How Princeton’s President Christopher Eisgruber Misstates the University’s Relationship to the Nation

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.