Hannah Reynolds Martinez ’22, Lynne Archibald ’87, and John Huyler ’67
2 Months Ago
Another Preemptive Action?
Two recent pieces, “Higher Education on the Ballot” (October issue) and “Princeton to Accept Certain Fossil Fuel Funds” (November issue), might be connected. The first discusses challenges facing elite universities: “‘We acted proactively’: Mun Choi *92 eliminated the DEI office at the University of Missouri, he says, to head off political pressure.” Choi lays out how public universities quietly dismantled their DEI departments ahead of a possible Trump win.
In the November issue, there is the report on Princeton thumbing its nose at its own process by suddenly gutting its fossil fuel dissociation policy. This was an unexpected reversal of the University’s tentative yet encouraging move away from fossil-fuel-funded research. At a Council of the Princeton University Community meeting, President Eisgruber ’83 noted that Princeton was the only American university with such a policy. It was also stated that there aren’t any projects needing fossil fuel funding from dissociated companies now. Did President Eisgruber wish to preemptively take the “dissociation target” off Princeton’s back?
As On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder wrote, most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given because people think about what a more repressive government will want and then just do it. It is disheartening that Princeton will not stand by its own principles with respect to the climate crisis. If the worst is true, it is deeply disturbing that Princeton, a private university with the largest per capita endowment in the world, is willing to jettison its students’ futures in order to prostrate itself before the new administration.
Two recent pieces, “Higher Education on the Ballot” (October issue) and “Princeton to Accept Certain Fossil Fuel Funds” (November issue), might be connected. The first discusses challenges facing elite universities: “‘We acted proactively’: Mun Choi *92 eliminated the DEI office at the University of Missouri, he says, to head off political pressure.” Choi lays out how public universities quietly dismantled their DEI departments ahead of a possible Trump win.
In the November issue, there is the report on Princeton thumbing its nose at its own process by suddenly gutting its fossil fuel dissociation policy. This was an unexpected reversal of the University’s tentative yet encouraging move away from fossil-fuel-funded research. At a Council of the Princeton University Community meeting, President Eisgruber ’83 noted that Princeton was the only American university with such a policy. It was also stated that there aren’t any projects needing fossil fuel funding from dissociated companies now. Did President Eisgruber wish to preemptively take the “dissociation target” off Princeton’s back?
As On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder wrote, most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given because people think about what a more repressive government will want and then just do it. It is disheartening that Princeton will not stand by its own principles with respect to the climate crisis. If the worst is true, it is deeply disturbing that Princeton, a private university with the largest per capita endowment in the world, is willing to jettison its students’ futures in order to prostrate itself before the new administration.