Tal Fortgang
‘17

The following is the final installment in a five-part review of Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber’s recent book, Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right. You can read Part I here, Part II here, Part III here, and Part IV here.

As the first four installments of this review have emphasized, Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber’s book aims unsuccessfully to invert the widening consensus that universities are failing to uphold their implicit compact with the American people. At the surface level, Terms of Respect aims to clarify the scope and stakes of contested civility norms—to see how they enlighten our understanding of the campus free-speech discourse. But beneath the surface is a different kind of argument, one in which assertions of power are acceptable, even laudable, when they systematically advance ideologies not shared by (or inimical to) the vast majority of Americans—as long as they advance the cause of equality.

We now assess Eisgruber’s peculiar take on the relation of the university to the nation that has treated it with increasing hostility in recent decades. Critics may wail that the universities have to be brought to heel for producing fanatics, snowflakes, and crybullies, but Eisgruber turns their argument on its head: it’s actually the nation that could afford to learn from the campus, he argues; to the extent universities are struggling with civility norms, they are simply a dirty mirror for broken civil discourse. Otherwise they are a model for balancing speech and other values with a “more vigorous” culture of speech than “most sectors of society.”

This thesis has two component parts, which can be asked as distinct questions. Are critics wrong to identify a free-speech crisis on campus? And, to the extent such issues arise, are universities merely replicating national problems of polarization in microcosm?

The Corruption of the Academy

On the first question, Eisgruber is at his most dismissive. He lashes out at those who think free speech is what ails the campus. “Right-wing muckrakers” following in William F. Buckley’s footsteps to “deploy evidence selectively, disparage intellectual elites, and win favor from constituencies alienated from or upset by the unconventional opinions or behaviors at universities.” They “weaponize free speech” as part of a “myth of campus indoctrination and orthodoxy,” inventing “characterological deficiencies” in students—painting them as fragile, intellectually cowardly, or congenitally intolerant. All this is an attempt “to discredit collegiate critiques of establishment norms. It is not a defense of free inquiry but an assault on it.”

It would have been nice if Eisgruber had supplied an actual critique of Buckley and his progeny instead of dismissing the author of God and Man at Yale as a political operative pushing a conspiracy theory. He could have also shown his readers basic respect by not euphemizing extreme ideological one-sidedness backed by the full force of campus administration as “critiques of establishment norms.” What establishment? Which norms?

Eisgruber knows exactly what critics are getting at when they complain about campus free speech, and Terms of Respect only reinforces it. The problem is that universities are corrupt—not in the sense of stealing and self-dealing but in the sense of being not rigorous, captured by ideological monoculture, and functioning as factories of ideological reproduction and acceptable bigotries. They prop up classes, scholars, and fields of study engaged in motivated reasoning and dressed-up ideological incantations.

Consider the example Eisgruber himself provides to show the importance of academic freedom. Princeton’s Near Eastern Studies department offered a course titled “Decolonizing Trauma Studies from the Global South,” which assigned a book called The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Eisgruber describes this book as “stridently critical of Israel.” That is a bit like describing a Flat Earth tract as “skeptical of mainstream cartography.” The book is replete with conspiracy theories about Israeli policy toward Palestinians, weaving together speculation about why Jews maim Palestinians as a matter of policy with the apparatus of academic jargon—”biopolitics,” “debility,” “settler-colonial logics”—that lends such a blood libel the superficial appearance of analysis.

Eisgruber presents this as a straightforward case of academic freedom, as if the only relevant question were whether the professor had the right to assign the book. He does not ask whether the book reflects the standards his institution claims to uphold, much less whether classes on “decolonizing trauma studies” advance knowledge or, rather, ideology. Yet the book, class, and even department—each decorated with activist jargon—should only cause readers to wonder whether unbridled academic freedom is causing the academy’s collapse.

An academy that cannot police its own ideological capture will not long survive. Totally divorced from the world of evidence and argument, replete with ideological premises dressed up as findings, such pseudointellectualism is useful to no one except those who already share its conclusion.

Academic inquiry should have objective value to the society in which it exists. Independent scholars can say and research whatever they please, but universities enjoy privileged social status because they are meant to advance something valuable to all. Eisgruber is not wrong that academic freedom as we have conceived of it for decades covers the assignment of The Right to Maim. He is wrong to assume that academic freedom, maximally construed, is something the nation simply owes universities regardless of how they deploy it. Trust must be earned and maintained. When the public perceives—correctly—that academic freedom is being invoked to cover for ideological indoctrination, it is right to demand better.

This becomes a free-speech issue in multiple, compounding ways, none of which involves “weaponizing.” The ideology that has captured much of the humanities and social sciences is itself intolerant of dissent. Questioning its premises is treated not as intellectual inquiry, but as moral transgression. Echo chambers reinforced by social and professional penalties result, preventing scholars and students from voicing doubts, and an institutional culture that signals unmistakably that the university is, at its default, a place for people of a certain political orientation. Conservatives may be tolerated, allowed their little centers and magazines at the ruling class’s indulgence, but such arrangements are exceptions that prove the rule, not an expression of actual pluralism.

Eisgruber tries halfheartedly to deny that any of this is true. His book is one long demonstration that it is. He smuggles progressive premises into questions he frames as neutral. He sets the Overton Window several standard deviations to the left of the median American and mistakes this for centrism. He consistently fails to take the perspective of conservative critics, relying on others’ flippant dismissals as authority. (He waves away Buckley with one crisp line from a critical reviewer.) He draws principled lines and then finds, case by case, reasons why certain violators were doing something defensible. He accuses his critics of bad faith because he cannot reconstruct why a reasonable person might hold their views. That is a tell. It is the product of an intellectual environment in which certain assumptions have gone unquestioned for so long that they no longer register as assumptions at all.

Are We Just Polarized?

The second component of Eisgruber’s thesis is simply unpersuasive and comes off as projection. “The problem is not that today’s students are somehow less respectful of free speech or less committed to argument and debate than their parents,” he writes. “The problem is that they, like their parents, live in a period of hardening political identities and partisan animosity.”

The claim is never argued, much less proved. Worse, Eisgruber does not grapple with the obvious objection: that if campus problems were merely a microcosm of national problems, we would expect universities to be genuinely polarized—riven by equal and opposite forces battling for dominance. Instead, they are homogeneous. These fights are not breaking out because there are strong conservative and strong progressive factions locked in combat. They are breaking out because one faction dominates and the other is too small, too cowed, or too professionally vulnerable to resist.

The historical record is worse still for Eisgruber’s thesis. Leftists were attempting to dominate universities well before the current era of partisan polarization that Eisgruber cites as the cause. The armed takeovers of university buildings in the late 1960s preceded by decades the polarization Eisgruber treats as prime mover. Terms of Respect neglects to connect the dots between that long history and the present moment—he certainly doesn’t acknowledge how many student radicals (including domestic terrorists) migrated into the professoriate in the intervening decades.

But what undermines this thesis most is Eisgruber’s own discussion of the university’s civic mission. He shows just how profoundly universities have become unmoored from serious scholarship, and why. He correctly states that “we should want our colleges to educate citizens who will be not only skillful thinkers, listeners, and speakers, but also engaged proponents of this country’s ideals.” To that end, though, he lionizes “experimenting with political action…even when [student protestors’] views are naïve or ill-considered.” It does not seem to occur to him that rewarding such behavior cuts against the university’s mission of cultivating skillful thinkers and listeners, because students have every incentive to become more strident, louder, and more stubborn, all of which are associated with authentic activism.

Eisgruber torches a straw man when he mocks critics for thinking students have poor character. This state of affairs isn’t really about students at all. It’s about the corruption of the institution tasked, at enormous public expense, with forming them into engaged and capable citizens. To those observing the academy’s unraveling, it looks like Eisgruber thinks of himself as a counselor at a summer camp for budding activists. Surely the President of a world-class university ought to believe that he occupies his position, and the students theirs, for better reasons. Universities exist, among other things, to form citizens—not merely to provide a stage on which half-formed instincts can be performed before an approving audience. If a student emerges from four years of education with greater zeal and less knowledge, believing that the loudest team wins, the university has failed.

Yuval Levin has argued that our institutions have ceased to form people and have instead become platforms for performance. Nowhere is that clearer than on campus, with figures like Eisgruber rationalizing the trend. The university is no bystander in this collapse. Eisgruber himself demonstrates it has been one of its primary drivers.

A Missed Opportunity

Terms of Respect is, in the end, a shame. It is a shame because the questions it declines to answer are genuinely important: how civil rights can be reconciled with individual freedoms when they conflict; how universities might rebuild the public trust they have squandered; how institutions might address ideological homogeneity without either mandating conclusions or pretending the problem doesn’t exist; how administrators might find the courage to consistently apply the neutral principles they articulate fluently yet enforce selectively; and how the university might understand its place within a free society that depends on it for knowledge, cultivation, and the formation of good citizens.

Eisgruber studiously avoids every one of those questions. Instead, he prefers to impugn the motives of his critics, to characterize the millions of Americans scandalized by campus episode after campus episode as the dupes of cynical “weaponizers,” and to suggest, with breathtaking condescension, that the radical students and their sympathetic administrators have the better of the argument. Those who believe their own eyes simply haven’t thought hard enough. He has been feted for this performance by fellow university presidents and by the most influential organs of elite media opinion, as if he has answered the difficult questions rather than simply thumbing his nose at those who see the corruption of the academy for what it is.

They should all be ashamed.

Tal Fortgang ’17 is a Legal Policy Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a regular contributor to PFS and a contributing writer at The Dispatch.

Annabel Green ‘26

In the recently published piece, The Next Campus Battle after Free Speech: Viewpoint Diversity at America’s Elite Universities, Edward Yingling ’70 and Leslie Spencer ’79 offer three “green shoots” to the ideological monolith that is America’s elite universities: civics centers, faculty reform, and the banning of diversity statements. I would like to offer a student perspective on these proposals. In my view, these reforms vary widely in their practical viability. Student civics programs offer the most promising path toward intellectual renewal, faculty reform appears the least promising, and hiring reforms, particularly the elimination of diversity statements, serve as a necessary precondition for genuine intellectual honesty.

Civics Centers

Civics centers, such as the James Madison Program, seem to be the most promising of these green shoots. Many campus programs, especially those of a more obvious political nature, operate with a clear ideological framework. Because of this, political programs can feel insular or recursive. One response to this problem is the reintroduction of programs which educate students in civic virtue while grounding them in the Western canon. These programs lack a spirit of activism and instead, they form students intellectually through the pursuit of knowledge and truth. Civics centers support engagement with foundational thinkers in philosophy, law, and political thought.

This approach also offers a constructive path for students strongly attached to a particular ideology. Attempting to challenge students’ ideological commitments directly, seems to be unfruitful. Instead, by encountering major thinkers in philosophy, law, and aesthetics, their ideological assumptions can be tested and gradually give way to deeper intellectual and moral questions and commitments.

Reform from within the Faculty

Faculty reform appears to be the least promising of the three green shoots because it assumes that transformation must occur within a highly homogeneous group. Initiatives such as the Heterodox Academy Campus Community Network are encouraging, but they do not fully address the depth of ideological uniformity within faculty culture.

There is a deeply entrenched belief in academia, often defended by the observation that educated people tend, on the whole, to vote Democratic. From this, some conclude that Republicans are too uneducated to be professors. The late English philosopher and social critic Sir Roger Scruton, pointed out the consequences of this assumption. In many elite institutions, conservatism is not treated as a serious body of thought to be confronted through civil argument and instead, it is dismissed as a moral defect. Once a political view is treated this way, it is rejected outright.

Another related issue I addressed in my essay, The Ideal of the University, is that professors have increasingly overreached the bounds of their authority. Many now see themselves as possessing authority over the moral formation of students. The difficulty is in abandoning these already deeply embedded assumptions, especially within a culture that is itself highly homogeneous. How such a change can be achieved in such an environment, I am not sure.

Diversity Statements

Banning diversity statements is a necessary precondition for restoring honest academic discourse. As Yingling and Spencer note, the requirement of diversity statements has functioned as a “de facto litmus test” for faculty applicants and has produced a niche industry dedicated to helping candidates craft the appropriate statement. Such requirements pressure faculty members to conform to prevailing ideological preferences. Faculty should not feel that they must virtue-signal or express allegiance to a political cause in hiring and promotion. Eliminating these statements is necessary to address ideological conformity at universities.

Conclusion

Drawing on my experience as a student, I believe civic centers most directly foster proper intellectual formation and foster the deepest intellectual and moral commitments, faculty reform is least likely to succeed given existing homogeneity, and banning diversity statements is a necessary precondition for restoring honest academic discourse.

Annabel Green ‘26, is a senior from Boulder, CO majoring in Public and International Affairs and minoring in Global Health & Health Policy. She is a PFS student writing fellow.

Joseph Gonzalez ‘28

Every so often, the complexities of the world break through the orange bubble that is Princeton University. There are occasional reminders of the world outside, like the pro-Ukraine flag-waving event outside FitzRandolph Gate, reminding us that a major conflict in Europe is still ongoing four years later. Even as a veteran, it still feels like something happening in a remote place. It was only when I attended the European Cultural Studies (ECS) Faber Colloquium, a requirement for the European Studies minor I am pursuing, that I reflected on Europe’s significance and the debt Princeton as an institution owes to Europe, from its architecture to its precept system.

The Colloquium featured University of Chicago professor Dipesh Chakrabarty on the 25th anniversary of his influential book “Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference.” Professor Chakrabarty argues that while Europe should still be studied because Western thought remains embedded in modern political and historical thought worldwide, it must be provincialized by treating Europe not as the universal center of history, but just another particular tradition among many. In one sense, he is not wrong in his analysis – Europe’s place and importance in the world has surely fallen.

As one of the only students here who lived to see the fall of the Berlin Wall and the celebration of the fall of the Soviet Union, I argue here that something critical has been lost with recent changes to how European history, politics, languages and culture are taught at Princeton. The former dual European Studies program has been replaced by a program that undermines rigorous study as it attempts toprovincialize Europe in line with Princeton’s current interdisciplinary approach to “studies.”

“This Week in History: Debating the role of interdisciplinary humanities in a Princeton education” recently appeared in the Daily Princetonian. It is about the historical debates over interdisciplinary approaches that led to the creation of the intensive year-long Humanities Sequence, known as HUM. I have completed the sequence and the Humanistic Studies minor, and I am proud of it. It also serves as proof that the debate over interdisciplinary studies as an approach is over. This concept, once looked down upon, is now celebrated by Princeton as a forward-thinking academic innovation. The university has also proudly announced its new minor in European Studies. Officially, the new minor is a joint offering of European Cultural Studies (ECS) and the Program in Contemporary European Politics and Society (EPS), designed to provide students with a “comprehensive exploration of Europe” by blending the humanities and social sciences. It also explicitly replaces the old ECS and EPS certificates.

The official description of the new minor is appealing. However, merging ECS and EPS into a single European Studies minor signals a concerning shift in Princeton’s curricular reform. What seems like a broadening of access might actually marginalize the field. By combining these two distinct intellectual paths under one interdisciplinary umbrella, Princeton risks reducing serious engagement with Europe’s political and cultural traditions. By design, it means less depth, less specialization, and diminished confidence in Europe’s importance as a subject worth dedicated study. To compare, let’s review what each program offered before the change.

The original ECS program was founded in 1975 and was one of Princeton’s oldest undergraduate certificate programs. It was created through collaboration among faculty under the leadership of one of America’s leading cultural historians, Carl E. Schorske. Its history mattered because it represented a serious institutional commitment to the study of European civilization, culture, and intellectual life.

Its structure also reflected a clearly distinct intellectual identity. The ECS certificate allowed students to fulfill the program either through two core ECS courses or the Humanities sequence, plus two additional upper-level courses. The program’s own description emphasized how students from diverse disciplines could gather around the humanities and the arts while still integrating those courses with their majors, independent work, and even studying abroad.

The old Contemporary European Politics (EPS) certificate was different. It required one gateway seminar and four courses, including both history and social science distribution requirements with an emphasis on European politics and society. There was also a need for sufficient foreign-language proficiency to use research materials for senior thesis work. Most importantly, it required that the senior thesis be on a subject related to contemporary European politics and society, unless an alternative independent project was approved.

These two programs were not the same. That was the point. One leaned more heavily toward culture, intellectual history, and the humanities. The other demanded engagement with politics, society, and language, as well as independent research. Their coexistence gave Princeton students choices about how to engage in the study of Europe. Merging them into one minor does not preserve both. It inevitably diminishes them. That is what seems to be happening here.

The new requirements for the European Studies minor consist of five courses: one prerequisite and four electives, split between ECS and EPS. But there is no independent work requirement and no language requirement. Students participate in a senior colloquium, but the structure no longer preserves the sharper demands once built into EPS.

“Interdisciplinary” may have become one of the most celebrated words in higher education. However, interdisciplinarity is not equivalent to rigor. It also is not the same as intellectual breadth, and certainly not the same as depth. When a program removes language requirements and independent research obligations, it is difficult to argue that academic seriousness has improved. Simplification does not equal enrichment. Princeton describes the new minor as a “comprehensive” and “global” study of Europe. But what appears comprehensive on paper does not translate into genuine comprehensiveness in practice.

What is lost is not just a credential but also a way of thinking about education. The disappearance of distinct European cultural and political identities suggests that preserving separation no longer matters as much as it once did as a topic of academic inquiry. And that should be a concern: the academic politics surrounding Europe as a subject, where it is often treated less as a civilization to be studied seriously than as a problem in the larger context of colonialism and multiculturalism.

Princeton might see this as progress, but I believe something valuable is being lost; it reflects a concerning aspect of what a university still considers worth preserving. Europe should be studied with a critical eye. Its imperial projects, exclusions, and contradictions are part of its history and should be discussed, warts and all. But students should question why the decision was made to provincialize Europe, when we are the inheritors of that Western tradition. As a minority first generation low income student with a GED, I might not be the face you expect to see on the barricades, but perhaps someone should have been manning the gates and waving the flag to make sure we did not forget how much it matters.

Joseph Gonzalez ‘28 is an Army and Marine Corps combat veteran and transfer student from Brentwood, NY, majoring in History. He is a PFS Writing Fellow.

Tal Fortgang
‘17

The following is the fourth in a multi-part review of Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber’s recent book, Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right. You can read Part I here, Part II here, and Part III here.

This series, reviewing Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber’s Terms of Respect began by acknowledging what the book gets right. Eisgruber distinguishes free speech as a moral principle from the First Amendment as a legal doctrine, and he is correct to resist the crude view that any campus speech regulation constitutes censorship. That is a reasonable starting point. Part II is where things get uncomfortable for him. By tracing his admiring use of New York Times v. Sullivan — a case in which the Supreme Court rewrote First Amendment doctrine to protect civil rights activism — Part II showed that his framework is not as neutral as it seems. Speech earns protection, in Eisgruber’s view, not by meeting consistent standards but by its relationship to favored equality claims. The result is a system in which the Black Justice League can violate campus rules without consequence while disruptions of conservative speakers are reframed as desirable exercises of free expression.

Part III pressed the charge further. Eisgruber’s deeper move, I argued, is revisionist: he recategorizes campus speech controversies as debates about equality rather than as what they are — incidents of intimidation, coercion, and institutional capture. His treatment of the 2015 Christakis episode at Yale is the clearest example. Sustained, vulgar harassment of a professor transmogrifies, in his telling, into “impassioned speech about racial justice.” Taken together, the three parts establish that what Eisgruber has written is not a principled theory of campus speech but a post-hoc rationalization for outcomes he prefers.

What the series has not yet addressed, however, are the genuinely difficult legal and cultural questions that Terms of Respect has evaded. By seemingly resolving tensions between speech and equality, and reframing what appears to be a free-speech debate as an ongoing push-and-pull about civility norms, Eisgruber avoids discussing ways in which our laws, norms, and culture already treat, and sometimes curtail, expressive freedom, and how universities can apply their obligations and stated commitments faithfully. Relatedly, he relies upon an underexplored approach to chilling effects, the phenomenon recognized in First Amendment doctrine that certain policies or social realities are suspect because they place an informal prior restraint on expression. Eisgruber’s unequal concern with chilling effects — sometimes equating it with censorship, sometimes overlooking it entirely – demonstrates an incomplete theory of how universities get free speech right.

I don’t make the law. Do I enforce it?

Universities like Princeton, which receive federal support, do not paint their speech policies onto a blank canvas. A constellation of rules already conditions continued government support on universities’ balancing free-speech concerns with civil rights law. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act forbids institutions receiving federal funding from allowing severe and pervasive discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, or national origin. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, and federal courts and other adjudicative bodies have, over the decades, elaborated what that statute requires in practice — including requirements about tolerable expressive conduct.

This matters enormously for Eisgruber’s argument, and he largely ignores it. Terms of Respect proceeds as though universities are the primary architects of the balance between speech and equality, free to reason their way toward a thoughtful equilibrium. But the federal government, through decisions of all three branches, has already drawn that balance, at least in part, in ways that do not always map neatly onto Eisgruber’s preferred framework. The substantive equality that must coexist with free expression on a federally funded campus involves shutting down expression that makes campus inhospitable to any racial, ethnic, and national-origin group, even if the expression couches itself in terms of equality or speaking truth to power. Whether such expression occurs civilly may matter—uncivil speech can reveal hostility—but content may be just as probative.

For instance, Eisgruber suggests that there is an “unpleasant choice” between “censor[ing] hateful speech” and “compromis[ing] equality” when “powerful adults try to suppress student speech…as when donors and legislators demanded that college administrators censor slogans chanted by pro-Palestinian protesters.” He cites a New York Times article titled “Campus Crackdowns Have Chilling Effect on Pro-Palestinian Speech,” previewing the conflation of censorship and chilling effects that pervades Eisgruber’s analysis. The article cites a few examples of suppressed student speech: at Brandeis, “a pro-Palestinian student group was barred for statements made by its national chapter” (which violated campus anti-harassment rules); “Administrators at the University of Vermont canceled an in-person event in late October featuring the Palestinian poet Mohammed el-Kurd.”

It is not obvious that those were the right moves. But given that the student group in question called the October 7, 2023 terror attacks in Israel “a historic win for Palestinian resistance” and the poet has repeatedly accused Israelis of having “an unquenchable thirst for Palestinian blood,” making disparaging comments about Jews’ physical traits, and harvesting and eating Palestinians’ organs, it’s not obvious that they were wrong either. A pattern of paying for such individuals to have a platform at your university could conceivably leave universities liable for fomenting a hostile environment for Israelis and Jews.

On Princeton’s own campus, students waving Hezbollah flags might be protected speech—Eisgruber calls it “highly offensive” but protected by “the anticensorship principle” —or it might be discriminatory harassment (or even material support for terrorism if coordinated with proscribed groups). Being Israeli is a protected characteristic; if Princeton consistently allows hostility against it, by permitting terrorist flags, disruptions, trespassing, and chants that Israelis have long considered threatening, even expressive conduct can lead to legal liability.

How the law and the commitment to freedom of speech interact here is not immediately clear; much depends on the particular facts of each case and the jurisdiction in which the case is brought. These are genuinely difficult legal questions. What is clear: Eisgruber needs to give us an account of how his vision is at least compatible with his civil right obligation. Otherwise it is just a dodge.

Of course, Eisgruber is free to say that he believes one should not censor anti-Israel speech as long as it is civil and advances a liberal notion of equality. What he might have to conclude, though, is that his preferred speech-and-equality regime is incompatible with civil rights law because the law understands equality differently. But if Eisgruber wants support for Hezbollah and celebrations of murdering people on the basis of their national origin relegated to the realm of speech worthy of stigma, not censorship, his gripe is with the civil rights regime he lauds throughout this book.

If it strikes the reader as unusual that civil rights law presents a challenge to Eisgruber’s approach rather than a boon, that is likely because the notion of equality and the substantive commitments it represents are contested. The deeper problem this illustrates is that Eisgruber borrows the moral prestige of civil rights while ignoring or even undermining its substantive commitments. He appeals to Sullivan, to the movement-era origins of robust First Amendment doctrine, to the ideal of equality as the animating purpose of expressive freedom. Yet our civil rights statutes require a kind of colorblindness, not rewriting rules to benefit favored groups and viewpoints, as the Supreme Court did in Sullivan and as Eisgruber does by making excuses for student agitators.

The kind of equality that must coexist with free expression at a federally funded university is not a floating philosophical concept to be defined anew by each college president. Yet Eisgruber merely asserts that he, and our free-speech regime, stand for equality, without defining what that term means or even grappling with the fact that it could be contested. For a book whose argument revolves around the compatibility of that ideal with freedom of speech, that is a massive evasion.

The Chilling Quagmire

Eisgruber is interested in the chilling effects, or informal prior restraints on speech. At times, chilling effects figure prominently in his analysis of whether speech is regulated properly, or whether unwarranted censorship has crept in. Indeed, in his celebration of Sullivan he applauds the Supreme Court landing on “a standard sufficiently powerful that civil rights activists…would feel free to criticize Southern public officials vigorously without fearing adverse rulings.” In other words, the best standard for free speech that fosters equality is an absence of prior restraints, whether formal or informal—chilling effects of various policies and social facts belonging to the latter category.

He invokes the concept with evident sympathy to defend the Princeton student who years ago wrote an op-ed criticizing the Tigertones’ performance of “Kiss The Girl” from “The Little Mermaid,” and especially the group singling out audience members for some prep-school debauchery. National press seized on the author’s use of the phrase “toxic masculinity” and connection of an a cappella group’s song choices to what Eisgruber calls “college campuses with sexual assault problems.” She “became the target of anonymous threatening online posts.”

Did anything untoward occur here? If so, what was it? Eisgruber takes an unusual approach to making sense of this episode.

Newspapers were trying to impose their own civility norms by shaming a feminist student for using the term ‘toxic masculinity.’ The student became the target of anonymous threatening online posts. Such bullying does violate the anticensorship principle — it responds to disagreements with the threat of unlawful force rather than reason — but it came not from the on-campus writer but from her off-campus critics.

In microcosm of the book’s argument, the Princeton student has got things right; it’s the rest of the nation that needs to learn an important lesson. The passage is worth unpacking, because it does several things at once.

First, it condemns newspapers for trying to impose civility norms through public shaming. That is a strange condemnation indeed. Eisgruber elsewhere celebrates “censorious speech,” (not a heckler’s veto but fierce criticism) because “the remedy for your bad speech may be better speech that is harshly critical of you.” Indeed, “social censure is different from censorship,” Eisgruber writes. “It is one way of enforcing…’civility rules’: social norms that enable people with different identities and viewpoints to interact respectfully and constructively.” So, why weren’t the critics’ arguments “legitimate contests about the meaning of respect and the terms of the civility rules” that govern the campus? Eisgruber admits that the critics were trying to impose civility norms—but won’t tell us why their contribution to the raucous contest is illegitimate.

Perhaps his suggestion is that because critics triggered anonymous online posts, they should have refrained from criticizing the student. This is not a workable principle; it is a policy that massively chills speech. If speech liable to whip up anonymous others on the internet does not warrant protection on campus, Eisgruber has buried an elephant in a mousehole, because all speech is liable to do that. Campus speech would be dead (the original op-ed included), and that principle would dwarf every other argument he makes in his book. Luckily for us, if not Eisgruber, this is not what he suggests. Rather, he clearly condemns the “off-campus critics” – not the pile-on commenters -- for “bullying” the student. That doesn’t help Eisgruber avoid the charge that he simply favors some speech based on its content, since he has admitted that the critics are part of the contest over civility yet still violative of some unarticulated standard. When does criticism become bullying? Apparently when it targets left-liberal students advancing left-liberal social goals. Rigging the game over and over, Eisgruber can’t help but view dissenting opinions as beyond the pale.

It’s also worth noting that Eisgruber takes a harder line on the status of anonymous online threats than he is willing to take on the conduct of campus protesters who trespass, shout down invited speakers, and occupy administrative buildings. Those activities, which are themselves rule violations, receive considerably more sympathetic treatment in his account, even though they don’t share the basic characteristics of contesting civility norms through speech.

But most tellingly, the passage reveals a deeply asymmetric sensitivity to chilling effects. When an anonymous off-campus mob threatens a feminist student, Eisgruber calls it a form of censorship — informal but real, serious enough to warrant condemnation.

But when the dominant ideological culture of an elite university systematically marginalizes dissenting views, Eisgruber evinces no comparable concern. Were there chilling effects when a mob of students berated Nicholas Christakis, or did students who agreed with the Christakises feel equally comfortable sharing their views moving forward? When anti-Woodrow-Wilson demonstrators at Princeton wrote in the Washington Post that Princeton’s reverence for Wilson was “spitting in their faces,” did that chill pro-Wilson speech? Evidently Eisgruber thinks not—he can’t even conceive of the possibility: “None of these disputes,” he writes regarding those demonstrators and their opponents, “can be adjudicated by…referring to the value of free speech.” Yet a perfectly analogous argument over a different Princeton student’s op-ed can.

The idea that institutionalized orthodoxies can chill speech seems to Eisgruber inconceivable. “Some opinions will inevitably be more popular than others,” he observes, but that “is not in any sense a violation of free speech or the anti-censorship principle.” It’s a correct observation unevenly applied. Eisgruber suffers from a remarkable blind spot for informal chilling effects when they don’t hamper his “side.”

“There is no free speech violation when students declare, via protest or otherwise, that they do not want racists, sexists, antisemites or homophobes invited to their campuses,” he writes. Of course, the students might just tar every speaker they don’t like as some kind of bigot—not to mention their fellow students who invited the speaker. And having an “ideologically homogenous faculty dominated by ACLU liberals” has no effect on the rigor of intellectual discourse because academics are intellectually honest and give credence to opposing positions. (In the same paragraph, Eisgruber, a former constitutional law professor, grossly mischaracterizes constitutional originalism.) He does not ask whether ideological homogeneity among professors, administrators, and students has other effects, such as discouraging dissenters from speaking up because they know they will be seen as unenlightened at best, racist-sexist-homophobic at worst. Instead, he affirms that “political diversity” does not matter much because “all scholars worth their salt” are able “to raise claims or points that reflect perspectives different from their own.”

That’s not just an incomplete answer to the informal-chilling challenge; it’s a position that would scandalize the man who lamented the Supreme Court’s decision in Student for Fair Admissions v. Harvard as “unwelcome and disappointing” because “diversity benefits learning and scholarship by broadening the range of questions, perspectives, and experiences brought to bear on important topics throughout the University.” That was Eisgruber, too. And: “we have an obligation to attract exceptional people of every background and enable them to flourish on our campus.”

Do those statements chill anti-affirmative-action speech at Princeton? I suppose that question is now moot, since Eisgruber apparently doesn’t believe it applies where scholars are “worth their salt.” Or perhaps he thinks racial diversity broadens the range of perspectives at a university but political diversity, somehow, doesn’t.

It’s an inconsistent, incoherent mess -- another casualty of Eisgruber’s ill-conceived attempt to fashion ad hoc principles to reverse-engineer a standard by which universities are succeeding, and the American people are projecting their own misbegotten ways onto the righteous academy.

Protecting the Consensus

Eisgruber is so disgusted with the accusation that students are “crybullies” that he disputes the charge in a way that ends up undermining his own argument about the vitality of campus debate. He has a ready answer for critics of campus “snowflakes,” or the idea that students are afraid of hearing disagreement. Students who disrupt speakers or refuse to extend platforms to controversial voices are not afraid of ideas they disagree with. Rather, they are exercising power, asserting themselves, demanding recognition of their standing as equal members of the academic community. This is a saving construction only if you already agree with those students. Whether an overwhelming assertion of power to protect regnant civility norms is worthy of celebration or is stifling orthodoxy depends on whether you believe the power they are asserting is warranted.

Consider how this squares with Eisgruber’s inspiration in Sullivan. What Eisgruber admired about that case was precisely that it liberated the relatively powerless from the legal weapons of the powerful. It allowed people to speak truth to power and advance equality without fear of ruinous liability. Yet “when students aggressively demand that they be protected from slights and offenses,” to ice out the Christakises and even the Ben Shapiros of the world, Eisgruber finds that admirable too: “They are exercising free speech rights rather than shirking them.”

What gives? When are powerful people enforcing orthodoxies entitled to have speech rules that reinforce and protect their preferred norms? Admitting that students are not afraid of new ideas but unwilling to hear challenges to their social or moral views may save them from the accusation of immaturity, but it undermines Eisgruber’s broader defense of student activism and universities’ ideological homogeneity. This is no theory of free speech. It merely shows how the “civility norms” framework is yet another cop-out; when the good guys enforce it it’s good, when the bad guys do it it’s evil. And on a practical level, it derogates judgments about approved dissent to students, who are free to enforce them by any means necessary, backed by faculty and administrators who have every incentive to preserve their ideological echo chamber.

Chilling effects, understood properly, are the mechanism by which this self-reinforcing consensus of acceptable opinion operates at scale. They occur not when formal rules prohibit certain speech but when the informal consensus of an institution has rendered certain positions radioactive. That is a description of the contemporary elite university, and an honest account of chilling effects would require Eisgruber to ask whether institutions like Princeton have created environments in which viewpoints held by significant numbers of Americans are treated, in practice, as beneath the threshold of serious engagement. Terms of Respect never poses, much less reckons with, that question. No wonder Eisgruber finds it shocking that Americans think universities have gone awry—and that it has something to do with the freedom of speech.

The Unstated Argument

The defense of the university Eisgruber lands on, once the apparatus of principled reasoning is set aside and the obfuscation is stripped away, is that the right people are winning. The good guys, the forces of equality, buoyed by systematic privilege and protection from professors and administrators, are prevailing. If some conservative speakers find the environment inhospitable, that is the natural consequence of their positions being unpopular with an educated and morally serious community. If some dissenting views are chilled, they are chilled by the weight of evidence and argument against them.

That argument might be defensible on its own terms. What it cannot do is pose as a neutral theory of expressive freedom. What Terms of Respect delivers is a post-hoc rationalization for a campus culture Eisgruber finds congenial, dressed in the borrowed authority of civil rights law and high principle. The equality it invokes is an ideological program that the law does not endorse and the Constitution does not require. That program is beginning to crack.

It revealed its hollow core in 2023, when university leaders who never met an offhand student comment they didn’t wish to hale into kangaroo court adverted to free-speech arguments when pressed about clear civil-rights violations. Proponents of the Eisgruberian view that free speech means giving activist groups free rein, they had been sufficiently dominant on campuses to avoid confronting what it would mean to apply their stated logic consistently and across the aisle. That their free-speech-defense muscles had atrophied so badly was telling. They were confused by the question of how university get free speech right; by the looks of Eisgruber’s effort, apparently the best one mustered yet, they still are.

As ever, the problem is not that our finest academics are antisemites, unintelligent (they are neither), or prone to misspeaking. It is that they are so deep in an ideological echo chamber they are incapable of seeing how their Jenga tower of principle collapses after pulling out a single block of substantive commitment to progressive outcomes. Their blind spots, double standards, and evasions are everywhere—and they all point in the same direction.

That is the central failure of Terms of Respect: it is fundamentally dishonest about its own premises, giving it the patina of rising above partisanship while actually only making sense among ideologues that already share Eisgruber’s assumptions. The final part of this series will examine how Eisgruber draws on the dishonesty and obfuscations to castigate a nation for “weaponizing” claims of free speech, when really the nation should be learning from universities’ enlightened approach to speech, truth, and power.

Tal Fortgang ’17 is a Legal Policy Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a regular contributor to PFS and a contributing writer at The Dispatch.

By Abigail Readlinger ‘27

On Friday, January 23, 2026, several students from Princeton University marched to the top of Capitol Hill, joining tens of thousands of Americans in the National March for Life. Originating just months after the legalization of abortion in Roe v. Wade (1973), the National March for Life inaugurated the first major public conversation on the sanctity of life and a constitutional protection of the unborn. Today, four years after the overturn of Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), the march still serves as a platform for individuals to express their hopes and visions for the future of the Pro-Life movement.

Having experienced the tangible and transformative power of free speech evident in the march, four Princeton students have graciously agreed to share thoughts both about their participation in the march and also about the overall experience with pro-life dialogue on campus.

Nadia Makuc (‘26), Joshua Jen (‘28), Anya Marino (‘28), and Tommy Hasty (‘28) are all members of Princeton Pro-Life. They attended the march last month in an effort to stand up in solidarity with Pro-Life America.

Hasty finds free speech as fundamental to the movement. “We are called to the truth as a society . . . To accomplish this we must be able to freely communicate, debate and discuss . . . Our love and respect for the human person, and consequently their ability to reason for themselves, in union with our recognition of the necessity that society pursue the truth together . . . leads us to hold free speech as a value central to the Pro-Life cause.”

Makuc echoes these sentiments, believing progress is impossible without first the “opportunity to have real dialogue and debate.” This opportunity is not only confined to national initiatives, but rather exists—and must exist—in our everyday lives. She continues, “Especially on a college campus, this is precisely where we should be able to best have an exchange of ideas so that we can better understand each other and find ways forward.”

University life—and Princeton in particular—is a breeding ground for change, as it brings together a beautiful and diverse collection of backgrounds, worldviews, experiences, and convictions. This change, however, can be brought about only in a culture of both genuine and respectful conversation with others.

The question arises: Does Princeton as an institution possess this culture when it comes to the pro-life position? The answer is nuanced. We are certainly not altogether devoid of the qualities necessary for honest debate. Jen is particularly encouraged by the faculty. “I do feel supported as a pro-life student. Every semester, the pro-life club hosts a faculty-student reception, which serves as a visual representation of the number of faculty that support pro-life students on campus.” Marino too ultimately believes that “Princeton University is supportive of free speech.” She also, however, concedes there are still times when she feels uncomfortable and unsupported in the midst of dominant campus ideologies. Makuc, who served as the President of Princeton Pro-Life from September 2023 to January 2025, notes that she was “pleasantly surprised” by her experience, and never faced any “big roadblocks” in her work for the club. “That being said,” Makuc added, “not being prevented from existing is different than being supported.” Hasty agrees, saying he feels “neither entirely support[ed] or condemmn[ed].” He further clarifies, however, that the purpose of the administration is not necessarily to “support students in their views, but to simply maintain a free and respectful place for views to be expressed.” With this definition in mind, he argues the institution does “a good job.”

When asked to consider the same question in respect to the general social culture at Princeton, responses were once again varied. Marino and Makuc are less inclined to express their beliefs outside of an academic setting. “If I run into issues for what I believe in,” Marino explains, “it comes from students.” Makuc relates a similar feeling. “There is an unsaid rule that being pro-life, or doing stuff for the pro-life club is not what you’re going to share when you first meet someone here, since it’s pretty clear that this is not the most welcome belief.” Hasty too acknowledges a fear of “negative social consequences” when talking to the “wrong person or wrong group.” He also, however, is very optimistic about “speaking to people one on one.” This type of social situation, he continues, “makes for a much more level playing field and people are generally more willing to engage thoughtfully alone rather than when under the influence of a group of peers.”

Much remains to be said about the culture of free speech on our campus. The testimonies of Makuc, Marino, Jen and Hasty reveal several insights into the importance of open dialogue, and the role of universities in encouraging such an environment. What does supporting free speech truly mean? Is it enough for unpopular opinions to simply not be prevented? Is it enough to simply not be condemned? Is it enough to simply maintain free speech in the classroom and risk an oversight of dominating social pressures? These are questions we must consider. For now, one thing is certain. The pro-life movement—while perhaps small—is alive at Princeton, and it has been seen thriving at our nation’s capitol. Its presence is a witness to a culture of free speech. And where improvements must certainly be made, there is much cause for hope.

Abigail Readlinger ‘27 is a Junior in the Politics department from Princeton, NJ. She is a PFS Writing Fellow.

Tal Fortgang
'17

The following is the third in a multi-part review of Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber’s recent book, Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right. You can read Part I here and Part II here.

In Part I of this series, I wrote that President Eisgruber’s Terms of Respect deserves credit for clearly distinguishing between free speech as a moral principle and the First Amendment as a legal doctrine, and for rejecting the simplistic claim that universities violate free speech whenever they regulate expression. Eisgruber rightly emphasizes that universities must balance expressive freedom with other core values, including equality and the great prerequisite of all campus rules: the ability of the academic community to function. His framework is thoughtful and serious, and it usefully puts free speech in its proper place within the campus setting—crucial, but not all-encompassing. Still, even where Eisgruber gets the theory right, significant practical problems, especially disruptive protests and enforcement failures, remain largely unaddressed, primarily because Eisgruber seems reluctant to follow his own basic theory where it leads and distinguish between constructive speech and disruption.

In Part II, I analyzed one of the sources of that reluctance and its surprising influence in bringing Eisgruber to this point. His model is shaped less by the First Amendment’s older, restraint-oriented traditions than by his admiration for the civil-rights-era decision in New York Times v. Sullivan, which he treats as proof that free speech is most defensible when tethered to a preferred conception of equality. From that premise, I suggested, he becomes inclined to bend or effectively suspend campus rules for activists who speak in the language of justice while rationalizing disruption aimed at disfavored speakers. The result is a rhetorically “neutral” emphasis on civility and respect that, in practice, functions as viewpoint selectivity—rigging the campus speech regime toward substantively left-liberal outcomes and away from even-handed rule of law.

Now we can get to the heart of the book. Eisgruber’s novel approach to campus free speech issues builds on this foundation, to argue that campus free speech issues aren’t really campus issues, and aren’t really about free speech. Rather, campuses reflect national divisions in microcosm, and the division is not about speech and its discontents, but about “the meaning of respect and, ultimately, what it means to treat people as equals.” He ultimately concludes that while speech has to foster constructive dialogue and truth-seeking, the controversies making waves are about the terms on which that constructive dialogue occurs—which is a good thing, as Eisgruber and his critics alike agree—and that universities are closer to being models (albeit imperfect ones) than sources of the problem. It’s this surprising take that gives Terms of Respect its punch and has made Eisgruber a minor folk hero among academia’s defenders.

It is surprising for good reason, though—because it doesn’t withstand scrutiny. It relies on legal and factual evasions (I will discuss some of the legal evasions in the next installment), reductive descriptions of the problem, evidence that does not support the analysis, and an altogether slanted approach to thinking about these issues as arguments between camps with different—and not necessarily equally legitimate—understandings of equality.

What is the real campus crisis?

Are most campus controversies “disagreements about the meaning of respect and, ultimately, what it means to treat people as equals”? One of Eisgruber’s primary examples is the Christakis affair, the 2015 controversy at Yale University involving married professors Nicholas and Erika Christakis, who were assigned to leadership roles at Yale’s Silliman College. After university administrators sent a pre-Halloween email discouraging students from wearing potentially offensive and culturally appropriative costumes, Erika Christakis sent an email questioning whether university administrators should regulate students’ Halloween costumes. She suggested that it was developmentally counterproductive for adults to police young people’s disagreements, and that students could handle cultural sensitivity issues through dialogue rather than formal oversight. Here is how Eisgruber describes the confrontation that followed:

Several students reacted angrily to Dr. Christakis’s message, leading eventually to an angry confrontation between a group of students and her husband. The episode generated campus protests at which student activists demanded that the Christakises be removed from their positions at the head of the college. Yale refused these demands, but Nicholas Christakis eventually stepped down from his mastership and Erika Christakis resigned from the Yale faculty entirely.

Then, the analysis: “What I want to emphasize,” Eisgruber writes, “is that aside from the demand to fire the Christakises, the dispute was at its core about civility norms, not censorship.” That’s quite a large “aside from,” seeing as hundreds of students and faculty made that demand in open letters and direct confrontations. It gets worse:

Dr. Christakis took her stand on the principle that campus civility norms should tolerate student behavior that is, in her words, “inappropriate,” “provocative,” “regressive,” “transgressive,” or “offensive.” Yet when the “offensive” student expression involved not Halloween costumes that played on racial stereotypes but rather impassioned speech about racial justice that insulted her husband, she—or Yale’s critics, in any event—thought that the students had crossed a line.

This shameful revisionism creates a false equivalency between a professor encouraging students to work out matters of offense amongst themselves, and students’ “impassioned speech about racial justice.” It elides the content of that speech, reported thus:

During the argument, a student yells at [Nicholas] Christakis, “Be quiet!” When Christakis says he disagrees with her description of his duty as a master of his college, the student delivers a loud and spirited condemnation of what she perceives to be his dereliction of duty. “Why the fuck did you accept the position? Who the fuck hired you?” the student says. “Then step down! If that is what you think about being a master, then you should step down. It is not about creating an intellectual space! It is not! Do you understand that? It’s about creating a home here! You are not doing that. You’re going against that.”

Is this vulgar harassment “impassioned speech about racial justice”? Does it get to the heart of civility norms, or what it means to treat each other as equals? Or is it, rather, an attempt to muscle out an old conception of the university, as “an intellectual space,” in favor of a new one (“a home”) using intimidation and harassment? It was precisely incidents like this one that led to neologisms like “crybully,” which captured what was really at play: not vigorous debates over the meaning of respect, as Eisgruber posits against factual evidence, but emotive outbursts meant to push the old guard out.

His concluding thoughts on the Christakis debacle boggle the mind.

So what should we make of these observations? Do they suggest that student protesters are fragile “snowflakes” who require a culture of excessive sensitivity that protects their tender egos and suffocates vigorous speech? Not at all…When students aggressively demand that they be protected from slights and offenses, they are often asserting power, not demonstrating weakness. They are exercising free speech rights rather than shirking them.

If you look at the content of the student protestors’ complaints, they are quite clearly demanding sensitivity in a way that suffocates vigorous speech. Whether that is warranted is a different question, which depends on whether the speech is sufficiently valuable in the context of the university’s mission. But “asserting power” and “demonstrating weakness” can clearly go hand-in-hand. More accurately, students can feign weakness, or use the language of vulnerability and sensitivity as a tactic to exercise their actual power. The students are bullying their teachers while evincing excessive sensitivity to slights and offenses. They are using speech in an irresponsible and destructive way.

Eisgruber telegraphs the ways in which he has stacked the deck in a shocking castigation of the Christakises: “If we ask students to be less sensitive to Halloween costumes that mock underrepresented groups, should we also ask administrators like Erika and Nicholas Christakis to be less sensitive to speech that challenges their authority?” It’s an astounding evasion; “challenges their authority” is such a brazen euphemism I had to read it twice. The students berated and cursed at a faculty member because, in their own words, he had prioritized intellectual freedom over a newfangled idea of inclusivity.

Somehow, it gets worse. Eisgruber asks, “which is more important from the standpoint of a student’s education: wearing offensive Halloween costumes or speaking out—wrongly or not—in the name of social justice?” That is a manipulated false choice, one that would immediately earn a Princeton freshman a low grade if posited in a paper. What’s important, as Erika Christakis made abundantly clear, is that students learn to tolerate discomfort and work out their differences without being refereed by administrators. Wearing particular Halloween costumes is not the point—which Eisgruber obviously knows—learning to deal with people causing you offense is. That is a genuinely important pedagogical message, one which Eisgruber tends to celebrate in general terms throughout his book yet sneers at when put into action. It is also another instance of rigging the analysis to favor the equality-coded speech over the “conservative” position, this time by downplaying or ignoring important facts and positing false choices. For shame. Eisgruber’s treatment of the whole episode is discrediting, dishonest, and unbecoming of any author—all the more so a university president.

Is this a debate about equality?

Substantively, Eisgruber has admitted that crybullying is real by celebrating these students’ “asserting power” by telling Nicholas Christakis to “be quiet” and cursing him out. Turns out, the analysis of these students’ speech does not hinge on whether they advanced civility norms at all. It’s the assertion of power that earns them Eisgruber’s defense. They worked to manufacture a consensus that the Christakises’ views on how to handle a pluralistic community is beyond the pale.

If that’s a debate about equality, it’s a curious one. Sometimes it takes the form of shouting down speakers who advance disfavored views while claiming victimhood status, as multiple protest movements described in Eisgruber’s book do, including at Princeton. Other times it’s about yelling at professors until they cow to the new orthodoxy that universities are “homes” rather than hubs of sometimes-uncomfortable intellectual and social development.

Perhaps disagreements about equality have reached such an advanced form that they now manifest as struggles over whose idea of fair and equal treatment controls our institutions. We no longer fight over slavery or Jim Crow, so students scream and curse over whether Ben Shapiro’s views, or the Christakises’, are outside the bounds of acceptable discourse. If civility rules are constantly contested and negotiated -- and surely that is desirable for moral progress to occur -- then how do we determine which pushes and pulls are legitimate, and which are out of bounds?

Many of these controversies end up dressed in the trappings of free speech and violations thereof for this (good) reason. Free speech is the default rule that excludes certain kinds of uncivil behavior—disruptive actions, the heckler’s veto, and so on—while allowing all kinds of expression to exert their influence. It is a minimalist rule that helps us mediate our raucous discourse and preserve pluralism. It instantiates equality by granting all a seat at the proverbial table, without rigging the game for one set of beliefs. It lets participants argue out which consensus principles should inform daily life—and argue it out for real, not through disruption, intimidation, or blackmail.

The alternative, which has been adopted in practice if not rhetoric by many universities, is to take a side and favor advocates of their preferred worldview. That is what Yale did when it failed to defend the Christakises, what so many universities have done in allowing hecklers and trespassing demonstrators to prevail, and what Eisgruber does as he shockingly rewrites the Christakises’ story even as he claims to advance a principled neutrality. When that happens, is it not legitimate for the many millions of Americans who disagree to cry foul? Are they wrong to see it as an unequal application, and therefore a flouting, of free-speech norms that disadvantages and abuses disfavored groups? Can Eisgruber and his ilk really be surprised when the federal government says it will no longer support institutions that provide systemic favor to ideologies far from the consensus views of the American people?

There is more to say about the evasions that pervade Terms of Respect, which I will cover in the next installments. But this is the big one. Universities are not leading the way on balancing free speech and equality. They are not models of constructive dialogue, except inasmuch as it is “constructive” to allow one substantive view of equality to bully its way to dominance. They have, consistently enough that Eisgruber commits to defending their doing so, allowed and even encouraged ideologues of one particular bent to “assert their power,” as though that is a good thing, and remake higher education in their image through naked, if emotional, force. A neutral and free-speech-focused regime would be preferable, even if Eisgruber thinks free speech is the wrong analytical frame for these issues. He will not like the alternative, which involves rethinking the role of the ideologically captured university in a pluralist society.

Tal Fortgang ’17 is a Legal Policy Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a regular contributor to PFS and a contributing writer at The Dispatch.

On February 19, the Princeton Council on Academic Freedom hosted Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the Berkeley School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, to discuss his forthcoming book Campus Speech and Academic Freedom: A Guide for Difficult Times, co-authored with Howard Gillman. Chemerinsky described universities as operating in a moment of political pressure, as debates over Israel–Palestine, race, gender identity, and other charged issues intensify scrutiny of campus speech.

Throughout the talk, Chemerinsky argued that free speech is truly tested when we defend free expression we detest. Resisting the impulse to legislate egregious ideas is essential to preserving free expression. In his book, Chemerinsky and Gillman seek to clarify how established legal principles apply in this environment, particularly at public universities, and he warns of conflating colloquial understandings of, for example, hate speech, with the rigorous standards which apply to the legal expression of terms.

He outlined four central points. First, all ideas and viewpoints may be expressed on a college campus. At public institutions, the First Amendment prohibits the government from suppressing speech because of its content or viewpoint, even if that speech is offensive. While public universities are directly bound by the First Amendment, most private universities, including Princeton, adopt free speech rules and policies which align with First Amendment principles.

Second, the First Amendment is not absolute. Certain categories of speech are unprotected, including incitement to imminent illegal activity, true threats, and harassment. Notably, “hate speech” as such remains protected, unlike in many European countries, and attempts to define it too broadly risk granting the government authority to censor.

Third, universities may impose content-neutral time, place, and manner restrictions. Institutions can regulate when and where protests occur, so long as policies do not discriminate based on viewpoint and leave open adequate alternative channels for expression. This principle is especially relevant to contemporary issues, such as campus encampments. Questions arise when invited speakers generate extraordinary security costs and courts have not provided definitive answers.

Fourth, Chemerinsky argued that government efforts to dictate what may be taught at public universities, such as anti-critical race theory (CRT) or “Stop W.O.K.E.” laws, violate the First Amendment and threaten academic freedom. Chemerinsky described the relationship between academic freedom and the First Amendment as a venn diagram; while academic freedom overlaps with the First Amendment, it is not coextensive with it. Academic freedom is governed by professional academic standards, and courts typically defer to schools to establish these standards.

Chemerinsky warned that giving the government the ability to legislate ideas poses a far greater danger than tolerating even deeply unpopular speech.

Annabel Green ‘26, is a senior from Boulder, CO majoring in Public and International Affairs and minoring in Global Health & Health Policy. She is a PFS student writing fellow.

The following is the second in a multi-part review of Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber’s recent book, Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right. You can read Part I here.

Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber made his name in the academy as a constitutional law professor. Since he is now the president of a pacesetting Ivy League institution, he is also at the forefront of the free-speech wars. It’s understandable, given those two pieces of information, that Eisgruber would seek to enlighten readers of Terms of Respect by analyzing the relationship between constitutional law—particularly the First Amendment’s protection of the freedom of speech--and campus speech-related controversies. It’s expected, even.

Yet Eisgruber manages to surprise his readers with his understanding of the relationship between the law of speech and contemporary controversies. The First Amendment was ratified in 1791, but Eisgruber takes his cues from the 1960s. “The American doctrine of free speech as we know it today emerged in the 1960s,” he writes. “Until 1964, the United States Supreme Court had a lackluster track record in free speech cases.” It was then that the Court decided New York Times v. Sullivan, a First Amendment case that shows, in Eisgruber’s view, “the important historical and conceptual links between free speech and the American struggle for racial equality.”

Sullivan: A Curious Choice

Sullivan “set the stage for the arguments about free speech that roil America and its college campuses today,” Eisgruber writes. How? It was a case that “emerged from the campaign for civil rights in the American South.” As Eisgruber describes, a pro-civil rights organization published an advertisement in the New York Times pleading for donations that would benefit protesting students against the brutalizing powers-that-be. “The advertisement contained serious errors,” Eisgruber admits, and Sullivan, the police commissioner of Montgomery, Alabama, sued the Times for libel. His reputation would be tarnished by New York Times readers’ impression of him as a tyrant, based at least in part on the errors in the ad. The law was on his side. Prior to Sullivan, Eisgruber explains, “if somebody sued you for libel, it did not matter how careful you had been or how innocent your intentions were; you had to pay damages unless you could prove that your statements were true or…had not harmed the plaintiff’s reputation.” Initially, the police commissioner won. The law of defamation supported his position, and had since time immemorial. Under normal circumstances, absent intervening legislation, that settles the matter.

Lucky for the New York Times, writes Eisgruber, “the Supreme Court rewrote the law of free speech.” After centuries of Americans living under settled law—150-plus years since the First Amendment’s ratification—the nine unelected justices of the Supreme Court “created a new and powerful restriction on libel law.” They invented the standard of “actual malice.” Only if the defendant acted with “reckless disregard for the truth,” could a libel suit prevail. Justice William Brennan explained why he would lead this brazen act of judicial legislation, which Eisgruber returns to repeatedly with unwavering applause: because the Constitution stands for “a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.” Eisgruber lionizes the Court’s decision to choose “a standard sufficiently powerful that civil rights activists…would feel free to criticize Southern public officials vigorously without fearing adverse rulings from local judges hostile to the activists and the court itself.” What’s more, the Court took the “rare and radical” step of “appl[ying] the [new] standard to the facts” rather than remanding a case to the trial court for the admission of evidence, cross-examination, and a jury decision regarding the facts. Not this time: “The justices apparently did not trust the Alabama courts to make determinations of their own.”

Calling this a thumb on the scale of a favored party is an understatement. Eisgruber celebrates that the Supreme Court rigged the game. The police commissioner should have won, so the Court rewrote the law. He might have still won had he gotten a fair trial under the new standard, so the Court deprived him of a trial. The Court chose a new rule to mediate between the First Amendment and the centuries-old doctrine of libel out of thin air in order to impose social change upon American society. It completely usurped states, legislatures, the Executive Branch, and the common law—probably the most anti-democratic act a court can undertake. And it did so under the dubious justification that our Constitution demands unfettered public discourse, a proposition undermined by the admission that the Court was changing the law. The First Amendment, to the Court and now to an approving Eisgruber, serves as an abstract endorsement of wide-open speech so long as it advances the cause of equality—even as actual First Amendment doctrine had to be overruled, indeed turned upside-down, to bring that abstraction down to the level of law.

Sullivan is a massively controversial case, and not because it came out in the civil rights activists’ favor. Multiple federal judges have signaled that the Supreme Court should consider taking another libel case so it can overturn Sullivan and restore defamation law to its last legitimately changed state. In this regard, Sullivan is an excellent symbol of outcome-based judging in the mid-20th century. The Court rewrote multiple areas of American law—from the law of religion to criminal procedure and much in between—to fit elite liberal opinions about what outcomes would be just. It gave rise to originalism, which rejected reasoning on the basis of sweeping rhetoric about “profound national commitments” perceptible to Supreme Court justices yet belied by the way Americans actually lived.

What Sullivan Reveals

The legal critique of Sullivan illuminates Eisgruber’s position by contrast. Most legal scholars today recognize that it is dicey and undemocratic for judges to invent new rules. After a few decades of justices based on contested moral and political reasoning, as in Sullivan, today’s Supreme Court limits its role to saying what the law is, not what it should be. Their legal reasoning illustrates by contrast the pitfalls of the Sullivan Court’s approach. Rather than posit abstract commitments—even to principles as noble as unfettered speech—today’s Court focuses on what legal terms have meant throughout American history. It does not declare that the First Amendment demands fealty to an abstract principle, as Justice Brennan did. Instead, it recognizes that the law can only be changed by elected lawmakers. So if Sullivan were before the Court today, the justices would never rewrite defamation law, and with good reason. It is not up to all institutions to effect social change at all times. For the purposes of judging, it is crucial to recognize that liberty, equality, and the rule of law sometimes tug in different directions and suggest a range of acceptable legal regimes. And it’s up to Congress to change the law, if the law is going to change.

Eisgruber’s approach to these issues is a throwback to mid-20th century judicial misadventures. His recap of Sullivan gives the impression that it was a heroic act of judicial courage that also shows the essential compatibility between the fight for equality and wide-open free speech. To a certain extent, that point is well-taken. Some degree of free speech is necessary to challenge entrenched power. But that is not the same as linking free speech to advancing equality, such that speaking truth to power without the equality justification would fail to merit the same protections. His position amounts to the claim that certain forms of speech deserve extra special protection if they speak Sullivan’s language. Just as the Court invented historical commitments incongruous with actual American cultural commitments to favor a cause it considered just, Eisgruber believes he can and should invent parallel commitments that cast favored movements as part of a raucous, wide-open debate over the meaning of dignity and equality, and unfavored movements as violations of civility norms. We can say it plainly: He is rigging the game.

Bad Law Makes Bad Policy

Indeed, understanding Eisgruber’s reliance on Sullivan actually explains his behavior much of the time. The best theory for Eisgruber’s handling of campus affairs, and his characterization of controversies’ root causes, is that he believes in a degree and quality of speech conducive to a substantively left-wing view of equality.

As noted in the previous installment of this review, Eisgruber describes perfectly why he had to come down hard against the demonstrators from the Black Justice League who took advantage of his kindness in letting them occupy his office, violating campus rules several times over, and behaving in ways completely incompatible with the kind of civility rules Eisgruber champions. Yet he did not discipline the group at all. Similar paralysis followed the takeover of Clio Hall by activists later reprimanded by a judge for mistaking a “political manifesto” for an apology. It struck again after a student group bragged about pulling a fire alarm on an event featuring Israeli diplomats. What can explain this vast gulf between Eisgruber’s rhetoric and his consistent inertia?

Sullivan, and Eisgruber’s love for it, explains it. Sullivan rewrote the rules to advance the civil rights movement, and Eisgruber thinks he is following in its footsteps. The Black Justice League couched its demands in terms of racial equality, and later protest groups used the same high-minded language about equality and justice. These superficial similarities left Eisgruber in a bind: admit that some movements that claim the mantle of equality cannot be reconciled with a properly calibrated speech code or punish the rule-breakers—implicitly rejecting their posited inheritance of the civil rights mantle.

Believing that generally left-liberal social movements continue Sullivan’s cause, Eisgruber had to pull a Sullivan of his own. He did not just rule in favor of the groups whose speech he found sympathetic by letting them off the hook each time they violated campus rules. He concocted a clever standard that would justify doing so repeatedly by couching substantive preferences in neutral-sounding language. The demonstrators, like he, were for equality—and who could be against equality? But equality is a contested concept. To some, for instance, it means applying rules equally. To others it means giving preferential treatment to groups with a history of suffering oppression. A free speech standard that is broad but limited to genuine civil speech treats that argument neutrally. But what Eisgruber offers only appears neutral. It incorporates Eisgruber’s preferred understanding of what fighting for equality really means—and at some point that means treating equally civil speech unequally based on its content.

If you were confused by the chasm between stated principles and those applied, Eisgruber’s own explanation of how First Amendment jurisprudence informs current campus debates should help make sense of the matter. When he says that free speech and equality have to coexist—and that civility rules inform and reinforce the relationship between the two—he takes a substantively left-wing view of equality and what it takes to sustain it.

Whose Idea of Equality Counts?

What really gives the game away is that Eisgruber does not extend Sullivan’s forgiving approach to speech to those with whom he disagrees politically. While whitewashing these demonstrators because they are engaged in an argument “about the meaning of respect and, ultimately, what it means to treat people as equals,” he make excuses for college students who try to shout down conservative speakers: “If college students are more agitated about outside speakers these days, it is partly because a variety of right-wing organizations are riling them up,” he writes, naming “conservative polemicists” like “Milo Yiannapolous and Ben Shapiro.”

Shapiro is a mainstream right-wing figure, and naming him alongside a genuine troll is certainly a tell about Eisgruber’s susceptibility to outgroup-homogeneity bias—failing to perceive differences among those who are dissimilar to you—and where he believes the outer bounds of acceptable discourse lie. “We should want students to be engaged, not docile,” when figures like Shapiro come to campus. Demonstrations against them are “exercises of free speech, not interferences with it.” Pulling fire alarms is no mere protest, though, and one leaves this exercise in victim-blaming thinking that Eisgruber is simply willing to shoehorn his view of what is an exercise of free speech into preexisting categories about what kind of political speech is worth protecting. That’s not taking a cue from the First Amendment, but from Sullivan, which distorted, exaggerated, perhaps even outright fabricated our nation’s relation to speech. And it cannot be justified as speaking truth to power, since it rigs the game in favor of the ideological preferences of the vast majority of college students, administrators, and as Terms of Respect reveals, leading university presidents.

As we will see in coming installments, this distortion colors Eisgruber’s view of the nature of campus disagreement. Even seemingly neutral insights about the nature of free-speech debates—which Eisgruber presents as profound and nuanced—end up reducing to ideological preferences and evasions of genuinely difficult legal and social questions.

Tal Fortgang ’17 is a Legal Policy Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a regular contributor to PFS and a contributing writer at The Dispatch.

Free speech and open inquiry are not abstract ideals – they are the lifeblood of a healthy university community. At Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS), we remain focused on advancing these principles through practical support for students and faculty who put them into action.

As such, we are pleased to tell you about two upcoming events at Princeton that reflect this mission in powerful ways.

Empowering Student Voices

Princeton Open Campus Coalition (POCC) will host an event on February 19 featuring RocaNews, a Gen-Z–driven media startup known for short-form, non-partisan journalism. In a media culture often defined by outrage and polarization, Roca takes a different approach – informing without inflaming, inviting genuine conversation rather than division. Their discussion will explore the challenges of running a non-partisan newsroom in an age of censorship, and how to sustain viewpoint diversity in a climate that too often discourages dissent.

PFS is proud to fund and amplify student-led events like this. We know that empowering students to organize discussions, question assumptions, and create spaces for varied perspectives is how real change begins. Supporting student organizations that embrace viewpoint diversity ensures that Princeton undergraduates continue to lead by example to bring respectful, open dialogue to campus life.

Amplifying Faculty Voices

PFS is also pleased to stand in aligned partnership with the Princeton Council on Academic Freedom (PCAF). Their February 19 event “Campus Speech and Academic Freedom: A Guide for Difficult Times” will convene voices on how to protect academic freedom in today’s climate. PCAF’s mission mirrors our own: ensuring that Princeton remains fearless, curious, and guided by truth rather than fear of reprisal.

These events highlight two pillars of a truly free university: students who engage courageously and faculty who defend freedom of thought. PFS is honored to support both efforts, reinforcing Princeton’s proud tradition as a place where open discourse is not merely tolerated, but celebrated.

Your support makes free speech possible

When you donate to PFS, you make events like these possible. Your support equips both students and faculty to model the open, honest exchange of ideas that a great university depends on.

In addition to supporting campus events, your contributions also fund our PFS Writing Fellows (student interns), several of whom will be personally attending and reporting on these two programs (watch for post-event recaps coming soon!). Every gift helps strengthen the culture of free expression that Princeton desperately needs, and inspires the next generation to carry those values forward. We appreciate your donation consideration.

There is a pressing long-term and deeply embedded problem at many universities – the almost total lack of viewpoint diversity among faculty. This is Part 2 of our breakdown of the problem with viewpoint diversity at Ivy League universities. Read Part 1 here.

WHAT TO DO? FIRST, RECOGNIZE THERE IS A PROBLEM

It is axiomatic that before a problem can be addressed, it must be recognized. There exists no study that credibly refutes the findings of the Yale and Harvard studies mentioned above, as well as the findings of numerous polls over recent decades. However, there are many who dismiss the significance of the lack of viewpoint diversity or even attack the concept. See, for example, a recent article by Johns Hopkins professor Lisa Siraganian in Academe Magazine, the magazine of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), wherein she argues that “[v]iewpoint diversity functions in direct opposition to the pursuit of truth, the principal aim of academia.” In an article that appeared last October in Inside Higher Ed, “Universities Can’t Pursue Truth Without Viewpoint Diversity,” authors John Tomasi and Jonathan Haidt (President and co-founder of HxA), counter Siraganian’s attack on the importance of viewpoint diversity:

By a circular logic, whatever (and whomever) a discipline rejects as ‘intellectually unsuitable’ must be so because the members of the discipline are the ones who set the disciplinary standards. By this reasoning, even when a discipline rapidly changes its scientific views, or politicizes its standards for admissions, hiring and publications, it could not be because they have lost a healthy amount of internal contestation, or have turned self-selection and self-governance into ideological capture. The professors are the experts, after all. Whatever they decide must ipso facto be correct.

The response of Yale and of Yale professors is instructive as to how administrators and faculty will duck and obfuscate on the diversity issue. In response to the Buckley study, Yale put out a statement that said: “Yale hires and retains faculty based on academic excellence, scholarly distinction, and teaching achievement, independent of political views.” To believe this, you would have to believe that only 2.3 percent of the pool of potential professors who would meet Yale’s qualifications are Republicans. (Of course, some Republicans may self-select not to apply for a Yale faculty position because they know their political views will disqualify them.)

And faculty response to the Yale Daily study shows a similar lack of perspective. One professor attributed the faculty far-left tilt to the fact that the Trump Administration “just cut Yale’s budget by $300 million annually,” referring to the endowment tax. But in the next paragraph of the story, the Yale Daily pointed out that in a previous study announced in January 2024, 98.4 percent of Yale faculty donations went to Democrats. That study was done based on contributions over a year before Trump took office for the second time. Again, lack of viewpoint diversity existed well before Trump’s focus on universities.

Another professor made this argument: “It’s true, generally across the culture, not just in universities, on the whole, in the country, educated people vote Democratic.” The implication is that Republicans are generally too uneducated to be professors. It is true that more college and graduate school graduates vote Democratic, but the numbers certainly do not justify this professor’s arrogant comment. According to the Pew Research Center, in the 2024 election, those with a college degree voted Democratic by a narrow margin – 51% to 46%; those with a post graduate degree voted Democratic by 65% to 33%.

These responses from Yale and Yale professors show the extent of the refusal of many administrators and faculty to recognize how lack of viewpoint diversity leads to the insular mono-culture that students, parents and the general public increasingly see.

UNIVERSITY LEADERS MUST LEAD

A very important schism has developed between university leaders over the need to make reforms that include addressing the lack of viewpoint diversity. Major articles in The Atlantic and elsewhere draw a distinction between those university leaders who resist acknowledging the problems, in part from the belief that conceding to a need for internal reform plays into the hands of those (including in the Trump Administration) who want to attack universities, and those who see the need to initiate reforms. The most visible spokesperson for the former group is Christopher Eisgruber, the President of Princeton. Daniel Diermeier and Andrew Martin, the Chancellors of Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis respectively, are the acknowledged leaders of the latter group. These two have created Universities for America’s Future to engage other university leaders in reforming higher education. It would be a major step forward if the two sides of this schism could find common ground.

Importantly, Harvard President Alan M. Garber recently took aim at faculty activism as a cause of stifling freedom of speech and open debate. And Dartmouth’s President Sian Leah Beilock recently made a forceful argument in The Wall Street Journal for university leaders to take action now to restore the public’s trust.

But to make change, more university leaders, presidents and chancellors, need to take this issue head on. It is understandable why many leaders will be reluctant to do so. It could be a very dangerous, even a career ending, endeavor. The debate will be controversial, and the odds are high that there will be a public fight with the most powerful group on campus – the faculty. Efforts to increase viewpoint diversity will be seen as attacks on academic freedom and as caving to political forces. There has been overreach from the Trump Administration and the right, and university leaders will need to lay out clearly that they recognize this overreach and that their efforts are in response to recognized internal problems, not simply to external pressure.

To minimize the risk, and most importantly to achieve success, the groundwork must be laid carefully. The process must proceed step-by-step, with allies and supporters being brought together. An important and necessary development is the creation of a network, formal or informal, of leaders of universities who are working for bottom-up change. Such a network can provide ideas, but most importantly it can demonstrate to a university’s constituents that the university’s leader is not acting in isolation or doing something radical. The change a given leader is advocating will then be part of a broad, well-grounded movement that has strong intellectual and historical support. In addition, such a network can be tasked with developing voluntary best practices on key issues, such as measurement of progress on viewpoint diversity and the role of faculty in choosing new faculty. It will be very difficult for individual university leaders to address such issues if they try to do it in isolation without a broader base for their actions.

It appears that such a network may be developing under Daniel Dermeier’s and Andrew Martin’s Universities for America’s Future, with the strong support of their boards of trustees.

TRUSTEES NEED TO SUPPORT CHANGE

Too many boards of trustees have abdicated their roles. Too often they are timid followers of the administration, rubber stamping whatever the leadership wants. A big problem is the way trustees are elected at many universities, which leads to passive boards. Princeton’s Board of Trustees election process provides a vivid example. While it appears on the surface that alumni elect much of the board, and alumni do vote for candidates, in reality the process is set up so that the choices are limited and picked by insiders. Candidates for board seats are not permitted to take public positions on any issues during the election – for example, on free speech. The result: current and past members of the board have told us that there is little internal debate about the need for change.

Yale provides a similar example. Like Princeton, Yale has a policy that prevents prospective board members from providing much information other than their biography. Yale used to have a policy that an alumnus with enough alumni signers on a petition could run for election to the board. However, after an alumnus achieved the required number of signers and was put on the ballot, Yale repealed the petition option. It would be a good idea for a group of leaders to produce a best practices document on the election of trustees.

A recent analysis from the Manhattan Institute, Ending Conformity on the Quad: How Trustees Can Bring Viewpoint Diversity Back to Their Universities, includes ways to empower boards of trustees that can apply to both public and private institutions. It is increasingly clear that trustees should recognize their fiduciary duty to address tough issues pro-actively. As a matter of course they should be asking if their university is fulfilling its mission. These problems will not evaporate after Trump’s term. The public’s low regard for public education should not be ignored by those charged with overseeing our universities.

ORGANIZE DEBATE AND MOBILIZE PUBLIC OPINION

What is the role of public trust in university reform? Gallup polls over time show a cratering of public trust in higher education from 60 percent to 32 percent in the last two decades. Two main reasons are cited for the decline: affordability and lack of viewpoint diversity.

Ongoing public debate between those who deny or downplay the problem of viewpoint diversity amongst faculty and those who see it as a serious problem in higher education would help to educate and mobilize the public. Coverage of the campus protests over the war in Gaza increased public awareness, but the focus of that coverage has been largely on free speech and antisemitism. Much of the public is generally aware of the lack of diversity among faculty, but its extent and its implications for society need more emphasis.

HOW TO MEASURE PROGRESS

While it will be difficult, progress on faculty diversity should be measured. This could be done by polling, but faculty may strongly object to, or may purposely sabotage, a poll. The Buckley Institute and The Yale Daily studies could be replicated. Creating a system of measurement would be a good project for the network of university leaders described above. Having a common system of measurement used by many universities would remove much of the possible controversy over its use at individual universities. The goal would not be to achieve some targeted numbers; it would be to see if progress is being made.

FACULTY SHOULD NOT BE SOLE GATE KEEPERS OF FACULTY HIRING

The most difficult obstacle to overcome in achieving more diversity in faculty will be the existing faculty. As we have laid out, the faculty at most universities is overwhelmingly on one side of the political spectrum. Consequently, they often live in a bubble where their views and their prejudices are seldom questioned. In many cases they are outright hostile to conservative and even moderate faculty. Most important to this discussion, while the situation varies by university, faculty act as gate keepers, to a large degree controlling what new faculty are hired and who is promoted.

To make material progress on faculty diversity, this gate keeping function on faculty hiring and promotion must be addressed. It will be a difficult and time-consuming battle against a powerful and entrenched opposition. Much of the battle will be over academic freedom, with faculty defending their gate keeping function and attacking attempts to weaken it as attacks on academic freedom.

The AAUP definition of “academic freedom” is instructive. According to AAUP, the main elements of academic freedom are freedom to teach; freedom on research; freedom on intramural speech; and freedom on extramural speech. It is the third item, intramural speech, that is relevant to the role of faculty in choosing other faculty. AAUP’s key sentence on this is: “In order to participate effectively in governance, faculty members must be free to speak truthfully and factually, and in order to protect academic freedom and academic quality at the institution, faculty must participate in governance.”

We have no problem with this definition. Faculty members should be able to speak truthfully and factually about university matters, and they should be able to participate in governance. But the key word is “participate.” They should not control governance and that includes practices for choosing faculty. Since it is clear that in many cases existing faculty have created practices that make it extremely difficult, and in some departments impossible, to have even a modicum of faculty viewpoint diversity, then those practices need to be changed, in consultation with faculty members, and faculty members have no right to claim such changes violate their academic freedom. Academic freedom does not give them carte blanche to decide how new faculty are chosen.

The difficulty of overcoming faculty opposition to change is further demonstrated by the very strong position AAUP has taken in support of diversity statements in hiring faculty and the right of faculty to develop and control such statements.

Here again, a best practices model for the role of faculty could be developed by the network of leaders, perhaps working with an advisory committee of faculty.

ALUMNI NEED TO ENGAGE

Alumni can have a critical role in this debate by advocating for more faculty diversity. As noted, there are over thirty alumni free speech groups for individual universities of all types around the country. While these groups’ primary focus has been on free speech, they should now also focus on faculty viewpoint diversity. FIRE’s alumni network and the Alumni Free Speech Alliance (AFSA) are resources for the creation of new alumni free speech groups. Up until now, these groups have been set up by alumni independently from their universities, and they sometimes have an adversarial relationship with their university administrations as they push for changes. However, university leaders who are now trying to effect change should consider encouraging the creation of alumni groups that, while independent, could be a source of building support for necessary change. These alumni groups can also be effective in communicating the need for change to fellow alumni. For example, our group, Princetonians for Free Speech, has over 16,000 subscribers. A very large portion of those are Princeton alumni, out of roughly 72,000 living undergraduate alumni.

Alumni obviously have another tool to promote change – alumni giving. There is clear evidence that at many universities alumni giving is down, if not in total dollars, then in participation rates. At Princeton, for example, 2024 saw the lowest annual giving participation rate in 80 years. From our discussions with alumni, it is clear the major reason for this decline is unhappiness with Princeton on issues of free speech and viewpoint diversity. Columbia also had a big drop – 28.8% – in its annual “Giving Day” contributions.

Many alumni would like to support their universities but do not want to give to a general fund that may be supporting programs with which they disagree or which seems to provide support for the status quo, to which they strongly object. The way to do this is through targeted giving to specific programs. For example, at Princeton, alumni can earmark their contributions so that they go to the James Madison Program. Supporting programs that will help change the monoculture on their alma mater’s campus can make a difference. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) has information on targeted giving.

Some universities have such large endowments that lower giving rates may not look like a big problem, but the clear unhappiness of many alumni should be of concern to all university leaders and trustees. Alumni provide support in other ways besides money. And for many universities the downturn in contributions can create real financial problems.

CHANGE IN HOW PROSPECTIVE STUDENTS AND PARENTS EVALUATE UNIVERSITIES

For many years there has been a hierarchy among universities that has greatly influenced where students want to go. The top ten, the top twenty, “ranked” schools have changed very little over the years. The U.S. News and World Report rankings, while widely criticized, have had a significant influence, although its rankings may not be all that different from where schools would be otherwise ranked through other means. Parents and student applicants devote incredible amounts of time, and in some cases money, to get into the “right” schools, often referred to as “Ivy Plus,” an elite club. There are still reasons to want to attend those schools – prestige, a top academic education, better job and graduate school prospects, etc.

But that can change, and indeed there are indications that parents and prospective applicants are now looking at issues around free speech, academic freedom, and viewpoint diversity in deciding where to apply, which they can do with the aid of FIRE’s free speech rankings. And job recruitment can have an influence on which schools students choose. One example is the several federal judges who have announced they will not take law clerks from Yale Law School.

CONCLUSION

“The joke went that in a university, ‘diversity’ means people who look different and think alike; viewpoint diversity, in contrast, is the form of diversity that really matters in scientific and intellectual life.” So says Steven Pinker, author, cognitive psychologist at Harvard University and perhaps the most eloquent spokesperson on faculty-driven reform of higher education.

Our focus on the problem of faculty viewpoint diversity in this essay is to demonstrate that intellectual diversity is the necessary precondition of true academic freedom. Without a wide-open contest of ideas, questions don’t get asked, approaches to complex problems don’t get tested, whole disciplines drift and stagnate, and whole schools of thought are simply not considered. Classrooms become places where favored viewpoints are affirmed rather than places where ideas are rigorously tested and challenged. If the monoculture that now dominates the faculty of our major universities cannot be opened up, public confidence will continue to deteriorate, and ham-fisted regulators may well step in to try to create a balance that universities have failed to create for themselves. The autonomy that America’s universities rightly prize may disappear because of those universities’ leaders, trustees and faculty who refuse to act. This cannot be a partisan battle. It is a call for tangible, structural reforms to challenge an ideological monopoly and create conditions for renewal, rather than to accept decline.

Edward Yingling ‘70 and Leslie Spencer ‘79 are, respectively, Secretary and Vice-Chair of Princetonians for Free Speech.

By Ed Yingling and Leslie Spencer
Princetonians for Free Speech Editorial

The last two years have seen a dramatic increase in the scrutiny of free speech and academic freedom on university campuses, largely in response to the protests that followed the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel and the Israeli invasion of Gaza. There has been important progress during this period that bolsters awareness of the importance of free speech and academic freedom principles. For example, in the last year, many university leaders, including the Presidents of Princeton, Stanford and Cornell, have given speeches and undertaken initiatives to promote open inquiry and academic freedom on their campuses. However, progress on these core values will mean little if there is not a major effort to address a pressing long-term and deeply embedded problem – the almost total lack of viewpoint diversity among faculty at many universities.

Our Princeton alumni group, Princetonians for Free Speech, has as its mission the promotion of three core values – free speech, open discourse, and viewpoint diversity. This is a typical mission statement for the more than thirty alumni free speech groups. With all such groups, most of the focus has been on the first two values. Until recently, this has also been true for leading national groups active in this area, such as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA), which have played critical roles in trying to reform our universities. An exception is Heterodox Academy (HxA), which is putting important focus on faculty viewpoint diversity.

If universities are truly to live up to their purpose in society, the lack of viewpoint diversity among faculty must be addressed. (There is also a real problem with viewpoint diversity among university administrators, but this article will focus on faculty.) In a recent HxA article, President John Tomasi stated the situation succinctly: “In today’s changing campus climate, supporting free expression and respectful discussion have (thankfully) become fashionable, but viewpoint diversity remains a third rail of university life.”

Indeed, without viewpoint diversity, the values of free speech and open discourse are of limited importance. If everybody on a campus believes pretty much the same thing, there is not much learning or advancement of knowledge through open inquiry and debate.

A LOOK AT THE NUMBERS

It has long been recognized that many universities, including the leading universities, have extremely low levels of diversity in political and intellectual outlook among their faculty. This 2023 Independent Review analysis of faculty surveys over time clearly shows that faculty political leanings since 1969 have turned sharply leftward. Recent polls confirm that often 95% or more of the faculty identify as Democrats and a very low percentage identify as Republicans or independents.

In A Report on Faculty Political Diversity the Buckley Institute at Yale lays this out. Released in December 2025, this study was not done by polling, but rather by a painstaking review of public records of Yale’s faculty party affiliation together with other data sources. It found that, among Yale undergraduate and law and management school faculty:

• 82.3 percent were registered Democrats or primarily supported Democrats.

• 15.4 percent were independents.

• Only 2.3 percent were Republicans.

• Twenty-seven out of 43 undergraduate departments had not a single Republican on the faculty.

And there is evidence that a significant percentage of faculty at many universities, especially in some departments, are not simply Democrats in terms of party affiliation, they also see themselves as “very liberal.” For instance, The Harvard Crimson reported on a 2022 faculty survey showing that over 45% of Harvard faculty identified as “liberal” and an additional 37.5% identified as “very liberal.” In this same study only sixteen percent identified as “moderate” and 1.7% as “conservative.”

In January 2026, the student newspaper, the Yale Daily News, announced the results of a study it conducted in 2025, this one using Federal Election Commission filings that listed Yale as an employer and “professor” under occupation. Of the 1,099 filings that met those two criteria, not one contribution was made to a Republican. 97.6 percent of the donations went to Democrats and 2.5 percent went to independent candidates or groups.

While these studies are Harvard and Yale specific, there can be little doubt that similar studies at many other universities would have similar results. For example, as law professor Johnathan Turley, who has written extensively on the problem of lack of faculty viewpoint diversity, pointed out in a recent column, a Georgetown study found that only nine percent of professors at the top 50 law schools identify as conservative.

And the problem is not just at so-called “elite” universities. Turley uses the example of a study that found that in six humanities departments at North Carolina State University, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 20 to 1.

There is valid critique of using political party registration data to measure faculty beliefs and biases, particularly with recent polarization and the dramatic changes in the nature of the two main parties. But looking at long-term aggregate studies of how tens of thousands of professors self-identify, Sam Abram’s HxA study of data compiled by the Higher Education Research Institute, shows that since 1995 university faculty “went from leaning left to being almost entirely on the left. Moderates declined by nearly a quarter and conservatives decreased by nearly a third.” Meanwhile the general electorate did not change materially. We do not argue here that faculty affiliations or political leanings should mirror the public’s, but decades of data clearly show the virtual disappearance of viewpoint diversity among faculty compared to the general population, with the latter self-identifying roughly equally between moderates, conservatives and liberals.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR UNIVERSITIES’ ROLE IN SOCIETY?

Viewpoint diversity among faculty may be further narrowing as conservatives and moderates tend to be older and are aging out, replaced by left-leaning faculty. In most cases, the faculty of a department has the primary role in picking new faculty, and those faculty often have a clear bias against prospective new faculty who do not think like they do.

Furthermore, the pipeline for new faculty – graduate students – often has severe roadblocks for conservatives and moderates. A highly qualified student we personally know, who recently applied to a half dozen top graduate schools in her field, found that every school required some type of diversity statement as part of the application. It was quite clear that no conservative, or even a moderate, who told the truth about his or her beliefs could submit a statement that would pass muster. The policy of requiring diversity statements was a de facto litmus test to even be considered for acceptance and has produced an active niche industry for faculty applicants on how to write such statements.

Faculty have a very special role in our society: They are the ones teaching our young people and advancing knowledge. But these key roles are almost totally filled by faculty with a one-sided view of politics and society. Unfortunately, much of the debate on this topic is currently colored by controversy surrounding the overly aggressive actions by the Trump Administration. There are a significant number of university leaders who say the problems on campuses are being grossly exaggerated and that the status quo must be defended. But regardless of one’s views about overreach by the Trump Administration, the numbers cited above and reinforced by numerous polls and studies confirm that there is a big problem with the lack of viewpoint diversity among faculty. This problem existed before Trump and will still exist long after Trump’s presidency.

It cannot be overstated how deeply embedded the problem of faculty homogeneity has become, compounded by the power that faculty exert on campuses. University presidents and boards of trustees are often reluctant, even afraid, to take faculty on. And any move to address the imbalance of faculty political views will almost certainly be attacked by faculty groups as a violation of academic freedom. But the ideological monolith that results breeds complacency at universities and thus fails the broader society in important ways.

A GREEN SHOOT – THE GROWTH OF CIVICS CENTERS

Some green shoots have appeared in the last few years that will have a positive impact on faculty diversity, even though viewpoint diversity may not be the principal goal of these initiatives. First, there is the significant increase in the number of universities that have, or are creating, centers for the study of civics. These centers will not only expand undergraduate and graduate level opportunities to study civics and related subjects; they will also create more positions for conservative and moderate faculty. Eventually these centers should have faculty of all political persuasions, and they should be encouraged to make sure that all viewpoints are presented and protected.

A recent article by Leslie Spencer outlines the growth of such civics programs. There are currently forty-five such programs as of December 2025. Thirteen are not yet fully operational, and we are aware of several others in the pipeline. HxA recently released “The New Landscape of Civics Centers in Higher Education,” a seminal study of the growth of civics centers broken down by type. It is by far the most comprehensive source of information about these centers, the issues they raise, and the opportunities they present. The study points out that the mission of these programs varies, but they often have several goals in common, one of which is: “Broadening the range of viewpoints included in teaching, research, and campus programs (typically by including more broadly conservative perspectives).”

The James Madison Program (JMP) at Princeton, created by Professor Robert P. George in 2000, is often cited as an example of how such programs could work. Indeed, Professor George has been consulted in the creation of other programs throughout the county over the past few years. As Princeton graduates who follow the James Madison Program, we know that it is a valuable addition to Princeton for many reasons, including increasing the diversity of faculty, broadening debate and championing viewpoint diversity. Notably, in recent years student interest in the JMP program has increased considerably.

While all types of such civics programs can have value, those that, like the James Madison Program at Princeton, are directly integrated into the university’s curriculum provide a particularly valuable model because the civics program faculty are members of established departments, rather than members of a department or program unto itself. Such a model can prevent a “silo” effect and can help integrate course offerings with diverse perspectives throughout the curriculum. Another important role of these programs can be to increase the pipeline of PhD candidates with diverse viewpoints, the numbers of which do not currently fulfill the need. We suggest that at some point a formal organization be created to act as a central resource for the advancement and creation of these centers. The Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education could be a model for such an organization.

A SECOND GREEN SHOOT: REFORM FROM WITHIN THE FACULTY

There is anecdotal evidence that some faculty are moving to universities where they see a more sincere commitment to viewpoint diversity – for instance, the high profile move by Professor James Hankins of Harvard to the new Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida.

But across academic departments at elite universities, faculty groups are now being created to promote open discourse, academic freedom, and intellectual diversity. Perhaps the best known of these is the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, which has more than two hundred faculty members. Other examples include the Princeton Council on Academic Freedom, Faculty for Yale, and the Columbia Academic Freedom Council.

In addition, HxA launched a major program in 2022, the HxA Campus Community Network, which has shown remarkable growth. The network extends across eighty-two university campuses and includes about 8,200 faculty, staff and students. The import of this development cannot be overstated – few such organized efforts by faculty existed only a few years ago. Individual faculty who support free speech, academic freedom and viewpoint diversity often felt isolated, not knowing which of their colleagues agreed with them. The result was a reluctance to speak out. Now, under HxA’s leadership and along with independent faculty groups, things are changing from within the faculty community.

Another significant development at the national level is the Academic Freedom Alliance. Formed in 2021, it is an alliance of hundreds of faculty members from all political persuasions “dedicated to upholding the principles of academic freedom” for faculty. It serves primarily to defend faculty who are attacked for exercising freedom of thought in their academic work and in their lives as citizens, including raising funds to support litigation when faculty members’ rights are threatened. Like the faculty groups at individual universities, AFA is strictly non-partisan. While faculty viewpoint diversity is not a primary goal of AFA, its growing national network of distinguished members can provide support in the future.

THIRD GREEN SHOOT – BANNING DIVERSITY STATEMENTS

Another green shoot is the movement to end the use of political “diversity statements” in the hiring and promotion of faculty. Mandatory diversity statements are increasingly viewed as “compelled speech” (which would be unconstitutional at public universities) and as a tool to enforce ideological conformity. Several schools have moved to drop their use, including the entire California university system (generally considered the pioneer of mandatory DEI statements), the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, MIT, and the University of Michigan. In his recent book Terms of Respect, Princeton’s President Eisgruber came out against the use of such statements in hiring and promotion. However, they are still widely used, particularly at the department level, in one form or another, including at Princeton. Furthermore, even if the requirement for such statements has been dropped, there are other ways, for example through interview questions and social media background checks, to accomplish the objective of screening prospective faculty for political views.

Stay tuned for Part 2!

Edward Yingling ‘70 and Leslie Spencer ‘79 are, respectively, Secretary and Vice-Chair of Princetonians for Free Speech.

The following is the first in a multi-part review of Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber’s recent book, Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right.

“When it comes to getting free speech right,” writes Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber in the introduction to Terms of Respect, “America’s young people deserve higher marks than they get.” This is a central contention of Eisgruber’s new book, and it is, as those young people say, big – if true.

It also begs the question twice over, in the way that is all but inevitable when we talk about higher education and speech, two goods contemporarily treated as goods of themselves, if not the highest goods. Whether Eisgruber’s contention is correct depends on what is meant by free speech, then again on what is meant by getting it right.

The debate over the former is deeply confused because two terms -- “free speech” and “the freedom of speech” – are so frequently conflated, not to mention used with a liberality bordering on recklessness throughout American culture. They are different, however, and the relationship between the two is contestable. “Free speech” is a principle; “the freedom of speech” is a legal term, protection for which is enshrined in the First Amendment. Many Americans understandably believe that the law should derive from the principle: the freedom of speech ought to encompass completely free speech, to the point that nearly any law burdening expression should be invalidated as a violation of First Amendment rights. As we will see, the constitutional law scholar Eisgruber thinks that the principle should derive its contours from the legal term—though in an idiosyncratic and revealing way.

Obviously one cannot fully proceed to assess whether universities have gotten free speech right without resolving that ambiguity. Nevertheless, for now we can applaud Eisgruber for directional correctness in setting up the analytical test for answering the follow-up. Getting free speech right is the subject of his book, and he has a standard: Putting free speech in its proper place as it “relates to equality, civility, respect, and other ideals that are essential to our civic life.” Just as nations, even those with broad commitments to protecting speech embodied in their national compacts, exist for purposes above and beyond promoting free expression, universities do not exist to foster infinitely more and freer speech without regard to its content.

This will not make Eisgruber any more popular with the free-speech-maximalist crowd, who tend to believe that First Amendment protections, maximally construed and widely applied, are appropriate guides for campus administration, and who take more than a few slings in Terms of Respect. In a chapter aiming to refute the claim that college students are snowflakes—the sarcastic term for coddled students liable to melt at the first sign of discomfort—Eisgruber dismisses the work of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression as being overbroad and generally confusing an active two-way street with unimpeded free speech for an epidemic of heckler’s vetoes and cancellations. “FIRE consistently confuses free speech with a student culture characterized by docility or quiescence,” Eisgruber writes. “When a student group is persuaded by other students to withdraw an invitation to an antisemitic speaker,” or some similar controversy sometimes categorized as a free-speech violation, “these are core exercises of free speech, not departures from it.” Drawing out the differences between the two points of view is valuable, even if Eisgruber may overstate his case. (Some things that look like persuasion are really more like intimidation, especially in ideologically monocultural institutions where it makes sense to be vigilant in sniffing out behaviors that could chill unpopular speech.)

A Return to Civility Norms

A campus that puts free speech in its proper place, robust yet subordinated to the university’s greater purposes, will account for what Eisgruber calls “civility norms.” In a refreshing rejection of the culture that denounces civility (“tone-policing”) as a tool of oppression, Eisgruber argues that campuses must articulate and defend a set of principles alongside which speech thrives and is directed towards constructive ends. Admittedly, civility norms are not just about civility in the sense of being polite. They are “social norms that facilitate cooperation, learning, and political community” even as they are not backed up with threats of institutional repercussions. What makes gossip bad but not illegal is that it violates well-warranted norms; gossip-mongers erode universities’ good functioning by increasing distrust and turning collaborators into competitors. They use less blunt instruments than rule enforcement does. Theirs is not the realm of discipline but of favoring some behaviors over others, for the good of a purposive community. Eisgruber favors the language of civility, but you might call them pro-social or institutional norms.

It is a good concept, albeit one Eisgruber appears reluctant to apply with full rhetorical force in some of his own examples. For instance, he refers to a “shameful disruption” of social scientist Charles Murray at Middlebury College in 2017. That is underselling it a bit. A mob, spurred on by the libel that Murray is a racist, physically attacked Murray and Professor Allison Stanger, leaving Stanger concussed. The New York Times covered the aftermath: 67 students faced disciplinary action; “None of the students were suspended or expelled.” That alone should refute the notion that universities and their students have a handle on the problem. If civility norms were in force, if they even factored into the university’s calculations, things would have never gotten to that point—and Eisgruber wouldn’t have to downplay the problem so egregiously.

The focus on norms and mutual respect also dodges harder cases where civility isn’t exactly the diametric opposite of the university’s constructive purpose. Take the Princeton students who held up a flag of the terrorist group Hezbollah, for example. It’s conceivable that expressions of support for such a repugnant organization is a violation of civility norms because the group is committed to wiping out a protected national-origin group, Israelis. But the mere presence of a flag does not, or at least should not, intimidate reasonable people out of going about their daily academic lives. Does that make it OK? One is hard-pressed to say so. The example reveals that sometimes the problem is not an absence of civility, even under Eisgruber’s expansive definition, but a superabundance of stupidity, or perhaps moral backwardness.

Not Everything is a Matter of Speech

Eisgruber is right to note that too much gets lumped in or lazily described as free speech issues. But as the support for terrorism example illustrates, some of those controversies are not exactly about civility norms either.

Nevertheless, the point is well-taken. Free speech is real, a real concept that matters in many circumstances, but in order for it to remain a substantively meaningful term it has to have a circumscribed definition. If it just means ‘heated campus debate’ it is not particularly meaningful.

But for civility norms to circumscribe campus free speech – more precisely, for rules and norms to define what kind of speech is worth protecting, what kind is worth censuring, and what kind is worth censoring – campus leaders first need to be consistent in distinguishing between categories and clarifying which paradigm will apply. In this respect, Terms of Respect verges on self-refutation. A recurring story, both as Princeton’s microcosm of our national controversies and a bellwether of what would come in the intervening decade, is the story of the Black Justice League’s occupation of Eisgruber’s office in 2015. The BJL wanted to remove Woodrow Wilson’s name from campus buildings. (Allow me to take this opportunity to note that, as a student at the time, I agreed with their ends, if for different reasons.)
“The protest had undeniably illiberal aspects,” writes Eisgruber of the BJL’s tactics. “Using bullhorns to shout over people is awful behavior. Some of the protestors’ demands—for example, that the university require all faculty to complete racial sensitivity training—were inconsistent with academic freedom.” Credit to Eisgruber, throughout the book, for opposing ideological litmus tests, even those masquerading as unobjectionable forms of workplace improvement. He continues: “I wish the student protestors had chosen different means, and different vocabularies, to make their points.”

And yet—and yet! “None of that changes the fact that protest was itself an exercise of free speech.”

Of course it does! That’s exactly what it does. What good is all the talk about legitimate civility norms—not to mention time, place, and manner limitations that allow the university to function in the most quotidian sense, prerequisite to all that high-minded stuff about constructive dialogues and community—if you fall right into the trap of calling this obvious violation of free speech an exercise thereof? Who is more responsible for the lack of clarity surrounding free speech rules, norms, and principles than those who wave away violations because they sympathize with the underlying cause?

Such frustrations only mount throughout the book.

What’s the Vision, What’s the Mission?

Nevertheless, Terms of Respect does get at one important truth, at least. Universities in a time of polarization and scrutiny require “a clearly articulated vision for what the university should do.” That includes asking tough questions such as “where should they invest? ... which fields matter most to the world, to students, and to the university’s mission[?]”

Those are good questions, indeed the right questions for university leaders and administrators to ask. Yet those questions demand second- and third-order questions: What is that vision, and who, if anyone, has been brave enough to articulate it? Where do universities look to derive their sense of mission, such that they can determine what matters?

That is where Eisgruber’s deeper problems begin. As the next installments in this series will discuss, Terms of Respect betrays serious blind spots in making those judgments. Part II will examine the decades-old Supreme Court case that advanced a contestable view of “the freedom of speech” under the First Amendment and set the tone for Eisgruber’s view of free speech. We will take a close look at Eisgruber’s reliance on that case and how it helps explain universities’ spotty track record—including the persistent gap between lofty principled rhetoric and hesitating lamentable inaction—on campus controversies revolving around speech. More pertinently, an analysis of the Supreme Court’s controversial decision and the role it plays in President Eisgruber’s preferred analytical frameworks begins to cast some doubt on his big, if true, claims.

Tal Fortgang ’17 is a Legal Policy Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a regular contributor to PFS and a contributing writer at The Dispatch.

By Marisa Hirschfield ’27, PFS Student Writing Fellow

On November 12, former ACLU Legal Director David Cole delivered the annual Tanner Lecture on Human Values. His talk, entitled “A Defense of Free Speech from Its Progressive Critics,” drew a crowd to the Friend Center. Cole has litigated several major First Amendment cases and currently serves as a law professor at Georgetown. A self-identified progressive, Cole explicated an argument in favor of the First Amendment.

Cole outlined the main progressive critiques of the First Amendment. “What unites these critiques is the sense that the First Amendment is too protective at the cost of another very important value in our society: equality.” He also acknowledged the progressive skepticism of free speech’s “core demand” of neutrality – the idea that the government “must be neutral as to the content and viewpoint of speech when it is regulating private speakers.”

Cole offered several rebuttals to the equality critique of free speech. He pointed out that First Amendment protections are generally distributed equally across political parties. In the past couple years, conservatives and progressives had almost identical win-loss records on First Amendment cases. There is little evidence, he explained, that conservatives disproportionately benefit from First Amendment challenges.

Some progressives contend that the rich can exercise their speech rights more fully than the indigent. “But that’s true of all the rights in the Constitution,” Cole said. “If you’re rich, you’re able to enjoy the right to travel more than if you’re poor.”

Inequality is indeed a problem, Cole suggested, but the First Amendment is not its root cause. “It is true that the nature of negative rights is that they don’t address background inequalities, and the background inequalities are at Gilded Age levels and deeply problematic. But the answer to that background inequality is not to deny the right to counsel, the right to privacy, the right to travel, the right to speech. It is to advocate, using the right to speech, for more egalitarian, redistributive measures.”

Some scholars argue that the First Amendment should not go so far as to protect hate speech or pornographic content, whose harms are vast. Cole strongly disagreed with this notion. “The hate speech and anti-porn ordinances seek to expand the authority of the state to regulate speech in the name of fighting violence. We’ve gone down that path. It led to many, many people being thrown in jail for expressing speech that the government didn’t like and justified on the ground that it would further violence.”

Tension mounted when feminist legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon took the stage. MacKinnon, the first Special Gender Adviser to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court and a current professor at Harvard Law School, offered fifteen minutes of commentary on Cole’s lecture. Her central contention: pornography is not protected speech, nor is it worth the harm it engenders.

The equality critique of free speech, which she originated, is “substantive, not formal,” and “evidence-based, not abstract.” According to MacKinnon’s theory, first outlined in her 1993 book Only Words, free speech is not actually a neutral principle. Rather, it reifies existing social structures by granting immunity to those already in power. She claimed David Cole’s lecture was “interesting” but a “total evasion” of this reality. By focusing on political neutrality, she said, Cole failed to account for other factors which dictate the outcomes of First Amendment litigation. “David Cole never asks if power, i.e. structural-social dominance, usually wins under his approach. It does.”

“He never even considers the principle of empirical hierarchy that substantive equality identifies.” She continued, “black or female supremacy, or compulsory homosexuality, do not exist. He natters on about risks and dangers of anything but neutrality and asks if we trust the government. He has nothing to say about actual realities of substantive disguised-as-neutral approaches to existing law. As if reality doesn’t matter, and has no dangers, and can’t be made to count in court.”

For MacKinnon, the state’s “neutrality” towards pornography is not only dangerous, but functionally a commitment to upholding gender hierarchies. She argued that pornography is a distinct form of speech unworthy of protection. “Pornography commodifies women’s suffering as sex,” she explained. “Her pain is not an idea. Her screams under torture are not one side of a debate.”

She doubled down on this point later in her lecture. “Coercion,” she said, “is not a discussion. Assault is not a debate. Trafficking and subordination that actually subordinates is not a viewpoint.” In her approach, pornography is more than a mere vessel for ideas. Rather, it is “integral to multiple crimes.” Bans on pornography, it then follows, should be made constitutional in order to pursue the compelling state interest of sex equality.

MacKinnon has devoted much of her career to delegitimizing pornography, which she sees as a sizable threat to women’s safety. Since she first began her advocacy, however, the pornography industry has only exploded. She voiced her disappointment that the law has not yet produced sex equality. She said of Cole’s argument: the “throughline is what can be done if nothing changes in First Amendment law. What I’m talking about here is what has been done because nothing has changed.”

The facade of neutrality, she argued, is the problem. “Where we are is where it has gotten us, and that includes not equal.”

Marisa Hirschfield ’27 studies History and Creative Writing and is a PFS Writing Fellow. She is from New York City.

The specter that the “chilling” of free speech has replaced official administrative suppression is real. I have experienced it, and if empirical evidence is not enough, then the data will corroborate it. It has been recorded in college polls, surveyed, and yet still appears to be a mystery to the people in charge, as they change their tune and beat the drum of “Free Speech.” Maybe it is time that they give up the ghost.

Case in point. It was Wednesday, November 6th, 2024, and the classroom in which I sat was a somber setting. Internally I was pleased, but I found myself surrounded by melancholy. The professor presiding over these events was Dr. Eddie Glaude, better known outside the University for his MSNBC (MS NOW) punditry. Dr. Glaude would go on to give an interview, called “The threat the second Trump term poses to Democracy” on that network on November 10th. The class (Black Intellectual Thought and The Philosophy of Race) ended early after he shared his personal feelings about the election (reflected in the interview above) that had just taken place. I welcomed it, exhausted as I was, after staying up through the night to watch my preferred candidate, Donald J. Trump, became the 47th president of the United States, sweeping all 7 swing states en route to victory.

I did not discuss this with my classmates; many were crying, some seemed legitimately scared that Trump had won. The professor did not tell me not to speak my mind; in fact, I have taken two more classes with Professor Glaude since then (Black Rage and Black Power and Malcolm, Martin, and Ella), classes where I have also kept my conservative views in check for obvious reasons. I enjoy his classes. I love history and I want to look at it from every lens. But I did not feel comfortable testing to see if my fellow classmates shared the same point of view. It was not due to lack of courage. I had served as an infantryman in Iraq. It was the fact that I knew there would be little to no civil discourse about the election. I felt that there would be no productive conversation that could possibly come out of it. My conservative values were clearly in contention with the beliefs of my professor. I just did not share the same worldview as my fellow classmates.

That was enough to find myself outside of the groupthink. I wanted to avoid being castigated as a supporter of some “White … (fill in the blanks and consider some invectives while you do so, you have heard it all before). Even though I am a minority and I have had many disadvantages in this life: I was a high school dropout, my mother died from a drug overdose, and I went to community college before I transferred to Princeton University. I did not fear the incoming administration; I welcomed it, and that would have been considered beyond the pale.

This trend has been consistent since I was part of the Freshman Scholar Institute (FSI) during the summer of 2024. A program designed to help incoming first-generation/low-income students (FLI) prepare for the rigors of Princeton, since FLI students lack many of the advantages, educational backgrounds, and cultural capital that most Princeton students possess. It’s there, at our introduction to Princeton. We read Dr. Ruha Benjamin’s “Race after Technology: Abolitionist tools for the new Jim Code” in a class titled “Ways of Knowing”. This is a Princeton professor who recently received the MacArthur “Genius” Grant , while on probation for protesting Israel, turned around and then called into question integration in the United States on Trevor Noah’s podcast . Honest discourse cannot take place if minds are not willing to be changed. I simply ask, how do you engage in exchange in the currency of ideas and begin to reason with someone who holds that view? These are the ideological leaders on campus, professors with devoted acolytes instead of basic note-taking students, and media personalities in their own right. When it comes to opposing the dogma, I, as a simple student, just say to myself… Don’t.

Joseph Gonzalez ‘28 is a History major. He is a veteran and transfer student, having served as both a Marine and Army infantryman. After he retired from the military, he attended community college and was then fortunate enough to be accepted to Princeton. He is a PFS Writing Fellow.

When Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber spoke at Harvard on November 5, 2025, he expressed what to his detractors may have sounded like an epiphany. “There’s a genuine civic crisis in America,” he said, noting how polarization and social-media amplification have made civil discourse uniquely difficult. Amid that crisis, he concluded, colleges must retain “clear time, place, and manner rules” for protest, and when protesters violate those rules, the university must refuse to negotiate. As he warned: “If you cede ground to those who break the rules … you encourage more rule-breaking, and you betray the students and scholars who depend on this university to function.”

Eisgruber is a leader among university presidents, and if his peers come to a similar recognition about the need to enforce neutral rules about speech it will be a welcome development. Over the last two years, those presidents have been reluctant to reinforce free speech protections by distinguishing clearly and consistently between protected and non-protected expression. In his recent book Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right, and promotional appearances, President Eisgruber has insisted free speech cannot mean unconditional license for disruption. Universities must welcome dissent and challenge, without allowing protest – or the aura of righteousness that often surrounds activism -- to impair the academic mission or suppress the rights of other members of the community.

This framework – distinguishing between content-based restrictions (which universities should generally avoid, though there are exceptions) and time, place, and manner restrictions (which universities must enforce) – is so regularly repeated one tires of hearing about it. If time, place, and manner rules are so important, why are we still fighting about campus disruptions? The answer is that those rules are paid lip service and then usually honored in the breach. Their enforcement is inconsistent to the point of being rendered null. When some disruptors are punished while others who engaged in coercion or violence are quietly rewarded, all the tributes to neutral rules in the world mean nothing. Free expression and campus order continue to suffer, and critics rightly start looking for more draconian ways to ensure that universities function as they are meant to.

The Ivy League has done a terrible job of sending a consistent message. Columbia University is a leader in this regard. After various demonstrations over the past two years included destruction of property, trespassing, and many other clear (and undisputed) violations of school rules, the administration handed out suspensions and even a couple of expulsions for individuals found responsible. Columbia publicly characterized the disruption as unacceptable because it threatened academic function and campus safety.

So far, so good. On paper, this looks like the kind of enforcement Eisgruber advocated. Break into a class, get kicked out of school – classroom functioning depends on it. But what about all the evidence cutting the other direction?

Were faculty members who prevented students from traversing through the unsanctioned encampment in the middle of campus helping or hurting free expression on campus? Certainly not. They were engaged in a civil rights violation – preventing people from freely traveling where they were entitled to walk.

Manan Ahmed was one such Columbia professor. He was filmed stopping a student from entering an unauthorized encampment. When the student asked why, Ahmed shrugged and said that the students inside the encampment wanted this particular student – or perhaps those like him – to stay out. His behavior was risible and exclusionary, the complete opposite of encouraging discourse and debate, arguably illegal and inarguably in service of a violation of school rules. Columbia’s history department has promoted him from Associate Professor to full Professor.

One exception proves a rule; multiple exceptions are no longer so exceptional. Citing students’ “right to protest,” then-Professor Camille Robcis also stood guard outside the Columbia encampment. Her participation only showcases how confused the culture of protest is. Even a history professor inverts the idea of time, place, and manner restrictions – standing guard to ensure the integrity of a violation of those restrictions -- in the name of the right to protest. Robcis has since been promoted to Chair of the department.

One begins to see how simply incanting truisms about putting protest in its place fails to achieve its desired effects. Our cultural veneration for protest makes it hard for administrators to condemn violations of neutral rules, and blinds them to ways in which even people claiming the mantle of free speech actually undermine it.

Similar mixed messages have come from Harvard. On October 18, 2023, a first-year Israeli student began filming demonstrators. According to police and court records (and widely circulated video), two graduate students, Ibrahim Bharmal and Elom Tettey-Tamaklo, along with others, approached him, blocked his phone camera with keffiyehs and fluorescent vests, surrounded him, and forcibly escorted him out of the protest crowd. The victim alleged that he was struck by multiple individuals.

In May 2024, Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo were charged with misdemeanor assault and battery and a Massachusetts civil-rights violation for their actions. A Boston judge later dismissed the civil-rights count and ordered them into a pretrial diversion program: anger-management classes, conflict-resolution training, and 80 hours of community service.

That alone raises serious questions about how bigotry is taken more or less seriously depending on the identities of the victim and attackers. But what happened afterward is more troubling still: Tettey-Tamaklo received a Harvard Graduate Teaching Fellow role in August 2025; Bharmal was awarded a $65,000 fellowship by the Harvard Law Review.

In other words: individuals charged with assault, on video using the cover of protest to engage in violence, were rewarded with positions of authority and influence. The very institution where crowds nod knowingly at the distinction between neutral rules and violations of free speech fails to conduct its own affairs accordingly.

Princeton has not been immune to this phenomenon. During the occupation of Clio Hall in 2024 and its immediate aftermath, President Eisgruber’s administration emphasizing order and safety while simultaneously signaling hesitancy about strict consequences. The brief occupation on April 29, 2024, began as part of a pro-Palestinian encampment demanding a range of actions including divestment, and resulted in 13 protesters being arrested and charged with criminal trespassing before the encampment later moved to Cannon Green. President Eisgruber’s initial statement decried the incident as “completely unacceptable” and highlighted the need for everyone on campus to “feel safe,” while university leadership framed the sit-in as an escalation into unlawful behavior that endangered staff and law enforcement. That rhetorical pressure on the protesters was echoed in senior administrators’ characterizations of the events and the invocation of safety concerns for staff.

At the same time, Princeton’s approach to enforcement was uneven: after Public Safety repeatedly warned that those remaining in Clio Hall past a deadline would be arrested, officers ultimately issued summonses and released the protesters rather than seeking harsher campus penalties, with the University indicating students were unlikely to face disciplinary sanctions beyond probation. As ever, the protective characterization of “protest” saved the day. Faculty and students defended the occupation as peaceful, as though rules against keeping the good order of the university were just recommendations. That view ultimately won out. Faculty members held a special meeting to recommend amnesty for the students, who do not appear to have suffered any consequences. If you violate time, place, and manner restrictions for certain reasons, the powers-that-be will come to your aid; what emerges by implication is content-based restrictions against disfavored views, who face the prospect of discipline because no one on the faculty or in the administration is sympathetic to their cause. A regime of inconsistent application violates its obligations to treat students and viewpoints equally.

This is hypocrisy, of course, but it is more than that, too. It signals that some coercive behavior and physical confrontation may be tolerable, perhaps even rewarded, if administrators analyze the facts in the light of the glowing halo of protest. Based on who has been rewarded despite (or perhaps because of) their participation in campus activism, one might even infer that the prevalent rule for doling out consequences has nothing to do with protecting speech and everything to do with which causes hold institutional favor.

There is a broader lesson here. The distinction between content-neutral time, place, and manner rules and content-based restrictions is sound, but insufficient if it is not reinforced consistently, swiftly, and decisively. The framework is only as good as its implementation.

Skeptics have good reason to believe that universities will continue to equivocate when forced to apply neutral rules to activist protest. Universities including Columbia and Harvard have long embraced protest as part of their identity: sit-ins, civil-rights marches, anti-war demonstrations. Indeed, in the same New York Times article where Prof. Robcis justified her assistance to campus rulebreakers, another professor saw exactly what was happening. In The Times’s paraphrase, astronomy professor James Applegate “thought the faculty’s participation in the campus protests was part of a romanticization of the Vietnam-era antiwar protests.” Applegate himself said it well: “These guys are trying to relive 1968,” and not for the sake of discourse. “I don’t think they have any intention of having a sensible conversation with anybody.” Sometimes it takes a scientist to remind humanities experts what they are meant to be doing.

Right now, universities simply lack the credibility to assert that they understand the importance of neutral rules. To regain that credibility, they will have to take steps to ensure they are prepared to act as decisively as their words indicate.

Campuses that do not already have transparent enforcement guidelines, with clear definitions of prohibited conduct such as harassment, assault, obstruction, intimidation, should publish them. These should include clear consequences, and clear timelines for adjudication.

Adjudication should happen promptly, through bodies that do not simply replicate ideological biases. Delays, obfuscation, and administrative foot-dragging undermine trust more than any single controversial decision.

Personnel decisions, including hiring, fellowships, promotions, and administrative posts must align with institutional conduct norms. Universities should obviously refrain from rewarding individuals who have been responsible for harassment, violence, or other activities at odds with universities’ mission of open inquiry and civil discourse. That is a bare minimum for being taken seriously on these issues.

It would also be nice if universities could clarify, for its students and faculty alike, that free speech protections are not only about protest. They are about creating an environment of learning, where all are equally free to study, debate, and move freely. Harassment, intimidation, and coercion, even when conducted under the banner of protest, is not protected dissent but a violation of crucial community norms.

We are in broken-record territory now, but it bears repeating: institutions must rededicate themselves to genuinely pluralistic discourse. They must resist pressure, and subdue their own impulse, to treat protest as the purpose of campus life or as institution-sanctioned theater. Campus activism deserves to be taken seriously: It can be where real ideas are hashed out, or where certain ideologies assert their privileged status. Only consistent leadership can ensure that the former does not yield to the latter. Not only in written policies but in actions, personnel choices, and disciplinary decisions.

High-minded lines about the importance of neutral rules may receive applause and plaudits for being tough, reasonable, and fair on matters of free speech. And they are a good start, an important principle, and a simple way to communicate what behavior is an is not acceptable. But defraying our civic crisis depends not on the elegance of the framework but whether the stewards of our institutions have the courage and integrity to apply it fairly to all.

Tal Fortgang ’17 is a legal policy fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a regular contributor to PFS and contributing writer at The Dispatch.

At Princetonians for Free Speech, doing this work the right way has never been simple. True nonpartisanship is costly. But it’s also essential.

The cost of being genuinely nonpartisan

At PFS, there is no such thing as free speech for some but not for others. We are committed to defending the widest possible freedom of speech for everyone. We try hard to uphold our core principles of nonpartisanship and viewpoint diversity. We count a wide range among our ranks: our board consists of all political persuasions and ideologies; and our friends and advisors are national leaders in objective campus free speech advocacy.

Why Princeton needs an independent voice

Princeton’s own policies promise robust free expression, but the lived reality on campus frequently falls short.

That is where PFS comes in. PFS stands as the only independent organization of alumni and friends dedicated to holding Princeton University accountable on free speech, academic freedom, and viewpoint diversity.

Why your support is crucial now

Princeton should be a place where ideas battle it out and people remain individuals—not group identities with approved talking points. Princeton thrives only when faculty and students are free to ask hard questions, follow evidence wherever it leads, and argue vigorously. Preserving that environment requires a persistent, independent presence pushing back. That’s PFS.

Donate to PFS

Your support keeps Princeton a place where ideas can truly compete.

Princetonians for Free Speech has just released its 2025 Annual Report, and the story it tells is one of dramatic expansion, renewed purpose, and growing impact. If you want a snapshot of how far this organization has come and where it’s headed, this year’s report delivers.

A Breakout Year for PFS

Over the past 12 months, PFS has strengthened its foundation and broadened its reach in ways that would have seemed ambitious just a year ago. Some key milestones:

• Hired our first full-time, paid Executive Director

• Expanded our audience from 1,400 to more than 16,000 subscribers

• Increased engagement with Princeton students, faculty, and administrators

• Built deeper partnerships with major national free speech organizations such as FIRE, Heterodox Academy, and others

These achievements reflect a simple truth: the demand for principled, independent advocacy for free expression at Princeton is growing, and PFS is rising to meet it.

Read the Annual Report

Why This Matters Now

The PFS fiscal year runs from October through September, and we trust that this report arrives at the perfect moment to understand our organization’s trajectory as you consider your year-end charitable giving.

Princeton alumni are not spectators in the life of the University. You are essential stakeholders. Your engagement and willingness to speak up can help shape Princeton’s future for the better.

How You Can Help

If you believe in restoring a culture of open inquiry at Princeton, one of the simplest ways to contribute is by spreading the word. Share the Annual Report with fellow alumni or post it on social media. Awareness fuels momentum.

PFS can’t do this work alone. But with a growing community behind it, the organization is better positioned than ever to defend free speech and academic freedom on campus.

Thank you for your support, and please reach out anytime with questions about our work or ways to get involved.

Donate now

The conversation may be over, but its impact is just beginning.

Princetonians for Free Speech is pleased to announce that the full recording of “Turning the Tide: A Candid Conversation with Dr. Robert George” is now available for viewing. This timely discussion, originally held on October 16, brought together two distinguished Princeton voices to address one of the most urgent issues facing universities today: the health of free expression on campus.

Dr. Robert George, director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, joined moderator Ed Yingling ’70, co-founder of Princetonians for Free Speech, for an unflinching look at the current campus climate. Together, they explored the growing challenges to open inquiry, the cultural pressures shaping student and faculty behavior, and why universities must reaffirm their commitment to free speech, civil discourse, and intellectual diversity.

Whether you were unable to attend the live webinar or wish to revisit the key themes and exchanges, we invite you to watch the recording and share it with others committed to strengthening free speech on campus.

Watch the full recording

PFS guided, encouraged, and amplified their voices – as well as publicly called for swift university action against the perpetrators – showing that free speech is a cause worth defending.

Today is Giving Tuesday—a day when your generosity can protect students who stand up for free speech at Princeton. Be the difference for courageous students like Max and Danielle, and help us hold the Princeton administration accountable to the values it promotes.

DONATE

PFS was born four years ago when two graduates, Stuart Taylor Jr. ’70 and Ed Yingling ’70, saw Princeton drifting from its mission and felt compelled to act. Today, PFS stands as the only independent, alumni-led organization holding Princeton University accountable for upholding free expression.

Please help us advance this cause. Your first-time gift can make a real difference:

• $500 feeds approx. 50 Princeton students at an event advancing open dialogue

• $1,000 funds one student intern for one semester to report on campus issues

• $1,500+ helps us sponsor student events that foster respectful, principled discourse

Today, we ask you to stand with us. Will you join us in restoring a culture of free speech and academic freedom at Princeton? Invest in courageous campus change this Giving Tuesday.

With gratitude,

PFS co-founders

We invite you to join us to keep the momentum going. In the last year, PFS has:

• Stood with students whose free speech rights were suppressed, empowered them to publicly highlight the Princeton administration’s failures in addressing these disruptive events, and publicly called for swift action against the perpetrators.

• Advocated to move Princeton higher up in FIRE’s free speech rankings through direct policy recommendations to Princeton leadership

• Grown a powerful network—with more than 16,000 email subscribers, 900+ published articles, and extensive outreach to the university.

As Giving Tuesday approaches, your investment will amplify our progress and help us keep Princeton a leader in free inquiry. We’d be grateful for your support.

DONATE

Please consider making your contribution early, before next week’s inbox rush.​ Your first gift will help protect students, strengthen open inquiry, and ensure Princeton remains a place where ideas can be debated, not silenced.

Advance the cause—invest in Princetonians for Free Speech this Giving Tuesday.

With gratitude,

Ed Yingling ‘70 & Stuart Taylor ‘70
PFS co-founders