Sitting in at Princeton: proud past, shameful present
The following is a guest contribution and reflects the author’s views alone. For information on how to submit a piece to the Opinion section, click here.
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The following is a guest contribution and reflects the author’s views alone. For information on how to submit a piece to the Opinion section, click here.
The following is an open letter and reflects the author’s views alone. For information on how to submit a letter to the Opinion section, click here.
The following is a guest contribution and reflects the author’s views alone. For information on how to submit a piece to the Opinion section, click here.
The following is a guest contribution and reflects the author’s views alone. For information on how to submit a piece to the Opinion section, click here.
This week, the stalls of Firestone are full and campus is focused as students are preparing for the end of the semester and the ever-approaching finals period. In an attempt to improve the student experience around this time of the semester, on Feb. 16, Dean of the College Jill Dolan sent an email to the undergraduate student body announcing a pilot final exam schedule for the Spring 2024 semester. According to Dolan, this schedule allows “students to sit for up to two exams in a day, which will facilitate a more efficient exam period.” Ideally, this pilot schedule would help shorten the exam period in the spring, enabling students to finish the semester earlier, something that students were concerned about, according to the email. But this exam schedule has the potential to be detrimental both to students’ academic achievement and mental health during the exam period. Students’ wellbeing and academic success should take priority over efficiency — the University should maintain the old final exam schedule.
The following is an open letter and reflects the author’s views alone. For information on how to submit a letter to the Opinion section, click here.
The following is a guest contribution and reflects the author’s views alone. For information on how to submit a piece to the Opinion section, click here.
As a top institution of higher education, Princeton tries to do its best to prepare us for our future: offering career fairs, hosting resume writing sessions, and even offering Last Lectures about careers in local government. But there is one place where the University is falling short: preparing its students to form healthy relationships. There is a normalization of hookup culture at the University that is detrimental to many students’ long-term goals of healthy, sustainable relationships. The University must provide better resources in educating its student body about the potential social and emotional harms of hookup culture during freshman orientation and follow up in SHARE training material for upperclassmen and eating clubs. At the same time, it’s up to us to work towards forming healthy habits.
In the Opinion piece written by President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 last week, Eisgruber articulated Princeton University’s restrictions on speech and emphasized Princeton’s right to “reasonably regulate the time, place, and manner of expression to ensure that it does not disrupt the ordinary activities of the University.” As a matter of law and administrative policy, President Eisgruber is correct. But restrictions on “disruption” to “ordinary activities” inherently suppresses the underlying intent of creating disruption of many protests that express progressive political views. This includes the University’s recent action taken against Princeton students’ sit-ins and protests on behalf of Gazans, victims of a military campaign — plausibly deemed genocidal — currently being waged by Israeli military forces. Not only do current regulations on “disruption” effectively prohibit impactful expression about progressive concerns, but — contrary to President Eisgruber’s assertions — these regulations are inherently not “viewpoint-neutral.” In fact, these rules stifle progressive speech, which is often accompanied by “disruptive” action supplementing the relevant propagated verbal and written messages.
The following is a guest submission and reflects the author’s views alone. For information on how to submit a piece to the Opinion section, click here.
The following are guest submissions and reflect the authors’ views alone. For information on how to submit a piece to the Opinion section, click here.
Over the last century, women have attained and even surpassed equal representation at U.S. colleges and universities to men — women now make up almost 60 percent of bachelor’s degrees awarded. Over the last few decades, women have also made huge strides post-college education: in the early 1980s, women made up only 30 percent of doctorate degrees — they now make up 54 percent. It‘s only natural that women are now also equally represented in the top levels of University administration — they are in charge of four out of the eight Ivy League schools. But recent events, such as Claudine Gay’s departure from her position as president of Harvard University, spark an important conversation on the ways in which meritocracy, race, and gender intersect in academic leadership. This present era calls for us to reevaluate our dedication to diversity and justice at the highest levels of government, especially in light of the different challenges that women face on the path to leadership at elite universities.
After student activists began directing hard questions at President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 during meetings of the Council of the Princeton University (CPUC) in 2019, administrators pushed through a policy that curtailed freedom of attendees to ask questions. Requiring them to submit questions in advance overturned a long-standing and respected custom of holding an open question period at the end of each meeting. At the time, The Daily Princetonian Editorial Board critiqued the move as ending “open discourse” at the CPUC.
Over the past week, landmark cases of student activism have swept across America. Advocacy at Columbia has emerged at the forefront of the headlines when over 100 students were arrested at a pro-Palestinian student demonstration on charges of trespassing. Across the nation, similar encampments have also emerged at the University of California, Berkeley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts University, and Emerson College.
The following is a guest submission and reflects the author’s views alone. For information on how to submit a piece to the Opinion section, click here.
Early Thursday morning, the Department of Public Safety arrested two graduate students for taking initial steps to establish encampments in McCosh Courtyard. Princeton authorized arrests within six minutes of the first tents being set up.
Confrontations at Columbia, Yale, and other campuses around the country have highlighted the importance of “time, place, and manner” regulations to universities’ academic and educational missions. Because the enforcement of these rules is essential to our community as well, I wanted to offer some observations about their role at Princeton and their relationship to other free speech principles.
This past Monday, April 22, was Earth Day. Since the very first Earth Day in 1970, students have used this day to celebrate the environment and demand action from powerful institutions on the climate crisis. The day has brought attention to environmental issues on college campuses, including at Princeton, from its inception. We, as Sunrise Princeton co-coordinators, celebrate how Earth Day has been a unifying force for the mainstream environmental movement. But we’re not satisfied with how Earth Day demonstrations have been co-opted by greenwashing campaigns and have kept the climate movement siloed from other liberatory struggles. That’s why Sunrise Princeton partnered with a coalition of organizers to cast off old frameworks this Earth Day and to demand that Princeton lead both in stopping actions that contribute to the climate crisis and in building climate justice in its community.
In SPI 499: Making an Exoneree, students have no papers, problem sets, readings, or exams. They just work to exonerate wrongfully imprisoned people. Students in the class “spend an intensive semester as investigative journalists, documentarians, and social justice activists.” As an action-centered class, SPI 499 is a testament to the fact that civic engagement is something that can be incorporated into our everyday learning.
The following is an open letter and reflects the author’s views alone. For information on how to submit a piece to the Opinion section, click here.