Princetonians for Free Speech

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.

“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. 

College competitive debate is not your classroom disagreements or high school suit-and-tie resume-building extracurricular. The Princeton Debate Panel (PDP), Princeton’s intercollegiate debate team, operates under the American Whig-Cliosophic Society (Whig-Clio). Competing with PDP involves weekend tournaments at other campuses, sometimes twice a month, late-night spars twice a week, and reading up on venture capital and other topics alien to a History major. It is time-consuming, nerdy, and fun, which makes it a hotspot for those who debate for the love of the game. Thus, on the surface, college competitive debate markets itself as a neutral ground for the free exchange of ideas and the training site for public speaking. But unfortunately, these principles can become susceptible to debaters’ pre-established views, and that is when the metric of good debating becomes a sliding scale: the more popular an argument is among judges and debaters, the less proof it needs, and the less popular it is, the more it must prove.

On a November Monday in 2016, two weeks after Donald Trump was elected president for the first time, the conservative campus organization Turning Point USA published a list of nearly 200 academics who, according to the site’s stated mission, “discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.”

Today, the infamous website has vanished; professorwatchlist.org instead redirects to Turning Point’s home page. Professor Watchlist may be no more, but academic freedom experts don’t consider it a victory.

It’s no secret that a majority of Americans have lost trust in universities. Survey research from Gallup and Pew points to similar causes, including unfair admissions practices, high tuition costs, limited job opportunities for many graduates and, most importantly, extreme political bias. 

As universities across the country seek to address these concerns, I’d like to make a suggestion: Start at the heart of the matter and fix the political bias first. By doing so, universities can signal their commitment to institutional neutrality and take the lead in decreasing the political polarization that plagues U.S. politics and culture.

A newly published paper finds that colleges were significantly more likely to report terminations of international students’ legal status if they had previously experienced campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war, suggesting, the authors say, that these institutions were targeted for legal action against foreign students.

The paper examines a spring of 2025 crackdown on foreign students, finding that the odds of status revocations were four to eight times greater on campuses that had been protest sites the prior year. The presence of demonstrations, rather than institutional type or political control of a college’s home state, was the strongest predictor of terminations.