Princeton’s first-year orientation program for the entire incoming class of 2030 featured an author who refused to publicly pronounce the word "trump" while the university’s president, Christopher Eisgruber, "sitting across from her, smiled and said nothing."
That account comes from a student in the class, Simon Riley, who wrote an article faulting the campus orientation for events that "only present a left-leaning perspective."
"Neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf was answering a student’s question when she nearly used the word ‘trump’ as a regular English verb, meaning ‘override’ or ‘overcome’ — but she couldn’t bring herself to finish her sentence. She collapsed into her armchair, citing her inability to say ‘his name’ out loud, and instead spelled it out, letter by letter," Riley writes in the Daily Princetonian, a student newspaper.
"Wolf’s attitude was not the exception at orientation, but the rule, when it came to presenting the other side of the political divide. She refused engagement with the other side when she treated a Republican president like Voldemort. The University showed similar avoidance in mandatory orientation events," Riley writes.
A Princeton university spokesman and Wolf did not return emails from the Washington Free Beacon seeking comment and providing an opportunity to dispute the account or address the issues raised.
Riley’s article goes on to enumerate the other events. "The ‘Sustainability in Action’ event, for example, included little about Princeton’s actual commitment to sustainability; instead, the intersectionality of racism and pollution was a primary topic, including a Kahoot quiz with a land acknowledgment. That perspective on environmentalism is irrelevant to everyday recycling, and it is also primarily a left-wing perspective," he writes.
Princeton, unlike Penn, Columbia, Northwestern, and Harvard, did not have a president toppled in the aftermath of anti-Israel protests. Its site outside a major media market helps avert attention. The presence there of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, directed by Princeton’s McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, Robert P. George, also has helped to insulate Princeton from many of the lawsuits and funding threats that have hit similar institutions. George, though he’s a little too friendly with Cornel West for my taste, is nonetheless a senior, accomplished, and widely respected figure in expanding viewpoint diversity on college campuses to include conservative ideas. He was heroic recently as a (now former) Heritage Foundation trustee.
College orientations have been a problem area on other campuses. At Amherst College in Massachusetts, an orientation event in the college’s Johnson Chapel featured students performing mock sex acts including oral sex, masturbation, and group sex. Others pretended to do drugs and shared their "high thoughts," the Free Beacon reported. At Harvard, the First Year Urban Program, a pre-orientation program for incoming Harvard students, had planned a stop on a campus tour of the "bad parts of Harvard"—outside the undergraduate Jewish center, Hillel. "The training guide instructed tour guides to say that Hillel was unwelcoming to Palestinian students," a Harvard student, Sabrina Goldfischer, reported in her senior thesis.
Princeton also had a sex orientation. "The ‘Safer Sexpo’ provided all the information a student could ever need about accessing contraception and abortions, but nothing about actually having a child. Should sex positivity exclude pregnancy? Even if the administration’s answer is ‘yes,’ it should present options other than abortion for handling unplanned pregnancy," Riley writes.
"The problem with these events is not that they present a left-leaning perspective on environmentalism, sex education, and DEI, but that they only present a left-leaning perspective. They create the illusion of a settled debate and imply that the conservative side isn’t worth engaging with," Riley writes.
I guess it’s a good sign for Princeton—and for elite higher education generally—that students feel comfortable enough to complain about this stuff publicly. Riley was able to get the piece published in the main student newspaper, not a conservative alternative paper such as the Princeton Tory. Yet maybe that’s too little to ask. What Riley is asking for is a campus where students are not merely free to complain about the ideological conformity. He’s proposing something else: "orientation should teach tolerance, not dogma." It’d be nice if the people running the university had figured that out before Riley, whose parents are nationally prominent conservative journalists and authors, arrived on campus, but apparently it did not happen.
