Kian Petlin
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 spoke out against the Trump administration’s higher education compact in a LinkedIn post on Oct. 10, calling the proposed agreement on university funding “a dangerous step in the wrong direction.”
He also thanked the presidents of the Association of American Universities (AAU), and the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) for opposing the compact, which was sent to nine universities, including Brown, Dartmouth, and the University of Pennsylvania in early October.
I really think you are pushing a very dangerous agenda. The Trump administration is 100% for the Republic of America. The previous administration as well as the Obama administration are more for socialism, in my day people that felt that way and talked that way were called communist. I think you need to reread history and really think about the stuff you’re pushing out there. This is a Christian country based on Christian values.
The shooting at Brown is deeply tragic. But it is not the time for mere thoughts and prayers. It hasn’t been for decades. As another Ivy League university, this moment calls for Princeton to stand in solidarity with the victims of the Brown shooting by pushing for significant reform to fight violence. University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 is uniquely equipped as the past chair and active board member of the Association of American Universities (AAU) — an organization with a precedent of condemning gun violence — to lobby for gun reform policies on the national and state level.
A discussion about Fizz and the role of social media in our discourse took place at Princeton University on December 3rd, 2025, hosted by the Princeton Open Campus Coalition (POCC) and funded by Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS), While the discussion has been lauded as an example of what can come about through open and civil exchange of ideas, several questions remain worth considering. What is the place of anonymous speech in our society? Should someone take responsibility for the things they say? Or has our public discourse been hollowed out by social media to the point where online commentary should be considered performative?
Tal Fortgang ‘17
When Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber spoke at Harvard on November 5, 2025, he expressed what to his detractors may have sounded like an epiphany. “There’s a genuine civic crisis in America,” he said, noting how polarization and social-media amplification have made civil discourse uniquely difficult. Amid that crisis, he concluded, colleges must retain “clear time, place, and manner rules” for protest, and when protesters violate those rules, the university must refuse to negotiate. As he warned: “If you cede ground to those who break the rules … you encourage more rule-breaking, and you betray the students and scholars who depend on this university to function.”
Russell Gold
October 24, 2025
Universities should absolutely be allowed to decide what to teach – as long as they accept no taxpayer dollars.