Latest News and Commentary: Princeton

Excerpt: Did you hear the news? Apparently, “true political diversity and debate at the Tory is all but dead,” or so says Shane Patrick ’24 in a column published in The Princeton Tory last month. Patrick argued that the organization has become obsessed with two issues — “free speech and Israel.” Though Patrick’s assertion that Catholic students are severely underrepresented in the Tory and repelled by the organization’s focus on free speech and Israel politics is unwarranted, he isn’t wrong to point out the single-mindedness and tunnel vision of conservative groups on campus. 

Why are the topics of interest in the Tory and other conservative groups on campus so uniform? The answer does not lie with a lack of diversity, but instead in intellectual laziness.

Excerpt: When college administrators support abortion rights or denounce structural racism through institutional statements, are they upholding the aims of academe to create a welcoming learning environment and improve society? Or are they aligning their institutions with a partisan political agenda and in the process muzzling contrarian viewpoints and shutting down robust classroom debates?

Board members, administrators, and faculty members are divided over whether their institutions — or units within them — should collectively speak up about controversial issues or stay silent.

Excerpt: Last week, I was supposed to be in Greece. When, almost exactly a year ago, I was invited to speak at a four-day international conference in Athens on “The ‘Future of the Past’: Why Classical Studies Still Matter,” I accepted happily. Finally, after years of turmoil, I was going to have the chance to sit down with colleagues and help chart a workable course forward for our embattled subject. In the end, however, the fact that my wife is pregnant made me decide to participate instead over Zoom. This turned out to be a blessing, since had I gone in person, I would have had to spend Thanksgiving with some loathsome people.

Excerpt: When the Philippine investigative journalist Maria Ressa won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, the committee called her “a fearless defender of freedom of expression” who “exposed the abuse of power, use of violence and increasing authoritarianism” of Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines who left office this year.

She argues that there is a strong link between the rise of authoritarianism and the decline of press freedom around the world.

Editor’s note: Maria Ressa is a Princeton alumna.

Excerpt: White professors at Princeton, past and present, including Joe Scanlan and Lawrence Rosen, should know better than to utilize racial slurs in their classrooms as educational tools. 

There is no good reason for a white professor to use the n-word in the classroom. Time and time again, student experiences have shown that there is no educational or truth-seeking value gained from actively hearing hate speech. Rather, as Omar Farah ’23’s column poignantly captured, white professors’ use of the n-word simply causes pain. It does not inspire novel discoveries. It does not encourage critical thought. It does not help turn students into scholars. Employment of the n-word by a white professor causes harm.

Excerpt: The James Madison Program at Princeton University hosted the one-day conference, “Institutional Neutrality and the Mission of the University,” on November 11. It consisted of two public panels followed by a private session of scholars invited to “craft a new Kalven Report 2.0.” The 1967 Kalven Report is a policy of institutional neutrality for universities on political and social issues.

Excerpt: Over the summer, the University amended its No Communication and No Contact Order (NCO) policy. Students are now required to reach out to the person they want an NCO against before requesting an order. After The Daily Princetonian reported on this development, much has been said — and much misunderstood — about it.

Some have suggested that the University was bullied by the Princeton Open Campus Coalition (POCC) into the change. Well, as the president and vice president of the POCC, let us say: If we bullied the University, we must have done so in an alien language, because our message went unreceived. The new policy is not one we advocated for, and it is as stupid as it sounds.

Excerpt: On Nov. 3, visual arts professor Joe Scanlan said the n-word while posing a question to students during his VIS321: Words as Objects seminar. He used the word during a discussion about a poem by Black poet Jonah Mixon-Webster’s poetic anthology “Stereo(TYPE).”

After Omar Farah ’23, a Black student in the class, raised an official complaint about the incident to the University, the Office of the Provost concluded that there had not been a violation of the Policy on Discrimination and/or Harassment following an initial assessment of the situation.

Excerpt: Joshua Katz, now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, addressed the "awfulness" of his experience at Princeton University, the "good" that eventually resulted, and suggestions for restoring "sanity to a world gone mad" at an invite-only conference on academic freedom hosted by the Stanford Graduate School of Business on Nov 4 and 5.

Excerpt: Princeton University has amended its procedures for the granting of No Communication and No Contact Orders (NCOs), the university equivalent of restraining orders. But the amendment is as asinine as it is likely to be misunderstood. Let me, as the President of the Princeton Open Campus Coalition, express my deep disappointment in the foolish new policy.