Princeton Freezes Most Hiring as Eisgruber Warns of Federal Attacks on Higher Ed

On the same day that Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 published a rebuke of President Donald Trump’s actions against Columbia in The Atlantic, University administrators emailed to faculty and staff with plans to “exercise holistic spending restraint” in a time of uncertain federal funding.

Provost Jennifer Rexford ’91 and Executive Vice President Katie Callow-Wright announced Wednesday that most early-stage faculty searches would be postponed, and annual raises for employees would return to pre-pandemic levels. In recent weeks, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, and MIT have announced hiring freezes, and Johns Hopkins said it was laying off more than 200 employees. 

Earlier in the day, in The Atlantic, Eisgruber argued that the government’s “successful collaboration” with universities “depended on its respect for academic freedom,” allowing scholars to conduct independent research while supported by government funds. 

But the reliance on government funding meant that if the government ever abandoned academic freedom, Eisgruber argued, “it could bully universities by threatening to withdraw funding unless they changed their curricula, research programs, and personnel decisions.”

Wednesday’s announcement from the University indicates that Princeton is acting under the assumption that the federal government’s punitive measures will not stop with Columbia — or the University of Pennsylvania, which learned Wednesday it was losing more than $100 million in federal grants. 

Rexford and Callow-Wright also said the University will be “considering changes to scope and schedule” for early-stage capital projects and warned that “more serious actions” could be necessary, pointing to the possibility of an endowment tax.

“If government officials think that stifling such criticism is politically acceptable and legally permissible,” Eisgruber wrote, “some people in authority will inevitably yield to the temptation to do so.”