Latest News and Commentary: Princeton

Excerpt: I am pleased to note that the Academic Freedom Alliance has launched a new podcast, The Academic Freedom Podcast. New episodes should drop every month or so and explore issues relating to academic freedom and campus free speech.

The first episode is now available, and it consists of the audio recording of the webinar panel that the AFA recently hosted on the landmark 6th circuit case on First Amendment protections for academic freedom and classroom speech by professors. The case is Meriwether v. Hartop. For that conversation, I was joined by Jeannie Suk Gersen, Steve Sanders, and Volokh Conspiracy co-blogger Jonathan Adler. I hope you will subscribe so that you will not miss future episodes that will include a mix of thematic panel discussions and guest interviews.

Excerpt: The classics department at Princeton University recently decided that the idea that classics majors ought to know Latin or Greek has been a mistake. Old-fashioned, perhaps. Until now, undergrads who wanted to major in the study of classical texts needed to come into the concentration with at least an intermediate level of Latin or Greek. But those students will no longer even have to learn either language to receive a degree in classics. This is a typical example of a university rushing to make policy changes under the guise of promoting racial equity that are as likely to promote racism as to uproot it.

The department had considered the policy change before, the Princeton Alumni Weekly reported, but saw it as taking on a “new urgency” by the “events around race that occurred last summer.”

Excerpt: The question is not whether Nikole Hannah-Jones should have been offered a tenured position in the journalism school at a university. My Princeton colleague, Sean Wilentz, is a man of the left and a historian of American politics and he has been among those who have raised red flags about the quality of "The 1619 Project" that won Hannah-Jones a Pulitzer Prize. There are plenty of good reasons why a member of the faculty might vote against extending such an offer.

The question is who ought to decide whether particular individuals should be hired for available faculty positions. The board at UNC has apparently taken the view that it should not rubber stamp such offers but should feel free to override the determination of the faculty and administration on individual personnel decisions. Nothing good can come of this.

Summary: Today’s rampant political polarization has led to alarming interference in academic affairs and threatens the foundations of teaching and scholarship, especially in areas of civics and American history. Most recently, the University of North Carolina Board of Trustees has apparently balked at the faculty’s recommendation that Nikole Hannah-Jones be appointed with tenure to the Knight chair in race and investigative journalism. She will instead hold the chair for a five-year term.

It seems that political considerations drove the board to take the extraordinary step of intervening in the university’s hiring decision – which would be a clear threat to academic freedom. There are, no doubt, reasons to object to awarding a tenured position to Hannah-Jones. Her work on “The 1619 Project” is controversial. So is her choice to sometimes dismiss and demean her critics instead of engaging with their arguments on the merits.

But political intervention in matters of faculty hiring will do lasting damage to higher education in North Carolina — and will embolden boards across the country similarly to interfere with academic operations of the universities that they oversee.

Whittington is a professor of politics at Princeton University and chairman of the Academic Freedom Alliance; Wilentz is a professor of history at Princeton

A video recording is now available of this May 20 panel discussion at Princeton Reunions, which was moderated by Robert P. George, who holds Princeton University's McCormick Chair in Jurisprudence and is the Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, and included Flora Champy, Assistant Professor of French and Italian, Princeton University; Randall Kennedy '77, Michael R. Klein Professor, Harvard Law School; and Stuart Taylor, Jr. '70, Journalist and President of Princetonians for Free Speech.

Excerpt: Cornell University is, at the moment, ground zero in this ideological battle.

Official working groups at Cornell recently proffered proposals to address such issues as settler colonialism, white privilege, structural racism, injustice and bias. Their "Educational Requirement for Antiracist, Just, and Equitable Futures" is aggressive and expansive.

A strident movement of Cornell faculty, graduate students and staff declared that Cornell "remains a site of entrenched racial disparities" that must change, because it is "complicit, in countless ways, in the reproduction of white supremacy." The group calls on the school to "embed decolonized readings in every possible course at Cornell" and to "abolish colorblind recruitment policies and practices...and replace them with intentionally anti-racist policies and practices." It adds a gratuitous bit of anti-Zionism to "set benchmarks" for addressing Cornell's "institutional partnership with Technion Israeli Institute of Technology."

Excerpt: Upon learning to read while enslaved, Frederick Douglass began his great journey of emancipation, as such journeys always begin, in the mind. Defying unjust laws, he read in secret, empowered by the wisdom of contemporaries and classics alike to think as a free man. Douglass risked mockery, abuse, beating and even death to study the likes of Socrates, Cato and Cicero.

Long after that, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would be similarly galvanized by his reading in the classics as a young seminarian. Yet today, one of America’s greatest Black institutions, Howard University, is diminishing the light of wisdom and truth that inspired Douglass, King and countless other freedom fighters. Academia’s continual campaign to disregard or neglect the classics is a sign of spiritual decay, moral decline and a deep intellectual narrowness running amok in American culture.

Cornel West is a professor of public philosophy at Harvard University and Professor Emeritus at Princeton. Jeremy Tate is the founder and CEO of the Classic Learning Test.

Excerpt: In the summer of 2018, incoming first-years encountered Princeton Professor Keith Whittingon’s book “Speak Freely” as the Princeton Pre-Read. For his introduction, Whittington expressed the hope that universities are “First Amendment institutions'' because they are “where ideas begin.” Universities are “bastions'' of “critical dialogue.”

On April 9, President Biden appointed Whittington to his 36-member Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. In the spirit of dialogue which Whittington himself espouses, we might hope for Whittington to engage in a meaningful exchange of views with Princeton’s student body concerning the future of the Supreme Court and of the United States.
Formed to analyze the merits of Supreme Court reform, the commission has the potential to inform groundbreaking transformations of one of our nation’s most powerful institutions. With the commission’s report “set to be finished in October,” Princeton students here and now have a unique window to interface with this project through Professor Whittington. To capitalize on this opportunity, students can do precisely what Whittington has long advocated: speak freely.

Excerpt: Princeton University, where I am currently an undergraduate student, clearly has different standards for political protests and religious services. Princeton recently permitted a large anti-racism vigil that violated Social Contract guidelines, but upheld the restrictions for the Catholic organization’s Easter Vigil and Mass. On March 27, several hundred Princeton University students and community members gathered for a “Stop Asian Hate rally and vigil” to condemn anti-Asian racism and to mourn victims of the recent Atlanta shooting. A Princeton University student publication reported that “protesters, who were instructed to be socially distant by organizers, appeared spread out,” although the photographs clearly demonstrate otherwise.

The event violated the university’s Social Contract, which explicitly requires signatories to “not host or attend any in-person gatherings on campus with more than five people indoors or ten people outdoors unless sponsored by the university or otherwise indicated by official, visibly displayed COVID-19 room occupancy limits.” Princeton officials attended the vigil. 

Summary: Student members of the American Whig-Cliosophic Society (known as Whig-Clio) received an email on April 9 announcing that the Whig-Clio Board of Trustees had rejected the March 4 recommendation by the student members to revoke the James Madison Award that Senator Ted Cruz had received in 2016. The students had voted to revoke the award -- the highest honor Whig-Clio bestows upon public servants -- because of Cruz’s alleged role in inciting the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6.

Whig-Clio has faced recurring accusations of anti-conservative bias. In 2018, Amy Wax, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was disinvited to speak less than 20 hours before her free speech-themed event was scheduled. This January, Tory Publisher and former Cliosophic Party Chair Adam Hoffman ’23, accused Whig-Clio of deliberately stifling conservative voices by preventing prominent figures, such as former University trustee George Will ’68 GS and D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Neomi Rao, from speaking.