Getting Campus Speech Right

President Christopher Eisgruber ’83’s new book about free speech and dissent on college campuses is hitting bookstores this fall, shortly ahead of the 10th anniversary of the student takeover of his office in Nassau Hall to demand racial justice, and it comes just as President Donald Trump and conservative critics assail universities as woke bastions of progressive intolerance and antisemitism that must reform or forfeit federal support. The timing is coincidental, Eisgruber says. But in Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right, and in a recent interview with PAW, Eisgruber uses his sometimes besieged perch between the fiery young activists to his left and the culturally aggrieved cadres on his right to sketch the contours of a healthy free speech environment that can accommodate both.

“Higher education in America is under attack, including through arguments that weaponize specious claims about free speech to undermine support for universities, academic freedom, and the quest to make campuses fully welcoming to students of all backgrounds,” Eisgruber writes. He remains optimistic against the threat. Despite widely reported, but relatively few, instances of so-called mob censorship on campuses in recent years, when protesters shut down addresses by controversial speakers, he writes, free speech “is in better shape on campuses than in the rest of society, and it’s stronger now in important respects than it was at colleges or elsewhere during the recent, more tranquil past.”

President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 speaks with students who spent more than 30 hours occupying his office in November 2015 protesting about racial justice issues, including Woodrow Wilson 1879’s legacy at the University.

Mary Hui ’17

In an interview with PAW, Eisgruber speaks while seated at the long wooden table in his office where, on Nov. 18, 2015, student protesters led by a student group called the Black Justice League pulled out laptops, played music, and did homework, while others camped on the floor. Photos of the episode show Eisgruber leaning against his desk, talking with the protesters. Dozens had arrived during his scheduled office hours, so “they’re not really in violation of University rules at that point,” he recalls in the interview. Many eventually left, but 17 or so hunkered down for more than 30 hours. The students’ demands included removal of Woodrow Wilson 1879’s name from campus buildings, along with a frank acknowledgement of Wilson’s racist legacy, such as his effort as president of the nation to resegregate federal offices.

As a constitutional scholar who at the time of the takeover had been president scarcely two years, Eisgruber confesses he still had something to learn about rambunctious free speech in practice. “I would kind of acknowledge three mistakes that I made in the course of that,” he says.

The mistakes included agreeing to an element of the protesters’ demands while they were still in the building. The University promised to undertake a serious reconsideration of Wilson’s legacy, without guaranteeing the outcome. This limited concession while the students remained in violation of University trespass rules could have given the impression that the way to get something from Princeton was to break regulations, Eisgruber says. “You’ve got to end the protest first, and you’ve got to enforce the rules,” he says. Since then, the University has clarified its rules and emphasized that disciplinary consequences will be strictly imposed if, say, students continue to occupy a restricted space after being warned. According to Eisgruber, a key element of a healthy free speech environment is having clear rules that are reliably implemented regardless of the content of the speech.

Another miscalculation was to expect that ceasing Princeton’s reflexively hagiographical treatment of Wilson — while also recognizing his significant role in making Princeton a great university but not removing his name — would be enough. Instead, the protest energy only increased. The third mistake was initially failing to “see the full moral gravity of Wilson’s wrongs,” Eisgruber says, and only belatedly, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder nearly five years after the takeover of his office, realizing that, in effect, the students were right: The name of “somebody who had taken the United States backwards on the issue of race” should not grace the School of Public and International Affairs. “That issue was wrenching for me when we [with the Board of Trustees] made that decision in 2020” to rename the school, Eisgruber says. “And I understand why some alumni will always disagree with that decision.”

Despite the missteps and violations, the Black Justice League protest helps illustrate a central theme of Terms of Respect. It’s the idea that the full exercise of free speech depends upon upholding another hallowed American value: equality. The purpose of a commitment to free speech is not to protect objectionable speech — although it does do that, Eisgruber writes. It is to ensure that all points of view have a chance to be heard, so that members of a community, or a university, or a democracy can learn from each other, get closer to the truth of complicated public issues, and achieve breakthroughs in knowledge. Yet for all to be heard, all members of the community must be afforded equal value and respect. That is why, in Eisgruber’s view, there can be no free speech without equality, and no equality without free speech. “If some people don’t feel like they can speak up, or if some people are not respected, we are not achieving our speech ideals,” Eisgruber says in the interview.

That’s a threatening idea for some who try to turn the ideal of free speech against the ideal of equality. In 2023, Eisgruber devoted his Commencement address to free expression and inclusivity. He voiced support for LGBTQ+ students expressing their identities. Afterward, he reports in the book, conservative critics accused him of interfering with free speech because opponents of gay rights might be afraid to speak up. “Their phony declamations used the words ‘free speech,’ but they wanted something else entirely — namely, to make college campuses comfortable places for those who oppose gay rights or real racial and sexual equality,” he writes.

In the case of the Black Justice League protest, “there were some people who said that the students’ behavior was somehow threatening to free speech,” Eisgruber tells PAW. Instead, after the protest, “we had a heck of a lot more speech about things that we were not talking about before.” The students were saying, in essence, that Wilson’s place of honor worked against “creating the kind of respectful environment that we need in order to be able to have the conversations that make this place work. So that is a point about speech and civility … and how equality and speech come together.”

To negotiate the inevitable tensions between free speech and equality, and between people who hold passionately opposing views, Eisgruber advocates for what he calls “civility rules.” These “enable people with different identities and viewpoints to interact respectfully and constructively,” he writes. They include the time, place, and manner rules that govern protests at Princeton, such as the provision against using bullhorns or other disruptions to drown out speakers, and the ban on overnight encampments on campus. They also include social norms that use speech to challenge views that some in the community find unacceptable. “Shouting down a speaker is almost always wrong, but stigmatizing certain statements as shameful is sometimes not only permissible but appropriate to create the kinds of deliberative environments that colleges — and democracies — require,” Eisgruber writes.

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Student activists have accused Eisgruber’s administration in the past of tone-policing, or urging respectful activist speech. Yes indeed, Eisgruber says. He doesn’t apologize for promoting civility. “Disrespectful discourse must be permissible, but we are sunk if it becomes normal,” he writes.

Campus protesters also chafe at some of the rules governing the manner of protests and the discipline students can face. At Reunions in May, pro-Palestinian demonstrators clustered along one section of the P-rade route, chanting and holding signs that said, “Service of What Humanity?” and “Princeton Funds Genocide and You Write the Check.” One protester, a member of the Class of 2025 who declined to give her name, lauded Eisgruber for standing up to the Trump administration over academic freedom but criticized his handling of the pro-Palestinian protests.

Eisgruber maintains in the book and in a column last year in The Daily Princetonian that regulating the manner of speech is not equivalent to censoring speech. The University protects speech that members of the community may find “to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed,” according to Princeton’s Principles of General Conduct. “Many free speech controversies are mistakenly presented as instances of impermissible censorship when they are in fact entirely legitimate arguments about the content and role of civility rules,” he writes in the book.

A protest of a speech by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett in April pushed the limits. In addition to a rally outside McCosh Hall, protesters inside McCosh 10, including at least one non-Princeton person, disrupted Bennett’s address, and someone pulled a fire alarm, to which Bennett and his supporters responded by singing, before ending the event. Eisgruber apologized to Bennett, and the non-Princeton protester was barred from campus, but the University couldn’t determine who pulled the fire alarm. Student protesters who loudly chanted as they quickly left McCosh 10 were found not to have violated the rules, while the University was unable to identify individuals who hurled antisemitic slurs outside the building after the event.

As he surveys the free speech landscape on American college campuses and examines egregious and exemplary cases at other institutions, Eisgruber also touches on a greatest hits of Princeton’s free speech controversies and kerfuffles — from President Robert Goheen ’40 *48 signing a petition against the Vietnam War in 1970; to the “Hickel Heckle,” also in 1970, when students shouted down a speech by Interior Secretary Walter Hickel.

Eisgruber also revisits more episodes from his tenure, including: the objections to professor emeritus Lawrence Rosen saying a notorious racial slur in a lecture for his course, Cultural Freedoms: Hate Speech, Blasphemy, and Pornography, in 2018; and Professor Joshua Katz’s dismissal in 2022 for interfering in a previous investigation into a consensual relationship he had with a student years earlier, but which Katz and his supporters called a reprisal for a 2020 column in which he described the Black Justice League as a “local terrorist organization” and skewered a faculty letter that had urged steps to fight “anti-Blackness.”

Eisgruber’s deadline for his manuscript was in January — too soon to reflect on the Trump administration’s assault on universities’ research funding and academic freedom. Yet parts of the book foresee debates that have erupted — including a recent piece in The Atlantic that labeled Eisgruber a leader of the “resistance” of college presidents against Trump, while the presidents of Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis are said to make up a rival group of “reformists,” who supposedly think universities need to address charges of campus politicization. Eisgruber tells PAW that calling him a leader of a resistance is “nonsense” and that the university presidents agree on more than they disagree on. Yet his book presciently addresses key elements of the discussion, such as the degree to which, at a politically polarized time, universities should pursue “institutional neutrality” as opposed to “institutional restraint” in their statements on public affairs. He writes about the fragile pact that exists between universities and society, and the challenge of demonstrating a commitment to unbiased scholarship and teaching while also standing up for a university’s values.

A university “is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic,” Eisgruber approvingly quotes a University of Chicago faculty report from 1967, another politically polarized time. “My view is, while I can speak out on some things that are important issues, I shouldn’t be pro or con a particular presidential administration,” Eisgruber tells PAW. “What I can be is pro-academic freedom. I can be pro-free speech and pro-equality.” He insists that “American universities are as strong or better than they’ve ever been,” and “diversity and inclusion, which are under attack in a lot of places, are critical to our missions and are critical to the excellence that we have.”

“Chris Eisgruber is the most important voice in higher education at this crucial moment,” says Heather Gerken ’91, former dean of Yale Law School.

To help universities nurture a “deliberative community” where free speech, equality, and robust discourse can flourish among people with diverse experiences and beliefs, Eisgruber offers nine suggestions in the book drawn from the examples and history he analyzes. Steps he’s taken at Princeton include instituting an annual discussion about free speech at freshman orientation. At the free speech assembly this fall, he says, “part of what I said to the students is, in this politically polarized time, we all have to be thinking about, how do we make sure that people with political views different from our own are able to speak up … . Every progressive on this campus should want this to be a place where conservative students feel able to speak up and be respected. And every conservative student should want this to be a place where progressives can speak up and feel respected.”

For as much grief as Eisgruber may get from student protesters — and perhaps vice versa — it’s clear from the book that he sees campus dissenters as figures who, across generations, have made Princeton a better place. He rejects caricatures of students as trying to shield themselves from ideas or speech they can’t handle. “When students aggressively demand that they be protected from slights and offenses, they are often asserting power, not demonstrating weakness,” he writes.

“Even when their views are naïve or ill-considered, protesters are among the minority of people willing to take risks and devote time and energy to the pursuit of a better world,” he continues. Still, he adds, “when they violate rules and disrupt university activities, they need to be held accountable.”

David Montgomery ’83 is a freelance journalist and former staff writer for The Washington Post Magazine.