Tablet – If you think America’s universities are in great shape, meet a man who gets paid $1 million a year to share your opinion.
“Get the university’s money to do the work you want to do to dismantle the university within,” was how Princeton Latinx Studies professor Lorgia García Peña described her professional goals to a conference in July 2025. “We want to abolish the university as it is,” she continued. “My loyalty is with Black and Latinx people, not with the university.”
Most employers would probably object to an employee’s publicly declared intent to use their resources to destroy them. But García Peña, who appears to have suffered no professional consequences, spoke in a polite tone, modulated her voice with apparent humility, and conformed to the measured, if craven, idiom that prevails in academia. In other words, she delivered her remarks with what her intended victim—Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber—might call “terms of respect.” Eisgruber chose that nondescript phrase as the title of his new book, which bears the self-serving subtitle “How Colleges Get Free Speech Right.”
Endlessly self-congratulatory, insufferably pedantic, irritatingly repetitive, and self-referential nearly to the point of parody, Eisgruber argues that our system of higher education is, with rare and regrettable exceptions, successfully fulfilling its primary functions. In his opinion, his industry deserves “high marks” for protecting free speech rather than criticism for devaluing it. Academia’s travails indicate that our campuses are merely hapless victims of a larger “civic crisis” besetting American society, not a cause of it.
Endowed with a strong tradition of free expression, in Eisgruber’s strikingly ahistorical view, America has only recently succumbed to political divisions exacerbated by rampant partisanship and pernicious social media use. Eisgruber’s Boomer myopia might have blocked out consideration of the Civil War, the Great Depression, the Red Scare, and Vietnam, but it allows him to argue that “we need rules, practices, and institutions” to “promote civil discussion in a polarized, raucous, and often rude society.”
Eisgruber indulges in a long disquisition on the constitutional and legally adjudicated origins of free speech, but he fails to answer the essential questions his reflections raise. Who decides what forms of “free speech” are acceptable? Who defines “respect” and sets the “terms” on which it should be accorded? Who maintains the balance between “liberty” and “equality?” In short, who makes and enforces the “rules?”
Eisgruber would like to convince us that the parameters of free speech should be set by individuals of what he imagines to be great discernment—people like himself, who, as anyone even vaguely familiar with campus life over the past 15 years will readily acknowledge, wield the coercive power to impose their own definitions, interpretations, and values on students and faculties who are usually too weak, careerist, or conflict-averse to resist.
No university president is likely to admit it, but this imbalance of authority lies at the root of all true problems on campuses today. It certainly has brought us a depressingly long way from University of California President Clark Kerr’s 1958 reduction of a university president’s major challenges to “sex for the students, athletics for the alumni, and parking for the faculty.” Eisgruber ironically lauds Kerr—who was eventually fired by then state governor Ronald Reagan—as a free-speech hero, leaving out both that tellingly modest quote and Kerr’s later reflection that his approach to free speech during the turbulent 1960s had amounted to a series of blunders for which he had no excuse.
Eisgruber breezily dismisses voluminous data documenting higher education’s failings, idly speculating that polls, for example, either fail to ask the right questions or pose them in flawed ways because their results do not match his “lived experience.” Nevertheless, he presents no other evidence to contradict study after study showing huge percentages of conservative and moderate students, and even a fair number of liberal students, admitting that they feel compelled to engage in self-censorship and avoid sharing their actual views on campus. At the same time, an alarmingly high percentage of “progressive” students believes it is acceptable to shout down or even physically attack people with whom one disagrees.
Eisgruber performatively rejects violence, but he has no answer to this or to parallel data showing a simultaneous decline in popular confidence in other institutions. Legacy media, the government bureaucracy, the federal judiciary, primary and secondary education, professional associations, credentialing bodies, and other institutions sanctimoniously flying the “civic mission” flag are also earning historically low marks in public trust. Is their polling flawed too? Are their critics also “odious” perpetrators of an “unrelenting right-wing intimidation campaign” that traces, in Eisgruber’s derisive judgment, all the way back to William F. Buckley’s youthful ruminations on his undergraduate years?
Beyond Eisgruber’s flawed premises, his arguments often undermine his own dubious assertions. In a typical self-centered digression, he pats himself on the back for the supposed wisdom of dropping Woodrow Wilson’s name from Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, a process he describes as a campus protest followed by community dialogue, compelling debate, unifying consensus, and responsive leadership. He gripes, however, about the same process unfolding nationally over affirmative action, which Eisgruber says he still supports despite its now well-established illegality. In other words, a winning argument favored by an “enlightened” university president “got free speech right,” while a winning argument he disfavors got it wrong. Conveniently for Eisgruber, in this system, he is a superordinate moral arbiter who until very recently enjoyed the luxury (or was it the privilege?) of virtually never being held accountable in that role.
In another example, Eisgruber gives surprisingly short and selective shrift to the case of Joshua Katz, formerly Princeton’s Cotsen Professor in the Humanities. Princeton fired Katz on Eisgruber’s recommendation in 2022, allegedly because he failed to cooperate fully in a reinvestigation of a sexual misconduct case that had occurred nearly two decades before and for which Katz had already been sanctioned with a one-year unpaid administrative leave.
Eisgruber insists that Katz—who was in hot water in 2020 for publicly objecting to racialist demands a group of his Princeton colleagues made after the George Floyd incident—enjoyed free speech to the fullest and was fired exclusively because of the procedural peccadillo. With a lawyerly gift for omission, he fails to mention that the reinvestigation, initially by student journalists, coincided with Katz’s controversial remarks implicating race, strongly suggesting the episode might never have happened otherwise. Eisgruber neither discusses the evidence supporting the procedural finding against Katz nor identifies the evidentiary standard used by the university’s unidentified investigators.
He also fails to consider that Princeton might have defamed Katz by associating him in a mandatory freshman orientation module on racism with slave owners and segregationists, or that failing to cooperate fully with a relitigated university human-resources investigation rarely, if ever, results in termination from academic employment. Nor does Eisgruber even try to explain why Katz’s alleged procedural impropriety deserved a far more serious sanction—termination for cause—than the original sex act itself, which had merited only temporary suspension from employment. While Eisgruber’s own right to free speech allows him to present Katz’s case in any way he chooses short of libel, informed readers are equally free to reject his parsed account and accept the widely shared view that the relitigated investigation was a cynical pretext to oust a tenured professor who had engaged in disfavored speech.
However obvious and effortful, Eisgruber’s defensiveness is easy to understand. He is the incumbent president and a prominent alumnus of America’s putatively “best” university—a job for which he is reportedly paid $1 million per year and that depends mightily on his ability to please and inspire trust in donors, alumni, and the trustees who hired him and may consider renewing his contract. For the past 18 months, he has been working in the shadow of the majority of his Ivy League presidential colleagues, who either resigned in disgrace or left their jobs before their contracts expired, with some of their institutions suffering serious reputational harm, major financial loss, and adverse federal civil rights findings. Eisgruber also chairs the board of the American Association of Universities, an organization of 71 prominent institutions that claims to “shape higher-education policy.” That mission does not seem to be going very well these days, but who could possibly imagine its board chairman saying anything even remotely critical of the already imperiled industry it claims to lead or of his role in it?
With his job, reputation, megasalary, and legacy all potentially at risk, Christopher Eisgruber may well be the most heavily incentivized person in the world to defend our deeply flawed system of higher education. His smug and facile book will not help his cause.