Josh Moody
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: With the Trump administration taking special aim at higher education, conservative policymakers and college leaders are embracing the opportunity to force a cultural reset across academe.
At a forum Tuesday morning called “Reclaiming the Culture of American Higher Education,” the architects of Project 2025, an official from the U.S. Department of Education and four college presidents cast the sector as ripe for reform. The event offered insights into how conservative thinkers operating the levers of power at the Education Department view the current state of higher education and the need for change.
Danielle Shapiro
The Free Press
Excerpt: Last night at Princeton, Jewish students were called “inbred swine,” told to “go back to Europe,” and taunted with gestures of the Hamas triangle by masked protesters. Sadly, slurs like these have become commonplace at anti-Israel protests at my college in the months since Hamas invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, but university president Christopher Eisgruber insists he is “proud of the campus climate at Princeton.”
This was a new low. At a place where we’re taught to respect and uphold the values of free speech, SJP went so far as to pull a fire alarm, literally silencing speech, and even bragged about it.
Maya Stahl
Chronicle of Higher Education
Excerpt: The Trump administration is demanding that Harvard University eliminate all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, reform admissions and hiring practices, and crack down on student discipline “to remain a responsible recipient of federal taxpayer dollars.”
Frances Brogan
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: In his 2017 book “On Tyranny,” an analysis of America’s anti-democratic shift under Trump, Yale historian Timothy Snyder implores his audience, “Do not obey in advance.” “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given,” he writes, arguing that those who adjust their behavior to fit the demands of an oppressive regime are “teaching power what it can do.”
But this week, Snyder and two other Yale professors, Marci Shore and Jason Stanley, announced that they are leaving Yale and joining the University of Toronto’s faculty. While Snyder and Shore, a married couple, attributed their departure to personal reasons, they accepted the positions at Toronto after the November presidential election.
Bill Hewitt
National Review
Excerpt: Once again, Princeton University’s president, Christopher Eisgruber, has taken to the friendly waters of The Atlantic. In his call to action on the part of universities and their leaders, Eisgruber correctly affirms “the rights of faculty members to pursue, publish, and teach controversial ideas.” Further, he makes an unintentionally noteworthy disclosure. The author’s biography mentions his forthcoming book, Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right. The cruel irony is that Eisgruber’s deeds at Princeton got free speech outrageously wrong.
Keith E. Whittington
The Volokh Conspiracy, Reason Magazine
Excerpt: Yesterday the Trump administration launched yet another massive financial blow at a university because it has done some things the administration does not like. This time the University of Pennsylvania's medical research is being decimated because the administration disagrees with the Penn athletic department's transgender policies.
Sarah Mashiat and Caitlyn Tablada
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: In the wake of slashed graduate admissions at the University of Pennsylvania and other colleges, the University has not directed departments to reduce the number of admissions officers, graduate school spokesperson Tracy Meyer told The Daily Princetonian.
Indeed, for many graduate students and professors, it is business as usual when it comes to admissions.
Irene Kim
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: The Department of African American Studies (AAS) held a Black History Month Forum called “What’s Behind the Attacks on DEI,” on Feb. 26, moderated by Professor Tera W. Hunter, chair of the department.
The four panelists — Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. GS ’97, Tera W. Hunter, Naomi Murakawa, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor — are all professors in the department.
Guillermo Molero
Bloomberg
Excerpt: A crowd of about 20 people assembled at Bobst Hall on Princeton University’s campus, as they do every Tuesday morning, to hear from Robert P. George, the founder of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.
George was there on a mission to combat the indoctrination of American youth with progressive values. As he sees it, illiberalism had spread rapidly in recent years, culminating in the campus culture wars that roiled quads from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Los Angeles last year amid protests over the war in Gaza and the rollback of diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
Lia Opperman
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: As some universities scrub diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) websites to comply with the Trump administration’s executive orders targeting diversity efforts, Princeton’s websites have largely remained up.
Luke Grippo
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: Political scientist and activist Norman Finkelstein GS ’87 returned to campus on Tuesday to discuss the war in Gaza with history professor Max Weiss. Throughout the talk, Finkelstein addressed the United States’ history with the Middle East from the early 2000s, the United Nations’ complicated history with the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the war in Gaza.
Lily Halbert-Alexander
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: Amid a national decline in study of the humanities, prestigious universities are cutting their entire classics departments. As a discipline, classics may seem to fly under the radar — classics majors comprised less than one percent of Princeton’s graduating Class of 2024. But over the last few years, classics has been the subject of charged conversations tying closely back to Princeton. This has sparked fundamental questions about what to do when books known as great and inspirational are called out for inspiring dangerous political movements.
Why Evolution is True
Jerry Coyne
Excerpt: The time has come that many have feared but many will celebrate: DEI (“diversity, equity, and inclusion”) is effectively gone from campuses by federal order.
Since virtually every institution of higher learning depends on some federal funding, this gives colleges the choices of abandoning DEI or abandoning federal money. You know which they’ll prefer. The former, of course, but they’ll try to have both, sometimes by duplicitous practices.
Christopher Bao and Luke Grippo
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: Municipal Prosecutor Christopher Koutsouris dropped the trespass charge against David Piegaro ’25 after several hours of testimony by witnesses for Piegaro’s defense in court on Tuesday, Feb. 4. Piegaro still faces an assault charge for an altercation with Assistant Vice President for Public Safety Kenneth Strother on the steps of Whig Hall on April 29 following the occupation of Clio Hall.
Frances Brogan
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: This spring, Princeton imposed the kind of penalties that Giberson escaped on students involved in the Princeton Gaza Solidarity Encampment. Jordan Johnson ’24 was a bystander at a pro-Palestinian protest in the Richardson Auditorium that disrupted President Eisgruber’s Reunions address. Larry Giberson ’23 was an active participant in a violent insurrection intended to prevent the peaceful transfer of presidential power.
Yet in a blatant perversion of justice, Johnson had his Princeton degree withheld for over a week, and Giberson was quietly granted his diploma on time even after he’d been charged with six violations of the U.S. code.
Leonard Milberg
The Daily Princetonian
The following is a guest contribution and reflects the author’s views alone. For information on how to submit a piece to the Opinion section, click here.
Editor’s Note: In the process of publishing this piece, The Daily Princetonian took several steps to corroborate the facts the author alleges, including reviewing emails referenced in the piece. The ‘Prince’ was unable to independently verify the conversation between Milberg and Eisgruber or the specifics of the document Milberg alleges Eisgruber asked him to sign. The University declined to comment on the specifics of the conversation.
University spokesperson Michael Hotchkiss stated the following in relation to Milberg’s account, “Princeton is grateful for Leonard Milberg’s generous support of the University over many years. The University takes steps to ensure that no donor interferes inappropriately in the conduct of University courses, exhibition, or research. As the University’s gift policies state: ‘Gifts to the University must respect the University’s fundamental commitment to academic freedom and the rigorous and independent pursuit of truth.’”
By Edward Yingling and Stuart Taylor Jr
Originally published in Real Clear Politics
In July 2020, a Princeton University professor, Joshua Katz, wrote an article containing provocative language that generated controversy on campus.
by George F. Will
Squalls of indignation gust across campuses so frequently that they seem merely performative — synthetic, perfunctory, uninteresting. Princeton’s current contretemps, however, fascinatingly illustrates how wokeness, which lacks limiting principles, limits opposition to itself.
by Eleanor Clemans-Cope, The Daily Princetonian
George F. Will GS ’68 recently took to the pages of the Washington Post, where he is a regular columnist, to announce to the world that wokeness at Princeton is destroying free speech.
In a few minutes, all of you will walk out of this stadium as newly minted graduates of this University. Before you do, however, long-standing tradition permits the University president to offer a few remarks about the path that lies ahead.
The University of California, Los Angeles, is the latest university to fire an employee for making negative comments about Charlie Kirk after his killing last fall, the Los Angeles Times reported.
After a gunman killed right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk during an event at Utah Valley University last September, Johnathan Perkins, director of Race and Equity at UCLA, shared his reaction in a series of posts on Bluesky. “Good riddance,” read one; “It is OKAY to be happy when someone who hated you and called for your people’s death dies—even if they are murdered,” read another. And finally, “I’m always glad when bigots die.”
Click here for link to full article
On November 12, former ACLU Legal Director David Cole delivered the annual Tanner Lecture on Human Values. His talk, entitled “A Defense of Free Speech from Its Progressive Critics,” drew a crowd to the Friend Center. Cole has litigated several major First Amendment cases and currently serves as a law professor at Georgetown. A self-identified progressive, Cole explicated an argument in favor of the First Amendment.
Cole outlined the main progressive critiques of the First Amendment. “What unites these critiques is the sense that the First Amendment is too protective at the cost of another very important value in our society: equality.” He also acknowledged the progressive skepticism of free speech’s “core demand” of neutrality – the idea that the government “must be neutral as to the content and viewpoint of speech when it is regulating private speakers.”
Defending the rights of students and faculty to speak freely has been part and parcel of FIRE’s mission for 26 years. We’ve seen universities try all sorts of ways to restrict expression, from free speech zones and excessive security fees to extensive pre-approval requirements for events. But one technique is particularly disturbing — using ostensibly pro-free speech policies to chill student and faculty expression.
