This report is addressed to university chancellors and presidents who are concerned about the state of academic scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences and who may wish, within their purview, to promote excellent scholarship in these vital fields. The charge to the committee, submitted in August 2025 and formulated by Daniel Diermeier, Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, and Andrew D. Martin, Chancellor of Washington University.
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.
A new episode of the Academic Freedom Podcast has been released. The podcast is sponsored by the Academic Freedom Alliance and the Center for Academic Freedom and Free Speech at Yale Law School.
Hayk Yengibaryan
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: Robert P. George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence in Princeton University’s politics department and the director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, announced in a public Facebook post Monday that he has resigned from the board of trustees of the Heritage Foundation after six years. George’s resignation came amid a weeks-long controversy in the right-wing think tank after its president defended Tucker Carlson’s interview with far-right commentator Nick Fuentes.
George did not respond to requests for comment in time for publication
Admiral Andrew Cunningham once said of the British Royal Navy, “It takes the Navy three years to build a ship. It will take 300 years to build a new tradition.” Gaining trust is harder than breaking it, and public trust, in particular, should not be trifled with. Over the last decade, trust in science, and academia more generally, has eroded substantially, partly if not largely due to internal problems.
Allen is the rare liberal academic who appeals to both Harvard and the American Enterprise Institute. Her willingness to take conservative criticisms of academe seriously has earned her cross-ideological credibility and influence. “I wish we had a lot more scholars like Danielle,” Frederick Hess, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told me. Her ecumenism reflects a core commitment: The university can’t ignore its critics; it must win some of them over.
To do that, she contends, universities will have to change. These changes include encouraging vigorous debate and a greater pluralism on campus, among other institutional transformations aimed at controlling costs, recentering a civic mission, and making admissions less opaque. Such changes will involve giving certain things up.
Dhruv T. Patel and Grace E. Yoon
Harvard Crimson
Excerpt: Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 reaffirmed in a Monday letter that the University would not bow to interference from the Trump administration — even as he suggested Harvard and the government “share common ground.”
In a three-page message addressed to United States Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, who announced one week ago that the Trump administration would no longer issue any grants or contracts to Harvard, Garber defended Harvard’s record on antisemitism and doubled down on the University’s refusal to concede to what he called an unlawful attempt to shape its core values.
The Editorial Board
Wall Street Journal
Excerpt: Columbia University’s decision Friday to bend to the Trump Administration’s governance demands has shocked the academy far and wide, and it is an unprecedented sanction. But perhaps it will also shock our academic elites into recognizing that they have courted this political backlash by too often abandoning their central mission of free inquiry.
Gavin Farinholt
The College Fix
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology made headlines in May when its leaders told faculty to discontinue the practice of requiring mandatory diversity, equity and inclusion statements in faculty hiring.
But a prominent MIT alumni group argues the move is not enough to protect free speech, academic freedom and intellectual diversity, and is calling on campus leaders to go further.
The declaration is a statement of purpose for the research university—a reaffirmation of pathbreaking research, transformative education, and the covenant between universities and the society they serve, grounded in academic freedom, merit and excellence.
Now the administration is back with Compact 2.0, formally titled "A National Call to Action to University Presidents and Governing Boards." It includes some rhetorical flourishes intended to make it seem less threatening to teaching, learning and research. But make no mistake: It once again asks colleges and universities to align themselves with a far-right agenda at the expense of students’ education and the public’s well-being.
Trajan Hammonds
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: A couple of weeks ago, at 1 a.m., I found out the National Science Foundation (NSF) Postdoctoral Fellowship I applied for was being canceled because it did not comply with Trump’s new executive order on federal funding for DEI initiatives. I did what anyone from my generation would do in a moment like this: I took to X to share my experience. It’s clear that the Trump administration’s assault against academia has begun — and ultimately students, researchers, and our country are on the losing end.
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 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.
Excerpt: Imagine walking into your first day of class and finding out that your beliefs have been officially condemned by the academic department offering the course. Pick the hot-button topic: abortion, affirmative action, marriage and sexual morality, transgender identity, Israel—university authorities have publicly decreed that your particular viewpoint is incompatible with the department's values.
Josh Moody
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: House Republicans have accused George Mason University president Gregory Washington of lying to Congress about diversity practices at his institution, ratcheting up pressure on the president to step down.
Washington has denied breaking the law through efforts to diversify GMU’s faculty and staff, telling Congress that the university did not practice illegal discrimination under his leadership.
Eric Kelderman
Chronicle of Higher Education
Excerpt: With federal funding as its leverage, the Trump administration has mounted a sustained campaign to give the federal government greater oversight of higher education. By a wide margin, the public rejects that effort — including the White House’s most recent foray, its proposed “compact” for higher education.
Surina Venkat
The Hill
Excerpt: The nation’s top schools have ramped up their spending on lobbying the federal government this year amid President Trump’s crackdown on higher education, disclosures filed last week show.
Twenty-four top universities and one of the nation’s largest college systems have already spent around $24 million lobbying Washington this year, more than double what they spent during the same time period last year, according to federal disclosures.
Jessica Blake
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: All the pieces of House Republicans’ plan to cut trillions in federal spending are now public, and if the package becomes law, colleges and universities could face crippling repercussions, higher education experts say.
“It is a full-out assault on the ability of students—especially low-income students—to access and afford higher education,” said Jon Fansmith, senior vice president for government relations and national engagement at the American Council on Education. “It will have a dramatically negative impact, not just on higher ed, but on the whole population.”
Josh Moody
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: With the Trump administration taking special aim at higher education, conservative policymakers and college leaders are embracing the opportunity to force a cultural reset across academe.
At a forum Tuesday morning called “Reclaiming the Culture of American Higher Education,” the architects of Project 2025, an official from the U.S. Department of Education and four college presidents cast the sector as ripe for reform. The event offered insights into how conservative thinkers operating the levers of power at the Education Department view the current state of higher education and the need for change.
Maya Stahl
Chronicle of Higher Education
Excerpt: The Trump administration is demanding that Harvard University eliminate all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, reform admissions and hiring practices, and crack down on student discipline “to remain a responsible recipient of federal taxpayer dollars.”
Why Evolution is True
Jerry Coyne
Excerpt: The time has come that many have feared but many will celebrate: DEI (“diversity, equity, and inclusion”) is effectively gone from campuses by federal order.
Since virtually every institution of higher learning depends on some federal funding, this gives colleges the choices of abandoning DEI or abandoning federal money. You know which they’ll prefer. The former, of course, but they’ll try to have both, sometimes by duplicitous practices.
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.
Evan Goldstein and Len Gutkin
Chronicle of Higher Education
Robert P. George, the conservative legal scholar and moral philosopher, has spent the past four decades at Princeton University assiduously cultivating an ever-widening network of influence. For parts of the religious right, he’s an intellectual lodestar on issues including gay marriage, abortion, and stem-cell research. The Catholic journal Crisis once quipped that “if there really is a vast right-wing conspiracy, its leaders probably meet in George’s kitchen.”
Over the course of two interviews — the first conducted from his home and the second from his office on the Princeton campus — George discussed the risk of indoctrination from the left and the right, the need for a more ideologically diverse professoriate, and how academe made itself vulnerable to attack by the Trump administration. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Luke Grippo
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: Nearly two years after tumbling down the steps of Whig Hall and being charged for simple assault and trespassing, seven months after he was found not guilty of the final remaining charge, and two-and-a-half months after he sued the University and Assistant Vice President for Public Safety Kenneth Strother over the incident, David Piegaro ’25 finally has Princeton’s response to his lawsuit: They want to dismiss it.
The response, submitted on Nov. 12 by University lawyer Lawrence S. Lustberg, asks the court for a pre-motion conference in advance of filing a motion to dismiss the complaint or, alternatively, immediate leave to file a motion to dismiss.
Ryne Weiss
FIRE
Excerpt: The first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one. In his new book Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right, Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber reports on FIRE’s data on free speech and First Amendment norms on campus while making no effort to understand it and misusing the data of others. In other words, he’s skipped that first step — and now Princeton is tumbling down the staircase.
On with Kara Swisher
Excerpt: Universities and free speech are at the center of America’s culture wars. And since President Trump took office, higher education has been in the crosshairs — and Princeton University president Christopher Eisgruber is one of the few college leaders speaking out.
In this episode, Kara talks with Eisgruber about his new book, Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right, and the growing attacks on universities, free speech, and academic freedom.
Robby George and Cornel West
FOX News
Excerpt: Union Theological Seminary professor Cornel West and 'Truth Matters' co-author Robert George join 'Fox News Sunday' to discuss the rise in political violence and the importance of civil political debate.
Lily Halbert-Alexander
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: In an otherwise insightful, hopeful, and at times even beautiful, piece in the New Yorker in April, Princeton Professor of History D. Graham Burnett makes one critical error: Compared to the rise of AI, he remarks, the Trump administration’s frightening invasions into university affairs seems like a “sideshow.”
Jia Cheng Shen
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: In his editorial “What is a Princeton degree really for?” written this past spring, Joel Ibabao ’27 treated a Princeton education as a private asset meant to be optimized for one’s own gain. This approach correctly recognizes that “finding oneself” at college can only take precedence over positioning oneself on the job market if financial security is a given.
But these personal considerations — finding yourself or achieving economic security — should not be the only ones. What Ibabao misses is that a Princeton education is aided immensely by the generosity of the University endowment and broader social compact between the federal government and society at large. Those few of us privileged to come out with those elite degrees, thus, are deeply indebted to the public.
