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David Montgomery ‘83
Princeton Alumni Weekly
Excerpt: For the first time in memory, Princeton is inviting alumni, faculty, students, and allies to lend their voices to a broad campaign of political advocacy and public affirmation in response to the Trump administration’s unprecedented attacks on research funding and academic freedom in American higher education. “To my knowledge, this is a new kind of initiative for the University,” President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 told PAW in an early May interview about the campaign, which is called “Stand Up for Princeton and Higher Education.”
Seth Mandel
Commentary
Excerpt: David Piegaro fell down the stairs outside a Princeton University building and rolled painfully to the bottom. That’s when he was handcuffed and put under arrest for aggravated assault. The supposed victim was Kenneth Strother, the university’s head of security—who had, according to video of the incident and witness testimony—caused Piegaro to fall down those stairs. Strother was unharmed. Piegaro faced jail time.
On Tuesday, Piegaro was acquitted. On Thursday, Princeton revealed it still had some salt to pour into Piegaro’s wounds. The university honored Strother with its President’s Achievement Award for his “commitment to excellence and exceptional performance.”
David French
New York Times
Excerpt: On Monday, Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, sent the dean of Georgetown University Law Center, a Catholic law school, a letter that said, “It has come to my attention reliably that Georgetown Law School continues to teach and promote D.E.I. This is unacceptable.”
Martin said that he’d begun an “inquiry” into the school and demanded to know whether it had eliminated all D.E.I. — which he does not define, but in right-wing circles tends to refer to any action at all designed to increase diversity or honor historically marginalized people — from the school and its curriculum. He also asked, “If D.E.I. is found in your courses or teaching in any way, will you move swiftly to remove it?”
FIRE
Excerpt: The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression agreed to drop its First Amendment lawsuit against Chappaqua Central School District after the district’s board of education adopted a robust First Amendment regulation that will protect the constitutional free speech rights of its students.
FIRE sued the district in 2024 on behalf of O.J., an LGBTQ+ student suspended for violating the district’s “hate speech” definition in its code of conduct because he used the words “faggot” and “twink” in a rap song recorded in his friend’s home after school.
Tom Nichols
The Atlantic
Excerpt: Seven years ago, Pauline Shanks Kaurin left a good job as a tenured professor at a university, uprooted her family, and moved across the country to teach military ethics at the Naval War College, in Newport, Rhode Island. She did so, she told me, not only to help educate American military officers, but with a promise from the institution that she would have “the academic freedom to do my job.”
But now she’s leaving her position and the institution because orders from President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, she said, have made staying both morally and practically untenable.
Christopher F. Rufo, Ryan Thorpe
City Journal
Excerpt: In recent months, Ivy League universities have changed their tune on “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Under pressure from President Trump, these institutions have renamed DEI departments, scuttled unpopular programs, and assured the administration that they are following the law. As Cornell president Michael Kotlikoff explained in February: “Just as we do not exclude anyone at Cornell for reasons irrelevant to merit, neither do we . . . hire or promote employees, award chairs or tenure, or make any other merit-driven decisions at Cornell based on race, ethnicity, or other attributes.”
Kotlikoff’s statement was unequivocal, but according to a trove of internal documents we have obtained, it was also untrue.
Akela Lacy
The Intercept
Excerpt: Harvard Divinity School broke precedent by refusing to publish a video of its commencement speech after a speaker went off-script to call attention to the perilous conditions in Gaza, The Intercept has learned.
Dan Mangan
CNBC
Excerpt: The U.S. Department of Education said Wednesday that Columbia University has failed to meet the standards for accreditation because the Ivy League school “is in violation of federal antidiscrimination laws” for allegedly tolerating harassment of Jewish students on campus.
The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights notified the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, an accrediting institution that Columbia belongs to, of the alleged violation. The department noted that by federal regulations, “accreditors are required to notify any member institution about a federal noncompliance finding and establish a plan to come into compliance.”
Exponent Summer Staff
The Exponent
Excerpt: About 3:15 p.m. Friday, Purdue sent an email to The Purdue Exponent stating the university will no longer facilitate distribution of the papers on campus.
According to the email sent by Purdue’s Office of Legal Counsel, the university cited the end of a licensing contract from 2014, albeit the university and The Exponent operated under that agreement for 11 years since its expiration. The university also cited its policy on institutional neutrality, which had been updated in June 2024. The Exponent will still continue to publish and print its newspaper.
Sarah Viren
New York Times
Excerpt: In January 2024, Maura Finkelstein finished teaching her first classes of the semester, unaware they would be her last as a professor. This was on a Wednesday at Muhlenberg College, a campus stippled with red doors meant to represent both hospitality and the college’s Lutheran roots.
It made sense. For months, students, alumni and strangers had been complaining about Finkelstein. They started a Change.org petition the previous fall, demanding that she be fired for “dangerous pro-Hamas rhetoric” and “blatant classroom bias against Jewish students.” As evidence, the petition, and its 8,000 signers, had offered up screenshots of Finkelstein’s posts: a photo of her, on Oct. 12, in a kaffiyeh, a kaffiyeh-patterned face mask and a tank top that read “Anti-Zionist Vibes Only.”
Jonah Valdez
The Intercept
Excerpt: In March, a group of scholars filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration to block the government from detaining and deporting students and professors for speaking out about Palestine.
Now, as the case heads to trial in Massachusetts federal court in July, those professors and students worry they may be targeted by immigration officials for speaking out in the courtroom on the witness stand.
Robert Pondiscio
American Enterprise Institute
Excerpt: The conservative education watchdog group Defending Education has done important and often brave work exposing ideological overreach in K–12 schools. I’ve cited their reports and findings many times and consider them friends and compatriots, so I don’t say this lightly: they’ve badly misfired with their new report, Consultants in the Classroom: Making Big Money in K–12 Schools. So badly, in fact, that they should withdraw the report and issue a correction and apology.
Thomas Chatterton Williams
The Atlantic
Excerpt: President Donald Trump’s assault on what he broadly calls DEI has been slapdash and sadistic. That doesn’t mean the system under attack should be maintained. Racial preferencing in university admissions as well as in employment and government contracting—more commonly understood as affirmative action—might once have been necessary, but long ago became glaringly unfair in practice.
Affirmative action in college admissions continues—despite being banned by the Supreme Court in 2023—through the use of personal essays, interviews, and other proxy mechanisms. It continues in businesses’ hirings and promotions. It’s possible to believe two truths simultaneously: Judging individuals by race instead of merit has to end, in no small part because it hurts the very people it is supposed to uplift; and Trump’s approach to ending it is harmful.
Johanna Alonso
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: The Trump administration is planning to implement a policy that would require all student visa applicants to undergo social media vetting, according to a cable sent by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Politico reported Tuesday. All new student visa interviews have been paused in preparation for the new policy.
“The Department is conducting a review of existing operations and process for screening and vetting of student and exchange visitor (F, M, J) visa applicants, and based on that review, plans to issue guidance on expanded social media vetting for all such applicants,” the memo reads, according to a copy published in full on social media by independent journalist Marisa Kabas.
Steven Pinker
New York Times
Excerpt: I’m hardly an apologist for my employer when I say that the invective now being aimed at Harvard has become unhinged. According to its critics, Harvard is a “national disgrace,” a “woke madrasa,” a “Maoist indoctrination camp,” a “ship of fools,” a “bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment,” a “cesspool of extremist riots” and an “Islamist outpost” in which the “dominant view on campus” is “destroy the Jews, and you’ve destroyed the root of Western civilization.”
Harvard is an intricate system that developed over centuries and constantly has to grapple with competing and unexpected challenges. The appropriate treatment (as with other imperfect institutions) is to diagnose which parts need which remedies, not to cut its carotid and watch it bleed out.
Keith Whittington, Cass Sunstein
Academic Freedom Podcast, Academic Freedom Alliance
Excerpt: Keith Whittington interviews Cass Sunstein, the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School, whose scholarly interests include free speech, constitutional law, and administrative law. He recently authored a paper, “Our Money or Your Life!’ Higher Education and the First Amendment,” available here, which explores the First Amendment constraints of federal funding to American universities. Sunstein helps unpack the legal and constitutional questions raised by the Trump administration's strategy of withholding federal grants from schools like Columbia and Harvard to force internal policy reforms.
Tal Fortgang of the Manhattan Institute
Fox News
Excerpt: With the Trump administration threatening to cut off its federal support, Harvard recently released its long-awaited internal report detailing rampant national-origin discrimination on campus – especially against Israelis and Jews. The administration claims that Harvard is rotten to the bone, hollowed out by ideological one-sidedness and an emphasis on social-justice activism rather than genuine inquiry. The university has countered that while it is working on rooting out discrimination, the administration has "overreached" to target the substance of what is studied and taught.
Daniel J. Solomon
Chronicle of Higher Education
Excerpt: Ever since the change of administration in Washington, campus conservatives have been snared in a novel predicament. Once academe’s outcasts and eccentrics, those on the right now elicit suspicion and rage. Our cries against the left’s capture of the humanities have risen to the ears of the White House, and the Department of Education has put an ultimatum to the universities: acquiesce to state interference in curriculum, hiring, and internal governance, or lose billions in federal funding.
Jake Offenhartz
Associated Press
Excerpt: New York University said it would deny a diploma to a student who used a graduation speech to condemn Israel’s attacks on Palestinians and what he described as U.S. “complicity in this genocide.”
Logan Rozos’s speech Wednesday for graduating students of NYU’s Gallatin School sparked waves of condemnation from pro-Israel groups, who demanded the university take aggressive disciplinary action against him.
Christa Dutton
Chronicle of Higher Education
Excerpt: Pro-Palestinian protests at three colleges in the past several days led to more than 100 arrests for trespassing or destruction of property. Several students were also suspended for violating their college’s policies and protest restrictions.
The mass arrests at Columbia University, Swarthmore College, and the University of Washington may signal a shift in how college leaders are responding to protests, experts say. Since last spring’s widespread protests over the war in Gaza, college leaders have drawn fierce criticism for being too slow to dismantle disruptive encampments or call in police to arrest those violating the law. Now, they’re eager to show federal authorities that they’re serious about stopping antisemitism and unruly protests.
Solveig Lucia Gold
City Journal
Excerpt: All eyes are on the Ivy League as the Trump administration takes on the universities that have most conspicuously accepted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars while flagrantly violating civil rights law. Though Columbia has capitulated in part to the administration’s demands, it remains to be seen what effect Trump’s demands will have on other Ivies’ policies. In fact, we may not know for years, since the handful that can afford to resist (Harvard, Princeton) will not go down without long, drawn-out legal fights.
Graham Parsons, professor philosophy at the USMA at West Point
New York Times
Excerpt: It turned out to be easy to undermine West Point. All it took was an executive order from President Trump and a memo from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth dictating what could and couldn’t be taught in the military and its educational institutions.
Nick Gillespie
Reason
Excerpt: Today's guest is Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. Pinker and Reason's Nick Gillespie discuss recent shifts at Harvard toward greater institutional neutrality and free speech, while warning that threats to academic freedom now come from both internal ideologies and external political forces—including pressure from the federal government under President Donald Trump.
Bill Hewitt
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: I write as a concerned alum with a long Princeton memory to openly and ardently oppose a dangerous proposal to amend the Council of the Princeton University Community Charter. University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 charged the Committee on Rights and Rules to “review the role and procedures of the Judicial Committee.” Their ensuing recommendation would strip the CPUC Judicial Committee of its jurisdiction to hear and decide initial complaints of serious University rule violations, as well as severely curtail the right of appeal of University community members at large.
Katherine Mangan
Chronicle of Higher Education
Excerpt: Four years ago, the University of Virginia Board of Visitors endorsed a call to double the number of underrepresented faculty by 2030 and to develop a plan for building a student population that better reflected the state’s racial and socioeconomic diversity. The university’s president, James E. Ryan, said the move signaled that “becoming a more diverse, equitable place is both the right and the smart thing to do.”
On Tuesday, the board voted unanimously to rescind any such numerical goals as part of a sweeping effort to wipe out evidence of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. The Trump administration had warned university officials, only the day before, that it had received complaints that the university wasn’t acting fast enough to carry through on its promise to “dismantle DEI apparatuses.”
Paul Mirengoff
Ringside at the Reckoning
Excerpt: This article by Stanley Kurtz describes how two giants of 20th century American conservatism -- William F. Buckley and Russell Kirk -- viewed academic freedom. The very short version is that Buckley was against it and Kirk was for it. Kirk viewed academic freedom as a vital part of our Western heritage. He saw it as an enabling condition of the quest for truth. But Kirk was not an academic freedom absolutist. Instead, says Stanley, he insisted that professors have duties along with liberties.
What would Kirk make of today's Princeton University? Princeton can't match the raw anti-Semitism so manifest at Columbia. But Princeton takes a backseat to no elite institution when it comes to promoting leftist orthodoxy and discriminating against whites and other groups disfavored by the woke.
Kian Petlin
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: Two weeks ago, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett visited campus to protests and a full lecture hall. His talk was interrupted several times, including by a walkout and a fire alarm — a remarkable spate of disruptions that prompted a University investigation, a public apology from University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83, and even a stand-alone editorial in The Wall Street Journal.
On Tuesday, another prominent figure in Israeli politics — this time the Israeli ambassador to the United States — came to give a talk. This time, he was met by a scaled-down audience, a smaller protest, and no disruptions inside — as well as a small army of Public Safety (PSafe) officers, University security, and free speech coordinators to ensure nothing went awry.
Ryan Holiday
New York Times
Excerpt: For the past four years, I have been delivering a series of lectures on the virtues of Stoicism to midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., and I was supposed to continue this on April 14 to the entire sophomore class on the theme of wisdom.
Roughly an hour before my talk was to begin, I received a call: Would I refrain from any mention in my remarks of the recent removal of 381 supposedly controversial books from the Nimitz library on campus? My slides had been sent up the chain of command at the school, which was now, as it was explained to me, extremely worried about reprisals if my talk appeared to flout Executive Order 14151 (Ending Radical and Wasteful Government D.E.I. Programs and Preferencing). When I declined, my lecture — as well as a planned speech before the Navy football team, with which my books on Stoicism are popular — was canceled.
Josh Moody
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: After a weeks-long standoff with the federal government over alleged antisemitism on campus, Harvard University sued the Trump administration on Monday over the $2.2 billion federal funding freeze enacted after the private institution rejected a far-reaching slate of reforms last week.
President Alan Garber announced the move in a statement to the university community Monday, noting that while some officials in the Trump administration have claimed the demand letter was sent by accident, the federal government has acted in ways that suggest it was purposeful.
John Tomasi
Free the Inquiry, Heterodox Academy
Excerpt: In a rare and admirable act of institutional defiance, Harvard University has rejected demands from the Trump administration that would have compromised its autonomy, chilled academic freedom, and upended core principles of academia. The government’s letter to Harvard — citing a broad civil rights investigation — demanded detailed records, ideological audits, and structural changes that amount to an effort at direct political control. Harvard was right to say no.
The administration’s demands are a serious threat to academic freedom. Yet Harvard's resistance will ring hollow unless it pairs its bold defense of independence with an equally honest reckoning about the internal failures that made it vulnerable to such scrutiny in the first place.
Jorge Reyes
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: During her visit to campus last week, U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor challenged students’ levels of civic engagement and willingness to move past political dogma. In response to a question about what citizens should do when they disagree with a court’s decision, she asked the large crowd of Princeton students: “Has everyone in this room read even one Supreme Court decision from beginning to end? How many of you can raise your hand?” Few hands went up.
Luke Grippo
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: Professor of Civil Engineering Peter Jaffé began researching industrial cleaning chemicals 20 years ago. In 2016, he decided to focus his research on developing ways to biodegrade perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). These chemicals are widely used in everyday consumer and industry products — although we are also exposed to them in our food, water, and air.
After six years of federal funding, Jaffé says that he and his team have found a way to biodegrade these chemicals. An almost $2 million grant for a field demonstration was the next step. However, this funding was lost on April 1, when several dozen grants awarded to University researchers from NASA, the DOD, and the Department of Energy (DOE) were suspended, reportedly worth at least $210 million.
Ilya Somin
The Volokh Conspiracy, Reason Magazine
Excerpt: In a previous post, I urged universities to band together to file a lawsuit challenging Donald Trump's policy of speech-based deportation of foreign students and academics. So far, I have had little, if any, success in persuading schools to do so. Many individual academics have expressed support for the idea (originated by the faculty of the Tufts Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy), but no university administrations have acted on it.
Still, I am happy to see that 86 colleges and higher education associations filed an amicus brief in a case challenging the deportations filed by the the Knight First Amendment Institute on behalf of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Middle East Studies Association (MESA).
Charlie Yale
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: What if I told you that Princeton is under investigation by the federal government for antisemitism, not because students, staff or faculty have filed a complaint, but because one man who is not affiliated with the University sent a complaint to the Department of Justice (DOJ)? What if I told you that this complaint and its overblown rhetoric is what led to the suspension of millions of dollars of federal funding to Princeton University?
For starters, it’s weird that the investigation spurring Trump’s rationale for the funding cuts was initiated by Zachary Marschall — a far-right blogger who has no connection to Princeton’s campus or community. Marschall made the jump from a few online videos of chants to the illogical and incorrect conclusion that they made Jewish students unsafe. If campus community members are feeling unsafe, allow them to make the complaint themselves.
Emmanuel Bourbouhakis, Jacqueline Gottlieb, Tarek Masoud, Steven Pinker, and Jon Rieder
Boston Globe
Excerpt: As chairs of the Academic Freedom Councils at Columbia, Harvard, and Princeton universities, we are alarmed at the threats to academic freedom currently faced by American universities. Universities are now confronted with extraordinary intrusions into their affairs by the federal government. At the same time, many threats to academic freedom emanate from within universities themselves. In this moment of crisis, we have an opportunity to address both threats, and to recommit the universities to their mission of advancing and disseminating knowledge.
Zach Gardner
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: In response to the Trump Administration’s recent efforts to suspend $400 million in federal grants to Columbia University and $210 million to Princeton University, professors and administrators have rushed to the defense of “academic freedom.” In a recent op-ed, University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 charged President Trump with launching “the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare of the 1950s.”
What Eisgruber doesn’t consider, however, is that the threat to academic freedom comes not from the government but from the universities themselves. Rather than focusing on external threats, Princeton should turn the microscope inward and acknowledge the recurring problem of intellectual diversity in its ranks.
Raf Basas
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: In focusing on Princeton more broadly as an institution, we often overlook Princeton’s crucial core: our community. Thus, the University must be vigorously proactive, as opposed to reactive, in defending our people, whether that be Princeton’s minorities, international students, or staff members. The University cannot just make statements — it must take tangible, material steps to empower the people in our community.
