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by Joshua Katz

The university claims it fired me for a long-past offense -- for which I was already punished -- but the truth should worry everyone.

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Princetonians for Free Speech editorial

In an April 29 editorial, Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS) laid out how the target on Princeton’s back on free speech, academic freedom, and antisemitism issues has been growing ever larger. Yet Princeton’s leadership continues to say publicly that everything is just fine at Princeton. Now something has happened that blows the cover off Princeton for everyone to see inside, and the repercussions will be very serious. It is untenable for Princeton’s leadership to continue to live in its bubble, seemingly divorced from reality, and to continue down the path of refusing both to admit there are problems and to take basic steps to address them.

Today, an article was published in Real Clear Politics, “Princeton Fails to Enforce Its Rules on Free Speech, Antisemitism”, written by Danielle Shapiro, who just graduated from Princeton in May. We will not repeat everything in her piece, but everyone interested in Princeton should read it. It is devastating, and the issues she raises will not end there. Her brave actions as a whistleblower will lead to story after story on this matter and will severely tarnish the reputation of Princeton. (Ms. Shapiro is on the board of PFS.)

Johanna Alonso
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: The University of Texas system and its institutions are no longer permitted to “adopt positions based on political or social passions or pressures,” according to a new rule approved by the Board of Regents on Thursday, The Austin American-Statesman reported.

“Rooted in the Kalven Report from the University of Chicago, the policy reflects the principle that the institution’s role is not to take positions on political, social, or other matters unrelated to its operation but to uphold a community where students, faculty, and staff have the freedom to do so,” a system spokesperson told the American-Statesman.

Micaiah Bilger
College Fix

Excerpt: Students blocked a conservative journalist covering a pro-Palestinian walkout on Thursday at Princeton University, following her and covering her camera with signs and flags.

Alexandra Orbuch, editor in chief of the conservative, independent student newspaper The Princeton Tory, wrote on X the aggressive obstructions made her very uncomfortable. Orbuch and The Princeton Tory published several videos on X showing student protesters repeatedly following the conservative journalist and blocking her camera.

Ava Johnson
Daily Princetonian

In his recently released book “Terms of Respect,” Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 presents a strong defense of free speech on college campuses. He locates the roots of contemporary free speech doctrine in the Civil Rights Era and ultimately concludes that “students are getting free speech right.” 

This is a commendable analysis consistent with Eisgruber’s public defenses of student speech. But his framework is often unfairly paternalistic.

Conor Friedersdorf
The Atlantic

Excerpt: This semester, student protesters opposed to Israel’s war in Gaza have already defaced a statue at Columbia, vandalized an administration building at Cornell, and blocked access to a convocation at Pomona College. Whether they will return to the tactic of erecting protest encampments, as happened on nearly 100 campuses last spring, is uncertain.

Francesca Block
The Free Press

Excerpt: The allegations were shocking. Fraternity brothers had been accused of beating new members with paddles, burning cigarettes into their skin, forcing them to lie on beds of nails, spitting on them, and commanding them to drink urine. University of Maryland administrators were alarmed by the claims, which appeared in their inboxes in late February, coming from at least two anonymous accounts. They decided to act fast.

But by the end of the school year in June, 35 Greek organizations out of the 37 on campus were cleared of all wrongdoing. The Maryland case, sources told me, reveals a double standard on American campuses today: students who openly break the law—including trespassing, breaking and entering, and harassing their fellow students—are given a pass when they’re committing crimes in the name of activism, while students suspected of behaving badly in their social lives are treated like villains.

PEN America Press Release

Excerpt: We continue to be deeply alarmed by the decision of campus administrators across the country to deploy the police to detain, arrest, and remove peaceful student protesters. The use of excessive force against students and faculty on multiple occasions is shocking and unacceptable.
Engaging police to deal with peaceful protests represents an escalation that is inimical to the exercise of free expression and to a learning environment, and further raises the risk of use of excessive force; except in extreme cases, the use of outside police against student protesters is the wrong decision and only serves to ratchet up tensions.

George Packer
The Atlantic

Excerpt: Fifty-six years ago this week, at the height of the Vietnam War, Columbia University students occupied half a dozen campus buildings and made two principal demands of the university: stop funding military research, and cancel plans to build a gym in a nearby Black neighborhood. After a week of futile negotiations, Columbia called in New York City police to clear the occupation.

Johanna Alonso
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Pro-Palestinian protesters interrupted a speech by Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin, a Democrat, at the University of Maryland on Thursday, the Capital News Service reported.

The protesters shouted that Raskin was “complicit in genocide,” to which he responded that he has advocated for hostages to be freed and for a ceasefire. Raskin was unable to continue his planned speech on democracy as the protesters continued heckling him and arguing with audience members. But he said he was willing to take questions, which led to further discussion about Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza. University President Darryll Pines eventually stepped in to end the lecture early.

Emma Camp
Reason Magazine
 
Excerpt: According to a new survey, only one-third of college students say it's never acceptable to shout down a controversial campus speaker. And one-quarter think using violence can be acceptable in at least some circumstances to stop someone from speaking on campus.

The highest-ranked schools consistently had "green" speech code ratings—a measure FIRE uses to indicate that a school's official policies do not trample student and faculty First Amendment rights—and administrations that consistently defended controversial speech. However, many of these same schools seem to have student bodies that aren't quite so tolerant.

Press Release
Cornell Free Speech Alliance

Today, the Cornell Free Speech Alliance, a nonprofit and nonpartisan coalition of Cornell alumni, faculty, and students, sent a report featuring 20 policy recommendations to Cornell University leaders intended to restore open inquiry and academic freedom on campus. The recommendations are the culmination of nearly two years of research and dialogue that began in response to an increasingly degraded free speech environment at the University. The transmittal of the recommendations coincides with the beginning of Cornell’s free expression themed 2023-2024 academic year, which many consider to be an empty and insincere attempt by university leaders to deflect pressure over free speech concerns.

By Stuart Taylor, Jr., Co-founder, Princetonians for Free Speech

Old-fashioned civil liberties champions who have not paid much attention since 2010 or so might be surprised to learn that the Obama Administration used Title IX sharply to curb free speech on campus (as well as due process for students accused of sexual harassment and assault).

Miriam Waldvogel
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Princeton students are preparing to set up their own “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” according to documents first obtained by the National Review and independently verified by The Daily Princetonian, following high-profile encampments at Columbia University, Yale University, and other college campuses that have resulted in student arrests. No tents have been erected in the Nassau Hall area — a focal point for previous sit-ins on campus — at time of publication. The documents did not specify a timeline for when the encampment might begin.

In a leaked press release, organizers reiterated previous demands for the University to “divest and dissociate with Israel,” as well as a call for broad transparency in the University’s research and investments. University officials have warned undergraduates that participation in an encampment or occupation may result in disciplinary action, including suspension and expulsion.

Peter Berkowitz
RealClearPolitics

Excerpt: As with many things Trump, the administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” provoked accusations of authoritarian takeover of vital American institutions. And, as with many things Trump, the administration’s compact overreached in pursuit of a worthy goal, giving critics ammunition to oppose urgently needed reform.

By Marisa Warman Hirschfield ‘27

“STUPID AND UGLY WINDMILLS ARE KILLING NEW JERSEY,” wrote President Trump in a recent Truth Social post. “STOP THE WINDMILLS.” A likely interpretation is that Trump blames wind power for New Jersey's 28% energy price hike. 

Kevin Carey
The Atlantic

Excerpt: In March 2019, a team of investigators from the U.S. Department of Education’s fraud-prevention team arrived at a Houston trade school for what was supposed to be a routine inspection. Several of the students the team wanted to interview, however, were nowhere to be found. At the end of a long and frustrating day, the investigators headed back to their car. That’s when two of the missing students appeared in the parking lot. They wanted to talk in a place where school administrators couldn’t overhear them.

Tal Fortgang
Manhattan Institute

Excerpt: No one can pinpoint when the fight against diversity, equity, and inclusion started – if it can even be disentangled from related campaigns against affirmative action, minority contracting, and other forms of identity favoritism – but it’s hardly a nascent movement by now. The Supreme Court has ruled that affirmative action, as long practiced in higher education, is illegal. The Trump administration is rooting out racial favoritism in government programs and contracting alongside states that are foregrounding merit in all public investments. 

However, to achieve its goals and maintain its victories, the anti-DEI movement must entrench its competing set of principles in non-governmental institutions – and ultimately in Americans’ hearts and minds.

Nitasha Tiku
Washington Post

Excerpt: Influential tech investor and Trump adviser Marc Andreessen recently said universities will “pay the price” for promoting diversity and allegedly discriminating against supporters of President Donald Trump, according to messages he sent to a group chat with White House officials and technology leaders reviewed by The Washington Post.

The billionaire’s messages also cited Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University, a respected institution at the heart of Silicon Valley that has incubated tech companies such as Google. Andreessen and his wife have donated millions of dollars to the school.

Ross Marchand 
FIRE

Excerpt: Great news: UConn School of Medicine administrators are going scalpels down on the school’s attempt to forcibly transplant politics and ideology into its incoming student body. 

In 2022, UConn finalized its own version of the Hippocratic Oath, which includes a promise to “actively support policies that promote social justice and specifically work to dismantle policies that perpetuate inequities, exclusion, discrimination and racism.” Most recently, UConn required the incoming class of 2028 to pledge allegiance not simply to patient care, but to support diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Conor Friedersdorf
The Atlantic

Excerpt: On President Donald Trump’s first day back in the White House, he issued an executive order ending diversity, equity, and inclusion in the federal government. Its sweeping language forbids DEI “mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities,” and orders the termination of all DEI positions—hundreds if not thousands of roles. Trump and his allies are also trying to curtail DEI in corporations that contract with the state, colleges that get federal funds, and more.

The ambition of these anti-DEI efforts mirrors the earlier, heavy-handed push, including by the Biden administration, to embed DEI practices into almost all of America’s most important institutions. It also underscores just how widely and variably the term DEI is now used across society.

AAUP Statement 

Excerpt: Aside from this resolution on divestment, the AAUP has never determined that the neutrality of institutions is either necessary for, or incompatible with, the principles of academic freedom. For more than a half century, we have instead chosen to emphasize the complexity of the issues involved, the dangers that can attend either approach, and the necessity of making institutional decisions with an eye to their effects on academic freedom and shared governance. This statement reaffirms that long-standing approach.

Julian Mark 
New York Times

Excerpt: A coalition of professors, diversity officers and restaurant worker advocates filed a federal lawsuit Monday in a bid to block President Donald Trump’s executive orders that target diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the U.S. government, the private sector and academia, alleging that he exceeded his authority in issuing them.

Sara Weissman
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: "Chaos is the goal,” Mike Gavin, president of Delta College in Michigan, told a Zoom room full of higher ed professionals on a January afternoon. “These external forces are trying to cause chaos to distract us from our mission.”

By “chaos” he meant the onslaught of anti-DEI legislation sweeping the country—state laws requiring universities to scrub diversity statements from their hiring processes, identify DEI-related courses and programs for scrutiny, and cut personnel, centers and offices dedicated to supporting underrepresented student groups.

Gabrielle Temaat
College Fix

Excerpt: The University of North Carolina Wilmington is the most recent college to close its “diversity and inclusion” office. The school announced the decision to shut down its Office of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion last week, according to WECT News.

“Based on policy requirements and consistent with System Office guidance, UNCW will close the Office of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion (OIDI), eliminate the Chief Diversity Officer position and shift the cultural and identity centers from OIDI to Student Affairs,” Chancellor Aswani K. Volety wrote in a message to the school.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution Is True

Excerpt: The problem with the Harvard policy lies not in its specifics above, but how it appears to be interpreted by the creators/op-ed writers, who seem to misunderstand the principle of institutional neutrality, try to diss our Kalven Report (perhaps to say, “Hey, Harvard has its own report, and a better one”), and then suggest that Harvard’s policy can in some cases be applied in a non-neutral way. In other words, what we get is a decent policy whose authors (at least two of them) have described for the public as a dog’s breakfast. This does not bode well for any future “institutional neutrality” of Harvard.

The Editors
National Review

Excerpt: It was a great racket while it lasted, but so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives have spent the last year in retreat — compelling the practitioners of discriminatory “social justice” to conduct a flailing rearguard action in a flight to more defensible terrain.

Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff
Washington Post

Excerpt: The University of Texas at Austin is laying off dozens of employees who previously worked in diversity, equity and inclusion roles in response to a state law that banned such programs, according to the Texas chapter of the American Association of University Professors.

Employees who had previously worked in DEI roles received layoff notices Tuesday. That came months after the university had reassigned them from those positions to comply with the legislation, which went into effect Jan. 1. The school declined to provide a specific tally of the number of people affected, though the AAUP said 60 is a “conservative estimate.”

Washington Times
Stephen Dinan

The University of Virginia shells out $20 million a year to employees who work on diversity, equity and inclusion, according to a new analysis of the public school’s spending.

OpenTheBooks.com said the university has at least 235 employees whose job titles signal they do DEI work for the school.

They are paid a total of $15 million, and the state-funded school spends another $5 million on annual benefits, according to OpenTheBooks’ calculations.

Greg Lukianoff and Adam Goldstein
The Eternally Radical Idea

Excerpt: Greg appeared on the PBS NewsHour last week to debate the pluses and minuses of the DEI bureaucracy on campus. Taking the “pro” DEI office position was Dr. Shaun Harper, Founder and Executive Director of the USC Race and Equity center — and someone you may recall from Greg’s appearance on the Dr. Phil program in 2022.

Megan Zahneis
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: Public colleges in Idaho would have to close offices and centers that do diversity, equity, and inclusion work if a Republican-backed bill introduced last week is enacted.

But, in a shift from the other bills targeting DEI measures that The Chronicle is tracking, the Idaho legislation also lists three dozen examples of specific jobs at Boise State and Idaho State Universities and at the University of Idaho that would be prohibited upon its passage.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: Now social psychologist Jon Haidt, who cofounded Heterodox Academy, has come out against DEI as well. Previously he kept pretty quiet on the issue, though he often spoke out favoring the pursuit of truth over the pursuit of social justice as the mission of a university. But now he’s at bat against DEI in the UnHerd article below (click to read). Note the strong title: abolishing DEI will “save academia.”

UPDATE: Jon Haidt has commented below (comment #19) and notes that the UnHerd characterization of his talk is incorrect; in particular he doesn’t oppose students chanting “Intifada” and “From the River to the Sea,”  but (like me) deplores the hypocrisy of punishing some speech and not other speech.

Alan Rozenshtein
Volokh Conspiracy, Reason Magazine

Excerpt: According to the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL), a conservative advocacy group, the University of Wisconsin Law School conducted a mandatory 1L "reorientation DEI session" last week for which students had to fill out a "race timeline worksheet" with "7 significant moments at least" of "significant life events around race" and read a worksheet listing 28 "common racist attitudes and behaviors," including views like "I'm colorblind" and "We have overcome." A student who attended the session confirmed to me that WILL's reporting was broadly accurate.

But I want to focus on a different point: that an educational institution committed to academic freedom and free inquiry should not use mandatory trainings to impose contested moral claims (again, without taking a position on the specifics of how the Wisconsin session was conducted).

Josh Moody
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: On Monday, the Florida Department of Education honored civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. for his “dedication to service and equality.” On Wednesday, Florida’s State Board of Education voted to prohibit spending on diversity, equity and inclusion programs at 28 state colleges.

The vote marks the latest strike against DEI programs in a state where such initiatives have come under fire from Republican governor—and current GOP presidential candidate—Ron DeSantis, who has called such programs both wasteful and “hostile to academic freedom.”

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: A free expression group is criticizing the university it ranked No. 1 nationally for student free speech after that same university allegedly punished a professor for using his own speech to criticize a student demonstration.

Carl Blair, a teaching professor in Michigan Technological University’s social sciences department, says Michigan Tech removed him from teaching one of his classes and barred him from contacting students enrolled in it. The public university allegedly did this last month after a national conservative group with campus chapters posted online an audio clip of him during a class, purportedly calling members of that group homophobic, dumb and racist.

Heterodox Academy

Excerpt: University orientation programs are foundational to the new student experience on campus. These programs cover helpful logistics of campus life and operations and, importantly, they also set the stage for the student experience, intellectual values, and social life. But how should orientation programs be structured to ensure that HxA values of open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement are instilled at the outset?

During this discussion, our panel of experts will discuss what student orientations need to cover, what they cover out of choice, and what they should cover.

Benjamin Rothove
College Fix

Excerpt: The University of Michigan announced a new initiative to “enhance inclusion and equity across the biomedical and health sciences community,” which includes hiring 30 new professors. With a $15.8 million investment from the National Institutes of Health and a $63.7 million investment from the University of Michigan, the Michigan Program for Advancing Cultural Transformation will “bolster U-M’s diverse academic environment by hiring tenure-track faculty with a demonstrated commitment to equity and inclusion.”

University of Michigan spokesman Rick Fitzgerald declined to answer a College Fix inquiry about how the program would respect academic freedom and if it was only open to racial minorities.