Under Second Trump Administration, Free Speech Debate at Princeton Intensifies

In many ways, Marisa Hirschfield ’27 represents the typical high-achieving Princeton student. A history major, Hirschfield writes for the Triangle Club and is interested in filmmaking and public interest law. Like many Princetonians, she identifies as politically progressive.

But where Hirschfield’s resume diverges from many of her classmates is that she serves as a writing fellow for Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS), a nonprofit founded by Stuart Taylor Jr. ’70 and Ed Yingling ’70 that seeks to promote free speech and academic freedom on campus. At Princeton, the free speech issue has been contested for the past several years but mostly involved conservative students who felt that they were being silenced or bullied for their views.

Hirschfield remains the exception, as Taylor says she may be the only progressive on the student staff. “My personal mission while at the organization is to make free speech nonpartisan again,” Hirschfield says, arguing that historic progressive gains in the abolition of slavery, gay rights, and women’s suffrage were all made “because dissidents were able to safely express what might have been unpopular viewpoints.”

Though Taylor and Yingling stress the group’s nonpartisan stance, in practice PFS has mostly advocated for the speech rights of right-leaning students and against the proliferation of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. The two alumni formed the group in 2020 in response to student backlash against a 2020 letter written by the Princeton Open Campus Coalition (POCC), a conservative free speech group on campus, to University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83. The POCC letter criticized the contemporary demands of 350 faculty for a variety of anti-racist reforms at Princeton. Some of those reforms included a “anti-racism committee” to monitor and vet research for racism, though that letter did not define what racism entailed.

According to Taylor, the students who signed the POCC letter were attacked on social media by their Princeton classmates as “Nazis, fascists, [and] racists.” Though Taylor recognizes that a negative response could fall under protected free speech, he argues “that when it crosses the line into harassment, it’s in a slightly different category.” After writing a letter to Eisgruber to condemn the harassment (which Taylor says Eisgruber responded to by writing that the critical students were exercising their right to free speech), Taylor reached out to his classmate, Yingling, with the idea of forming an alumni group in the anticipation that more free speech flare-ups lay ahead.

In his career as a reporter and columnist, Taylor wrote about legal affairs for The New York Times and National Journal. His work often found him critiquing progressive policies that, in his view, contributed to injustices in higher education. This included Mismatch, a 2012 critique of affirmative action policies cowritten with UCLA law professor Richard Sander; Until Proven Innocent, a 2007 book coauthored with historian KC Johnson examining a 2006 case in which three members of the Duke men’s lacrosse team were falsely accused of rape; and The Campus Rape Frenzy (also written with Johnson), a 2017 book that argued that universities had compromised the principle of due process in campus sexual assault cases.

Yingling, a former CEO of the American Bankers Association, says he had little engagement with free speech advocacy before cofounding the group, apart from participating as a student in Vietnam War protests, like one in which he and his fellow Princetonians occupied the lawn outside the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) in Princeton to “sit on a blanket and drink wine.”

Today, Taylor and Yingling’s initiative is one of several across the country that seek to advocate for free speech and academic freedom. According to Yingling, in 2021, after alumni from Davidson College asked PFS for advice in forming their own free speech group, the Princeton and Davidson groups teamed up with like-minded organizations at Washington and Lee University, the University of Virginia, and Cornell University to found the Alumni Free Speech Alliance (AFSA), an umbrella organization now featuring 27 alumni advocacy groups. Other organizations that profess support of academic freedom and free speech include the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), and at Old Nassau, the Princeton Council on Academic Freedom (PCAF).

According to journalist and former Clinton White House official Lawrence Haas *81, who serves on the PFS board, such momentum represents a much-needed “groundswell.” In his view, institutions should protect the freedom of speech of those with opposing viewpoints. “There’s no need to develop a capacity to exchange ideas with those that you agree with.”

Kristen Shahverdian, the program director of Campus Free Speech at PEN America, warns that campus free speech advocacy often falls prey to politicization. “Claims for and against free speech have swung from the right to the left and back again,” Shahverdian says. “Often people use the framing of free speech to defend free speech that they prefer, regardless of where they stand on the ideological spectrum.”

In an April interview on the New York Times podcast The Daily, Eisgruber drew a distinction between allowing multiple viewpoints to be expressed on campus and enforcing ideological balance in the manner of a political talk show. “There are political divisions about things like climate and vaccines right now, and there’s no obligation on the part of the universities to reflect what is the political division of opinion on those subjects,” Eisgruber said. “An honest, fair, truth-seeking process will produce criticisms of society; it won’t just be a mirror to society.”

Throughout his tenure as president, Eisgruber has walked a fine line on the subject of free speech, frequently arguing that free speech and academic freedom were “bedrock values of any academic community” while denouncing hate speech, like calls for genocide. In January 2024, after the December 2023 Congressional hearings attacking the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania for their handling of antisemitism claims during Israel-Palestine protests, Eisgruber condemned the hearings as “nakedly partisan jeremiads.” This year, Eisgruber’s March article in The Atlantic in response to the Trump administration’s cancellation of $400 million in funding to Columbia University received national attention for his insistence that though legitimate concerns had been raised about antisemitism at Columbia, the move represented an unprecedented assault on academic freedom. 

Princetonians for Free Speech members Todd Rulon-Miller ’73, left, Stuart Taylor Jr. ’70, and Edward Yingling ’70 speak at an event during Reunions in 2023.

Courtesy of Princetonians for Free Speech

For Princetonians, the PFS website can function as a hub for free speech debate news, republishing articles on the issue from across the web. For alumni who donate to the group, PFS offers “Inner Circle” Zoom conversations with free speech advocates. The group’s 2024 Annual Report stated that PFS raised more than $300,000 from 154 donors in the previous fiscal year. Yingling says that the group’s recent social media marketing has yielded an average of 500 new subscribers per month; the group currently reaches 7,500 alumni.

The group also brings speakers to campus (such as conservative Washington Post columnist George Will *68 and former Republican politician Mitch Daniels ’71) though Taylor acknowledges that attendance at these events is usually poor, a victim of the average Princetonian’s busy schedule — and the group’s minor imprint on campus, which tends to be made up of a small group of right-leaning students (apart from Hirschfield). Taylor asserts they want to recruit more centrist and left-leaning students, and Yingling says they would support anyone on campus with a free speech problem.

“If you’re for free speech and academic freedom, you’ve got to be for free speech and academic freedom for everybody,” Yingling says. When asked whether that would apply to pro-Palestinian protestors targeted by the Trump administration, Yingling says it’s a “complex issue.” On that topic, Taylor elaborated that “to the extent that they’re advocating for the destruction of Israel, if it’s just advocacy, we think it’s protected speech.” However, Taylor argues, “if it rises to the level of harassment of Jewish students on campus in various ways, it’s the kind of harassment that violates both tort law and intentional infliction of emotional distress.”

Shahverdian says PEN America’s principles in regard to free speech acknowledge that “legitimate concerns regarding discrimination and hateful speech will arise in the context of free speech debates.” For PEN, “the unique academic mission of colleges requires that these institutions teach and model the responsibilities that accompany free speech as they work to protect it.”

One of PFS’s proposals included a revised first-year orientation that better emphasized the University’s free speech policy, a suggestion implemented in Princeton’s fall 2022 orientation and expanded in the 2024 iteration, the latter of which Taylor characterized as “excellent on free speech.” In its 2024 annual report, PFS also suggested 10 other reforms that Princeton should adopt to improve free speech and viewpoint diversity. These included the implementation of an institutional neutrality policy, eliminating the use of DEI statements in hiring, and setting up a free-speech ombudsman.

“We’re not trying to kill DEI, but we think it’s gone too far,” Taylor explains, arguing that DEI statements serve as ideological litmus tests that restrict hiring to faculty who subscribe to progressive views. In a February blog post on the PFS website, Taylor wrote that “careful change on the DEI and racial and gender fairness fronts would be a good thing at Princeton as well as around the country if done right,” but called the Trump administration’s anti-DEI efforts “scattershot [and] sometimes perverse.”

For Hirschfield, the position of defending free speech is complicated. “A lot of the times free speech can be an obstacle to progressive causes or even perpetuate twisted ideas,” she says. “It’s weird to be on the side where you’re defending that, but ultimately you’re defending the principle of free speech, not the ideas that free speech protects.”