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Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 said the University “went wrong” by allowing professors to inject their personal views into the classroom, arguing that faculty activism had chilled free speech and debate on campus.

In rare and unusually candid remarks on a podcast released on Tuesday, Garber appeared to tie many of higher education’s oft-cited ills — namely, a dearth of tolerance and free debate — to a culture that permits, and at times encourages, professors to foreground their identity and perspectives in teaching.

“How many students would actually be willing to go toe-to-toe against a professor who's expressed a firm view about a controversial issue?” he said.

For the first time since the 2024 “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” at Princeton, Yuval Donio Gideon, head of the Public Diplomacy Department of the Consulate General of Israel in New York, met with University administrators and campus rabbis to discuss the experience of Israeli and Jewish students on campus.

Gideon met with Vice President for Communications and Government Affairs Gadi Dechter and Vice Provost for International Affairs and Operations Aly Kassam-Remtulla, two top Nassau Hall officials. He also met with Rabbi Eitan Webb, the co-director of Princeton University Chabad House, and Rabbi Gil Steinlauf ’91, the executive director of the Center for Jewish Life.

In February of this year, a few colleagues and I co-founded a group called Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff (CJFS), which now has more than 200 members on more than two dozen campuses. Our group, which is predominantly made up of academics at Massachusetts colleges and universities but includes members from across New England, is one of several such efforts nationwide that have coalesced into a new National Campus Jewish Alliance. 

We recognize that Jewish safety is inseparable from the safety of all people, and we work to foster academic environments that reduce antisemitism by treating educators as partners, not as suspects.

The months since Charlie Kirk’s murder on Utah Valley University’s campus in September have seen a deluge of firings and suspensions of teachers, faculty, and staff across the country for celebrating the assassination, or just for being insufficiently mournful. As the dust settles and court cases proceed, more details are emerging about the political pressures universities faced to punish protected political expression.

In Iowa, lawmakers were so incensed by one Iowa State University staff member’s speech about the shooting that they outright dismissed the possibility of a lawsuit.

Princetonians for Free Speech participated for the fifth time at the 5th Annual Campus Free Speech Roundtable, hosted by North Carolina Congressman Greg Murphy, MD, held in Washington, D.C. on December 12th.

This year, Executive Director Angela Smith represented PFS at this event. The purpose of the 90-minute roundtable was to hear from free speech experts, engaged alumni, representatives from the Trump Administration, and lawmakers about the importance of protecting free speech in higher education.

A discussion about Fizz and the role of social media in our discourse took place at Princeton University on December 3rd, 2025, hosted by the Princeton Open Campus Coalition (POCC) and funded by Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS), While the discussion has been lauded as an example of what can come about through open and civil exchange of ideas, several questions remain worth considering. What is the place of anonymous speech in our society? Should someone take responsibility for the things they say? Or has our public discourse been hollowed out by social media to the point where online commentary should be considered performative?

On Sunday, May 24, Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS) hosted a breakfast at the Nassau Inn — and despite dreary skies outside, the energy inside couldn't have been brighter. About 70 alumni, current students and other free speech supporters turned out for what proved to be an engaging and inspiring morning.

PFS leadership set the stage with organizational updates from Co-founder Ed Yingling '70, President & CEO Todd Rulon-Miller '73, and Executive Director Angela Smith — including the exciting news that PFS has grown to over 26,000 email subscribers (20,000 of whom are Princeton alumni). This represents remarkable growth from just 1,400 two years ago, showing a momentum that was on full display during this packed event. 

America’s colleges have had a rough go of it in recent years. After the Great Recession sent students flooding back to campus, schools have faced one evolving crisis after another: COVID, government interference, protests, and the chaos of AI tools in the classroom. Despite some positive enrollment trends, schools are also staring down a very near future where there will simply be fewer 18-year-olds to fill their seats.

Is the purpose of college just to get a good job, or is there more to it? And though the nation’s colleges and universities have been in rough spots before, is it finally time to start rethinking their entire model? On this week’s Radio Atlantic, the Atlantic contributing writer Ian Bogost and I sift through the fraught landscape of American higher education.

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.

From the outset, DEI at MIT was controversial even before it became a target of outside political scrutiny. Initial objections came not only from skeptics who opposed DEI as ideology or bureaucracy, but also from DEI supporters who believed it wasn’t enough. Some student activists and steering-committee members argued that the draft plan had been weakened by senior administrators. They criticized what they saw as closed-door changes, fear of upsetting faculty and donors, lack of transparency, and a plan that risked becoming “mostly performative” unless leadership accepted stronger, centralized standards.

The criticism from both directions showed that DEI at MIT was controversial before it became a target of outside political scrutiny. MIT’s DEI project was caught between competing criticisms: too ideological and bureaucratic for some, too weak and decentralized for others.

At the University of Michigan’s 2026 commencement exercises, history professor Derek Peterson stood before graduating seniors and their families and, as chair of the Faculty Senate, used his five minutes at the commencement microphone to praise pro-Palestinian campus activists for opening “our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza.” 

I have no interest in adjudicating Peterson’s views on the war, his critics’ views, the regents’ threats, or the president’s clumsy attempt to thread the needle. The deeper problem sits one level up and it is this very simple idea: It is the recurring, almost compulsive instinct among faculty to treat every microphone, every syllabus, and every graduation stage as a venue for personal political witness and the bewildered surprise when the rest of the world responds.

On April 11, 2025, the president of Yale, Maurie McInnis, convened a Committee on Trust in Higher Education. On April 10, 2026, the ten tenured faculty members on the committee submitted their report—unanimously. Detailed and running to fifty-six pages, it is a model of clarity.

There is much to admire in the report, and I will not stint on praise. But in addition to the appropriately strong words about many things that plague America’s colleges and universities, there is also a lack of strong words about other highly relevant things that Americans care and fight about. For example, the committee skirts around the dreaded trio of diversity, equity, and inclusion and does not mention the current U.S. president by name. I will have more to say on this subject, as well as on the need for the committee’s strong words to be followed by strong actions.

I contend that the narrow, politicized curatorial approach of the new Princeton Art Museum’s American wing turns our nation’s vibrant story into a muted tapestry. Like a quilt losing meaning when its unique patches are made uniform, the exhibit elevates grievance over achievement, division over unity, and progressive ideology over historical accuracy. The overall structure, deliberate additions, and obvious omissions dull the nation’s artistic vibrancy and overlook Princeton’s remarkable place in the American experiment.

The 80+ scholars who gathered at UC Berkeley for HxA’s West Coast Regional Conference didn’t come to vent or to mourn a lost university. They came to get organized and lead their campuses in reform. Vanderbilt University Chancellor Daniel Diermeier set the tone from the first minutes of his keynote about what must be done for change in the academy to occur.

“There used to be times when it took just a letter to get a speaker disinvited,” he said. “This is not the case right now.” Institutional neutrality is gaining ground. Diverse speakers are being welcomed on campuses where they once weren’t. On these things, “we look back and things are moving in the right direction.” But Diermeier was clear that acknowledging progress is not the same as declaring victory. Much work remains.

On April 10, 2026, a committee of 10 professors at Yale University published a report examining issues including the suppression of free speech. The Daily Princetonian published an article outlining perspectives from multiple Princeton professors on the report and its potential implications for Princeton. PFS released a related editorial, Yale issues a clarion call for change, joining other leading universities. Where is Princeton? PFS put Yale’s report in the context of the growing consensus amongst a widening circle who believe University leaders must take responsibility for their role in reaching this critical point. President Eisgruber is not among this list of reformers.

In March 2026, the journal Theory and Society published a sweeping analysis of academic social science research spanning 1960 to 2024. The paper, “The ideological orientation of academic social science research 1960-2024,” ran over 600,000 article abstracts through a large language model to map the ideological orientation of an entire field across six decades.

James Manzi, a DPhil (PhD) student in sociology at the University of Oxford, unleashed a wide-ranging discussion across social media with the publication of his paper. In the conversation below, Manzi walks us through the paper’s central findings, responds to questions about methodology, and sketches next steps.

One in 10 faculty members working in states that restrict academic speech are seeking jobs out of state, according to survey data released this week. Six percent reported they are trying to leave the academy altogether.

The new data on relocating researchers underpins anecdotal stories about faculty members fleeing red states in search of greater academic freedom. Researchers with Ithaka S+R, a nonprofit higher education consultancy, surveyed 4,003 researchers at U.S. four-year colleges and universities via email about a slate of topics, but their first look at the data is focused on academic freedom in research. 

Princeton spent $240,000 on congressional lobbying in the first three months of the year, the second-highest spending total of any quarter in recorded history. The University’s Lobbying Disclosure Act filing shows lobbying efforts spanning issues including scientific research, financial aid, immigration issues, and the recently increased endowment tax.

The increased spending comes after the Trump administration cut hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants to the University, investigated Ivy League institutions over allegations of antisemitism, and ended a program sponsoring active-duty service members in graduate studies.

On April 15, 2026, Yale President Maurie McInnis announced, in an open letter to the Yale community, the issuance of a blockbuster fifty-page report by a special committee of ten Yale faculty that called for reform across many aspects of Yale’s policies and educational practices. The report dealt extensively with PFS’s core issues of free speech, academic freedom, and viewpoint diversity. But it also addressed other issues, such as affordability, admissions policies, political homogeneity, governance, grade inflation, the impact of technology on learning – all those issues that contribute to the decline in trust in higher education.

In our National Speech Index, FIRE asks the general public a variety of questions related to free speech, including: How acceptable is it to use physical violence to stop someone giving a speech in their community? Gen Z are 9.6 times more accepting of violence against speakers than Baby Boomers, and over 25 times more accepting of violence against speakers than the Silent Generation. 

Each successive generation is more supportive of violence against speakers than the last, in most cases more than twice as supportive. About 43% of Gen Z say violence against speakers is at least rarely acceptable, and over a quarter say it’s sometimes or always acceptable.

Last spring, Yale University President Maurie McInnis asked a group of faculty to examine why Americans were losing confidence in higher education—and to propose remedies to restore it.

Their much-anticipated findings, released Wednesday, call for changes to address everything from perceived political bias among faculty, to opaque admission standards and crushing student debt. “In its report, the committee calls on Yale to reflect on and take responsibility for our role in the erosion of public trust,” McInnis wrote. “I accept this judgment fully.”

About two-thirds of grades at Harvard College last school year were A’s. That doesn’t count A-minuses, which were another 18 percent, meaning fewer than one in six grades were a B-plus or lower. You might have guessed grading at Ivy League schools was lenient, though not this lenient.

Grade inflation — like the inflation of a currency — is a collective action problem. Professors increase the share of A’s they hand out because they know other professors are doing so and breaking from the herd would have costs. Just 35 percent of grades at Harvard were A’s in the 2012-2013 academic year, but the number climbed at a rapid clip and then surged during the covid pandemic.

We now assess Eisgruber’s peculiar take on the relation of the university to the nation that has treated it with increasing hostility in recent decades. Critics may wail that the universities have to be brought to heel for producing fanatics, snowflakes, and crybullies, but Eisgruber turns their argument on its head: it’s actually the nation that could afford to learn from the campus, he argues; to the extent universities are struggling with civility norms, they are simply a dirty mirror for broken civil discourse. Otherwise they are a model for balancing speech and other values with a “more vigorous” culture of speech than “most sectors of society.”

This thesis has two component parts, which can be asked as distinct questions. Are critics wrong to identify a free-speech crisis on campus? And, to the extent such issues arise, are universities merely replicating national problems of polarization in microcosm?

Wokeness, campus protests, and the instruction of leftist ideas within universities do not erode civil discourse or violate free speech norms. Or so President Christopher Eisgruber argues in his new book, Terms of Respect. Overall, I agree with Eisgruber’s assessment, but there are some conceptual nuances that I will offer in order to refine his argument. This review will not provide a comprehensive summary of the book nor will it recount every minor personal agreement and disagreement I have. Rather, it will present Eisgruber’s most important arguments and my opinions on his larger takeaways.

A federal judge on Friday blocked in 17 states the Trump administration’s demand that public colleges and universities submit detailed race- and gender-related admissions data stretching back seven years.

The ruling, by U.S. District Court judge Dennis Saylor IV of Boston, was in response to a March 6 lawsuit by the attorneys general from the group of Democratic-led states. Their lawsuit argued that forcing colleges and universities to complete the new Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement survey was unlawful, “arbitrary and capricious” and exceeded the authority of the agency that approved it, the Office of Management and Budget.

It’s time for conservative faculty to stop “keeping their heads down until tenure.” Universities need bold, excellent conservative scholars—not undercover ones—to strengthen their institutions. Having worked at a free-market think tank before academia, my sympathies were clear. Yet as the only openly right-wing faculty member in my college, I earned tenure, served as program director, and became department chair. Here is my advice.

As the University undergoes budget reduction measures, the Board of Trustees has officially approved the operating budget for the 2026–2027 fiscal year. In a report recommending key budget parameters, the University signaled the beginning of a “gradual reduction” in graduate student enrollment, asked academic and administrative units to trim budgets, and revealed curtailed funding available for faculty raises and graduate students. 

While subject to change, the total operating budget for fiscal year 2027, which runs from July 2026 to June 2027, is currently set at $3.407 billion — a small increase from this year’s projected spending of $3.336 billion.

The Trump administration’s investigations and demands for admissions data have extended beyond undergraduate colleges and universities, The New York Times reports. Now, the Department of Justice is requesting years’ worth of information about applicants at major medical schools.

The three institutions currently under investigation—Stanford University, Ohio State University and the University of California, San Diego—have been asked to turn over the reports by April 24. If they don’t, according to the Times, the DOJ says federal funding for their professional programs could be on the line.

More than 100 years ago, Stanford University terminated economics and sociology professor Edward Ross and set in motion a wild chain of events that would eventually result in the formal establishment of academic tenure in the United States.

Tenure isn’t solely a tool that protects controversial, outspoken faculty. It also protects faculty who conduct research that may lead them down risky paths, allowing them to pursue their research to its limits and previously unknown conclusions. It protects faculty whose work runs counter to the interests of the people in power. And it protects faculty who explore new pedagogical methods in the classroom as they attempt to innovate and push higher education in new directions.

Last year at an event hosted by the DC Center of Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), the host of NPR’s “Weekend Edition Sunday” Ayesha Rascoe asked President Eisgruber if today’s students are “fragile flowers who can’t deal with anything challenging their preconceived notions?”  In response, Eisgruber shared that he in fact has observed quite the opposite. 

The truth about free speech on college campuses and in civic discourse in American society is more complex than individuals’ inability to handle opposing viewpoints. In reality, it is external complications that influence whether an individual decides to speak openly about a belief or position they hold. Students and leaders are consistently weighing whether openly expressing their opinion is worth the political, social, or financial repercussions that could arise as a result. 

Some colleges and universities now have until April 6 to collect and report admissions data that the Education Department says it plans to use to identify unlawful race-based admissions practices, a federal judge decided Tuesday.

It’s the latest development in a lawsuit 17 Democratic state attorneys general filed against the department earlier this month over the Trump administration’s original demand that colleges and universities with selective admissions policies complete the new Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement survey by March 18.

The probability that universities can reform themselves from within, in the absence of powerful external pressure, is very close to zero.

People who have seriously thought about the state of our universities are not only skeptical about the possibility of reform from within, but are also pessimistic even about the possibility of creating successful new universities. My intention is not to discourage people from trying, far from it since I consider myself firmly in the camp of reformers, but rather to draw attention to the enormous obstacles we face.

Four years ago, a user on a subreddit for Princeton asked, “What are some easy but interesting distribution requirement fillers for LA, SA, EM, EC? I’m basically asking for the humanities side of ‘rocks for jocks.’” This sentiment remains widespread at Princeton. During course selection periods, I often encounter inquiries on apps like Reddit or Fizz about easy classes to fulfill Princeton’s distribution requirements.

It’s time we say the quiet part out loud: many Princeton students are gaming the system. Rather than exploring the foundations and methodologies of a broad range of disciplines, they’re engineering the narrowest possible encounters with classes outside of their comfort zone and interests.

Almost immediately after Donald Trump took office for the second time, the White House and the Department of Education launched a shock-and-awe assault against its perceived foes in higher education, announcing a new investigation or seizure of funding seemingly every week. Their targets appeared overwhelmed by the speed and severity of the offensive.

But the aggressive pace that won the administration so many early victories eventually proved to be its great weakness. The government could move so quickly only by skipping almost all of the procedural steps required by federal law. Once universities and their allies recovered from their shock and challenged the Trump administration, they were able to block many, if not most, of the White House’s moves in court. Trump has certainly left his mark on America’s universities. But he has not broken them.

Last month, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth made several announcements, stating he was ending partnerships with multiple highly selective colleges and universities that have long educated military service members. But it remains unclear what he’s actually canceling, why specific universities have been targeted or favored and what he plans to replace these programs with.

Now we can get to the heart of the book. Eisgruber’s novel approach to campus free speech issues builds on this foundation, to argue that campus free speech issues aren’t really campus issues, and aren’t really about free speech. Rather, campuses reflect national divisions in microcosm, and the division is not about speech and its discontents, but about “the meaning of respect and, ultimately, what it means to treat people as equals.” He ultimately concludes that while speech has to foster constructive dialogue and truth-seeking, the controversies making waves are about the terms on which that constructive dialogue occurs—which is a good thing, as Eisgruber and his critics alike agree—and that universities are closer to being models (albeit imperfect ones) than sources of the problem. It’s this surprising take that gives Terms of Respect its punch and has made Eisgruber a minor folk hero among academia’s defenders.

In a series of February memos, the University informed faculty and non-union staff of raise cuts and benefit reductions for the coming fiscal year, with a decrease in personnel also on the horizon. 

The adjustments to employee pay and benefits came shortly after the annual State of the University letter from University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 reported that the University would be tightening its budget primarily due to declining long-term endowment return expectations and continued uncertainty over federal funding. Eisgruber discussed some of the raise cuts at his annual Council of the Princeton University Community town hall on Feb. 9.

It’s like clockwork. War breaks out. Then come the calls for censorship. After the war with Iran began over the weekend, the group Columbia University Apartheid Divest tweeted “Marg bar Amrika” — Persian for “death to America.” The group is not a recognized student organization at Columbia University, and it’s unclear who operates its X account. But that didn’t stop demands for punishment.

The group’s tweet is unquestionably protected speech. The Supreme Court has twice held that even flag burning — often a visceral, symbolic expression of contempt for the nation — is constitutionally protected. As the Court famously declared, “If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.”

In PFS Supports Two Student and Faculty Events that Advance Free Expression, Executive Director Angela Smith highlights PFS support for two important on-campus events that happened in February, one organized by students, the other by faculty.

“Free speech and open inquiry are not abstract ideals – they are the lifeblood of a healthy university community. At Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS), we strive to advance those principles through practical, tangible support for students and faculty who put them into action.  As such, we are pleased to tell you about two recent events at Princeton, supported by PFS, that reflect this mission in powerful ways.”

Read more about these events, why PFS supports them, and why you should support PFS. 

And read coverage of these two events in the Student Corner below, written by our writing fellows Annabel Green ‘26 and Joseph Gonzalez ‘28.

RocaNews is one of those new platforms growing by the seemingly simple acts of building trust and conducting on-the-ground reporting in the places the New York Times promised to do. They believe their readers are smart enough to form their own opinions. At least that was being claimed on February 19th in McCosh Hall at an event entitled RocaNews, Non-Partisan Reporting, and the Fight against Legacy Media organized by the Princeton Open Campus Coalition (POCC). RocaNews currently has 2 million instagram followers, 651,000 YouTube subscribers, and a daily newsletter sent to over 200,000 subscribers. If that growth is not enough to convince you that they are doing something right, you can see for yourself through a myriad of ways, all focused on ease of access and user experience. Roca uses Instagram and newsletters to build a go-to news community based on factual, on-the-ground reporting.

Texas Tech leaders have somehow convinced themselves that race and gender are not legitimate topics to discuss in a psychology class. That’s absurd on its face: You can’t teach human behavior while treating basic dimensions of human identity as off-limits.

Will Crescioni, a lecturer in Texas Tech’s Department of Psychological Sciences, submitted his course materials for his honors-level psychology course the same day the Texas Tech system issued a memo ordering universities to review courses and ensure faculty do not “promote or otherwise inculcate” certain ideas related to race and gender. Just over a month later — and only two days before the semester began — his course was scrapped. His offense? Refusing to alter his course content.

The Manhattan Institute offers a simple proposal: state legislatures should expand oversight of their public universities. With powers clarified by lawmakers and a new mandate to exercise their existing powers, university board members can act as a counterweight to the excesses of university faculty and administrators—specifically, through greater involvement in the hiring of administrators, the approval of faculty lines, and the creation of core curricula.

On Friday, approximately 200 students and community members gathered at the Fountain of Freedom to protest against the Trump administration’s immigration policies and the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents. The protest was the first campus rally of the spring semester and was part of a “national shutdown” initially organized by protesters in Minneapolis.  

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.