blaming Israel for Hamas’s evil.

Christopher Connell ’71
Princeton Alumni Weekly

Excerpt: Even now, tens of thousands of high school seniors around the country and the world are taking SATs — optional since the pandemic — and polishing essays in hopes of walking the campus pathways with Foster and Gardner. Princeton in August tweaked the short essay questions on its application to comply with the Supreme Court ruling, including asking applicants to write about how “your lived experience has shaped you.”

In August, the Board of Trustees established an ad hoc committee to examine Princeton’s admission policies, guided by two key principles: merit-driven admissions and the imperative to attract students from all sectors of society, including underrepresented groups.

Charlotte Young and Katie Tiers
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: On and off Princeton’s campus, Whig-Clio is recognized as a political force in the history of debating societies. Today, the society prides itself as “the oldest college and literary debating club in the United States.” Notable alumni include James Madison Class of 1771 and Woodrow Wilson Class of 1879. While the club boasts itself as the premier political organization on campus, often bringing popular speakers, hosting parliamentary debates, and holding councils on national and international affairs, it has struggled to sustain its membership over the years. 

Now, it has around 300 members — a sharp decline from Whig-Clio’s glory days.

In 1983, Whig-Clio was engulfed in debate over a scheduled Friday night showing of the pornographic film “Debbie Does Dallas.” The choice provoked sharp criticism, both from members of Whig-Clio and the Women’s Center, which called for the showing to be canceled. Conversely, other members of Whig-Clio were enraged at the threat of cancellation, casting criticism as an attempt to censor the society.

Click here for link to full article

Aidan Gouley
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: This year’s Pre-read, “How to Stand up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future,” by Maria Ressa ’86, argues that defending democracy requires no less than a transformation in how liberal societies engage in discourse — not simply specific policy prescriptions or direct action-based activism. Ressa’s call for open discourse should be resonant on a campus where free speech is considered core. Each of us must work to build such an environment. As Ressa says, effective activism can only be preserved in environments that catalyze rigorous discussion and critical thought.

Should free exchange erode, the University community does not merely risk losing the educational value of speech, but also threatens to concede a critical pillar of free society altogether. We have to reclaim the mantle of free speech from right-leaning groups and ensure that free speech isn’t harmed by either institutional overreach or communal neglect.

Donald A. Downs
Academe Blog

Excerpt: In late August, John Wilson posted a critique of the recently published Princeton Principles for a Campus Culture of Free Inquiry. I have long respected Wilson’s views on higher education. In this case, however, I find his critiques misplaced. The Principles’ authors had two main objectives: garnering support for the Principles by individuals and institutions and engendering a broader debate on reform. I welcome Wilson’s critique as a catalyst in this debate.

Frances Brogan
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: On May 30, Larry Giberson ’23 graduated from Princeton with a degree in Politics. His graduation deserves attention because he participated in the January 6th riots at the Capitol. He has identified himself in photos at the riot and recently pleaded guilty to a felony charge of interfering with police during a civil disorder. So why did Princeton grant him a degree?

Zach Gardner
Princeton Tory

Excerpt: The Constitution had a great week at the Supreme Court. In the span of 24 hours, the Court prohibited the violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (SFFA v. Harvard), reaffirmed the First Amendment’s prohibition on compelled speech in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, and upheld the separation of powers in Biden v. Nebraska.

By Emily Aronson, Office of Communications Princeton University

Excerpt: “We must stand up and speak up together for the values of free expression and full inclusivity for people of all identities,” Eisgruber said, followed by rousing applause from the students, families, friends and other guests seated inside Princeton Stadium. “To all of you who receive your undergraduate or graduate degree from Princeton University today: Your help is urgently needed — now!” he said. “So, as you go forth from this University, let your voices rise. Let them rise for equality. Let them rise for the value of diversity. Let them rise for freedom, for justice, and for love among the people of this earth.”

Professor Elizabeth Bogan, a much-admired senior lecturer who retired last year after teaching economics from 1992 to 2020, submitted the following letter to the editor to the Daily Princetonian on February 7. She told PFS on February 13 that it had not been published or even acknowledged. Meanwhile, the paper has continued to attack Professor Katz.

By Adam Gussow ’79 *00

[T]hat brings me to the second mode of civil disobedience. There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part!