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David Montgomery '83
Princeton Alumni Weekly
Excerpt: President Christopher Eisgruber ’83’s new book about free speech and dissent on college campuses is hitting bookstores this fall, shortly ahead of the 10th anniversary of the student takeover of his office in Nassau Hall to demand racial justice, and it comes just as President Donald Trump and conservative critics assail universities as woke bastions of progressive intolerance and antisemitism that must reform or forfeit federal support.
In a recent interview with PAW, Eisgruber uses his sometimes besieged perch between the fiery young activists to his left and the culturally aggrieved cadres on his right to sketch the contours of a healthy free speech environment that can accommodate both.
By Marisa Hirschfield ‘27
On September 17th, Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen delivered the annual Constitution Day Lecture in McCosh 50. The lecture, co-hosted by the James Madison Program and the Program in Law and Normative Thinking, was entitled “Our Civil Rights Revolution.” Professor Gersen discussed the history of affirmative action and the evolving meaning of civil rights.
Christopher L. Eisgruber
The Atlantic
Excerpt: A few weeks ago, I welcomed Princeton’s newly arrived undergraduates to campus with what has become an annual tradition: a presidential lecture on the importance of free speech and civil discussion. This semester, I will host small seminars with first-year and transfer students to impress upon them my view that free speech is essential to the research and teaching mission of American universities.
Bill Hewitt
National Review
Excerpt: September 30 marks the publication of a new book by Princeton University president Christopher Eisgruber, Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right. For those who plan to read the book that ostensibly defends the culture of free speech on campuses, it is worth reviewing the author’s abysmal record on protecting free expression.
Angela Smith and Leslie Spencer
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: In a recent Opinion piece, Siyeon Lee and Charlie Yale critiqued a letter from Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS) to entering first-year students that appeared recently in The Princeton Tory, the University’s leading conservative political magazine. In their piece, Lee and Yale questioned why we chose to publish in “a journal that only appeals to a select few on this campus,” and accused us of holding “selective views of free speech.”
To be clear: there is no such thing as free speech for some but not for others. Other than speech that is unprotected by First Amendment law, PFS is committed to defending the widest possible freedom of speech and open discourse for everyone, no matter how unpopular or offensive the point of view.
By Tal Fortgang ‘17
With students returning to campus for the start of the new academic year, and demonstrations from radical groups sure to crop up on quads once again, one question universities face is how to balance robust academic freedom with universities’ competing interests. Schools cannot live on academic freedom alone; the functioning of a university requires standards, rules, and regulations to allow students and faculty to flourish. Yet university leadership, especially at elite schools where abstract thinking is prized and questions are regularly left unanswered as matters of mere intellectual exercise, has not even begun to articulate a principled way of weighing these matters. They can begin to do so by considering an unlikely – and unwitting – source of wisdom: Princeton professor Lorgia García Peña’s recent address to the Socialism 2025 conference, on using one’s academic perch to dismantle the academy.
