More than 1,300 sign a petition that champions free speech
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While students from Yale University in Connecticut to Claremont McKenna in California are protesting, demanding more cultural sensitivity, safe spaces and trigger warnings, some students at Princeton University in New Jersey are fighting back.
In response to a sit-in of the university president’s office by 200 members of the Black Justice League, over 1,300 members of the university community signed a petition to ensure that Princeton “maintains its commitment to free speech and open dialogue and condemns political correctness to the extent that it infringes upon those fundamental academic values.”
As signatures on the petition climbed, students formed the Princeton Open Campus Coalition. They wrote to Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber and asked to meet with him to discuss preserving the freedom of speech and civil debate that are the hallmarks of a classical education. Evan Draim, a Princeton senior and one of the group’s founders, told me in an email: “We hope that our peers at other colleges gain inspiration from what we are doing at Princeton.”
The Black Justice League’s demands include a dorm for those who want to celebrate black affinity; mandatory diversity training; and a requirement that students take a course on so-called marginalized peoples. They also want the renaming of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the removal of a mural of President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson, who graduated from Princeton in 1879 and who served as the university’s president from 1902 until 1910, formally segregated the federal workforce.
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