By Tal Fortgang ‘17
With students returning to campus for the start of the new academic year, and demonstrations from radical groups sure to crop up on quads once again, one question universities face is how to balance robust academic freedom with universities’ competing interests. Schools cannot live on academic freedom alone; the functioning of a university requires standards, rules, and regulations to allow students and faculty to flourish. Yet university leadership, especially at elite schools where abstract thinking is prized and questions are regularly left unanswered as matters of mere intellectual exercise, has not even begun to articulate a principled way of weighing these matters. They can begin to do so by considering an unlikely – and unwitting – source of wisdom: Princeton professor Lorgia García Peña’s recent address to the Socialism 2025 conference, on using one’s academic perch to dismantle the academy.
Jennifer Schuessler and Vimal Patel
New York Times
Excerpt: The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, an increasingly prominent free-speech organization, has long been known as a fierce opponent of campus political correctness. Since its founding in 1999, it has been celebrated for defending conservatives and other dissidents from the prevailing liberal culture at America’s universities.
The group, long a scourge of university administrators, also finds itself working to help protect schools it has criticized in the past from new threats. When FIRE filed a brief in support of Harvard’s lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s cuts in research funds, the group noted its own record as “a leading critic of Harvard’s inconsistent and insufficient protection of free speech and academic freedom.”
Cathy Young
The Bulwark
Excerpt: Last week's right-wing freakout over the Cracker Barrel logo redesign—apparently amounting to white-guy erasure—had more than its share of sublimely ridiculous moments. But none, perhaps, were more emblematic of the current “anti-woke” crusade than the call to action from author, activist, and Manhattan Institute fellow Chris Rufo.
Of course, what also makes it noteworthy is that Rufo isn’t just some random social-media blowhard. In recent months, he has emerged as the unofficial ideologue of the Trumpian assault on the liberal cultural establishment.
Justine McDaniel, Susan Svrluga and Emily Davies
Washington Post
Excerpt: Columbia University disciplined more than 70 students for participating in a May protest of the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza, the school said Tuesday, days after university officials hoping to cut a deal with the Trump administration to restore federal funding attended a meeting at the White House.
The university suspended or expelled more than 80 percent of the students sanctioned in connection with a demonstration at the university’s Butler Library, according to university spokeswoman Millie Wert. Some will have their degrees revoked, while others were put on probation.
Tom Nichols
The Atlantic
Excerpt: Seven years ago, Pauline Shanks Kaurin left a good job as a tenured professor at a university, uprooted her family, and moved across the country to teach military ethics at the Naval War College, in Newport, Rhode Island. She did so, she told me, not only to help educate American military officers, but with a promise from the institution that she would have “the academic freedom to do my job.”
But now she’s leaving her position and the institution because orders from President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, she said, have made staying both morally and practically untenable.
Robert Pondiscio
American Enterprise Institute
Excerpt: The conservative education watchdog group Defending Education has done important and often brave work exposing ideological overreach in K–12 schools. I’ve cited their reports and findings many times and consider them friends and compatriots, so I don’t say this lightly: they’ve badly misfired with their new report, Consultants in the Classroom: Making Big Money in K–12 Schools. So badly, in fact, that they should withdraw the report and issue a correction and apology.
by Princetonians for Free Speech
On April 4, we published a Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS) editorial entitled “Princeton in the Crosshairs,” in which we discussed the multiple attacks on universities being launched by the Trump Administration and listed reasons why Princeton was now likely to become a major target, much like Columbia and Harvard have been. In the few weeks since we published that editorial, there have been very important developments, involving universities in general and Princeton specifically. The bottom line is that Princeton is noweven more in the crosshairs, with investigations and lawsuits coming from several directions. Yet Princeton still does not admit it has problems and will not take the most basic steps to address them, steps that other universities are increasingly taking.
Ryan Holiday
New York Times
Excerpt: For the past four years, I have been delivering a series of lectures on the virtues of Stoicism to midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., and I was supposed to continue this on April 14 to the entire sophomore class on the theme of wisdom.
Roughly an hour before my talk was to begin, I received a call: Would I refrain from any mention in my remarks of the recent removal of 381 supposedly controversial books from the Nimitz library on campus? My slides had been sent up the chain of command at the school, which was now, as it was explained to me, extremely worried about reprisals if my talk appeared to flout Executive Order 14151 (Ending Radical and Wasteful Government D.E.I. Programs and Preferencing). When I declined, my lecture — as well as a planned speech before the Navy football team, with which my books on Stoicism are popular — was canceled.
The meeting of New College of Florida’s Board of Trustees on Wednesday afternoon began with a full hour of fierce criticism from members of the community, as dozens of professors, students, and parents lambasted what they view as a hostile takeover of the institution by a Republican governor with likely presidential ambitions.
Press Release
Knight First Amendment Institution, Columbia University
Excerpt: Multiple universities have recently announced that they will consider or rely on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA’s) definition of antisemitism in policing speech on campus.
The following can be attributed to Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “It’s disappointing that some of the nation’s leading institutions of higher education are agreeing to curtail and punish criticism of Israel in the name of fighting discrimination. As major free speech groups have recognized, using the IHRA definition of antisemitism to delineate the outer boundaries of free speech will have the effect of proscribing or deterring legitimate political speech and scholarship."
Bianca Quilantan and Madina Touré
Politico
Excerpt: Leaders who once helmed the nation’s most prestigious universities are homing in on a message for their successors: resist, defend and litigate.
That formula, they argue, is the only way to survive an administration eager to extract fundamental concessions from schools that go far beyond addressing stated concerns about antisemitism. In the three months since returning to the White House, President Donald Trump has demanded that some of these private institutions end diversity programming, change admissions requirements, toughen student discipline policies and audit some academic programs.
Filming student protesters. Emailing administrators about a newspaper launch. Asking a commentator for additional information to back up their claims. Placing a disclaimer on a letter to the editor. These basic journalistic practices are a far cry from disruption or harassment, yet student journalists nationwide have recently received notices of investigation based on each one of these acts.
These students face a fight behind the closed doors of conduct hearings, and the outcome of these battles determines how colleges and universities decide who is a journalist and what journalism on their campus can look like.
In December, UC Berkeley administrators handed down a six-month suspension without pay to Peyrin Kao, a 26-year-old computer science lecturer, after finding that he had violated university policy by making pro-Palestinian comments to students in a classroom after class and advertising that he was participating in a hunger strike.
We asked two UC Berkeley professors with opposing views, Christopher Kutz and Erwin Chemerinsky, to succinctly lay out their case in support, or in opposition, to the measure.
ACE, joined by 22 other national higher education associations, filed an amicus brief yesterday with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit supporting Harvard University in its lawsuit challenging a Trump administration effort to bar international students from attending.
The brief urges the appeals court to affirm a preliminary injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs last June that blocked enforcement of a presidential proclamation that would have suspended the entry of foreign nationals seeking to study at Harvard.
Yale University has finally achieved the academic version of Nirvana, a state of perfect peace and enlightenment. A recent study found that the faculty had finally purged every Republican donor from its ranks. While 98 percent of the political donations went to Democrats, not a single professor could be found who gave to a single Republican candidate. The complete lock for Democrats is in a country that is split evenly between Republicans and Democrats.
The Yale Daily News reviewed more than 7,000 Federal Election Commission filings from 2025 listing Yale as the employer: “Of 1,099 filings that included ‘professor’ in their occupation, 97.6 percent of the donations went to Democrats, while the remaining 2.4 percent went to independent candidates or groups,” the student newspaper reported Jan. 14.”
The study reinforces the recent Buckley Institute report, which found that, of the 43 departments surveyed, 27 entire departments contained zero Republican professors.
The Network of Enlightened Women works on dozens of U.S. college campuses to amplify the voices of conservative young women who are questioning progressive orthodoxies. Free Expression associate editor Mary Julia Koch spoke recently with Karin Lips, the founder and president of NeW, about her mission to support conservative women in college and in their careers, and how she’s pushing back on the left’s definition of feminism.
If you were to judge by public-opinion polling, you might reasonably conclude that Americans have broadly given up on the idea of going to college. In 2013, 70 percent of adults surveyed by Pew said that a college education was “very important.” This year, only 35 percent did. Over the same time period, the share of Americans who believe that college is “not worth the cost” rose from 40 to 63 percent, according to NBC.
If you were to judge, instead, by the choices that Americans are actually making, you might draw a different conclusion. Despite the reported skepticism of higher education, enrollment in four-year colleges and universities is growing.
There is a growth sector in American higher education. The number of “Civics Centers” has exploded in the last decade, and especially since 2021.
What are these civics centers, and what explains their proliferation now?
Heterodox Academy (HxA), the leading non-partisan higher education reform organization in the US for faculty, staff and students, championing open inquiry, viewpoint diversity and constructive disagreement, has decided to provide some answers.
At the University of North Florida, where I serve as a professor of education, I was told, along with my colleagues, to alter our syllabi to remove the terms “diversity” “equity” “inclusion” and “culture.” “It’s only three or four words,” the university administrators said. “It’s the law and we must follow the law.”
This semester, it became clear to me that Florida universities, and the faculty who teach there, are being muzzled by zealous policy makers and by over-complying administrators. These four words – “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion,” and “culture” – have been deemed inappropriate as subjects to discuss in a college classroom at University of North Florida. This censorship is a harbinger of what’s to come: a threat to the pursuit of knowledge and academic inquiry everywhere.
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.
