Did you know that the Constitution is a tool of geopolitical gaslighting, and that it furthers a racial crisis and a democratic crisis?

Neither did we. But we didn’t go to Princeton. Because that’s the sort of thing they were saying during a recent Constitution Day panel discussion called “Citizenship and Its Discontents in Our Evolving Democratic Republic.”

Did you know, too, that Princeton — just like every other university that takes federal funds — is required to host an annual event marking September 17 as Constitution Day? On that day, or on an adjacent weekday when the 17th falls on a weekend as it did this year, the Department of Education stipulates that schools are to include “an educational program about the U.S. Constitution for its students.”

Unfortunately, the DOE’s guidelines don’t require these educational programs to say anything good about the Constitution, and so the woke professors at Princeton outsmarted us and trashed that one-of-a-kind document.

“There is a debate in this country as to whether the Constitution should be abolished,” said sociology professor Patricia Fernández-Kelly, who moderated the panel and who clearly doesn’t get out much. A debate about abolishing the Constitution? Really? Maybe there’s one taking place in the Princeton faculty lounge. And, yeah, given that the lounge is located “in this country,” we guess Fernandez-Kelly is technically right.

She went on to argue that “the Constitution doesn’t provide an aspirational program to fulfill.”

Centrist- and right-leaning parents and their Princeton students were no doubt chagrined to find out that when these America-hating panelists weren’t savaging one of the truly great works of Western Civilization, they were taking shots at the Republican Party as the source of what ails us. According to one of those panelists, Rich Benjamin, a cultural critic, anthropologist, and author best known for the book Searching for Whitopia, the Republicans aim to “disrupt the country for ideological ends” and the party holds “anti-democratic sentiments.”

Another panelist, Rhacel Parreñas, added that she “would not put it past Congress — if they [sic] became a Republican majority — to appease white nationalists, those who wish to go back to the time when it had been only whites … could be citizens of this country, and to repeal the citizenship clause of the First Amendment.”

Three cheers for Constitution Day!

Elsewhere in “higher” ed, one of Princeton’s fellow Ivy Leaguers, Columbia, came in dead-last in a ranking of the best and worst college campuses for freedom of speech, scoring a pathetic 9.91 out of 100. As the New York Post reports:

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) released its third annual College Free Speech Rankings for the 2022-2023 school year. In partnership with College Pulse, they surveyed nearly 45,000 students from more than 200 colleges — making it the largest ever survey about campus expression.

The University of Chicago came first for campus free speech, scoring 77.92 points out of 100. Four public universities rounded out the top five: Kansas State University, Purdue University, Mississippi State University and Oklahoma State University.

Kudos to each of those schools for pulling a C.

If there’s a bright side for Columbia, it’s that the school can’t fall off the floor. Indeed, there’s nowhere to go but up. But the school would do well to emulate the University of Chicago, which in 2014 published The Chicago Principles, a brief treatise that said, among other free-speech-supporting things, “The University has a solemn responsibility not only to promote a lively and fearless freedom of debate and deliberation, but also to protect that freedom when others attempt to restrict it.”

The statement concludes: “Without a vibrant commitment to free and open inquiry, a university ceases to be a university. The University of Chicago’s long-standing commitment to this principle lies at the very core of our University’s greatness. That is our inheritance, and it is our promise to the future.”

“The principles,” the Post notes, “have since been adopted by dozens of other institutions, including Princeton and Johns Hopkins University.”

That’s as it should be, but it’s not enough. Why hasn’t every college and university made clear their commitment to free speech? What are they afraid of?