By Sergiu Klainerman (Higgins professor of mathematics at Princeton), Heterodox STEM, Substack
The scientific enterprise in United States is being seriously challenged by powerful anti-scientific trends. Postmodern relativism, under the pretense of anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-colonialism, anti-ableism... is undermining the very foundations of science as a search for truth.
by Kevin DeYoung, PrincetoniansForFreeSpeech.org
As of the online publication of this essay, Princeton University is still deciding what to do with Witherspoon...
Penn’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors will focus its efforts on open expression and faculty governance this academic year.
The group, which spans the University’s 12 graduate schools, organizes instructors and researchers to advocate for causes on campus. Communication professor and AAUP-Penn chapter president Jessa Lingel outlined the organization’s upcoming advocacy plans in an interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian. “Open expression is a really important issue for our group because it affects every part of teaching and learning at Penn,” Lingel said.
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.
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.
A couple of months ago, we spoke with the Chronicle of Higher Education about what they are calling “the conservative hiring boom.” At the time, it seemed clear to us that there was a “vibe shift” of sorts in terms of academic norms. Standalone DEI statements were on the decline, and there were anecdotal reports of heterodox scholars being recruited for faculty positions with a goal of increasing viewpoint diversity.
In light of this, we ran a poll asking folks about their perceptions of academic job market vibes, using an informal member email survey. We collected responses from 244 people working in higher education (77% of whom are HxA members). Here’s what we found.
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.
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.
