Latest News and Commentary: Princeton

Excerpt: Princeton professor and author Keith Whittington joins Tim O’Brien to talk about the current state of not-so-free-speech on the American college campus and Keith’s role in the new and growing Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA). Keith explains the growing fear among professors and instructors that the smallest thing they say or do could ruin their careers.

They could be canceled for using the wrong story or word to illustrate a point while teaching a class. Something they say or do could be perceived by some students as a triggering factor for some negative emotion. If you do a quick Google search, you’ll find stories where educators were called out by students for perceived lack of sensitivity to certain issues. Stories like those have created a growing concern among educators that something has to be done to turn the tide.

Excerpt: The 2,887 Princeton students who returned to campus this semester have faced a harsh new reality as they attempt to navigate the University’s pandemic-related restrictions and many of its seemingly absurd regulations.

Student press outlets have seen their coverage curtailed and have been prevented from producing print publications—censorship in all but name—and students of faith have had to watch in disbelief as the University shamelessly encourages non-socially-distanced sexual activity, offering contraception and sex toys to students, while simultaneously claiming that social distancing guidelines render it too dangerous to allow prayer, worship, and Mass in the Chapel. To me, this dichotomy accurately encapsulates Princeton’s response to COVID-19 thus far: hypocritical, absurd, and logic-free.

Excerpt: Last week, I helped launch the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA), a nonprofit organization comprising college and university faculty members from across the ideological spectrum who are committed to defending each other’s free speech. I am a right-of-center libertarian in my own political views. Although conservative faculty are a minority on college campuses, theirs is not the only speech under threat in our current political environment. Suppression of controversial ideas runs rampant on all sides. Liberal and moderate academics are deeply affected by the erosion of tolerance for dissent on our college campuses. Many of them decline to speak out on controversial subjects precisely because of the fierce intimidation that they face from their own side — and, to be frank, that they all too often face from politicians and activists on the political right. The sense of fear in modern academia is pervasive and the threats to free speech are widespread.

Excerpt: The Princeton Theological Seminary segregated participants in its mandatory racial bias training by race, according to video materials obtained by Young America’s Foundation. The training, led by Laurie Carlsson and Dr. Michelle Majors, offered three separate spaces for students and faculty to participate: A “white-only space” to “grapple with our whiteness and how we’ve been socialized, in a way that does not harm our colleagues and co-students of color,” a separate group “only open to students who identify as Black, Indigenous, or a person of color,” and a group for participants “uncomfortable with either of these scenarios.” The segregated groups are designed to “[create] safety and support while addressing the personal institutional challenges of becoming an anti-racist institution,” Majors said during the presentation. According to materials obtained by YAF, Director of Student Life Programs Yeda Walker at one point suggests that professors go easier on minorities in class.

Excerpt: Monday, March 8, was an important day for free speech and academic freedom on campuses across the United States.  On that day, the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA) was officially launched, with over 200 professors and emeritus professors from a number of universities as initial members. The purpose of the AFA is to support free speech in academia, including through legal support for those who have their free speech and academic freedom challenged.  The AFA has a Legal Advisory Committee made up of noted lawyers with experience on First Amendment issues to support its efforts.
PFS strongly supports this very important initiative. As a group of Princeton alumni, we are particularly proud that the AFA was started by Princeton professors, including Keith E. Whittington and Robert P. George. We highly recommend you read the interview of Professor Keith Whittington, by PFS President Stuart Taylor, Jr, which appeared on our website the day the AFA was announced.

Excerpt: Classics professor Joshua Katz has filed a lawsuit alleging that the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), a federation of 75 scholarly organizations, retracted his invitation to serve as one of the society’s delegates to a prominent international conference after he wrote a controversial op-ed last July. In the complaint, Katz claims that the ACLS invited him to serve as a volunteer delegate to the Union Académique Internationale (UAI), an academic conference based in Paris, and then revoked that invitation “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.” Katz is seeking unspecified monetary compensation on the basis that the organization’s actions caused him “substantial damage, lessened his reputation, and reduced his potential for future advancement.”

Excerpt: Two hundred professors launched the nonpartisan Academic Freedom Alliance this week to advocate for free speech in academe and, in some cases, legally defend professors’ academic freedom. Members include Cornel West, Robert P. George, Jeannie Suk Gersen, Jay Parini and Claire Potter. Membership is currently by invitation only, but the group plans on opening up to all academics. “The AFA will provide strength in numbers for its members,” physicist Shivaji Sondhi of Princeton University said in a statement. “As membership continues to expand, administrators will have to think twice before baselessly censuring or terminating an employee.”

Excerpt: It’s not a sign of health in American higher education that organizations devoted to defending academic freedom are proliferating. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has expanded rapidly in recent years as threats to campus liberties multiply. In 2015 Heterodox Academy emerged to promote viewpoint diversity in the progressive-dominated social sciences. This week comes the Academic Freedom Alliance, a cross-ideological group of scholars who aim to defend faculty members’ rights to engage in unpopular speech and advocacy. The group, announced Monday, says on its website that “our members will defend faculty members’ freedom of thought and expression in their work as researchers and writers or in their lives as citizens.” The group is also advised by litigators such as liberal First Amendment expert Floyd Abrams and the prominent conservative appellate lawyer Paul Clement. “The AFA will aid in providing legal support to faculty whose academic freedom is threatened by institutions’ or officials’ violations of constitutional, statutory, contractual, or school-based rights,” its website says.

Excerpt: Talking about cancel culture is one thing; doing something about it is another. In the long term, conservatives and other non-leftists need to build more of our own institutions resistant to woke pressures, and we also need to liberate young people from the clutches of indoctrination by woke thought-programmers. But in the meantime, how can we fight back in the institutional structures where pressure campaigns find both sympathy among those in power and fear of standing up to the new censors? What can be done in universities that won’t stand for academic freedom on principle, [that] dictate the inclusion of propaganda in course syllabi, and [that] muzzle dissenting faculty? [As] Robert P. George of Princeton tells Wesley Yang at the Chronicle of Higher Education, it was past time for academics concerned about freedom of speech and thought in the academy — by no means only conservatives, but libertarians, moderates, and old-style liberals as well — to join forces to provide material support to those targeted by the mob

Excerpt: In connection with the creation of the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA), reported nearby and in this press release, Keith Whittington, who chairs the AFA’s Academic Committee, a nine-member body which sets policy for the organization. agreed to answer some questions posed by Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS). He is Princeton’s William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics. The exchange follows.

Q. You are the author of Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech, a 2018 book that won the PROSE Award for best book in education and the Heterodox Academy Award for Exceptional Scholarship. Can you state generally your views on how freedom of thought and expression are faring at Princeton and other universities around the country?