Letter to the Editor: Eisgruber’s administration has quietly eviscerated the free speech rule

May 18, 2023 1 min read

By Edward Yingling and Stuart Taylor, Jr.
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: In its May 2 article entitled “A decade later: a split legacy for Eisgruber,” the Daily Princetonian erred in saying that “Edward Yingling ’70 and Stuart Taylor ’70, co-founders of Princetonians for Free Speech” (PFS) argued that Eisgruber’s decision to fire then-professor Joshua Katz would “destroy Princeton’s acclaimed free speech rule” — making the free speech rule one that would protect only a small subset of the speech that the rule’s language and intent clearly do protect.

In fact, this was a Yingling-Taylor criticism not of President Eisgruber, but of a December 7, 2021 letter-ruling by Vice Provost for Institutional Equity and Diversity Michele Minter, which removes Rule 1.1.3’s protection from almost all instances of harassment for speech. . . . Eisgruber’s response to Whittington, and his similar responses to criticisms by Professor of Mathematics Sergiu Klainerman and others, plus the never-revoked Minter letter-ruling, mean that the Eisgruber administration has quietly eviscerated the free speech rule that Eisgruber claims to support.”

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