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At many American universities, progressive assumptions seem embedded in the machinery of campus life. Left-wing speakers and views are applauded, while conservative views (on abortion, for example) are often treated as beyond the pale.

Yet mission statements and promotional materials tend to describe the university’s purpose in nonpartisan terms. When studies show the dearth of right-leaning faculty, administrations typically insist this is just the result of neutral search processes. A gap has opened between the impartial, truth-seeking role universities claim for themselves and the policies they pursue.

I just returned from the University of Wyoming, where I debated the President of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Todd Wolfson over the need for colleges and universities to maintain institutional neutrality. The debate was organized by the Steamboat Institute and was live-streamed.

The formal question presented for debate was: “Is institutional neutrality necessary to preserve the university as a forum for open inquiry rather than an actor in political disputes?” I spoke in favor of institutional neutrality while Wolfson argued against it as a necessary component to higher education.

What happens when an entire profession can’t see what’s hiding in plain sight in its own data? That puzzle animated Stony Brook University sociologist Musa al-Gharbi’s keynote at the Heterodox Academy 2026 West Coast Regional Conference, held recently at UC Berkeley.

The deeper problem, he contends, is not bad-faith activism but a structural one: peer review, editing, and committee deliberation only correct for bias when the people doing the correcting actually differ from one another, and the academy and the press increasingly do not. His full speech is transcribed below.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Princeton chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) met Monday afternoon for a discussion surrounding academic freedom and the Trump administration’s attacks on higher education. 

Fewer than 30 faculty members attended the meeting, compared to the over 50 members present at the chapter’s inaugural meeting. Faculty members reformed the Princeton chapter of the AAUP last March amid attacks on higher education from the Trump administration. Since then, they have convened monthly to discuss updates and to identify threats to higher education.

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.

Alumni possess wisdom and perspective that current students do not yet possess. They also have something that current students don’t: money that can be used to get the attention of university leaders. Sometimes alumni can make the greatest contribution to their alma maters by not contributing. For me, four decades after graduating from MIT, this is one of those times.

In the golden decades that stretched from the end of World War II to the 2010s, there was almost no better business to be in than higher education.

What’s that you say? A university is not a business? Well, I take the point, but just the same, universities were certainly operating more and more like businesses, with glossy marketing campaigns, sophisticated plans to ensure more admitted students actually enrolled and elaborate price discrimination schemes designed to squeeze every last dollar out of students. Increasingly, they also adopted that classic business maxim: “The customer is always right.”

On Tuesday, Hampshire College became the latest academic institution to announce its closure. There was a time when such failures were rare occurrences. That trickle is turning into a torrent, but the media and academics are missing a critical part of the lesson. There is no greater example of how academics are killing higher education than the death of Hampshire College.

Observers across the political spectrum have identified a real problem in American higher education: too many campuses have drifted from genuine inquiry toward ideological performance and political engagement. That diagnosis is not partisan. It reflects a widely shared concern that universities are prioritizing critique over inquiry, activism over scholarship, and signaling over substance.

But even that diagnosis is incomplete - and the missing piece matters enormously for how we respond. A quieter, more structural crisis is unfolding beneath the ideological one: the erosion of faculty pay, stability, and dignity. Until we take that seriously, we will keep treating symptoms while the underlying condition worsens.

On Friday, U.S. District Judge Noël Wise ruled that immigration provisions that allowed Secretary of State Marco Rubio to revoke student visas had a chilling effect on noncitizen student journalists at the Stanford Daily. Wise wrote that portions of two federal immigration provisions are unconstitutional when used against noncitizens for speech protected by the First Amendment. 

The Stanford Daily Publishing Corporation brought the lawsuit alongside two anonymous students unaffiliated with Stanford, though one student was later dismissed from the case. The plaintiffs were represented pro bono by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE.

It’s time for conservative faculty to stop “keeping their heads down until tenure.” Universities need bold, excellent conservative scholars—not undercover ones—to strengthen their institutions. Having worked at a free-market think tank before academia, my sympathies were clear. Yet as the only openly right-wing faculty member in my college, I earned tenure, served as program director, and became department chair. Here is my advice.

Last month, Yale University released a striking report acknowledging that public trust in higher education is eroding — and that universities themselves bear responsibility. The report’s authors offer a candid recognition of the depth of this crisis, citing a recent  Pew Research Center poll indicating that 70% of Americans believe higher education is heading in the wrong direction.

Reports like Yale’s point to real issues: cost, transparency and questions about academic culture. But recognition is not the same as a reckoning.

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.

 On a rainy March afternoon, a half-filled lecture hall in the basement of East Pyne became an unlikely forum for questions about teaching and something much larger: fear, not just about what can be said in the classroom and on campus, but how it can be perceived in the public eye.

At an American Association of University Professors (AAUP) event on political pressure and faculty governance led by Joan W. Scott, a professor emerita of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a Princeton professor of African American studies, the two situated the campus climate as increasingly shaped not only by internal debates over speech, but by growing federal government scrutiny and political intervention.

This past April, the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education delivered a final report to university president Maurie McInnis on the problem of declining trust in higher education. The work of the 10-person faculty committee, established by President McInnis in spring 2025 and co-chaired by me and Professor Beverly Gage, focused in part on how Yale could right its own ship, ultimately recommending 20 steps that the university should take to help restore trust.

Fortunately, President McInnis took the report and its recommendations seriously, starting by taking responsibility (the report’s first recommendation) on behalf of the university for its role in the trust crisis.

Questioning colleges is normal. There are outstanding concerns about the experience, the education, and the enterprise of higher education: How much does it cost, and is that more than families can pay? Who gets in, and why? Are faculty members treated with dignity? What is college even for? So, although college leaders argue that a few of the concerns voiced in the document are legitimate, they also see within it the bane of Ilium.

On this week’s Radio Atlantic, I’m joined by Jack Stripling, the host of the College Matters podcast at The Chronicle of Higher Education, to consider higher education in the Trump era, and the purpose of college itself.

I recently listened to Ross Douthat’s interview with the philosopher Jennifer Frey. She is a serious thinker and an unusually courageous academic entrepreneur. What she built at the University of Tulsa before it was dismantled is exactly the sort of thing more universities should be attempting. Yet almost every argument she offered for the humanities is, I think, completely unpersuasive to anyone not already on our side of the table.

This report is addressed to university chancellors and presidents who are concerned about the state of academic scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences and who may wish, within their purview, to promote excellent scholarship in these vital fields. The charge to the committee, submitted in August 2025 and formulated by Daniel Diermeier, Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, and Andrew D. Martin, Chancellor of Washington University.

Admiral Andrew Cunningham once said of the British Royal Navy, “It takes the Navy three years to build a ship. It will take 300 years to build a new tradition.” Gaining trust is harder than breaking it, and public trust, in particular, should not be trifled with. Over the last decade, trust in science, and academia more generally, has eroded substantially, partly if not largely due to internal problems.

Professor George explained that he does not believe there is “one single uniquely correct model for colleges and universities.” The success of College of the Ozarks demonstrates the strength of its distinctive mission—not the need for every college to adopt the same model.

On April 10, 2026, a committee of 10 professors at Yale University published a report examining issues including the suppression of free speech. The Daily Princetonian published an article outlining perspectives from multiple Princeton professors on the report and its potential implications for Princeton. PFS released a related editorial, Yale issues a clarion call for change, joining other leading universities. Where is Princeton? PFS put Yale’s report in the context of the growing consensus amongst a widening circle who believe University leaders must take responsibility for their role in reaching this critical point. President Eisgruber is not among this list of reformers.

About two-thirds of grades at Harvard College last school year were A’s. That doesn’t count A-minuses, which were another 18 percent, meaning fewer than one in six grades were a B-plus or lower. You might have guessed grading at Ivy League schools was lenient, though not this lenient.

Grade inflation — like the inflation of a currency — is a collective action problem. Professors increase the share of A’s they hand out because they know other professors are doing so and breaking from the herd would have costs. Just 35 percent of grades at Harvard were A’s in the 2012-2013 academic year, but the number climbed at a rapid clip and then surged during the covid pandemic.

As the University undergoes budget reduction measures, the Board of Trustees has officially approved the operating budget for the 2026–2027 fiscal year. In a report recommending key budget parameters, the University signaled the beginning of a “gradual reduction” in graduate student enrollment, asked academic and administrative units to trim budgets, and revealed curtailed funding available for faculty raises and graduate students. 

While subject to change, the total operating budget for fiscal year 2027, which runs from July 2026 to June 2027, is currently set at $3.407 billion — a small increase from this year’s projected spending of $3.336 billion.

Four years ago, a user on a subreddit for Princeton asked, “What are some easy but interesting distribution requirement fillers for LA, SA, EM, EC? I’m basically asking for the humanities side of ‘rocks for jocks.’” This sentiment remains widespread at Princeton. During course selection periods, I often encounter inquiries on apps like Reddit or Fizz about easy classes to fulfill Princeton’s distribution requirements.

It’s time we say the quiet part out loud: many Princeton students are gaming the system. Rather than exploring the foundations and methodologies of a broad range of disciplines, they’re engineering the narrowest possible encounters with classes outside of their comfort zone and interests.

It’s like clockwork. War breaks out. Then come the calls for censorship. After the war with Iran began over the weekend, the group Columbia University Apartheid Divest tweeted “Marg bar Amrika” — Persian for “death to America.” The group is not a recognized student organization at Columbia University, and it’s unclear who operates its X account. But that didn’t stop demands for punishment.

The group’s tweet is unquestionably protected speech. The Supreme Court has twice held that even flag burning — often a visceral, symbolic expression of contempt for the nation — is constitutionally protected. As the Court famously declared, “If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.”

by Leslie Spencer, '79

Hardly a day goes by without national media spotlighting controversies involving free speech and academic freedom at universities across the country.  In California, Stanford Law School is scrambling to repair the damage done to its reputation when...

The grief Emily Taylor had been holding at bay finally washed over her in January. It had been four months since a lone gunman shot Charlie Kirk in the throat at Utah Valley University, killing the conservative commentator in minutes. That winter “was the first time in my entire life that I didn’t go back to school,” said the former English professor, holding back tears.

Taylor had resigned from her tenured position in December to save her tiny college in South Carolina from a political witch hunt in which lawmakers threatened to pull her school’s funding because she’d written a brief essay acknowledging that before his violent death, Kirk had employed violent rhetoric.

As I complete my undergraduate studies at Princeton University, I find myself reflecting on the purpose of education. This article aims to articulate my understanding of education in an abstract sense and to advance a normative argument grounded in the classical tradition. I address more concrete implications of the historical vocation of education in greater depth in my essay published last October by PFS,The Ideal of the University.

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. 

In the battle between Harvard and the federal government, Princeton is siding with Harvard.

On July 22, the University signed an amicus curiae brief supporting Harvard’s suit against multiple executive branch agencies over research funding cuts in a federal appeals court. The brief was joined by 35 other research universities and colleges, including the rest of the Ivy League.

A new episode of the Academic Freedom Podcast has been released. The podcast is sponsored by the Academic Freedom Alliance and the Center for Academic Freedom and Free Speech at Yale Law School.

For almost all of the past 65 years, I have been a part of Harvard — from that day in 1960 when I walked up the steps of Thayer South to begin my freshman year, to my time at Harvard Medical School, both as a student and a professor. But never, in all that time, have I been so deeply ashamed of the University, nor as fearful about its future, as I am now.