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The Editorial Board
Cornell Daily Sun

Excerpt: College students are losing sight of why democracy matters. At Cornell, where censorship is becoming the norm, it’s no wonder why. When people get robbed of opportunities to participate peacefully in what the late civil rights leader John Lewis called “good trouble, necessary trouble,” that disillusionment quickly alchemizes into rage and disdain.

That’s what makes the University’s Interim Expressive Activity Policy so backward, depraved and ultimately dangerous — it fans those flames of resentment. On Jan. 24, the administration unilaterally implemented a set of draconian guidelines to redefine what acceptable protest on campus looks like.

Eugene Volokh
The Volokh Conspiracy, Reason

Excerpt: This question has been in the news recently, in light of the recent House Committee hearings on "Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism." A few thoughts on my part:

[1.] There's no "advocacy of genocide" exception to the First Amendment, or to the contractual promises of student free speech that many private universities rightly implement.

[2.] Indeed, as I've argued before, it is important that students be free to debate what is proper to do in war, and what wars are just. War involves mass killing, in some wars by the millions. I think some such killing is atrocity and some is just. But different people draw the lines differently, and that is a matter that is quite rightly up for debate.

Dan McLaughlin
National Review

Excerpt: One case that isn’t quite ready to be considered Tuesday, but could intrigue the justices, is Speech First, Inc. v. Sands (No. 23-156), which challenges campus speech codes. The case comes from a divided panel decision of the Fourth Circuit, which rejected challenges to two Virginia Tech campus speech policies.

Virginia Tech has backed off the policy since the suit was filed. FIRE also notes that “time and time again, [it] has seen universities revise unconstitutional policies, only to bring them back when there is employee or state government turnover.” Given the widespread use of such policies and the open circuit split on their legality, it would seem a fit time for the Court to get involved.

Joe Killian
NC Newsline

Excerpt: The UNC System has issued directives to its 17 campuses on how to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court’s June decision on the role of race in admissions. Over five pages, it lays out specific policies for universities and warns against actions and policies not explicitly prohibited by the Supreme Court decision, due to “the high cost of litigation” for those who might sue.

As NC Newsline has reported, legal scholars and critics of the decision have warned threats of lawsuits by conservative activists may intimidate universities into going beyond what is required by the ruling. The UNC System’s directives appear to substantiate those fears.

Lori Rozsa
Washington Post

Excerpt: The Florida State Board of Education approved new rules Wednesday for how Black history will be taught in public schools that critics are decrying as a “step backward.”

The updated standards say students should learn that enslaved people “developed skills” that “could be applied for their personal benefit,” and that in teaching about mob violence against Black residents instructors should note “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”

By Jeremy Bauer-Wolf
Higher Ed Dive

Excerpt: The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday ruled against race-based admissions practices at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, shattering decades of legal precedent and upending the recruitment and enrollment landscape for years to come.

In fact, most colleges don’t rely on race as an admissions factor, as they accept a majority or all of their applicants. Thus, only a small swath of selective higher ed institutions will likely need to remold their admissions policies. But no matter what, when enrollment offices have accounted for race, it was not supposed to be the sole admissions criterion, which court precedent already established as illegal.

Michelle Miao and Nate Howard
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Since Nov. 5, Princeton commentators from across the political spectrum have misrepresented progressive Kamala Harris supporters.

On one hand, columnist Julianna Lee ’25 wrote a well-intentioned but misinformed op-ed characterizing left-leaning students at Princeton in broad strokes as stuck inside the Orange Bubble and unwilling to engage with other perspectives. On the other hand, certain members of the leftist community have spent more time denigrating Democrats than working to fight fascism. On both of these counts, we would like to set the record straight.

Patrick McDonald '26
Campus Reform

Excerpt: Princeton University is offering a new course titled “Gender, Reproduction, and Genocide” that compares the Israel–Hamas conflict to the Holocaust. 

The class is instructed by Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a self-identified “noted Palestinian feminist” who has publicly denied that Hamas killed babies or raped women during the Oct. 7 massacre, according to The Washington Free Beacon.

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.”

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.”

Luke Grippo 
Daily Princetonian 

Excerpt: Political scientist and activist Norman Finkelstein GS ’87 returned to campus on Tuesday to discuss the war in Gaza with history professor Max Weiss. Throughout the talk, Finkelstein addressed the United States’ history with the Middle East from the early 2000s, the United Nations’ complicated history with the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the war in Gaza.

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.

FIRE

Excerpt: The Supreme Court sidestepped deciding whether government pressure on social media platforms violates the First Amendment. But just a few weeks ago, it unanimously reaffirmed a core First Amendment principle: The government can’t censor by private coercion any more than it can by public legislation.

Despite reams of evidence documenting government pressure, the court held today these plaintiffs lacked standing to sue. FIRE is concerned about what this means for future First Amendment plaintiffs. But the majority opinion notes courts have the power to stop government attempts to pressure social media platforms when proven. That’s important.

Vimal Patel
New York Times

Excerpt: The toppling of the University of Pennsylvania’s president, Elizabeth Magill — four days after her testimony before Congress on whether to punish students if they called for genocide — was a victory for those who believe that pro-Palestinian protesters have gone too far in their speech.

For many longtime observers of the campus speech wars, however, this moment is a dire one for freedom of expression.

Hannah Natanson and Susan Svrluga
Washington Post

Excerpt: The resignation of the University of Pennsylvania’s president following her testimony over how to handle calls for the genocide of Jews has highlighted the tightrope school leaders are walking as students protest the war in Gaza — and fueled instant debate over how far colleges can go to restrict speech.

Hope Perry ‘24
Princeton Alumni Weekly

Excerpt: A judge for the United States District Court for Massachusetts issued a temporary restraining order, pausing the Department of Energy’s proposed grant cuts to universities across the country, including Princeton.’’ 

The American Association of Universities — a group that includes Princeton, MIT, and Harvard — filed a suit against the Department of Energy April 15. The temporary restraining order today means that the Department cannot modify or cut funding pending a hearing.

April 15, 2025

John McWhorter, Cornel West & Robert George – Truth, Faith, and Reason in an Age of Division on The Glenn Show

Watch here

Francesca Block
The Free Press

Excerpt: Shilo Brooks is on a mission to teach Ivy League students how to read.

If the trend in academic life for the past few decades has been to skim hundreds of pages per day and then pick apart the past, Brooks wants to do something old-school that feels radical: he wants his students to absorb no more than fifty pages a week and see the big picture. And he’s doing it by bucking another trend: he’s embracing great men (and women).

Keith E. Whittington
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Imagine, if you will, that a relatively small, but passionate and loud — complete with drums, chants, and megaphones — group of Princeton students thought that SPIA should be renamed the Donald J. Trump School of Public and International Affairs and launch new initiatives focused on American greatness. After pressing their demands for many months to no effect, they decide that more direct action would be needed to bring attention to their cause. They march through the hallways of Robertson Hall, take an office, yell out of windows, and drop “Make America Great Again” flags through them, and announce that they will occupy the office until their demands are met.

Darius Gross
Princeton Tory

Excerpt: On Friday, November 3, the Council of the Princeton University Community (CPUC) Committee on Naming held a symposium entitled “Monuments, Memory, and the John Witherspoon Statue.” According to a poster advertising the event, it was held to “explore memorialization, monuments in American art history, and the university campus as a space and a community” in relation to the ongoing debate surrounding a campus statue of John Witherspoon, the University’s sixth president and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. The statue has lately been the subject of controversy, given Witherspoon’s participation in slavery. During the event, many of the invited speakers raised the possibility of removing or replacing the Witherspoon statue, which currently stands in Firestone Plaza.

Victoria Davies and Lia Opperman
Daily Princetonian

Amid the ongoing conflict in Israel and Palestine, political speech has been in the spotlight on campus. University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 spoke with “Bloomberg Markets: The Close” on Oct. 10 about protecting free speech on campus in light of the war. He referenced an orientation module that first-years complete about respecting free speech and engaging in civil dialogue.

VP Rochelle Calhoun, The Office of the Vice President for Campus Life

Excerpt:  Dear students,

I write to update you about the brief takeover of Clio Hall yesterday afternoon.

This incident represented an escalation by protestors into unlawful behavior that created a dangerous situation for protestors, University staff, and law enforcement. As protestors entered Clio Hall, our staff found themselves surrounded, yelled at, threatened, and ultimately ordered out of the building.

Leslie Spencer ‘79
Princeton Alumni Weekly

Excerpt: On Jan. 18, President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 released his “State of the University” letter entitled “Excellence, Inclusivity, and Free Speech.” The core of his remarks defended the course that Princeton has steered in pursuit of excellence and ever-increasing inclusivity through many decades and into these turbulent times.

He added a telling admission: “Promoting both free speech and inclusivity is a challenging task. There are, to be sure, times when we or others will make mistakes. When we do, we should strive to correct them and become better.” Was Eisbruber hinting at mistakes Princeton has made and a desire to find ways to have honest conversations about how to get this right?

John Warner
Academic Freedom on the Line, AAUP

Excerpt: As one of the small number of non-academics among the fellows of the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, I’m continually impressed with how much my fellow fellows from academia know, and how deeply they’ve thought about issues in their areas of expertise. 

As we see in the Q&A below, the present crisis in higher ed has both deep and broad roots, and, in my view, acknowledging and addressing these roots are the only way to move forward toward a system of post-secondary education that is accessible and oriented around the interests of free people in a democratic society.

Dan Mangan 
CNBC

Excerpt: The Trump administration on Monday announced investigations into Harvard University and the Harvard Law Review after a report that the prestigious legal journal was selecting articles for publication based on their authors’ race and not merit.

The announcement comes as the Trump administration and Harvard feud over the administration’s demands that the Ivy League university adopt a series of changes, including dismantling its DEI — diversity, equity, and inclusion — programs, and screening international students for ideological red flags.

Douglas Schleicher
Daily Princetonian 

Excerpt: In thinking about the complex problem of academic freedom, the Princeton community must take care to avoid false dichotomies that could be harmful and restrict free speech. One such dichotomy is the idea that we can have either controversial academic inquiry or allow those impacted by that inquiry to speak up and be heard — but not both. 

In a guest contribution published on Thursday in The Daily Princetonian, Joan Scott falls into this precise trap. While defending the right to host this past Friday’s conference, entitled “The Anti-Zionist Idea: History, Theory, and Politics,” she simultaneously seeks to delegitimize and silence Rabbi Gil Steinlauf ’91 for expressing concern about its framing and impact, suggesting that his advocacy on behalf of Jewish students is somehow a threat to academic freedom rather than an exercise of it.

Hayk Yengibaryan and Christopher Bao
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: In his annual State of the University letter published on Jan. 29, University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 defended the University’s endowment, its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts, and institutional restraint. Though his letter does not, according to him, address the recent orders and policies from the Trump administration targeting universities, much of what Eisgruber wrote addressed attacks on higher education in recent years.

Nicholas Confessore
New York Times Magazine

Excerpt: Leaders of the University of Michigan, one of America’s most prestigious public universities, like to say that their commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion is inseparable from the pursuit of academic excellence. Most students must take at least one class addressing “racial and ethnic intolerance and resulting inequality.” Doctoral students in educational studies must take an “equity lab” and a racial-justice seminar. Computer-science students are quizzed on microaggressions.

When Michigan inaugurated what it now calls D.E.I. 1.0, it intentionally placed itself in the vanguard of a revolution then reshaping American higher education. Around the country, college administrators were rapidly expanding D.E.I., convinced that such programs would help attract and retain a more diverse array of students and faculty.

Academic Freedom Alliance Press Release

Excerpt: The Academic Freedom Alliance today announced the favorable resolution of its case in defense of John Strauss, a professor at the University of Southern California who was accused of harassment by student protestors after he briefly engaged with them at a pro-Palestinian rally on campus. USC dismissed the case against Professor Strauss earlier this month.

Douglas Soule
Tallahassee Democrat

Excerpt: An attorney representing education officials appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis Friday told a federal appeals court that Florida lawmakers, if they so choose, can prohibit professors from criticizing the governor in the classroom.

“In the classroom, the professor’s speech is the government’s speech, and the government can restrict professors on a content-wide basis and restrict them from offering viewpoints that are contrary,” said Charles Cooper of the Cooper & Kirk law firm, responding to a judge posing that scenario.

Jennifer Kabbany
The College Fix

Excerpt: The UNC System Board of Governors on Thursday voted to repeal a five-year-old policy mandating diversity, equity and inclusion offices on each of its 17 campuses, paving the way for diversity jobs to by cut systemwide.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: A reader sent me the tweet below (I don’t spend much time on Twitter), but it intrigued me not so much because University of North Carolina (UNC) system spends millions on DEI (that’s not unusual), but because it reports that its DEI policy may be eliminated across all UNC schools this week.  Note that there are 686 DEI positions in the system, with salaries adding up to over $70 million ($91 million if you include benefits).

Academe Blog

Excerpt: In recent months, trustees, donors, lobbying organizations, and members of Congress have repeatedly misrepresented the words and deeds of Penn faculty and students who have expressed concern for Palestinian civilians and criticized the war in Gaza, going so far as to suggest that faculty who have publicly condemned Hamas were Hamas supporters and that groups protesting genocide were calling for genocide.

These distortions and attacks on our colleagues have not addressed the scourge of antisemitism—a real and grave problem. Instead, they have threatened the ability of faculty and students to research, teach, study, and publicly discuss the history, politics, and cultures of Israel and Palestine. These attacks strike at the heart of the mission of an educational institution: to foster open, critical, and rigorous research and teaching that can produce knowledge for the public good in a democratic society.

Annabelle Timsit
Washington Post

Excerpt: A federal judge in Arkansas temporarily blocked a state law that would have made it a crime for librarians and booksellers to give minors materials deemed “harmful” to them — a move celebrated by free-speech advocates, who had decried the law as a violation of individual liberties.

Section 1 would have made it a criminal offense to knowingly provide a minor with any material deemed “harmful” — a term defined by state law as containing nudity or sexual content, appealing to a “prurient interest in sex,” lacking “serious literary, scientific, medical, artistic, or political value for minors” or deemed “inappropriate for minors” under current community standards.

Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder
Washington Monthly

Excerpt: The Supreme Court’s rejection of affirmative action in college admissions will provoke widespread debate. But not in the classrooms of Florida’s public colleges and universities, because the Stop WOKE Act prohibits it. 

That’s why we were happy to submit an amicus brief last Friday to support the plaintiffs—seven faculty members and a student group—seeking to strike down the Stop WOKE Act. The law is subject to a preliminary injunction, pending appeal from Florida. The federal appeals court for the Eleventh Circuit is expected to rule in the next six months.

Jessica Blake
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Republicans are primed to ratchet up their efforts to hold colleges accountable after securing a majority in the House and Senate.

With President-elect Donald Trump in the White House, the table is set for the GOP to make significant progress on a higher ed wish list that includes granting federal aid to nontraditional programs, increasing taxes on wealthy colleges, cracking down on campus antisemitism and busting the current model for accreditation, experts say.