Editor’s note:
Below is the exchange of emails between Professor Sergiu Klainerman and Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber about the administration’s attacks on now-fired Professor Joshua Katz for his article about racial issues on campus. Professor Klainerman provided the emails to PFS.
From: seri@math.princeton.edu<seri@math.Princeton.EDU>
Sent: Monday, October 11, 2021 8:26 AM
To: Christopher L. Eisgruber<eisgruber@Princeton.EDU>; Deborah A. Prentice <predebb@princeton.edu>; Gene A. Jarrett <gjarrett@princeton.edu>
Subject: RRR complaint
Dear President Eisgruber:
I am writing to inform you that together with a group of colleagues, I filed a complaint last week to the online DEI system, requesting an investigation of those responsible for the official university webpage “To Be Known and Heard: Systemic Racism and Princeton University” and the accompanying video in which Professor Joshua Katz was vilified and misquoted. These were mandatory materials that all incoming first-year students had to read and watch. In addition to the violations of the University’s Regulations 1.1.5 and 1.1.1, detailed in our complaint, there are, we believe, three additional and important academic issues involved in this incident.
Dear President Eisgruber,
You and I have never met. Nor are we likely to meet because it has been very rare that I attend my class reunions. However, I have followed your career as President of Princeton, because I read the Princeton Alumni Weekly (which is, of course, no longer published weekly)...
Gabe Levin
The Nation
Excerpt: Dr. Eric Cheyfitz, a professor of American studies at Cornell, said the university has canceled the two classes he was set to teach this semester. It comes as the provost is recommending that he be suspended for two semesters without pay on the grounds that he violated federal antidiscrimination laws, The Nation has learned.
Cheyfitz’s lawyer, Luna Droubi, said it’s the latest turn in months of investigations—carried out by different university bodies—into whether Cheyfitz, 84, told a graduate student last semester to drop a class he was teaching about Gaza because the student is Israeli. Cheyfitz, who is Jewish and whose daughter and grandchildren live in Israel, denies the allegation.
Andrea Brower
Common Dreams
Excerpt: For months before U.S. President Donald Trump took office, nearly daily reports rolled in of students and professors on trial for their activism for Palestinian life.
The number of the similar cases is impossible to know, due in part to near media omission. Many people who have faced or are currently facing investigations are instructed that they must remain silent (and isolated) as to not “compromise” the investigation. Some are quiet because their jobs, prospects for future employment, and safety are at stake. What is clear is that the trials are wide-reaching, extraordinarily punitive, largely coordinated, and were coming down rapidly across the country at educational institutions of all types even before Trump was sworn in.
Christa Dutton
Chronicle of Higher Education
Excerpt: Pro-Palestinian protests at three colleges in the past several days led to more than 100 arrests for trespassing or destruction of property. Several students were also suspended for violating their college’s policies and protest restrictions.
The mass arrests at Columbia University, Swarthmore College, and the University of Washington may signal a shift in how college leaders are responding to protests, experts say. Since last spring’s widespread protests over the war in Gaza, college leaders have drawn fierce criticism for being too slow to dismantle disruptive encampments or call in police to arrest those violating the law. Now, they’re eager to show federal authorities that they’re serious about stopping antisemitism and unruly protests.
by Stuart Taylor Jr. & Edward Yingling
National Review
Excerpt: Princeton University is tiptoeing toward canceling its greatest president and a founder of our nation in a process that its trustees and president Christopher Eisgruber accelerated on October 2 by announcing that they would leave the statue of John Witherspoon in its prominent place on Firestone Plaza — but probably only for now. The issue has been punted to the “Campus Art Steering Committee” to decide whether the statue should be moved, or removed.
by Edward Yingling
Real Clear Politics
Results of a new survey of Princeton students sponsored by PFS has just been released. Today Real Clear Politics published an article by PFS co-founder Ed Yingling that highlights the survey’s key findings
Elyse C. Goncalves and Akshaya Ravi
Harvard Crimson
Excerpt: Harvard Medical School canceled a planned Jan. 21 lecture on wartime healthcare and a subsequent panel with patients from Gaza receiving care in Boston in response to objections that students would hear from Gazans impacted by the war and not also Israelis.
Course instructors and students were notified Tuesday morning that the events — scheduled for that evening — would not be held. Medical School Dean George Q. Daley ’82 wrote in a Wednesday email sent to first-year students and obtained by The Crimson that his office began receiving complaints from students and faculty within days after the session was first publicized last week.
The recent report on the state of scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social sciences has renewed the debate over the internal politicization of academe. As one of its authors (speaking only for myself), I find the report relatively tepid.
With the new academic year approaching, I encourage professors who teach on controversial matters to include on their syllabi a statement like the one I include on mine:
“As set forth in Rights, Rules, Responsibilities section 1.1.3, Princeton University strictly respects the right to free speech of everyone in our community of scholars and learners. That right is sacrosanct in this class and is possessed by faculty and students alike. With the aim of advancing and deepening everyone’s understanding of the issues addressed in the course, students are urged to speak their minds, explore ideas and arguments, play devil’s advocate, and engage in civil but robust discussions. There is no thought or language policing. We expect students to do business in the proper currency of intellectual discourse—a currency consisting of reasons, evidence, and arguments—but no ideas or positions are out of bounds.”
Five months after the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, a wave of lawsuits reveals how Americans were investigated, fired, and in one case, arrested for their online reactions to his death.
The most dramatic case involves Larry Bushart, a retired police officer in Lexington, Tenn. A self-described progressive and "keyboard warrior," he'd been posting memes that mocked Republican officials' mourning over Kirk. Then local police came to his door.
More than half of U.S. college and university students now study in a state with at least one law or policy restricting what can be taught or how campuses can operate.
There is no use in sugarcoating things. For higher education in America, 2025 was a year of catastrophe. Across nearly every conceivable front – from state capitals to Capitol Hill and even on social media – America’s politicians have been a full-scale campaign against colleges and universities, with a concerted focus on speech. The toll is immense. Fear among faculty, students, and administrators is widespread. Self-censorship in teaching and research is rampant.
Last November, a faculty report from UC San Diego showed that over the past five years, the number of freshmen placed in remedial math had increased thirtyfold. Reactions ranged from sober warnings about declining readiness to claims of a collegiate “math horror show.” In response, some commentators argued that treating the findings as a problem reflected a culture-war misunderstanding about equity, student success, or what colleges “really do.”
That reaction entirely misses the point. The UC San Diego report exposed something far more consequential. American colleges are failing at one of their core economic functions: They are no longer acting as credible gatekeepers for employers.
Several hundred feet from the White House, down a concrete path and across a quiet brick courtyard adorned with historical markers lie the doors to a small courthouse. The Court of Federal Claims, a legal venue where the U.S. government is always the one being sued. The building is now poised to be the site of fights over droves of terminated research grants.
Although it’s the latest iteration of a court that’s existed since 1855, predating Lincoln’s election, it’s not a well-known institution. It’s not the subject of on-screen, steamy legal dramas. But the U.S. Supreme Court’s preliminary rulings last year have elevated its importance for higher ed.
The past two years have exposed a fundamental tension in higher education. Most universities are committed to both diversity and free speech, yet many are unable to cope with the social consequences of passionate disagreement.
As protests over Israel and Gaza spread across campuses, administrators called for a return to civility, as though civility were a switch that could be flipped back on. But the confusion, anger, and institutional paralysis that followed suggest that universities aren’t just struggling to maintain civility on campus; they have no consensus about what civility requires.
EmmaWhitford
Inside Higher Ed
As promised in a memo from the chancellor earlier this month, some Texas Tech University system faculty members were asked this week to report whether any course they teach “advocates for or promotes” specific race, gender or sexual identities. It is the latest step in a sweeping curricular review focused on limiting discussion of transgender identity, racism and sexuality across the five-campus public system.
FIRE
Ninety one percent of undergraduate students believe that words can be violence, according to a new poll by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and College Pulse.
The survey’s findings are especially startling coming in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination — an extreme and tragic example of the sharp difference between words and violence.
“When people start thinking that words can be violence, violence becomes an acceptable response to words,” said FIRE Chief Research Advisor Sean Stevens. “Even after the murder of Charlie Kirk at a speaking event, college students think that someone’s words can be a threat. This is antithetical to a free and open society, where words are the best alternative to political violence.”
Jon A. Shields, Yuval Avnur, and Stephanie Muravchik
The Free Press
Excerpt: The right seems to be on a mission to expose universities as centers of leftist indoctrination. Too often we professors waved away the charge. We called these assertions naive at best, Trumpy at worst. Students, we rightly noted, are not putty in our hands, to be molded as we see fit. They have their own minds. Plus, we all too often struggle to even get them to do the readings. How could we possibly be indoctrinating them?
Matthew Harwood
FIRE
Excerpt: Since Charlie Kirk’s murder, the Trump administration has launched a blitzkrieg against Americans’ free speech rights. The scale and speed are dizzying — and they jeopardize the United States’ credibility as the world’s leading defender of free expression as other democracies continue to falter.
Being critical of America, capitalism, and Christianity shouldn’t put you on the feds’ radar because all those viewpoints are protected speech. A federal investigation should only occur when there’s reasonable evidence that some person or group — regardless of their constitutionally protected beliefs and opinions — has crossed the line into criminality.
The Editorial Board
Wall Street Journal
Excerpt: Universities have been in fight mode with the Trump Administration, but it doesn’t have to be that way. On Wednesday the University of Virginia signed an agreement with the Justice Department that pauses all federal investigations against the school, without an enormous ransom or coercive new mandates.
Brendan Cantwell
Ungated, Substack
Excerpt: The Trump administration on Wednesday evening released a memo inviting University of Arizona, Brown University, Dartmouth College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Virginia to enter into a “compact” (henceforth The Compact) with the federal government.
I will say that if the provisions outlined in The Compact were required by law, it sure seems like the administration would not need a special deal that offers preferred client status as an incentive to get what it wants. Read The Compact for yourself. It’s about 10 pages long. In the meantime, here is my assessments for why this is a rotten deal.
Greg Lukianoff
New York Times
Excerpt: If you’re a free-speech lawyer, you face a choice: Either expect to be disappointed by people of all political stripes — or go crazy. I choose low expectations.
Again and again, political actors preach the importance of free speech, only to reach for the censor’s muzzle when it helps their side. If, like me, you defend free speech as a principle rather than invoke it opportunistically, you get distressingly accustomed to seeing the same people take opposite positions on an issue, sometimes within the space of just a few months.
