The debate over free speech on campus is usually framed as a persuasion problem: if only more students believed in free expression, the culture would protect it. A new study in Science Advances, by researchers at Stanford, Penn, Columbia, and the University of Colorado, suggests the problem runs deeper.
Harvard University leaders have been soliciting wealthy donors for $10 million contributions to fund endowed professorships with the stated goal of expanding “viewpoint diversity” on campus.
Pardon me for finding this hypocritical. Over the past year, the University has systematically curtailed, suspended, or restructured every program with a serious focus on studying Palestinian rights and raising up Palestinian voices targeted by the Trump administration’s April 11 demands. It’s abundantly clear that some views are not welcome on this campus.
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.
Samuel A. Church and Cam N. Srivastava, Crimson Staff Writers
Harvard Crimson
Excerpt: Harvard Salient editor-in-chief Richard Y. Rodgers ’28 announced on Tuesday that the conservative student magazine would remain active despite a Sunday statement from its board of directors suspending its operations pending a conduct investigation.
Rodgers wrote in an email to the Salient’s mailing list that the board’s decision to temporarily halt its operations was “an unauthorized usurpation of power by a small number of individuals acting outside the bounds of their authority.”
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
