Free speech, funding and academic freedom at U.S. colleges are under attack. Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber shares how his university is weathering the storm.
Guests
Christopher Eisgruber, president of Princeton University. Author of “Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right.”
Transcript
Part I
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: In November of 2021 then Ohio Senate candidate JD Vance spoke at the National Conservatism Conference. His speech was titled “Universities are the enemy.”
JD VANCE: I think if any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.
CHAKRABARTI: Since then, Vance has of course become Vice President of the United States. The Trump administration in which he serves has turned the considerable power of the federal government towards bringing universities to heal. It has cut billions of dollars in federal research grants to elite institutions.
President Trump has issued a slew of executive orders and actions targeting universities when it comes to free speech, academic freedom, anti-Semitism, trans students, immigration, student loans, diversity, and more. Now at the epicenter of this sea change are the presidents of America’s colleges and universities.
Some have either stepped down or been forced to resign. In 2024, following an outcry against antisemitism on campuses, Minouche Shafik from Columbia University, Liz Magill from the University of Pennsylvania, Claudine Gay from Harvard, and Martha Pollack from Cornell University all stepped down.
More recently, just this month, in fact, Mark Welsh resigned as President of Texas A&M. In a video recorded by a student, Welsh is heard initially refusing to fire a professor who included gender identity content in a children’s literature course, while he later fired that professor, Welsh resigned under pressure on September 19th.
Christopher Eisgruber is watching all of this from his post as President of Princeton University. He’d previously served as Princeton’s Provost from 2004 to 2013, and he became president in 2013 and he’s author of a new book titled “Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right.” And he joins us today from Princeton, New Jersey. President Eisgruber, welcome to On Point.
EISGRUBER: Meghna, thank you for having me. I’m delighted to be with you.
CHAKRABARTI: Fun times to be a college president, isn’t it?
CHRISTOPHER EISGRUBER: They’re very challenging times, although being a college president in my view is also a great job. It’s one that for me at least, enables me to work with an inspiring set of students and a fantastic set of faculty members on behalf of an institution that makes a tremendous difference in America and the world.
CHAKRABARTI: Your diplomacy is appreciated. But let’s get down, let’s get real now. You’ve been —
EISGRUBER: I am being real.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. But I’m still going to ask you anyway. You have been in university administration for quite some time. Honestly, has it ever been as politically sensitive or challenging or from your position as president, do you feel yourself looking around more than ever about potentially taking what would later be perceived as a major misstep?
EISGRUBER: It’s a hard time right now, so I certainly agree with that. And it’s harder than it’s been during my time in academic administration, that’s for sure. So you worry a lot about those missteps. If you look back in history at another polarized period in the late 1960s and 1970s, Meghna, you could give the same kind of list of presidents who had to step down that you gave a moment ago.
So it’s not the first time we’ve seen these kinds of difficulties, but absolutely. It’s hard right now.
CHAKRABARTI: But now we also have, as I mentioned in the open, and you know very well, we have the federal government following up with what would be previously cultural and local debates or skirmishes.
That is distinctly different. Is it not?
EISGRUBER: Yes, I think that’s different, and it’s something that I think all Americans should be concerned about. Because I think these institutions, as I said, a moment ago, make a tremendous difference for our country, not just for the people who attend them, but for America more broadly.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So let’s dig into some of the things that you write about in your book, which again is titled “Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right.” Now, there is a specific incident that you mentioned, and it involves a student protest at Princeton back in 2015, so a decade ago.
And just for background, a group of student protestors calling themselves the Black Justice League occupied your office, the president’s office for some 36 hours because they were demanding that the school remove Woodrow Wilson’s name from Princeton facilities.
And of course, Wilson was the 28th president of the United States, former Princeton President from 1902 to 1910. Also was a racist. And while in fact he was Princeton’s president in the very early 20th century, he discouraged applications from Black students saying, quote: The whole temper and tradition of the place are such that no negro has ever applied for admission. End quote.
So here’s a clip from that, again, that 2015 student protest inside your office.
We owe him nothing. This university owes us everything. I walk around this campus understanding that this was built on the backs of my people, and I owe none of you guys anything. We owe white people nothing. If not for the evilness of white hatred in this country, Black people will not be where they are today.
We will not have to be fighting for our rights in this country to sit here and for you to tell me that it is okay to have Woodrow Wilson’s name plastered across buildings, to idolize him, to see him as a God on this campus. That is disgusting. Because as a Black person, I am reminded of our second-class citizenship and how we are yet to be seen as humans in these spaces.
CHAKRABARTI: Professor Eisgruber, I believe that was actually, was that directed at you?
EISGRUBER: That was directed at me, that was in my office as the students had moved in.
CHAKRABARTI: So tell me more about that. What was your reaction when that happened?
EISGRUBER: Obviously, it was a really difficult moment. Just to give a little bit of background, we knew students were going to protest.
They were coming to what is the chief administration building at Princeton called Nassau Hall, which dates back to before the Revolutionary War. When they came, I went out to meet them and hear what it is they had to say. We had an open-door policy at that point, and they actually came during my office hours, so the doors were open, and students marched into the office.
I went in along with my Dean of the college, Jill Dolan, to hear them out. To try to talk to them, to understand their concerns. And there was a lot of emotion and a lot of heat. And that is part of what happens on college campuses. The language can be intense, as it was in that clip when students raise concerns.
And I think the clip and the fact that you have it illustrates something that I talk about in the book, which is at this point when protests happen on college campuses. They’re very public events. They get recorded for posterity and they’re not just happening within a particular room.
They’re observable widely beyond it.
CHAKRABARTI: How did you handle that moment? Because if I remember correctly, Princeton, in fact, did not at that time remove Wilson’s names from campus building.
EISGRUBER: No, that’s correct. In the very intense moment that you just described, and we were listening, we tried to continue that conversation for a while and to see whether or not we could cool it down.
After I think 30 minutes or so, but I don’t remember the exact amount of time. Dean Dolan and I left the office. And then as you said, the students were in it for over 30 hours. I’ll tell you, if you’re a university president, it feels a lot longer than that when something like that is going on.
Eventually we agreed to set up a set of committees, including a trustee committee to look at the question of whether or not Wilson’s name should remain on our School of Public International Affairs. That committee ended up conducting a process that gathered input from people throughout the campus, from alumni, importantly from historians.
We solicited six page or so letters that you can still find online from prominent historians to tell us about what Wilson did and to offer judgment. And at that point, what we eventually made after several months was a decision to speak more openly about Wilson’s racism and the complexity of his legacy on the campus.
But not to remove the name. We did later after the George Floyd murder, remove the name.
CHAKRABARTI: Why did you do it after Floyd’s murder?
EISGRUBER: I think there were a couple of different things that motivated that, the reason was that we became persuaded that in light of Wilson’s racism, it was inappropriate to, I’ll be offering him as a model statesman to students, which we felt that we were doing by having his name as an honorific on the school.
As we learned more about Wilson’s history, including from those historians, part of what was really important to my judgment and the judgment of the board of trustees was that Wilson wasn’t merely a product of his times, which you might conclude from some of the things that you accurately summarized earlier.
He was also somebody who took the United States backward on the critical issue of racial equality. So he re-segregated the Federal Civil Service, for example, which had been desegregated since Lincoln’s time. So part of it was that as time went on, that judgment became more apparent to us. It became more apparent to us, I think both because the conversations on the Princeton campus continued after our initial discussion.
I would’ve predicted at the time that we made our choice that this particular issue would subside, and that the critical problem was that we had talked about Wilson too, Hey, geographically, rather than acknowledging his racism. And we really changed that, but people remained very upset about the name on the school.
Many of our students remained upset about that. And then I think in the wake of the George Floyd murder, as we thought about what that meant for the country and for the university, Wilson’s failings and vices became more prominent to us in our thinking about what it meant to have his name on the school.
CHAKRABARTI: And that was five years later, right?
EISGRUBER: Yes, that’s correct.
CHAKRABARTI: So another way of looking at it is that in the spirit of free and open discourse, President Eisgruber. Another way of looking at it is that the facts of Wilson’s racism did not change, because the facts were known in 2015. But what changed was this national outcry against police violence on Black men.
I guess what I’m saying is lots of people look at Princeton’s decision to remove Wilson’s name in 2020 as capitulation to social change in the nation, rather than a principle principled stance on Woodrow Wilson himself.
EISGRUBER: Meghna, and please call me Chris. What I would say is that in the spirit of free and open discussion, there were continuing discussions on our campus about what Wilson’s racism meant and how we should think about honorifics and the role that naming should play.
There were continuing discussions in our country and on our campus as part of that about what race meant to our country and what racism had meant to our country over time. And so we had an initial set of deliberations that I think advanced our thinking about these issues. And then we moved beyond those and made another decision.
Part II
CHAKRABARTI: Chris, I just want to note that as you said in the previous segment, that college protests are nothing new in this country. And in fact, in the book, you point out that especially in the ’60s, protests often got significantly more violent than they are in recent years. You point out that in what, 1969, there was a student protest at Cornell, students were carrying rifles.
Also, in the ’60s there was a bombing at the University of Wisconsin. So I just wanted to provide a little bit more context to why you said that.
But moving on, when you talk about free speech and that, in fact, contrary to what many Americans believe, American universities right now are an exemplar of how to cultivate free speech.
Give me some examples of how you think colleges and universities are doing that.
EISGRUBER: So I think the most important examples are in the things that go on every day that don’t get a lot of attention from the news media. They’re not splashy, spectacular events. Those are classroom conversations.
They’re the research that faculty members engage in. They’re the exchanges that occur in thousands and thousands of panels and lectures that take place on college campuses. But I think college campuses are doing well, even with some of the things that do get a lot of attention, right?
So there are people who would take that protest clip that you played earlier and chart that as an example of something going wrong from the standpoint of free speech. Those are tough conversations that are actually happening on a college campus, and it’s our job when you have a really emotional exchange like that to find ways to cool it, have civil discussion that everybody engages in and dig deep on the issues.
But I think colleges do a good job of that. And there are plenty of conversations that take place, even provocative speakers come to campus, where people ask tough questions of those speakers, where protests happen around it, and we should know that.
CHAKRABARTI: I agree. Definitely debates and conversations are taking place in classes in American universities. But specifically in the most elite universities in the country, of which Princeton is one of them, there are places in which I think the institution sometimes sends different messages.
For example, I guess the class of 2025, that’s about to or that just graduated this past summer, when they first entered Princeton as freshmen, and this was just right after COVID.
All freshmen were required to watch a video in which classics professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta talked about free speech. But he talked about it as a privilege rather than a right, and he basically celebrated a particular form of free speech, in which he said, quote: Free speech and intellectual discourse that is flexed to one specific aim.
And that aim is the promotion of social justice and an anti-racist social justice, as that. End quote. So if this is a video that all incoming freshmen are required to watch by the university, isn’t the university sending a message that some speech is acceptable and others are not, or some ideas are acceptable and others are not.
EISGRUBER: That was one video that was shown as part of an orientation in one year with a number of different faculty on it, expressing viewpoints with which students could engage. I disagree with Padilla, with Professor Padilla Peralta about the things that he said about free speech, but part of what we do is expose students to different viewpoints that they’re going to agree or disagree with.
What we do is expose students to different viewpoints that they’re going to agree or disagree with.
What we’ve done actually in the wake of that particular video and that orientation was to create an orientation around free speech that we give every year. Where I actually lecture to the students about the importance of free speech and the importance of civil discussion and respect.
So I think that’s a better way of starting students off with a discussion of free speech. And we make mistakes. Sometimes we learn from those mistakes. But I think one kind of mistake that can get made as you look at universities is to take something and say, okay, there are a lot of good things going on, but we’re going to focus in on one error.
From my standpoint, that was not a particularly good orientation video. I think we’re doing a lot better now.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So what I’m trying to explore here is the difference between institutional rules around free speech on which, as you know it in the book, Princeton is very clear on you follow the Chicago rules of we are going to be a campus where vigorous debate and respect is in the air we breathe.
Those are the institutional rules, but there’s another set of rules that people follow, and those are cultural and social. Those rules, quote-unquote, I’ll put those in air quotes, are created by the very people who make up the institution, students, faculty, staff, and I think there is a fair argument there that it is hard for a lot of students to feel as if they can speak freely on Princeton’s campus.
Let me give you some other broader data points than just one video. For example, back in 20 years ago, George Will, in one of his columns complained that Princeton faculties and other of the Ivys are, quote, intellectual versions of one-party nations.
There’s a more recent finding from 2024 from the Manhattan Institute. Granted a conservative leaning Institute, who said, who found that only 7% of Princeton’s faculty identified as being conservative, almost 50% identified as being liberal. So a seven to one ratio there. Does that ratio provide the environment in which all ideas can be fairly discussed?
EISGRUBER: We have an environment where all ideas can be fairly discussed and Meghna, rather than relying on columns from 20 years ago, or a Manhattan Institute article or one video. Part of what the commitment we’ve made is just to publish our data from our students, where we ask them about, among other things, do they feel free to express their views? Do they feel respected when they express their views? And we break that data down by their political backgrounds and viewpoints and we publish it.
So you’ll find a 70-page deck on my website with that information. I think our students and I think this is consistent with what we see on the campus and in the pages of our student newspapers are able to engage in those robust and civil debates that are essential to what a campus does.
And if you take a look at the pages of the Daily Princetonian, for example, our student newspaper, where there are debates among students that take place, for example, after the horrible murder of Charlie Kirk last month, you’ll see different viewpoints there being expressed.
So from my standpoint, Meghna, you know, what’s interesting is people will look for these data points, and it sounds like you went back 20 years to find something from George Will. What’s going on our campuses all the time are lots of discussions.
If you look for those, I think they’re pretty easy to find. And as I said in our case, we’ve made this decision to just publish the data. So instead of speculating about this, people can look.
CHAKRABARTI: So tell me more about what the Princeton University’s own data says about if students feel like they can speak freely on campus.
EISGRUBER: You get a range from all of our students, but overall, the numbers are good on that. That is the students are saying that they feel that they’re able to speak up and that they are respected for their viewpoints.
If you get students interestingly at either end of the political spectrum, whether they say they’re very liberal or they’re very conservative, they’re going to express, some less ability, less sense that their views are as respected by their classmates or by others on the campus in a way that’s not surprising.
If you’re taking more extreme positions, you’re going to get more pushback. But part, another part of what we do, as I said earlier, is start every year with an orientation around free speech to try to build exactly the kind of culture that you describe.
We have sessions with Penn-America that we’ve done with our student leaders in order to work with them around free speech and civil discussion, both of which are important, our Office of Religious Life brings together student leaders from different ends of the spectrum, takes them on a retreat together, helps them to build respectful ways of talking to one another.
CHAKRABARTI: You rightfully pointed out that the previous data points I brought up were from 20 years ago. And Manhattan Institute is definitely right leaning. So I did find some other data from, more recently, from 2023, and you had mentioned I should read the pages of the Daily Princetonian, and I did.
Spent quite a bit of time over the weekend reading what students have to say about their world class university. And in 2023, there was an opinion piece written by Matthew Wilson, who was then a junior at Princeton and he remarked on a survey, the senior survey that was done by the Daily Princetonian itself, so it’s a student newspaper survey of senior students, and they asked 571 graduating seniors.
That’s about 44% of the then class of 2023 to answer questions about their political views. And the Daily Princetonian found this, that 65% of very conservative and 55% of somewhat conservative students expressed significant discomfort with openly sharing their political views on campus, whereas only 3% of self-identified leftist students and 5% of very liberal students felt equally discomforted.
And so Matthew Wilson actually in his opinion piece asked you a question, Chris, and the question is this quote, does President Eisgruber believe that a campus where the only students who feel largely uncomfortable openly sharing their views come from one political persuasion?
Is that a campus where civil discourse operates at a functionally healthy level? How would you answer Matthew?
EISGRUBER: I think first of all, I care about everybody’s ability to speak up and express their views. And I think it’s going to be uncomfortable at times for everybody to be able to do that.
Look, I think we have to look at all data, although I have some skepticism about student newspaper surveys and I would hope people would look at the data that I mentioned earlier, which has a much higher response rate. But I’m glad you brought this up, Meghna, because I think this comfort metric is the wrong one to be thinking about.
It gets used a lot when people ask is there free speech on college campuses? Let’s look at the comfort levels of students speaking up and saying things that people are going to criticize, which I hope all of our students, whether they’re on the left or the right are doing, that’s going to be an uncomfortable thing.
And if you’re on a campus where you’ve got really engaged discussion, where people say something other than, Oh, that’s interesting, that’s your view, it’s going to be uncomfortable to say controversial things. When I think about what it is that we should be looking for a healthy, robust, free speech environment, where students like Matthew Wilson are speaking up on college campuses, I expect that there’s going to be some discomfort attaching to that.
Louis Brandeis, whom I quote extensively in the book, talked in one of the most important Supreme Court opinions about free speech, his concurrence in Whitney v. California, about the way in which the First Amendment presupposes a courageous, self-reliant people, and that’s something I say to students every year as they come in the door.
We want you to be having conversations that are going to feel uncomfortable, and we expect you will at Princeton. And that’s part of what it means to be part of a people and a student body committed to free speech.
We want you to be having conversations that are going to feel uncomfortable, and we expect you will at Princeton. And that’s part of what it means to be … a student body committed to free speech.
CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. By the way, I heard you say that you have doubts about the robustness of student run surveys, and I don’t know what their methodology was, to be transparent.
I don’t know how the Daily Princetonian tabulated their results but to be fair, they did say they did pull45 % of that graduating class. So it’s not a small sample size, but you’re getting to something else. Chris, you wrote about in the book, you asked the question just flat out, Do today’s students hide from scary ideas?
That’s the title of one of the chapters in your book, and I think a lot of people would say, yes they do. And not just on the right, but left and center. It’s become so almost a cliche, easily satirized now about trigger warnings and creating safe spaces and removing texts from syllabi because they might cause offense.
Correct me if I’m wrong. You’re there on campus every day, but the nation sees America’s universities, and particularly its elite ones as being a place where students maybe can’t handle ideas, because they actually are protected from them.
EISGRUBER: Yeah. Meghna, that is wrong. And I think universities have been the target on this of storytelling that cherry picks particular incidents. When you played that clip, interestingly, from that that protest earlier.
I think that shows exactly the opposite of what you just described. A lot of people are upset about protests like that one, but those are students engaging with ideas that America really had not engaged with previously. They’re confronting a university president about those ideas.
They’re angry and they’re upset, but they were raising a historical point that eventually our board of trustees found valid. I think that happens through a protest. I think it happens through classroom discussions, and I think it happens all the time.
There is a much better set of survey work if you do want to pay attention to the methodology that goes on with regard to these surveys coming out, of work done by Timothy Ryan and a bipartisan set of colleagues in the University of North Carolina system.
I think it’s a really interesting set of questions, partly because it sprawls across a set of different universities, including the North Carolina flagship, excellent leadership public university and other universities in the state, and finds no evidence for these claims that students don’t want to encounter ideas different from their own.
They do. And that is my experience with students on our campus, both in terms of what they self-report when we survey them, with much higher response rates than 45%. And when I deal with them in one-to-one discussions, they’re eager for these conversations. But Meghna, let’s be clear about this, because this is another point that I make in the book.
We are living right now in a polarized America where lots of us have difficulty engaging in conversations across partisan lines or dealing with the other side. We’re living in a country right now where half of Democrats and half of Republicans say they regard people in the opposing party as downright evil.
We are living right now in a polarized America where lots of us have difficulty engaging in conversations across partisan lines or dealing with the other side.
That’s a recipe for self-censorship. It’s a recipe for an incapacity to engage in civil discussion, and it’s not about a younger generation or about colleges. It’s about America, and we all have to deal with it. So part of what I think we need to be careful about, there’s always this tendency on the part of older generations to say, those kids, they’re not as committed to our values as we are.
I work every day with this younger generation. I find them inspiring and fully committed.
CHAKRABARTI: So tell me more about that, because they, of course, are not living on an island when they’re on campus, right? They too are within the fierce ebb and flow of this massive polarization that we have. Do you see that sort of changing campus life?
We deal with social media that encourage provocation. That makes it tough to have the conversations we need to have.
Just for students in general.
EISGRUBER: Sure. I think our students and all of us right now live in an America that is as polarized as it’s ever been, and we deal with social media that encourage provocation. That makes it tough to have the conversations we need to have.
Part III
CHAKRABARTI: Not only do we have the issue of free speech, but academic freedom and the two go hand in hand on American campuses. And in the book, you talk about examples where you have to deal with pressures on academic freedom, and there’s a specific one that I’d love to hear about a little bit more. It has to do with something that happened back in 2018.
It made national news, including Tucker Carlson. And here he is on his show back in 2018 talking about the incident.
TUCKER CARLSON: A professor at Princeton has just discovered the limits of academic freedom, the fragile feelings of students, as part of a lesson on free speech. In an anthropology class, a professor called Lawrence Rosen asked students whether it was worse for a white man to physically attack a Black man or to use a racial slur.
Students didn’t react well. Many stormed out. At least one got right in his face and screamed the F word. Rosen has now canceled his class.
CHAKRABARTI: Chris, tell me more about this and how you handled that moment.
EISGRUBER: So Larry Rosen, who’s a friend and an excellent teacher was teaching a course actually on blasphemous speech.
And Larry began his course in a way I also teach about free speech. Very different than I would do, but Larry has won more teaching awards than I’ve done, but he would begin, for example, he’d lay an American flag, if I recall correctly, on the floor of the classroom, and invited students to walk on it.
He uttered some of the language, including the N word, but he articulated it fully, that was most provocative. And he felt it was important to begin the class that way in order to have students experience the kind of effects of these languages and of this language and these expressions.
A lot of us would introduce that material differently, but it’s entirely within the scope of a professor’s academic freedom to decide that’s the way that he wants to present this material. In the case of Professor Rosen, it was a considered pedagogical choice, but he wanted the students to feel the full force of what he was saying, and they did, and they responded in a way that was forceful as well.
The chair of the Department of Anthropology, Carolyn Rouse and I both backed Professor Rosen’s ability to continue with teaching his class if we wanted to. I said then what I just said now, which is that this is a permissible pedagogical choice. Professor Rosen decided, I think, understandably that he just couldn’t go forward with the level of emotion that got generated in the classroom by that pedagogical choice and the amount of attention that came from outside afterwards. And decided he didn’t want to go forward with the course.
CHAKRABARTI: So two things there. One is, again, I’m still thinking earlier how you said that students want robust and differing opinions to be debated on campus. But here’s yet another case where students just walked out because they just didn’t want to deal with witnessing or hearing those ideas.
EISGRUBER: Meghna, I don’t, I actually don’t think that’s a fair description.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay.
EISGRUBER: But what’s going on here? There are a lot of ways to talk about the ideas. And what happened there before the walkout was that one of the students said to Professor Rosen, could you please not use that word the way you’re using it?
Because of the effect that it has on me as an individual and what it means in our society. And Professor Rosen said no, and he continued to use the word again, a defensible pedagogical choice by him. But what he was trying to do there was provoke, and he provoked beyond what he anticipated from that set of students.
But if you want to look for a civil conversation, neither you nor I, nor for that matter Tucker Carlson on Fox News ever articulated the word that we’re discussing. There are ways to do that, and there are reasons why when we’re gonna have that conversation, we’re gonna discuss these hard ideas, but we’re gonna do it without that provocation. It seems interesting to me as you talk about these instances with students, which you say illustrate students’ unwillingness to engage in difficult discussions.
You’ve given examples of students raising an argument about Woodrow Wilson that no one had raised on the campus before. An example of a student from the right challenging me as university president and now an example of students raising arguments about pedagogy in the classroom.
And I think what we’re seeing here in this conversation is something that happens a lot when people criticize college campuses. That is controversy, engaging around really difficult things in sometimes emotional ways gets coded as the opposite, as some kind of censorship or silence.
I think what you’re talking about here are really tough discussions about hard subjects, such as when do you use a word that can be really inflammatory to people and has been associated with a history of racism in our country, in a civil discussion in the classroom.
And that’s a lot of what my book is about.
CHAKRABARTI: Fair point. I absolutely say that I will concede that, especially with the first example of the 2015, in your office. But with Professor Rosen’s class, I think it’s different because ultimately, he did, and correct me if I’m wrong, but he did cancel the class, is that correct?
EISGRUBER: He, yes, he chose to cancel the class.
CHAKRABARTI: So how is that of the kind of outcome that you want? The whole class has been canceled. It’s not that he just decided the next time we discuss blasphemous speech, I will not use certain words. It seems like he did not feel the kind of academic freedom to even make a small change in the class.
Instead, it’s gone.
EISGRUBER: I think Professor Rosen did feel the freedom to make a choice both about how he teaches and whether to continue that particular class. But Meghna, if you’ve ever taught a class right, you need a certain kind of level of trust between faculty members and students, and you make a set of judgements as you go through about how to build that to have a civic discussion.
Again, there are professors who may be able to pull off the style of teaching that Professor Rosen used in that class and had used successfully before. It’s not the way I do or would teach those particular subjects, but that was the choice he made under the circumstances. You don’t want the class to come to an end.
And I think Professor Rosen, for example, who was the chair of the department at the time, encouraged the students to stick with the class. But that’s also a choice they have to make. And I note in the book, Professor Geoffrey Stone, who’s the author of these extraordinary free speech principles at the University of Chicago, that many institutions, including my own, have adopted.
He used to use an example involving the articulation of the N word in his classes, a set of his students came to him and said, Professor Rosen, we need you to understand how this feels to us and what it does to our sense of inclusion within the class. And he decided to make the change about how he teaches the class.
That’s all part of what goes on with free speech and negotiating the terms of respect.
CHAKRABARTI: I’m not just keeping my focus only on quote-unquote left-wing views or even fragility to use that term.
Because we could easily argue right now that one of the same things that Professor Rosen did in his course in terms of inviting students to step all over the flag, if even if he had said it’s protected speech for me to burn the flag. It might be provocative to you, but it’s protected speech. Right now we have an executive order from the President of the United States that’s seeking to basically criminalize that form of protected speech again, so I’m not just picking on the left.
What I’m trying to say is that I think there are ample examples of how, I hear you, Chris, when you say colleges and universities are doing everything they can to protect just even the notion of academic freedom and free expression in this country. Absolutely. But in practice, people do have differing opinions on the success of colleges in that endeavor, but —
EISGRUBER: People have differing opinions.
That’s great. We need to debate these things but notice this, right? What we’re aiming at on college campuses are civil and constructive discussions about issues that matter, that’s the core of what it is that we do. Part of what I insist on in the book and what we haven’t talked so much about is that requires free speech, but not just free speech, right?
What we’re aiming at on college campuses are civil and constructive discussions about issues that matter.
If people are insulting one another or just getting angry, that’s not enough. It also requires, and this is really important, equality and inclusivity. So students from all backgrounds and faculty from all backgrounds can feel they can speak up and state their views and be treated respectfully. And that process of trying to figure out in a multicultural society that is polarized and divided, that’s hard.
We don’t always get it right, but I think we’re actually doing a pretty darn good job of creating those discussions, even when you find times when things go wrong. The fact that something went wrong in a classroom or that something went wrong in a protest or a video, that doesn’t mean there’s not a whole lot of really good stuff going on, and that’s what’s important.
CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. But to get back to something that we started with Chris, if I may. And you agreed with me on this, that one of the major differences right now is that we do have a presidential administration that has openly and explicitly said they are putting America’s institutions of higher educations in, I’m not going to use that term, they are focusing the power of the federal government on colleges and universities.
You heard JD Vance from 2021 calling universities the enemy essentially. One of the ways in which the Trump administration has been doing that is rescinding hundreds of millions of dollars of grants to, federal grants to the most elite institutions in this country.
And I just want to quickly ask you, that has also happened to Princeton. Yes. I understand that there was the threat to remove somewhat $200 million in funding.
EISGRUBER: Yeah, the federal government in the spring of last year sent us a notice saying that it was suspending roughly what it described as $200 million of grants, mainly from the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense. In order to check whether or not the grants and the research that they were sponsoring were consistent with what they said statute federal policy, the Constitution, and so on.
Roughly half of those were restored in late August.
CHAKRABARTI: Have you been in conversations with the federal government and have they, obviously, you have if some of that money has been restored, but have they asked for any concessions in return from Princeton?
EISGRUBER: No concessions have been requested of us.
We haven’t had conversations in the nature of a deal. I have conversations with lots of people in the federal government, including the executive branch, about why it is that American universities, including Princeton, are great assets for this country and about the interest that I believe the Trump administration as well as our university has in the kinds of research that are the subject of those grants, which are grants that pay for research in quantum science, artificial intelligence, and other areas that are stated priorities for the administration.
CHAKRABARTI: Do you think that some of the deals that your fellow top universities have made with the government were the right idea? I believe that when we’re dealing with the federal government or in everything else we have to do, we have to stand by certain principles related to academic freedom.
Those are principles about what our scholars can study, and how they teach, whom we admit, whom we can hire and other policies that go to the intellectual environment of our campuses. I have been concerned by concessions that others have made as they’ve made arrangements or deals with the federal government.
I don’t judge my fellow presidents, as you said, Meghna, at the beginning of this conversation. This is an exceptionally hard time to be a university president, and people have got extraordinary pressures and horrible choices to have to make. But I am concerned when deals breach those lines.
This is an exceptionally hard time to be a university president, and people have got extraordinary pressures and horrible choices to have to make.
CHAKRABARTI: And do you think they have, just to be clear, yes or no?
EISGRUBER: Yes. I think that some of the deals that have been made have included provisions about how academic units are organized or about who can be admitted. And I don’t think those should be things that are being conceded in as a response to threats to federal funding.
CHAKRABARTI: So we’re having this conversation, Chris, at a time where it’s not only this decades long debate over whether there’s free speech on campus or not, but part of the reason why the Trump administration has been able to come down so hard on colleges and universities is because, quite frankly, amongst a not insignificant portion of the American people, these are moves that they support.
You’re a president right now of a university at a time where trust in higher education in this country has reached basically historic lows. I’m sure you’re familiar with the recent Gallup data as I am, but from a 2025 Gallup survey, they found that only 20% of people they surveyed who identify as Republicans, only 20% of them said that college is very important compared to 42% of Democrats.
That’s a really low number. And we’ve seen also similarly low numbers of people saying colleges, is it worth it anymore? And a huge number say, like 80% of them who are identified as Republicans say, no, it’s not worth it anymore. This is also the bigger ocean that you’re swimming in as a college president.
Are you concerned about these numbers, about how Americans overall see the importance of higher education?
EISGRUBER: Meghna, first of all, I am concerned about numbers that show slipping support, although the most recent polls that I’ve seen actually have shown a rebound over the past year.
But look, I’m concerned about any poll where people are saying they don’t think college is worth it. Because there are economic facts about this. A college degree, at just about any four-year institution, is going to be one of the best investments that people make in their lifetime. College degrees are expensive.
But the return on investment, and they are investments, is extraordinary. That’s true in economic terms and it’s true in non-economic terms. So when I see things like that, I think we’ve got to work harder to get the word out to folks. We’ve also gotta recognize when you talk about those kinds of partisan gaps in opinion polling, that’s part of this polarization that we’re dealing with, and we gotta look for ways to address that.
That’s true. But I think these institutions, these extraordinary places that have made such a difference to our country in terms of its health, its prosperity and its security, and such a positive difference in the lives of people who have attended, we need to be supporting those institutions and getting the word out about what it is that they do.
CHAKRABARTI: We have just under a minute left to go, Chris and I want to quote something that you wrote in the book about the most important duty of a university principle right now.
EISGRUBER: University president.
CHAKRABARTI: Sorry, university president. Sorry. Getting my presidents and principles confused here.
Yeah. Okay. But the quote is this from the book: The principle and crucial job of university presidents in our fraught time is to protect their university’s capacity to be the home and sponsor for critics, not to become critics themselves. In the last 30 seconds that we have, Chris, what do you mean by that?
And how are you doing that?
EISGRUBER: So I think it’s very important that universities be a place that gives the freedom to faculty members and students to take a variety of positions, including ones that are critical of those in power or social arrangements, that push how we think about things. It’s not the job of university presidents to be doing that and speaking up on behalf of a particular position. But it is the job of university presidents to speak up about the value of higher education.
The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.