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By Jamie Saxon, Office of Communications, Princeton University
(photo attribution: Princeton University)
Editor's Note: PFS commends Princeton and President Eisgruber for this year's orientation program on free speech. From our founding in 2020, PFS has argued that orientation should always include a robust discussion of free speech. In 2021, it didn't — the only mention of free speech that year was a faculty member's attack on the concept. Every year since, President Eisgruber has personally led a session on the subject. Two Princeton students, Abigail Anthony '23 and Myles McKnight '23, led the push to make that happen, and Myles gave an outstanding speech at the very first session. We're proud that both Abigail and Myles now serve on the PFS board.
President Christopher L. Eisgruber introduced transfer and first-year students to the University’s expansive commitment to academic freedom and free expression during his fifth annual Orientation session on the topic.
At Tuesday’s event, he was joined for a wide-ranging conversation by Summer Lopez *08, co-chief executive officer of PEN America, an organization known as a worldwide champion for free expression. Both shared personal insights about engaging energetically across opposing viewpoints in a deeply polarized society.
“Research and education require not only that we speak, but that we listen to and learn from one another,” Eisgruber told the students. “They require that we respect and benefit from the wide variety of experiences and viewpoints represented on this campus.”
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Princeton’s austerity program is already well underway. The University calls it a transition “from growth to focus,” but it has meant 5–7 percent cuts to departmental budgets, more than 3 percent of staff positions disappearing through layoffs and unfilled vacancies, and increased employee contributions for benefits such as medical insurance. Fewer people and resources are left to support a recently expanding student body, and more reductions are coming.
In his February letter announcing this “focus,” University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 emphasized Princeton’s financial strength, but pointed to lower expected long-term endowment returns, from 10.2 to 8.0 percent annually, as forcing the University’s response.
In 1985, the 17th president of Princeton University William G. Bowen GS ’58 delivered an opening exercises address that described universities as standing “at a slight angle to the world.” He noted how it was, in some ways, a historical aberration that universities in the U.S. could maintain their dissent from authority, and broadcast and house unorthodox — even outrageous, or broadly offensive — ideas.
Bowen defended this independence from political control as enhancing the quality of universities’ teaching and research. So has current University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83, who has posited the idea that “great benefit” comes from allowing universities to continue operating “at a slight angle to the world.”
Since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, top colleges and universities have faced an onslaught of federal attacks: slashing grant money for research, pressuring schools to end diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, cracking down on visas for international students, and ending graduate program sponsorship for active duty military at top schools. However, some Ivy League universities — the center of many of Trump’s ongoing attacks — have decreased messaging on the potential consequences of these federal directives.
“One thing that’s been clear is that a lot of universities have felt that publicity would bring no advantage or do them no good,” history professor David Bell GS ’91, who has been outspoken about federal actions against universities, said in an interview with The Daily Princetonian.
