That students today find the second part of the Honor Committee’s dual mandate repugnant will surprise no one. The mandate stipulates that students not only maintain their own academic integrity, but also report fellow students for infractions. Reluctance to adhere to the latter clause is no new phenomenon.
As far back as 1996, when matriculating students were still required to submit an essay affirming they understood both parts of the mandate, Chair Emeritus David Cushman ’96 noted that nearly 30 percent of freshmen failed to acknowledge the latter. While the essay was phased out in 2023, that number has been even higher in recent years, according to senior members of the Committee.
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.
In April 1995, University maintenance crews spent two days cleaning “walkways, benches, plazas and walls on campus,” working to remove not dirt or debris, but simple sidewalk chalk. The chalk drawings, according to a report from The Daily Princetonian, consisted of “pro-gay messages” written by hand during Pride Week. After the removal, advocates were rightly in uproar. Following the incident, the University, claiming that the discrepancy had transpired because of “cross-office confusion,” clarified its chalking policy — it was henceforth banned, in all cases.
Three decades on, chalk at Princeton has found itself relegated to dusty trays in classrooms and lecture halls. Hardly anyone — students, activists, artists, campus organizations, candidates, schoolchildren — chalks University grounds anymore. Simply put, the University’s ban has worked. But the question remains: Why is Princeton so afraid of chalk?
By Edward Yingling and Stuart Taylor Jr
Originally published in Real Clear Politics
In July 2020, a Princeton University professor, Joshua Katz, wrote an article containing provocative language that generated controversy on campus.
Since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, top colleges and universities have faced an onslaught of federal attacks: slashing grant money for research, pressuring schools to end diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, cracking down on visas for international students, and ending graduate program sponsorship for active duty military at top schools. However, some Ivy League universities — the center of many of Trump’s ongoing attacks — have decreased messaging on the potential consequences of these federal directives.
“One thing that’s been clear is that a lot of universities have felt that publicity would bring no advantage or do them no good,” history professor David Bell GS ’91, who has been outspoken about federal actions against universities, said in an interview with The Daily Princetonian.
A Minnesota judge dismissed the federal government’s challenge to a state law in Minnesota that makes some undocumented students eligible for in-state tuition.
This is the first ruling against the Trump administration’s campaign to end in-state tuition for undocumented students—a policy that the government’s lawyers have argued violates federal laws. In three of the seven lawsuits so far, the states agreed with the administration and scrapped their state laws. But Minnesota challenged the Justice Department in court and sought to dismiss the lawsuit altogether.
Almost 10 months after the Trump administration temporarily froze all student visa interviews in spring 2025, the State Department has released data showing the impact of that pause.
According to Inside Higher Ed’s analysis of the data, which was released Friday and covered the months from June to August, the number of student visas issued in summer 2025 declined by more than 100,000 from the previous summer, to 186,160. While the sharpest drop was in F-1 visas, which are for international students studying at a college or university and is the largest category of student visa, the number of J-1 and M-1 visas also declined.
Collin Binkley
Associated Press
Some of the country’s most prestigious colleges are enrolling record numbers of low-income students — a growing admissions priority in the absence of affirmative action.
At Princeton University, this year’s freshman class has more low-income students than ever. One in four are eligible for federal Pell grants, which are scholarships reserved for students with the most significant financial need. That’s a leap from two decades ago, when fewer than 1 in 10 were eligible. “The only way to increase socioeconomic diversity is to be intentional about it,” Princeton President ChristopherEisgruber said in a statement. “Socioeconomic diversity will increase if and only if college presidents make it a priority.”
Jennifer Jennings
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: Universities are the enemy. Or so we’ve been told.
So let me take you behind enemy lines to my undergraduate lecture course of about 100 students, called “Schooled: Education, Opportunity, and Inequality.” It’s cross-listed in Sociology and the School of Public and International Affairs, which is already a red flag to those who use “woke” as both adjective and diagnosis.
Cynthia Torres
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: At the Council of the Princeton University Community (CPUC) meeting on Monday, Eisgruber was confronted with queries on the Trump administration and University governance from several students who had skirted the committee’s rules on submitting questions on advance.
The first question came from Vasanth Visweswaran ’28, who asked Eisgruber how he could use his position as chair of the Association of American Universities (AAU) to “defend all members of the University community from the recent Trump administration attacks on free speech, funding cuts and threats for deportations.”
Elisabeth Stewart
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: Princeton released its fourth annual diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) report on Thursday, Jan. 30. The report, which covers the 2023–24 academic year, includes new data on the University’s DEI programming, partnerships with Native American and Indigenous initiatives, outreach to transfer and veteran students, and the fostering of belonging across faith-based identities.
The report’s release comes amid the latest onslaught of anti-DEI policies from the new presidential administration.
Bill Hewitt
Princeton Tory
Editor’s note: As the Naming Committee and the University approach the end of their deliberations on the vitally important decision whether to replace or remove the 10-foot bronze statue of the indispensable early Princeton president John Witherspoon (1768 to 1794), a signer of the Declaration of Independence, over his ownership of two slaves, we are featuring the latest of several articles (this one in the Princeton Tory) by Bill Hewitt ’74. The November 3 symposium, “Monuments, Memory, and the John Witherspoon Statue,” is the last scheduled public exploration of the issues. Hewitt has acquired encyclopedic knowledge of the historical facts, which he says show Withespoon to have been a heroic figure and enlightened for his time about slavery and its eventual abolition. The statue has stood in Firestone Plaza outside East Pyne Hall since being installed in 2001 under the leadership of Princeton President Harold T. Shapiro.
President Eisgruber has flagrantly failed his own stated standards of conduct – and abandoned his duties to the Princeton community. He refuses to prevent publication of multiple statements on University websites that falsely defame the reputation of John Witherspoon, Princeton’s indispensable early president and a founder of the United States. Moreover, these defamations’ profound misdirection about Witherspoon’s true relation to slavery have sown anguish and dissension across the University community.
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.”
Last week, FIRE released results from April’s National Speech Index, a quarterly poll designed to track Americans’ changing attitudes and beliefs about free speech. The latest iteration sampled 1,000 Americans from April 9 through April 17, 2026, asking how acceptable they find various protest tactics in response to a speech in their community.
Notably, the average American opposes censorship far more than college students in this country. Most Americans reject overtly violent censorship tactics. In fact, only 18% say it’s at least rarely acceptable to use violence to stop a speaker, compared to 33% of college undergraduates — and 27% last fall despite the murder of Charlie Kirk weeks before.
The Crimson Editorial Board
Harvard Crimson
Excerpt: This summer, Harvard College swapped the language of diversity, equity, and inclusion for the language of “culture and community,” closing the Harvard College Women’s Center and BGLTQ spaces, only vaguely promising to keep services unchanged. DEI might have failed at Harvard, but without increased transparency, the cautiously-worded rebrand will suffer a similar fate.
Now, the rage at the College is “viewpoint diversity,” exemplified in its Intellectual Vitality initiative and DEI rebrand. We agree with the premise: the academic mission requires engaging with diverse perspectives. But as Harvard’s institutional emphasis on diversity shifts to the intellectual, students from backgrounds affected by the DEI purge may find themselves unsupported.
Jessica Blake
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: In the nearly seven months since President Trump took office again, academic associations, faculty unions, researchers and other groups have used the legal system to push back on the administration’s efforts to reshape higher education and the federal government.
So far, district and appeals courts have largely suggested that the executive branch’s actions are unconstitutional and ruled in favor of university advocates, handing down preliminary injunctions, restraining orders and a few final judgments that have blocked the Trump administration’s goals. But based on the few cases that have reached the Supreme Court, some higher education experts worry the tide may be turning, and the high court’s conservative majority will ultimately side with the president.
Dhruv T. Patel
Harvard Crimson
Excerpt: Harvard will immediately rename its Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging to “Community and Campus Life,” the University announced Monday.
The move comes as the Trump administration continues its campaign to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programming at universities. In two April letters outlining demands to Harvard, federal agencies urged the University to dismantle its DEI programming — or lose billions of dollars in federal funding.
American Association of University Professors Press Release
Excerpt: The national AAUP and our Harvard chapter filed a lawsuit on Friday seeking to block the Trump administration from demanding that Harvard University restrict speech and restructure its core operations or else face the cancellation of $8.7 billion in federal funding for the university and its affiliated hospitals.
“The First Amendment does not permit government officials to use the power of their office to silence critics and suppress speech they don’t like,” says Andrew Manuel Crespo, Morris Wasserstein Professor of Law at Harvard University and general counsel of the AAUP-Harvard Faculty Chapter. “Harvard faculty have the constitutional right to speak, teach, and conduct research without fearing that the government will retaliate against their viewpoints by canceling grants.”
Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff
Washington Post
Excerpt: The University of Virginia’s governing board voted Friday to dissolve its office of diversity, equity and inclusion, joining other efforts by President Donald Trump and Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) to remove DEI initiatives in the state and beyond.
The Board of Visitors, overwhelmingly controlled by Youngkin appointees, voted unanimously in favor of a resolution that dismantled the office. It said state law does not call for such stand-alone offices, but the resolution allows the university to transfer programs “permissible” by law to other homes. It was not immediately clear what would qualify as permissible.
In short emails in July, Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber spurned a distinguished professor's plea to take seriously the letter and spirit of Princeton's free speech rule.
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.
Universities may be tempted to treat these capabilities as inevitable improvements in education. Students will be able to consume vast amounts of information, more than ever before. But like AI writing itself, such consumption would be vast but shallow. The more interesting possibility, then, is that AI will force universities to rediscover the value of intellectual work that cannot be outsourced.
Two Princeton University professors and a former professor at the Princeton Theological Seminary were awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in July. The new $41.4 million wave of humanities funding follows a legal battle regarding the future of federal support for the humanities.
PFS Editorial
Two recent developments show free speech is in serious trouble at Princeton. This week, the “2021 College Free Speech Ranking,” published by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), placed Princeton dead last in the Ivy League on free speech and...
A newly published paper finds that colleges were significantly more likely to report terminations of international students’ legal status if they had previously experienced campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war, suggesting, the authors say, that these institutions were targeted for legal action against foreign students.
The paper examines a spring of 2025 crackdown on foreign students, finding that the odds of status revocations were four to eight times greater on campuses that had been protest sites the prior year. The presence of demonstrations, rather than institutional type or political control of a college’s home state, was the strongest predictor of terminations.
The American Association of University Professors sued Texas A&M University officials and the system Board of Regents last week to block a policy that limits discussion of “race or gender ideology” in class unless preapproved by the institution’s president.
Open Video of James Madison Program Panel Discussion on “The Fight for Free Speech at Princeton and Beyond” During 2022 Princeton Reunions configuration options
Stakes are high as the Trump administration looks to rewrite the rules governing accreditation in the first of two week-long rule-making sessions starting today. The overhaul could dramatically change who is in charge of academic oversight and what they evaluate when determining whether an institution should have access to federal aid.
Right-leaning think tanks applaud the changes, released last week in a 151-page draft, calling them an overdue means to ensure campus civil rights compliance, address college costs and ensure institutions are held accountable for their students’ outcomes. But accreditation experts, left-leaning policy analysts and student advocacy groups say the lengthy regulations, while vague and abstruse, pose a major threat to the future of institutional autonomy and America’s status as the crown jewel of global higher education.
On Sept. 18, 1894, the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents issued the greatest declaration in defense of academic freedom ever made by a university—an achievement even more remarkable because it was the first statement espousing academic freedom ever made by an American college, and one that introduced the concept of institutional neutrality.
A week before colleges must report years of admissions data to the federal government, a group of Democratic state attorneys general sued the Trump administration to block what they say is an unlawful demand.
In recent weeks, colleges and the institutional research offices tasked to collect and report the data have been sounding the alarm about the looming deadline. An association recently requested a three-month extension. The Education Department responded with a conditional three-week extension.
Iowa is considering a slate of bills that would limit speech in college classrooms and threaten academic freedom. These measures would mandate reviews of classroom content for DEI or critical race theory, remove topics like “multiculturalism” from teacher training programs, and enshrine a viewpoint-discriminatory definition of “antisemitism” into university policy.
These proposals test longstanding constitutional limits on government interference with academic freedom and classroom discussion, so let’s take a look at each one in turn.
The growing (though not unanimous) acknowledgement that academia has lost public trust may be increasingly uncontroversial. But identifying remedies to repair that broken trust is proving to be much more contested.
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.”
Princeton claims to care about free speech — University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 has written a book about it, and maintains an official policy of institutional restraint to protect students’ freedom to form and express their own opinions. But in this era of government violence, it is no longer possible to defend free speech with an institutional restraint policy tying the University’s hands behind its back.
It is time for Princeton to deviate from the conciliatory principle of strict institutional restraint. It must stand in vigorous opposition against the cruelty of federal immigration officers, as well as other government overreaches that threaten freedom of speech for members of our community.
Bill Hewitt ‘74
Princeton Alumni Weekly
Excerpt: Princeton’s “double down on DEI” faces a direct challenge from President Trump’s Jan. 21 Executive Order 14171. It mandates an end to race- and sex-based preferences in institutions that receive federal funding, prioritizing merit-based opportunity. As a recipient of substantial federal support, Princeton is now at a crossroads: Will it comply with the law faithfully, or will it risk vital funding and the University’s hard-won standing — all to continue its DEI policies and programs?
A federal judge has granted an additional tranche of colleges a delay before they must submit newly required data to the U.S. Department of Education on their applicants, admits and enrollees broken down by race and sex.
Institutional members of two higher education groups — the Association of American Universities and the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts — will now have until April 14 to submit the data.
