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.
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.
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.
We write this to alert faculty, students, and the administration of the appointment of Ronen Shoval as Research Scholar and Lecturer in Politics, and to invite us to reflect on who we want to appoint to teach our students.
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!
A nine-month correspondence with Princeton’s president sheds more light on his administration’s deceitful embrace of woke fanaticism at the expense of excellence
International students’ internship opportunities may soon be significantly limited. Following new guidance from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the University indicated in a Sept. 1 email that Curricular Practical Training will likely no longer be approved for all undergraduate and most graduate students. CPT is a temporary work authorization that allows international students on F-1 visas to pursue off-campus internships.
The new guidelines issued by the Department of Homeland Security do not change the underlying regulation, but instead represent a stricter interpretation of the existing policy compared to previous years.
On July 29, Vanderbilt University’s board of trustees announced the release of “The University And Its Purpose: A Declaration of First Principles.” Under the guidance of Chancellor Daniel Diermeier, this declaration marks an alarming threat to free expression and represents the worst attack yet by a Board of Trustees against academic values.
Over the past few years, higher education institutions have adopted emerging artificial intelligence tools in an effort to enhance nearly every aspect of campus life—not just teaching and learning but also admissions, alumni networks, fundraising and advising. Now some are even experimenting with AI’s ability to advance one of the hottest trends on college campuses: fostering constructive dialogue among students, who are more divided over politics now than at any point in the past 40 years.
Two-thirds of Princeton course grades are in the A range, according to the most recent annual Undergraduate Grading Report, published in December. While several peer institutions have recently faced scrutiny for climbing GPAs — including Harvard, where flat A’s dropped from 60% to 53% in the fall semester after instructors were urged to curb grade inflation — Princeton has largely stayed out of the spotlight. But the numbers show that the University is no exception to trends elsewhere.
In the recently published piece, The Next Campus Battle after Free Speech: Viewpoint Diversity at America’s Elite Universities, Edward Yingling ’70 and Leslie Spencer ’79 offer three “green shoots” to the ideological monolith that is America’s elite universities: civics centers, faculty reform, and the banning of diversity statements. I would like to offer a student perspective on these proposals. In my view, these reforms vary widely in their practical viability. Student civic programs offer the most promising path toward intellectual renewal, faculty reform appears the least promising, and hiring reforms, particularly the elimination of diversity statements, serve as a necessary precondition for genuine intellectual honesty.
I regularly teach a freshman seminar at Sarah Lawrence College. And every semester, without fail, the same scene plays out. A student lingers after class, or appears at my office door, or sends a carefully worded late-night email, sharing a view they would never dream of voicing to their peers. Sometimes it’s a defense of Israel, or abortion rights, or gun control, or simply to confide that they are not extremely liberal.
I thought about those students when I read the new Gallup and Lumina Foundation report, “The College Reality Check: What Students Experience vs. What America Believes.” Its central message is reassuring: the critics of higher education are exaggerating. But before accepting that reassurance, it helps to know who’s offering it. The Lumina Foundation is one of the most influential funders in American higher education, with an endowment of roughly $1.4 billion and a mission organized explicitly around equity and increasing college access and graduation rates.
In recent weeks, there has been much discussion over Harvard’s proposed grading policy, which would cap A grades at 20 percent in classes across the board. The policy also stipulates that, instead of using grade point averages for awards and prizes, Harvard would use a percentile rank. We asked our writers to share their reflections on grading at Princeton, the proposed Harvard policy, and what it all means for higher education.
Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS) today announced a landmark achievement: its email subscriber list has officially surpassed 26,000 verified subscribers, approximately 80% of which are alumni, representing one of the most significant milestones in the organization's history since its founding in late 2020. This high number represents a highly engaged network of supporters committed to preserving the fundamental value of free speech at Princeton.
The pro-Palestinian demonstrations and encampments that sprang up on many campuses in spring 2024 created unprecedented conditions for an aggressive crackdown on student speech. Unlike during previous protest movements, such as the Vietnam War, when most students took one side of an issue against the adult establishment, the pro-Palestinian movement pitted pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian students—and faculty—against one another, fueling tensions that spilled into classrooms, dorms and quads.
That unrest collided squarely with President Donald Trump’s re-election and his second-term agenda, which included targeted attacks on both immigrants and “woke” higher ed institutions.
A new national coalition, the Alliance for Higher Education, announced its launch Tuesday, promising to defend higher education from government interference.
The nonprofit’s mission is to protect higher ed’s role in fostering democracy by ensuring that colleges and universities have academic freedom, autonomy and opportunity for all students to learn and succeed, said Mike Gavin, the organization’s inaugural president and CEO. “Our goal—the joke I’ve been making—is to make things less bad,” Gavin told Inside Higher Ed. “But in the long run, what we want to see is” higher ed making good on its “democratic promises.”
