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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.
The U.S. Department of Defense will end sponsorship for graduate students at Princeton and other Ivy League institutions beginning in the 2026–27 academic year, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ’03 announced in a video on social media Friday.
Hegseth said the Pentagon would stop funding active military students’ attendance in graduate programs, fellowships, and certificate programs at dozens of “elite” universities, which he characterized as incompatible with military training priorities.
In a series of February memos, the University informed faculty and non-union staff of raise cuts and benefit reductions for the coming fiscal year, with a decrease in personnel also on the horizon.
The adjustments to employee pay and benefits came shortly after the annual State of the University letter from University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 reported that the University would be tightening its budget primarily due to declining long-term endowment return expectations and continued uncertainty over federal funding. Eisgruber discussed some of the raise cuts at his annual Council of the Princeton University Community town hall on Feb. 9.
In recent weeks, there has been much discussion over Harvard’s proposed grading policy, which would cap A grades at 20 percent in classes across the board. The policy also stipulates that, instead of using grade point averages for awards and prizes, Harvard would use a percentile rank. We asked our writers to share their reflections on grading at Princeton, the proposed Harvard policy, and what it all means for higher education.
