by Asher Lehrer-Small, The Guardian
Since Texas lawmakers in 2021 passed a ban on lessons teaching that any one group is “inherently racist, sexist or oppressive”, a little-noticed provision of that legislation has triggered a massive fallout for civics education across the state.
Maria Ressa, Class of 1986, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for her efforts to safeguard freedom of expression in the Philippines.
On July 31, federal judge Zahid N. Quraishi issued an opinion mostly denying a motion to dismiss a civil lawsuit brought by David Piegaro ’25. The motion was jointly filed by Princeton University and Kenneth Strother, the University’s police chief, who are the defendants in the case. The ruling sends 12 of the 13 claims against the defendants to discovery, where the parties will gather evidence before a potential trial.
The lawsuit stems from an altercation between Piegaro and Strother that occurred during the 2024 Gaza Solidarity encampment. Piegaro was charged with simple assault and trespassing after the incident. In April 2025, he was found not guilty of simple assault while the trespassing charge was dropped earlier that year in February. Quraishi’s opinion allowed most of the claims Piegaro made to proceed.
A few months ago, I heard from one of the greatest antitrust legal scholars of our time — Lina Khan, the former chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) — in an event hosted by the Princeton Program in Law and Public Policy.
The event turned out to be a “fireside chat” between Khan and Director of the Program in Law and Public Policy Deborah Pearlstein, an all-too-familiar manifestation of the “conversation” format that plagues Princeton events. Instead of letting visitors speak for themselves, we filter their thoughts and ideas through a moderator, who all too often serves to dilute whatever interesting points the speaker might have to share into a superficial overview of their career and accomplishments.
“T-R-U-M-P.”
Neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf was answering a student’s question when she nearly used the word “trump” as a regular English verb, meaning “override” or “overcome” — but she couldn’t bring herself to finish her sentence. She collapsed into her armchair, citing her inability to say “his name” out loud, and instead spelled it out, letter by letter. At the Princeton Pre-read assembly, in front of the entire Class of 2030. University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83, sitting across from her, smiled and said nothing.
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.
By Stuart Taylor, Jr. and Edward Yingling,
Readers of these pages are well aware that free speech, academic freedom and viewpoint diversity are in big trouble at U.S. universities. But many of those worried over the state of campuses are almost resigned to the idea that the forces of illiberal intolerance have won. The fight is far from over. On Oct. 18, five alumni groups are announcing the creation of an organization to stand up for open inquiry: the Alumni Free Speech Alliance.
To Princetonians for Free Speech Subscribers, Members and Friends,
Happy Giving Tuesday from PFS! We are grateful for the support we've received over the past 4 years from alumni like you and many others. As our Special Feature this month, we are proud to present the PFS 2024 Annual Report, which showcases our achievements over this year. We hope you will continue to help us grow our reach and impact during this season of giving!
Free speech is usually described as a right one either has or does not have, relative to the laws of one’s residence. But a right, like a muscle, is only as strong as its use. When my family flew to the United States in 2018, I naively thought that I had escaped the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) systematic suppression of free speech. I believed that I would access Google, YouTube, and Winnie the Pooh without any need for a VPN to circumvent the “Great Firewall of China,” a term used to describe the CCP’s firm control on online content. But I was clueless: I unknowingly carried a part of the repression within me.
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.
September 18, 2023
Dear President Eisgruber and Board of Trustees:
With the beginning of a new school year at Princeton, we are writing to you on behalf of Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS) to reiterate our strong support for Princeton becoming a leader on free speech and academic freedom issues and to inform you of our efforts to assist in achieving that goal.
“Terms of Respect,” the 2025 book by University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83, claims in its subtitle that “colleges get free speech right.” And, in a required orientation event on Aug. 25, he attempted to convince the Class of 2030 that Princeton does too.
In a panel discussion with Summer Lopez GS ’08, a co-CEO of PEN America, Eisgruber outlined Princeton’s "time, place, and manner" restrictions, which dictate the context of expression at Princeton, not the content. However, looking around Richardson, where some of the Class of 2030 watched the discussion on a livestream, I noticed that many of my peers were exercising their own freedom to not pay attention.
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.
A trial began Friday for five current and former Stanford University students who occupied the university president’s offices during a pro-Palestinian protest in 2024 — in a rare instance of demonstrators facing trial for actions from the wave of campus protests that year.
Prosecutors accused the demonstrators of spray-painting on the building, breaking windows and furniture, disabling security cameras and splattering a red liquid described as fake blood on items throughout the offices. The university is seeking $329,000 in restitution.
Tom Perkins
The Guardian
Excerpt: The University of Michigan is using private, undercover investigators to surveil pro-Palestinian campus groups, including trailing them on and off campus, furtively recording them and eavesdropping on their conversations, the Guardian has learned.
The surveillance appears to largely be an intimidation tactic, five students who have been followed, recorded or eavesdropped on said. The undercover investigators have cursed at students, threatened them and in one case drove a car at a student who had to jump out of the way, according to student accounts and video footage shared with the Guardian.
Jerry A. Coyne
Why Evolution is true
Excerpt: This article in The Atlantic by Frank Foer, former editor of The New Republic (and who attended Columbia) gives a thorough and excellent summary of the history of antisemitic protests at the school. You can probably access it for free by clicking on the headline below, or you can find the article archived here. It’s well worth reading.
by Johanna Alonso, Inside Higher Ed
Students at the State University of New York at Albany don’t view their recent protest of Ian Haworth, a conservative writer and podcaster who has made provocative statements about transgender people, as a disruption of his speaking engagement on campus.
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.
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.
Join us on October 6 at noon ET for a look at our new study of Princeton faculty political donations. It's the first of its kind at Princeton. Of the faculty who made a federal donation in the 2023-24 cycle, 98% gave to Democrats, 2% gave to independents, and none gave to Republicans. That doesn't mean Princeton has no conservative or independent faculty, but it does show how narrow the range of views is on campus.
We'll walk through the findings, compare them with similar studies at Yale and Harvard, and talk about what this lack of viewpoint diversity means for teaching, research, and open debate. We'll also discuss why Princeton's leadership has not addressed the issue, while leaders at peer schools have.
Nicole Goodkind
CNN
Excerpt: Harvard University, like many campuses across America, continues to struggle in its contention with hate speech, protests and unrest over the Israel-Hamas war. One of its most prominent donors said Harvard needs to take urgent action to fix the problem, or it could risk a massive donor exodus.
Billionaire hedge fund CEO Bill Ackman called on Harvard to take steps to tackle a rise in “blatant antisemitism” and “anti-Israel attacks” on campus. Ackman, who received his undergraduate degree and MBA from Harvard, added that the failure to take action would put “important sources of Harvard’s revenues” at risk.
The Trump administration wants to streamline its existing higher education accountability measures with a new earnings test, holding all postsecondary programs to the same standard—regardless of the certification level or institution type involved. But doing so could water down an existing accountability measure for certificates and for-profit programs.
Under a new policy proposal, released by the Department of Education late last week, undergraduate programs would be required to show that on average their graduates earn more than a working adult with a high school degree. Programs that fail to meet those standards for multiple years could lose access to all federal loans.
A group of students and professors at public universities across Alabama are asking an appeals court to halt a state law that bans diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in public schools and prohibits the endorsement of what Republican lawmakers dubbed “divisive concepts” related to race and gender.
The Alabama measure, which took effect in October 2024, is part of a wave of proposals from Republican lawmakers across the country taking aim at DEI programs on college campuses.
Josh Moody
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: Six months into his second term, President Donald Trump has forced changes at many of the nation’s wealthiest universities, some of which have shed hundreds of jobs amid federal funding issues and investigations.
While sector layoffs are so frequent that Inside Higher Ed has dedicated monthly coverage to rounding up such reductions, those actions are more common at small, cash-strapped colleges or state institutions reeling from budget cuts. But universities with multibillion-dollar endowments have been among those making the deepest cuts in the first half of 2025, often driven by freezes on federal funding that the Trump administration imposed with minimal notice.
