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By Danielle Shapiro
Princeton’s President Christopher Eisgruber has positioned himself as perhaps the leading academic defender against the Trump administration’s crackdown on universities, citing the importance of universities and academic freedom, as well as his belief that the administration has greatly overreached in its attacks, especially against Harvard.
Yet his ability to lead credibly this defense was challenged in April by an event at Princeton featuring former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who is considered one of the favorites to succeed Benjamin Netanyahu next year. Demonstrators inside McCosh Hall shouted Bennett down and a fire alarm was pulled, apparently by a protester, ending the event. Outside, Jewish attendees were called “inbred swine,” among other slurs, and told to “go back to Europe.” President Eisgruber apologized to Bennett and university officials promised a serious investigation. A number of observers noted the importance of Princeton enforcing its rules in this situation. I attended the April 7 event, and I volunteered to speak as a witness to university investigators, with whom I met twice for over two hours.
I was therefore shocked when on May 19 I received the results of that investigation in a letter from a university official: No students would be disciplined for their premeditated disruption and blatant antisemitism. As a result, seniors who participated in breaking the rules have now graduated without consequence. What’s more, no meaningful actions would be taken to preclude the same type of disruption and antisemitism from occurring in the future. For all his public statements about how good things are at Princeton, Eisgruber’s system failed its first test.
Isaac Bernstein and Justus Wilhoit
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States Ketanji Brown Jackson sat down for an hour-long conversation with Professor Deborah Pearlstein in front of a full house at Richardson Auditorium on Wednesday. Nominated to the Supreme Court in 2022, she discussed her historic path to the nation’s highest court, the challenges of public life, and the lessons that have guided her career.
Princetonians for Free Speech
Excerpt: Dear Princeton Class of ’29:
This letter comes to you from the alumni organization, Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS). We have existed since you started high school four years ago. We were founded in response to a growing concern that Princeton has drifted from its core mission of the pursuit of knowledge and truth, and towards a narrow activism that threatens free speech, academic freedom, and viewpoint diversity.
Paul Du Quenoy
Tablet Magazine
Excerpt: Endlessly self-congratulatory, insufferably pedantic, irritatingly repetitive, and self-referential nearly to the point of parody, Eisgruber argues that our system of higher education is, with rare and regrettable exceptions, successfully fulfilling its primary functions. In his opinion, his industry deserves “high marks” for protecting free speech rather than criticism for devaluing it. Academia’s travails indicate that our campuses are merely hapless victims of a larger “civic crisis” besetting American society, not a cause of it.
Endowed with a strong tradition of free expression, in Eisgruber’s strikingly ahistorical view, America has only recently succumbed to political divisions exacerbated by rampant partisanship and pernicious social media use.
