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Yesterday, we discussed how UCLA medical school has been accused of racial discrimination in admissions. Now Yale School of Medicine has also been accused of “intentionally select[ing] applicants based on their race” in knowing circumvention of Supreme Court precedent.

The Justice Department announced that “Yale’s documents reveal that they studied how to use racial proxies to circumvent the Supreme Court’s prohibition on using race to select students…admissions data demonstrate that Black and Hispanic students have a much higher chance of admission to Yale than White or Asian students with the same test scores.”

New York University’s Jonathan Haidt checks a number of boxes for an in-house commencement speaker: best-selling author, public intellectual, and high-profile campus figure. A social psychologist teaching “ethical leadership” at NYU’s school of business, his books like The Coddling of the American Mind and The Anxious Generation show up on airport bookshelves and the Obama end-of-year-list. He has been a fixture on the liberal-nerd podcast circuit and in the TED Talk world, best known for advocating for free speech and limited screen time. Despite that résumé — or because of it — some NYU students donning violet gowns today at Yankee Stadium would prefer it wasn’t Haidt delivering their final undergrad address.

The faculty, administrators, and trustees who establish graduation criteria at America’s most prominent colleges and universities have made a clear set of judgments about what every educated citizen should know. Their choices suggest that familiarity with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is more essential than an understanding of economics, American history, and the Constitution.

Harvey C. Mansfield, who enrolled at Harvard in 1949, joined the faculty in 1962, and retired in 2023, has been called many things: “great dissenter,” “prophet,” “racist, homophobic and misogynist,” “sophist,” “slipshod.” Mansfield prefers “annoying Socratic gadfly.” A dean once advised that he’d be more persuasive if he argued less. Mansfield says he tried, but it didn’t work. “Retirement seems to strengthen my voice.”

Mansfield spoke to us over zoom from his house in Ipswich, Mass., where he now spends the bulk of his time. Dressed in a suit and red tie, he discussed affirmative action for conservative professors, why the academy needs bipartisanship more than nonpartisanship, and whether old professors stick around too long. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law has brought a new meaning to the heckler’s veto. Some of us criticized the law school for its failure to hold students accountable for disrupting a recent Federalist Society event featuring James Percival, general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security. 

While the law school administration does not appear interested in holding the protesters accountable, it has threatened the Federalist Society that it could face discipline if it identifies any of the students who disrupted the event. This perfectly surreal position was stated in a letter from Bayrex Martí, UCLA’s assistant dean for student affairs.

PFS’s featured editorial this month is Yale Issues clarion call for change, joining other leading universities. Where is Princeton?  We put Yale’s report in the context of the growing consensus amongst a widening circle of University Presidents that President Maurie McGinnis is correct. University leaders must take responsibility for their role in reaching this critical point. President Eisgruber is not among this list of reformers.

If you want to know more about why Princeton is not leading this movement to restore trust in higher education,link here to a comprehensive Five-Part Review of President Eisgruber’s book, Terms of Respect, How Colleges Get Free Speech Right, written for PFS by Tal Fortgang ‘17.

From higher ed journalism to concerned professors, AI is often portrayed as an unprecedented frontier to be tamed, a danger to both the future of the humanities and the independent, critical thinking abilities of its scholars. But a strict AI ban is superfluous, not to mention difficult to enforce: If students are plugging essay prompts into ChatGPT en masse, there are larger issues at stake that a band-aid AI ban won’t fix.

The Princeton Council is changing course on proposed modifications to the municipality’s special event regulations after over 40 people assembled at the Council’s Monday meeting to register opposition to what they viewed as potential restrictions on the community’s ability to organize.

The potential ordinance that local activists objected to, which was discussed by municipal attorney Lisa Maddox during a work session at the Council’s March 23 meeting, would impose increased fees, a new permitting process, and space restrictions on large public events.

In Princeton, we have access to opportunities that can enrich our experience of the anniversary. Walking our university’s campus every day makes it easy to take for granted the footsteps of greatness we follow. However, I believe that reflecting on Princeton’s role in the Revolution – the legacy of which surrounds us in the form of buildings, monuments, and documents – will help us gain a deeper appreciation of our history and lead us to recommit to the values we hold dear as Americans.

Stakes are high as the Trump administration looks to rewrite the rules governing accreditation in the first of two week-long rule-making sessions starting today. The overhaul could dramatically change who is in charge of academic oversight and what they evaluate when determining whether an institution should have access to federal aid.

Right-leaning think tanks applaud the changes, released last week in a 151-page draft, calling them an overdue means to ensure campus civil rights compliance, address college costs and ensure institutions are held accountable for their students’ outcomes. But accreditation experts, left-leaning policy analysts and student advocacy groups say the lengthy regulations, while vague and abstruse, pose a major threat to the future of institutional autonomy and America’s status as the crown jewel of global higher education.

A few months ago, I heard from one of the greatest antitrust legal scholars of our time — Lina Khan, the former chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) — in an event hosted by the Princeton Program in Law and Public Policy.

The event turned out to be a “fireside chat” between Khan and Director of the Program in Law and Public Policy Deborah Pearlstein, an all-too-familiar manifestation of the “conversation” format that plagues Princeton events. Instead of letting visitors speak for themselves, we filter their thoughts and ideas through a moderator, who all too often serves to dilute whatever interesting points the speaker might have to share into a superficial overview of their career and accomplishments.

 On Sept. 18, 1894, the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents issued the greatest declaration in defense of academic freedom ever made by a university—an achievement even more remarkable because it was the first statement espousing academic freedom ever made by an American college, and one that introduced the concept of institutional neutrality.

Vague. Undefined. Overbroad. Burdensome. Legally contested.

That’s how major higher ed groups are describing the Trump administration’s latest effort to crack down on what it considers diversity, equity and inclusion by requiring colleges and universities to sign a pledge that they will comply with “executive orders prohibiting unlawful discrimination on the basis of race or color” to receive federal funds. The proposed pledge warns that race-based scholarships, hiring preferences, diversity statements and more may constitute illegal discrimination, in the government’s opinion.

Earlier this month, the Anti-Defamation League gave Princeton a C on its annual campus antisemitism report card. It would make sense that the University, like many of its students, wouldn’t be used to receiving grades lower than an A. But this C is one we shouldn’t worry about. The ADL’s assessments of colleges and universities don’t actually measure antisemitism in any meaningful way, nor do they measure the quality of Jewish student life.

The Anti-Defamation League has given Princeton a C in its third annual Campus Antisemitism Report Card earlier this month. In 2024, Princeton got an F on its first report card.

The ADL has historically been considered one of the most prominent Jewish civil rights organizations, though its credibility has been contested in recent years. The league assesses 150 colleges and universities nationally, but many members of the Jewish community on campus consider the C grade to be unreflective of the state of Jewish life at Princeton, believing that Princeton deserves a higher grade.

A topic of recent debate in the media and on college campuses is the Pentagon’s decision to sever ties with several Ivy League and elite universities. This includes Princeton University. This move follows Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s characterization of these institutions as “ Woke Breeding Grounds.”  The goal is not to prevent these men and women from attending college but instead to direct them towards institutions more ideologically aligned with the viewpoints of the current administration. While this is the administration's prerogative, as someone who has served in both the Marine Corps and the Army as an infantryman, and am now a Princeton student myself, I am skeptical about this move. 

Active-duty military members should not be barred from educational choices if given the opportunity, especially at a time when attending college can determine your future, and where you have gone to school matters. It is also a blow aimed at the wrong people.

The Trump administration launched two new investigations into Harvard University “amid allegations that it continues to discriminate against students on the basis of race, color, and national origin,” the Department of Education announced in a news release Monday. 

The department’s Office for Civil Rights said it received new complaints about antisemitic harassment on Harvard’s campus—an issue the administration has already spent a year investigating and which the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit about last week. OCR will also investigate claims that Harvard is continuing to use race-based preferences in admissions.

Allen is the rare liberal academic who appeals to both Harvard and the American Enterprise Institute. Her willingness to take conservative criticisms of academe seriously has earned her cross-ideological credibility and influence. “I wish we had a lot more scholars like Danielle,” Frederick Hess, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told me. Her ecumenism reflects a core commitment: The university can’t ignore its critics; it must win some of them over.

To do that, she contends, universities will have to change. These changes include encouraging vigorous debate and a greater pluralism on campus, among other institutional transformations aimed at controlling costs, recentering a civic mission, and making admissions less opaque. Such changes will involve giving certain things up. 

Iowa is considering a slate of bills that would limit speech in college classrooms and threaten academic freedom. These measures would mandate reviews of classroom content for DEI or critical race theory, remove topics like “multiculturalism” from teacher training programs, and enshrine a viewpoint-discriminatory definition of “antisemitism” into university policy. 

These proposals test longstanding constitutional limits on government interference with academic freedom and classroom discussion, so let’s take a look at each one in turn.

Higher education needs a “hard reset.” That was the message from Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent last week at the American Council on Education’s (ACE) annual meeting. The remarks by a government official offered a stern warning to get on board or get out of the way. “I hope that you all are ready, having made it through the five stages of grief and, most importantly, reaching the final state of acceptance,” Kent explained (while referencing bunk psychology research).

With the pressure on higher ed holding steady, it’s a question of what’s next after over a year of targeted attacks on elite universities. Jon Fansmith, ACE’s senior vice president for government relations and national engagement, thinks that something like a second “compact” is coming. This time, focused on “systemic change” across all 4,000 institutions of higher education rather than a select handful.

Harvard University will allow active-duty troops to defer their admission for up to four years in response to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s ban on academic involvement with the school — a rebuke of his attempt to sever ties between the Ivy league school and the military.

The university will also work with students accepted into the Harvard Kennedy School’s programs to get expedited consideration at four other graduate schools that have not been banned by the Defense Department, according to a person familiar with the plans and a letter written for prospective students obtained by POLITICO.

Two weeks after introducing a policy that allowed administrators to secretly record faculty members during class, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill chancellor Lee Roberts told faculty he would nix the rule. 

“The whole idea was to create clarity and reassurance,” Roberts said during a Faculty Senate meeting Friday. “That policy clearly has not achieved that aim.” Faculty members applauded at the news. During a Q&A, Roberts confirmed that no faculty members will be surreptitiously recorded until—and if—a new policy is put in place. Administrators will continue to evaluate whether the university needs such a policy, he said.

The Trump administration is expanding its efforts to dismantle the Education Department by moving its oversight of school safety grants and foreign funding for universities to other agencies, the administration announced Monday.

The Department of Health and Human Services is slated to take over work related to school shootings and student mental health programs. The State Department will be tasked to help the Education Department manage how the federal government monitors the flow of billions of dollars in foreign gifts and contracts to higher education institutions.

The Department of Justice filed a new lawsuit against Harvard University, accusing it of failing to hand over documents and comply with a federal investigation into alleged racial discrimination in its admissions process, in the latest escalation of Donald Trump’s long-running legal pursuit of the nation’s oldest university.

Harvard stressed in a statement that it was responding to inquiries “in good faith” and prepared to engage “according to the process required by law”.

Speaking at the American Whig-Cliosophic Society on Feb. 5, J Street founder Jeremy Ben-Ami acknowledged that many people who come to his events are already “his people” — they agree with him and are excited to hear their position reaffirmed. J Street is a nonprofit and lobby that self-describes as “pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy.” Although Ben-Ami took questions from students who, in turn, considered his positions too supportive of Israel or not supportive enough, Ben-Ami is correct that, in general, political speakers preach to their own choirs.

This phenomenon does not stop at FitzRandolph Gate, and it undermines the value of inviting acclaimed speakers to Princeton.

If you combined two of Princeton’s three most popular A.B. majors — SPIA and Politics — you could nearly fill McCosh 50. With so many students taking courses about politics and policy, one might expect the American Whig-Cliosophic Society senate — the Society’s home of parliamentary-style debate — to be a vibrant center of debate on campus. Yet the benches of the senate chamber frequently lie empty.

Harvard University has more than 100 students who are in the Reserve Officer Training Corps. They will get their diploma and then put their life on the line for their country, serving under a secretary of defense, if he is still in his job by spring, who has nothing but contempt for their education and their alma mater.

In a statement issued on Friday, Pete Hegseth charged that Harvard is graduating officers with “heads full of globalist and radical ideologies that do not improve our fighting ranks.” He declared that the Pentagon would cut all ties with Harvard and its programs.

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 

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.

February 2, 2026

Dear PFS Subscribers and Friends,

2026 has started with a bang. “Viewpoint diversity” is in the news. What is its role in protecting the knowledge-generating and truth-seeking mission of America’s universities? Please see our Special Feature, an original article by PFS’s Edward Yingling and Leslie Spencer, The Next Campus Battle after Free Speech: Viewpoint Diversity at America’s Elite Universities.

Also see an important new book Viewpoint Diversity: What It Is, Why We Need It, and How to Get It, forthcoming next month from Heresy Press. It is a collection of essays by some of the country’s leading heterodox thinkers who confront the rise of orthodoxy on both the left and the right.

And our Quote of the Month is from a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Is a Four-Year Degree Worth It? by the President of Dartmouth Sian Leah Beilock, who makes an urgent call for university leaders to take action now to “reform ourselves.”

Happy New Year from PFS!

Sitting in my office, I began searching for some cause for hope, some reason to believe that higher ed could stanch the damage for the next generation of students. It occurred to me that I’d been hearing less despair from colleagues at certain smaller schools that offer undergraduate study in the “liberal-arts tradition,” a broad and flexible approach to education that values developing the person over professional training. I wondered if these schools—especially the wealthy ones that cluster near the top of national rankings—might enjoy some natural insulation from the fires raging through the nation’s research universities.

Current and former heads of both research universities and liberal-arts colleges confirmed my intuition: Well-resourced and prestigious small colleges are less exposed in almost every way to the crises that higher ed faces.

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.

The National Endowment for the Humanities has announced more than $75 million in awards, including $10 million grants to two public universities with “civics” schools and to an education network headquartered at a conservative think tank.

The $10 million going to the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education is for a project dubbed Recovering the Humanities in Service of the University. Kelly Hanlon, FEHE’s operations director, said the foundation “does not have any political, ideological or religious affiliation, nor does it fund policy work.” But FEHE is based at—and shares its president with—the Witherspoon Institute, a conservative think tank next to Princeton University’s campus.

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.

Nearly three in four senior leaders described their level of uncertainty about the federal policy environment and its impact on planning as “extreme” or “moderate,” according to the poll. Another 19% reported “some” uncertainty and 7% described it as “slight.” 

Trump’s impact on international student enrollment — with recent studies showing dips in graduate and new students from abroad — also loomed large for many leaders. Sixty percent said they were extremely or moderately concerned about immigration restrictions and visa revocations.

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.

A Texas A&M University dean canceled an "Ethics in Public Policy" graduate course three days into the spring semester, saying the professor refused to submit information needed to be exempt from a new ban on teaching gender and race ideology.

The dean specifically named professor Leonard Bright in a Wednesday email to his colleagues at the Texas A&M Bush School of Government and Public Service and used the course cancellation as a warning about following university processes. But Bright and other faculty advocates say they lack clarity about the rules for the ongoing course review and that administrators are using that ambiguity to their advantage.

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.

A federal appeals court is keeping in place the ban on the National Institutes of Health’s attempt to cap indirect research cost reimbursement rates for universities and researchers who receive its grant money.

The decision preserves institutions’ access to billions of dollars for annual expenses, such as lab costs and patient safety, which are not easily connected to specific projects. The NIH negotiates individual reimbursement rates with each institution, but a cap would change that and limit funding. U.S. District Court of Massachusetts judge Angel Kelley first blocked the rate cap last February, and it has remained blocked since.

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.”

Education Secretary Linda McMahon told a conservative news outlet she wants to focus less on higher ed this year. The comment comes after the Trump administration’s yearlong use of multiple federal departments to pressure universities and their employees and students to conform to the White House’s desires.

McMahon discussed her 2026 priorities in an interview with Breitbart before Christmas. As the outlet put it, “McMahon said the new year is a chance to shift a little bit away from higher education and focus on elementary and secondary.”

Click here for link to full article 

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.

On Jan. 2, the Office of the Vice President for Campus Life released a set of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) regarding a new University policy regulating audio and visual recording. The policy classifies any recording made at events deemed private — where not all participants have consented — as “secret or covert,” placing such recordings in violation of University rules.

However, recording at public events, such as advertised public speaker events, is permitted unless the speaker, performer, or party hosting the event explicitly states otherwise. “The policy does not cover meetings open to all current members of the resident University community or to the public,” according to the FAQ website.

Last month’s issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly (PAW) fawns over Michael Park ’98, a right-wing lawyer and, since 2018, a U.S. circuit judge. Park’s portrait commands the cover, while the accompanying long-form profile, titled “The Contender,” speculates that he could become Donald Trump’s next nominee to the Supreme Court. The author is P.G. Sittenfeld ’07.    

But Sittenfeld is not just any old journalist. Last May, President Donald Trump pardoned Sittenfeld, a one-time rising star in Cincinnati politics, following his conviction on federal bribery and extortion charges in 2022. Sittenfeld, a Democrat, owes his freedom to Trump —  the man who nominated his subject Park to his judgeship, and the man with the power to elevate Park further to the nation’s highest court. Nowhere does PAW disclose this striking conflict of interest.

Researchers at Princeton and across the nation who receive federal funding have had a tumultuous year. Come Wednesday, they have one more thing to balance: a new federal public access policy that could cost researchers thousands of dollars more to publish in academic journals.

The new public access policy, known as the Nelson Memo, was released under the Biden administration in 2022 and mandates that any research that is funded by federal agencies be made publicly available at the time of publication.

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.

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.