Reconsidering External Threats

By Khoa Sands ‘26

The second Trump administration's attack on higher education has reinvigorated conversations around academic freedom. Concerns once relegated to the center and the right have been taken up again by the left with newfound salience. Princeton, thankfully, has managed to escape the worst of the madness, despite some major cuts to research funding. This relatively privileged situation has not stopped Princetonians from debating, discussing, and defending academic freedom at Princeton. 
    
Last April, a roundtable hosted by the Princeton Council on Academic Freedom, a recently launched faculty group, outlined some of the major positions on Trump’s higher education policy. While Princeton has hosted numerous free speech events, this one had a decidedly different tone than the usual programming offered by the James Madison Program or Princetonians for Free Speech. Rather than focusing on internal threats to academic freedom from the University administration or overzealous activist students, many are now more concerned about external threats to the university from the government – a dichotomy that the panelists were eager to point out. 

Professor Anton Ford of the University of Chicago criticized the government’s assault on academia, while noting the novelty of the situation: for the first time, an attack on academic freedom is being conducted in the name of academic freedom. Ford, a professor of philosophy, also criticized the Chicago Principles as an authoritarian prohibition against the free speech rights of professors to engage in political speech and action. What advocates of the Chicago Principles misunderstood, Ford claimed, was that the true threat to academic freedom has always been external to the university. Governments and special interest groups pose a far greater threat to free inquiry than professors, administrators, or students. 

Professor Randall Kennedy of Harvard Law School expressed his support for President Eisgruber’s long-standing “institutional restraint” policy, agreeing that in rare cases, collective action was merited. Why, then, are so many universities suddenly embracing institutional neutrality instead? The answer, Kennedy suggests, is a “fear of politics.” It has been well documented that current times are especially political; politics has encompassed every aspect of civil society and culture. In truth, we are just realizing that it always has, in no small part due to the increasing weaponization of culture and civil society for political ends. With these lines being blurred, it is no surprise that universities fear charging headfirst into the political arena. Universities are rightly realizing that politik compromises wissenschaft. Who can blame them, especially after the chaos of last spring’s protests, and the ascendency of Chris-Rufoism on the right? 

Universities should fear politics, and resist becoming partisan institutions. However, by portraying higher education as politically compromised by the left, the Trump administration has forced universities into a difficult position. Trump’s critiques are not without merit, but his scorched earth approach risks making the worst fears of the right a reality by increasingly driving higher education to the left. Elite universities are small centers of tremendous wealth that pursue objectives often misunderstood by the American public. If we are to receive public funding, universities must justify their existence to the American public, as Professor Keith Whittington pointed out at the same event. Universities exist to further the free exchange of ideas and seek truth – objectives that have tangible benefits for all Americans. But it is not surprising taxpayers balk at funding higher education when they see and hear students advocating anti-American worldviews. A legitimate institution of higher education must preserve its role as a marketplace for the free exchange of ideas. That goal requires attentiveness to internal ideologues as well as external pressures.

Conservatives have long focused on internal threats to academic freedom – speaker shout-downs, student protests, domineering administrators. These threats come from within the university. In the past couple of years, the left has taken up the cause of academic freedom as well. However, they are concerned with external threats – specifically of a right-wing government they view as the second coming of Joseph McCarthy. The hypocrisy is undeniable. The same people who presided over some of the worst violations of academic freedom, at Princeton and elsewhere, now are rebranding themselves as its champions. 

This situation provides established organizations defending academic freedom (including Princetonians for Free Speech) an opportunity to lead. These organizations, which often lean rightwards, can resist the temptations of partisanship and a one-sided focus on internal threats. Leading the fight for academic freedom means standing above partisan hypocrisy, vigilant against internal and external threats to academic freedom. 

Khoa Sands ‘26 is the Editor-in-Chief of the Princeton Tory, President of the Princeton Human Values Forum, and Vice-President of the American Whig-Cliosophic Society.