Dear President Eisgruber,
We the undersigned undergraduate students of Princeton University write on behalf of the Princeton Open Campus Coalition, founded in 2015 to advocate for the university’s robust protection of important values such as free speech, free thought, and bold and fearless truth-seeking. We approach you now because we find that the events of recent months, weeks, and days have laid bare the volatility and constant threat under which these important, but all-too-fragile, ideals exist.
On June 22, 2020, some students of the School of Public and International Affairs (“School”) submitted a list of demands to the University administration, seeking the enactment of certain “anti-racist” policies. Among their demands is the institution of required courses in line with their professed beliefs on “race, capitalism, and colonialism.” They further demand that the University, acting through the School, hire more Black faculty, require “anti-racist training once per semester for all faculty, staff, preceptors, and administrators,” purge the University of any reference to Woodrow Wilson, and divest from what they term the “prison-industrial complex.” While we express no collective opinion on some demands like divestment, the vast majority of claims and demands made by these students amounts to a concerted siege of free thought at Princeton, which they seek to effect by hijacking the University bureaucracy to create a monopoly for their beliefs on deeply controversial and contentious issues. Consequently, we strongly oppose politicization of the curriculum by requiring courses that reflect a certain ideological commitment. We have no problem with new courses drawn from diverse intellectual traditions; indeed, we welcome them. Among the principal purposes of a university is to expose its students to novel thought. However, requiring that a mandatory, one-sided core curriculum be instituted to further reinforce pre-existing ideological commitments is antithetical to the fundamental mission of a university and a liberal arts education.
The demand for “anti-racist training” is nothing more than the institution of a wrongthink correctional program, and we strenuously oppose any attempt to require “cultural competency” or “unconscious bias” training for any member of the University community. This training would undoubtedly coerce members of the community to accept the premises and conclusions that proponents of these reeducation camps advance. There would be no room for any act of dissent or good-faith debate on whether a particular instance of speech or action indeed amounts to racism. Potential dissenters would be intimidated in an atmosphere of fear and potential retribution. We have no doubt that every member of the Princeton community, ourselves certainly included, would strongly and unequivocally identify with the cause of “anti-racism” under whose banner these students purport to rally. But “anti-racism” is a vague and radically unhelpful term that will be filled in with question-begging conclusions by those who subscribe to the reigning orthodoxy on matters of race. Affirmative action, for example, has long been a matter of contention, not only in American political and legal discourse, but also in academic circles. Are we prepared to say, as the University of California system appears to have done, that opposition to affirmative action is “racist” and constitutes an impermissible “microaggression?” Other examples of controversial matters touching on race include, but are certainly not limited to, the historical accuracy of the New York Times’s recently launched “1619 Project,” the relationship between police officers and their communities, illegal immigration and immigration enforcement, urban crime, the so-called “War on Drugs,” issues of family structure and father-absence in poor communities of every description, and welfare policy. These, and other, matters lie at the core of significant legal, political, and academic discourse. Proper engagement with the various sides of these debates is premised on the robust protection of the freedom to make reasoned arguments and freely and publicly explore different points of view on these contentious issues with no regard for whether these free pursuits of truth “trigger” others.
To brand one side of these important debates as “racist,” “offensive,” or “harmful” and seek the “training” of those who hold alternative or “unacceptable” views is to rig the game well before it has begun and weaponize the administrative apparatus of the University against those who would doubt, question, or challenge the reigning orthodoxy of the day and age. This would strike a fatal blow to the very heart of higher education, the first principle of which is that there ought to be no safe space or shelter at a university “in which any member of the community is ‘safe’ from having his or her most cherished values challenged.”
The increasingly popular trend of erasing opposing viewpoints and policing the acceptable range of thought and speech may not be corrected soon, but we firmly believe that it is the duty of institutions like Princeton, and universities more generally, to strongly resist the forces of enforced orthodoxy and unequivocally protect the freedom of thought and speech. In concrete terms, it is the duty of the University to refuse to initiate or entertain any disciplinary or adverse action against those who challenge established views, resist in no uncertain terms efforts to rig the curriculum in favor of particular ideologies, protect the safe expression of all points of view, and ensure that no programs are instituted to “reeducate” those who dissent from the orthodoxy. Princeton has already affirmed these, and other, principles of academic freedom by adopting the University of Chicago’s principles of free speech and expression. Now is the time to abide by them—spirit and letter.
Universities are neither safe spaces for the mindless regurgitation of established views nor indoctrination centers in which knowledge handed down is to be passively accepted. As history has amply shown, the courage and fortitude to stand athwart the approved wisdom of the age, and pose difficult, challenging, and uncomfortable questions to its proponents, lies at the heart of the pursuit of knowledge. We all celebrate Galileo for his fearless challenge to the geocentric model of the universe, even at great threat to his life and freedom. We admire the courage of Socrates, who stood by his convictions in the face of death. And, yet, in our own day and age, we wrap our emotions and identities so tightly around our ideological beliefs that we refuse to entertain, or even permit, any challenge to their truth or validity. An important aspect of education is humility—the open-mindedness to engage in civil discourse with those of opposing or differing viewpoints, the ability to seriously reflect on arguments that question or threaten one’s deepest convictions, and the grace to recognize the possibility that one can be wrong or mistaken in one’s strongest beliefs. If education is to mean anything at all, it must mean open debate and discourse on the issues that matter the most to us. For, if we are omniscient, and definitively know ourselves to be right, there is no purpose to education other than being affirmed in that which we already know and believe to be true beyond doubt. Surely education means more than this.
We wholeheartedly welcome the hiring of racially diverse faculty. But racial diversity is not the only form of diversity, and we strongly suspect that the signatories of the School’s letter would be far from pleased if their call for diversity were to be extended to ideological diversity or if the racially diverse members of the faculty did not subscribe to their ideological commitments. Would Thomas Sowell be as welcome as Ta-Nehisi Coates? If it is indeed racial diversity that they truly seek, would they celebrate the speaking invitation of Clarence Thomas, Tim Scott, Ben Carson, or Condoleezza Rice with as much enthusiasm as they would the invitations of Marc Lamont Hill, Michelle Obama, Maxine Waters, or Stacey Abrams? These questions virtually answer themselves, revealing that this effort is a move to consolidate ideological power masquerading as a campaign for racial justice.
The siege against academic freedom is never at its core about race. It is, as it has always been and shall ever be, fundamentally about ideology and power. Power, once attained, seeks self-preservation at all cost, and history is replete with examples too numerous to count of those in power seeking to cement their hold on political or cultural authority by establishing an orthodoxy of acceptable thought and punishing those who would dare dissent or deviate from that prescription of correct-think.
It warrants observation that we neither have nor express a consensus on the substance of any underlying policy questions mentioned or described here. We are not all Democrats, Republicans, progressives, conservatives, or libertarians. We approach these, and other, issues in different ways and greatly vary in the conclusions at which we arrive. We are, however, firmly united in our belief that fearless and unrestrained civil discourse is critical to a proper understanding of these complex issues and that robust protection of free thought, speech, and academic pursuit, particularly in the context of controversial issues, is the sine qua non of a sound liberal arts education. In the end, it is not the orthodoxy or the view of the majority that warrants protection; the protection of those views is easily and painlessly achieved. Rather, if the freedom of thought is to mean anything at all, it must mean the protection of the view of the minority, of the dissenter, of the one among the many, especially when stakes, tensions, and emotions run highest.
Princeton University has been a bastion of trailblazing thought and discourse since before the birth of the American republic. In her halls and through her influence have seeds of ideas grown into mighty oaks, sparks of thought blazed as a light for the ages, and fearless pursuits of truth enriched the knowledge of our world. As students at Princeton, we could not be prouder of the tradition of fearless academic exploration and truth-seeking in which this university has led the academic world for centuries. We ask now that this great tradition be preserved, protected, and vigorously defended in a world that has never been more direly in need of it.
Respectfully,
The Members of the Princeton Open Campus Coalition
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