Princeton’s honor system, as-is, emphasizes the responsibility of students to uphold Princeton’s commitment to academic freedom, rigor, and integrity. As the chair emerita of the Honor Committee, which handles suspected academic violations on in-class exams, I have intimate knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of the system’s fidelity to the pursuit of knowledge.
Recently, however, the Honor Committee has experienced new strains, including an uptick in cases in the last year and challenges such as generative AI, and student sentiment has recognized that its procedures need to better reflect the current challenges to academic integrity. For years, the Committee has had conversations about introducing proctors into exam rooms, to serve as another potential witness and reporter — and the time has finally come to take this step.
College Republicans have sued the University of Florida’s president on free speech grounds over the school’s decision to deactivate its chapter after being notified that at least one member engaged in an antisemitic act.
The University of Florida College Republicans filed the lawsuit Monday in federal court against interim president Donald Landry, asking a judge to stop the enforcement of the school’s decision and to restore access to facilities on the Gainesville campus. “The University of Florida punitively deactivated and shut down the UFCR, in response to alleged viewpoints expressed by a member of UFCR, and in an effort to silence the club and chill its future speech,” the group said in its lawsuit.
The rapid expansion of funding for “civics institutes,” along with the spreading of state mandates that civics be taught as a core subject in colleges, has ignited much controversy. Debates focus on whether civics should be prioritized above other vital subjects, whether civics education should be concentrated in autonomous centers on campus, and whether states should dictate how it should be taught.
Ironically, the impetus to make civics a discipline came from progressive scholars nearly 20 years ago, not the conservatives now founding civics institutes across the country.
Jan-Werner Müller, renowned scholar of democratic theory and the history of political thought, was named Class of 1943 University Professor of Politics. Professor Müller is the founding director for the Academic Freedom Initiative and Forum for the History of Political Thought, which bring scholars together to examine academic freedom and the development of political ideas, respectively. Princeton endows 25 University professorships, which are the highest honor for faculty at the University.
Princeton faces many domestic threats. In 2024, a Forbes College dryer burst into flames, setting off fire alarms and forcing students to evacuate the residential college. Last year, residents of Yeh College and New College West were plagued by droves of mice in dorm rooms when they returned from winter break. Still, despite the formidable challenges these campus snafus represent, the threat these mishaps pose to the University pales in comparison to recent polemics against Princeton’s humanities education.
In an October podcast episode with The Free Press, Shilo Brooks, a former Princeton lecturer and executive director of the James Madison Program, painted a grim picture of the state of humanities education at Princeton. But Brooks’ issues with the humanities at Princeton are completely unfounded — a simple rebuttal lies in students’ level of passionate and sincere engagement with the humanities.
In 1985, the 17th president of Princeton University William G. Bowen GS ’58 delivered an opening exercises address that described universities as standing “at a slight angle to the world.” He noted how it was, in some ways, a historical aberration that universities in the U.S. could maintain their dissent from authority, and broadcast and house unorthodox — even outrageous, or broadly offensive — ideas.
Bowen defended this independence from political control as enhancing the quality of universities’ teaching and research. So has current University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83, who has posited the idea that “great benefit” comes from allowing universities to continue operating “at a slight angle to the world.”
Amelia Freund
Princetonians for Free Speech
My name is Amelia Freund and I am honored to be serving as President of the Princeton Open Campus Coalition (POCC) this year. An Army brat hailing from the DC-Maryland-Virginia area, I am a member of the great class of 2028, the Butler College Class Council, and the Politics Department. In high school I read On Liberty by John Stuart Mill several times over in my philosophy courses, each time I found it engaging and inspirational. I was particularly drawn in by Mill’s defense of free speech. He believed that for an idea to be true, it must be continuously discussed and debated, requiring broad protections for civic discourse. His argument resonated with me a great deal, and has carried me to countless engagements with freedom of speech since then, both in and out of the classroom.
By Edward Yingling, Stuart Taylor Jr., and Todd Rulon-Miller
We are writing on behalf of Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS) on a matter of utmost urgency. Princeton has now reached the point where free speech is no longer protected and where those who do try to exercise free speech can be viciously attacked with no consequences, and even attacked by the University itself.
Abigail Saguy, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles, was a little bit nervous to teach a course called “Sociology of Gender” again. She’d last done so in 2019, and found the atmosphere increasingly combative, saying student activists in her course had attempted to “police” her readings and word choice. So in 2024 she tried something new: She got students to debate each other virtually.
In 2023, FIRE raised the following question: What’s going on in Florida? In light of recent affronts to academic freedom in the Sunshine State, we regret to raise this question once again.
A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education describes the current trend on college campuses of starting “civil dialogue” programs. These programs are designed to help students engage with diverse ideas in more constructive ways. This effort is commendable but the question is: Will these programs work?
Even as campuses embrace civil dialogue, there is a danger that some university leaders are quietly redefining “open inquiry.” And they are doing so in a way that makes campus dialogue more narrow and less intellectually demanding than it ought to be.
Emma Whitford
Inside Higher Ed
The University of Oklahoma put a lecturer on administrative leave last week for allegedly exercising “viewpoint discrimination” five days after a different instructor was placed on leave for alleged religious discrimination.
Kelli Alvarez, an assistant teaching professor focused on race and ethnicity in literature and film, allegedly encouraged students to miss her English composition class to attend a protest in support of Mel Curth, a graduate teaching assistant in the psychology department who was removed from teaching after a student filed a religious discrimination complaint against her. Alvarez said she would excuse the absences of students who attended the protest. But according to university officials, she did not extend the same offer to students who intended to miss class that day to “express a counter-viewpoint.”
Rose Horowitch
The Atlantic
Administering an exam used to be straightforward: All a college professor needed was an open room and a stack of blue books. At many American universities, this is no longer true. Professors now struggle to accommodate the many students with an official disability designation, which may entitle them to extra time, a distraction-free environment, or the use of otherwise-prohibited technology.
No one should be kept from taking a class, for example, because they are physically unable to enter the building where it’s taught. Over the past decade and a half, however, the share of students at selective universities who qualify for accommodations—often, extra time on tests—has grown at a breathtaking pace.
Samuel J. Abrams
FIRE
The recent controversies surrounding Charlie Kirk — and the extraordinary reaction that followed his campus appearances and commentary — offer a revealing window into the fragile state of free expression in contemporary America.
Two recent New York Times opinion pieces examining the backlash were right to highlight how quickly public discourse has hardened into a zero-sum contest in which speech itself becomes grounds for professional punishment, social ostracism, and institutional retaliation. But the deeper lesson is even more unsettling: Free speech is increasingly treated not as a constitutional principle, but as a conditional privilege — one that applies only when speech is politically comfortable.
Catie Ratliff
C-ville.com
Excerpt: WUVA, the sole student broadcast news and culture outlet at the university published an exclusive interview with interim President Paul Mahoney on October 12. Fourth-year Sophia Bangura, one of the student journalists who worked on the project, was terminated from the organization three days later for “insubordination” for asking follow up questions during the interview and declining to apologize to the interim president’s office.
Nika Schindler and Nikoloz Inashvili
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: Most graduate program cohort sizes will see a “modest reduction” in the 2025 admission cycle, according to University spokesperson Jennifer Morrill.
Morrill attributed these changes to uncertainty about the University’s budget and research funding. All departments and academic units have been directed to cut 5 to 10 percent of their budgets this academic year, and the University has been rocked by hundreds of millions of federal cuts to its research funding (although about half of those grants have been restored).
Ian Bogost
The Atlantic
Excerpt: Harvard is worried about going soft. Specifically, about grade inflation, the name for giving ever higher marks to ever more students. According to an “Update on Grading and Workload” from the school’s office of undergraduate education, released last week to faculty and students, this trend has reached a catastrophic threshold. Twenty years ago, 25 percent of the grades given to Harvard undergrads were A’s. Now it’s more than 60 percent.
As a professor at another elite private university, who has been teaching undergraduates for more than 20 years, I have surely been guilty of inflating grades. The spectacle unfolding at Harvard is more visible, but the condition that underlies it is widespread and chronic.
Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder
Banished, Substack
Excerpt: Amna & Jeff talk to Jon Zimmerman about why some profs are afraid to speak their minds.
Chapin Lenthall-Cleary
The Eternally Radical Idea
Excerpt: Suppose you’re a controversial left-wing speaker. Who do you think would be more likely to let you voice your opinions on campus: a slightly conservative man or a democratic socialist woman?
Jasper Ward
Reuters
Excerpt: The U.S. State Department said on Tuesday it had revoked the visas of six foreigners over social media comments made about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
The announcement of the revocations came as U.S. President Donald Trump posthumously awarded Kirk with the presidential medal of freedom, the highest civilian honor in the U.S., on what would have been Kirk's 32nd birthday. "The United States has no obligation to host foreigners who wish death on Americans," the department said on X.
Josh Moody
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: Citing multiple concerns, Brown University on Wednesday rejected an invitation to join the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” that the Trump administration proposed.
Following MIT’s rejection, the Trump administration said the compact was open to all colleges. But of the original nine invitees, there are no takers so far, though officials at the University of Texas system have indicated they view the proposal favorably. The system’s flagship in Austin was part of the nine.
Michael Regnier
Free The Inquiry, Heterodox Academy
Excerpt: More than a week after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the shock waves are still rolling through higher education. Kirk’s murder, on a college campus, in the act of open debate, was committed by a killer who reportedly believed that “Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” Although the assassin was a college dropout, his apparent logic was very familiar on campus: some ideas are just “hate,” and the normal rules don’t apply.
But those of us doing campus programming should look in the mirror before we mention dialogue programs in the same breath as Charlie Kirk. As Redstone points out, Kirk “was pro-life, he supported the police, he questioned systemic racism, and he believed there were only two genders.” These are all squarely mainstream, and in some cases majority, viewpoints in the United States, yet scandalous on many campuses.
Emma Whitford
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: At least eight faculty and staff members have been fired or suspended so far for comments they made in response to the death of Turning Point USA founder and conservative firebrand Charlie Kirk, who was shot and killed Wednesday during an event at Utah Valley University.
Charlie Sykes and Sarah McLaughlin
To the Contrary Podcast, Substack
Excerpt: On today’s “To the Contrary” Podcast, I’m joined by Sarah McLaughlin, senior scholar at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, about her new book Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech.
Jonathan Zimmerman
Washington Monthly
Excerpt: We’ve got this, say some colleges and universities. Yes, we’re cutting deals with Donald Trump’s administration. But we are also preserving our core value: academic freedom. We’ll be OK.
That’s what Columbia University declared last month, when it agreed to pay the administration $200 million for allegedly failing to protect students from antisemitic harassment. And it’s what Harvard said last week, when it canceled a journal’s special issue devoted to education in Palestine. Don’t believe them. The Harvard episode is a textbook case of censorship, brought to you by those who proclaim fealty to academic freedom. And once we have turned our back on that principle, we won’t have any reason to exist.
Erin Shaw and Nicole Barbaro Simovski, Ph.D
Free the Inquiry, Heterodox Academy
Excerpt: A new report from education consulting firm EAB documenting results from a survey of thousands of high school students and first-year college students shows a worrying trend for viewpoint diversity on college campuses: prospective college students are intentionally self-sorting into ideologically aligned universities.
The data reveal that 29% of prospective first-year college students reported removing a college from their “might apply” lists based on political reasons. More students dropped potential colleges for being “too conservative” or being in a Republican-controlled state than for being “too liberal.” The report also notes that higher-income students were more likely than others to remove colleges across all political reasons.
Jonah E. Bromwich
New York Times
Excerpt: Mahmoud Khalil, the first pro-Palestinian campus protester detained by the Trump administration, was released on bail Friday, bringing an end to his monthslong imprisonment.
Mr. Khalil, a Columbia University graduate and legal permanent U.S. resident, had been held for 104 days, watching as other students targeted by the administration won favorable rulings and were released on bail. He was denied the opportunity to be present when his wife gave birth to their son in April and he missed his graduation from Columbia.
Matthew W. Finkin
Chronicle of Higher Education
Excerpt: An article on threats to academic freedom on college campuses in last week’s New York Times Magazine touched on a running debate between the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). The former has long been the expositor of the meaning of academic freedom; the latter is active in litigating free-speech cases. The quarrel between the two organizations raises some hard questions about the AAUP’s current role.
Liam Knox
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: Almost three months after the arrest of Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, international students in the U.S. still face unprecedented challenges and threats from the federal government. For many, this semester has been a roller coaster of existential fear, fleeting hope and, above all, uncertainty about their future.
Lee C. Bollinger
The Atlantic
Excerpt: The nation’s leading universities are locked in an unprecedented battle with a president and an administration that have chosen to withhold billions of dollars in vital federal research funding in order to take control of institutions for which freedom of thought and expression are among their most essential values.
So, here is my thesis: American universities are rooted in the bedrock of human nature and the foundations of our constitutional democracy. They are every bit as vital to our society as the political branches of government or quasi-official institutions such as the press (often even referred to as the “fourth branch” of government). Universities, as institutions, are the embodiment of the basic rationale of the First Amendment, which affirms our nation’s commitment to a never-ending search for truth.
by Ed Yingling '70
Washington insiders believe it is very likely that a significant increase in the tax rate on university endowment income will be enacted this year. They cite the need for additional tax revenue to offset the Trump tax cut agenda and the antipathy of many Republicans to what has been happening on campuses for the last two years. They also focus on the fact that then-Senator JD Vance introduced a bill in the last Congress imposing a 35 percent tax on endowment income.
Academic Freedom Alliance
Excerpt: It is a grave threat to the mission of American universities if international scholars and students fear removal from the United States based on little more than their expression of views disfavored by people holding public office. Academic freedom is a condition of the robust exchange of ideas that drives the pursuit of knowledge in colleges and universities, and everyone in an academic community must be equally protected in their academic freedom.
David French
New York Times
Excerpt: On Monday, Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, sent the dean of Georgetown University Law Center, a Catholic law school, a letter that said, “It has come to my attention reliably that Georgetown Law School continues to teach and promote D.E.I. This is unacceptable.”
Martin said that he’d begun an “inquiry” into the school and demanded to know whether it had eliminated all D.E.I. — which he does not define, but in right-wing circles tends to refer to any action at all designed to increase diversity or honor historically marginalized people — from the school and its curriculum. He also asked, “If D.E.I. is found in your courses or teaching in any way, will you move swiftly to remove it?”
Maggie Kelly
Inside UATX
Excerpt: Last week, UATX founding trustee Bari Weiss and Palantir CEO Alex Karp visited campus to discuss the failures of American education and the urgent need to build anew.
“Our educational institutions have really done us a disservice,” Karp said. “The primary disservice was somehow teaching people that it's better to believe in nothing than in something."
Cathy Young
The Bulwark
Excerpt: OVER THE COURSE OF DONALD TRUMP’S re-election campaign, he cast himself as a warrior for free speech—so no surprise that among the first executive orders of his second term was one titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.”
The anti-censorship executive order could still have merit even if Trump is a hypocrite; we’ll get to that in a moment. But the idea that the second Trump administration will usher in a new golden age for free speech in America is as bizarre as the idea that Biden’s America was a dreary intellectual gulag where debate was muzzled and only officially approved speech was allowed.
Will Clark
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: Right now, fear is taking hold over the threats universities will face from a hostile Trump administration. We’re advised to relinquish diversity as a framework, dismantle recently built DEI infrastructure or emphasize thinking with the enemy. Such postures take the shibboleths attributed to university liberalism and shrink their presence. They capitulate to a right-wing political movement intent on remaking the university in a regressive image. We need not look further than universities in Florida and Indiana to see our future.
But in the coming crisis, our work cannot just be defensive. Rather, our future lies in collective action.
Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: Texas A&M University said this week it’s no longer sending representatives to a conference aimed at recruiting prospective minority doctoral students after online accusations and threats—including from the governor.
