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.

Attend a free speech-themed event at Princeton, or read any of our articles on the Princetonians for Free Speech website and you will encounter a familiar phrase, so ubiquitous it has almost become cliche: the “truth-seeking mission of the university.” Many defenders of academic freedom frame the debate in terms of a conflict over the fundamental telosof the academy (I myself have done this several times.) Is the mission of the university the pursuit of truth, or is it a socio-political goal? Whatever this socio-political goal, whether the radical social equality of Herbert Marcuse or the fascism of the Nazis, when the university dedicates itself towards political ends, truth suffers, freedom is extinguished and the academic vocation is compromised. Therefore, in order to protect free speech in the academy, we must reiterate and defend the mission of the university as the pursuit of truth. But what if we have it all wrong?

On November 11, the James Madison Program hosted a conversation with Carleton College professors Amna Khalid and Jeff Snyder on “the state of campus free expression today.” Both Khalid and Snyder have toured the country to speak on free speech issues, worked for the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, and are frequent contributors to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Since last spring, the campus free speech debate has taken on a markedly different tone. Leftists rediscovered the virtues of free speech and institutional neutrality, while conservatives cried for common sense limitations. Central to the new conversation was the role of protest in the academy, and specially, encampments. Last April, Khalid and Snyder penned their own contribution in CHR, defending the importance of campus protest and activism. Protest, in their view, is an integral part of democratic citizenship, and universities have a duty to cultivate good citizens of our liberal society. But while many would accept that our universities have some duty to civic society, is protest necessarily the correct fulfillment of that obligation? Should a democratic society seek to cultivate activists or free thinkers? I would argue the latter – one cannot fulfill the right of free expression unless it is preceded by free thought and free thought can only be cultivated through liberal education.

However, this disagreement made me sympathetic to the crux of their critique of most free speech discourse: that the “truth-seeking mission of the university” may be unhelpful in the service of academic freedom, or just plain false. According to Khalid and Snyder, truth-seeking is an anachronistic view of academia, one that “neglects one hundred and fifty years of intellectual history in the academy” such as the secularization of higher education and the intellectual development of humanities disciplines towards more interpretive-based approaches. Certainly, some disciplines are obviously dedicated to the pursuit of truth, particularly the hard sciences, but a “truth-seeking mission” is less convincing when applied to, say, literary theory. Therefore, there exists a “sliding scale” of veracity from the hard sciences to the arts; on one end the mission is the pursuit of truth, on the other the discipline is interpretation, and the goal is critical thinking. In this view, critical thinking, that is open-mindedness and competent analytic skills, is the goal in itself, rather than the skills necessary to form a judgment of truth. In their telling, the constant reiteration of the truth-seeking mission of the university alienates potential allies in the humanities whose work is more interpretive.

Critical thinking is certainly a virtuous endeavor. In the tradition of Mill and Tocqueville, it is necessary that democratic citizens free their minds from the groupthink of mass culture in order to participate virtuously in a republic; free thought must precede free speech. But can critical thinking be an end in itself– an intrinsic good? We can accept that some academic disciplines are more directly concerned with truth and others with critical thinking, but what is one to do with the critical thinking acquired? Some scholars, like Allan Bloom and Eric Voegelin, have emphasized the intrinsic good of critical thinking and having an inquisitive, philosophical mind. And yet there is something deeply unsatisfying about existing in a state of perpetual criticism, and one that is inimical to the classical goal of liberal education: the good, the true, and the beautiful. Constant criticism is a recipe for nihilism. In his essay on the discipline of history, Nietzsche wrote that criticism “ is always a dangerous process...for since we are now the products of earlier generations, we are also the products of their aberrations, passions, mistakes, and even crimes. It is impossible to loose oneself from this chain entirely…too often what remains is a case of someone who understands the good without doing it.” Critical thinking is indeed indispensable for liberal education, but it cannot be an end in itself, but rather an instrumental good towards the pursuit of truth. To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, an open mind and an open mouth have the same goal: to shut it on something solid.

The above is a republish of a 2024 article written by PFS Writing Fellow Khoa Sands ‘26.

Tal Fortgang
‘17

There is a particular kind of bad idea that thrives under the protection of academic freedom. Such a toxic philosophy does not contribute to the marketplace of ideas. Rather, it gains prominence within the academy precisely because it systematically poisons that marketplace from within. When it comes under attack from outside university gates, campus administrators invoke free inquiry and end up defending it as precisely the kind of controversial matter academics must be free to explore; professors assign it as cutting-edge gospel; students come to think of it as precisely what they’re attending college to absorb.

Third Worldism is such an idea. Though it is not campus-grown like critical theory, it has found the American university to be an almost perfect habitat. It manifests in open celebrations of violence, if the bloodshed is directed against Westerners. A perfect example was the recent demonstration at Swarthmore College, where students chanted to express their love for Iran and its terrorist proxy Hezbollah to kill soldiers. Iran and Hezbollah have killed hundreds of American troops in the past and are actively engaged in a war against the very country that protects these students’ right to speak.

Traditionally, the analysis of these dime-a-dozen student actions revolves around their right to project such horrific messages on campus. Under the laws of civil rights, freedom of speech, immigration, material support for terrorism, and more, it’s arguable. It’s also not the only analytical mode available.

The better question is this: Is this the kind of movement universities should incubate? Speech that flows freely on campus can nevertheless erode the basic epistemic trust that makes serious inquiry possible. Third Worldism provides a perfect example of a set of ideas that ought to have been marginalized — not banned, but treated as something akin to pseudoscience — though it is tolerable under free-speech or academic-freedom principles. It is shouldn’t thrive within the university, because it is beneath the university; it is unserious and corrosive.

What is Third-Worldism?

As scholars like Zineb Riboua and Martin Kramer have documented in their analyses, Third Worldism is not a set of policy preferences. It is an epistemological framework—a way of sorting all human experience into categories that reinforce the theory that the West exploits the rest of the world. In its most coherent form, it holds that the global South has been systematically victimized by Western capitalism, imperialism, and cultural hegemony, and that this victimization is the master key to understanding history, politics, economics, and even science.

This worldview is distinct from both Islamism and classical Marxism. Instead, it stems from “Third-Worldist” intellectual traditions developed in the mid-20th century, particularly through thinkers influenced by anti-colonial struggles such as Algeria’s war of independence. Over time, scholars like Maxime Rodinson and Edward Said recast Zionism and Israel through a colonial lens, and these ideas were institutionalized in Western academia. The result is a conceptual system in which Western nations are defined as illegitimate from the outset, while anything untoward done by the “Third World” is interpreted as resistance through the same inductive process.

Within this system, historical complexities—such as, for example, the fact that nearly all nations began with one ethnic group conquering another—are minimized or reinterpreted to fit the model. Riboua has astutely pointed out how this creates intellectual “fog,” where accumulating terminology gives the appearance of depth while simplifying reality into moral binaries.

The intellectual lineage runs through Frantz Fanon and the Tricontinental movements of the 1960s, through Said’s postcolonial turn, and into the contemporary diversity-equity-inclusion apparatus that now shapes hiring, curriculum, and institutional culture at nearly every research university in the country. Riboua’s work tracing the ideological foundations of states like Iran and Algeria—where, as analysts at the Washington Institute have noted, the ruling ideology “blends anti-imperialist Marxism, Shia Islamism, and reactionary Third Worldism”— illuminates where these ideas end up when taken to their logical conclusion outside the seminar room.

What makes Third Worldism especially durable is its self-sealing quality. Because it frames Western institutions—including liberal epistemology, empirical social science, and the peer-reviewed journal—as instruments of domination, it renders itself immune to standard academic falsification. To critique it from within the Western tradition is, by the logic of the framework, to reproduce the oppressor’s perspective. Kramer, in his forensic dissection of Middle East Studies programs, identified “militant third worldism” as the dominant influence in a field that had largely abandoned scholarly rigor for advocacy—one that made it nearly impossible to produce honest analysis of the Arab world, Islam, or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because the ideological conclusion was baked into the methodological premise.

Not Scholarship but Catechism

If this were scholarship that allowed for free and open inquiry, and critiques running in both directions, it would make an interesting sub-field of academic study. Certainly, Americans ought to understand the ruling ideology of states like Iran, just as we understand Chinese Communism and North Korean Juche. The problem is that there is no scholarship at play here. It is catechism with footnotes. And its spread through the humanities and social sciences has been less like a debate won than like an infection left unchecked—not because the arguments are compelling, but because the institutional incentives for resisting them have nearly disappeared.

Third Worldism is a peculiarly campus-driven phenomenon, and this helps explain why those who view Western civilization as an obstacle to their ambitions—whether Islamist movements, authoritarian states, or the network of foreign-funded advocacy organizations that now operate openly on American campuses—have long identified the university as the single most important entry point for ideological influence. You can see its fingerprints everywhere in the texture of campus life. Introductory sociology courses teach students that the United States was built on genocide and slavery before they have learned the basics of social-science literacy. Anthropology syllabi begin with the caveat that “Western science” is one knowledge system among many, epistemically equivalent to indigenous oral traditions. Philosophy departments assign Fanon and Gayatri Spivak while dropping the analytic tradition as suspect. “Decolonize the curriculum” is not a fringe slogan; it is an active administrative initiative at institutions from Columbia to Berkeley to the University of Michigan. The language of ordinary campus exchange has been colonized—if one may use the term—by assumptions that treat American power as presumptively evil, Western history as an uninterrupted crime, and any defense of liberal institutions as bad-faith apologetics. When Iranian state media praises student encampments, or when Chinese influence operations fund campus organizations promoting anti-Western grievance narratives, they are not introducing foreign ideas into a neutral space. They are watering seeds that have already been planted.

Critiquing Third Worldism and its prevalence in the academy should be seen as a mirror image of concerns over reflexively jingoistic curricula—except Third Worldism is worse. Uncritical celebration of American power, the insistence that the United States can do no wrong, the dismissal of foreign perspectives as irrelevant or hostile would be an intellectual failure.

But Third Worldism is guilty of precisely the same failure: it replaces one set of unexamined assumptions with another, substitutes one form of motivated reasoning about the political ends of our academic enterprise for another, and demands that students organize their understanding of the world around a predetermined moral conclusion.

The crucial difference is that unthinking patriotism, whatever its faults, does not typically turn its adherents against the civilization that sustains their freedom, their institutions, or their capacity to dissent. Third Worldism does. A student indoctrinated in reflexive nationalism is intellectually limited. A student indoctrinated in Third Worldism is intellectually misled and systematically oriented toward the belief that the country whose libraries she uses, whose courts protect her speech, and whose taxpayers fund her education is a force for evil in the world. That is not a symmetrical problem.

None of this is an argument for political uniformity in the classroom, for replacing one ideology with its opposite, or for universities to pivot hard towards nationalism. It is an argument for honest reckoning with the prevalence of anti-intellectual activism in higher education—and why it has flourished when it is anti-Western. Education reformers who want to improve American universities need to be able to name what has gone wrong, specifically and without euphemism. So do (for different reasons) those who, against mounting evidence, still insist that the academy remains a site of genuine, values-neutral inquiry worthy of public trust and public dollars.

Third Worldism is not diversity of thought. It is not critical thinking. Wherever it has taken hold, has made universities less honest, less rigorous, and less worthy of the remarkable privilege their existence represents. Its omnipresence in higher education is an obstacle to restoring American higher education to its full potential. Not, as its reeling defenders would have it, an expression of academic freedom at its finest.

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

We’ll share updates on PFS’s work — and then, in what promises to be the highlight of the morning, hear directly from a current Princeton student and recent graduates about what free speech looks and feels like on campus today, and in the real world after.

• Welcome & Opening Remarks

  • Ed Yingling ’70, PFS Co-Founder

• PFS Update

  • Todd Rulon-Miller ’73, President & Treasurer

• Operational Update

  • Angela Smith, Executive Director

• Student & Recent Graduates Panel ★ Featured ★

  • One current student · Two recent graduates · Open Q&A

  • Hear about how free expression and open inquiry are experienced today on campus and in life after Princeton.

RSVP

Guests are warmly welcome — feel free to bring a spouse, partner, or friend (please forward this invitation to interested classmates). Come ready to listen, ask questions, and engage. We look forward to seeing you in Princeton next month!

PFS Editorial

On April 15, 2026, Yale President Maurie McInnis announced, in an open letter to the Yale community, the issuance of a blockbuster fifty-page report by a special committee of ten Yale faculty that called for reform across many aspects of Yale’s policies and educational practices. The report dealt extensively with PFS’s core issues of free speech, academic freedom, and viewpoint diversity. But it also addressed other issues, such as affordability, admissions policies, political homogeneity, governance, grade inflation, the impact of technology on learning – all those issues that contribute to the decline in trust in higher education.

Importantly, Yale is publicly recognizing the need for change. The report’s cover letter from the faculty committee states: “We believe the issue of declining trust is real, urgent, and must be addressed.” President McInnis echoes this statement in her letter to the Yale community: “Today, universities nationwide are facing a historic wave of calls for change. Trust in institutions is waning, and that’s not a problem we can brush aside. For higher education to serve the public good, we need the public’s trust.”

PFS salutes President McInnis for her leadership in advocating for change. With the announcement of this report, McInnis immediately becomes a leader in the growing chorus of top university leaders across the country speaking out and implementing significant reforms.

Among those university leaders speaking out are the presidents of Dartmouth and Harvard. In a January opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, “Is a Four-Year Degree Worth It?” Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock discussed the need for change and laid out specific areas for reform. She said:

American higher education has a trust problem. We shouldn’t pretend otherwise, and it won’t solve itself. In 2026 I’d like to see colleges and universities across the country take steps to restore trust.

At Harvard, President Alan Garber openly discusses the need for change, and according to the Harvard Crimson, Provost John F. Manning is leading a fundraising effort to aggressively move to broaden viewpoint diversity among faculty.

At the University of Texas at Austin, the Provost, William Inboden, has written about the loss of trust in higher education, including his influential article, “Restoring the Academic Social Contract.”

Johns Hopkins President Ron Daniels is in a multi-year collaboration with the American Enterprise Institute to increase faculty viewpoint diversity, notably through the Civic Thought Project. “Universities cannot hope to fulfill our truth-seeking mission unless our ideas are being tested and contested from within, among those whose perspectives, experiences, and thoughts broadly differ from one another.”

While resisting the Trump Administration’s attacks on American higher education, UCLA’s president Julio Frenk acknowledged the loss of public trust, saying that universities can no longer simply assert their value: “We need to earn back the trust of the public by demonstrating that we actually deliver that value.”

For the 10th anniversary of the Chicago Principles last year, President Alivisatos of University of Chicago said:

“We are in a crisis regarding free expression and academic freedom at universities. … [D]eference to conventional wisdom has stifled inquiry in a number of disciplines. Some quarters of higher education prize activism over inquiry. Important social questions go unaddressed because of fear of the answers. And errors persist because of fear of disagreeing with popular positions. This itself is an emergency.”

But real change requires that reform-minded leaders work in concert. Very importantly, Chancellors Daniel Diermeier of Vanderbilt and Andrew D. Martin of Washington University in St. Louis have for over two years been the most outspoken advocates for embracing change, emphasizing the loss of public trust in higher education. They have created “Universities for America’s Future” as an umbrella group for university leaders who want to discuss needed reforms and how best to implement them, and they have issued a joint Statement of Principles, adopted by the boards of both universities.

And where is Princeton at this critical time? Princeton is not only not embracing the need for reform, but Princeton President Eisgruber is generally seen as the leader of those who believe that advocating for reform is a mistake. In fact, a public dispute between Diermeier and Martin and Eisgruber was widely reported in the press. The argument from those in the Eisgruber camp seems to be that the perceived problems with universities are being exaggerated and that advocating for reform just plays into the hands of those in the Trump Administration who are attacking universities. In a recent talk on campus to promote his book Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right, he said:

“The principal reason that American universities are being attacked is not because they have departed from their mission but because they are faithful to it, … They’re being attacked because they protect the independence and academic freedom of their students and scholars. They’re being attacked because they pursue ideas and theories unsettling or unwelcome to those in power. They’re being attacked because they have pushed hard to achieve a diverse, equal and inclusive society that the United States Constitution envisions and that justice requires. … We should take great pride in these universities, in these institutions that are at once marvelous and upsetting and we should defend them zealously.”

On this point, PFS believes that the Trump Administration has indeed overreached in its pressure campaign on universities. However, we also believe that the problems cited by reformers existed before the last presidential election and will continue to exist after Trump leaves the presidency. It is quite possible to defend universities against unwarranted attacks while still identifying real internal problems and the reforms needed to address them.

Standing up for the critical role of universities and educating the public about that role is of paramount importance, and President Eisgruber is to be commended for his leadership in that regard. However, defending institutional autonomy is not enough. It cannot be denied that the public has lost trust in higher education. There is too much evidence that this is the case. Nor can it be denied that universities, including Princeton, have lost sight of their core mission. It is difficult to argue that significant problems don’t exist -- for example, the many instances of antisemitism on campuses, the high levels of self-censorship amongst students, the well-documented administrative bloat outpacing student enrollment, the sharp decline in humanities and social sciences enrollment, the lack of transparency and merit-based standards in admissions and faculty hiring, and the many studies that show an extreme lack of viewpoint diversity among faculty cannot be denied.

To a degree, Princeton has fared better recently than some other leading universities – e.g., Harvard and Columbia. And Princeton can proudly point to the James Madison Program, which is now being replicated at universities across the country. However, Princeton has serious problems that are beyond the scope of this editorial to detail. To cite two clear examples: There are problems with antisemitism, and with high levels of student self-censorship, as shown in PFS’s student survey, Princeton’s Free Speech Campus Culture. See here for specific reform recommendations that PFS has made to the Princeton administration. The fact that last year the alumni giving participation rate fell to an eighty-year low should give Princeton’s leadership pause.

Other universities, including Princeton’s great rivals, Yale and Harvard, are publicly recognizing the need for change and undertaking programs to address that need. For Princeton, the first step would be to admit reform is needed. It is a real and pressing matter.

Tal Fortgang
‘17

The following is the final installment in a five-part review of Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber’s recent book, Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right. You can read Part I here, Part II here, Part III here, and Part IV here.

As the first four installments of this review have emphasized, Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber’s book aims unsuccessfully to invert the widening consensus that universities are failing to uphold their implicit compact with the American people. At the surface level, Terms of Respect aims to clarify the scope and stakes of contested civility norms—to see how they enlighten our understanding of the campus free-speech discourse. But beneath the surface is a different kind of argument, one in which assertions of power are acceptable, even laudable, when they systematically advance ideologies not shared by (or inimical to) the vast majority of Americans—as long as they advance the cause of equality.

We now assess Eisgruber’s peculiar take on the relation of the university to the nation that has treated it with increasing hostility in recent decades. Critics may wail that the universities have to be brought to heel for producing fanatics, snowflakes, and crybullies, but Eisgruber turns their argument on its head: it’s actually the nation that could afford to learn from the campus, he argues; to the extent universities are struggling with civility norms, they are simply a dirty mirror for broken civil discourse. Otherwise they are a model for balancing speech and other values with a “more vigorous” culture of speech than “most sectors of society.”

This thesis has two component parts, which can be asked as distinct questions. Are critics wrong to identify a free-speech crisis on campus? And, to the extent such issues arise, are universities merely replicating national problems of polarization in microcosm?

The Corruption of the Academy

On the first question, Eisgruber is at his most dismissive. He lashes out at those who think free speech is what ails the campus. “Right-wing muckrakers” following in William F. Buckley’s footsteps to “deploy evidence selectively, disparage intellectual elites, and win favor from constituencies alienated from or upset by the unconventional opinions or behaviors at universities.” They “weaponize free speech” as part of a “myth of campus indoctrination and orthodoxy,” inventing “characterological deficiencies” in students—painting them as fragile, intellectually cowardly, or congenitally intolerant. All this is an attempt “to discredit collegiate critiques of establishment norms. It is not a defense of free inquiry but an assault on it.”

It would have been nice if Eisgruber had supplied an actual critique of Buckley and his progeny instead of dismissing the author of God and Man at Yale as a political operative pushing a conspiracy theory. He could have also shown his readers basic respect by not euphemizing extreme ideological one-sidedness backed by the full force of campus administration as “critiques of establishment norms.” What establishment? Which norms?

Eisgruber knows exactly what critics are getting at when they complain about campus free speech, and Terms of Respect only reinforces it. The problem is that universities are corrupt—not in the sense of stealing and self-dealing but in the sense of being not rigorous, captured by ideological monoculture, and functioning as factories of ideological reproduction and acceptable bigotries. They prop up classes, scholars, and fields of study engaged in motivated reasoning and dressed-up ideological incantations.

Consider the example Eisgruber himself provides to show the importance of academic freedom. Princeton’s Near Eastern Studies department offered a course titled “Decolonizing Trauma Studies from the Global South,” which assigned a book called The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Eisgruber describes this book as “stridently critical of Israel.” That is a bit like describing a Flat Earth tract as “skeptical of mainstream cartography.” The book is replete with conspiracy theories about Israeli policy toward Palestinians, weaving together speculation about why Jews maim Palestinians as a matter of policy with the apparatus of academic jargon—”biopolitics,” “debility,” “settler-colonial logics”—that lends such a blood libel the superficial appearance of analysis.

Eisgruber presents this as a straightforward case of academic freedom, as if the only relevant question were whether the professor had the right to assign the book. He does not ask whether the book reflects the standards his institution claims to uphold, much less whether classes on “decolonizing trauma studies” advance knowledge or, rather, ideology. Yet the book, class, and even department—each decorated with activist jargon—should only cause readers to wonder whether unbridled academic freedom is causing the academy’s collapse.

An academy that cannot police its own ideological capture will not long survive. Totally divorced from the world of evidence and argument, replete with ideological premises dressed up as findings, such pseudointellectualism is useful to no one except those who already share its conclusion.

Academic inquiry should have objective value to the society in which it exists. Independent scholars can say and research whatever they please, but universities enjoy privileged social status because they are meant to advance something valuable to all. Eisgruber is not wrong that academic freedom as we have conceived of it for decades covers the assignment of The Right to Maim. He is wrong to assume that academic freedom, maximally construed, is something the nation simply owes universities regardless of how they deploy it. Trust must be earned and maintained. When the public perceives—correctly—that academic freedom is being invoked to cover for ideological indoctrination, it is right to demand better.

This becomes a free-speech issue in multiple, compounding ways, none of which involves “weaponizing.” The ideology that has captured much of the humanities and social sciences is itself intolerant of dissent. Questioning its premises is treated not as intellectual inquiry, but as moral transgression. Echo chambers reinforced by social and professional penalties result, preventing scholars and students from voicing doubts, and an institutional culture that signals unmistakably that the university is, at its default, a place for people of a certain political orientation. Conservatives may be tolerated, allowed their little centers and magazines at the ruling class’s indulgence, but such arrangements are exceptions that prove the rule, not an expression of actual pluralism.

Eisgruber tries halfheartedly to deny that any of this is true. His book is one long demonstration that it is. He smuggles progressive premises into questions he frames as neutral. He sets the Overton Window several standard deviations to the left of the median American and mistakes this for centrism. He consistently fails to take the perspective of conservative critics, relying on others’ flippant dismissals as authority. (He waves away Buckley with one crisp line from a critical reviewer.) He draws principled lines and then finds, case by case, reasons why certain violators were doing something defensible. He accuses his critics of bad faith because he cannot reconstruct why a reasonable person might hold their views. That is a tell. It is the product of an intellectual environment in which certain assumptions have gone unquestioned for so long that they no longer register as assumptions at all.

Are We Just Polarized?

The second component of Eisgruber’s thesis is simply unpersuasive and comes off as projection. “The problem is not that today’s students are somehow less respectful of free speech or less committed to argument and debate than their parents,” he writes. “The problem is that they, like their parents, live in a period of hardening political identities and partisan animosity.”

The claim is never argued, much less proved. Worse, Eisgruber does not grapple with the obvious objection: that if campus problems were merely a microcosm of national problems, we would expect universities to be genuinely polarized—riven by equal and opposite forces battling for dominance. Instead, they are homogeneous. These fights are not breaking out because there are strong conservative and strong progressive factions locked in combat. They are breaking out because one faction dominates and the other is too small, too cowed, or too professionally vulnerable to resist.

The historical record is worse still for Eisgruber’s thesis. Leftists were attempting to dominate universities well before the current era of partisan polarization that Eisgruber cites as the cause. The armed takeovers of university buildings in the late 1960s preceded by decades the polarization Eisgruber treats as prime mover. Terms of Respect neglects to connect the dots between that long history and the present moment—he certainly doesn’t acknowledge how many student radicals (including domestic terrorists) migrated into the professoriate in the intervening decades.

But what undermines this thesis most is Eisgruber’s own discussion of the university’s civic mission. He shows just how profoundly universities have become unmoored from serious scholarship, and why. He correctly states that “we should want our colleges to educate citizens who will be not only skillful thinkers, listeners, and speakers, but also engaged proponents of this country’s ideals.” To that end, though, he lionizes “experimenting with political action…even when [student protestors’] views are naïve or ill-considered.” It does not seem to occur to him that rewarding such behavior cuts against the university’s mission of cultivating skillful thinkers and listeners, because students have every incentive to become more strident, louder, and more stubborn, all of which are associated with authentic activism.

Eisgruber torches a straw man when he mocks critics for thinking students have poor character. This state of affairs isn’t really about students at all. It’s about the corruption of the institution tasked, at enormous public expense, with forming them into engaged and capable citizens. To those observing the academy’s unraveling, it looks like Eisgruber thinks of himself as a counselor at a summer camp for budding activists. Surely the President of a world-class university ought to believe that he occupies his position, and the students theirs, for better reasons. Universities exist, among other things, to form citizens—not merely to provide a stage on which half-formed instincts can be performed before an approving audience. If a student emerges from four years of education with greater zeal and less knowledge, believing that the loudest team wins, the university has failed.

Yuval Levin has argued that our institutions have ceased to form people and have instead become platforms for performance. Nowhere is that clearer than on campus, with figures like Eisgruber rationalizing the trend. The university is no bystander in this collapse. Eisgruber himself demonstrates it has been one of its primary drivers.

A Missed Opportunity

Terms of Respect is, in the end, a shame. It is a shame because the questions it declines to answer are genuinely important: how civil rights can be reconciled with individual freedoms when they conflict; how universities might rebuild the public trust they have squandered; how institutions might address ideological homogeneity without either mandating conclusions or pretending the problem doesn’t exist; how administrators might find the courage to consistently apply the neutral principles they articulate fluently yet enforce selectively; and how the university might understand its place within a free society that depends on it for knowledge, cultivation, and the formation of good citizens.

Eisgruber studiously avoids every one of those questions. Instead, he prefers to impugn the motives of his critics, to characterize the millions of Americans scandalized by campus episode after campus episode as the dupes of cynical “weaponizers,” and to suggest, with breathtaking condescension, that the radical students and their sympathetic administrators have the better of the argument. Those who believe their own eyes simply haven’t thought hard enough. He has been feted for this performance by fellow university presidents and by the most influential organs of elite media opinion, as if he has answered the difficult questions rather than simply thumbing his nose at those who see the corruption of the academy for what it is.

They should all be ashamed.

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

Annabel Green ‘26

In the recently published piece, The Next Campus Battle after Free Speech: Viewpoint Diversity at America’s Elite Universities, Edward Yingling ’70 and Leslie Spencer ’79 offer three “green shoots” to the ideological monolith that is America’s elite universities: civics centers, faculty reform, and the banning of diversity statements. I would like to offer a student perspective on these proposals. In my view, these reforms vary widely in their practical viability. Student civics programs offer the most promising path toward intellectual renewal, faculty reform appears the least promising, and hiring reforms, particularly the elimination of diversity statements, serve as a necessary precondition for genuine intellectual honesty.

Civics Centers

Civics centers, such as the James Madison Program, seem to be the most promising of these green shoots. Many campus programs, especially those of a more obvious political nature, operate with a clear ideological framework. Because of this, political programs can feel insular or recursive. One response to this problem is the reintroduction of programs which educate students in civic virtue while grounding them in the Western canon. These programs lack a spirit of activism and instead, they form students intellectually through the pursuit of knowledge and truth. Civics centers support engagement with foundational thinkers in philosophy, law, and political thought.

This approach also offers a constructive path for students strongly attached to a particular ideology. Attempting to challenge students’ ideological commitments directly, seems to be unfruitful. Instead, by encountering major thinkers in philosophy, law, and aesthetics, their ideological assumptions can be tested and gradually give way to deeper intellectual and moral questions and commitments.

Reform from within the Faculty

Faculty reform appears to be the least promising of the three green shoots because it assumes that transformation must occur within a highly homogeneous group. Initiatives such as the Heterodox Academy Campus Community Network are encouraging, but they do not fully address the depth of ideological uniformity within faculty culture.

There is a deeply entrenched belief in academia, often defended by the observation that educated people tend, on the whole, to vote Democratic. From this, some conclude that Republicans are too uneducated to be professors. The late English philosopher and social critic Sir Roger Scruton, pointed out the consequences of this assumption. In many elite institutions, conservatism is not treated as a serious body of thought to be confronted through civil argument and instead, it is dismissed as a moral defect. Once a political view is treated this way, it is rejected outright.

Another related issue I addressed in my essay, The Ideal of the University, is that professors have increasingly overreached the bounds of their authority. Many now see themselves as possessing authority over the moral formation of students. The difficulty is in abandoning these already deeply embedded assumptions, especially within a culture that is itself highly homogeneous. How such a change can be achieved in such an environment, I am not sure.

Diversity Statements

Banning diversity statements is a necessary precondition for restoring honest academic discourse. As Yingling and Spencer note, the requirement of diversity statements has functioned as a “de facto litmus test” for faculty applicants and has produced a niche industry dedicated to helping candidates craft the appropriate statement. Such requirements pressure faculty members to conform to prevailing ideological preferences. Faculty should not feel that they must virtue-signal or express allegiance to a political cause in hiring and promotion. Eliminating these statements is necessary to address ideological conformity at universities.

Conclusion

Drawing on my experience as a student, I believe civic centers most directly foster proper intellectual formation and foster the deepest intellectual and moral commitments, faculty reform is least likely to succeed given existing homogeneity, and banning diversity statements is a necessary precondition for restoring honest academic discourse.

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

Joseph Gonzalez ‘28

Every so often, the complexities of the world break through the orange bubble that is Princeton University. There are occasional reminders of the world outside, like the pro-Ukraine flag-waving event outside FitzRandolph Gate, reminding us that a major conflict in Europe is still ongoing four years later. Even as a veteran, it still feels like something happening in a remote place. It was only when I attended the European Cultural Studies (ECS) Faber Colloquium, a requirement for the European Studies minor I am pursuing, that I reflected on Europe’s significance and the debt Princeton as an institution owes to Europe, from its architecture to its precept system.

The Colloquium featured University of Chicago professor Dipesh Chakrabarty on the 25th anniversary of his influential book “Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference.” Professor Chakrabarty argues that while Europe should still be studied because Western thought remains embedded in modern political and historical thought worldwide, it must be provincialized by treating Europe not as the universal center of history, but just another particular tradition among many. In one sense, he is not wrong in his analysis – Europe’s place and importance in the world has surely fallen.

As one of the only students here who lived to see the fall of the Berlin Wall and the celebration of the fall of the Soviet Union, I argue here that something critical has been lost with recent changes to how European history, politics, languages and culture are taught at Princeton. The former dual European Studies program has been replaced by a program that undermines rigorous study as it attempts toprovincialize Europe in line with Princeton’s current interdisciplinary approach to “studies.”

“This Week in History: Debating the role of interdisciplinary humanities in a Princeton education” recently appeared in the Daily Princetonian. It is about the historical debates over interdisciplinary approaches that led to the creation of the intensive year-long Humanities Sequence, known as HUM. I have completed the sequence and the Humanistic Studies minor, and I am proud of it. It also serves as proof that the debate over interdisciplinary studies as an approach is over. This concept, once looked down upon, is now celebrated by Princeton as a forward-thinking academic innovation. The university has also proudly announced its new minor in European Studies. Officially, the new minor is a joint offering of European Cultural Studies (ECS) and the Program in Contemporary European Politics and Society (EPS), designed to provide students with a “comprehensive exploration of Europe” by blending the humanities and social sciences. It also explicitly replaces the old ECS and EPS certificates.

The official description of the new minor is appealing. However, merging ECS and EPS into a single European Studies minor signals a concerning shift in Princeton’s curricular reform. What seems like a broadening of access might actually marginalize the field. By combining these two distinct intellectual paths under one interdisciplinary umbrella, Princeton risks reducing serious engagement with Europe’s political and cultural traditions. By design, it means less depth, less specialization, and diminished confidence in Europe’s importance as a subject worth dedicated study. To compare, let’s review what each program offered before the change.

The original ECS program was founded in 1975 and was one of Princeton’s oldest undergraduate certificate programs. It was created through collaboration among faculty under the leadership of one of America’s leading cultural historians, Carl E. Schorske. Its history mattered because it represented a serious institutional commitment to the study of European civilization, culture, and intellectual life.

Its structure also reflected a clearly distinct intellectual identity. The ECS certificate allowed students to fulfill the program either through two core ECS courses or the Humanities sequence, plus two additional upper-level courses. The program’s own description emphasized how students from diverse disciplines could gather around the humanities and the arts while still integrating those courses with their majors, independent work, and even studying abroad.

The old Contemporary European Politics (EPS) certificate was different. It required one gateway seminar and four courses, including both history and social science distribution requirements with an emphasis on European politics and society. There was also a need for sufficient foreign-language proficiency to use research materials for senior thesis work. Most importantly, it required that the senior thesis be on a subject related to contemporary European politics and society, unless an alternative independent project was approved.

These two programs were not the same. That was the point. One leaned more heavily toward culture, intellectual history, and the humanities. The other demanded engagement with politics, society, and language, as well as independent research. Their coexistence gave Princeton students choices about how to engage in the study of Europe. Merging them into one minor does not preserve both. It inevitably diminishes them. That is what seems to be happening here.

The new requirements for the European Studies minor consist of five courses: one prerequisite and four electives, split between ECS and EPS. But there is no independent work requirement and no language requirement. Students participate in a senior colloquium, but the structure no longer preserves the sharper demands once built into EPS.

“Interdisciplinary” may have become one of the most celebrated words in higher education. However, interdisciplinarity is not equivalent to rigor. It also is not the same as intellectual breadth, and certainly not the same as depth. When a program removes language requirements and independent research obligations, it is difficult to argue that academic seriousness has improved. Simplification does not equal enrichment. Princeton describes the new minor as a “comprehensive” and “global” study of Europe. But what appears comprehensive on paper does not translate into genuine comprehensiveness in practice.

What is lost is not just a credential but also a way of thinking about education. The disappearance of distinct European cultural and political identities suggests that preserving separation no longer matters as much as it once did as a topic of academic inquiry. And that should be a concern: the academic politics surrounding Europe as a subject, where it is often treated less as a civilization to be studied seriously than as a problem in the larger context of colonialism and multiculturalism.

Princeton might see this as progress, but I believe something valuable is being lost; it reflects a concerning aspect of what a university still considers worth preserving. Europe should be studied with a critical eye. Its imperial projects, exclusions, and contradictions are part of its history and should be discussed, warts and all. But students should question why the decision was made to provincialize Europe, when we are the inheritors of that Western tradition. As a minority first generation low income student with a GED, I might not be the face you expect to see on the barricades, but perhaps someone should have been manning the gates and waving the flag to make sure we did not forget how much it matters.

Joseph Gonzalez ‘28 is an Army and Marine Corps combat veteran and transfer student from Brentwood, NY, majoring in History. He is a PFS Writing Fellow.

Tal Fortgang
‘17

The following is the fourth in a multi-part review of Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber’s recent book, Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right. You can read Part I here, Part II here, and Part III here.

This series, reviewing Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber’s Terms of Respect began by acknowledging what the book gets right. Eisgruber distinguishes free speech as a moral principle from the First Amendment as a legal doctrine, and he is correct to resist the crude view that any campus speech regulation constitutes censorship. That is a reasonable starting point. Part II is where things get uncomfortable for him. By tracing his admiring use of New York Times v. Sullivan — a case in which the Supreme Court rewrote First Amendment doctrine to protect civil rights activism — Part II showed that his framework is not as neutral as it seems. Speech earns protection, in Eisgruber’s view, not by meeting consistent standards but by its relationship to favored equality claims. The result is a system in which the Black Justice League can violate campus rules without consequence while disruptions of conservative speakers are reframed as desirable exercises of free expression.

Part III pressed the charge further. Eisgruber’s deeper move, I argued, is revisionist: he recategorizes campus speech controversies as debates about equality rather than as what they are — incidents of intimidation, coercion, and institutional capture. His treatment of the 2015 Christakis episode at Yale is the clearest example. Sustained, vulgar harassment of a professor transmogrifies, in his telling, into “impassioned speech about racial justice.” Taken together, the three parts establish that what Eisgruber has written is not a principled theory of campus speech but a post-hoc rationalization for outcomes he prefers.

What the series has not yet addressed, however, are the genuinely difficult legal and cultural questions that Terms of Respect has evaded. By seemingly resolving tensions between speech and equality, and reframing what appears to be a free-speech debate as an ongoing push-and-pull about civility norms, Eisgruber avoids discussing ways in which our laws, norms, and culture already treat, and sometimes curtail, expressive freedom, and how universities can apply their obligations and stated commitments faithfully. Relatedly, he relies upon an underexplored approach to chilling effects, the phenomenon recognized in First Amendment doctrine that certain policies or social realities are suspect because they place an informal prior restraint on expression. Eisgruber’s unequal concern with chilling effects — sometimes equating it with censorship, sometimes overlooking it entirely – demonstrates an incomplete theory of how universities get free speech right.

I don’t make the law. Do I enforce it?

Universities like Princeton, which receive federal support, do not paint their speech policies onto a blank canvas. A constellation of rules already conditions continued government support on universities’ balancing free-speech concerns with civil rights law. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act forbids institutions receiving federal funding from allowing severe and pervasive discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, or national origin. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, and federal courts and other adjudicative bodies have, over the decades, elaborated what that statute requires in practice — including requirements about tolerable expressive conduct.

This matters enormously for Eisgruber’s argument, and he largely ignores it. Terms of Respect proceeds as though universities are the primary architects of the balance between speech and equality, free to reason their way toward a thoughtful equilibrium. But the federal government, through decisions of all three branches, has already drawn that balance, at least in part, in ways that do not always map neatly onto Eisgruber’s preferred framework. The substantive equality that must coexist with free expression on a federally funded campus involves shutting down expression that makes campus inhospitable to any racial, ethnic, and national-origin group, even if the expression couches itself in terms of equality or speaking truth to power. Whether such expression occurs civilly may matter—uncivil speech can reveal hostility—but content may be just as probative.

For instance, Eisgruber suggests that there is an “unpleasant choice” between “censor[ing] hateful speech” and “compromis[ing] equality” when “powerful adults try to suppress student speech…as when donors and legislators demanded that college administrators censor slogans chanted by pro-Palestinian protesters.” He cites a New York Times article titled “Campus Crackdowns Have Chilling Effect on Pro-Palestinian Speech,” previewing the conflation of censorship and chilling effects that pervades Eisgruber’s analysis. The article cites a few examples of suppressed student speech: at Brandeis, “a pro-Palestinian student group was barred for statements made by its national chapter” (which violated campus anti-harassment rules); “Administrators at the University of Vermont canceled an in-person event in late October featuring the Palestinian poet Mohammed el-Kurd.”

It is not obvious that those were the right moves. But given that the student group in question called the October 7, 2023 terror attacks in Israel “a historic win for Palestinian resistance” and the poet has repeatedly accused Israelis of having “an unquenchable thirst for Palestinian blood,” making disparaging comments about Jews’ physical traits, and harvesting and eating Palestinians’ organs, it’s not obvious that they were wrong either. A pattern of paying for such individuals to have a platform at your university could conceivably leave universities liable for fomenting a hostile environment for Israelis and Jews.

On Princeton’s own campus, students waving Hezbollah flags might be protected speech—Eisgruber calls it “highly offensive” but protected by “the anticensorship principle” —or it might be discriminatory harassment (or even material support for terrorism if coordinated with proscribed groups). Being Israeli is a protected characteristic; if Princeton consistently allows hostility against it, by permitting terrorist flags, disruptions, trespassing, and chants that Israelis have long considered threatening, even expressive conduct can lead to legal liability.

How the law and the commitment to freedom of speech interact here is not immediately clear; much depends on the particular facts of each case and the jurisdiction in which the case is brought. These are genuinely difficult legal questions. What is clear: Eisgruber needs to give us an account of how his vision is at least compatible with his civil right obligation. Otherwise it is just a dodge.

Of course, Eisgruber is free to say that he believes one should not censor anti-Israel speech as long as it is civil and advances a liberal notion of equality. What he might have to conclude, though, is that his preferred speech-and-equality regime is incompatible with civil rights law because the law understands equality differently. But if Eisgruber wants support for Hezbollah and celebrations of murdering people on the basis of their national origin relegated to the realm of speech worthy of stigma, not censorship, his gripe is with the civil rights regime he lauds throughout this book.

If it strikes the reader as unusual that civil rights law presents a challenge to Eisgruber’s approach rather than a boon, that is likely because the notion of equality and the substantive commitments it represents are contested. The deeper problem this illustrates is that Eisgruber borrows the moral prestige of civil rights while ignoring or even undermining its substantive commitments. He appeals to Sullivan, to the movement-era origins of robust First Amendment doctrine, to the ideal of equality as the animating purpose of expressive freedom. Yet our civil rights statutes require a kind of colorblindness, not rewriting rules to benefit favored groups and viewpoints, as the Supreme Court did in Sullivan and as Eisgruber does by making excuses for student agitators.

The kind of equality that must coexist with free expression at a federally funded university is not a floating philosophical concept to be defined anew by each college president. Yet Eisgruber merely asserts that he, and our free-speech regime, stand for equality, without defining what that term means or even grappling with the fact that it could be contested. For a book whose argument revolves around the compatibility of that ideal with freedom of speech, that is a massive evasion.

The Chilling Quagmire

Eisgruber is interested in the chilling effects, or informal prior restraints on speech. At times, chilling effects figure prominently in his analysis of whether speech is regulated properly, or whether unwarranted censorship has crept in. Indeed, in his celebration of Sullivan he applauds the Supreme Court landing on “a standard sufficiently powerful that civil rights activists…would feel free to criticize Southern public officials vigorously without fearing adverse rulings.” In other words, the best standard for free speech that fosters equality is an absence of prior restraints, whether formal or informal—chilling effects of various policies and social facts belonging to the latter category.

He invokes the concept with evident sympathy to defend the Princeton student who years ago wrote an op-ed criticizing the Tigertones’ performance of “Kiss The Girl” from “The Little Mermaid,” and especially the group singling out audience members for some prep-school debauchery. National press seized on the author’s use of the phrase “toxic masculinity” and connection of an a cappella group’s song choices to what Eisgruber calls “college campuses with sexual assault problems.” She “became the target of anonymous threatening online posts.”

Did anything untoward occur here? If so, what was it? Eisgruber takes an unusual approach to making sense of this episode.

Newspapers were trying to impose their own civility norms by shaming a feminist student for using the term ‘toxic masculinity.’ The student became the target of anonymous threatening online posts. Such bullying does violate the anticensorship principle — it responds to disagreements with the threat of unlawful force rather than reason — but it came not from the on-campus writer but from her off-campus critics.

In microcosm of the book’s argument, the Princeton student has got things right; it’s the rest of the nation that needs to learn an important lesson. The passage is worth unpacking, because it does several things at once.

First, it condemns newspapers for trying to impose civility norms through public shaming. That is a strange condemnation indeed. Eisgruber elsewhere celebrates “censorious speech,” (not a heckler’s veto but fierce criticism) because “the remedy for your bad speech may be better speech that is harshly critical of you.” Indeed, “social censure is different from censorship,” Eisgruber writes. “It is one way of enforcing…’civility rules’: social norms that enable people with different identities and viewpoints to interact respectfully and constructively.” So, why weren’t the critics’ arguments “legitimate contests about the meaning of respect and the terms of the civility rules” that govern the campus? Eisgruber admits that the critics were trying to impose civility norms—but won’t tell us why their contribution to the raucous contest is illegitimate.

Perhaps his suggestion is that because critics triggered anonymous online posts, they should have refrained from criticizing the student. This is not a workable principle; it is a policy that massively chills speech. If speech liable to whip up anonymous others on the internet does not warrant protection on campus, Eisgruber has buried an elephant in a mousehole, because all speech is liable to do that. Campus speech would be dead (the original op-ed included), and that principle would dwarf every other argument he makes in his book. Luckily for us, if not Eisgruber, this is not what he suggests. Rather, he clearly condemns the “off-campus critics” – not the pile-on commenters -- for “bullying” the student. That doesn’t help Eisgruber avoid the charge that he simply favors some speech based on its content, since he has admitted that the critics are part of the contest over civility yet still violative of some unarticulated standard. When does criticism become bullying? Apparently when it targets left-liberal students advancing left-liberal social goals. Rigging the game over and over, Eisgruber can’t help but view dissenting opinions as beyond the pale.

It’s also worth noting that Eisgruber takes a harder line on the status of anonymous online threats than he is willing to take on the conduct of campus protesters who trespass, shout down invited speakers, and occupy administrative buildings. Those activities, which are themselves rule violations, receive considerably more sympathetic treatment in his account, even though they don’t share the basic characteristics of contesting civility norms through speech.

But most tellingly, the passage reveals a deeply asymmetric sensitivity to chilling effects. When an anonymous off-campus mob threatens a feminist student, Eisgruber calls it a form of censorship — informal but real, serious enough to warrant condemnation.

But when the dominant ideological culture of an elite university systematically marginalizes dissenting views, Eisgruber evinces no comparable concern. Were there chilling effects when a mob of students berated Nicholas Christakis, or did students who agreed with the Christakises feel equally comfortable sharing their views moving forward? When anti-Woodrow-Wilson demonstrators at Princeton wrote in the Washington Post that Princeton’s reverence for Wilson was “spitting in their faces,” did that chill pro-Wilson speech? Evidently Eisgruber thinks not—he can’t even conceive of the possibility: “None of these disputes,” he writes regarding those demonstrators and their opponents, “can be adjudicated by…referring to the value of free speech.” Yet a perfectly analogous argument over a different Princeton student’s op-ed can.

The idea that institutionalized orthodoxies can chill speech seems to Eisgruber inconceivable. “Some opinions will inevitably be more popular than others,” he observes, but that “is not in any sense a violation of free speech or the anti-censorship principle.” It’s a correct observation unevenly applied. Eisgruber suffers from a remarkable blind spot for informal chilling effects when they don’t hamper his “side.”

“There is no free speech violation when students declare, via protest or otherwise, that they do not want racists, sexists, antisemites or homophobes invited to their campuses,” he writes. Of course, the students might just tar every speaker they don’t like as some kind of bigot—not to mention their fellow students who invited the speaker. And having an “ideologically homogenous faculty dominated by ACLU liberals” has no effect on the rigor of intellectual discourse because academics are intellectually honest and give credence to opposing positions. (In the same paragraph, Eisgruber, a former constitutional law professor, grossly mischaracterizes constitutional originalism.) He does not ask whether ideological homogeneity among professors, administrators, and students has other effects, such as discouraging dissenters from speaking up because they know they will be seen as unenlightened at best, racist-sexist-homophobic at worst. Instead, he affirms that “political diversity” does not matter much because “all scholars worth their salt” are able “to raise claims or points that reflect perspectives different from their own.”

That’s not just an incomplete answer to the informal-chilling challenge; it’s a position that would scandalize the man who lamented the Supreme Court’s decision in Student for Fair Admissions v. Harvard as “unwelcome and disappointing” because “diversity benefits learning and scholarship by broadening the range of questions, perspectives, and experiences brought to bear on important topics throughout the University.” That was Eisgruber, too. And: “we have an obligation to attract exceptional people of every background and enable them to flourish on our campus.”

Do those statements chill anti-affirmative-action speech at Princeton? I suppose that question is now moot, since Eisgruber apparently doesn’t believe it applies where scholars are “worth their salt.” Or perhaps he thinks racial diversity broadens the range of perspectives at a university but political diversity, somehow, doesn’t.

It’s an inconsistent, incoherent mess -- another casualty of Eisgruber’s ill-conceived attempt to fashion ad hoc principles to reverse-engineer a standard by which universities are succeeding, and the American people are projecting their own misbegotten ways onto the righteous academy.

Protecting the Consensus

Eisgruber is so disgusted with the accusation that students are “crybullies” that he disputes the charge in a way that ends up undermining his own argument about the vitality of campus debate. He has a ready answer for critics of campus “snowflakes,” or the idea that students are afraid of hearing disagreement. Students who disrupt speakers or refuse to extend platforms to controversial voices are not afraid of ideas they disagree with. Rather, they are exercising power, asserting themselves, demanding recognition of their standing as equal members of the academic community. This is a saving construction only if you already agree with those students. Whether an overwhelming assertion of power to protect regnant civility norms is worthy of celebration or is stifling orthodoxy depends on whether you believe the power they are asserting is warranted.

Consider how this squares with Eisgruber’s inspiration in Sullivan. What Eisgruber admired about that case was precisely that it liberated the relatively powerless from the legal weapons of the powerful. It allowed people to speak truth to power and advance equality without fear of ruinous liability. Yet “when students aggressively demand that they be protected from slights and offenses,” to ice out the Christakises and even the Ben Shapiros of the world, Eisgruber finds that admirable too: “They are exercising free speech rights rather than shirking them.”

What gives? When are powerful people enforcing orthodoxies entitled to have speech rules that reinforce and protect their preferred norms? Admitting that students are not afraid of new ideas but unwilling to hear challenges to their social or moral views may save them from the accusation of immaturity, but it undermines Eisgruber’s broader defense of student activism and universities’ ideological homogeneity. This is no theory of free speech. It merely shows how the “civility norms” framework is yet another cop-out; when the good guys enforce it it’s good, when the bad guys do it it’s evil. And on a practical level, it derogates judgments about approved dissent to students, who are free to enforce them by any means necessary, backed by faculty and administrators who have every incentive to preserve their ideological echo chamber.

Chilling effects, understood properly, are the mechanism by which this self-reinforcing consensus of acceptable opinion operates at scale. They occur not when formal rules prohibit certain speech but when the informal consensus of an institution has rendered certain positions radioactive. That is a description of the contemporary elite university, and an honest account of chilling effects would require Eisgruber to ask whether institutions like Princeton have created environments in which viewpoints held by significant numbers of Americans are treated, in practice, as beneath the threshold of serious engagement. Terms of Respect never poses, much less reckons with, that question. No wonder Eisgruber finds it shocking that Americans think universities have gone awry—and that it has something to do with the freedom of speech.

The Unstated Argument

The defense of the university Eisgruber lands on, once the apparatus of principled reasoning is set aside and the obfuscation is stripped away, is that the right people are winning. The good guys, the forces of equality, buoyed by systematic privilege and protection from professors and administrators, are prevailing. If some conservative speakers find the environment inhospitable, that is the natural consequence of their positions being unpopular with an educated and morally serious community. If some dissenting views are chilled, they are chilled by the weight of evidence and argument against them.

That argument might be defensible on its own terms. What it cannot do is pose as a neutral theory of expressive freedom. What Terms of Respect delivers is a post-hoc rationalization for a campus culture Eisgruber finds congenial, dressed in the borrowed authority of civil rights law and high principle. The equality it invokes is an ideological program that the law does not endorse and the Constitution does not require. That program is beginning to crack.

It revealed its hollow core in 2023, when university leaders who never met an offhand student comment they didn’t wish to hale into kangaroo court adverted to free-speech arguments when pressed about clear civil-rights violations. Proponents of the Eisgruberian view that free speech means giving activist groups free rein, they had been sufficiently dominant on campuses to avoid confronting what it would mean to apply their stated logic consistently and across the aisle. That their free-speech-defense muscles had atrophied so badly was telling. They were confused by the question of how university get free speech right; by the looks of Eisgruber’s effort, apparently the best one mustered yet, they still are.

As ever, the problem is not that our finest academics are antisemites, unintelligent (they are neither), or prone to misspeaking. It is that they are so deep in an ideological echo chamber they are incapable of seeing how their Jenga tower of principle collapses after pulling out a single block of substantive commitment to progressive outcomes. Their blind spots, double standards, and evasions are everywhere—and they all point in the same direction.

That is the central failure of Terms of Respect: it is fundamentally dishonest about its own premises, giving it the patina of rising above partisanship while actually only making sense among ideologues that already share Eisgruber’s assumptions. The final part of this series will examine how Eisgruber draws on the dishonesty and obfuscations to castigate a nation for “weaponizing” claims of free speech, when really the nation should be learning from universities’ enlightened approach to speech, truth, and power.

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