Christopher Eisgruber is the President of Princeton and seems to be the Ivy League leader who is stepping up to resist moves made by the Trump administration at other leading colleges and universities. He wrote a piece about it for the Atlantic and recently gave an interview about it to the NY Times. I want to be fair to President Eisgruber who does acknowledge that some of the antisemitism he’s seen on his campus lately has disturbed him.
Eisgruber: So look, let me give you examples, both from my own campus and off my own campus. So on my own campus, I would say that both during my time as a student and a faculty member and then as president, I had never heard an antisemitic remark directed to someone else or to me until last year. I did hear antisemitic remarks, including a couple that were directed my way over the past year.
Adams: In person, somebody actually said something to you?
Eisgruber: Somebody sent me something by email. And there was another one that was left for me as a message. I’ll just put it that way.
And there’s more:
Those are, in my view, marginal instances on our campus, but they’re unacceptable instances. If I look more broadly at what’s going on, these are not things that we’ve experienced on Princeton’s campus, but there are reports of students being physically harassed or targeted on campuses.
There are classes that have been interrupted. There are students who have trouble getting to their classes. There were remarks made by people, students, and academics in the wake of the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks that were utterly unacceptable.
So there was one Cornell faculty member, for example, who described the event as exhilarating to him.
So he doesn’t have his head completely in the sand here but he does characterize all of this as “marginal instances.” But compare that to a report published earlier this week by the Free Press. It’s a firsthand account of what life has been like on Princeton’s campus since the 10/7 attack on Israel.
Last night at Princeton, Jewish students were called “inbred swine,” told to “go back to Europe,” and taunted with gestures of the Hamas triangle by masked protesters. Sadly, slurs like these have become commonplace at anti-Israel protests at my college in the months since Hamas invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, but university president Christopher Eisgruber insists he is “proud of the campus climate at Princeton.”
What would it take for him to question that belief?
The latest outrage was sparked by a visit from former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett. More than 200 students had turned up to hear Bennett talk about his time as prime minister from 2021 to 2022 and the current government under Benjamin Netanyahu post–October 7…
Around 7 p.m. on Monday, anti-Israel protesters gathered at the campus’s flagship building, Nassau Hall, and then marched, while banging drums and shouting into microphones, toward McCosh Hall, where Bennett started giving his remarks at 7:30 p.m. I settled into a seat to hear him talk. About 20 minutes into his speech, around 25 students stood up in unison and shouted at Bennett, “War criminal!” “We charge you with genocide!” and other exclamations before walking out en masse.
Here’s what that looked like.
Disruptors at @Princeton shouted at, pulled a fire alarm on, and walked out of former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s speech yesterday. We’re starting to sound like a broken record, but event disruptions are not free expression! pic.twitter.com/m7dYg3fvVv
— FIRE (@TheFIREorg) April 8, 2025
A few minutes after that disruption, they pulled a fire alarm, forcing everyone to evacuate.
As they filed out, students had to walk past a large group of around 100 protesters who were shouting various things at them (as mentioned in the excerpt above).
My point is this. President Eisgruber is adopting the now-widespread idea (on the left) that the Trump administration isn’t really reacting to antisemitism on campus so much as using it to pursue its own agenda. But I think in trying to make that case he and others are downplaying just how extreme the pro-Hamas activists on campus have become. These are people who support violence, who support the 10/7 attack and who support the now-deceased mastermind of the attack. And as seen above, these people are prepared to take extreme action to force their position on others.
None of that seems marginal to me.
Finally, in the same NY Times interview, President Eisgruber said this:
So it is important for universities to have vigorous contestation about the truth and to make it possible for people of diverse viewpoints to express their opinions and to flourish on the campus. So we need to be a place where conservatives feel welcome…
And I do think universities can do better about that. That is, when we’re talking about free speech, we have to talk about the importance of having multiple viewpoints heard.
He’s saying the right things but clearly the hardcore contingent of activists which he is downplaying do not believe those things. By minimizing their extremism, I think he is probably missing how bad things on campus actually are. It’s only marginal if you choose to accept the heckler’s veto and avoid the topic entirely. But if you engage, it’s extremism in your face, shouting you down or shutting you down. That’s not how universities are supposed to work.
