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University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 presented his annual State of the University letter and answered questions about various student concerns at the first 2026 meeting of the Council of the Princeton University Community (CPUC).
Eisgruber spent the majority of his presentation reviewing the University’s strategic shift in endowment spending priorities amid diminishing long-term endowment return projections. This includes a 10-year estimated $11.3 billion deficit in endowment growth relative to previous growth projections, according to the Princeton University Investment Company (PRINCO).
In his 2026 “State of the University” letter sent to students on Monday, University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 previewed major upcoming changes to University finances. The letter, titled “From Growth to Focus,” described a move away from expansion, citing long-term economic factors.
The changes will come in addition to the 5–7 percent departmental budget cuts over the last year, alongside the hiring freeze instituted last March. “The long-term endowment trends described in this memorandum are likely to require more targeted, and in some cases deeper, reductions over a multiyear period,” Eisgruber wrote. “The change that I am describing … goes beyond the pace of construction. It will affect everyone on campus.”
Ten years ago, Princeton University’s Board of Trustees published a strategic framework to guide the institution into the future. As I prepared this annual letter to the community—the tenth in a series that began in 2017—I reread the framework and the mission statement included in it.
The strategic framework and the values expressed in it have shaped a period of remarkable, mission-driven growth. As I describe in the paragraphs that follow, those values will be equally crucial in the months and years to come, when changed political and economic circumstances require that we transition from a period of exceptional growth to one defined by steadfast focus on core priorities.
Hugh E. Brennan
October 12, 2023
It is amusing how our best and brightest are willing to subvert the law in the interest of their ideology. I might say in service of their religion. Princeton undergraduate admissions are a limited and valuable commodity virtually guaranteeing entry to the elite of American society. The idea that immutable characteristics of race or ethnicity enter into the equation is subversive of republican citizenship. Justice Harlan’s courageous statement “our constitution is color-blind” in his famous Plessy v Ferguson dissent is, now in our increasingly diverse population, more important as the lodestar of our jurisprudence than ever. That American children of East and South Asian descent should be forced through an increasingly narrowed gate is as atrocious as when there were “too many” Jews. Somehow, a Korean grocer’s kid is tasked with making up for slavery and Jim Crow.
That the public has caught on to this vicious racial gerrymandering scheme is evident in the rapid increase in college applicants claiming indigenous or Hispanic identities. Should DNA tests be required along with essays?
Reflect that our great universities join the antebellum South, Nazi Germany, and apartheid South Africa in their obsession with race. Not very good company to keep.