Universities Serve Democracy Through Disagreement, Access, and Self-Governance

Chris Eisgruber’s defense of American universities begins with a dispute over evidence. He does not deny that campuses face serious pressures or that some incidents go wrong. He argues that the public case against universities is often built from the wrong sample: a controversial outside speaker, a protest that becomes a national example, a campus conflict treated as if it represents the institution as a whole.

That matters because the civic value Eisgruber assigns to universities is not located mainly in those visible flashpoints. He points instead to disciplined disagreement in classrooms, wider access to talent, and forms of self-governance that allow academic judgment to withstand pressure from outside or inside the institution. If the university is judged only by the loudest conflict, its ordinary educational work disappears from view.

The work he wants counted first happens in classrooms: seminars where students are pressed on what they believe, challenge one another, question faculty, and are questioned in return. Eisgruber’s claim is not that campuses are placid. He says the country is in a crisis of public discourse, driven by information technology and political polarization, and that colleges feel those forces too. The challenge for university leaders and teachers, he says, is the hardest since at least the late 1960s and early 1970s. But the performance of universities should be judged by their central educational work, not only by episodic breakdowns that travel well through media and politics.

Outside speakers, Eisgruber says, are “about 2%, maybe 1%” of what colleges do. They still deserve protection. Speakers invited to campus should be able to say what they came to say, not be shouted down, and audiences should be able to hear from a variety of voices. But the public habit of treating those events as the core test of higher education badly distorts the institution.

Eisgruber points to student and alumni experience as a better place to look. He cites a Lumina Foundation survey called “College Reality Fact Check,” which, as he describes it, asks students and alumni whether they are actually encountering discussions across ideas and points of view. His point is that people inside college communities should be asked directly, not only the general population, including those who may never have been on a particular campus or part of a college community. In his telling, students and alumni report positively.

The book Eisgruber was discussing, Terms of Respect, is framed by Daniel Porterfield as an argument few people are making loudly at the moment: that colleges “get free speech right.” Eisgruber accepts that this is controversial because it pushes back against critics who say the university has “all gone to hell.” His answer is not that universities never fail. It is that the failures have been over-indexed, while the core educational activity — disciplined disagreement in classrooms — has been undercounted.

Chris Eisgruber rejects the premise that universities must choose between free speech and equality. He describes a common framing: either one is on the “free speech team,” permitting uncensored speech even when it criticizes equality or underrepresented groups, or one is on the “equality team,” protecting those groups through censorship. Eisgruber says that opposition is wrong for colleges and wrong under the Constitution.

His alternative is not a compromise in which each value is partly sacrificed. He argues that getting free speech right requires a deep commitment to both. A university should protect the ability to hear and test ideas while also supporting the full inclusion of students whose identities or communities may be attacked by some of those ideas. That produces hard cases, not easy slogans.

Porterfield pressed him on the familiar case: a speaker is invited; some students or community members say the speaker’s views are offensive to their background, identity, or worldview; the president may even agree that the speaker’s views are damaging. Should the institution still defend the right of the inviting group to host the speaker?

Eisgruber’s answer is yes. But he first corrected the usual picture of who objects to speakers. Students, he says, take a lot of criticism from commentators who claim they cannot handle disagreement. At Princeton, most people who come to him electronically, in person, or by letter to demand that a speaker not appear are not students. They are often alumni or people with no connection to the university community.

When students do raise objections, he thinks the institutional answer often has to recognize both realities: some speech can be hurtful and damaging to students the university wants fully included, and the speaker still must be allowed to appear. That is how he connects his commitments to free speech and equality. The university should neither pretend speech has no social consequences nor turn those consequences into a general license to suppress.

Eisgruber also makes room for protest as part of the educational environment. He disagrees with a friend, Rick Shweder, whom he describes as preferring campus disagreement to occur through argument rather than protest, with protest taking place off campus. Eisgruber takes a different view. Protest, he says, is an important part of free speech in America and belongs on college campuses because students should think not only about ideas in the abstract but about how those ideas matter in the world.

That view comes with practical discomfort. Eisgruber recalls that his office was occupied by protesters for 36 hours early in his presidency. Signs and anger were directed at him. He acknowledges that, as a president, there are times when he wishes students would make their points differently. But he sees protest as part of preparation for citizenship in a “rough and tumble democracy,” not a deviation from university life.

Porterfield asked whether Eisgruber had always held that view of speech or whether experience changed him. Eisgruber answered with a memory from his senior year in college. Home in Oregon, he argued over dinner with older people in state government that advertising and mass media were damaging political understanding and required more regulation. They defended the free speech position. At the time, he remembered leaving the conversation aware that they were asking what was wrong with young people who did not understand the importance of free speech. In retrospect, Eisgruber says, they were on the right side of that argument and he was on the wrong side.

Chris Eisgruber distinguishes academic freedom from ordinary free speech. Free speech protects the public’s broad liberty to speak. Academic freedom, in his account, is a special right for scholars and teachers, rooted in the responsibilities of the profession. It gives faculty an unusually strong ability to teach and write things that may upset their employer — a freedom most employees do not have — but it is bounded by scholarly norms.

That definition matters because it avoids two opposite errors. One error is administrative micromanagement of classrooms, in which leaders or outside actors impose approved viewpoints or teaching scripts. The other is a faculty entitlement theory in which an appointment gives a professor license to “spout off about whatever is on my mind.” Eisgruber rejects both. Academic freedom is the right to teach and research in accordance with the norms of one’s scholarly discipline.

His first answer to unfairness in classrooms is hiring. A university’s primary safeguard, he says, is choosing faculty who are committed to scholarship, teaching, fair exchange, and truth-seeking. Faculty can be driven by passions; Eisgruber respects that. They can also teach in different styles. He does not believe every course should be a neutral survey of all opinions, nor that every professor must conceal a position. Some of the most interesting classes, he says, are built around a provocative argument. But professors must be fair to arguments relevant to the field, including arguments they reject, and they must allow students to challenge them.

The concrete case he discusses involved a Princeton faculty member who pronounced the N-word many times in a creative arts class dealing with a work of art and literature that used the word explicitly. Students reacted strongly. In the wake of that episode and an earlier one, Princeton created a faculty committee to clarify expectations for the classroom.

Eisgruber emphasizes the composition of the committee because it supports his larger argument about self-governance. It included people recognizably on the left and the right, scientists, humanists, and social scientists — the kind of group one might assume could not reach consensus. It did. The resulting policy, now in Princeton’s faculty rules and procedures, affirms that professors have academic freedom to design the syllabus, decide how to teach, and determine whether to say provocative things. It also says professors must respect students’ opinions, treat students respectfully, and allow students to question the choices made in designing the course and syllabus as well as the professor’s own views.

For Eisgruber, this is not an exception to academic freedom. It is an example of academic freedom properly understood. The professional right carries professional obligations. A university can defend a professor’s authority to teach difficult material and still articulate norms of respectful engagement in the classroom.

Porterfield identified that balance as a “standard of respect” attached to academic freedom. Eisgruber’s point is sharper: respect is not an add-on from administrators trying to soften speech; it is connected to the scholarly and pedagogical responsibilities that justify academic freedom in the first place. Academic freedom, as he defines it, is not the personal privilege of a faculty member to speak on any subject in any manner. It is a protection for the work of scholarship and teaching as those fields understand their own standards.

That distinction also explains why Eisgruber does not treat classroom problems primarily as occasions for presidential discipline. The first institutional question is whether the faculty member is doing the work of the discipline, teaching relevant material, and creating conditions in which students can ask hard questions. If the answer is yes, the university should be wary of substituting an administrator’s judgment for a scholar’s. If the answer is no, the issue is not merely speech; it is professional performance.

Chris Eisgruber says institutional autonomy is threatened “at every institution in the country today,” though more severely at some than others. He treats that autonomy as complementary to academic freedom. Universities need the ability to make judgments about scholarship and teaching through the people closest to those practices: faculty, disciplines, departments, and shared-governance processes.

The classroom policy committee at Princeton is his model of how this should work. Eisgruber could have tried to impose a rule by presidential authority and still called that institutional autonomy. But he says that would have been a mistake. The better decision was to ask faculty to develop the policy because they understand teaching, scholarship, and disciplinary differences. What works in African American studies may not be the same as what works in constitutional law, physics, or economics. A committee that includes those perspectives can make a better rule than an administrator “at remove from the essence of what a university does.”

His concern is not only internal governance. Eisgruber says that, at the state level, Texas, Indiana, and others have imposed requirements that faculty submit syllabi for approval. He also refers to what he calls a “well documented story” from Texas A&M involving a professor being prohibited from teaching Plato because of homoerotic content in Plato. Eisgruber’s response is blunt: “Well, it’s Plato.” Students have to be allowed to confront and reckon with such material, he says, because it is part of what makes the work powerful across time.

The same line of argument frames his response to federal pressure on universities. Porterfield asked about Eisgruber’s willingness to speak beyond Princeton: on access for low-income students, on free expression, and on legislative intrusion into higher education. Eisgruber answered that many university leaders are acting collectively, even if not always visibly. He mentioned Ángel Cabrera, with whom he worked through the American Talent Initiative and the Association of American Universities, and Ted Mitchell of the American Council on Education.

According to Eisgruber, the Association of American Universities filed six lawsuits against the federal government in one year while he and Cabrera were on the board authorizing them. He adds that AAU had never filed a lawsuit against anyone before that year. In his telling, that shift marks the severity of the moment: university associations that had not previously used litigation in that way were concluding that legal action had become necessary.

The pivotal moment for Eisgruber was what he describes as the government’s suspension of Columbia’s research funding about 15 months earlier, paired with demands that Columbia change its Middle Eastern studies programs and other areas if it wanted the funding restored. Eisgruber calls that a “clear transgression of a red line”: the use of financial power to attack the academic freedom of an institution.

He knew speaking out carried risk, including the possibility of retaliation not only against him personally but against Princeton. His reasoning had two parts. First, Princeton might be attacked whether or not he spoke. If that happened after silence about Columbia, any later defense of academic freedom could look pretextual. A principle has to be defended at the outset. Second, the issue went to the reasons he entered education, became a constitutional scholar, and accepted the presidency. If he stayed silent when those things were in peril, he said, he could not look himself in the mirror.

This is where Eisgruber’s discussion of free speech becomes a discussion of power. His concern is not only whether students and speakers can talk on campus. It is whether the institution can preserve academic judgment when governments, donors, boards, presidents, or faculty factions press on it. In his account, university autonomy is part of what allows serious disagreement to continue inside the university.

Chris Eisgruber connects his defense of universities to access for low- and moderate-income students. Porterfield situated that work in the American Talent Initiative, a collaboration managed by the Aspen Institute with Ithaka S+R and Bloomberg Philanthropies. He described it as involving about 130 top institutions that voluntarily committed to enrolling more low- and moderate-income students, and said those schools had increased the number of low-income students enrolled on a running basis by 75,000 over eight or nine years — “like creating 20 new Rice Universities all for low-income kids.”

Eisgruber credits Porterfield as a key founder of the initiative, but his own account makes clear why the project fit his presidency. American higher education, he argues, is better than it has ever been, but not as good as it should be. The constitutional phrase he reaches for is “form a more perfect union,” adapted to “form a more perfect higher education.” The work is not restoration to an imagined past. It is improvement from an already valuable institution.

His definitions of diversity and inclusion are tied directly to talent. Diversity means drawing talent from every sector of society. Inclusion means making sure that talent can flourish on campus. As Princeton’s provost, he taught an evening seminar on higher education to first-year students and read William Bowen and Martin Kurzweil’s Excellence and Equity in Higher Education. The book, he says, made a compelling case that American colleges and universities were not reaching low-income students to the extent they should, even though talent existed and would thrive if institutions became more imaginative in finding it.

That became one of his explicit reasons for seeking the Princeton presidency. He says he still had the option of returning to teaching and scholarship, a job he loved. He did not want the presidency merely because it was interesting to be Princeton’s president. He wanted it because he wanted to expand opportunity at Princeton and more broadly for students from low-income backgrounds.

Princeton’s numbers are central to the claim. Eisgruber says that when he and former Princeton president Shirley Tilghman began working on socioeconomic diversity, Princeton was 7% Pell, making it a laggard among selective American institutions. Princeton later set public targets of more than 20% Pell and 70% of students on financial aid. Eisgruber explains that Pell refers to students from low-income backgrounds through a federal grant program reaching roughly the bottom 40% of the income distribution. In Princeton’s last two incoming classes, he says, the university reached 25% Pell.

Eisgruber’s preferred example is Hadi Kamara, a Princeton graduate from the year of the discussion. After high school, Kamara was unsure, and apparently his advisers were unsure, whether he should go to college. He joined the United States Air Force and became a crew chief for a C-130 transport plane. The Air Force recognized his talent, and he later attended Northern Virginia Community College.

Princeton, which had not had a transfer program when Eisgruber became president, created one aimed at community college students and military veterans. Kamara transferred from Northern Virginia Community College to Princeton and graduated on his way to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. For Eisgruber, that story answers what the American Talent Initiative and Princeton’s access work are for: not an abstract institutional target, but the discovery of talent that a traditional admissions system might have missed.

Porterfield adds that Princeton had not previously admitted community college transfers before Eisgruber’s presidency. Eisgruber notes that alumni were supportive, and he stresses that Princeton expanded the undergraduate student body rather than treating the change as a zero-sum redistribution of fixed places.

That distinction matters to him. Growth, he says, can create different alliances than zero-sum fights. By expanding the undergraduate student body, Princeton could admit students from more backgrounds without framing the decision as one group losing because another group gained. To anyone still questioning community college transfers, Eisgruber says, Kamara “kind of makes it game over.”

Eisgruber’s access argument also clarifies why he links universities to public purpose rather than only to individual mobility. If selective institutions draw students too narrowly, he says, they are not reaching talent that could thrive on their campuses. If they find talent more broadly and make it flourish, they become stronger academic communities. In his account, socioeconomic access is not separate from excellence; it is one of the ways universities become more excellent.

Chris Eisgruber describes Princeton’s Board of Trustees as unusually well-functioning, collegial, and focused on the long-term interests of the university. In answer to an audience question about how he manages the board, he says he inherited a strong board from his predecessors, and that some universities’ recent troubles have come from internal divisions, including within boards.

His own practice is transparency. He says he shares issues and decisions with trustees while they are still relatively “inchoate,” because he believes he can learn from them and that better decisions come from engaging them with data. His example is legacy admission, which he called a hot-button issue. Another university president was surprised that Eisgruber had allowed a trustee committee to examine it. Eisgruber’s answer was that he had asked the board to form the committee. He trusted them to consider the institution’s long-term interests.

This is not a claim that boards should run the academic core. It is part of his broader governance view: institutional actors have proper roles, and a president has to keep them connected to principles. A divided or factional board can make a university harder to govern. A board that works collegially, receives information early, and keeps the institution’s long-term interests in view can help the president make better decisions.

The same logic appears in Eisgruber’s answer to an audience question about money, donors, and centers of power within universities. The questioner asked whether donor interests can create centers that threaten the university’s unifying purpose and its ability to make policy arguments publicly. Porterfield compressed the question into a direct version: is money corrupting the freedom and mission of the institution, and how should a president manage that?

Eisgruber acknowledges the tension. Universities have to be entrepreneurial. They have to attract funding, pay bills, and pay faculty salaries. A donor may make it possible for a university to start a program in one field and not another. That, he says, can be acceptable and even necessary if universities are to seize new opportunities for research and teaching. But a donor cannot control what happens in the program.

His example from his time as provost involved a possible endowed chair in Catholic studies. He told the advancement office to make clear to the donor that the scholar appointed to the chair could study the Catholic Church from any perspective. To make the point concrete, he mentioned David Kertzer, then provost at Brown University and author of The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in Anti-Semitism in the 20th Century. Eisgruber said that book was an important work in Catholic studies, and Princeton would need to be free to appoint someone like Kertzer just as it would be free to appoint someone more sympathetic to the Catholic Church. The gift did not materialize after that.

That outcome is, for Eisgruber, part of the job. Universities can seek money, but they need red lines. Donor support can shape what becomes possible; donor control cannot shape what scholars are permitted to conclude. The phrase he returns to is “bedrock commitment to principle.” Without that, the entrepreneurial necessities of universities become vulnerabilities.

Chris Eisgruber’s answer to what he wishes students would do more and less of is less institutional and more educational. He begins by saying he thinks highly of students and that teaching young people gives him hope in difficult times. But he sees pressures bearing down on them: pressure to know immediately what job they will have after graduation, to maximize income, to pursue prestige. He links some of that pressure to economic stratification.

He does not dismiss the practical concern. Institutions, he says, have an obligation to deliver economically for students. Graduates do need jobs, and worrying about employment is not irrational. But college is also a rare period for intellectual immersion — a time to read and learn in ways that may never again be as available. He quotes former Barnard president Judith Shapiro: students should want “the inside of your head to be an interesting place to spend the rest of your life.”

That is what he wishes students would do more: treat college not only as preparation for the first year of a career, but as a chance to build an inner life and intellectual range. He adds that things that seem irrelevant at the time may become decisive 25 years later.

What he wishes they would do less is form exclusive circles. As Princeton president, he jokes, he has a “Swiss passport” into every group on campus, including selective social clubs that would never have admitted him when he was a student — a nerdy kid from Oregon with unkempt hair, flannel shirts, jeans, and few social graces. Now, he says, some of those clubs even want to claim him as a former member, which he denies.

His point is not that student groups are bad. He says the people in different organizations and clubs are wonderful in their own ways. But the impulse toward exclusivity is one he would soften. Students should be more embracing and open toward one another. “Do less of that,” he says of the pressures that lead young people to build exclusive clubs.