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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.”

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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.”

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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.

President Donald Trump’s skepticism of the current accreditation system bled into Tuesday’s National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI) meeting—the first since Education Secretary Linda McMahon and other officials were confirmed.

The Trump administration has cast accreditation as beset by alleged woke priorities, a theme repeated Tuesday along with pledges to shake up the system.

What is college for? If you ask four different people, you’re likely to get four different answers. Universities teach students how to think. They produce groundbreaking research. They create citizens. They prepare students for jobs. They archive the wisdom of the past. And so on.

However, beneath the veneer of diversity, all university goals ultimately come down to the same thing. At their core, universities are epistemic institutions, committed to the creation, preservation, and transmission of knowledge.

The good news is that the percentage of colleges and universities earning FIRE's "red light" (bad) rating has reached a low of 13 percent — a 55 percent drop since the "Spotlight" report began in 2006, and a 1.5 percent drop from last year. The bad news is that Princeton is among that 13 percent. Princeton is still found to maintain policies that "clearly and substantially" restrict free expression.

The first time we knew there was something seriously afoul in the Princeton Department of Classics was when, in January 2018, the then-chair circulated to the faculty a draft of a mission statement emphasizing the historical complicity of classics in perpetuating race-, class-, and gender-based inequality and promising a new era of inclusivity.

The draft itself was not especially interesting—such things rarely are—but one of us (Joshua, then a professor in the department) was bothered by the absence of “academic excellence” from its stated goals. When he pointed this out to his colleagues in a mild email, his words were met with incredulity and derision.

As students, professors, and administrators get ready to return to campus for what events both in the United States and abroad suggest will be another tumultuous year, the American Association of University Professors has decided to add fuel to the fire by announcing that it no longer categorically opposes academic boycotts. The decision by the once-august and respected organization is not surprising. After all, the AAUP is now led by a professor of journalism and media studies who a week ago used his official platform to call J. D. Vance “a fascist” and to claim that America’s colleges and universities are not in fact “ideological indoctrination centers.”

Last week, a committee of scholars convened by Vanderbilt University released a report on the state of humanities and social sciences scholarship across the United States.

As one of the signers of the report, I am all too familiar with the fact that activist scholars sometimes play fast and loose with logic and evidence to justify conclusions dictated in advance by a political program. Those who dissent can risk serious damage to their careers. Journals have been forced to apologize for research they have published — not because of poor logic or manufactured evidence, but because the results were politically unacceptable. 

Among the strengths of America’s higher education sector has been an uncanny ability to change and remake itself in the face of social, economic, political, artistic and intellectual changes—not just superficially and marginally, but significantly and even teleologically.

While the aspirational aesthetics of our universities—a pastiche of the ancient British and European institutions by way of pre-revolutionary New England and the mid-Atlantic—remain largely unchanged over the past century, their activities, outputs, constituencies, and funding sources have changed dramatically. This adaptive ability redounds to the benefit of universities and to the so-called higher education “system” as a whole, ensuring resilience and a (sometimes begrudging) willingness to change in response to internal and external challenges.

Oversized inflatable beach balls get bounced out on college campuses by student organizations that invite everyone to write on the “speech ball.” Students scrawl political slogans, insults, and provocative symbols. On some campuses, it might be a speech wall or a boulder. In all these cases, the idea, we’re told, is to exercise free expression. But what actually happens is a spectacle of empty rhetoric, where showboating and shock masquerade as meaningful discourse and campuses become stages for provocative performances rather than spaces for genuine intellectual exchange.

Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to cap “A” grades in undergraduate courses at roughly 20 percent of enrollment beginning in fall 2027. Nearly 70 percent of voting faculty backed the measure. It’s one of the most aggressive reversals of grade inflation in modern American higher education.

The signaling argument is correct as far as it goes. But it misses the more important consequence of capping “A’s,” the one that should matter most to anyone concerned about the intellectual culture of American higher education.

A new study commissioned by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression indicates that donations from faculty at top universities have become increasingly one-sided, with the range of opinion becoming concentrated on the left.

Eight of the ten most politically diverse faculty bodies were at universities located in the U.S. South, a region where conservatives are more plentiful (the other two were Kansas State University and Brigham Young University). Meanwhile, four of the ten least intellectually diverse campuses were located on the West Coast, and four were Ivy League schools in the Northeast.

On April 15, I had the pleasure of hosting, on behalf of the Cliosophic Society, Ambassador John Bolton at Princeton’s Nassau Inn for a discussion entitled “The Room Where It Happened: National Security Decisions Under Pressure.” Bolton’s legacy as a leading professional in American foreign policy offered more than a glimpse behind the diplomatic curtain; it invited a critical examination of the processes and personalities that have shaped recent American engagement with the world.

Harvard faculty voted to impose a roughly 20 percent cap on A grades beginning in fall 2027, approving the College’s most aggressive attempt in decades to reverse grade inflation and reshape academic standards.

Faculty voted 458 to 201 for the first plank of the three-part proposal, which will limit A grades in undergraduate courses to 20 percent of enrollment, with flexibility for up to four additional A’s. Faculty also approved a companion measure to use average percentile rankings, rather than GPA, to determine internal awards and honors. That measure passed 498 to 157, with 76 percent of participating faculty in favor.

College students want to debate but are afraid to do it, according to a recent report from Banjo, an online platform “dedicated to the civil, peaceful exchange of ideas.”

The survey of 1,019 students across more than 600 institutions found that 92 percent of students were “slightly” to “extremely” interested in engaging in debates with their peers. Yet 66 percent of the students surveyed reported avoiding debates to prevent conflict in the past two weeks, and 64 percent reported feeling anxious when discussing controversial topics during that time period.

Today, the teachers I’m talking about tend to feel like dissidents within the academy, like they are doing something countercultural. That’s because at most schools, humanistic education has been pushed into the remote corners of academic life. It’s not that people woke up one morning and decided to renounce the humanistic ideal, it’s just that other goals popped up. It was easier to fundraise for them, easier to sell them to tuition-paying parents. The idea of forming students into the best version of themselves sort of got left behind.

The good news is that things are changing. There is an interesting pattern in the history of higher education: Universities reform after confrontations with barbarism.

Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS) today announced a landmark achievement: its email subscriber list has officially surpassed 26,000 verified subscribers, approximately 80% of which are alumni, representing one of the most significant milestones in the organization's history since its founding in late 2020. This high number represents a highly engaged network of supporters committed to preserving the fundamental value of free speech at Princeton.

The University of Chicago has undergone a “curriculum degradation” in the past 13 years, according to a new analysis by an accounting professor.

Professor Ivan Marinovic, who teaches accounting at Stanford University, analyzed language used in University of Chicago course titles and descriptions between 2012 and 2025 for his analysis, published at the Heterodox STEM Substack.

He found the use of “progressive” language, such as “equity” and “intersectional” has doubled, compared to the use of “Western canon” words, such as “Bible” and “Western civilization.”

All in-person examinations at Princeton will be proctored starting July 1, representing the most significant change to the honor system since it was established in 1893. The faculty passed a proposal requiring instructor supervision at Monday’s faculty meeting, with one opposing vote.

The historic vote was the culmination of months of deliberation within the administration and student governing bodies about how to address increasing concerns over academic integrity violations, including the proliferation of AI usage. The proposal cleared a full faculty vote as the final of three required rounds of approval, having already been passed unanimously by the Committee on Examinations and Standing and the Faculty Advisory Committee on Policy.

The University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law is in the midst of a free-speech emergency. When a major American law school teaches its students that the right way to respond to political opponents is to silence them, something has gone wrong. And when it then attempts to protect those disruptive students from public criticism by threatening other students’ speech, it’s a crisis.

That’s just what happened at UCLA this past month.

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.

Lightning rarely ever strikes the same place twice, so the fact that higher education is experiencing yet another case of self-awareness is a miraculous occurrence. 

The Harvard Medical School (HMS) released a report on April 21, 2026 following an assessment on the state of open inquiry and public discourse at HMS. This yearlong assessment began in May 2025 and was led by the HMS Open Inquiry Working Group (OIWG), culminating in a 40-page report that offers 11 key recommendations to “serve as a roadmap for fostering and advancing a culture at HMS that is dedicated to open inquiry and respectful discourse.”

Incidents decreased most significantly on college and university campuses, by 66% (from 1,694 to 583).

The most significant factor contributing to the decrease in incidents on college campuses in 2025 was the decline of the anti-Israel encampment movement that drove the spike in incidents on campuses in the spring of 2024. Antisemitic incidents related to anti-Israel protests, including encampments, decreased by 83% on college campuses in 2025 compared to the year before. But the threat of antisemitism on college campuses is far from gone. Incidents on college campuses remained almost three times higher in 2025 than in 2021.

Some 15 years after the No Child Left Behind Act promised to close the racial achievement gap, it looked as if charter schools were making real progress toward that goal. Using data from 2015 to 2019, Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes reported that more than 200 charter networks were closing or even reversing racial disparities in reading, math, or both.

Then, just as the charter sector was posting striking results, many school networks strayed from their commitment to academic excellence. Staff-led demands for social justice convulsed the schools. “Anti-racism” and “equity” displaced effective instruction as their top priority.

Feroce and his co-founders believed that the chapter, while certainly not the only conservative group on campus, would fulfill a unique need. “There’s a lot of conservatives on campus, a lot of groups,” Feroce notes. But, he added, many of them are focused primarily on “academia and intellectual thought.” The mission of TPUSA, however, as evidenced by Wold’s lecture, revolves around common sense and plain speech. This is a mission, Feroce argued, that would “fill a space for students on campus” and appeal to an untapped group of conservatives seeking to express themselves.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s civics school has been controversial since early 2023, when the campus Board of Trustees called to “accelerate” its development before faculty even knew it was underway. The board’s then-chairman said on Fox News he was trying to “remedy” a lack of “right-of-center views” on campus.

The university said it selected the international law firm K&L Gates last summer to review “allegations and concerns” regarding the school. Over more than seven months, the review team analyzed hundreds of thousands of documents and interviewed dozens of people. The report is complete, reportedly at a cost of $1.2 million and running more than 400 pages. But the university is refusing to release any of it—despite calls from students, faculty and media to at least reveal some contents.

A curious feature of the recently released “Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education,” which is rightly being hailed as a major statement of the academic-reform movement, is a certain gingerness when it comes to describing the shape and substance of professorial political radicalism — a significant driver of declining public faith in the sector. 

True, the report names the concern that “liberal professors indoctrinate their students,” and it endorses processes to encourage “open interchange” rather than ideological conformity. But, perhaps out of a reluctance to lend aid and comfort to right-wing opponents of academic freedom, the report refrains from getting too specific about the contours of left-wing academic politicization.

There is a particular kind of bad idea that thrives under the protection of academic freedom. Such a toxic philosophy does not contribute to the marketplace of ideas. Rather, it gains prominence within the academy precisely because it systematically poisons that marketplace from within. When it comes under attack from outside university gates, campus administrators invoke free inquiry and end up defending it as precisely the kind of controversial matter academics must be free to explore; professors assign it as cutting-edge gospel; students come to think of it as precisely what they’re attending college to absorb. 

Third Worldism is such an idea. Though it is not campus-grown like critical theory, it has found the American university to be an almost perfect habitat.