Edward Yingling & Stuart Taylor, Jr. [PFS Secretary-Treasurer and President]
Excerpt: Free speech is very much in today’s headlines, especially with the outraged demands for technology companies to banish -- or not -- from their platforms speech they consider incitements to violence or hateful. But the greater danger may be the hostility within our colleges and universities to the free speech and academic freedom of faculty and students, and even alumni, who dissent from the views dominant on campuses today. Surveys show that a high, and growing, number of college students are opposed to free speech and to what the Supreme Court has called the “profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.” As Princeton alumni and lawyers who have a strong belief in the vital importance of free speech, we have recently co-founded Princetonians for Free Speech. We have started by appealing mainly to alumni because they are the only university stakeholders who have the numbers and the capability to defend these basic freedoms effectively in campus environments where students and faculty who openly support free speech are outnumbered and outgunned by those who oppose it. But we hope to find allies among faculty and students as well.
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by Stuart Taylor Jr. & Edward Yingling
National Review
Excerpt: Princeton University is tiptoeing toward canceling its greatest president and a founder of our nation in a process that its trustees and president Christopher Eisgruber accelerated on October 2 by announcing that they would leave the statue of John Witherspoon in its prominent place on Firestone Plaza — but probably only for now. The issue has been punted to the “Campus Art Steering Committee” to decide whether the statue should be moved, or removed.
by Zeke Douglas Rosenthal, Edward Yingling, and Wyatt Browne
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: On Wednesday, in response to a wave of national campus encampments in response to the war in Gaza, Vice President for Campus Life W. Rochelle Calhoun wrote in an email to the student body that “any individual involved in an encampment, occupation, or other unlawful disruptive conduct who refuses to stop after a warning will be arrested and immediately barred from campus.”
Leslie Spencer ‘79
Princeton Alumni Weekly
Excerpt: On Jan. 18, President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 released his “State of the University” letter entitled “Excellence, Inclusivity, and Free Speech.” The core of his remarks defended the course that Princeton has steered in pursuit of excellence and ever-increasing inclusivity through many decades and into these turbulent times.