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Editor's note: Below is an excerpt of an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, followed by an excerpt of a press release announcing the launching of the Alumni Free Speech Alliance.
October 18, 2021
By Stuart Taylor, Jr. and Edward Yingling
The Wall Street Journal
Excerpt: Readers of these pages are well aware that free speech, academic freedom and viewpoint diversity are in big trouble at U.S. universities. But many of those worried over the state of campuses are almost resigned to the idea that the forces of illiberal intolerance have won. The fight is far from over. On Oct. 18, five alumni groups are announcing the creation of an organization to stand up for open inquiry: the Alumni Free Speech Alliance.
AFSA’s founders are groups of graduates of Cornell University, Davidson College, Princeton University (our alma mater), the University of Virginia, and Washington and Lee University. Our allied organizations are the Cornell Free Speech Alliance, Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse, Princetonians for Free Speech, the Jefferson Council (composed of UVA alumni) and the Generals Redoubt (W&L alumni).
AFSA’s member groups are nonpartisan and will protect the rights of faculty and students across the ideological spectrum. Our goal is to ally with scores of as-yet-unformed alumni groups around the country. Why alumni? Because with rare exceptions, everyone else may feel too exposed to attacks to take a stand against campus culture.
October 18, 2021
Alumni Free Speech Alliance
Excerpt: Millions of college and university alumni around the country are dismayed by the intolerance of unpopular viewpoints at their alma maters, and now some have begun to fight back.
Alumni have organized groups at five of America’s most prestigious higher-ed institutions -- Cornell University, Davidson College, Princeton University, the University of Virginia, and the Washington & Lee University – to defend free speech, academic freedom, and viewpoint diversity on college campuses. Today these groups are announcing that they have joined forces under the banner of the Alumni Free Speech Alliance to launch a national effort to mobilize alumni.
“Free speech and academic freedom are critical to the advancement of knowledge and to the success of our colleges and universities,” said Edward Yingling, a co-founder of the Princeton alumni group. “Yet these basic principles are under attack today at schools across the country.”
Excerpt: A lot of people want to convince you that you need a Ph.D. or a law degree or dozens of hours of free time to read dense texts about critical theory to understand the woke movement and its worldview. You do not. You simply need to believe your own eyes and ears.
In this ideology, speech is violence. But violence, when carried out by the right people in pursuit of a just cause, is not violence at all. In this ideology, bullying is wrong, unless you are bullying the right people, in which case it’s very, very good. In this ideology, education is not about teaching people how to think, it’s about reeducating them in what to think. In this ideology, the need to feel safe trumps the need to speak truthfully. The goal is to send a message to everyone else: Step out of line and you are next.
Excerpt: Bates College administration pressured campus newspaper The Bates Student on Wednesday to remove an article from its website featuring interviews with five Bates employees trying to unionize adjunct faculty and non-managerial staff, citing low pay, poor working conditions, and declining staff retention.
The students’ original October 13 article detailed dire working conditions during the more severe months of the pandemic, Bates administration’s use of intimidation tactics, and the benefits of unionization. According to staff members at The Bates Student, the paper’s managing editor, who wrote the story, took her article down at the behest of Bates’ media relations specialist Mary Pols and the administration the same day it was posted. The following day, an edited version of the story was published to The Bates Student’s website. In the new story, pro-union information and worker quotes were replaced with anti-union talking points and comments from Bates administration.
Excerpt: Universities are surprisingly popular places. In surveys of public confidence, they fare better than banks, big corporations, and the entertainment industry — and much better than journalists. While only about a third of Americans have a degree, colleges play an outsize role in popular culture, too. That includes the massive collegiate athletics industry as well as niche products like The Chair.
Attitudes toward higher education are sharply partisan, though. A Pew study in August found 76 percent of Democrats but only 34 percent of Republicans believe colleges have a positive social impact. And that difference is reflected in two recent controversies about academic freedom, one at Yale Law School (YLS) and one at the University of Georgia. Disparate in some respects, both incidents involve subversion of the university's core principle of academic freedom in pursuit of knowledge.
Excerpt: Free speech is in jeopardy yet again at Yale University, where law school administrators met with a student multiple times to pressure him to apologize for language he used in an email that offended some of his classmates. The incident illustrates how university officials can seek to intimidate students into silence and conformity through obscure procedures and veiled threats of punishment.
Put yourself in the shoes of a law student. You’re repeatedly told you should issue a public apology if you want the matter to “go away.” You’re told the issue might “linger” even after you graduate and that the “legal community is a small one.” And right before you leave one of these meetings, the administrators imply that the matter could somehow wind up before the state bar. A bar that requires you to pass a searching review of your character and fitness.
Excerpt: One of the hallmarks of Jewish tradition is its intense focus on debate and disagreement. Unfortunately, it appears that this value is being lost on many of the nation’s younger Jews — namely those currently enrolled in colleges and universities.
A just-released survey from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education captures the voices of over 37,000 students at 159 colleges and provides empirical insight into the current state of speech and expression on campus today. The picture is not good. The data show that one-third of all students think trying to disrupt and shout down speakers when they visit campuses is sometimes or always acceptable. Among Jewish students surveyed, 40% reported feeling this way. Two-thirds of Jewish students — compared to just about half of students nationally — answered that blocking other students from attending a campus speech is justifiable.
Princeton
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Classics professor’s lawsuit against academic society dismissed by New Jersey court
Excerpt: A lawsuit filed by classics professor Joshua Katz that alleged “viewpoint discrimination” against him by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) was dismissed in court on Oct. 5. The judge found that the suit failed to meet the requisite standards for jurisdiction in federal court in New Jersey, but did not rule on the merits of Katz’s claims. The decision leaves the door open for Katz to refile his suit against the ACLS in New York, where the society is based.
Katz alleged that after the society invited him to serve as a volunteer delegate to the Union Académique Internationale, an academic conference in Paris, it revoked the invite “solely because he expressed views that, although fully reasonable and protected by ordinary principles of academic freedom, offend the ideological sensibilities of some in academia.”
Cancel culture backfires as thousands register for remote lecture by geophysicist at Princeton after MIT axed it because he said academic evaluations should be based on merit not racial 'equity'
Excerpt: Thousands of people have registered for a remote lecture by a geophysicist at Princeton University after the MIT canceled it due to pressure from “woke” students because the professor argued that academic evaluations should be based on merit, not racial “equity.”
University of Chicago professor Dorian Abbot was denied the opportunity to give the prestigious Carlson Lecture, which is devoted to “new results in climate science” and hosted by MIT's Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences. But Princeton University decided to host Abbot's lecture via Zoom on October 21 - the day it was scheduled to be given at the MIT. Princeton professor Robert P. George, who has publicly backed Abbot since his lecture was “shockingly and shamefully canceled,” said the university has since had to expand the Zoom quota for the lecture as thousands of people have registered.
Should Princeton Exist?
Editor’s note: The below Eisgruber interview occurs at a time of great controversy about the unremitting attacks on free speech in Princeton’s official freshman orientation and the University’s dismal free speech ranking by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education last month.
Excerpt:
Emma Green: You have carved out a position on academic speech and freedom that is a little countercultural. In a recent speech at Penn, you brought up a Princeton professor who, during a class, used a racial slur. There are many people who believe that those kinds of words should never be permitted in an academic context. Why is it worth it to defend the use of these kinds of words?
Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber: I care passionately about the position you just described. Right now, everybody insists on dividing free speech and inclusivity from one another. They insist on a version of the free-speech ideal that is just about unconstrained expression. But we are not here just to have unfettered expression. We are a part of a truth-seeking enterprise. We try to make a difference in the world by, among other things, distinguishing better and worse arguments.
Green: You’ve also talked about your concern about the shrinking space for conservative ideas on campus. Robert George is an example of someone you’ve praised publicly, who has deeply held, well-considered viewpoints that I think would be hard for some students to countenance—his stance on LGBTQ and transgender identity chief among them. I wonder why you think it’s worth it to have a professor like him on campus.
Eisgruber: It is clearly worth it.
So They’re Trying to Shut You Up
Excerpt: Many professors have no idea what to do when a mob is howling for their heads. They have never been through such an ordeal before, and are naturally frightened and rattled. Fortunately, many American colleges and universities have policies in place to protect the academic freedom of research scholars and instructional faculty members. Moreover, some professors have the benefit of tenure protections that can hamper administrative attempts to summarily dismiss them, if only to placate the mob. But those protections are not enough if academics do not know how to make use of them.
We offer the following advice as members of the newly formed Academic Freedom Alliance, made up of more than 400 faculty members who span the nation and the ideological spectrum. The group exists to provide moral, strategic, and legal assistance to faculty members whose academic freedom and/or job status have been harmed or jeopardized improperly for something they have said or written.
An Open Letter to Princeton’s Class of 2025 | OPINION
Excerpt: Dear Class of ’25:
Did you appreciate the clever way you were introduced to Princeton? Did you recognize that your orientation video was a non-advertised test, disguised as a woke clarion call to social justice activism at Princeton? Did you catch the subtle challenge to abandon critical thinking and instead embrace the camaraderie of bashing a distinguished Classics professor? Were you able to get past the faux-indoctrination and manipulation and realize that Princeton was actually trying to teach an important lesson, namely that even incoming fresh-persons have the responsibility to think for themselves and to distinguish the trendy from the true? Princeton realizes that this is a skill that will be critical for you to hone and develop and unleash on those trying to put blinders on you, not only at Princeton, but well beyond graduation.
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