Your Cart is Empty
Excerpt: Ronen Shoval, a 2022-23 associate research scholar with the James Madison Program and lecturer in politics at Princeton, faced opposition from students, faculty, and locals while on campus due to his affiliations with a right-wing Israeli movement some have said has similarities with fascism.
Shoval founded Zionist nongovernmental organization Im Tirtzu in 2006, though he told PAW via email that he severed ties with the group more than a decade ago. In 2013, a Jerusalem district court ruled the group had characteristics similar to fascist organizations, though in 2015, the nation’s Supreme Court dismissed that ruling.
Oliver Wu
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 spoke about defending free speech on college campuses during a book talk at the new Princeton University Art Museum’s Grand Hall on Wednesday. The event was open to University students, faculty, and staff, but had limited spots. Eisgruber spoke for over half an hour before taking questions from the audience.
Eisgruber noted the tense climate for higher education under the second Trump administration. “American research universities are the best in the world, but today, they face unprecedented and withering attacks from our country’s own government,” he said. “Much of this attack is both unlawful and broadly unpopular.”
By Tal Fortgang ‘17
What is an Ivy League university? The simplicity of the question is deceiving. Everyone knows what Harvard is. Except increasingly, no one does – not the students who attend, and certainly not the administrators who shape the institution, thereby answering that question every day.
Isaac Barsoum
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: On Friday, Nov. 7, 2025, Sunrise Princeton, alongside the Princeton Progressive Coalition, organized a rally of more than 100 demonstrators. We called on the University to act as a leader by defending life-or-death climate research, divesting from weapons manufacturers to end the genocide in Palestine, protecting immigrants and international students, and safeguarding academic freedom in a time when rising authoritarianism threatens progress across the world.
As a lead organizer for this rally, I learned an important lesson: Princeton students care a lot about progressive change, and are willing to publicly display their support because they’re optimistic that their actions can make a difference on a policy level. They just feel like they’re too damn busy.
Seth Akabas '78
August 04, 2023
I can accept that the right to speech is broader than is the right to teach, but even the circumscription of the right to teach should be limited to egregious cases. For example, if Mr. Shoval had uttered such hateful lies as Arab people “harvest organs of” Israelis, have an “unquenchable thirst" for Israeli "blood,” and are “genocidal,” or if Mr. Shoval had denied the facts of the connection of Arab people to lands where they live as “fictional indigenity [sic]”, and justified that denial in overtly racist terms, such as how easily or not people are susceptible to sunburn – as an honoree of the Princeton University English Department in fact said about Jewish Israelis, and had never severed himself from or disavowed those statements, then a circumscription of his right to teach might be appropriate (even while defending his right to speak utter lies and hate). A more than decade old affiliation with an organization, which affiliation has been long severed, however, should not be a grounds for denying the ability to teach.