Princeton faces many domestic threats. In 2024, a Forbes College dryer burst into flames, setting off fire alarms and forcing students to evacuate the residential college. Last year, residents of Yeh College and New College West were plagued by droves of mice in dorm rooms when they returned from winter break. Still, despite the formidable challenges these campus snafus represent, the threat these mishaps pose to the University pales in comparison to recent polemics against Princeton’s humanities education.
In an October podcast episode with The Free Press, Shilo Brooks, a former Princeton lecturer and executive director of the James Madison Program, painted a grim picture of the state of humanities education at Princeton. In the episode, Brooks critiques the “scientization of the humanities,” a process by which Brooks argues that Princeton courses cause students to learn to read quickly and mechanically: to “use a book … as mere data.”
Princeton’s pedagogical “scientization,” argues Brooks, “castrates, neuters, sterilizes the power of [literature] to affect the soul and makes it into something that’s useful for producing scholarly papers in obscure journals.”
The inhuman humanities at Princeton have, for Brooks, moved into the realm of “those July Fourth hotdog eating contests, when the guys are cramming hot dogs into their mouths.”
But Brooks’ issues with the humanities at Princeton are completely unfounded — a simple rebuttal lies in students’ level of passionate and sincere engagement with the humanities. This reality is just the opposite of Brooks’ claim: the humanities at Princeton emphasize close engagement with texts. Not only is this level of inquiry in-depth, but it is also hugely popular at the University.
Every academic year since 1992, Princeton underclassmen across a wide range of disciplines have elected to study in the Western Humanities Sequence, a year-long intensive great books program. This fall, the program was at full capacity, with 60 underclassmen opting in. The “Hum Sequence” is self-selecting, bringing students to pursue extra rigor in the humanities, solely motivated by love of learning itself.
Among national universities, Princeton’s percentage of humanities majors vastly outperforms the national average, with 12.2 percent of undergraduates concentrating in the traditional humanities in the Class of 2024, compared to a national university average of four percent in 2020.
At Princeton, Brooks’ own former employer, the James Madison Program (JMP) in American Ideals and Institutions, works to promote a humanistic education in civics and philosophy. The program’s reach is broad, with 313 undergraduates participating in JMP’s Fellows’ Forum in the past academic year. The Forum offers undergraduates opportunities outside of the classroom to gain “a better understanding of constitutional politics and the moral and philosophic dimensions of political life.”
Still, while Brooks’ claims sound like an educator’s innocuous gripes, there is a far more troubling reality underlying the accusation. Bari Weiss, Brooks’ interviewer, is an opponent of Ivy League institutions with substantial influence in the Trump administration’s educational policymaking. In 2023, Weiss said that universities that “have fancy slogans like Veritas and claims to truth in their motto and in their mission statement … don’t actually believe in those missions anymore.” As David Klion wrote in the Guardian in 2025, “if you work at a liberal institution and you want the Trump-controlled federal government to step in and discipline it, Bari Weiss is there to help.”
By criticizing Princeton’s ability to educate its students on Weiss’ podcast, Brooks fans the flames of several dangerous critiques of higher education that are prevalent in the Trump administration. And, through The Free Press, an outlet dedicated to covering “stories that are ignored or misconstrued in the service of an ideological narrative,” Brooks and Weiss have an opportune platform for criticizing universities and a powerful audience able to act on it.
Delegitimizing the quality of education at Princeton — and implicitly, at peer institutions — fuels government attacks on higher education. This move by Weiss and Brooks follows a playbook written by American political leaders, including Vice President JD Vance, who in 2021 criticized American universities with a quote from Richard Nixon: “the professors are the enemy.”
Princeton’s successful encouragement of humanistic studies — including work from Brooks’ former employer — exposes these various critiques as disingenuous. Indeed, if Princeton administrators were to capitulate to critics of Princeton’s pedagogy, the University would be destined for a bleak educational reality.
Take, for example, recent events at The University of Austin (UATX), a school partly founded by Weiss in the name of creating an institution in which “students are not vessels to be filled with dogma, but minds to be sharpened with disciplined thinking.” UATX was also founded on the principle that, in the words of its co-founder Niall Ferguson, “academic freedom dies in wokeness.” Following the guidance of Weiss and her ilk, UATX’s insistence on creating an inquisitive school descended into the pursuit of uniformity.
Indeed, there is a sinister undercurrent to UATX’s dual emphasis on anti-wokeism and educating students “who build character.” Harvard professor Steven Pinker put it best when he stepped down from the school’s advisory board in 2021: an intellectual community shouldn’t coalesce around reaction. “I don’t think universities should be committed to some doctrine, like left-wing political correctness,” Pinker said, “but that doesn’t mean that un-left-wing, un-political correctness, un-wokeness is a coherent basis of a university.”
Negative education, the teaching of students that avoids a specific pedagogical method, is not a legitimate form of education in American universities. When universities lean into this perspective, they move students away from educational fears, rather than towards Brooks’ goal: cultivating positive virtues.
The humanities at Princeton aren’t broken, but the political discourse around the University is. And, given the choice between the allegedly broken humanities at Princeton and the pedagogy of fear at Austin, I’ll take the Princeton I know, mice included.
Josh Stiefel ’29 is an assistant Opinion editor for the ‘Prince.’ He is from Teaneck, N.J. and can be reached at js9365[at]princeton.edu.
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