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Annabel Green '26
Before declaring my major in the School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), I had considered many majors such as classics, history, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. I settled on SPIA because it offers a disciplinary breadth through which I can narrow down my tentative interests.
Early into the major, I was sympathetic to the political orthodoxy through which many Princetonians operate which I would summarize as characterized by critical theory (i.e. neo-Marxist concepts of group identity and power struggle). However, I soon found myself increasingly in misalignment with the prevailing narrative and the deep grievance and resentment my fellow classmates seemed to feel toward the current state of the country.
A change of heart, catalyzed by an internal wrestling with progressive ideology, began to take shape during my Sophomore year. I increasingly sought out the views of economists and intellectuals who aligned with conservative and classical liberal values. While I consider myself as naturally hesitant and unsure of myself, I found conviction through these endeavors. Although I was raised an atheist, I became convinced by arguments which described the destructiveness of New Atheism and of postmodernism; characterized by nihilism, moral relativism, and the repudiation of any claims of objectivity and of non-negotiable ultimacy (i.e. God).
My ideological transformation was made available to me through the freedom of discourse both online and amongst friends and family. Particularly, I deeply value the authentic conversations in which I engage with my twin sister, a student at Cornell.
The freedom of speech has been mistakenly reduced to the prerogative to speak without fear of censorship or retaliation, and while it very much is this, the freedom of speech is something more essential. The freedom of speech precedes and succeeds the freedom of conscience. Both of these freedoms are integral to the integrity and development of the individual. We must be allowed to question not only the arguments with which we are presented but also the premises and assumptions which underlie those very arguments.
Wrestling with ideas is a toilsome endeavor that is messy and not without flaws. Yet there is a great and important wound that forms when you humbly accept your former ignorance and hubris. The freedom of speech is vital for the improvement of ideas, because ideas need to withstand criticism, opposition, and the unrelenting test of time. In On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill wisely remarked:
"He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion."
Annabel Green ’26 is a Public and International Affairs major, and a member of the Global Health Program at Princeton. She hails from Boulder, Colorado. She is a PFS Writing Fellow.
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Prestigious universities and leading state schools across the nation have embraced viewpoint diversity by building new institutions—civic education centers and the like—which are simultaneously on yet apart from the campus. Harvard has quietly taken a different tack. Over the past several months, the university’s top brass have been asking major donors for $10 million gifts to endow new professorships under the banner of “viewpoint diversity.” Provost John Manning, a scholar often associated with the conservative legal movement, has led the effort, aiming to place between 20 and 30 new faculty across schools and departments rather than siloed in a standalone institute.
Why Harvard would need additional funding for this is an open question, but putting that partly aside, we ought to ask what to make of this unique initiative. It stands a chance of being either the most consequential reform attempt in elite higher education this decade, or a sophisticated piece of reputation management serving double duty as a clever fundraiser. Which one it turns out to be depends on whether Harvard has thought carefully about what viewpoint diversity means, and whether it intends to execute in line with a considered answer.
Are some schools better at fostering intellectual diversity than others? The study clearly reveals that the most elite universities are among those with the least ideological diversity. Princeton is ranked 13 out of the 55 in the study, with its faculty slightly more ideologically diverse than, for instance, UC Berkeley, Brown, Dartmouth and Harvard, and slightly less diverse than Stanford, Cornell, UCLA or Georgetown.
There is little doubt that this study provides another opening for politicians and critics to attack higher education, perhaps in unfair ways. Princeton could help neutralize this by joining those reform-minded university leaders in the now burgeoning effort to regain the public’s trust in higher education.
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.
