By Elaine Gao ‘28

Free speech is usually described as a right one either has or does not have, relative to the laws of one’s residence. But a right, like a muscle, is only as strong as its use. When my family flew to the United States in 2018, I naively thought that I had escaped the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) systematic suppression of free speech. I believed that I would access Google, YouTube, and Winnie the Pooh without any need for a VPN to circumvent the “Great Firewall of China,” a term used to describe the CCP’s firm control on online content. But I was clueless: I unknowingly carried a part of the repression within me.

During my freshman spring at Princeton, I knew I had found the perfect topic for my writing seminar’s “Let Every Voice Be Heard” final paper when I listened to an interview with Bob Fu, a Chinese Christian who escaped the Communist regime. He openly explained that he religiously converted after reading the biography of a prominent Chinese Christian leader, and Fu was imprisoned for leading an underground church. He even started the international organization ChinaAid after resettling in the United States as a refugee to fight for religious freedom and the rule of law in China. His story, contrasted with the many other Chinese immigrants who never spoke publicly – or even with their own children – about what they had endured, was a powerful reminder that one can break free from the chilling effect of having lived under authoritarianism.

I mentioned the topic at home, expecting my parents to be proud and excited. But they were alarmed, and they discouraged me from writing the paper I had imagined: “You still have family in China,” “You could be denied entry at the Chinese border when we visit family,” and “You could be endangering us,” they warned me. I had just assumed that those constraints only applied to the people on some secret list known only to the CCP, not a family that had simply moved abroad or a young college student in America writing an essay for class. I accused my parents of being paranoid, but I didn’t realize at the time that I too still feared the CCP.

There was a honeymoon stage to my new access to free information. I was surprised by even seemingly mundane activities, like reading headlines that were critical of the U.S. and China, or watching movies like “Seven Years in Tibet.” Larger revelations came when I was watching a documentary about the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, and whenever I was reading about the Belt and Road Initiative’s consequences for Southeast Asian countries. Like a hungry infant, I consumed the free expression of others. I knew I had been set apart from my peers back home, who were still oblivious — by the design of the CCP — to the darker side of the one-child policy and the “educational” camps in Xinjiang, among other things.

I simultaneously deceived myself into thinking that I, too, had become an expert on speech suppression, though watching someone lift weights does not qualify as exercising. Access to information is merely a single component of true free speech. But perhaps a more important component is actually expressing oneself. I found that to be easy enough when it came to a daily exchange, an argument, or a pretentious speech given at a debate tournament. I liked being heard, and I often made sure that I was heard. But I refrained from discussing the speech suppression that occurred back home, for I still feared that the CCP would punish me.

Ultimately, I let my parents’ fear become my own, so I never wrote that paper. Looking at my final research on a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints mission to the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), I wondered why I had accepted my parents’ suggestion to write about something completely different. I wanted to be someone like Bob Fu, not like his adversaries or my parents. Yet when the moment came, I still flinched because I could not fully dismiss my parents’ paranoid-sounding – but somewhat legitimate – concerns. I remembered my mom complaining about having to screenshot a newly published article by a pastor when we were living in China because the article would be removed from the internet the very moment she finished screenshotting. I also remembered my parents whispering with a photographer friend who had not captured one man in his 100,000 pictures of Xinjiang, which is the strongest possible proof of the current persecution of the Uyghur population in northwest China. All the possibilities of what the Chinese government could do to me — as well as the people I loved who still lived there — dominated my thoughts for the rest of the semester, and the following year.

For a while, I found a refuge in history. By researching repressive regimes that have fallen, like the GDR, I drew meaningful lessons that connected with my home country. I convinced myself that I was different from the self-censoring cowards because I was still writing about repression, just not about my own country.

But it is really simpler than that. Free speech does not mean we all need to become whistleblowers who rewrite history. Free speech can look like being free to answer when someone asks me about my experience in China. Free speech can look like writing about a topic of which I am passionate, and taking necessary precautions when sharing or publishing the writing.

I spent most of my life looking at free speech the wrong way. Self-censorship is not a hidden organ that keeps us healthy; rather, it is more like a debilitating tear in an important muscle. Once our free-speech muscle is injured, we must actively pursue rehabilitation. And throughout your life, you need to regularly hit the gym so that the muscle doesn’t weaken. You will never know how much you can lift, but you will never get close to the answer by watching others play the sport known as debate.

Elaine Gao ‘28 is studying History, French, and Humanistic Studies. On campus, she is a member of Princeton Christian Fellowship, Princeton Debate Panel, and the vice president of Princeton Legal Journal. She hails from Beijing, China.

By Tal Fortgang ’17

Artificial intelligence is forcing universities to confront crucial questions about the nature and future of higher education. Among these: What, exactly, should a university require a student to do for himself or herself? Universities have embraced laptops, smartphones, online databases and every other technology that promised to make learning more efficient. Generative AI now offers efficiency on a different scale. It can draft an essay in seconds, summarize a book instantly, and produce an argument on almost any subject on demand. Universities may be tempted to treat these capabilities as inevitable improvements in education. Students will be able to consume vast amounts of information, more than ever before. But like AI writing itself, such consumption would be vast but shallow. The more interesting possibility, then, is that AI will force universities to rediscover the value of intellectual work that cannot be outsourced.

The University of Chicago has begun taking that possibility seriously. In July, its Law School announced an AI strategy built around the view that students should learn both with AI and without it, ostensibly because these are different kinds of learning. In required first-year courses, students will generally be prohibited from using laptops, tablets and phones in class, with limited exceptions. The school says the policy is intended to cultivate listening, reasoning, participation and the ability to make arguments in real time. Elsewhere, students will be taught to use AI deliberately and responsibly, including through required first-year instruction and more advanced experimentation.

Chicago has extended the experiment beyond the Law School. The Social Sciences Collegiate Division has announced that its Core courses will generally prohibit classroom technology and ban student and instructor use of artificial-intelligence tools beginning this fall. The experiment reflects the sensible proposition that a useful tool can become a poor substitute for the activity it was meant to assist. A calculator helps with arithmetic, a search engine helps locate information, and an AI model can help generate and revise prose. None of those capabilities eliminates the educational value of learning arithmetic, conducting research, or writing an argument—all of which involve working through multifaceted reasoning to an endpoint of clear expression.

Making this distinction will only become more important as AI improves. A university that defines education as the efficient transmission of information will have difficulty explaining why students need professors at all. Machines will be able to explain legal doctrines, summarize a novel, compare competing theories and produce a respectable first draft—all respectfully, patiently, and quickly. Universities would be left selling an expensive credential that obscures the fact that machines increasingly provide the same services for free.

The stronger case for higher education rests on harder-to-measure abilities. Students should leave college better able to concentrate, reason, write, speak, judge evidence and change their minds when the evidence demands it. Those abilities develop through practice. They require the student to sit with a difficult passage, formulate an argument, discover its weaknesses, and defend it before someone who knows enough to object. Struggling itself is educational – it’s how the deeper, harder-to-measure abilities are built – and ultimately geared towards the kind of education we talk about when we talk about education being valuable. Removing all of it would be like going to the gym to watch someone else lift weights. You may learn some things, but you will not build your own muscles.

Humanities departments have the most to lose but could seize the opportunity to make the most of these developments. For years, language departments and the humanities have struggled to explain their value amid declining enrollment and growing pressure to justify every course in terms of immediate career utility. AI exacerbates the problem. It can summarize Shakespeare, explain Kant, imitate the style of a historian and produce an essay on nearly any assigned topic better than most college students. If the humanities exist to produce competent prose or transmit information about canonical texts, their future looks bleak.

The good news is that they don’t. The humanities teach students how to pay attention to another mind. They teach them to recognize an argument buried in a difficult text, to notice an ambiguity that a summary omits, and to ask why a writer chose a particular word with all its connotations. Each is an exercise in understanding human beings as individuals and as a collective. Reading a great work slowly can change a student’s understanding of human motives, political institutions, and our moral responsibilities. These areas of substantive knowledge are crucial to master for young people to grow into fully flourishing adults. Humanities administrators and professors need to think about how the incentive structures they set up encourage and reward that profoundly humane enterprise.

AI also raises a challenge to the centrality of academic freedom that deserves more attention. Academic freedom depends on creating classrooms in which students can encounter ideas and test their intuitive responses against arguments they have not previously considered. That is obviously incompatible with outsourcing responses to an algorithm.

Universities have become increasingly concerned with ideological conformity. Much of that concern has focused on whether students and professors feel free to express unpopular views. The AI question introduces additional dimensions. Intellectual dependence can arise even in a classroom where every viewpoint is formally permitted. For one thing, AI large language models sound like the voice of God, but they are more akin to the synthetic voice of their programmers—who are hardly without their own prejudices. There is a real risk that students migrate towards the median view of Silicon Valley technologists, who have machines making their views sound especially reasonable and authoritative.

Moreover, students who habitually consult an algorithm before forming their own judgments may become less willing to endure uncertainty, confusion and disagreement. The result could be a generation of highly assisted thinkers who have had comparatively little practice thinking unaided.

Chicago’s approach is promising because it preserves opportunities for both technological fluency and intellectual independence. Students will encounter AI as a professional tool. They will also encounter classrooms in which the technology stays outside the door. That makes sense. A law student should learn to use AI to research and organize information, just as a lawyer will. He should also learn to reason through a difficult question because it’s possible that at some point no machine will be available, likely there will be times when the machine is wrong, and nearly certain there will be times when a question requires judgment that cannot be reduced to a prompt.

Higher education has spent decades equating innovation with adding technology, increasing convenience and removing obstacles. AI may force a reversal. Some obstacles deserve to remain. Students should sometimes have to write the paragraph themselves. They should have to remember an argument without consulting a screen and answer a professor’s question before having the opportunity to ask AI for help. These are small acts of intellectual self-reliance, but they are geared towards producing capable citizens. A university is one of the few institutions with the time and authority to cultivate them systematically.

A university confident in its educational mission should be willing to ask which technologies make students more capable and which merely make student work easier. The distinction will become more important as machines become more capable. The universities that make it well may discover that the future of education depends on preserving the inconveniences that technology is most often designed to replace. After all, those exercises train the muscles higher education was meant to build in the first place.

Tal Fortgang ’17 is a Legal Policy Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a regular contributor to PFS and a contributing writer at The Dispatch.

By Abigail Readlinger ‘27

Facing an audience of nearly four hundred Princetonians—clad patriotically in a pair of Old Glory socks and a tie boasting the text of the Declaration of Independence—Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale Law School, Akhil Reed Amar, delivered a spirited address in celebration of Constitution Day.

Presented by Princeton University Public Lectures and co-sponsored by both the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and the Program in Law and Normative Thinking, the university’s Annual Constitution Day lecture endeavors to both commemorate and further appreciate our foundational documents. This year, Professor Amar’s lecture, entitled “America at 250: From ‘Created Equal’ to Birthright Citizenship, fell nothing short of expectations.

With animated speech and sincerity of heart, Professor Amar encouraged students to honor Constitution day by “thinking about each other.” Despite political or ideological differences (Amar himself is a liberal) the promises of the Constitution are shared among us all. Indeed, the very first line of the preamble, in its all-too-familiar majestic black font, that famous phrase “We the People,” is an invitation for each of us to participate in the great American project. “We don’t have alot in common,” Professor Amar laments, “but we all do have to understand our Constitution.” And, in understanding so, we will find what we do. Furthermore, in recognition of this common identity, we must act with both honesty and receptivity. “Thinking about each other” necessitates more than mere thoughts—it necessitates our ability to hear, to listen, and to respond.

This conclusion, however, is made only after Professor Amar expands on another founding document, The Declaration of Independence.

In an homage to the ultimate hero of his lecture, President Lincoln, Professor Amar began with the words, “12 score and 10 years ago, our Founders declared independence.” On July 2nd, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was held to vote, and just two days later, finally approved. It was here that yet another set of remarkable little words—All Men are Created Equal—were enshrined in American history.

Yet, as Professor Amar reminds us, the remaining portion of the document is no less remarkable. Even, and especially not the twenty-seven grievances against the Crown.

The Founders required a justification for their separation, and according to Professor Amar, the list of grievances allowed them to say, “Here are the reasons we are doing what we are doing.” And while each abuse eroded attachment to the Crown, the last abuse provoked the final sever. The English Parliament had been deaf to the voice of justice. They had refused to listen. And in acknowledging their common equality, the colonies insisted on being heard.

Represented as such, this list of grievances becomes intimately and inseparably united to the principle that all men are created equal. The Creator has endowed each and every man with certain unalienable Rights, so should Justice require that no Right be infringed, impeded, or ignored.

Be that as it may, as Professor Amar points out, neither the signing of the Declaration of Independence nor the ratification of the Constitution produced a society where all men received all their rights. How then, he asks, are we to perceive the founding idea that all men are created equal?

As promised, Professor Amar returns to Lincoln. According to the President, the principle that all men are created equal was a proposition to which the nation had dedicated itself. Dedicated, not in the sense that the proposition would always be realized, but rather, that it would always be honestly and earnestly pursued. Professor Amar expands on this argument, claiming that “All Men are Created Equal” is the “true north” of the American project. Keeping such an ideal in mind most effectively ensures the progression of equality continues. Finally touching on birthright citizenship, Amar cites the 14th amendment, as well as the 13th, 15th, and 19th amendments, as evidence for the evolution and realization of a common equality.

Despite such progress, and even despite the Supreme Court’s recent reaffirmation of birthright citizenship in Trump v. Barbara, Professor Amar reminds his audience that the evolution of equality has not yet finished. Referencing Lincoln again, he insists that all inequality must be “put on the path of ultimate extinction.”

Professor Amar closed his time with an earnest appeal. He asked that we, especially the younger generation, “learn and read.” He asked that we both “understand our history” and also “understand each other.” And perhaps, in asking this, Professor Amar ultimately asked us to learn from our Founders. The primary abuse listed in the Declaration of Independence is that of turning a deaf ear to justice. In the here and now, there is no English Parliament. And yet we ourselves, yes, “We The People,” are still more than capable of silencing and ignoring the voices around us. The Founders recognized a principle of equality which refused to accept such behavior. So too must we do the same.

One need not agree with Professor Amar’s view on birthright citizenship to acknowledge that if all men are created equal, each has a right to be seen and to be heard. If we are to stay “true north,” we will think and act in recognition of our remarkable shared identity.

As Princetonians, our history is inextricably linked with that of the Founding. In honor of both these legacies, we are compelled to pursue our own ideas with honesty and vigor, while also receiving the ideas of others with humility and grace. The Declaration says it best as it proclaims, “Let facts be submitted to a candid world.” I can only hope that we, in this town, may be part of that world.

Abigail Readlinger ‘27 is a Senior in the Politics department from Princeton, NJ. She is a PFS Writing Fellow.

Join us on Tuesday, October 6 at Noon EST to discuss a first-of-its-kind study of Princeton faculty political contributions. The numbers are stark: during the 2023-2024 election cycle, 98% of reported faculty contributions went to Democrats, 2% to independents, and 0% to Republicans.

Register for a live webinar breaking down what this means and what comes next:

• How we built the study using FEC-reported contribution data

• Why Princeton’s numbers echo what’s already been found at Yale, Harvard, and other peer schools

• Why Princeton’s leadership has stayed silent while Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt, and Washington University have started addressing the issue

• What real viewpoint diversity would take — and how PFS plans to push for it

REGISTER FOR THE WEBINAR

Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS) released a first-of-its-kind study showing that 98% of reported political contributions by current Princeton faculty went to Democratic candidates or affiliated groups during the 2023-2024 election cycle. Independents and their affiliated groups received 2% of contributions, while Republicans and their affiliated groups received none.

PFS said the findings point to a near-total absence of viewpoint diversity among the university’s faculty.

The study covers all contributions by current Princeton faculty that are required to be reported to the Federal Election Commission, covering the most recent full election cycle.

PFS noted its findings echo recent studies at other leading universities. Yale professors donated overwhelmingly to Democrats in 2025, according to the Yale Daily News, and a 2022 Harvard Crimson survey found similar patterns among Harvard faculty.

The lack of faculty viewpoint diversity has become one of the most closely watched issues in higher education reform, PFS said, with a growing number of university leaders announcing changes to address it — often over faculty objections. PFS said Princeton’s leadership has yet to acknowledge the issue publicly, unlike leaders at Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt and Washington University.

Viewpoint diversity has been a top priority for PFS since it published “The Next Campus Battle After Free Speech: Viewpoint Diversity at America’s Elite Universities“ last February, written by two PFS officers. Today’s study builds on that effort.

“This first of its kind study of Princeton faculty contributions demonstrates the glaring lack of viewpoint diversity among Princeton faculty, an issue that Princeton’s leadership can no longer ignore,” said Edward Yingling, co-founder and chairman of Princetonians for Free Speech.

An in-depth PFS article describing the study and the efforts to increase faculty viewpoint diversity is available here. The full study is available here.

FIRE’s 2027 College Free Speech Rankings are out, and Princeton fell to 176th out of 261 schools, down from 160th out of 257 last year. Score: 58.1. Grade: F. Among Ivy League peers, Princeton lands in the middle of the pack — behind Dartmouth (6th), Harvard (71st), Yale (72nd), and Brown (98th), but ahead of Cornell (219th), Penn (227th), and Columbia (246th). The core of the FIRE rankings is a yearly student survey.

Here’s the good part news: on almost every question that measures how students actually feel, Princeton does well. The university ranks 4th in the country on whether students trust the administration to protect speech and defend a speaker during controversy — a strength for six years running. It ranks 4th on political tolerance, meaning Princeton students are more willing than students nationally to let controversial speakers from either side of the aisle actually speak on campus. That’s an area Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS) has worked directly to support (helping student groups have controversial speakers on campus and defending their right to be heard once they’re there) and it’s good to see it showing up in the numbers. Self-censorship ranks 15th, and comfort expressing ideas jumped from 165th last year to 35th — one of the biggest swings in the whole national survey.

So if students feel this good about speech at Princeton, why the F? There are two problem areas, and both are easily fixable by the administration:

1. The written policies. Princeton still carries FIRE’s worst rating “red light” for rules on harassment, internet use, and demonstrations that give administrators broad discretion to punish protected speech. FIRE’s report is specific: three of Princeton’s four harassment policies don’t meet the legal standard for peer harassment; the internet policy bans vaguely defined “malicious” or “harassing” content; and Princeton requires advance approval for all protests, which effectively prohibits any spontaneous demonstration. PFS has sent the university specific, workable language to fix exactly these provisions before; the university has not responded or acted on it.

2. No institutional neutrality. Princeton has adopted the Chicago Statement on free speech, but has not adopted a policy of institutional neutrality, meaning the university still may take official positions on political and social issues, unlike a growing list of peers including Harvard, Penn, and Cornell.

FIRE ran the numbers on what fixing these defects would actually do: if Princeton simply moved from “red light” to “yellow light” on its policies, it would rank 82nd instead of 176th. Add institutional neutrality on top of that, and it would rank 53rd. Fixing the policies is the single clearest lever available, and it’s one Princeton’s leadership can pull without touching anything about campus culture ... and one we’ve already handed them a roadmap for.

None of this is abstract. These rankings are used by prospective students and their families deciding where to apply, and right now Princeton’s actual policies are dragging down a genuinely strong campus climate Princeton has built— and one PFS has had a hand in building.

By Leslie Spencer '79, Princetonians for Free Speech

FIRE recently published its 2026 Spotlight on Speech Codes, which rates free-speech codes at 486 colleges and universities. Nationally, it found significant progress: a record number of colleges earned FIRE’s highest rating for protecting free expression, and a record low number maintained policies restricting student speech and expression that are protected by the First Amendment.

The good news is that the percentage of colleges and universities earning FIRE’s “red light” (bad) rating has reached a low of 13 percent — a 55 percent drop since the “Spotlight” report began in 2006, and a 1.5 percent drop from last year. The bad news is that Princeton is among that 13 percent. Princeton is still found to maintain policies that “clearly and substantially” restrict free expression.

Why does Princeton have a “red light” rating? FIRE points to four areas: its internet usage policies, its over-broad policies on “bias and hate speech” that could restrict protected expression, its policies on what constitutes “harassment,” and its “protest and demonstration” policies.

It would be relatively easy to change the policy language to improve Princeton’s free expression guarantees, especially since FIRE offers colleges guidance on how to improve their ratings. PFS attempted to help Princeton by working with FIRE to improve Princeton’s rating, but our efforts were ignored. This tells us that Princeton has no interest in reviewing its speech codes to improve its reputation for honoring free expression guarantees.

Princeton’s reluctance to improve its FIRE speech code rating is surprising because, in general, Princeton has strong free expression principles in place. Under President Eisgruber’s leadership, Princeton was the first university to adopt the “Chicago Statement” on free expression in 2015, after the University of Chicago created it.

However, President Eisgruber has attempted to discredit the methodology behind FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings, both in public appearances and in his book Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right. So we can assume he’s equally dismissive of FIRE’s speech code ratings, which focus solely on the places where a university’s written policies fail to meet First Amendment standards.

Major progress has been made over the last 20 years in universities’ commitment to protecting free expression, and FIRE has no doubt had a big influence on that change. Princeton is among the relatively small number of colleges that still fail the test.

The following is a republish of a 2025 article by Edward L. Yingling, Cofounder of Princetonians for Free Speech.

INTRODUCTION:

It is now widely understood that for years many of our country’s colleges and universities have been losing their way; they are no longer bastions of the core values of free speech, open discourse, and academic freedom, nor are they focused on promoting learning and the advancement of knowledge. Instead, they have increasingly become focused on a specific agenda and advancing that agenda, in the process often repressing these core values.

There have been individuals and institutions fighting back, trying to reform universities and to restore these core values, but it often seemed a lonely fight. Much of the effort was to support those who had been “cancelled.” In more recent years the reform side gathered new advocates and began to coordinate. Existing organizations – such as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), and the Heterodox Academy (HxA) – became stronger and expanded their efforts. Faculty across the country organized to form the Academic Freedom Alliance.

On some campuses, groups of faculty members began to organize, often informally. Also, on some campuses small groups of students organized to support free speech and open discourse. In 2021, start-up alumni groups from Davidson, Princeton, The University of Virginia, Washington and Lee and Cornell announced the creation of the Alumni Free Speech Alliance, which was launched in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece in October 2021. At least thirty schools now have active alumni groups supporting free speech on their campuses.

Still, it seemed progress would be slow against the entrenched opposition on campuses. But then, in the wake of the tragic attack on Israel in October of 2023, everything changed. The protests, and in some cases riots, on campuses, including on the campuses of leading universities, laid bare for all to see what had been developing for years. The blatant antisemitism was shocking. And the responses of the leaders of some of the country’s leading universities drew attention to their narrow viewpoints and the complicity of the trustees who had chosen them.

In 2024, there was important movement on many fronts in the battle to restore universities to their historic and critical role. Yet still there were warning signs of the walls that had to be scaled. Greg Lukianoff, President of FIRE, has stated that, according to FIRE’s database, 2024 was the worst year ever for deplatforming attempts, such as shout downs and disinviting speakers, since FIRE started tracking them in 1998.

There were many green shoots in 2024, but 2025 is sure to be a year of dynamic and disruptive change. In fact the very broad and aggressive Executive Orders issued by the Trump administration guarantee that there will be significant changes. Individual advocates of campus free speech and academic freedom may believe some of these changes go too far or are counterproductive, and this outline does not attempt to judge the changes. The purpose of this article is to outline in one place areas where dynamic change will occur in 2025. It is not designed to be either comprehensive or rigorous in its analysis; rather it serves as a synthesis of the main areas of change, organized by constituency.

STUDENTS, PROSPECTIVE STUDENTS, PARENTS AND EMPLOYERS:

There is already anecdotal evidence that applications are down materially at some of the most prestigious schools that suffered reputational damage as result of protests and the reaction to those protests. For example, Harvard refused to release information on early admissions as it has in the past, raising suspicions that applications were down. At the same time, there is anecdotal evidence that applications to schools that emphasize the values of free speech and academic freedom are up. Prospective students are voting with their feet. Some universities are stressing their values, implicitly contrasting them with elite universities the reputations of which have been badly tarnished. An example of this is Vanderbilt University, which has taken clear steps to raise its profile in supporting free speech.

In some cases, employers have indicated that they will no longer be recruiting at certain schools because of the values those schools are teaching. This will also influence where students want to go. This trend for students and employers was foreshadowed in a June 2023 article written by Stuart Taylor and Edward Yingling, Princeton alumni, entitled “Colleges should compete on Free Speech.”

While this trend of applicants and potential employers looking to schools with better values and records on free speech and academic freedom will take years to play out, 2025 may be the year the trend accelerates and is more widely recognized, as more prospective students and prospective employers become educated on the options.

FACULTY:

The faculty of many universities are not only overwhelmingly liberal, but highly progressive, according to numerous polls, and can be intolerant of free enquiry and intellectual pluralism. This is a huge long-term problem for viewpoint diversity that is likely to get worse in the short term as conservative and moderate professors age out. It is greatly exacerbated by the litmus tests of diversity statements often now required in applications to join a faculty.

In recent years, even many liberal faculty members have become concerned about the atmosphere on campuses that inhibits free speech and academic freedom. They have in some instances become afraid of the growing non-faculty bureaucracy that can criticize and even investigate them over one sentence said in a classroom if a student reports them. Surveys show many faculty pull back from fully expressing themselves in class or elsewhere, knowing that their careers can be ruined. According to Lukianoff, a 2024 FIRE survey found that one out of three faculty members admitted to hiding their political views to avoid censorship reprisals.

While there have been some small groups of faculty members that worked informally to promote the core values, they often worked behind the scenes and were largely made up of conservatives. As noted, in recent years, the number of these groups has increased, and non-conservatives have joined the effort. Heterodox Academy undertook an organized effort to promote such groups. The Academic Freedom Alliance was formed to support faculty whose free speech rights were threatened. However, in 2024, this movement began to accelerate. At several leading universities, groups of faculty members came together publicly to support core values. The one that has received the most attention is the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard. Princeton faculty members have formed the Princeton Council on Academic Freedom.And in just the last few months, similar groups have been formed at seven other universities, including Duke, Columbia, MIT, and Yale.

In September of last year, the University of Chicago received an anonymous grant of $100 million to support free speech efforts at the Chicago Forum for Free Speech and Expression.

With these strong examples, it seems likely that 2025 will be the year that this faculty movement really takes off, both in terms of the impact of existing faculty groups and in the creation of new ones.

ALUMNI:

As noted above, alumni of various universities have already begun to organize to promote free speech and academic freedom on their campuses, and at this point at least thirty such organizations have been created. Almost all are members of the umbrella group, the Alumni Free Speech Alliance. With support from ACTA and FIRE, this alumni movement is now set to expand in 2025.

Alumni also have raised concerns about what has been happening at their schools in other ways. There have been high profile cases of large donors cutting off contributions, for example at Harvard and Penn. While some of these situations have received significant publicity, there is no doubt much more alumni discussion with university administrators and trustees behind the scenes. Furthermore, there are now real examples of this trend in alumni giving playing out: After increasing every year for ten straight years, in 2024 Columbia’s Giving Day donation totals dropped by 28.8 percent and the number of gifts dropped by 27.9 percent. (Giving Day was postponed in 2023.)

Also, behind the scenes, alumni are increasingly discussing ways to target giving to specific programs they support rather than to give to the university to use as it sees fit. As the numbers are reported in 2025, there will likely be significant drops in the amount given and in participation rates at schools that have failed noticeably to support the core values.

CONGRESSIONAL ACTION:

There are a number of ideas to address campus reform being discussed in Congress. Although there was little publicity about it, in 2024 the House of Representatives passed, by a party-line vote, a multifaceted bill on the issue. In 2025 the Congress will likely be much more active in considering important legislative changes in the area of higher education. The political atmosphere generated in large part by the events on campuses in 2024 will provide impetus to aggressive legislative approaches. However, the very narrow Republican majorities in the House and Senate and the historically large Republican agenda in Congress could limit how much is enacted.

A proposal that’s likely to be enacted is a higher tax on the income of large university endowments. This does not directly address the role of universities and their core values, but it will be a direct response to the political and reputational problems of many universities generated in 2024, and especially of the “elite” ones (which generally have the largest endowments, sometimes in the tens of billions of dollars). The weak political position of such universities is further exacerbated by the fact that Republicans will be looking hard for additional tax revenue to offset the extension of the Trump tax cuts and other suggested tax cuts.

Furthermore, there is already a tax on endowment income in the law, and so this would not be unprecedented. Under a provision enacted in 2017, income on endowments of over $500 million is subject to a 1.4% tax. Also in the last Congress, J. D. Vance introduced a bill, S. 3514, that would have imposed a 35% tax on the investment income of university endowments of $10 billion or more. If a broader tax on endowments is enacted, universities will face a constant political problem – it will be easier to increase the tax rate if they remain unpopular.

The reason this tax is likely to be enacted is that it could qualify to be included in the reconciliation bill, which will be enacted in the first part of the year, and which can be enacted by simple majorities in the House and Senate. While the process on reconciliation will be messy, there is almost no chance a reconciliation bill will not be enacted.

Another legislative measure not directly related to the problems on campuses, but that is likely to be actively considered, is significant change in the student loan program. There is talk among Republicans about requiring schools to bear some small percentage of the losses on loans to their students – to have “skin in the game.” Conceivably such a change, or other changes to the student loan program that would cut its costs, could be included in reconciliation as well, if not in a 2025 version, then in a 2026 version; but such changes will be complicated and are not yet fleshed out.

Other provisions affecting college and universities may be more difficult to enact. The House might pass a package with unanimous Republican support, but it likely would require sixty votes to overcome a filibuster in the Senate. Even if all fifty-three Republicans supported such efforts, seven Democrats would be needed to stop a filibuster. However, on some specific issues, given the unpopularity of the “elite” universities, it might be possible to attract Democratic support. In addition, specific items might be split out and put in other “must pass” legislation, such as appropriation bills. The bottom line is that in addition to an increased tax on endowment income, universities are likely to be at risk for other legislative changes they will not like throughout 2025 and beyond. The entire relationship between Congress and universities will change for the foreseeable future, providing pressure for reforms that may be traumatic for university leadership and faculty.

To see what these other potential changes might include, it makes sense to look at the bill that passed the House on a party-line vote last October – H.R.3724, the End Woke Higher Education Act. It will certainly be the starting point for Congressional action, and a version of that bill could pass the House in the first part of 2025, possibly with a few additional items. This House-passed bill: ensures colleges and universities are not forced to adhere to DEI principles or to support or oppose political beliefs to receive accreditation; makes free speech a condition for receiving federal funds under Title IV of the Higher Education Act; requires schools to educate students on their First Amendment rights; prohibits schools from forcing students, faculty, or applicants to take political litmus tests; and requires schools to annually disclose their free speech policies.

The leadership of the House Education Committee has taken a strong advocacy role on the problems on college campuses, as publicly demonstrated in the dramatic hearing held last year with university presidents and in the passage of legislation through the House in October. Congressman Greg Murphy of North Carolina, a former member of the Committee, has also taken a leadership role. These are Members very committed to the effort who, along with Senators who have already expressed a willingness to legislate, will drive change.

REGULATORY ACTION:

With the new Trump Administration, it is certain that the Department of Education will undertake an aggressive approach toward colleges and universities. It will be the complete opposite of the approach the Obama and Biden administrations took. There will be a strong effort to eliminate the Department; indeed, it will be among the highest priorities of the Department of Government Efficiency effort, although key leaders of Congress have expressed skepticism about the ability to fully eliminate it. In the interim, there will be a major focus on addressing free speech related issues within the purview of the Department. The new Secretary will look for innovative ways to make changes relating to higher education, including on DEI and diversity statements.

In the first Trump Administration, significant changes were made to Title IX of the Higher Education Act. The Biden Administration finalized a new rule on Title IX that not only undid most of the Trump changes, but also went much further. Some of the Biden changes had negative implications for free speech on campuses, for example by broadly defining prohibited harassing speech.

A decision by a Federal District Court Judge in early January threw out the new Biden rule in its entirety. While there is a possibility of appeal, there is no reason to believe the Trump Administration would support such an appeal. Legal analysts believe the result of the court decision is to restore the original Trump rule. Even if that is the case, the Trump Education Department is likely to review the Trump rule in view of recent campus developments and possibly strengthen its provisions relating to free speech and due process.

In addition to changes in accreditation policies contained in the bill that passed the House in 2024, changes could be made through regulatory action. Trump has publicly stated his interest in making major changes to accreditation, and the Education Department has authority to make changes. Furthermore, the new Executive Orders, discussed below, will impact accreditation policies. There is already an active process underway to create an alternative to the currently authorized accreditors, which, to many, appear to display an inherent bias in their requirements for accreditation. While the approval process for the alternative may take time, it seems likely to come to fruition. Thus, while changes may not be finalized, 2025 could be the year when the foundations are laid for major changes in the current accreditation process.

Finally, among the many Executive Orders signed by President Trump are three that, while not specifically addressing campus free speech or academic freedom, show the intention to move aggressively on these and related issues. The first relates to DEI policies in government and the second relates broadly to government censorship of speech at the federal level. The third, most important for higher education, aims to end discriminatory policies and restore merit-based opportunities throughout the country. According to the Wall Street Journal, this separate Executive Order requires federal agencies “to investigate diversity programs at publicly-traded corporations, non-profits, colleges, and foundations.” The article also says that recipients of federal contracts will be required to certify that they do not have “programs promoting DEI that violate any applicable Federal anti-discrimination law” and that the Trump Administration “intends to use its executive order on DEI to force universities to drop their internal diversity programs.” According to the article and other sources, grants from NIH in particular, a major source of funding for many universities, will be used to force such changes.



These sweeping changes under the Executive Orders will undoubtedly be complex to administer, and will take time. There will be many court challenges. But clearly, due to the threat of federal funding cuts, universities will be under enormous financial pressure to change or eliminate DEI policies and programs.

UNIVERSITY ADMINISTRATIONS:

The most important changes, of course, must occur at universities themselves. In 2024, changes occurred in important areas on some campuses, changes that would have been unlikely only a year before. In 2025, the pace of these changes should accelerate as more college administrations and trustees are asked why they also have not made such changes and as pressure from applicants, potential employers, alumni, Congress, and the Trump Administration increases. Key issues on which change may accelerate include:

1. Institutional Neutrality: According to FIRE, twenty-nine schools have now moved to adopt institutional neutrality, including some leading universities such as Vanderbilt, Harvard, Stanford, and Yale. However, the policies of institutional neutrality adopted should be read carefully. For example, the President of Dartmouth wrote a high-profile op-ed on Dartmouth’s new policy, but that policy is not true neutrality, as it contains exceptions that undermine its stated purpose.

2. Removal or limitations on DEI: For years, DEI programs at many universities have grown steadily, both at the university level and within departments. In 2024 the DEI movement came under extensive criticism, both for its direction and for the large amount of money being devoted to it. This criticism was not only directed at higher education. Business and government DEI programs were also criticized. A number of businesses, including Meta, Walmart and McDonald’s, began cutting back or dismantling their DEI programs, and it is clear that the new Trump Administration will be doing the same across the federal government, as shown in the Executive Order on DEI mentioned above.

At universities, there has been a relatively small number of announcements of cutbacks on DEI programs, but now that DEI-related issues are receiving such scrutiny, the movement to cut back or eliminate such programs will accelerate in 2025. Already three states -- Texas, Tennessee, and Utah -- have enacted laws to stop such programs at their public universities, and more will in 2025; legislation to do so has been introduced in the majority of states.

Of greater significance, as outlined above, Congress and the Trump Administration will have a very strong focus on DEI. The Administration has already acted aggressively through its Executive Orders. Expect there to be significant pushback from some university administrators and faculty. Nevertheless, the ability of the Administration to use the contracting and grant process to force change is an extremely powerful tool.

3. Litmus tests: In 2024, for the first time, there was significant movement to stop requiring DEI statements for faculty applications. High-profile examples of where DEI statements were removed are the University of Michigan, MIT, and Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Some states have moved to outlaw such statements in their public universities, including Ohio and Wisconsin, and more states will act. Often these changes were strongly opposed by faculty members, but the trend to remove these types of statements, which so clearly chill free speech and academic freedom and which act as a barrier to viewpoint diversity, will build momentum in 2025.

4. Creation of programs and schools devoted to civics and study of the Constitution: There have long been programs at some universities devoted to the study of civics, the Constitution and American government, but only a few were significant in affecting the climates on their campuses. In 2024 this began to change. Large and robust programs were created, most often at state universities. A prime example is the new UNC School of Civic Life and Leadership. Others were launched at state universities in Florida, Texas, Arizona, Ohio, Tennessee, Michigan and Utah. Many of these are patterned, at least in part, on the highly successful James Madison Program at Princeton, where notably student interest has grown steadily in recent years.

The number of these programs can be expected to increase significantly as more state governors and legislatures will want such programs in their schools, and private schools will want them to compete for student applicants. In fact, the limiting factor may be the need to increase the number of faculty able to teach in such programs.

5. Adoption and implementation of free speech principles: According to FIRE, over 100 institutions have now adopted free speech rules based on the Chicago Principles. In 2025, more schools will feel the need to adopt them since more prospective students will be looking for such policies at schools they are considering. In that connection, the annual FIRE free speech rankings will be increasingly considered by prospective students. For university administrators, a key lesson from the turmoil of 2024 is the need for clear implementation policies on free speech and the consistent enforcement of them going forward. Of course, not every administration will have learned that lesson.

6. Anonymous Campus reporting systems: An issue that has not received much national attention is the campus reporting systems that have been instituted by many universities in recent years. The justification for these systems is to prevent harassment or discrimination. However, free speech advocates strongly believe these systems result in a chilling impact on free speech. The definition of harassing actions and speech is quite often both overly broad and vague; many of these systems allow anonymous reporting; and reports often result in investigations with little due process.

In 2025 this could change, as more focus is put on these reporting systems. It is quite possible that continuing legal actions will force schools to abandon, or at least pull back, these systems. In 2024, a lawsuit by Speech First that challenged such a system at Virginia Tech reached the Supreme Court, which ruled against Speech First on procedural grounds. However, a strong dissent in the case lays out the rationale for the Supreme Court eventually ruling against a university that continues such reporting.

7. New universities: The new University of Austin (UATX), which took in its first entering class in 2024, has created a model for an alternative that addresses current problems in our system of higher education. Instead of, or in addition to, reforming universities where problems are deeply imbedded, the idea behind the new school was to create a university from scratch committed to core values and the traditional role of a university, with a constitution explicitly designed to implement those values. As the University of Austin continues to succeed in 2025, it will show that such alternatives can prosper.

SUMMARY

Even without the protests and riots on campuses, resulting from the terrorist attacks in Israel and the war in Gaza, that shined a spotlight on the deep problems in universities, the movement to restore core values to campuses was already growing. However, due to this spotlight, in 2024 the momentum of that movement increased. 2025 is a year when change will accelerate and where more tangible results will be shown.

A report commissioned by the chancellors of Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis recently concluded what most Americans already suspected: the humanities are in serious trouble. The Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences, released in June, brought together ten scholars from across disciplines to evaluate whether the humanities and humanistic social sciences are living up to their own stated standards of open inquiry and scholarly rigor. Ten scholars surveyed the landscape and found politicization, degraded standards, and a “toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.” Of all the disciplines examined, anthropology was singled out as the most extreme case of scholarly deterioration.

The Chronicle of Higher Education offered Princeton anthropologist Carolyn Rouse, the American Anthropological Association’s president, a chance to respond. What resulted was the interview heard ‘round the academic world — because Rouse attempted to defend the academy against the report’s findings and ended up confirming them more convincingly than any study could.

Over the course of a lengthy exchange, Rouse dismissed the so-called Vanderbilt report without engaging a single finding; claimed to have ended political advocacy by the AAA when the record shows the opposite; alternated between purism for objective facts and suggesting that objectivity is impossible; likened defending the sex binary to astrology; and declared that she does not credit opinion polls, even polls of her own members, because “people don’t know a lot.”

The best way to discredit academia, it turns out, is to let prominent academics defend their cause. Rouse’s interview is a case in point of how to lose the capacity for self-correction while retaining perfect confidence in one’s own rigor. And it should trouble anyone who cares about the future of higher education. Rouse believed her responses were appropriate, if not exemplary, coming from a leader in an esoteric academic field. That she chose to take the tacks she did, without fearing that other academics would throw her or anthropology under the bus, says a lot about the impressions Rouse presumably has of her colleagues, and what they would consider appropriate.

On to the substance. Presented first with the report’s conclusions, Rouse leveled vague methodological criticisms: “They used AI. It’s an embarrassment of embarrassments.” The interviewer noted that the authors used AI as one method among several to survey large bodies of text. Rouse was unmoved: “Even before we read that, we were all thinking, ‘This reads like they used AI.’” It would be better for her cause if she could cite a single finding and explain why it was wrong. And surely, she would have to confront the fact that real human beings signed off on the report. The one anthropologist on the commission, who found that their field was badly degraded, “has his own quirkiness.” That does not explain why he should be written off, to say the least.

The Vanderbilt report argued that the humanities exist to educate citizens to exercise their freedom, not to encourage social justice activism. Rouse countered that these critiques came from “people who are philosophers or whatever feel completely comfortable criticizing a discipline they don’t really understand. I would never do that.” It takes her two sentences to do that: “I realized so much of this is insider analytical [sic] philosophy baseball,” she continues, acknowledging that she was about to enter a field unlike her own. “They have this weird cut-out for Socrates, as if in ancient Greece and ancient Rome, they did this kind of Ivy League dispassionate theorizing…They could have lofty ideals about democracy. But the private space of the home was not a space of democracy.”

She then tried to explain how social justice belongs to the philosophical tradition: “Social justice is just another refinement of this question about freedom.” Specifically, “Social justice is about finding a way to have a democracy where whatever freedom — whatever we mean by freedom, right? — the idea that, like, how can you have somebody who’s not going to necessarily even have the kinds of absolutist free speech that a lot of these people, for instance, talk about.”

Candidly, these are not the considered judgments, or even stray observations, of someone prepared to defend her discipline. More egregious than the fragmented thoughts and lack of systematic reasoning she betrays is that Rouse elides the difference between education and activism.

It’s that difference that haunts her throughout. “When I became president-elect,” she claims, “I ended political-statement writing by the AAA.” At best, this boast highlights the fact that Rouse does not believe all statements that sound political are truly political statements. Claiming that the AAA stopped making political statements on Rouse’s watch is simply untrue. She became president-elect on October 5, 2023. On October 30, twenty-five days later, the AAA issued a statement on “violence in the Middle East” highlighting how “anthropological literature has empirically demonstrated the many forms of structural and everyday violence imposed by the Israeli government on the Palestinian population.”

There was also a boilerplate conflation of study and activism: “The mission of the AAA has human rights and dignity at its core. This means we must work to dismantle the systems of oppression that deny basic human rights and dignity.”

Nor was that the end of the AAA’s politicization. With Rouse at the helm, for example, it has advocated for the defense of a buffer zone around Chaco Canyon on behalf of Indigenous communities. Rouse herself has written for the AAA on “meaningless speech and political capture,” in which she argues that academic freedom is meant to preclude “nonsensical speech” that could proliferate when “decoupled…from ethics and evidence” such as the assertion that “there are only two sexes.” (More on this shortly.)

Asked about objectivity, Rouse declared that anthropologists “are the instrument for data collection in the same way a Geiger counter detects radiation.” In the same breath, she insists that anthropological “data…is, of course, subjective.” When pressed on a former AAA president’s description of anthropology’s “political project” to “challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism,” she responded: “Speech is never free. Speech is always connected to something else.” Aside from misunderstanding the meaning of “free” in “free speech,” this seems to indicate that all freedoms are exercised in service of power, or an agenda. It’s still unclear whether Rouse thinks that anthropology is objective data collection or part of a subjective political project.

The conversation turned to biological sex, which serves as a touchstone for fights over academic freedom, objectivity, and politicization. In 2023, the AAA canceled a conference panel on its importance in anthropological research. Rouse expressed no regret: “The idea that there are two sexes is just factually incorrect, and to force biological anthropologists to teach that is the equivalent of turning an astronomy department into an astrology department.” She added: “I don’t know, maybe you want to kill babies that aren’t just XX presenting XX or XY presenting XY, but that’s what we have in this world.” This does not display a sophisticated understanding of those who disagree, and Rouse made her incuriosity about opponents’ views explicit: “I don’t know why people care so much. You know, genetic variation is an interesting thing.” To Rouse, the wrongness of the sex binary is blindingly obvious, even as researchers churn out peer-reviewed biological philosophical explanations for why this view, held by nearly all human beings since the dawn of time, remains true.

The interviewer observed that only 56 percent of anthropologists themselves accept Rouse’s view on sex and gender. Rouse responds: “I just don’t trust opinion polling.” Did canceling the panel on the topic contradict the AAA’s stated commitment to “vigorous and ongoing debates”? No, because the panelists would not have brought “factual information” to the table — objectivity is back! — and “I think one of the people in the panel is big on right-wing social media.”

It’s all enough to ask what on earth is going on here. I believe the answer is relatively simple. Rouse made a name for herself in 2016 for leading a walkout from a speech by social scientist Charles Murray. In 2017, she delivered a lecture titled “F%*# Free Speech,” to which she regularly refers still today. In 2023, perhaps not despite but because of these antics, the largest professional organization of anthropologists elected her its president. She distinguished herself at a time when hostility to open inquiry was considered vogue among academics. Now that the tide has turned, with powerful critics accusing academics of losing the plot, she must reposition herself as a leader in the academic resistance who can maintain her activist posture. Wriggling out of such a jam requires an extraordinary degree of mental dexterity, cleverness with language, and a theory of mind — the ability to perceive what people unlike you are thinking. Most people do not have all those skills in spades, and Rouse is no exception. She is profoundly unable to fathom what it is that anthropology’s critics are so upset about even as she displays it without irony. Maybe an ideologue, maybe suffering from a bad case of Ivory Tower Syndrome, maybe just a product of her field, she ends up looking confused, skittish, and obfuscatory.

Save the academy from its enemies, by all means. But save it from its defenders first.

Tal Fortgang ’17 is a Legal Policy Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a regular contributor to PFS and a contributing writer at The Dispatch.

What is an Ivy League university? The simplicity of the question is deceiving. Everyone knows what Harvard is. Except increasingly, no one does – not the students who attend, and certainly not the administrators who shape the institution, thereby answering that question every day.

The university’s identity – its own sense of proper functioning, reflected in its form -- is at least contested. We learned as much in a recent set of stories about absenteeism and grade inflation at Harvard. When a Harvard freshman recently told The Harvard Crimson that “what makes a Harvard student a Harvard student is their engagement in extracurriculars” and objected that new academic reforms “attack the very notion of what Harvard is,” she articulated something remarkable. Though the quote struck some readers as naive or entitled, it displays an observant eye. This freshman has spent precious few months on campus but could already articulate – perhaps since before she even matriculated or applied -- what her institution has become: a place where academics are peripheral. As recruitment officers, promotional materials, and older students were surely quick to display, even if they did not phrase it this way, extracurriculars, networking, and credential collection are the stuff of which the Harvard “experience” is made. The spires and lecture halls look the same, but the form of the university is changing. It is catching up with its function.

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Harvard recently revealed that over 60 percent of grades awarded are now A’s, up 20 percentage points from a decade ago (at which point Harvard already had a reputation for handing out A’s like Costco samples). Grade inflation has serious second-order effects, of course. As the New York Times reported in October, Harvard students routinely “skip class and fail to do the reading,” and many can earn strong grades without attending at all. One junior explained the logic plainly: “If they can get good grades without attending class, they stop.” Harvard’s own internal committee found that attendance is low, students select courses based on perceived ease, and students prioritize extracurriculars over coursework. Whatever lip service is paid to the importance of traditional study, students’ revealed preferences indicate that they believe there is more value in doing just about anything else.

Of course, this is not a Harvard problem exclusively. Yale awards more than three-quarters of grades in the A-range. Brown offers competitive grade inflation by most measures. Princeton, which famously implemented a soft grade deflation policy in 2005, abandoned the policy in 2014 after, among other things, complaints that Princeton students were at a competitive disadvantage compared to their inflated peers. Even Princeton’s current average GPA of 3.56 — significantly lower than Harvard’s 3.8 — represents substantial inflation compared to historical norms. Across these institutions, GPAs have risen by approximately 0.1 per decade since the 1980s, with no corresponding evidence that students are learning more or figuring out how to master material more efficiently.

Grade inflation may cause a lot of disorder in Ivy League life. But it is also a symptom. That is where taking seriously the freshman quoted in the Crimson comes in. Has Harvard quietly reinvented itself as something other than an educational institution? The centrality of intellectual, stimulating, but not quite traditionally academic pursuits indicates that it has. How best to understand what it is now?

Ivy League schools admit extraordinarily talented students. The admissions processes are obscenely competitive, with acceptance rates below 5 percent at most of these institutions. Getting in is the hard part, and those who make it through are assuredly capable and credentialed. Usually, they have distinguished themselves from their peers by building resumes emphasizing innovation and initiative. They have not just excelled in school; they have also built robots and nonprofits. That is the first signal of what elite education in the 21st century is all about. It’s a credential ratchet: You need a PhD to become a law professor, a BA to become an administrative assistant, and a CV to get into school. Having overproduced future elites of the laptop class, we need ever-innovative sorting mechanisms.

This dynamic has been accelerated by the story elite universities tell about their pride of place within the tech, startup, and innovation economy. It’s hard to display your continued leadership by touting how refined graduates of your political science department are, how well they read Plato or how good they are at considering new arguments. Perhaps you could point to graduates that have gone on to careers in the public eye; but that would be alienating in an era of political polarization and generally seems likely to entangle universities in debates about whether some conventionally rich CEO, Member of Congress, or Supreme Court Justice is “good.”

It’s only natural that schools will look for proof of success that is less thorny, yet still indicative of well-directed brainpower. Innovation. Tech leadership. Start-ups. Yet the culture of Silicon Valley sheds the trappings of traditional success, trading suits for sweatshirts and favoring moving fast and breaking things rather than slowing down to appreciate them. That may be good for Americans and vastly improve modern quality of life. But it does not jell well with the idea that smart people should show up to lectures and read every assigned page of Machiavelli.

Harvard’s most celebrated “alumni” are often dropouts like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. For admissions offices, this creates a remarkably convenient narrative. The easiest thing to do is brag about how brilliant your students are: they invent companies, launch startups, create the next social media platform, all on the side while technically enrolled – even earning (wouldn’t you know it!) straight A’s.

Eventually this extracurricular brilliance, the work that earns acclaim and changes the world, begins to displace the educational component entirely. Why should students prioritize problem sets and seminar readings when the institution itself celebrates those who skipped them to build Facebook in their dorm room?

There is nothing inherent in university education serving as an obvious value-add in this equation. If students can skip class, avoid readings, and still become Harvard’s poster children, the institution is not developing them. It is, more precisely, incubating them. One could argue that the education students receive comes primarily from each other rather than from the institution itself.

Some students understand this intuitively. They’re not enjoying the results. One Harvard student told The Crimson she spent an “entire day… sobbing in bed” because the grade inflation report seemed to downplay her hard work. She shouldn’t blame the messenger, as she surely knows. She was promised intellectual formation and instead found a system that makes no genuine academic demands, meaning she could have spent her time on things she enjoyed more with the same result. If you wanted to do college “right” in an old-fashioned sense, by marinating in great texts and structured discussions of important ideas, you would be severely disappointed. Another expressed related anguish at the thought of harsher grading standards: “I killed myself all throughout high school to try and get into this school. I was looking forward to being fulfilled by my studies now, rather than being killed by them.” The hard part was supposed to be over; getting into Harvard was meant to be a fun reward for frittering away your high school years on resume-building.

“I can’t reach my maximum level of enjoyment just learning the material because I’m so anxious about the midterm,” said another freshman. If grades are deflated, “it’s unrealistic to assume that people will enjoy their classes.” Can you blame her for thinking “enjoyment” was the centerpiece of the Harvard experience?

Let’s not ignore the vicious-cycle relationship this has with college protest culture, either. Enjoyment comes from expression, from alignment with a seemingly righteous cause, from spending time using one’s power for good. When students encamp on quads, take over buildings, or shout down speakers, onlookers often ask whether they have better things they could be doing with their time. The answer is not so complex – it’s just ‘no,’ because increasingly daring protests are part of the college experience. You won’t be expelled for covering your face and wreaking havoc; your grades won’t even suffer. It will just be transgressive, social, downright fun. It’s the consummate Ivy League experience.

So, what is an Ivy League education? It is a bundle of goods and services, only some of which are actually educational. The grade inflation crisis reveals that the educational component has atrophied while the credentialing, networking, and signaling components have grown. Universities have every incentive to be incubators, rather than educators. Incubating talent is its function. Absenteeism, grade inflation, protest culture, and the centrality of “enjoyment” are the forms that support it.

Every incentive, that is, except one. Americans have built an enormous edifice of tax policy, cultural prestige, and opportunity allocation on the assumption that elite universities are primarily educational institutions performing an educational mission. They were, we assumed, providing some value-add through education, rather than simply providing beautiful buildings and expensive sustenance for four years. That assumption needs revision.

We can preserve what these institutions currently do well — convincing talented young people to attend and encouraging them to collaborate with equally bright peers — while reminding them that genuine academic rigor is a precondition of maintaining the special status that comes with claiming to add more than a scrap of paper to young Americans’ development. The students crying in their rooms have already figured this out, even if they aren’t quite sure why they feel so cheated.

Originally published in November 2025, this article by Tal Fortgang ’17 is being republished here.

Princetonians for Free Speech has long warned that Princeton and other universities were likely to be hit with a big increase in the 1.4% tax on endowment income. When the threat materialized during the 2025 legislative session, it sent shockwaves through higher education.

During the drafting of the 2025 Budget Reconciliation bill—a.k.a. the “One Big Beautiful Bill”—the House Ways & Means Committee voted to report out its portion of the legislation. This massive bill contained numerous tax provisions, including a large increase in the tax rate on endowment income. The bill created a tiered tax rate based on an institution’s “student-adjusted” endowment. There were four rates: 1.4%, 7%, 14%, and 21%. The 21% rate applied to schools with an endowment of at least $2 million per student. It is the same as the corporate tax rate.

Initially, Princeton appeared to qualify for the 21%. According to reports at the time, others qualifying for the highest rate were Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and MIT. (Note that Texas, which has a large endowment, is not covered by the endowment tax because it is a public university.)

It is impossible for outsiders to estimate with any accuracy the exact cost to Princeton of such taxes for several reasons, including: the fact that the bill added extraneous items (“student loan interest income and certain royalty income”) into the definition of endowment income; investment income can vary considerably year-to-year; and presumably, institutions adjust their investments and the way income is recognized over time to minimize the tax. A very simplistic figure could be generated by taking the University’s endowment, assuming just for this purpose an income of 6 percent, and applying the 21% tax rate. Based on an estimated $34 billion endowment, that would have resulted in an income of $2.04 billion and a tax of $428.4 million.

The anticipated pain to Princeton was considerable. According to an article explaining the management of the endowment on the Princeton website, earnings from the endowment provide about two-thirds of Princeton’s annual operating revenue.

Ultimately, however, Princeton avoided the financial blow. On May 8, 2025, The Daily Princetonian reported that Princeton would not have to pay any net investment income tax on returns from its $36.4 billion endowment. A strategic expansion of its undergraduate financial aid program left the University below the 3,000 tuition-paying student threshold required to qualify for taxation.

Despite Princeton finding a way to navigate the threshold, the legislative battle demonstrated the severe risks facing elite institutions. The Ways & Means bill was combined with equivalent bills from other House committees raising revenue and making budget cuts into the final Reconciliation package. Because it was a Budget Reconciliation bill, it was not subject to a filibuster in the Senate and could pass with just fifty votes (plus the Vice-President). Despite political potholes, material differences between chambers, and fierce negotiations, pressure from President Trump ultimately pushed the legislation forward.

Unlike the case with some other issues, there was virtually no push-back among Republicans on the tax on endowment income. The endowment tax was included as a significant revenue raiser to contribute to offsetting the costs of the Trump tax agenda.

Princetonians for Free Speech has written several articles about the growing target on Princeton’s back for investigations, lawsuits, and further funding cuts from the Trump Administration. Of course, the primary target has historically been Harvard, with the Administration continuing to threaten to put even more penalties on the school. For example, the head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission previously stated the Commission would investigate Harvard for discrimination in the hiring of faculty. These Administration attacks continue to spread to other universities, and we fear Princeton has put itself near the top of the target list.

Politically, the genesis of this tax is the need to raise revenue to offset tax cuts and, most importantly, the general antipathy of politicians and, indeed, much of the public toward universities and particularly the “elite” universities. The higher tax on endowment income was based solely on the endowment size per student; it made no differentiation between schools based on the specific issues the Trump Administration had been raising. Some of these universities lobbied against this tax for months and made no progress.

Anticipating these ongoing financial pressures, Princeton had already been planning to cut its budget. The Princeton administration even sent out a memo asking all its departments and units to plan for budget cuts of up to 10% to be phased in over three years.

While Harvard and others bringing lawsuits to stop some of the Trump Administration’s efforts may have some success in the courts, there is every reason to think the political and financial attacks on elite universities, including Princeton, will continue, with significant consequences.

Note: On May 8, 2025 The Daily Princetonian reported that Princeton will not have to pay any net investment income tax on returns from its $36.4 billion endowment, after a recent expansion of its undergraduate financial aid program left the University below a 3,000 tuition-paying student threshold to qualify for taxation.

This article is an updated version of the observations and arguments made by Princetonians for Free Speech in a response to that report.

What is an Ivy League university? The simplicity of the question is deceiving. Everyone knows what Harvard is. Except increasingly, no one does – not the students who attend, and certainly not the administrators who shape the institution, thereby answering that question every day.

The university’s identity – its own sense of proper functioning, reflected in its form -- is at least contested. We learned as much in a recent set of stories about absenteeism and grade inflation at Harvard. When a Harvard freshman recently told The Harvard Crimson that “what makes a Harvard student a Harvard student is their engagement in extracurriculars” and objected that new academic reforms “attack the very notion of what Harvard is,” she articulated something remarkable. Though the quote struck some readers as naive or entitled, it displays an observant eye. This freshman has spent precious few months on campus but could already articulate – perhaps since before she even matriculated or applied -- what her institution has become: a place where academics are peripheral. As recruitment officers, promotional materials, and older students were surely quick to display, even if they did not phrase it this way, extracurriculars, networking, and credential collection are the stuff of which the Harvard “experience” is made. The spires and lecture halls look the same, but the form of the university is changing. It is catching up with its function.

Harvard recently revealed that over 60 percent of grades awarded are now A’s, up 20 percentage points from a decade ago (at which point Harvard already had a reputation for handing out A’s like Costco samples). Grade inflation has serious second-order effects, of course. As the New York Times reported in October, Harvard students routinely “skip class and fail to do the reading,” and many can earn strong grades without attending at all. One junior explained the logic plainly: “If they can get good grades without attending class, they stop.” Harvard’s own internal committee found that attendance is low, students select courses based on perceived ease, and students prioritize extracurriculars over coursework. Whatever lip service is paid to the importance of traditional study, students’ revealed preferences indicate that they believe there is more value in doing just about anything else.

Of course, this is not a Harvard problem exclusively. Yale awards more than three-quarters of grades in the A-range. Brown offers competitive grade inflation by most measures. Princeton, which famously implemented a soft grade deflation policy in 2005, abandoned the policy in 2014 after, among other things, complaints that Princeton students were at a competitive disadvantage compared to their inflated peers. Even Princeton’s current average GPA of 3.56 — significantly lower than Harvard’s 3.8 — represents substantial inflation compared to historical norms. Across these institutions, GPAs have risen by approximately 0.1 per decade since the 1980s, with no corresponding evidence that students are learning more or figuring out how to master material more efficiently.

Grade inflation may cause a lot of disorder in Ivy League life. But it is also a symptom. That is where taking seriously the freshman quoted in the Crimson comes in. Has Harvard quietly reinvented itself as something other than an educational institution? The centrality of intellectual, stimulating, but not quite traditionally academic pursuits indicates that it has. How best to understand what it is now?

Ivy League schools admit extraordinarily talented students. The admissions processes are obscenely competitive, with acceptance rates below 5 percent at most of these institutions. Getting in is the hard part, and those who make it through are assuredly capable and credentialed. Usually, they have distinguished themselves from their peers by building resumes emphasizing innovation and initiative. They have not just excelled in school; they have also built robots and nonprofits. That is the first signal of what elite education in the 21st century is all about. It’s a credential ratchet: You need a PhD to become a law professor, a BA to become an administrative assistant, and a CV to get into school. Having overproduced future elites of the laptop class, we need ever-innovative sorting mechanisms.

This dynamic has been accelerated by the story elite universities tell about their pride of place within the tech, startup, and innovation economy. It’s hard to display your continued leadership by touting how refined graduates of your political science department are, how well they read Plato or how good they are at considering new arguments. Perhaps you could point to graduates that have gone on to careers in the public eye; but that would be alienating in an era of political polarization and generally seems likely to entangle universities in debates about whether some conventionally rich CEO, Member of Congress, or Supreme Court Justice is “good.”

It’s only natural that schools will look for proof of success that is less thorny, yet still indicative of well-directed brainpower. Innovation. Tech leadership. Start-ups. Yet the culture of Silicon Valley sheds the trappings of traditional success, trading suits for sweatshirts and favoring moving fast and breaking things rather than slowing down to appreciate them. That may be good for Americans and vastly improve modern quality of life. But it does not jell well with the idea that smart people should show up to lectures and read every assigned page of Machiavelli.

Harvard’s most celebrated “alumni” are often dropouts like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. For admissions offices, this creates a remarkably convenient narrative. The easiest thing to do is brag about how brilliant your students are: they invent companies, launch startups, create the next social media platform, all on the side while technically enrolled – even earning (wouldn’t you know it!) straight A’s.

Eventually this extracurricular brilliance, the work that earns acclaim and changes the world, begins to displace the educational component entirely. Why should students prioritize problem sets and seminar readings when the institution itself celebrates those who skipped them to build Facebook in their dorm room?

There is nothing inherent in university education serving as an obvious value-add in this equation. If students can skip class, avoid readings, and still become Harvard’s poster children, the institution is not developing them. It is, more precisely, incubating them. One could argue that the education students receive comes primarily from each other rather than from the institution itself.

Some students understand this intuitively. They’re not enjoying the results. One Harvard student told The Crimson she spent an “entire day… sobbing in bed” because the grade inflation report seemed to downplay her hard work. She shouldn’t blame the messenger, as she surely knows. She was promised intellectual formation and instead found a system that makes no genuine academic demands, meaning she could have spent her time on things she enjoyed more with the same result. If you wanted to do college “right” in an old-fashioned sense, by marinating in great texts and structured discussions of important ideas, you would be severely disappointed. Another expressed related anguish at the thought of harsher grading standards: “I killed myself all throughout high school to try and get into this school. I was looking forward to being fulfilled by my studies now, rather than being killed by them.” The hard part was supposed to be over; getting into Harvard was meant to be a fun reward for frittering away your high school years on resume-building.

“I can’t reach my maximum level of enjoyment just learning the material because I’m so anxious about the midterm,” said another freshman. If grades are deflated, “it’s unrealistic to assume that people will enjoy their classes.” Can you blame her for thinking “enjoyment” was the centerpiece of the Harvard experience?

Let’s not ignore the vicious-cycle relationship this has with college protest culture, either. Enjoyment comes from expression, from alignment with a seemingly righteous cause, from spending time using one’s power for good. When students encamp on quads, take over buildings, or shout down speakers, onlookers often ask whether they have better things they could be doing with their time. The answer is not so complex – it’s just ‘no,’ because increasingly daring protests are part of the college experience. You won’t be expelled for covering your face and wreaking havoc; your grades won’t even suffer. It will just be transgressive, social, downright fun. It’s the consummate Ivy League experience.

So, what is an Ivy League education? It is a bundle of goods and services, only some of which are actually educational. The grade inflation crisis reveals that the educational component has atrophied while the credentialing, networking, and signaling components have grown. Universities have every incentive to be incubators, rather than educators. Incubating talent is its function. Absenteeism, grade inflation, protest culture, and the centrality of “enjoyment” are the forms that support it.

Every incentive, that is, except one. Americans have built an enormous edifice of tax policy, cultural prestige, and opportunity allocation on the assumption that elite universities are primarily educational institutions performing an educational mission. They were, we assumed, providing some value-add through education, rather than simply providing beautiful buildings and expensive sustenance for four years. That assumption needs revision.

We can preserve what these institutions currently do well — convincing talented young people to attend and encouraging them to collaborate with equally bright peers — while reminding them that genuine academic rigor is a precondition of maintaining the special status that comes with claiming to add more than a scrap of paper to young Americans’ development. The students crying in their rooms have already figured this out, even if they aren’t quite sure why they feel so cheated.

The above is a republish of a 2025 article written by Tal Fortgang ’17.

By Tal Fortgang ‘17

Faith in higher education continues to plummet, and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)—the nation’s leading organization representing faculty interests and a longstanding voice on academic freedom and university governance—has decided to train its guns on the growing movement to establish civic education centers at public universities. The AAUP’s objections amount to a single, unlovely demand: we get to decide what students learn, and nobody else gets a vote.

It is worth understanding what these centers are, and the movement they stand for, before understanding why the AAUP is so desperate to kill them. Over the past several years, legislatures in at least nine states — including Florida, Texas, Ohio, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arizona — have established or funded civic education programs at their flagship public universities. To name just a few: Ohio State’s Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society, UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Civic Life and Leadership, and perhaps most ascendant of all, the University of Florida’s Hamilton Center share a premise: American undergraduates are scandalously ignorant of the intellectual and institutional foundations of their own civilization. Existing faculty have demonstrated no interest in fixing the problem, and perpetuate their preferences by reproducing, hiring, and credentialing people altogether similar to them.

The numbers back this up. Surveys regularly find that fewer than half of college graduates can name the three branches of government. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni has documented the near-total disappearance of meaningful civics requirements at top universities. Students can earn degrees in political science without ever reading the Federalist Papers. The centers stand for the proposition that universities exist at least in part to cultivate capable citizens, which in turn requires some familiarity with the ideas that have shaped our nation. The new institutions therefore emphasize courses on the Western canon — Aristotle, Locke, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Tocqueville — alongside study of America’s founding documents and constitutional tradition, and other sources that speak directly to matters of enduring importance in a free, democratic society bound by the rule of law.

Some, like the one at Tennessee, also assign Marx and other critics of liberalism, because in their judgment that is a crucial part of understanding the sweep of Western Civilization. Good—there should be variance rooted in good-faith argument, and an acknowledgment that there is no single “agenda” at play, aside from getting students to think hard about the core questions that shape our world.

This, to hear the AAUP tell it, is an existential threat to the university.

Their criticisms, as my colleague John Sailer has meticulously documented, follow a predictable script. First comes the objection to eroding the faculty-centric principle of shared governance. These centers were created by legislatures rather than faculty senates, and therefore their hiring processes violate established norms of faculty self-rule. At Ohio State, critics have complained that the Chase Center’s director wields “sole and exclusive authority” over faculty recruitment, bypassing departmental search committees. Associate Professor Ashley Hope Perez called this “essentially legislatively directed hiring at a university” and warned that it amounted to “setting up political loyalty for tenure.” At UNC, the local AAUP chapter leader, history professor Erik Gellman, went further, characterizing the scholarship funding offered to students who enroll in the civics school’s courses outright bribery. Following Gellman’s rhetorical lead, a new progressive group at UNC has called for a boycott of the new civics center because it represents an alleged Republican takeover of the faculty’s rightful remit.

The most frequently occurring and most revealing objection is the claim that these centers are simply Trojan horses for conservative indoctrination. Behind the scenes, as Sailer has exposed, the AAUP has undertaken a war to defend campuses’ ideological purity. “I would really love to see kind of a robust research project on these right-wing centers and individuals—like, naming and shaming and discrediting and undermining the legitimacy,” said the director of an AAUP subdivision nominally committed to academic freedom. “I would love to strategically map who these f---ers are, and figure out what the weaknesses are, and design a research agenda that just goes through them and tries to knock them out.”

These interrelated arguments are exactly what you would expect from a faculty that senses it is losing its monopoly over educational discretion—not just how each professor handles her classroom, but who gets to teach, what they teach, to whom, and why.

Shared governance sounds noble in the abstract but in practice has become the mechanism by which an ideologically uniform professoriate reproduces itself. Ideological imbalances among faculty are the stuff of legend; entire academic fields have zero self-identified political conservatives. In such a context, “faculty-led hiring” is a synonym for political monoculture. The AAUP is defending the cartelization of higher education, even as professors have no greater claim to expertise in the management of an educational system than boards of regents or other elected officials.

Citizens fund public schools, and they control them. They do not exist to perpetuate an ideological academic machine. When legislatures intervene to wrest some control over what is taught and by whom, they are not attacking academic freedom; but acting as the stakeholders they are. Moreover, they have ample grounds to believe they are correcting a market failure the faculty created.

The ideological objection collapses the moment you examine the actual syllabi. Courses assigning Aristotle, Locke, Adam Smith, and Karl Marx are not conservative indoctrination. They are the liberal arts tradition that the university was built to transmit and that the existing faculty largely abandoned in favor of the trendy and ideological. The charge of right-wing bias is projection from people who are accustomed to the privilege of being able to maintain an ideological monoculture for years, and now sense their entitlements slipping away.

If anything, the AAUP’s opposition to civic education centers should encourage education reformers. Arguments grounded in territoriality over the nuts and bolts of university-classroom programming, with a dash of ideological orthodoxy, reveal the importance to faculty of maintaining their intransigence. For decades, professors have expanded their remit to control more university operations, making more decisions about pedagogy, curriculum, hiring, and altogether what ideas are worth teaching and emphasizing. Even at public schools, professors continue to treat external accountability as an invasion. The same instinct that resists civics centers resists post-tenure review, curricular reform, transparency in hiring, and any effort by trustees, legislators, alumni, students, or other stakeholders to exercise the authority that is, at least in part, theirs.

The good news is that the faculty cartel’s grip is weakening. Nine state legislatures have already acted. Trustees are waking up to their fiduciary responsibilities. Organizations like the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, the American Enterprise Institute, the National Association of Scholars, the Manhattan Institute (where I work), and Heterodox Academy are providing the intellectual and policy infrastructure for reform. Most of all, students themselves, offered the chance to spend classroom time grappling with the great texts and questions of the Western tradition, are showing up. The University of Florida’s Hamilton School illustrates the trend: after its civic education courses were added to Florida’s core curriculum, enrollment in qualifying classes increased from 671 to 1,205 students. Administrators at other new civic education centers have reported similar year-over-year growth.

The AAUP can denounce all of this as an assault on academic freedom. But academic freedom is not, and never has been, synonymous with professors’ sovereignty over the university. Professors have the right to pursue truth without political interference in their research and teaching. They do not have the right to a permanent monopoly on what gets taught, who gets hired, and how public money gets spent. If the public determines that professors have abdicated their duty by allowing generations to graduate without understanding the Constitution, the Enlightenment, or the intellectual foundations of the free society that sustains their own privileges, they should not hesitate to return the academy to its core functions.

The civic education centers are not perfect. Some will need better curricula, better hiring, better integration with the broader university. But their existence represents something the AAUP cannot tolerate and the rest of us should celebrate: proof that the professoriate does not get the last word. The university belongs to all of us. We can act like it.

Tal Fortgang ’17 is a Legal Policy Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a regular contributor to PFS and a contributing writer at The Dispatch.

I’ve worked at the Office of Undergraduate Admission for almost three years now, and for two of those years I have been asked to represent the university as a student panelist for Princeton Preview (a day for 500+ admitted students to be on campus). My experience with this event, especially as the most recent one was just last month, gives me pause to reflect on the joy I receive in sharing my perspective, but even more so on the gratitude I feel for a University which has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to viewpoint diversity on my behalf.

Student panelists are asked by the administration to openly relate their thoughts on the academic, social, and extracurricular scenes at Princeton. They are asked to honestly express their values and how they have pursued them on both campus and beyond. In other words, they are asked to be exactly themselves.

Knowing this to be the role, when I was first requested for the position, I admit I was slightly surprised. I am an outspoken conservative and a devout Catholic. I am an active member of The James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, and I am a board member and the former Vice President of Princeton Pro-Life. So yes, you could say my views stray far from the norm.

I had known that Princeton affirmed a verbal dedication to free speech, but I had been convinced that such a dedication was just a mere toleration, if even that. However, in actively pursuing and publicizing the perspective of a student such as myself, I am able to now personally testify that this University has proved a vivacious commitment to viewpoint diversity. I accepted the student panelist position out of a genuine gratitude for such commitment, and I felt a desire to share the reality of Princeton’s support and encouragement.

I will never forget my first panel. In a crowd of over five hundred admitted students and on the very first question of the Q&A portion, I was asked about my beliefs. “What is it like being a conservative, pro-life student on campus? Do you feel you can speak freely? Are there spaces for you?” I answered her question honestly, and I spoke freely. I explained to her Princeton’s commitment to free speech, to learning, and to truth. I shared my own personal stories, those of my friends, and the inspiring conversations I had with those who did not hold my beliefs. When I finished, Victor, the panelist to my left, added a final comment—one I believe to be both beautiful and true. “You’re seeing it in action right now,” he said. Victor went on to explain that his political and social beliefs were primarily left-leaning, that his worldview was entirely different from my own. “And yet here we are, Abby and I, sitting next to each other—as friends—speaking in front of you.” He continued, “That is why you should come to Princeton.” And that right there is one belief of his I will get behind!

In having a truly diverse group of students share their perspectives, Princeton makes known that there exists a home for every viewpoint. However, as much as I believe this claim to be true, there are unfortunately those who do not. It is easy to dismiss the Princeton administration and culture as entirely polarizing and ideologically biased. In fact, it is true that many here hold the same dominant perspective . But to focus on this fact alone, to rest our entire judgement on one such observation, runs the dangerous risk of neglecting the clear and persistent efforts of this University to encourage every student—even the conservative ones—to share the beliefs that he or she so earnestly pursues.

I do not by any means suggest there is an absence of all conflict or disagreement between conservative students and the general administration and culture at Princeton. Nor do I suggest that opportunities for viewpoint diversity are at their highest. But I will give credit where credit is due. Princeton Preview has demonstrated to me that this University has an active commitment to free speech and free expression. But furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, it has demonstrated to me that the students themselves have this same commitment. For two years, I have sat on a panel with individuals entirely different from myself. Yet, we are united by one common bond—our joy in being able to honestly express ourselves and our gratitude to Princeton University, which makes such a joy so possible.

Abigail Readlinger ‘27 is a Junior in the Politics department from Princeton, NJ. She is a PFS Writing Fellow.

As I complete my undergraduate studies at Princeton University, I find myself reflecting on the purpose of education. This article aims to articulate my understanding of education in an abstract sense and to advance a normative argument grounded in the classical tradition. I address more concrete implications of the historical vocation of education in greater depth in my essay published last October by PFS, The Ideal of the University.

My fellow students and I are frequently encouraged to construct our own meaning, determine our own values, and in doing so, invent ourselves, so to speak. Ironically, I think this pursuit leads to nihilism, self-destruction, and despair. From its Latin roots, the wordeducare means “to lead out” or “to draw out.” This etymology raises an important question:what exactly is being drawn out, and toward what end? Increasingly, I have come to believe that education is not primarily the construction or expression of the self. The classical tradition understood education quite differently and in light of this understanding, I believe education ought to be understood as a process of discovery oriented toward truth, beauty, and goodness, and entailing a gradual orientation of the person toward these objective ends.

All three of these ends, I argue, are indicative or evidence of each other. A helpful illustration of my argument is in Plato’s vision of intellectual ascent in theSymposium. Through Socrates’ recounting of Diotima’s teachings,eros (love) becomes a movement upward from attachment to particular beautiful things toward increasingly eternal things. Beginning with admiration for individual instances of beauty, the soul gradually learns to perceive beauty in more universal abstract forms until it ultimately reaches the highest end of contemplation which isauto to kalon (the Form of Beauty itself). Education similarly, should train the soul to move toward deeper truth. Education, then, is the process of refining our taste and therefore, refining what discern, orient ourselves towards, and admire.

Catastrophically, I think the notion that these unified ends (i.e. beauty, truth, and goodness) are subjective, has made the process of learning seem subject to personal preference. Classical thinkers (e.g. Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas), understood beauty as a way in which truth manifests itself. This understanding differs from the contemporary tendency to reduce beauty to subjective preference or personal expression. I have found the late English philosopher Roger Scruton persuasive on this point. In his renowned workBeauty: A Very Short Introduction, Scruton argues that beauty demands reverence because it directs us beyond narcissism and toward what is real. He writes that “beauty is a call to renounce our narcissism and look with reverence on the world.”

The classical understanding of education is ultimately rooted in humility in that it assumes that truth precedes us and that the world possesses an inherent order. Furthermore, I believe the process of discovering this order is a much better pursuit than self-discovery, so to speak. Education ought to be the formation of the person through an encounter with what is already real, already enduring, and already worthy of our attention, which I believe is the most humble pursuit.

Annabel Green ’26 is a senior from Boulder, Colorado, majoring in Public and International Affairs and minoring in Global Health and Health Policy. She is a PFS student writing fellow.

By Tal Fortgang ‘17

The protests that greeted Department of Homeland Security General Counsel James Percival at UCLA School of Law in April were not surprising. Law students, especially at highly ranked schools like UCLA, have become notoriously intolerant of disfavored speakers coming to campus — and few institutions are quite as polarizing as DHS in the “Abolish ICE” era. It was striking, however, that the students who organized the interruptions of Percival’s presentation — with heckling, hacking coughs, cellphones, and the occasional profanity — did exactly what “snowflake” students have been ridiculed and denounced for doing when encountering someone they don’t agree with.

Their justifications were perfectly on brand. “By giving Mr. Percival a platform,” wrote 18 student groups in an open letter, “the Federalist Society and UCLA Law are legitimizing and normalizing racially discriminatory policies that are actively harming both UCLA students and our broader community.” The tactics are nothing new. The justifications are nothing new. Even the UCLA administration’s reflexive defense of the perpetrators—threatening the Federalist Society not to publicize the faces of students who disrupted the event, and then backtracking, issuing a statement calling the event a successful application of free-speech principles — is more of the same.

The critical reactions to the students violating their code of conduct and basic free-speech principles comes off shopworn as well. Two lines of critique are most intuitive and receive the most airtime. First: How are students who cannot bear to hear someone they detest supposed to defend unpopular clients, cross-examine hostile witnesses, address opposing arguments, or endure the procedural discipline of actual courtroom practice? Second: Don’t these students know they are not persuading anyone by engaging in mindless disruption? Not only will they fail to hone their powers of persuasion in law school; they will alienate people from the very cause that spurred them to disrupt in the first place.

These were once fair questions. The persistence of these infuriating, juvenile displays of intolerance, however, suggests that the traditional criticisms are moot. A consistent cohort of students is not trying to become better professionals at all. Rather, such students are using their education to practice political stunts. They see their job as fighting for a righteous cause, against “policies that are actively harming” people. Part of that fight involves flexing one’s muscles and showing who really belongs in elite universities. Those who violate the rules with impunity, affirming that the administration will reflexively take their side, demonstrate that they “own” UCLA.

One cohort of radicals inviting their own expulsion and thus ending their host university’s descent into intolerance would not be a story, of course. But the UCLA incident reminds us that these events continue in the same form they have always taken, even as the individual participants graduate and new provocateurs fill their spots. This is a story about the university, not the students they coddle. Administrators dissemble, make excuses, and year after year replenish their stock of disruptive radicals. Those decisions amount to a confirmation that the radicals are right: They do own UCLA and have transformed its law school into something quite different from what the public thinks it is.

The March 9, 2023 debacle where Stanford Law students harassed Judge Kyle Duncan and prevented him from speaking was supposed to be a turning point. The students who shouted down the federal judge and disrupted his discussion with disgusting profanity were scandal enough. But the more consequential moment came when administrator Tirien Steinbach infamously rose to affirm that she believed the students were in the right even as she asked them to pipe down, before chiding the Federalist Society for inviting a federal judge with the infamous phrase, “is the juice worth the squeeze?” The question itself revealed the problem: At Stanford Law, the protestors’ views were orthodox, the Federalist Society was deviant. While technically it violated Stanford’s rules to shout things about female reproductive anatomy at Judge Duncan to disrupt his speech, it was understandable given how divisive he — not those who disagree with him — was.

It seemed to have not occurred to Steinbach that a relevant question was not whether Judge Duncan fit comfortably into Stanford Law’s dominant political culture, but whether Stanford Law students were being formed properly by the administration’s choices. Steinbach later stepped down. No students faced any discipline. Stanford Law was doing its job; Steinbach’s mistake was explaining what that job was, out loud.

UCLA’s administrators appear to be following the same script. The accusation bedeviling so much of higher education is especially appropriate at law schools, where ideological capture appears especially acute. Elite law schools have drifted from their core purpose. They still teach doctrine. Students still work through civil procedure and memorize standards of review. But law schools’ cultural self-understanding has shifted significantly. Young people are not there to become refined advocates capable of serving any client within the bounds of the law. Nor are they there to expand their minds so they won’t be caught off-guard when opposing counsel makes an unexpected or seemingly illogical argument. That is why the classic critiques of the UCLA incident don’t land, and critics find themselves seemingly shouting into a void.

Based on law schools’ own behaviors, they consider the ideal graduate an ideologically minded professional equipped to deploy a wide array of tactics in the service of particular social outcomes. They may acquire legal tools along the way, but credentialing these activists with a JD from a reputable school is what animates hiring committees, student organizations, administrative bureaucracies, and much of the faculty culture at schools like UCLA, Stanford, and Yale (another top law school where non-orthodox speakers have been mistreated).

The students who disrupt events embody the best of contemporary higher education, as its ostensible stewards would have it. They aren’t trying to persuade anyone because they don’t need to; they have power in their corner, as UCLA’s administration readily confirmed, and they can simply show the minority of dissenters that their presence is at best tolerated.

In his celebrated 2025 book Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites, my Manhattan Institute colleague Ilya Shapiro showed how law schools’ particular problems are hardly confined to the legal academy. They are a civilizational problem, a higher-education failure distilled to its purest form. Shapiro, himself a victim of a ridiculous smear campaign and cowardly administrators at Georgetown Law, documented how the law schools most susceptible to unhinged displays of intolerance serve as transmission belts for the elite sensibilities that flow outward to our most important sensemaking and taste making institutions. The legal profession is one of the primary channels through which campus culture reshapes American life. Its pathologies cause wider problems, but are also reflections of the ways in which our broader culture has abandoned persuasion and professional competence in favor of strong-arming and the subordination of traditional norms to the achievement of desired social goals.

This goes some way toward explaining why the atmosphere at elite law schools can feel more ideologically rigid than at other parts of the university. Classes are smaller and the stakes are higher. Graduates will become federal clerks, prosecutors, agency officials, policymakers, and judges. The professional norms they absorb in law school will go with them. The gatekeeping that subordinates reason to power, articulated by Steinbach and reinforced once again at UCLA, will not stop unless it has reason to.

It may be the case that many of these graduates will eventually be moderated by clients, courts, and deadlines. But lawyers do lots of things aside from litigate. Most of the individuals who behaved execrably to silence Percival will occupy positions in which they face very little adversarial pressure. Law firms, nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and compliance departments are full of people whose professional judgment is rarely tested by genuine adversarial pressure. Others will work where their zealous ideological purity is considered a strength. The ideological habits formed in law school have ample room to persist, spread, and become orthodoxies themselves. They can reshape important institutions, including the law itself, before there is any opportunity for course-correction. The same is true for other sectors that draw upon newly credentialed elites to repopulate their ranks each year.

Is that a problem? Perhaps once upon a time universities considered it a failure to graduate young people who would become adequate professionals with latent destructive tendencies. Clearly that is not the case now. The debate over law schools is thus ultimately a debate about higher education’s self-understanding, and whether credentialing institutions maintain sufficient commitment to the principles that make them worth taking seriously.

The question that ought to preoccupy university leaders is whether those who train tomorrow’s professionals still believe that being a professional is the point.

Tal Fortgang ’17 is a Legal Policy Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a regular contributor to PFS and a contributing writer at The Dispatch.

Tal Fortgang
‘17

Prestigious universities and leading state schools across the nation have embraced viewpoint diversity by building new institutions—civic education centers and the like—which are simultaneously on yet apart from the campus. Harvard has quietly taken a different tack. Over the past several months, the university’s top brass have been asking major donors for $10 million gifts to endow new professorships under the banner of “viewpoint diversity.” Provost John Manning, a scholar often associated with the conservative legal movement, has led the effort, aiming to place between 20 and 30 new faculty across schools and departments rather than siloed in a standalone institute.

Why Harvard would need additional funding for this is an open question, but putting that partly aside, we ought to ask what to make of this unique initiative. It stands a chance of being either the most consequential reform attempt in elite higher education this decade, or a sophisticated piece of reputation management serving double duty as a clever fundraiser. Which one it turns out to be depends on whether Harvard has thought carefully about what viewpoint diversity means, and whether it intends to execute in line with a considered answer.

Where the viewpoint-diversity movement is going is guided by where it comes from. After October 7, 2023, Harvard’s task forces on antisemitism and anti-Muslim bias folded bias prevention into a broader project of open inquiry. President Alan Garber pledged to “speed the establishment” of a university-wide viewpoint diversity effort. The Trump administration then sharpened the pressure considerably, demanding in an April 2025 letter that Harvard commission an external audit of its faculty, students, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, and reform any department found lacking by hiring a “critical mass” of new faculty.

Garber rejected those demands while acknowledging that Harvard had “unfinished business” and needed to reaffirm “a culture of free inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and academic exploration.” The Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics has since piloted a “Debate, Debrief, and Dessert” series, launched an American Service Fellowship for public servants and veterans, and floated a visiting faculty program that would bring scholars for yearlong fellowships with the hope of retaining some permanently. Harvard Law School has reportedly extended an offer to Notre Dame law professor and philosopher Sherif Girgis, who is known for his eloquent defenses of socially conservative views that tend to be unpopular at elite universities. Bringing Girgis aboard would be the single best thing Harvard has done in years. He is a one-man viewpoint-diversity machine.

Yet when the endowed professorship plan became public, more than a dozen Harvard faculty weighed in with cautious concern. Some questioned what “viewpoint diversity” would even mean. Others worried about donor influence over hiring. An op-ed in the Harvard Crimson argued that viewpoint diversity should be understood to mean promoting disciplines “under attack by those in power,” specifically naming women’s and gender studies, while rejecting the idea of hiring faculty who hold views that “one political party or even a majority of Americans has adopted.” The faculty who produce the monoculture are defining, on their own authority, which heterodox views count as legitimately heterodox.

This brings us to what viewpoint diversity actually requires, and why getting the definition right is no semantic quibble.

Viewpoint diversity is not synonymous with partisan balance or with ideological bean-counting. Trying to reach a fifty-fifty split regarding any issue or system of thought would be unworkable and beside the point. What matters is whether a department contains scholars with genuinely different foundational assumptions, different methodologies, and different prior commitments within the university’s legitimate remit — scholars whose work, at its core, challenges rather than confirms what their colleagues take for granted even as they remain geared towards the basic republican goods an American university must promote.

I’ll give an example. A department of economists who disagree about marginal tax rates but agree that market mechanisms are presumptively legitimate, and that empirical social science is the appropriate way to resolve policy questions, has almost no viewpoint diversity in the sense that matters. A department that also contains an economist who questions those priors, and who can supervise doctoral students who question them, contributes something valuable.

This can be a bitter pill for those of us who believe that free-market economics are superior to their competitors to the point of discrediting the alternative. But universities require not just diverse ideas but diverse points of entry into the conversation, including different views of the life well-lived and the university’s role in promoting it. The task of viewpoint diversity is to introduce scholars capable of challenging what the dominant culture has declared settled, not scholars who vary only within the range the dominant culture considers acceptable.

This is also why viewpoint diversity is a prerequisite to the free-speech-reform project’s success. The past several years have produced genuine progress on the procedural dimension: universities have adopted Chicago-style free speech principles, DEI statements are being dropped from hiring criteria, and even FIRE’s speech-codes database is thinner than it once was. But procedural reform without cultural reform is a new set of rules administered by the same people with the same assumptions.

If minority answers to the great open questions are met with members of the majority rolling their eyes, assigning lower grades, excluding dissenters from dissertation committees, or making clear through a hundred informal signals that some ways of thinking categorically do not belong, rules protecting speech will not change such an environment. The culture will persist as long as it treats some premises as unbecoming of sophisticated people.

Tenured scholars in prestigious departments are the mechanism that changes this. Visiting fellows, debate series, even endowed chairs in an adjacent institute can provide succor to students who feel stifled, but they are unlikely to shift the culture from the outside. Scholars who stay, who advise students, who sit on committees, who push back in faculty meetings — these are the people who alter what questions a department treats as worth asking.

How bad is the problem? Harvard Kennedy School’s visiting fellowship proposal is a promising signal, but its own donors were told that the school is struggling to find qualified conservative candidates. Perhaps this is merely academic self-justification: we would hire more widely if only the pipeline produced them. Yet there is reason to accept half of that argument. The pipeline is definitely thin. That doesn’t excuse the universities from addressing that problem. You need a few teachers to break in and train a new generation of diverse-thinking scholars, not because the universities need affirmative action to benefit individual conservatives (or even the conservative movement), but because the university itself benefits from having a critical mass of people willing to debate and refine matters of public importance.

Harvard’s decision to embed new faculty across schools and departments rather than in a standalone institute is the right one. (Princeton’s James Madison Program is similar; though it exists as its own entity, its faculty are dispersed throughout different departments.) It signals that the goal is to change ambient departmental culture, not to create a politically protected preserve where heterodox views are tolerated at a safe distance.

But the university now faces a harder question than whether to act. The question is whether it will allow “viewpoint diversity” to mean what it must mean: scholars who can look their colleagues in the eye and tell them that their field’s received wisdom is flawed, and who have the job security to keep saying so. Five years from now, the test of this initiative will not be the number of chairs endowed or the balance sheets of donor dinners. It will be whether a doctoral student at Harvard can write a dissertation that challenges the orthodoxies of her field while still engaging in forms of reasoning her fellow Americans can recognize—encouraging sophistry is not the point—and can find a faculty committee to supervise it. Harvard will have succeeded if such a scholar can question the things seemingly all Harvardians believe, and still be treated as of the campus, rather than an outsider who somehow infiltrated.

Tal Fortgang ’17 is a Legal Policy Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a regular contributor to PFS and a contributing writer at The Dispatch.

Leslie Spencer
Princetonians for Free Speech

The average college professor who donates to political candidates is “only slightly less left on the ideological spectrum than Bernie Sanders.” So reveals a new report by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) . Faculty at America’s top universities overwhelmingly donate to candidates on the left, with the range increasingly concentrated on the far left. The study’s author, University of Rochester professor David Primo, concludes that the “The figures suggest that ideological diversity is essentially absent from universities today.”

The study analyses campaign contributions by faculty over time at 55 institutions of higher education in the US, including Princeton. Data from 100,000 faculty members gathered by FIRE for its 2024 faculty survey was compared with 850 million campaign contributions gathered since 1979. The method used provides a more revealing measure of ideology than looking at simple party affiliation: A Republican professor who gives exclusively to Lisa Murkowski, for instance, scores very differently from one who gives exclusively to Ted Cruz.

Are some schools better at fostering intellectual diversity than others? The study clearly reveals that the most elite universities are among those with the least ideological diversity. Princeton is ranked 13 out of the 55 in the study, with its faculty slightly more ideologically diverse than, for instance, UC Berkeley, Brown, Dartmouth and Harvard, and slightly less diverse than Stanford, Cornell, UCLA or Georgetown. But it is important to note: Princeton’s scores are very similar to all of the elite schools located on the West Coast and the Northeast, which show extreme lack of ideological diversity and which on average skew far left, a reality that has grown more pronounced over time. The schools that show more ideological diversity are in the South and Midwest: Professors at Texas A&M, Clemson and Kansas State for instance, spread out ideologically three or four times more than Princeton or any of the Ivy and other elite schools in the Northeast and West Coast. In sum, Princeton faculty as measured by political contributions are among the least ideologically diverse in the country and occupy a narrow band of left and far-left politics with virtually no conservative or moderate presence as a counterweight.

Why does this matter? Can’t leftwing professors teach without indoctrinating, and research without bias? The study concludes:

Regardless of one’s political views, the lack of ideological diversity in academia should be of concern for the broader enterprise of higher education. Scholars have raised concerns that the quality of higher education both in terms of scientific progress and the classroom experience is hindered by lack of viewpoint diversity. Scientists who view the world through the same ideological lens are, all else equal, not going to push the boundaries of knowledge in the same way that a group of diverse thinkers will. Similarly, students are likely to receive a different sort of educational experience – especially in the humanities and social sciences – if they never encounter a conservative professor in four years of study.

FIRE stresses that the way to champion viewpoint diversity on campus does not mean quotas or top-down management. Instead it recommends ways to enliven a campus culture so that students and faculty “regularly encounter real disagreement on contested political, moral, cultural, and scholarly questions, and can air and respond to those disagreements on the merits without fear of professional, academic, or social punishment.”

There is little doubt that this study provides another opening for politicians and critics to attack higher education, perhaps in unfair ways. Princeton could help neutralize this by joining those reform-minded university leaders in the now burgeoning effort to regain the public’s trust in higher education. Princeton’s leadership could, for instance, commit to strict institutional neutrality policies, end ideological litmus tests in hiring and admissions, and redouble its efforts to train students and administrators about free speech protections. For a more detailed list of reforms, see PFS’s Top Ten recommendations to Princeton’s leadership. FIRE’s findings need not cause conflict and defensiveness. It can instead become a foundation for reforming discourse, research and teaching on college campuses. Princeton should look hard at FIRE’s faculty ideology study and lead the effort to course correct.

Leslie Spencer '79 is Vice Chair of Princetonians for Free Speech.

— Remarks as delivered —

In a few minutes, all of you will walk out of this stadium as newly minted graduates of this University. Before you do, however, long-standing tradition permits the University president to offer a few remarks about the path that lies ahead.

I hope that your journeys will contain many moments of brightness, celebration, and joy, but they begin in troubled times when our world is struggling to cope with partisan divisions, political violence, and rapid technological change.

We are, of course, not the first Princetonians to confront such challenges. As I seek perspective on today’s problems, I often find it useful to consult the wisdom of our predecessors from the 1960s, another period when America, and its college campuses, experienced social upheaval.

Princeton’s leader during that decade was Robert F. Goheen. Goheen was both an undergraduate and a graduate alumnus of this University, earning his bachelor’s degree in 1940 and his doctorate in 1948, both in classics.

He became Princeton’s president in 1957, when he was 37 years old and still an assistant professor.

I do not know how the University trustees recognized that a young untenured classicist was ready to lead a great university, but they chose brilliantly. When Goheen died in 2008, two other former Princeton presidents, William Bowen and Harold Shapiro, praised him as the “architect of the modern Princeton.”[1]

Robert Goheen oversaw the long overdue admission of women to Princeton’s graduate and undergraduate programs. He increased the number of underrepresented minorities on campus. He reformed the University’s governance processes and guided the University through roiling conflicts over the Vietnam War. During his fifteen-year tenure, Princeton constructed or acquired thirty-eight new buildings and the faculty grew by forty percent.[2]

Those who knew Robert Goheen describe him with admiration, as a man of integrity, humility, compassion, and courage.

Goheen collected his thoughts about Princeton and higher education in a book titled The Human Nature of a University.[3]

In the closing paragraphs to that book, Goheen reflected “on th[e] word ‘courage’” and its connection to the mission of the American university. He observed that, and these are his words:

“Hostile forces anchoring on selfish interests, or the status quo, have in every century opposed those institutions dedicated to the advancement of learning and the betterment of human life, and we would be rash indeed to underestimate these forces.”[4]

He ended his book with these words:

“Courage, with temperance, is always needed to hold the university to its role and mission: courage on the part of men and women of good will who cherish the spirit of liberal learning and seek a better day for [humanity]. So girded, the university as a human institution can be confident not only of its past but of its present and future, ready to stand up for its aims and basic commitments, bold to make its voice heard in the land.”[5]

We often think of “courage” as a heroic virtue and associate it with risks to life or limb. On this view, its antonyms are timidity, weakness, or fear.

Goheen, however, contrasted courage with insecurity and vanity, or, more precisely, with the desire to be popular.

Here is what he says about why courage is essential to the university and its members:

“Perhaps the highest and most difficult function of the university, its most irreplaceable form of service in a free society, [is] to be willing to stand up as a judge of society’s tastes and actions. The critic and the judge are not always popular, but the greatest teachers in all ages have preferred hard truth to comfortable fiction and self-respect to popular esteem.”[6]

The Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison, who taught at Princeton as the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities, struck similar themes in her brilliant address titled “The Place of the Idea; The Idea of the Place,” which she delivered at Princeton’s 250^th anniversary convocation in 1996.

Morrison said that Princeton was founded by religious dissenters who prized “conscience … above orthodoxy,” a position she said was “so unpopular among colonial educators [that it] must have seemed reckless.”[7]

Near the end of her speech, Morrison, like Goheen, called for courage. She hoped that Princeton’s origins in unpopular dissent would inspire Princetonians to maintain “a fierce commitment to … virtues such as integrity and honor and fair play and courage.”[8]

In a famous Supreme Court opinion, Justice Louis Brandeis defended the American people’s right to free speech by arguing that:

“To courageous, self-reliant [people], with confidence in the power of free and fearless reasoning applied through the processes of popular government, no danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is opportunity for full discussion.”[9]

For many years when I taught this passage to my students, I treated its reference to courage as a mere rhetorical flourish. I regarded it as patriotic praise that flattered readers but was largely irrelevant to the point that Brandeis was making.

Only as our society became more turbulent did I perceive what Brandeis meant, and what Robert Goheen recognized amidst the tumult of the 1960s: namely, that civic and personal courage are essential if we are to have the “full discussion” that is required to rebut dangerous tendencies and corrosive ideas.

Dissenting from a popular opinion—in politics, in a committee meeting, or in a discussion among friends—will often feel uncomfortable. There is an inevitable temptation to remain silent so as not to hurt other people’s feelings, forfeit their affection, or risk retribution.

If we are to live up to the ideals of citizenship and scholarship, we must sometimes speak anyway. We must be faithful to the standards of truth-seeking inquiry and civic responsibility even when they lead us down difficult paths.

As Louis Brandeis, Robert Goheen, and Toni Morrison all emphasized, self-government, freedom, and learning cannot always be comfortable. They require independence, and independence by definition entails the strength to stand alone, to be respectfully and when possible politely, but nevertheless unabashedly, unpopular.

Courage is necessary not only to assert dissenting opinions but also, and equally importantly, to admit error or change one’s mind. That, too, is an essential part of learning, in life generally and especially on a college campus.

To quote again from Robert Goheen’s book, students and faculty “should be constantly in the process of making up their minds and then unmaking them.”[10] On a healthy college campus, he wrote, “there should be controversy and arguing and a great deal of churning of matters of mind and spirit.”[11]

I know that all of you who receive your degrees today have earned them fully by working hard, deepening your knowledge, and acquiring new skills.

I hope that you have also not only experienced but enjoyed and been formed by what President Robert Goheen called the “millrace of jostling and tumbling ideas.”[12]

Our world needs not only your knowledge and your skills but also your courage. I accordingly hope that in the days and years to come you will, in Goheen’s words, prefer “hard truth to comfortable fiction and self-respect to popular esteem.”[13]

I wish, in short, that you will always carry with you the spirit of this place as Robert Goheen and Toni Morrison have exemplified and described it.

I hope, too, that as you venture forth to meet the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead, you will always consider this campus one of your homes and that you will return to it often.

Those of us on this platform will greet you then as we cheer you today, wishing you every success as Princeton University’s Great Class of 2026! Congratulations!

[1] Bowen said Goheen was “the architect of the modern Princeton”; Shapiro called Goheen “the first architect of today’s Princeton.” Ruth Stevens, “Robert F. Goheen, 16th president of Princeton, dies at age 88; service set for April 27,” Princeton University, March 31, 2008, https://www.princeton.edu/news/2008/03/31/robert-f-goheen-16th-president-princeton-dies-age-88-service-set-april-27.

[2] “Former University President Robert Goheen ’40 dies” The Daily Princetonian, March 2008, https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2008/03/former-university-president-robert-goheen-40-dies; Douglas Martin, “Robert F. Goheen, Innovative Princeton President, Is Dead at 88,” April 1, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/nyregion/01goheen.html.

[3] Robert F. Goheen, The Human Nature of a University (Princeton University Press, 1969).

[4] Goheen,The Human Nature of a University, 115.

[5] Goheen,The Human Nature of a University, 116.

[6] Goheen,The Human Nature of a University, 116.

[7] Toni Morrison, “The Place of the Idea; The Idea of the Place,” as delivered at Princeton’s 250^th anniversary convocation, October 25, 1996, https://pr.princeton.edu/news/96/q4/1025spch.htm.

[8] Morrison, “The Place of the Idea; The Idea of the Place.”

[9] Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357, 377 (1927) (Brandeis, J., concurring).

[10] Goheen, The Human Nature of a University, 52.

[11] Goheen, The Human Nature of a University, 59.

[12] Goheen, The Human Nature of a University, 59.

[13] Goheen, The Human Nature of a University, 116.

On Sunday, May 24, Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS) hosted a breakfast at the Nassau Inn — and despite dreary skies outside, the energy inside couldn’t have been brighter. About 70 alumni, current students and other free speech supporters turned out for what proved to be an engaging and inspiring morning.

PFS leadership set the stage with organizational updates from Co-founder Ed Yingling ‘70, President & CEO Todd Rulon-Miller ‘73, and Executive Director Angela Smith — including the exciting news that PFS has grown to over26,000 email subscribers (20,000 of whom are Princeton alumni). This represents remarkable growth from just 1,400 two years ago, showing a momentum that was on full display during this packed event.

The heart of the program belonged to the students.

Amelia Freund, an undergraduate from the class of ‘28, joined Myles McKnight ‘23 and Danielle Shapiro ‘25, two recent graduates, on a panel that offered candid, first-hand perspectives on campus life. They covered the challenges of navigating the faculty and administration, what advocating for free speech on campus entails, the progress they think has been made and where shortfalls still exist.

Shapiro recounted organizing and attending an April 2025 event at McCosh Hall featuring former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, where demonstrators shouted down the speaker, pulled a fire alarm to end the event, and hurled antisemitic slurs at Jewish attendees outside. She argued that the severity of the protester’s behavior and tactics undermined the attendees’ right to listen. Post-event, Shapiro personally spent over two hours with Princeton administrators detailing her experience and identifying the disruptive students involved. Even so, Princeton declined to discipline any of the students responsible and allowed seniors to graduate without consequence for their violations of university rules. PFS’s letter to President Eisgruber sent in the immediate aftermath of this event stressed the importance of enforcing university rules as well as First Amendment protections.

The panel also took aim at the media landscape students navigate when advocating for free speech on campus. The Daily Princetonian, panelists noted, leans heavily left in its editorial outlook, and students who champion free speech, viewpoint diversity, or dissenting perspectives routinely find it difficult to get their voices published there. They argued that the resulting gap in coverage leaves a distorted picture of campus discourse and makes the already uphill work of advocacy even harder.

One standout moment came from McKnight, who, along with a classmate during their time at Princeton, had the courage to approach the Administration directly and advocate for a robust free speech discussion at freshman orientation. Their persistence paid off: not only was the programming adopted, but it has also become a fixture of the orientation experience. So compelling was his case that the Administration invited him to address the entire incoming class on the subject — a remarkable testament to what one motivated student can achieve.

A Q&A and open discussion followed, with many lively comments and questions, including from the distinguished academic, columnist and book author Walter Russell Mead, who had delivered the keynote at the James Madison Program’s Reunions event. His participation added notable depth to the conversation.

It was a wonderful morning in Tiger Town with engaged alumni, student voices and a passion for free speech, academic freedom and viewpoint diversity leading the way.