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.
In the wake of the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel, contentious debates on the conflict have dominated campus discourse.4 Yet Princeton is stifling these discussions and newsgathering by its student press, by permitting students who dislike certain speech to be granted no-communication or no-contact orders against other students.
Harvard is quietly asking donors for $10 million gifts to establish new endowed professorships in a sweeping bid to reshape its faculty under the banner of “viewpoint diversity,” according to two people familiar with the initiative.
The campaign, driven by Harvard’s top brass, aims to raise several hundred million dollars to support a new cohort of professors. If successful, the funding could bring dozens of faculty members to campus and drastically shift Harvard’s academic makeup.
Matters of viewpoint diversity have recently received considerable attention in the academy and the media. A recent essay by Lisa Siraganian, “Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity,” makes the case against efforts to increase viewpoint diversity.
I believe that the lack of viewpoint and intellectual diversity within the university has hindered the pursuit of knowledge and the well-being of society. I would thus like to take up Siraganian’s invitation and charge.
To keep the frontier of inquiry truly open, we must address the lack of viewpoint diversity in the academy. HxA’s most recent report reviews literature on faculty political diversity, and draws attention to a potentially narrow range of political viewpoints on campus — with some important caveats. We found that left-leaning faculty are the norm, yet many faculty are apolitical or independent and only a small proportion are conservative.
Higher education faces a choice on how to proceed: build to expand, or ban to counter. Both of these competing approaches are underway, and this week’s news displayed that tension.
On February 19, the Princeton Council on Academic Freedom hosted Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the Berkeley School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, to discuss his forthcoming book Campus Speech and Academic Freedom: A Guide for Difficult Times, co-authored with Howard Gillman. Chemerinsky described universities as operating in a moment of political pressure, as debates over Israel–Palestine, race, gender identity, and other charged issues intensify scrutiny of campus speech.
Throughout the talk, Chemerinsky argued that free speech is truly tested when we defend free expression we detest.
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.
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.
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.
Abigail Anthony
National Review
Excerpt: Current Princeton undergraduate Alexandra Orbuch shared footage on social media of an event on campus that featured former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. Predictably, activists tried to prevent him from speaking.
