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By Stuart Taylor, Jr. and Edward L. Yingling, Co-founders of Princetonians for Free Speech
President Eisgruber’s letter to the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA) seeks, unpersuasively, to drape in the mantle of free speech and academic freedom his refusal to delete from Princeton’s website his administration’s smears of Professor Joshua Katz as a racist. Eisgruber does so, insulting the AFA in the process (and the hundreds of distinguished faculty members from all over the country who make up the AFA), by saying the AFA is asking him to “censor” the attack on Katz in the University’s “To Be Known and Heard” presentation.
Eisgruber flings variants of the word “censor” at the AFA a remarkable seven times in his three-page letter. But seven repetitions of a transparently bogus accusation do not make it true. Eisgruber tries to redefine the issue as involving the efforts of administrators acting in their individual capacities. He seeks desperately to hide the fact that what the AFA wants the University to take down from its official website is an attack on Katz that Eisgruber subordinates, in their official capacities, – that is, the University itself -- put on the website more than a year ago.
For the reasons stated below, anyone viewing the website would think, correctly, it is from the University. The entire entering class, which was shown the presentation during orientation, would certainly have thought that this was Princeton’s official message, and that the attacks on Katz did not come from “University staff members enjoy[ing] free speech rights” as individuals, as Eisgruber claims, but rather from all the departments and offices listed on it.
Consider these facts:
--The presentation says explicitly that it was sponsored by two Princeton entities, the Carl A. Fields Center and the Office of Wintersession and Campus Engagement, and was co-sponsored by seven other offices and departments, including the Office of the Vice Provost for Institutional Equity and Diversity and the Office of the Vice President for Campus Life.
--It was introduced with great fanfare to the entire Princeton community in January 2021 by the leaders of ten different departments and offices.
--It was placed on the official Princeton website in January 2021 by Princeton officials and remains there to this day.
--In March 2021 there was another presentation of it to the Princeton community by the Carl A. Fields Center and the Office of Wintersession and Campus Engagement.
--In August 2021 it was shown to the entire entering class as a central part of orientation, where it was also the subject of breakout sessions run by students.
---It contains the trademark of Princeton University and states that it is copyrighted by the "Trustees of Princeton University." Under Princeton's official guidelines, "Use of the University’s … trademarks symbolizes authority to conduct such activities on behalf of the institution.”
Nowhere in the website presentation are individuals involved in its production named. It is clear that it is being presented by multiple departments and offices of the University, not by individuals. We say, again, that anyone looking at it would think it was being presented by the University, and we know that any court would find it is a product of the University itself.
In that regard, Princeton’s leadership should look at a very recent court decision in a high-profile case involving Oberlin College. Indeed, the continuing roles of Princeton University and its administrators in repeating and amplifying the smears of Katz as a racist sound very much like the roles of Oberlin College administrators in aiding and abetting a few years ago defamatory claims by students that Gibson’s Bakery, near the campus, had a history of “racial profiling and discrimination.” Those actions by the college led to the March 31, 2022 decision by a unanimous three-judge panel of the Ohio Court of Appeals, in Gibson’s Bakery v. Oberlin College, upholding a lower court’s award to the bakery of $25 million in damages and $6.2 million in attorney’s fees for libel, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and intentional interference with a business relationship. In the Oberlin case, it was largely the action of one individual administrator, the dean of students, that led to the judgement against Oberlin. At Princeton it is worse: It involves multiple departments and offices, and the trademark and copyright of the University are on the website.
As the AFA made explicit in its letter, nobody is proposing to prevent Princeton faculty members or administrators from attacking anyone they choose, as Eisgruber implies the AFA is proposing. They will remain free to do so in their personal capacities on websites, in op-eds, in letters to the editor, in speeches, in broadcast appearances, in class, on picket lines, or in other ways. But it is a misuse of Princeton University’s website and other Princeton resources to amplify attacks by University offices on one of its own professors.
In addition, “To Be Known and Heard” is utterly one-sided. Its discussion of Katz is all smear. The Eisgruber administration offered neither Katz nor anyone else an opportunity to respond. By putting one-sided attacks on the website in the first place and keeping them there for more than a year without allowing any response defending Katz, Eisgruber’s administration has made the University complicit in the attacks.
So let us summarize the situation at Princeton resulting from its administrators’ actions and the Eisgruber letter to the AFA. As things stand, if a student or faculty member says or writes something that offends the orthodoxy at Princeton – and even if Eisgruber, disingenuously, says it is protected speech -- multiple departments of the university are free to launch an attack on that person before the entire Princeton community, an attack so vicious in its name-calling that the student or faculty member may be forced to leave Princeton. If asked, Eisgruber will validate the attack, claiming he is defending free speech, even though that attack, like those shouting down a speaker, in fact kills free speech on campus. And the clear and overwhelming message is that if you say what you think at Princeton, you can be ruined.
All this has now been put before the Princeton Board of Trustees by strong letters from Princetonians for Free Speech, the AFA, and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). Meanwhile, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has also assailed Princeton’s attack on free speech. Thus, the three most respected national campus free speech groups have strongly criticized Princeton in this case. It is unprecedented for all three to criticize the same university in this manner.
FIGHT FOR FREE SPEECH!
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Prestigious universities and leading state schools across the nation have embraced viewpoint diversity by building new institutions—civic education centers and the like—which are simultaneously on yet apart from the campus. Harvard has quietly taken a different tack. Over the past several months, the university’s top brass have been asking major donors for $10 million gifts to endow new professorships under the banner of “viewpoint diversity.” Provost John Manning, a scholar often associated with the conservative legal movement, has led the effort, aiming to place between 20 and 30 new faculty across schools and departments rather than siloed in a standalone institute.
Why Harvard would need additional funding for this is an open question, but putting that partly aside, we ought to ask what to make of this unique initiative. It stands a chance of being either the most consequential reform attempt in elite higher education this decade, or a sophisticated piece of reputation management serving double duty as a clever fundraiser. Which one it turns out to be depends on whether Harvard has thought carefully about what viewpoint diversity means, and whether it intends to execute in line with a considered answer.
Are some schools better at fostering intellectual diversity than others? The study clearly reveals that the most elite universities are among those with the least ideological diversity. Princeton is ranked 13 out of the 55 in the study, with its faculty slightly more ideologically diverse than, for instance, UC Berkeley, Brown, Dartmouth and Harvard, and slightly less diverse than Stanford, Cornell, UCLA or Georgetown.
There is little doubt that this study provides another opening for politicians and critics to attack higher education, perhaps in unfair ways. Princeton could help neutralize this by joining those reform-minded university leaders in the now burgeoning effort to regain the public’s trust in higher education.
A federal judge ruled last month that the National Endowment for the Humanities’ (NEH) termination of more than 1,400 grants in April 2025 had violated the Constitution on several counts. Princeton researchers await the effects of the verdict, which ordered that the NEH must rescind its termination notices.
