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Hayk Yengibaryan and Justus Wilhoit
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: In the early hours of Wednesday, Nov. 6, former President Donald Trump officially defeated Vice President Kamala Harris to become the 47th president of the United States. With Harris’s defeat, Princeton students are questioning where this leaves them and the future of America.

Despite a significant majority of Princetonians supporting Harris, the rest of the country experienced an overwhelming red shift. In a New York Times analysis, more than 90 percent of counties with complete voting results shifted toward the former president, indicating a trend of strengthened support for Trump in 2024 compared to 2020.

Valentina Moreno
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: At 1:45 p.m. on July 21, history and public affairs professor Julian Zelizer sat at his desk in his home office, working on his latest books and enjoying a hot Sunday summer afternoon. At 1:46 p.m., President Joe Biden shocked the nation with his Instagram announcement that he would be withdrawing from the presidential race and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate. Before Zelizer could even finish reading Biden’s letter, he was inundated with phone calls from news outlets and radio shows seeking his expert analysis of the situation. With no time to prepare notes, he powered up his computer and addressed the nation live on CNN.

Throughout this close election season, Zelizer and other Princeton professors have been extending their political expertise beyond the classroom, regularly submitting articles for a host of publications.

The Editorial Board
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: Political speakers on campus often face protests from activists who say their presence makes students feel “unsafe.” No such worry for United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, who is going on something of an American campus grand tour with her anti-Israel message.

PEN America Press Release

Excerpt: PEN America today sharply criticized some Republican members of Congress for their recent actions scrutinizing academic decision-making at the Naval Academy, including insinuating that an invitation to scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat to deliver a lecture could violate federal law, which led to the event’s cancellation.

Ted Balaker
The Coddling of the American Mind, Substack

Excerpt: Every time I think the Ivies are completely doomed, a ray of sunshine pierces the darkness. There’s Steven Pinker at Harvard. Randy Wayne
at Cornell, and at Princeton, there’s Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS).

Each has done so much to advance free speech, open inquiry, and viewpoint diversity, and each has been instrumental in bringing The Coddling movie to campus. Pinker, as well as Harvard Undergraduates for Academic Freedom, made our first Ivy League special screening possible. Wayne, along with the Cornell chapter of Heterodox Academy, made our second Ivy League special screening possible. And, along with along with Whig Clio, we have PFS to thank for our third Ivy League special screening.

Sophie Brissett and Isabella Dail
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) organized a rally on Cannon Green to disrupt the second annual Community Care Day (CCD), a day that promotes well-being on campus, on Friday.

Around 60 protesters gathered in East Pyne Courtyard at 5 p.m. before moving to Cannon Green — an area of campus where organized protest is now explicitly prohibited. Despite new signage this semester on Cannon Green that reads, “This space is reserved for officially sanctioned University events and may not be used for other organized activities without permission,” the demonstration was able to continue as planned.

Anemona Hartocollis
New York Times

Excerpt: Maura Finkelstein, an anthropology professor at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, was an avid poster on social media. She called a fund-raiser for the Israeli war effort “students raising money for genocide,” and she frequently ended her posts with the words “Free Palestine.”

Sara Berinhout
FIRE

Excerpt: When the University of Washington encouraged faculty to include a statement in each course syllabus acknowledging that the school sits on land once held by the Coast Salish tribes, computer science professor Stuart Reges decided to express his disagreement.

But when a handful of students and staff complained, the university removed his syllabus from the course website, encouraged students to file complaints against him, siphoned away his students to a newly created second offering of his class to be taught by another professor, and launched a year-long investigation into Reges, an award-winning professor, over allegations that his parody statement was offensive and violated university anti-harassment policy. With FIRE’s help, Reges stood up for his academic freedom.

Sena Chang
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: On Oct. 2, the Princeton University Board of Trustees announced in a letter that John Witherspoon’s statue would remain on campus. The decision came after an extensive review process that began in November 2022 by the Council of the Princeton University Community (CPUC) Committee on Naming.

Abigail Anthony
National Review

Excerpt: In early September, Harvard University announced changes to its “doxing” policies, stating that “doxing occurs . . . when a community member publicly shares an individual’s personal information without their permission with the intention and effect of intense harassment.” Unfortunately, the new guidelines provide yet another avenue to censor speech on campus by establishing a framework for a hypersensitive student to punish a university member who publicly stated what that student had done.

Jacob Wendler, Lily Ogburn, William Tong, and Jerry Wu
Daily Northwestern

Excerpt: For the first time since student protests erupted on campus calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and University divestment from Israel during Spring Quarter, Northwestern President Michael Schill sat down with The Daily for a wide-ranging interview. He reflected on his handling of April’s encampment on Deering Meadow and discussed the University’s path forward.

Keith E. Whittington
Reason Magazine

Excerpt: A health sports instructor at the University of Kansas is out of a job after a video clip of his in-class behavior went viral. The university's statements do not inspire confidence, even though the professor might well have been out of bounds.

Sofia Menemenlis, Jessica Ng, Hellen Wainaina, and Givarra Azhar Abdullah
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: At the CPUC meeting on Sept. 30, Resources Committee Chair Jay Groves announced the establishment of an online portal to solicit “community input” on the divestment proposal, which would remain open for 12 days. With respect to the mechanics of this process, Groves indicated that the Committee did not have specific plans for how it would consider the feedback it was soliciting, nor whether and how it would meet with interested groups.

Setting aside broader questions about the role of “consensus” in situations of social injustice, we write to express our concern with this post-hoc, poorly defined, and inadequately communicated process.

Kali Jerrard
National Association of Scholars

Excerpt: Yesterday marked the one year anniversary of Hamas’ invasion of Israel and in the course of the past year, world politics and higher education have irrevocably changed.

While campus protests began anew this semester and pro-Israel professors face cancelation there is a small glimmer of hope. This past year has refocused the efforts of policymakers to right the ship. Moreover, we have seen what can happen when college administrators show real courage and stand up to the mob. Such examples should be reproduced elsewhere. Our colleges and universities may, after all, find a path back to the principles that once made them world class. Here’s hoping.

Julie Bonette
Princeton Alumni Weekly

Excerpt: The two pro-Palestinian protesters who were arrested on Princeton’s campus for attempting to set up tents in the spring pleaded guilty and received suspended fines on Oct. 1, but Judge John McCarthy III ’69 denied the same deal to the first of the Clio Hall occupiers appearing in Princeton Municipal Court.

Bridget O'Neill
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 shared in an interview with The Daily Princetonian that the University will not consider institutional neutrality. The University administration will maintain the current policy of institutional restraint although Eisgruber expressed plans to issue statements “less frequently.”

M.J. Koch
The Free Press

Excerpt: At The Spence School, a tony all-girls private institution on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Anne Protopappas was larger than life. “Bonjour!” she’d smile to students, wearing her quintessentially French red lipstick with Plato tucked under one arm and croissants in the other to offer her next class.

But in February, she was fired. Unable to find another teaching job, she is suing the school, its trustees, and its two top officials, Head of School Felicia Wilks and Director of Teaching and Learning Eric Zahler. Protopappas’s firing stems from a May 2023 incident that took place in her Advanced French class, which was being taken by eight Spence seniors. Out of the blue, according to the complaint, one student asked, “Why did France ban the hijab?”

Peter Berkowitz
RealClearPolitics

Excerpt: Like all rights-protecting democracies – and especially as a 21st-century great power with globe-spanning interests – the United States requires a host of highly-trained individuals to keep its government functioning, military operating, economy churning, and civil society thriving.

When true to its mission – transmitting knowledge, invigorating the moral imagination, cultivating independent thought, fostering toleration and civility – liberal education serves the public interest by making experts of all sorts more informed, thoughtful, and judicious. When it betrays its mission – indoctrinating, administering political litmus tests, encouraging a haughty self-regard among those who toe the party line, and mocking and punishing dissent – liberal education subverts the public interest.

Bill Hewitt
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: In 1970, Princeton University created the CPUC as a culmination of two years of work by the Special Committee on the Structure of the University. In the preface to its final report, that committee said of the new body: “Both directly and through representatives, more people will participate in decisions on a wider range of issues, and it will be easier to raise issues, to get a hearing, to win the support of others, and to gain access to those formally responsible for making decisions.”

We, the undersigned members of the Princeton University community, earnestly petition for the CPUC to adopt this revised version of its annual “Resolution on the Order of Business” for the 2024-2025 academic year. The reforms proposed here will enable the CPUC to better fulfill its aforementioned founding goals of broad participation in University governance.

FIRE

Excerpt: After Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano sued Oklahoma historian James P. Gregory Jr. for criticizing his academic research, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression is stepping in to defend James’ First Amendment right to question powerful public officials.

James is a museum director and Ph.D. candidate who did nothing more than raise legitimate concerns about the quality of Mastriano’s academic scholarship, engaging in expression squarely protected by the First Amendment.

Laura Spitalniak
Higher Ed Dive

Excerpt: In August, regional AAUP conferences surveyed 2,924 faculty members from twelve Southern states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. Roughly 60% of survey participants hold tenure.

Over half of faculty cited salary concerns and their state’s political climate as factors pushing them to pursue other employment, at 56.5% and 53.3% respectively. And 49.6% cited concerns over academic freedom.

Miriam Waldvogel
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: The 15 students and University community members arrested during pro-Palestine protests last spring will not have their cases dismissed following a hearing on Tuesday.

Aymen Aboushi, an attorney representing the 12 students and one postdoc arrested for occupying Clio Hall, motioned to dismiss the charges of defiant trespassing, which Judge John McCarthy III ’69 ultimately rejected to hear. Citing body camera footage, he argued that the students at Clio Hall did not receive notice from the officers who arrested them that they were trespassing. Under New Jersey law, defiant trespassing occurs when someone enters a space after “knowing that he is not licensed or privileged to do so.”

Greg Lukianoff
The Eternally Radical Idea, Substack

Excerpt: For the fifth consecutive year, FIRE has delivered its annual College Free Speech Rankings. This year, we paired the largest survey of college student attitudes on free expression ever conducted (almost 59,000 students surveyed!) with the most comprehensive databases ever collected of deplatforming attempts, professor cancellation attempts, student cancellation attempts (full database forthcoming, but the incidents used in the rankings calculation are on our website), and speech codes ever collected.  

The full report is well worth reading. But to prime you for it, here are five key takeaways that show how colleges have moved around, explore why that might be, and highlight what students need to work on most.

Bill Frezza
Heterodox STEM, Substack

Excerpt: I recently had the pleasure of serving as one of the judges for a high school debate program called Incubate Debate held at the New College of Florida. It also included an evening speaking to and with the students involved, who ranged in age from 12 to 18. They had spent an entire week in this residential program training for the big event, learning how to research and debate complex and controversial issues with vigor, clarity, and civility.

I was shocked by how outspoken, courageous, courteous, studious, poised, well-informed, attentive, and totally uninfected by the Woke Mind Virus these kids were. It gives me fresh hope for the next generation.

Olivia Sanchez
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: On Sept. 5, the University retracted its decision to ban protests on the front lawn of Nassau Hall. Cannon Green and the Prospect House grounds remain off-limits locations to protest.
According to University spokesperson Jennifer Morrill, the change was made because the walkways in front of Nassau Hall “have long been an approved protest site.”

Sara Weissman
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: University of Austin, a new higher ed institution founded by high-profile conservative figures, officially welcomed its inaugural class on Monday.

The university, sometimes referred to as UATX, markets itself as an institution born out of alarm over the “rising tide of illiberalism and censoriousness prevalent in America’s universities” and says it is committed to “the pursuit of truth.”

Olivia Sanchez
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: The first Princeton class admitted following the Supreme Court decision banning race-conscious affirmative action has experienced little change in racial diversity, according to enrollment statistics released by the University on Wednesday.

In an emailed statement to The Daily Princetonian regarding how the numbers managed to stay stable, University spokesperson Jennifer Morrill wrote, “We can’t speak to the admissions processes of other institutions, either before or after the Court’s ruling. At Princeton, we are adhering to the limits set by the ruling and continuing to use a holistic admission process that involves a highly individualized assessment of the applicant's talents, achievements and his or her potential to contribute to learning at Princeton.”

Judah Guggenheim
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: In Princeton Israeli Apartheid Divest (PIAD)’s 66-page proposal for divestment, there is not a single mention of Hamas, unless you count the titles of articles in the footnotes (which I don’t). The proposal references “Israel’s response,” but never explicitly mentions the horror of the Oct. 7 attacks that Israel is responding to or the fact that the terrorists who carried them out are deliberately hiding in places of worship, schools, and private homes. Israel is currently fighting a war against a terrorist organization that indiscriminately killed, raped, tortured, and kidnapped over 1400 people of many nationalities. That sentence should break your heart.

But the PIAD proposal gives no indication as to how boycotting or divesting from Israel will lead to a better future for Palestinians, because it never addresses what that future will actually look like.

Douglas Belkin
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: Jewish students at Columbia University were threatened, attacked, shunned and harassed on campus last school year, and many faculty refused to believe their complaints or act to stop the problem, a new report said.

Conor Friedersdorf
The Atlantic

Excerpt: Stanford found anti-Semitism to be “widespread.” Harvard reported that Jews and Israelis faced “shunning, harassment, and intimidation.” Columbia found that they “have been the object of racist epithets and graffiti, anti-Semitic tropes, and confrontational and unwelcome questions.” All of the task forces explored how to protect Jews from discrimination, harassment, and barriers to educational access, while also honoring commitments to free speech. Most schools urged expanding diversity, equity, and inclusion frameworks to encompass and benefit Jews.

But Stanford rejected that approach, arguing that DEI is itself “fundamentally flawed.” Instead, its task force recommended treating all students equally and helping them to forge a culture that encourages constructive disagreement. Alone among the reports, the Stanford recommendations offer its campus and other institutions that heed its advice a path to a better future.

Annie Rupertus
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Nassau Hall has long been an iconic location for campus protests.

Princeton’s website on systemic racism uses an archival photo of a student protester in front of Nassau Hall as the cover image for its page celebrating campus activism. The building has served as the site of numerous protests that successfully spurred change at the University on issues such as racism, ethnic studies, the Vietnam War, Title IX reform, and more.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: I think there’s little doubt that the pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel protests will once again roil colleges campuses this coming academic year.  As protestors vow that they’ll continue their activities, legal or not, and as Israel continues to root Hamas out of Gaza, I fully expect more trouble come this fall.

George Leef
James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

Excerpt: Norman Wang is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), where he has been on the faculty since 2008, specializing in cardiology. His troubles at the school began in March 2020, after he published an article in the Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA) entitled “Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity: Evolving Race and Ethnicity Considerations for the Cardiology Workforce in the U.S. from 1969 to 2019.”

Shortly after the publication of Wang’s article, it came under attack from Twitter users, who denounced it as “racist.” In July 2020, UPMC officials who had been alerted to Wang’s heresies by the Twitter mob sprang into action against him. On July 31, they summoned him to a meeting with Dr. Samir Saba, chief of UPMC’s cardiology division, and Dr. Kathryn Berlacher, another faculty member, to discuss the article. Wang said that he stood firmly behind it. That could not be tolerated.

Susan Svrluga
Washington Post

Excerpt: Columbia University is bracing for disruptive protests to resume as students arrive on campus this week, even as some hold out hope that the new administration will be able to broker peace. The days before the start of classes have been marked by restricted campus access, talk of giving campus security officers more clout and last-minute discussions about rules.

Many faculty, students and others have said they expect protests over the Israel-Gaza war to erupt with equal or greater intensity and predicted another chaotic year ahead.

The Editorial Board
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: Another day, another Biden Administration regulation, and another loss in federal court. This time it’s the Education Department’s 1,577-page rule on Title IX, the law that prohibits sex discrimination. The Supreme Court on Friday upheld lower judges who stayed the regulation and, despite quibbles by four Justices, all nine seem to believe the rule is an overreach.

Bret Stephens
New York Times

Excerpt: As college students return to campus, this is what I hope a university president might say to them about how their school intends to handle future protests.

Josh Moody
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: When Columbia University President Minouche Shafik resigned abruptly on Wednesday, she became the third campus leader since December to step down amid Congressional pressure over how they handled sprawling student protests tied to the war between Israel and Hamas.

Abigail Anthony
National Review

Excerpt: Civil disorder is rife in the United Kingdom. Axel Muganwa Rudakubana, a 17-year-old born in the United Kingdom to Christian immigrants from Rwanda, killed three young girls and injured others in a knife attack at a dance class on July 29. However, his name was initially undisclosed to the public because he was under 18, which led to speculation that he was a Muslim immigrant or an asylum-seeker. This speculation sparked violent riots against immigration and similarly intense counter-protests nationwide. Now, over 1,000 people have been arrested in relation to the riots, with charges ranging from violent disorder to other, speech-related offenses.

Jonathan Turley
Jonathan Turley's Blog

Excerpt: Eighty years ago, the U.S. government launched a war bond campaign featuring a painting by artist Norman Rockwell in the struggle against the authoritarian threat from Europe. The picture they chose was Rockwell’s Freedom of Speech depicting a man rising to speak his mind at a local council meeting in Vermont. The image rallied the nation around what Louis Brandeis called our “indispensable right.”

Alyssa Lukpat
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: A federal judge ruled the University of California, Los Angeles, must ensure equal access to campus for Jewish students after some alleged in a lawsuit they were blocked by protesters at this spring’s pro-Palestinian encampments.

Hans Bader
Minding the Campus

Excerpt: If a university is ordered by the government to investigate each instance of speech that is bigoted to determine if it cumulatively contributed to a “hostile environment” for some minority group, it will have a powerful incentive to adopt a “zero tolerance” policy for offensive speech, to avoid the time and expense of constant investigations, and avoid potential liability for a “hostile environment.” That’s true even if the speech is political or religious, such as advocating the elimination of Israel or Palestinian self-rule or questioning Jewish, Arab, or Middle Eastern practices.

Yet, that burdensome duty to censor is more or less what the Biden administration told universities to do in recent Title VI and Title IX investigations, such as in a press release about an investigation of Drexel University for anti-Semitism, and an accompanying letter resolving the Title VI investigation.

Paul Larkin
Heritage Foundation

Excerpt: The text of the Constitution prohibits the adoption of a religious qualification as a prerequisite for holding federal office, and the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause bars the federal or state governments from denying anyone the ability to adopt whatever religious beliefs he or she chooses to treat as sacred.

But culture can be upstream or downstream of the law. In the case of antisemitism, American society did not extirpate it; it merely drove antisemitism underground, where it lay in wait for a chance to return. Sadly, it is back, as the events on America’s campuses have proved in the months since Hamas launched its brutal, murderous, and savage attack on Israel and its people on October 7, 2023.

Bret Stephens
New York Times

Excerpt: On its face, there’s nothing necessarily political about the mantra that the customer is always right. It can buck up the patience of an exasperated shopkeeper dealing with a finicky patron or push complacent manufacturers to think harder about evolving consumer tastes. It fosters a service culture that, as visitors to the United States often remark, is notable for its niceness.

Rexton Laird
FIRE

Excerpt: Ahead of what could be another tumultuous year for free expression on college campuses, forthcoming FIRE/College Pulse survey data shows just a fraction of undergrads have a solid understanding of their own campus’s protest policies.

Conducted near the end of the Israeli-Palestinian campus protests, between May 17 and June 25, 2024, the survey sampled 3,803 undergraduates at 30 four-year colleges and universities in the U.S. Asked how aware they are of their college’s written speech policies on campus protest, almost half of students surveyed said they are either “not aware at all” (19%) or “not very aware” (29%). Only 19% of students — less than a fifth — responded they are “extremely” (6%) or “very”(13%) aware of the relevant policies.

Aaron Sibarium
Washington Free Beacon

Excerpt: Princeton University is on the verge of promoting a professor who participated in the occupation of a campus building that disrupted university operations and led to more than a dozen arrests, according to an email reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

The university has recommended that the classics scholar Dan-el Padilla Peralta, who along with 13 anti-Israel student protesters stormed Princeton’s historic Clio Hall in April, be promoted from associate to full professor, pending the approval of the university’s board of trustees. Peralta already has tenure, but the promotion would make him eligible for university leadership roles, including deanships.

Thomas Catalano
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Regan Crotty ’00 will serve as Princeton’s new dean of undergraduate students, according to a University announcement made July 15. Crotty will now lead the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students (ODUS), which is responsible for co-curricular and extracurricular aspects of student life.

Crotty brings to the role a decade of experience serving in various capacities at the University. After graduating from Princeton in 2000, she went on to earn her law degree from the University of Chicago Law School before returning to Princeton as an ODUS investigator, responsible for investigating alleged violations of University policy. Following that role, she was Interim Executive Director for Planning Administration in the Office of Vice President for Campus Life (VPCL) where she managed travel oversight, supervised ROTC and Outdoor Action, and represented the VPCL on various committees.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: In the summer of 2022, Florida newspapers reported on the strange appearance of $3 million in one-time funds from Florida’s GOP-controlled state Legislature for something called the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civics Education at the University of Florida. The university said it hadn’t asked for this new entity.

Two years later, this center—backed by Florida governor Ron DeSantis and now embraced by university officials—is rapidly expanding to become a UF college. But the center has remained beset with controversy, from its murky origins to university investigations of its alleged faculty opponents to a summer Faculty Senate approval of its degrees that left some professors feeling “railroaded.”

Greg Lukianoff
The Eternally Radical Idea, Substack

Excerpt: the line between these two sides of the argument can’t be so clear-cut, can it? Surely, at least some of the people who argue that words are violence have in fact been punched in the face. So why would they make the argument anyway?

I fear the answer is simple: It's a tactical advantage when facing any speaker you hate. Equating words and violence is a rhetorical escalation designed to protect an all-too-human preference which Nat Hentoff, a dearly departed friend and a great defender of freedom of speech in the 20th century, used to call “Free speech for me, but not for thee.”