Claudine Gay’s Lessons for Princeton

A s Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and other elite universities have lately languished in unwanted public attention, Princeton and its president, Christopher Eisgruber, have largely avoided the spotlight. While Penn president Liz Magill was forced from office soon after a disastrous congressional hearing on antisemitism on December 5 — with Harvard’s Claudine Gay following her out the door just last week — Eisgruber remains, and Princeton has emerged more or less unscathed.

But the past several years at Princeton have been troubled — indeed, political controversies have plagued the university for nearly my entire time as a student. There are a few lessons the university’s leaders can learn from the Gay affair: failures at Harvard that led to her downfall, and how similar failures at Princeton can be avoided and rectified.

Ditch “institutional restraint” for comprehensive institutional neutrality.

The Gay debacle has made clear that for Princeton and other nonsectarian universities, any posture short of comprehensive institutional neutrality all but invites hypocrisy and double standards to flourish. One of the principal criticisms that Gay and other university leaders faced was that their initial responses to antisemitism and Hamas’s brutal attacks on October 7 did not reflect the same urgency, gravity, and forcefulness with which they confronted a range of issues in recent memory: from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade and the racial unrest of 2020. Some, including Gay, reached for the mantle of protecting free speech to justify their tepid reactions; others cited a need for universities to remain neutral. But as I and many others have noted, the sudden discovery of the virtues of neutrality now reeks of a cynical insincerity when invoked by university leaders whose history on these issues is nothing short of abysmal.

As president, Eisgruber has rejected efforts to adopt institutional neutrality, set forth in the University of Chicago’s acclaimed Kalven Report, as official university policy for academic and administrative units to follow. Instead, he has promoted something called “institutional restraint,” by which the taking of sides on normative questions disputed by reasonable people of goodwill is not excluded and the university’s supposed “ethical commitment[s]” to certain viewpoints must be taken into consideration. In practice, this has allowed Princeton programs to take explicitly partisan stances on hotly contested issues such as abortion.

Such breaches of institutional neutrality create ideological in-groups and out-groups, a division that has simply no place at a nonsectarian university that professes broad commitments to spirited truth-seeking and open discourse. And, as recent events have shown, failure to publicly commit to a posture of neutrality leaves administrators vulnerable to charges of bias and hypocrisy when politically uncomfortable issues arise and the prospect of partisan statement-issuing becomes less appealing.

Avoid partisan polemicizing when representing (or seeming to represent) the university.

Recent months have seen Eisgruber test the waters of targeted ideological polemics and, at times, blatant political advocacy. Surrounded by (and wearing) official university regalia at his speech at Princeton’s commencement ceremony last year, he baselessly attacked skeptics of socially progressive ideology as opponents of free speech. Several months later, his administration forced all first-year students to attend a conversation between himself and the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, purportedly to encourage them to embrace freedom of expression. Instead, the ACLU head raged against “heteronormativity” and “the patriarchy that’s just bludgeoning people’s gender identities” while fallaciously rooting the importance of free speech in its ability to advance his progressive agenda.

I recognize that Eisgruber’s behavior on these occasions likely reflected his true beliefs. I respect his right to hold them — and to profess them publicly, both as an eminent scholar and as a private citizen. But when the university’s president becomes a partisan figure and turns his office into a bully pulpit for his preferred political causes, the damages caused are severe and any potential upsides hard to see. Gay was an intensely political administrator. As dean of Harvard’s faculty of arts and sciences, she worked tirelessly to embed ideologically biased DEI mores into many aspects of campus life.

The role of Princeton’s president, to quote former Harvard president Drew Faust, is not to be the university’s “denouncer-in-chief.” So Eisgruber should resist the temptation to engage in partisan polemics and ideological virtue-signaling when representing the university — and when good-faith observers might get that impression.

Acknowledge that DEI has gone too far — and work to rein it in.

Another thing the Gay saga has demonstrated is the dangerous contradictions associated with what until now has been universities’ full-throated embrace of DEI ideology. Burgeoning bureaucracies charged with enforcing speech codes, the policing of language and thought, and “bias reporting,” all purportedly in the service of inclusion, utterly failed to prevent vile Jew-hatred from taking hold on their campuses. But this was easily foreseeable. As Steven Pinker, Samuel Abrams, and others have noted, DEI ideology was bound to fail. The system’s worst excesses — the identitarian sorting of people into classes of oppressor and victim, the fostering of ideological conformity and groupthink, and the antagonism toward any criticism or dissent — were laid bare when a group of people (Jews and Israelis) lazily cast as “oppressors” in the DEI power hierarchy became the ones targeted by hatred and prejudice.

Now, as former Harvard Medical School dean Jeffrey Flier has outlined, universities have essentially two options. One would be to expand DEI practices and curtail speech further in response to failures after October 7. Another would be to recognize DEI’s concrete limitations and work to rein it in. This is an opportune moment for Harvard, Princeton, and other universities to acknowledge that speech-chilling DEI policies are incompatible with the truth-seeking missions of the institutions— their raisons d’être — and to reevaluate DEI’s place on campus accordingly. During my time as a student, Eisgruber has consistently argued that faithfulness to DEI principles is inextricably linked with support for free speech — and that “Princeton’s dedication to excellence requires sustained commitments” to DEI. In light of recent events, he should reconsider that position. It’s time to acknowledge that DEI has gone too far and support efforts to rein in divisive practices that undermine campus culture and the intellectual life of the university.

Encourage a campus culture of viewpoint diversity and freethinking.

The surest guarantor of a healthy campus free-speech climate, where both pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian advocates feel free to advance their ideas, is robust viewpoint diversity among faculty and students. Viewpoint diversity breaks ideological monopolies, undermines cultures of conformism and groupthink, and provides the ideal conditions for free speech and open discourse to thrive. Without viewpoint diversity — that is, when a dominant perspective, ideology, belief, or worldview becomes campus orthodoxy — dissenting voices will inevitably become marginalized and everyone, from students seeking good grades and social approbation to junior faculty up for tenure, will face intense pressure to conform.

Gay failed to recognize viewpoint diversity as something valuable and worth pursuing. Eisgruber would do well not to make the same mistake. The facts on the ground are frightening — like students at Harvard, Princeton students overwhelmingly share the same moral, political, and ideological commitments. At Harvard, less than 3 percent of faculty describe themselves as any degree of conservative; I have no doubt that similarly minuscule numbers persist at Princeton. This ideological homogeneity is a problem whose consequences will not be limited to a few isolated campus incidents. While Eisgruber frequently asserts the value of conceptions of diversity rooted in immutable characteristics (e.g., racial diversity), he hardly ever acknowledges the paramount importance of viewpoint diversity. But encouragement of viewpoint diversity is a must if Princeton is in the future to avoid the structures of illiberalism and outbursts of blind prejudice and hatred seen at Harvard and elsewhere.

The time is ripe for reforms at Princeton. If Eisgruber would like Princeton to avoid crises similar to those that have wreaked havoc at Harvard, the Gay saga provides several valuable lessons that he would be wise to heed.