There is exactly one kind of institution in the world whose product is “thinking” — the university. This is an existential challenge for every university, Princeton most definitely included, now that nearly all artificial intelligence is purpose-built to offload the hard work of thinking.

Universities need to return to the foundations of learning with trust — and verification — at the heart of their relationship with students. They also need to be far more prescriptive about what learning looks like so that students who arrive with limited capacity for deep reading have the time and space to develop their critical thinking skills.

The University has implemented a new limit on the number of Undergraduate Student Government (USG), Graduate Student Government, and Council of the Princeton University Committee (CPUC) student representatives allowed to attend faculty meetings. 

In an email to student leaders obtained by The Daily Princetonian, Associate Dean of Undergraduate Students Ian Deas wrote that the new changes will go into effect at the Sept. 14 faculty meeting and each constituency will be able to send a maximum of two observers to a meeting. The Rules and Procedures of the Faculty do not specify the number of observers permitted from the student governments or CPUC.

In January, the new University Recording Policy, which prohibits recording in contexts “when privacy would be reasonably expected,” took effect. That’s news to the Class of 2030, which has no reasonable way to learn about this policy.

That’s because Princeton didn’t publish the policy as part of its Rights, Rules, Responsibilities website, nor was it linked to on the broader University Policy website or on the Community Standards website. And new students were not informed about the policy during any Orientation events.

Rep. Elise Stefanik’s withering questioning of presidents of prominent colleges during a congressional hearing on antisemitism became a flashpoint in the national debate over campus speech. Then the New York Republican wrote a book about it.

In Poisoned Ivies, published earlier this year, Representative Stefanik decries the “academic rot” at prestigious institutions like Columbia and Harvard Universities and the University of Pennsylvania, whose leaders eventually resigned amid criticism of their handling of 2024 protests over the war in Gaza. But Stefanik levies her critique more broadly at “American colleges and universities,” “campuses across the country,” and a “broken system.”

The Department of Homeland Security’s widely criticized rule limiting how long international students can stay in the country won’t take effect Sept. 15 after a federal judge postponed the rule as part of a lawsuit challenging the policy.

Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts wrote in a 48-page order that Trump officials didn’t respond adequately to public comments on the rule or consider alternative options, among other violations of the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs how departments create regulations. The department also failed to show a rational connection between the rule and its purported national security objectives.

The grief Emily Taylor had been holding at bay finally washed over her in January. It had been four months since a lone gunman shot Charlie Kirk in the throat at Utah Valley University, killing the conservative commentator in minutes. That winter “was the first time in my entire life that I didn’t go back to school,” said the former English professor, holding back tears.

Taylor had resigned from her tenured position in December to save her tiny college in South Carolina from a political witch hunt in which lawmakers threatened to pull her school’s funding because she’d written a brief essay acknowledging that before his violent death, Kirk had employed violent rhetoric.