The Princeton Principles for a Campus Culture of Free Inquiry: A Roadmap to Get American Universities Back on Track

As seen in some of my posts, more than a few American Universities have decided, officially and/or de facto, that their core mission does not include unbridled learning driven by curiosity. Here is a brief description of how the new Princeton Principles came to be:

On April 14-5, 2023, a group of eminent scholars and practitioners gathered at Princeton University to explore ways to strengthen and rebuild the open, rules-based international order. In the shadow of the COVID pandemic and Russia’s war on Ukraine, they searched for “first principles” and reform ideas for twenty-first century global governance architecture, focusing in particular on rules and institutions for the world economy and great power security cooperation.

The newly published Princeton Principles for a Campus Culture of Free Inquiry seek to "advance free inquiry, honor intellectual merit, and respect the diverse ideas that arise naturally from the pursuit of truth." These are detailed principles that address many of the problems that have bedeviled universities, especially over the past ten years.  Further, these Princeton Principles perfectly complement the Chicago Principles and the Kalven Committee Recommendations. 

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Warning About “Your” Data

Do you have secure copies of your data? I do. James Lindsey has this warning. I create pdfs of my books and the Internet articles I value. Saving only the links is precarious. I buy my books in paper. It's for this reason. Too many things are disappearing these days. Things can disappear off the internet for innocent reasons too, of course. Sometimes, website are shut down for financial reasons or because the person maintaining the website doesn't want to maintain it. But way too many documents are becoming inconvenient to persons unknown in recent years and then they are no more . . .

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Transgender Activism and the Road not Taken

ELIZA MONDEGREEN argues that we could have avoided most of the pandemonium we are currently witnessing about transgenderism. His article is titled: "Trans Activism and the Road Not Taken: The current conflict over trans rights was entirely avoidable."

Here an excerpt from Mondegreen's article, along with Colin Wright's illustration:

A conversation about reasonable accommodations is a nuanced conversation. Instead, we got a radical trans movement that wants to erase sex in law and society, put men in women's prisons and boys in girls' sports, and run an unregulated medical experiment on gender-nonconforming children. This has given rise to an absurd and dystopian reality where men are granted access to women’s prisons, sports, and other protected spaces, and where gender-nonconforming children have become the target of unregulated medical experiments that involve puberty blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones, and extreme surgeries.

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Internet COVID Censorship: Zero-for-Four

Dr. Vinay Prasad:

It is kinda a big problem when government asks social media to censor people opposed to masking toddlers, closing schools, mandating boosters in young men and people suspicious of the narrative of natural origin, and then turn out to be wrong on every single issue.

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