Search

Megan Cameron
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: With Election Day just over a month away, Princeton’s politically active student groups are gearing up for a surge of campus engagement. Both the Princeton College Republicans and Princeton College Democrats are planning a series of events aimed at mobilizing students ahead of the Nov. 5 election. These groups are finding ways to encourage political engagement despite University restrictions on political activities, which are enforced by the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students (ODUS), the office under which these groups are registered.

Alex Norbrook and Alan Plotz
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Princeton rolled out a new protest website two weeks ago, expanding their “time, place, and manner” restrictions to more times, more places, and more manners. By placing explicit bans on some of the most common forms of political demonstration, tightening language on obscure and inconsistently-applied existing restrictions, and departing from a constructive approach of speaking with protestors, the policies intend to stoke fear and chill protest.

We, the undersigned member organizations of the Princeton Progressive Coalition, oppose these tightened restrictions, reject the University’s hostile approach to protest, and call on all who support free speech and free expression to challenge these protest bans.

Conor Friedersdorf
The Atlantic

Excerpt: This semester, student protesters opposed to Israel’s war in Gaza have already defaced a statue at Columbia, vandalized an administration building at Cornell, and blocked access to a convocation at Pomona College. Whether they will return to the tactic of erecting protest encampments, as happened on nearly 100 campuses last spring, is uncertain.

Eleanor Clemans-Cope
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: In a recent feature in The Atlantic, Princeton Lecturer Lauren Wright charges that conservative students on elite liberal college campuses like Princeton’s are constantly challenged and thus better prepared for real-world discourse, while liberal students are coddled and unwilling to engage. She backs this up with interviews from 43 college students — 28 conservatives and 15 liberals at “competitive schools.” But her framing reflects a misunderstanding of what truly constitutes meaningful intellectual and community dialogue on campus. I should know — I was one of her interviewees.

Wright misunderstands a critical aspect of campus dialogue. Liberals do interact with opinions that challenge their own, but they do so on issues that are typically grounded in productive, forward-looking dialogue, like criminal legal system reform, geo-engineered climate solutions, diplomatic engagement between the United States and China, and the morality of consulting jobs.

Hope Perry ‘24
Princeton Alumni Weekly

Excerpt: Princeton Israeli Apartheid Divest (PIAD) returned this fall semester with an inaugural rally and a familiar message from last spring, calling for the University to divest and disassociate from Israel and Israeli companies, universities, and cultural institutions, and asking Princeton to drop charges against students who participated in an April sit-in.

Juan Carlos Lara
KQED News

Excerpt: Most Bay Area universities are back in session for the fall semester, and with the return of classes comes the return of student organizers whose mass demonstrations and encampments rocked campuses across the country last spring.

Those organizers say they haven’t given up on their demands, but they are shifting tactics away from the 24/7 encampments. In recent weeks, university leaders have also announced policy changes that students fear will violate their first amendment rights and hamper their ability to organize effectively.

Gabrielle Temaat
College Fix

Excerpt: The University of North Carolina Wilmington is the most recent college to close its “diversity and inclusion” office. The school announced the decision to shut down its Office of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion last week, according to WECT News.

“Based on policy requirements and consistent with System Office guidance, UNCW will close the Office of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion (OIDI), eliminate the Chief Diversity Officer position and shift the cultural and identity centers from OIDI to Student Affairs,” Chancellor Aswani K. Volety wrote in a message to the school.

Jerry A. Coyne
Why Evolution Is True

Excerpt: Most rational people, I believe, are opposed to academic boycotts: those political movements that try to prohibit the exchange of scholars or academic information with countries deemed unacceptable on ideological grounds. These boycotts not only stem the free flow of information among countries that is the lifeblood of academia—especially of science—but also punish those who can contribute to this knowledge even though those people rarely have any influence with their government. Indeed, as in the case of Israel (surely the reason for the dropping of the boycott prohibition), many scholars are opposed to the government’s policies.

Inside Higher Ed reports on the ending of boycotts by the influential organization the American Association of University Professors, an organization that should know better.

Francesca Block
The Free Press

Excerpt: The allegations were shocking. Fraternity brothers had been accused of beating new members with paddles, burning cigarettes into their skin, forcing them to lie on beds of nails, spitting on them, and commanding them to drink urine. University of Maryland administrators were alarmed by the claims, which appeared in their inboxes in late February, coming from at least two anonymous accounts. They decided to act fast.

But by the end of the school year in June, 35 Greek organizations out of the 37 on campus were cleared of all wrongdoing. The Maryland case, sources told me, reveals a double standard on American campuses today: students who openly break the law—including trespassing, breaking and entering, and harassing their fellow students—are given a pass when they’re committing crimes in the name of activism, while students suspected of behaving badly in their social lives are treated like villains.

Josh Moody
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Columbia University President Minouche Shafik resigned abruptly Wednesday night after months of pressure from Congress and campus constituents over her handling of pro-Palestinian student protests.

Shafik spent a little more than a year in the role, a tenure fraught with tension over how she navigated campus demonstrations related to the war between Israel and Hamas that began last fall. The protests at Columbia—which set off a wave of similar demonstrations at colleges across the nation—culminated in the construction of an encampment in the center of campus and the occupation of an administrative building for nearly two weeks, resulting in the arrest of more than 100 protesters in April.

Emma Camp
Reason Magazine

Excerpt: Last week, officials ordered several public universities in Florida to examine courses for "antisemitism or anti-Israeli bias," reported The Chronicle.

The directive, issued on Friday, ordered the leaders of 12 public universities in the State University System of Florida to provide the system's board of governors with a list of "related instructional materials" for any course whose description or syllabus contains the keywords Israel, Israeli, Palestine, Palestinian, Middle East, Zionism, Zionist, Judaism, Jewish, and Jews.

John Warner
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: There are a number of recent stories about political acts that are direct attacks on how higher ed institutions operate that have me worried because they lack contemporary precedent.

Consider the gap between a board dedicated to overseeing the health and well-being of the institution and one specifically dedicated to “controlling” the institution, apparently on behalf of the state’s chief executive. Oversight and control are two very different things.

Robert Barba
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: Three Columbia University deans, who were placed on indefinite leave last month over insensitive text messages they sent during a panel about Jewish life on campus, are resigning, a university spokeswoman said Thursday.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Over the past two years, lawmakers in at least 10 states have pushed legislation that would weaken—or outright eliminate—tenure in public colleges and universities. With the exception of a Democratic state senator in Hawai’i, these bills have all been pushed by Republicans in states such as Texas where the party controls the Legislature.

Despite these proposals, no state has actually gone through with fully banning tenure from its public colleges and universities. The bills that would’ve done so either failed to pass or were watered down before passage after facing opposition from faculty members, who stress that tenure protects academic freedom, including for conservatives, and from university leaders, who say it helps recruit professors who could make more outside academe.

Jennifer Kabbany
College Fix

Excerpt: A Bakersfield College professor who was investigated and disciplined after he questioned the use of grant money to fund social justice initiatives at his school has agreed to a $2.4 million settlement to resolve his lawsuit.

Matthew Garrett, formerly a tenured history professor at the California community college, will receive $2,245,480 divided into monthly payments for the next 20 years as well as an immediate one-time payment of $154,520 as “compensation for back wages and medical benefits since [his] dismissal,” according to the July 10 settlement agreement.

Michael T. Nietzel
Forbes

Excerpt: Only 36% of Americans believe that higher education “is fine” as it is now, a five percentage-point decline from just a year ago. That’s one of the top-line findings of a new survey released this week by New America, the progressive think tank.

Americans’ growing unhappiness with the current state of higher education was also revealed by the fact that in 2024 73% of them believed that higher ed offers a good return on investment, down from 82% who felt that way in 2017. In addition, only 54% of Americans think that higher education is having a positive impact on the way things are going in the country today, a 16 percentage-point drop since 2019.

Sam Kahn
Persuasion

Excerpt: The Court has ruled, the results are in, and what we are left with is… the worst of all possible worlds.

In Moody v. NetChoice/NetChoice v. Paxton, the Court espoused a doctrine in which social media companies are viewed as curators or compilers of online material, with the feed constituting a “distinctive expressive offering”—even when those curatorial choices are in fact made by algorithms or AI tools. That philosophy gives the social media companies carte blanche to moderate—or censor—as they wish. Meanwhile, in the highly consequential case Murthy v. Missouri, the Court found that plaintiffs lacked standing to sue the government even when the government had copiously interfered in tech companies’ moderation practices.

Jonathan Zimmerman
Philadelphia Inquirer

Excerpt: How should schools regulate what students post on the internet?
I don’t know. But here’s what I do know: We’ll never craft good policies around online student speech unless we listen to what students have to say.

That’s been the missing voice in the controversy in Great Valley, a Chester County school district where middle school students made 22 TikTok accounts impersonating their teachers. Some of the fake videos were truly horrible, casting the teachers as pedophiles or depicting them in sexual encounters with each other.

Eliot A. Cohen
The Atlantic

Excerpt: After 42 years of academic life—not counting five years spent getting a Ph.D.—I am hanging it up. A while back, I concluded that the conversation that I would most dread overhearing would be an alumna saying to a current student, “I know, I know, but you should have seen the old man in his prime.” I believe I dodged that one.

Academic Freedom Alliance Press Release

Excerpt: The Academic Freedom Alliance today announced the favorable resolution of its case in defense of John Strauss, a professor at the University of Southern California who was accused of harassment by student protestors after he briefly engaged with them at a pro-Palestinian rally on campus. USC dismissed the case against Professor Strauss earlier this month.

Maggie Hicks
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: This month, Raz Segal learned that he’d been offered a job to run the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota’s flagship. It was an exciting career move for Segal, an associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University.

Five days later, Minnesota withdrew the offer. The problem, according to key players involved in the search, was Segal’s opinion of the Israel-Hamas war — namely an October 13 article he wrote arguing that Israel’s ongoing attacks on the Gaza strip were a “textbook case of genocide.”

Douglas Soule
Tallahassee Democrat

Excerpt: An attorney representing education officials appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis Friday told a federal appeals court that Florida lawmakers, if they so choose, can prohibit professors from criticizing the governor in the classroom.

“In the classroom, the professor’s speech is the government’s speech, and the government can restrict professors on a content-wide basis and restrict them from offering viewpoints that are contrary,” said Charles Cooper of the Cooper & Kirk law firm, responding to a judge posing that scenario.

Brian Rosenberg
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: I suspect that I am not the only former college president who has experienced a mild bout of PTSD during the past several months, as the frequency, intensity, and visibility of attacks on presidents have increased to a level that would have been difficult to imagine even on my worst days.

Cory Alperstein ’78, Lynne Archibald ’87, Robert Herbst ’69, Jessie Press-Williams *23, Hannah Reynolds ’22, Ryan Warsling *21
Princeton Alumni Weekly

Excerpt: Every year, the Committee to Nominate Alumni Trustees calls for nominations for elections to be held in April. As alumni who care about Princeton and its place in the world, we responded. However, in the unofficial year of democracy, our experience has left us with many questions about who really runs the University.  . . . Our concerns relate . . . to the process and profound lack of transparency of the Board of Trustees and the Committee to Nominate Alumni Trustees.

Jessie Appleby
FIRE

Excerpt: Despite the real benefits of virtual meetings, they are not a replacement for real life. At its best, they facilitate meetings and communication that otherwise could not have occurred. But a screen cannot replicate the experience of an in-person gathering. In short, virtual events and in-person events are not interchangeable.

Yet many universities have started treating them as such. In recent years, FIRE has seen schools increasingly rely on the availability of virtual meeting platforms to evade their constitutional and other free speech obligations to provide sufficient security for events to proceed without sustained disruption.

Kurt Streeter
New York Times

Excerpt: Waves of boos, angry chants and the steady rhythm of feet pounding on metal seats were upending the graduation ceremony at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Viva, viva Palestina!” students sang out. “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Israel’s apartheid has got to go!”

Once it was over and most had left the school’s low-slung football stadium, Berkeley’s chancellor, Carol Christ, sat near the podium in a folding chair. She is silver-haired and soft-spoken, a soon-to-retire 80-year-old former English professor with an unusual background for the modern college president: Her views on free speech first crystallized during her years as a student protester in the turbulent 1960s.

Bill Hewitt
Princeton Alumni Weekly

Excerpt: Complicity in the wrongful shedding of blood was the theme to the disruptions of President Eisgruber’s address at Alexander Hall and recent landmark vandalisms. This raises, with apology to Florence Reece and her 1930s protest song “Which Side Are You On,” the question, “Which ‘genocide’ are you on?”  

In their zeal to be pro-Palestinian and their efforts to depict Israel’s efforts of self-defense as “genocide,” PIAD and SJP brazenly ignore Hamas’ goal and actions to annihilate Israel. Symbolically raising their red hands of protest against Israel’s actions, these PIAD and SJP protesters stand morally submerged in the blood Hamas wrongfully sheds.

Francesca Block
The Free Press

Excerpt: Shilo Brooks is on a mission to teach Ivy League students how to read.

If the trend in academic life for the past few decades has been to skim hundreds of pages per day and then pick apart the past, Brooks wants to do something old-school that feels radical: he wants his students to absorb no more than fifty pages a week and see the big picture. And he’s doing it by bucking another trend: he’s embracing great men (and women).

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution Is True

Excerpt: The problem with the Harvard policy lies not in its specifics above, but how it appears to be interpreted by the creators/op-ed writers, who seem to misunderstand the principle of institutional neutrality, try to diss our Kalven Report (perhaps to say, “Hey, Harvard has its own report, and a better one”), and then suggest that Harvard’s policy can in some cases be applied in a non-neutral way. In other words, what we get is a decent policy whose authors (at least two of them) have described for the public as a dog’s breakfast. This does not bode well for any future “institutional neutrality” of Harvard.

Jennifer Kabbany
The College Fix

Excerpt: The UNC System Board of Governors on Thursday voted to repeal a five-year-old policy mandating diversity, equity and inclusion offices on each of its 17 campuses, paving the way for diversity jobs to by cut systemwide.

Abigail Anthony
National Review

Excerpt: Princeton University faculty passed a non-binding resolution on Monday calling for disciplinary and legal amnesty for students arrested for the pro-Palestinian encampment and occupation of a university building. The resolution passed 154–136, with eight abstentions.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: A reader sent me the tweet below (I don’t spend much time on Twitter), but it intrigued me not so much because University of North Carolina (UNC) system spends millions on DEI (that’s not unusual), but because it reports that its DEI policy may be eliminated across all UNC schools this week.  Note that there are 686 DEI positions in the system, with salaries adding up to over $70 million ($91 million if you include benefits).

Leigh Revers
Heterodox STEM

Excerpt: Diversity, equity and inclusion: unless you have been hiding in some ideological ‘safe space’ expunged of today’s wokery —and let’s face it, where in Canada would that be?— these three ubiquitous terms will be instantly familiar to everyone who happens to work in an organization or institution in Canada, whether public or private.

The Editorial Board
Washington Post

Excerpt: As the United States reckoned with racial inequality during and after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, many saw Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs as a way to address the issues in higher education. As part of the trend, many schools began requiring candidates for teaching positions to submit DEI statements. In these statements, potential hires explain how they would advance diversity, equity and inclusion in their teaching and research activities. One 2021 study found that about one-third of job postings at elite universities required them.

Bill Hewitt
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: The May 3 faculty letter calling for VP Calhoun’s resignation argues that in her April 30 email to Princeton undergraduates about the April 29 takeover of Clio Hall, Vice President Calhoun gave not only an incorrect, mistaken, or misinformed description of the events, but also one that was purposely deceptive. Not satisfied to demand her preemptory firing, the faculty letter concluded with the hyperbolic claim that Calhoun’s leadership is “the real threat to the Princeton University community.”

The Editors
National Review

Excerpt: It was a great racket while it lasted, but so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives have spent the last year in retreat — compelling the practitioners of discriminatory “social justice” to conduct a flailing rearguard action in a flight to more defensible terrain.

Abigail Anthony
National Review

Excerpt: Nearly 2,000 people who claim to be Columbia University alumni have signed a letter pledging to “withhold all financial, programmatic, and academic support” from the institution until it meets the demands of anti-Israel protesters, claiming that $77 million in donations is at risk.

The letter, addressed to Columbia president Minouche Shafik and the school’s trustees, expresses support for the protesters who oppose the university’s “continued collaboration with the Israeli government’s ongoing genocidal violence against Palestinians.”

Keith E. Whittington
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Imagine, if you will, that a relatively small, but passionate and loud — complete with drums, chants, and megaphones — group of Princeton students thought that SPIA should be renamed the Donald J. Trump School of Public and International Affairs and launch new initiatives focused on American greatness. After pressing their demands for many months to no effect, they decide that more direct action would be needed to bring attention to their cause. They march through the hallways of Robertson Hall, take an office, yell out of windows, and drop “Make America Great Again” flags through them, and announce that they will occupy the office until their demands are met.

Olivia Sanchez and Miriam Waldvogel
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: A group of students, faculty, alumni, and postdocs met with University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83, Dean of the Graduate School Rodney Priestley, and Dean of the School of Public and International Affairs Amaney Jamal on Monday at 11:30 a.m. to discuss the demands of the ongoing sit-in on Cannon Green.

The students’ demands, which have been public since the beginning of the sit-in on April 25, include divestment from Israeli companies and American military funding, an academic boycott of Israeli universities, the cultivation of ties with Palestinian academic institutions, and the creation of a center for Palestinian studies with scholarships for people displaced from Gaza. Multiple students present at the meeting told the Daily Princetonian that Eisgruber declined to meet any of their demands.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Paul Alivisatos, the President of the University of Chicago, explained why he ordered the University cops to dismantle our encampment of pro-Palestinian protestors after eight days.  There are good parts and not so good parts, but it’s clear that the basis for dismantling the enclave was to uphold our principle of institutional neutrality—the Kalven principle).

Sean Stevens
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

Excerpt: The second edition of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s National Speech Index, released today, finds that both liberals and conservatives are concerned about the future of freedom of speech in the country, regardless of which major party candidate wins the presidential election in November.

The survey also finds that this is where the agreement ends. There are stark differences between liberals and conservatives on the state of freedom of speech in America today and on how often they think colleges and universities should take positions on political issues.

PFS found this video on May 2; it was filmed on April 23
Video filmed at London’s Conway Hall
Niall Ferguson
 
Excerpt:  I know these words sound nice and nobody wants to be against them, but I have to tell you that in George Orwell’s 1984, words mean the opposite of what they appear to mean.
 
What diversity, equity, inclusion turned out to mean at Harvard was uniformity of thought, no equity, no due process for anybody who fell foul of the inquisition, and exclusion of conservatives and indeed anybody who is deemed to be too far to the right, including classical liberals.”

PEN America Press Release

Excerpt: We continue to be deeply alarmed by the decision of campus administrators across the country to deploy the police to detain, arrest, and remove peaceful student protesters. The use of excessive force against students and faculty on multiple occasions is shocking and unacceptable.
Engaging police to deal with peaceful protests represents an escalation that is inimical to the exercise of free expression and to a learning environment, and further raises the risk of use of excessive force; except in extreme cases, the use of outside police against student protesters is the wrong decision and only serves to ratchet up tensions.

Ted Balaker
The Coddling of the American Mind Movie, Substack

Excerpt: Most of our “DVD extras” are paywalled, but we’re making this one available to everyone. In it, Jonathan Haidt touches on the role universities, specifically administrators, play in encouraging students to think in binary terms, to see the world as battle between good and evil.

Jon references the work of Samuel Abrams, a professor at Sarah Lawrence College. Abrams conducted a national survey of college administrators who work directly with students. He found that “liberal staff members outnumber their conservative counterparts by the astonishing ratio of 12-to-one.” That makes administrators the most left-lopsided group on campus

George Packer
The Atlantic

Excerpt: Fifty-six years ago this week, at the height of the Vietnam War, Columbia University students occupied half a dozen campus buildings and made two principal demands of the university: stop funding military research, and cancel plans to build a gym in a nearby Black neighborhood. After a week of futile negotiations, Columbia called in New York City police to clear the occupation.

Elisabeth H. Daugherty, Peter Barzilai s’97, and Julie Bonette
Princeton Alumni Weekly

Excerpt: Pro-Palestine protesters tried to stage a sit-in at Clio Hall Monday night, and at least two were put onto a bus by police. Dozens of others blocked the front and back doors and said they would not leave until charges were dropped and the University agreed to negotiate their demands.

Princeton Alumni Weekly
Brett Tomlinson, Elisabeth H. Daugherty, Julie Bonette

Excerpt: Protesters set up tents for a student-led pro-Palestine encampment in McCosh Courtyard at about 7 a.m. Thursday. After warnings from University officials, two Princeton students were arrested, and the remaining protesters packed away their camping gear and continued the demonstration as a sit-in.

Yolanda Wang, Yurii Stasiuk, and Tristan Hernandez
Yale Daily News

Excerpt: Early Saturday morning, the Yale Corporation — the University’s highest governing body, which includes 16 trustees as well as University President Peter Salovey — convened at the Greenberg Conference Center for their last meeting before the summer recess.

The Yale Corporation meeting comes the morning after pro-divestment protesters stayed overnight on Beinecke Plaza with an encampment of more than 25 tents. The encampment followed a mass protest during Salovey’s farewell dinner in the Schwarzman Center last night, and a week-long effort by various students and groups to occupy the plaza. The Corporation — which is in charge of the search for Yale’s 24th president — is also in the eighth month of its search but has not shared a timeline for when the decision will be made. Salovey is set to step down on June 30.