In light of recent scrutiny on higher education by the U.S. federal government, on April 2, the Princeton Council on Academic Freedom (PCAF) held a roundtable discussion in McCosh Hall titled, “Should Universities Engage in Politics?”
The meeting came after President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 declared that Princeton will not practice institutional neutrality in his annual State of the University letter published on Jan. 29.
Institutional neutrality states that colleges and universities should not make collective statements, a point of discussion at Princeton in the wake of Eisgruber’s statement, especially as several other universities adopted institutional neutrality.
The discussion was moderated by Princeton politics professor Frances Lee. University of Chicago philosophy professor Anton Ford, Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy ’77, and Yale politics professor Keith Whittington all shared their opinions on the role that Princeton and other universities should generally play during a time of turmoil in higher education.
Eve Krakowski, a professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies and one of the PCAF co-chairs, spoke to The Daily Princetonian in an interview about organizing the discussion. “[PCAF] has two core missions. One is to defend academic freedom, and we had no idea how timely that would be. The other is promotion of respectful and seriously engaged discussion across differences,” she shared.
This event comes in amid federal funding cuts and pauses at several universities, including Princeton. On April 1, Eisgruber announced in an email that the Trump administration suspended several dozen research grants to the University. After the Trump administration cancelled $400 million in federal funding at Columbia University, Eisgruber took to The Atlantic to rebuke the government’s actions as “a radical threat to scholarly excellence and to America’s leadership in research.”
Elaborating on the motivations of PCAF, Krakowski specified that she wanted to represent the different philosophies around institutional neutrality. “The original idea was to really tackle the idea of political neutrality at the institutional level, which is something that we as a council believe in but recognize is complicated,” she said.
She said that PCAF selected speakers who have “all either written or spoken about aspects of [institutional neutrality],” making sure to garner a collection of diverse perspectives.
“The moral threat to universities is external, not internal. It does not come from our students,” Ford, who offered opening remarks, noted.
Kennedy, citing the current political environment as “worse than McCarthyism,” stated that his perspective on institutional neutrality is that universities should be careful not to “needlessly bring heat onto the institution.” Instead, he believes the increased popularity of institutional neutrality among universities in recent times could be “a fearful stance” rather than a result of any inherent benefit of institutional neutrality.
“The core responsibility of the university is to resist those pressures to suppress controversial speech that people disagree with and instead hold the standard that universities are places in which people get to speak their minds,” Whittington added.
When Lee asked about the recent suspension of federal funding by the Trump Administration, Whittington shared, “I think we’re facing a kind of scope and detail of pressure on universities from the political arena that really we’ve never faced in this country before.” He added that state universities face additional pressures as they need to follow their state’s legislation in addition to federal.
Ford additionally discussed external funding pressures, highlighting the role of external donors beyond the government. “As federal funds are withdrawn from the university … the only place that these institutions have to turn is donors … the less [universities] can depend on the government, the more they depend on the rich,” he stated. Ford speculated that universities’ responses to encampment protests in Spring 2024 often involved an element of responding to donors’ requests.
Regarding how universities should handle publishing public statements, Whittington said that, “We ought to distinguish between statements and actions. And I think a lot of the arguments and concerns that are applicable if you think about statements are not so applicable when we think about actions.” He added that certain issues that students push for statements on, such as divestment, are feasibly actionable and require a concrete plan to accomplish — which goes beyond a simple statement.
After Lee concluded pre-determined questions, she opened up the floor to audience questions. “At what point do you go from acceptable student protest to behavior that is destructive to the mission of the university?” one audience member asked. Kennedy clarified that, though students may have perceived universities’ responses to protests as confusing, public universities are allowed to prohibit unlawful verbal conduct in alignment with the First Amendment. He also noted that all schools have their own policies regarding disruptive behavior.
Another audience member asked about a resolution, proposed at an Oct. 21, 2024 faculty meeting by multiple PCAF members, that would prohibit collective faculty statements. She stated that the faculty are going to meet and potentially vote on issues pertaining statement containment in a few weeks and asked how the panelists were planning on voting. Whittington answered, “My own view is faculty shouldn't be issuing those kinds of institutional statements … while also making sure that we all recognize and continue to value and protect the ability of faculty to speak out individually.”
At the Oct. 21 faculty meeting, the faculty voted with a narrow margin to postpone voting on controversial proposals and to form an ad-hoc committee to research faculty-wide statements.
Another audience member asked again about how funding cuts will impact universities, specifying his confusion over how universities are planning to sustain themselves with the potential of federal cuts remaining long term.
Kennedy responded by emphasizing that universities will need public support in the coming years, especially noting how Ivy League institutions like Princeton can often face additional public derision of Ivy League universities as elitist. He asked, “How do we convince people to stand with us? How do we convince people that we are actually contributing? Maybe we should do a better job of making [Princeton] more available to a wider scope of people, so that a wider scope of people feel like they have a stake.”
Meghana Veldhuis is a senior News writer for the ‘Prince.’ She is from Bergen County, N.J., and typically covers graduate students, postdocs, faculty, and campus unions and labor.
Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
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