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Devon Williams
The Daily Princetonian
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.
There’s not much left of what made Princeton special, is there?
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Faith in higher education continues to plummet, and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)—the nation’s leading organization representing faculty interests and a longstanding voice on academic freedom and university governance—has decided to train its guns on the growing movement to establish civic education centers at public universities. The AAUP’s objections amount to a single, unlovely demand: we get to decide what students learn, and nobody else gets a vote.
Six days after the report went online, the AAA fired back with a full-throated defense. “Anthropologists welcome rigorous critique of the discipline,” wrote its president, Carolyn M. Rouse. “What we cannot accept is a sweeping verdict about anthropology’s intellectual culture, scholarly practices, and professional norms built on selective evidence and issued without consultation.
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.
Doug Hensler '69
June 11, 2026
When an institution or enterprise lowers its standards, a result like this is predictable and inevitable. This goes way beyond Princeton. The degradation of responsibility and accountability and the adoption of relativism (aka, anything goes) in American society is part and parcel to this outcome, the abandonment of an honor system like Princeton’s. Here is an short video made by Harvard’s Dr. Clay Christensen (RIP) that encapsulates a part of that degradation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjntXYDPw44.