This call for near unanimity is inconsistent both with the University’s previous divestment decisions and the University’s role as a liberal arts institution. To be a liberal arts institution, as then-President Harold Shapiro GS ’64 wrote in a 1999 article to the Princeton Alumni Weekly, the University “needs to prepare us for an independent and responsible life of choice,” give us “a capacity to make moral and political choices,” and provide us a moral education. Equating consensus with near unanimity and disposing of politically contentious petitions abandons the University’s commitment to this moral education.
The University must resolve this contradiction: Either turn away from moral education and cease to divest at all, or make divestment a component of that moral education, letting go of the notion of complete consensus.
October 30, 2023
Princetonians for Free Speech Joins Amicus Brief asking the US Supreme Court to hear a Bias Response Team Case.
Last month Princetonians for Free Speech joined the Alumni Free Speech Alliance and eight of its members in submitting a “friend of the court” amicus brief to the Supreme Court of the United States. In it we argue that the court should agree to hear the case Speech First v. Sands. The case challenges whether Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University’s Bias Incident Response Team violated students’ first amendment rights through its collecting and storing of records related to students’ expression protected by the First Amendment. PFS’s interest in this case derives directly from the similar bias response system in operation on Princeton’s campus. We believe these systems, which have proliferated at colleges in recent years, serve to chill student expression and promote a climate of fear.
At HxA, we are taking this moment as an opportunity to examine how admissions policies and procedures could contribute to a pluralistic campus environment by recruiting and admitting students from across all spectra of society. Conversely, admissions processes could do the opposite — effectively signaling to students an ideological monoculture and filtering out those who might challenge it. Admissions is a vital lever for creating true academic pluralism.
A district court judge dismissed a Trump administration lawsuit seeking individual applicant records from Harvard on Monday afternoon, finding that the government failed to meet procedural requirements before suing the University.
Judge Myoung J. Joun’s 10-page opinion did not rule on the merits of the records request, leaving open the possibility that the government could bring a new lawsuit if it corrected its procedural missteps.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill agreed not to use or analyze racial data in its admissions process and to adopt race-blind policies for scholarships as part of a settlement with the Trump administration announced Monday.
The agreement with the Education and Justice Departments also requires UNC to hire a coordinator to respond to complaints of antisemitism and provide mandatory antisemitism training to all students, faculty and staff. In addition, UNC can’t partner with any bridge or pipeline program that takes into account a student’s race or ethnicity. In exchange, the Education Department will close its 18 investigations into UNC, and the Justice Department will end a compliance review that began April 18, 2025. UNC is not required to pay anything, as some universities have.
November 28, 2023
To Princetonians for Free Speech subscribers, members and friends,
What a month. The shocking fallout on America’s campuses as a result of the October 7 massacre in Israel has made the mission of PFS more critical than ever. We have attempted to convey the gathering storm around free speech and academic freedom in this, our sixth Monthly Newsletter. We truly welcome your thoughts and feedback HERE.
You may have seen the just-released PFS inaugural Annual Report, recording highlights of an incredible year for PFS, and announcing our priorities going forward. IT’S GIVING TUESDAY! Have a look at the Annual Report HERE and tell us what you think. And consider PFS for your year-end giving HERE. We are extremely grateful for your support and we need you now more than ever!
For the first time since 1893, Princeton students took all of their in-person midterm examinations with proctors present. Following the spring faculty vote that upended the University’s 133-year-old precedent set by the Honor Code, this semester’s examinations marked the official return to mandated proctoring.
The change to proctoring was implemented amid growing concerns over the advancement of generative AI and personal electronic devices and how they can make cheating more accessible and less obvious. Students and professors alike expressed their mixed opinions about this shift and its future implications.
The Department of Defense last week said the 30 institutions it ordered to audit their partnerships with foreign entities of concern have “fully mitigated” those partnerships.
On Monday, Oct. 19, the Pentagon said the audits resulted in more than 80 “termination-related” actions across the 30 universities with institutions on the Section 1286 list of foreign entities of concern, “as well as precautionary terminations involving entities not specifically identified on the list.”
The Department of Homeland Security’s widely criticized rule limiting how long international students can stay in the country won’t take effect Sept. 15 after a federal judge postponed the rule as part of a lawsuit challenging the policy.
Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts wrote in a 48-page order that Trump officials didn’t respond adequately to public comments on the rule or consider alternative options, among other violations of the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs how departments create regulations. The department also failed to show a rational connection between the rule and its purported national security objectives.
AI arrived on campus as a crisis but has since become banal. Students can now do basically all their schoolwork automatically with AI—answering scientific problem sets, writing computer code, and drafting essays. Professors like me have no idea whether we are really teaching or just LARPing for students who are also pretending to occupy their role.
I’ve come to the conclusion that something bigger, stranger, and more damaging has been taking place for a long time. AI has combined with two other recent campus crises—the coronavirus pandemic and the research-funding cuts of the second Trump administration—to amplify a deeper truth: American college is incompatible with itself. Americans speak of “college” as if it is one coherent thing. That’s wrong.
This report presents findings from a national survey of 1,959 law school faculty at 192 American Bar Association (ABA) approved law schools in the United States, conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). As one of the largest surveys of law faculty on free expression and professional norms, the data reveal a profession that strongly endorses free speech principles while struggling to live them out in practice.
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.
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.
The early nineteenth century was a formative era for American higher education, a time when colleges were fragile, small-scale institutions, often caught between their colonial legacies and populist hostility to privileged elites studying the liberal arts.
These tensions came to a head in the case Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, which helped to establish the independence of American higher education from governmental control. At issue was the very nature of a college. Is it a public utility, subject to the demands of the state? Or is it a self-governing institution whose autonomy deserves constitutional protection?
When university researchers started to receive notice last year that the Trump administration was canceling their grants, they often didn’t get a clear explanation why beyond that their project “no longer effectuates agency priorities.”
Among the strengths of America’s higher education sector has been an uncanny ability to change and remake itself in the face of social, economic, political, artistic and intellectual changes—not just superficially and marginally, but significantly and even teleologically.
While the aspirational aesthetics of our universities—a pastiche of the ancient British and European institutions by way of pre-revolutionary New England and the mid-Atlantic—remain largely unchanged over the past century, their activities, outputs, constituencies, and funding sources have changed dramatically. This adaptive ability redounds to the benefit of universities and to the so-called higher education “system” as a whole, ensuring resilience and a (sometimes begrudging) willingness to change in response to internal and external challenges.
Harvard faculty voted to impose a roughly 20 percent cap on A grades beginning in fall 2027, approving the College’s most aggressive attempt in decades to reverse grade inflation and reshape academic standards.
Faculty voted 458 to 201 for the first plank of the three-part proposal, which will limit A grades in undergraduate courses to 20 percent of enrollment, with flexibility for up to four additional A’s. Faculty also approved a companion measure to use average percentile rankings, rather than GPA, to determine internal awards and honors. That measure passed 498 to 157, with 76 percent of participating faculty in favor.
All in-person examinations at Princeton will be proctored starting July 1, representing the most significant change to the honor system since it was established in 1893. The faculty passed a proposal requiring instructor supervision at Monday’s faculty meeting, with one opposing vote.
The historic vote was the culmination of months of deliberation within the administration and student governing bodies about how to address increasing concerns over academic integrity violations, including the proliferation of AI usage. The proposal cleared a full faculty vote as the final of three required rounds of approval, having already been passed unanimously by the Committee on Examinations and Standing and the Faculty Advisory Committee on Policy.
Some 15 years after the No Child Left Behind Act promised to close the racial achievement gap, it looked as if charter schools were making real progress toward that goal. Using data from 2015 to 2019, Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes reported that more than 200 charter networks were closing or even reversing racial disparities in reading, math, or both.
Then, just as the charter sector was posting striking results, many school networks strayed from their commitment to academic excellence. Staff-led demands for social justice convulsed the schools. “Anti-racism” and “equity” displaced effective instruction as their top priority.
Colleges and universities occupy a special place in American life, but when stripped down to their legal studs, they are nothing more than nonprofit corporations incorporated by the laws of the states they sit in.
The University of California at San Diego’s medical school discriminated on the basis of race in admissions decisions over the course of three cycles, the Justice Department claimed this week.
A House Democrat who serves on the education committee plans to launch an effort to impeach Education Secretary Linda McMahon.
Rep. Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon said Wednesday that McMahon violated her oath of office as well as federal law by transferring dozens of programs at the Education Department to other federal agencies without Congress’s consent. Bonamici’s announcement comes after the Trump administration said Tuesday it was shifting civil rights enforcement to the Justice Department and management of special education programs to the Health and Human Services Department.
The National Science Foundation has reversed its recent freeze on new grant funding for Duke, Harvard and Yale Universities, Nature reported. Limitations on new grants for Princeton University, however, remain in effect.
The reversal took place on May 28, one day after Nature published a story detailing a funding pause for all four institutions. An NSF database showed that on April 9 the accounts of the four universities had been marked with a note that said, “Future Awards to Organization on Hold,” Nature reported. As of Thursday, the note had been removed from every account except Princeton’s.
Yesterday, we discussed how UCLA medical school has been accused of racial discrimination in admissions. Now Yale School of Medicine has also been accused of “intentionally select[ing] applicants based on their race” in knowing circumvention of Supreme Court precedent.
The Justice Department announced that “Yale’s documents reveal that they studied how to use racial proxies to circumvent the Supreme Court’s prohibition on using race to select students…admissions data demonstrate that Black and Hispanic students have a much higher chance of admission to Yale than White or Asian students with the same test scores.”
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), AFT Connecticut, Yale AAUP and the national AFT sent a letter to the Yale University Board of Trustees, urging them to reject any negotiated, closed-door settlement with the Trump administration regarding its admissions practices. The coalition warns that making concessions under political pressure would compromise Yale’s academic freedom, shared governance, and institutional independence.
Court rules that Florida professors are not mouthpieces for the government and that the ‘Stop WOKE Act’ violates the First Amendment. Ruling rejects Florida’s attempt to enact a “speech ban on all public college and university professors,” protects academic freedom and free inquiry on campus.
Since faculty voted in may to proctor in-person exams, national news outlets and some alumni have decried the end of Princeton’s 133-year-old tradition of unsupervised testing, but students, faculty, and recent graduates say the conversation within the campus community has been mild.
Each year, the undergraduate college at Harvard awards the Sophia Freund Prize to the graduating senior with the highest GPA. For decades, the prize went to one student, sometimes two if there was a tie. In 2025, there was a 55-way tie. The top students all had a perfect GPA. Hundreds more were nearly perfect. Last year, flat A’s accounted for 66 percent of grades. A’s and A–’s accounted for 84 percent.
Grade inflation is about more than numbers. Putting a perfect GPA in reach of so many students perversely deters them from taking classes that could threaten it. It’s as if students start college with a shiny new car and hope to go four years without a scratch. Who would dare go off-road?
Princeton University’s Board of Trustees is now advising the Council of the Princeton University Community’s Resources Committee to “quickly dispose of petitions” when the potential for consensus is low, and to “avoid becoming a tool for intensifying division,” according to a public statement released by the board on Wednesday. The Resources Committee is a group of faculty, students, and staff that considers proposals for dissociation.
“If dissociation submissions clearly fail the consensus criterion, there is no need to thoroughly examine whether other criteria are met, to burden disputants with establishing a lack of consensus, or to otherwise extend consideration of the petition,” the statement read. Dissociation refers to severing financial relationships with an entity, including refraining from soliciting or accepting gifts or grants and purchasing products from the entity.
Princeton’s austerity program is already well underway. The University calls it a transition “from growth to focus,” but it has meant 5–7 percent cuts to departmental budgets, more than 3 percent of staff positions disappearing through layoffs and unfilled vacancies, and increased employee contributions for benefits such as medical insurance. Fewer people and resources are left to support a recently expanding student body, and more reductions are coming.
In his February letter announcing this “focus,” University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 emphasized Princeton’s financial strength, but pointed to lower expected long-term endowment returns, from 10.2 to 8.0 percent annually, as forcing the University’s response.
Last week I recorded a FedSoc forum with Professor Jesse Merriam at Patrick Henry College. The topic was "No Enemies to the Right? Antisemitism and the Big Tent." Usually, when I do one of these events, I am talking about something newsworthy. But this forum was a bit more personal, as I was the newsworthy event. I discuss my resignation from Heritage, and provide some updates of what has happened since.
More than 1,100 University of California math and science professors are urging UC regents to reinstate college-entrance exams, saying that unprepared students are lowering academic standards and draining teaching resources.
The request, delivered in a two-page letter last week, cites a sharp decline in readiness among students studying science, technology, engineering and math. Nearly one-third of students taking first-semester calculus at UC Berkeley “displayed severe preparation deficits,” the letter said.
Princeton will not have to pay any net investment income tax on returns from its $36.4 billion endowment, a University investment official said at a private event in January, after a recent expansion of its undergraduate financial aid program left the University below a 3,000 tuition-paying student threshold to qualify for taxation.
Experts had projected that the new tax on wealthy university endowments — enacted under H.R. 1, the omnibus tax and spending bill passed by congressional Republicans in July 2025 — would have cost Princeton roughly $180 million annually.
The medical school at the University of California, Los Angeles, allegedly gave preference to Black and Hispanic applicants over the last three admissions cycles, in violation of federal law and a 2023 Supreme Court ruling, the Justice Department said Wednesday as it released the results of a yearlong investigation into the institution.
The findings, outlined in a seven-page letter, mark the first time that the Justice Department has publicly claimed that a university discriminated based on race during the admissions process.
Thus far, Princeton has left decisions on AI use in the classroom to individual faculty members. It is currently weighing a proposal to require proctoring for in-person examinations, a good start if adopted. Should it commit to a broad set of solutions and generate the institutional energy required to implement them, the University would model positive change for educational institutions at all levels.
The fixes are obvious. Yet obvious fixes are often not made thanks to apathy and inertia, resistance to change, torpidity, investment in the status quo, lack of imagination, and defeatism. Meaningful change requires energy and commitment for the long haul, on the part of a sufficiently large number of people.
Attorneys for Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia University student who has become the symbol of the Trump administration’s crusade against pro-Palestinian speech, have petitioned the US Supreme Court to review his case – the final chapter in a months-long legal saga that could determine countless foreign citizens’ ability to challenge their detention by US immigration authorities in federal court.
The public increasingly sees through the righteous image that American higher education wishes to project. Professors and administrators say that they curtail only injurious and hateful speech despite their tendency to equate injurious and hateful speech with conservative opinions. They maintain that they promote diversity, equity, and inclusion to rectify injustice and enhance education and not, as evidence suggests, to reward minorities and women whose thinking conforms to progressive orthodoxy. And they offer an undergraduate curriculum that allows students to fashion a slate of classes that suits their individual needs, tastes, and skills but which – typically lacking a mandatory and coherent core – leaves graduates destitute of that basic knowledge of America, the West, and other civilizations that informs the judgment of responsible citizens.
A federal judge ruled last month that the National Endowment for the Humanities’ (NEH) termination of more than 1,400 grants in April 2025 had violated the Constitution on several counts. Princeton researchers await the effects of the verdict, which ordered that the NEH must rescind its termination notices.
Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 slammed the White House’s bid to politicize the approval of National Institutes of Health research funding as “unprecedented” during a Tuesday Zoom call with alumni.
Asked about threats to the University’s federal funding, Garber appeared to point to an executive order proposed by U.S. President Donald Trump last week that would give a board of political appointees final say over how NIH money is spent. He also seemed to cite an Office of Management and Budget rule proposed earlier this year that would have put senior political appointees in charge of grant disbursement.
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International students’ internship opportunities may soon be significantly limited. Following new guidance from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the University indicated in a Sept. 1 email that Curricular Practical Training will likely no longer be approved for all undergraduate and most graduate students. CPT is a temporary work authorization that allows international students on F-1 visas to pursue off-campus internships.
The new guidelines issued by the Department of Homeland Security do not change the underlying regulation, but instead represent a stricter interpretation of the existing policy compared to previous years.
In January, the new University Recording Policy, which prohibits recording in contexts “when privacy would be reasonably expected,” took effect. That’s news to the Class of 2030, which has no reasonable way to learn about this policy.
That’s because Princeton didn’t publish the policy as part of its Rights, Rules, Responsibilities website, nor was it linked to on the broader University Policy website or on the Community Standards website. And new students were not informed about the policy during any Orientation events.
Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 said Sunday that Harvard’s legal fees are “mind-boggling,” calling them the “price” of defending the University against a barrage of federal investigations and lawsuits.
At a Harvard Hillel event to celebrate the launch of YARID, a new journal of Jewish thought, Garber said that while he does not “speak publicly about this,” the fees are the “the price of defending yourself against all kinds of investigations, lawsuits, congressional investigations, other investigations from the current administration.”
Vice President JD Vance said Thursday that nine universities are under investigation for allegedly abusing the J-1 visa program, which allows noncitizens to temporarily teach, lecture, conduct research or receive graduate medical education, among other options.
The Labor Department is leading the investigation, and at a press conference on visa fraud Thursday, an official said that subpoenas “have been served” to higher ed institutions. The department’s inspector general, Anthony D’Esposito, pledged to “follow the money and uncover the schemes.”
