Nolan L. Cabrera
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: This is a call to my dear faculty friends and colleagues in higher education institutions. In the first months of the new presidential administration, and indeed since the election, many have been searching for answers. I have been in more meetings, gatherings and brain dump sessions than I can count, all focused on the same existential question: What does this all mean?
I am not calling for us to be lacking in strategy or unaware of our contexts. However, I am extremely concerned that a number of my fellow academics are engaging in pre-emptive self-censorship.
Jaweed Kaleem
LA Times
Excerpt: After the Trump administration told schools to dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion programs or face federal funding cuts, USC has deleted the website for its university wide Office of Inclusion and Diversity and merged it into another operation, scrubbed several college and department-level DEI statements, renamed faculty positions and, in one case, removed online references to a scholarship for Black and Indigenous students.
The University of Southern California’s actions — similar to some other universities throughout the country — appear to be aimed at avoiding federal scrutiny, according to USC faculty and staff and reviews of portions of the USC website archives.
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.
Robby Soave
Reason Magazine
Excerpt: Newly inaugurated President Donald Trump signed a bevy of executive orders earlier this week, including one that seeks to end the federal government's pressure campaign on social media companies.
The "Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship" executive order reaffirms the free speech rights of social media users and prohibits government agents from engaging in unconstitutional censorship.
Katherine Knott
Inside Higher Ed
A federal district judge on Tuesday blocked the Biden administration from enforcing its new regulations for Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 in Alaska, Kansas, Utah and Wyoming.
Judge John Broomes of the District of Kansas wrote in a 47-page opinion that the Education Department lacked the authority to expand prohibited sex-based discrimination under Title IX to include discrimination based on gender identity and that the new regulations could chill speech “through vague and overbroad language.” The protections for LGBTQ+ students are at the heart of the Kansas lawsuit and other legal challenges.
On July 30, 2026, the American Association of University Professors did something it had never done in its 110-year history: endorse a candidate for federal elected office. AAUP President Todd Wolfson announced his organization would back Abdul El-Sayed, a Democratic candidate in Michigan’s U.S. Senate primary. And Wolfson made it clear that further endorsements will be coming, describing a shift from a defensive posture to an “offense” built on organizing and political advocacy.
Last Wednesday, I sat in Green Hall having an “ordinary” but peculiar experience: listening to my professor read aloud from her private set of lecture notes, while the class sat and stared at a bare-bones slideshow of historical quotes. Around me, dozens of my classmates were dutifully typing out summaries of every slide.
But, as my professor narrated her questions about the origins of the peculiar ideas of sovereignty, my attention was more focused on the origins of the peculiar idea of the lecture.
On Jan. 5, the University released its annual Report of the Treasurer. Following a tumultuous year for higher education across the country, the report emphasizes the University’s lab partnerships with federal departments, close ties to active-duty soldiers and veterans, and involvement in AI and public service.
The report, entitled “In the Nation’s Service,” comes after approximately $200 million in research-specific funding was suspended last year by the Trump administration, then partially reinstated over the summer.
In an age of social media, access to news and information can seem less like a privilege than a tidal wave. What we end up seeing isn’t fully objective: It’s composed, in large part, of opinions and biased perspectives that arise in the aftermath of striking or unsettling events. As long as you have a device and an internet connection, you can share and consume opinions on any given subject with minimal vetting.
There’s no shortage of editorialized content in the world today. So why would you specifically seek out the opinion page of a newspaper, and why ours in particular? What do we, as a student newspaper, have to offer you as a member of the Princeton community?
The shooting at Brown is deeply tragic. But it is not the time for mere thoughts and prayers. It hasn’t been for decades. As another Ivy League university, this moment calls for Princeton to stand in solidarity with the victims of the Brown shooting by pushing for significant reform to fight violence. University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 is uniquely equipped as the past chair and active board member of the Association of American Universities (AAU) — an organization with a precedent of condemning gun violence — to lobby for gun reform policies on the national and state level.
Roberto Lachner
Daily Princetonian
In a recent Opinion piece, Contributing Opinion Writer Vitalia Spatola takes on one of the more important questions Princeton students face: Whom should I date? I wholeheartedly agree your potential boyfriend’s or girlfriend’s values are of the utmost importance in making that decision. However, Spatola endorses a type of thinking harmful both to our romantic and non-romantic relationships, with deep consequences for civil discourse more broadly.
Charlie Yale
Daily Princetonian
It’s not often that an “F” on an essay draws national headlines. But I guess that’s this week’s fixation.
When students assume that grading is ideologically motivated and in bad faith — and when they choose to take these concerns straight to reactionary publications that have it out for higher education instead of engaging in productive dialogue with the members of the University community — our ability to have academically fulfilling conversations begins to slip away.
By Robert P. George
The Wall Street Journal
The ideological partisanship, dogmatism and bigotry on display in our society today are to some degree the fruit of our educational system. Too many college classrooms have become indoctrination camps. Some students buy into the leftist ideology they’re taught and become its enforcers. Others react by embracing opposing forms of extremism. Either way, radicalism and animus replace knowledge and wisdom.
So what should we do? The answer isn’t complicated, but acting on it will take determination and courage. Colleges and universities must return to offering a rigorous liberal arts education that refuses to engage in indoctrination and challenges groupthink. College courses must actively cultivate the virtues of curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual humility, analytical rigor and, above all, dedication to the pursuit of truth.
Joseph Anthony Gonzalez '28
The specter that the “chilling” of free speech has replaced official administrative suppression is real. I have experienced it, and if empirical evidence is not enough, then the data will corroborate it. It has been recorded in college polls, surveyed, and yet still appears to be a mystery to the people in charge, as they change their tune and beat the drum of “Free Speech.” Maybe it is time that they give up the ghost.
Oliver Wu
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 spoke about defending free speech on college campuses during a book talk at the new Princeton University Art Museum’s Grand Hall on Wednesday. The event was open to University students, faculty, and staff, but had limited spots. Eisgruber spoke for over half an hour before taking questions from the audience.
Eisgruber noted the tense climate for higher education under the second Trump administration. “American research universities are the best in the world, but today, they face unprecedented and withering attacks from our country’s own government,” he said. “Much of this attack is both unlawful and broadly unpopular.”
Chris Cleveland, Substack
Excerpt: In the September issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly (PAW), there was a remarkable article. Alumni participation in Annual Giving had dropped dramatically over the last decade. This is a four-alarm fire -- not only for financial reasons, but because alumni participation is a key indicator for the national college rankings.
Elizabeth Hu
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 addressed conflicts between free speech and censorship on college campuses during a discussion at the Princeton Public Library on Monday. He was joined in conversation by Deborah Pearlstein, Director of Princeton’s Program in Law and Public Policy.
He also addressed the difference between censorship and controversy through a reference to Judge Kyle Duncan, who was invited to speak at Stanford Law School in 2023. Duncan’s talk was interrupted by student protesters throughout and was eventually cut short. “That’s real censorship,” Eisgruber said. “It made it impossible for a speaker that some people on campus wanted to hear to be heard, and that should be recognized.”
City Journal
Excerpt:
Princeton University, like all Ivy League schools, has sunk more deeply into administrative activism over recent years. The school maintains a robust Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy, with more than six DEI employees per 1,000 students. The school also displays several other activist commitments that distract it from its educational mission—most notably, Princeton’s decision to intervene in the Students for Fair Admissions case at the Supreme Court in favor of affirmative action.
Professors Robert P. George, Tom Ginsburg, Robert Post, David Rabban, Jeannie Suk Gersen, and Keith Whittington
Substack on Academic Freedom
Excerpt: We write as scholars of academic freedom to respond to the proposed Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education. We are politically diverse and do not share common views about the wisdom of particular proposals contained in the Compact. Nor do we agree on the extent or substance of the reforms needed in American higher education today. We are, however, united in our concern about key features of the proposed Compact.
The power to punish extramural speech has been abused against both conservative and liberal speakers in the past. The requirement of the Compact that universities and colleges censor students and faculty who voice support for “entities designated by the U.S. government as terrorist organization” imposes overly intrusive regulation of constitutionally protected speech.
David Montgomery '83
Princeton Alumni Weekly
Excerpt: President Christopher Eisgruber ’83’s new book about free speech and dissent on college campuses is hitting bookstores this fall, shortly ahead of the 10th anniversary of the student takeover of his office in Nassau Hall to demand racial justice, and it comes just as President Donald Trump and conservative critics assail universities as woke bastions of progressive intolerance and antisemitism that must reform or forfeit federal support.
In a recent interview with PAW, Eisgruber uses his sometimes besieged perch between the fiery young activists to his left and the culturally aggrieved cadres on his right to sketch the contours of a healthy free speech environment that can accommodate both.
