YouSaid · the spoken record

Chris Eisgruber

lines on the record: 49
first: 2025-10-02
most recent: 2025-10-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I am glad I took the job. I still love my job. I love the people I work with. I love my faculty. I love my students and my alumni. And I think these institutions matter so much, which is why I wrote the book.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our commitment to our democracy depends on finding ways to find the good actors on the other side to recognize that there are people who may agree fundamentally on what it means to be an American on some basic values that we share and whom we can talk to. So I realize that's an optimistic position. It may sound optimistic to people on both sides of this dispute right now, but that's what democracy is all about. And we got to remember, we've been through some tough times before where we've had to have tough conversations. The civil rights movement in the 1960s and what happened on college campuses in the early 70s, that was no picnic. And finding ways to bring ourselves back to a shared civic space where the robust argument can happen is really important.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's human, and then managed to connect and discuss the political. And I don't mean we can all just be polite to one another and say, hey, it's okay if you have views that I find repugnant. That's not okay, but it doesn't mean that we need to insult one another either.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We need to find ways that state strong propositions and values in a way that is constructive and that people who disagree can hear what it is we're saying. I continue to believe, and maybe it comes out of that heritage, that we just discussed, that there are a lot of things that we as Americans hold in common and we should be able to understand one another. And the reason that I do care about civility, and I understand and respect the critique that you just mentioned, is I think we need to be able to talk to one another across differences. So we've got this tremendously tempting kind of social media environment right now where we can all publish things and say things and feel good about it. And sometimes it just feels good to say things that are angry. But I think sometimes we need to be able to cultivate the skills that allow us to sit down with somebody who's got an identity different from our own and have a conversation with them where we connect at a level.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“had come and what her story was, I knew that her family and my father had both come here because of the freedom that to get away and to get here more than just to get away, but to get here because of the freedoms this country offers and with that comes a certain kind of responsibility.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's my pain. Yeah, this discovery for me of my Jewish identity and my mother's Jewish identity has been very meaningful to me in my life. It's put me in touch with a group of cousins about whom I feel very warmly. And it's also given me kind of a different set of cultural resources to draw upon as I try to understand what's happening in my life and my world. So I do think about this. I think about what happened in Germany and how rapidly democratic norms can devolve has, you know, I think about the obligation that all of us have to speak up. And I'm not sure why because, again, some of this I didn't know, but certainly I grew up with the sense that one of the things that you have to do as a democratic citizen is to speak up and make your views known, and it's part of our responsibilities and obligations. I think it may have been in part because I knew, even though I didn't know why my mother”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Harder, I would say. You should give them a little backbone. He was an independent minded student. He's an independent minded leader.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I love that. Hakeem Jeffries was one of my students back when I taught contracts at NYU. So I look with pride at what he's doing.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, I would not say the hardest point in it, Kara, was for me before I made the decision as I was thinking about publishing that article in the Atlantic. People talk about metaphorically loosened sleep. I lost sleep literally for a couple of nights because I knew that it wasn't just a risk to me. It was a risk to my campus. But once I published it, what I found was someone, to my surprise, it liberated my campus to speak up and say, we're looking for this. And again, it may not be everybody on the campus, but having that strong sense of support has really helped as we go forward”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think there's outside pressure, and one of the things I've said in the book is that if you stand up for not only free speech, but for equality and diversity and do that in higher education, you will be subject to attacks. So I know that that's a risk. What I would say, Kara, is my own community, has been really strong. That doesn't mean unanimous, but it means really strong behind me. That means our trustees. It means our faculty. It means graduate student. It means undergraduates. You know, and when I spoke out in the spring, I had a couple of undergraduates chasing me across.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we are paying for more students coming out of low income backgrounds here at Princeton now too. I want to be a leader, but we're never going to catch the University of California system in terms of the numbers. Those numbers are not making a difference to whether or not the University of California system is under attack. So I want to keep those two issues separate. Yeah, there are good reasons why I think great universities should be thinking about reaching more students because that makes a difference to our country and it makes a difference in student lives. Is that going to solve the political issues we're facing? I don't think so.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, I think in-person education matters. I think it matters at the K-12 level. I think it matters at the undergraduate and graduate level. So I do think you have to bring people to our campus. And I think there are important reasons why Princeton uses and should use that endowment, not only for undergraduate education, which you and I have been focusing on, but for doctoral education and to support research, right? That's critical to what we do. And we do the education and research at a very high level. That's important too. So that constrains how much we can expand and how rapidly we can expand. I think Kara, look, you know, there's a lot in this right now. If you take a look, I think you noted earlier in the program, University of California is one of the universities that's under attack right now. Those are large campuses and astonishingly good campuses, perhaps the best public.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Focused on military veterans and community college students. So on that point, you know, I agree basically with Scott Galloway. Yeah, these places are special. We should be expanding them. We should continue to expand them. And we should make a real commitment to bringing in low-income students.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, look, I think we should continue to grow. And in fact, one of the main reasons I took the job at Princeton was I wanted to see us expand in two different ways. One was just to grow the student body. So that was a commitment I made when I came into office. We've expanded by 10% and we've landed in a way that would enable us to continue expanding beyond that. How we expanded is also important because I thought one of the most important things to do was increase the representation of low and middle income students on our campus. So we've taken over a period that began when I was the provost in Shirley Tillman, also a big champion for low-income students, was the president into my presidency. We've gone from 7% PEL students, which was unacceptable in my view, that PEL students are the students from lowest income families in America. That number is now 25% in the entering class, 17% plus our first gen students. We've added a transfer program.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, roughly. Yes, roughly. No, that's wrong. We have five thousand seven hundred undergraduates and 2,800 doctoral students.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the effect of the US economy will be significant, it will affect our prosperity, it will affect our health, the ability to develop new cures. It will affect our security. Because let's take something like quantum science, which the Trump administration identifies as a major priority for the United States. Quantum science is relevant to computing capacity. It's relevant to things like cryptography. We don't want to lose to China. When it comes to quantum science, but we need the government to be investing alongside universities like ours, which are ready to do that if the United States is going to be preeminent in that field.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we have more capacity to stand strong on the basis of the values that we have. But, Kara, I want to be clear about this. At Princeton and everywhere else, if the federal government pulls back from the 70-year compact that the government has had with research universities, public and private across administrations, Democratic and Republican, it will reduce the level of excellent research and teaching that gets done in the United States. There's no way we or anybody else can escape from that.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are ways in which I think our financial model is stronger. I mean, just to name one, we don't have a medical school at Princeton. Medical schools are really important to America and the world, obviously, but a lot of medical school faculty are paid on soft money. That is, they're paid on government grants. We have a model that pays our faculty from an endowment that is very strong and enables us to support our faculty, our students, and a lot of our physical plant. But we like everybody else are at risk from what's going on. There are steps that we might take, and we are taking now to get more efficient and leaner in what we do. We're going to go through a round of budget cuts. We're going to pull back from some of the projects that we had envisioned, and that will allow us, we hope, to continue despite the headwinds to achieve very high levels of excellence.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it depends on who you talk to in the administration, but I certainly think there are people in the Trump administration who recognize the importance of doing what they call it.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm talking to them about why I think the continued recruitment of talent, continued investment in universities is in their interest as well as in our attitude.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. I agree 100% with what you just said, Kara, so far we have continued to be able to bring in talent at both the faculty and the student level. But when you have extraordinary people who are thinking about coming to America and contributing to our country in ways that immigrants have done throughout our history, if they perceive hostility or high barriers, or if there are just costs that they can't meet, of course that is going to make them think differently about the options that they confront and the choices that they have. I want to say I regard this as something that all Americans, again, of whatever political party should care about and should recognize it as something that has historically been a strength for America and should be into the future. So my responsibility is to speak up for universities and their values and not to take sides about the administration as distinguished from its policies. And so what I'm talking to the administration.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A bright red line for me. There has to be the capacity to argue about critical questions and gender and how we understand gender and sexuality are critical questions. They're contested questions within our society. And something is going deeply wrong when one position is being imposed on what faculty members can say in the classroom or in their scholarship or when students are being prohibited from saying things. And I'd go a step further than that, Kara. I would say we need to make sure that all of our students are LGBTQ students, our trans students, are able to flourish on our campuses. That's part of our commitment to being a place that's excellent where people from all backgrounds are able to thrive.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And self reliant around free speech. And ideally, we're all willing to deal with tough questions and we're willing to brush off things that we find to be insulting or potentially hurtful and do our best to get the conversation back onto the merits. But I think we see people reacting differently from that and understandably on both sides of the aisle. You were talking about some of the responses to the comments made about Charlie Kirk, where there was a very sensitive counter reaction from people when some were saying arguably offensive things that's happened on the left. It's happened on the right. It's happened earlier in our history. It's happened now what we've got to do is push forward into brave conversations.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the first thing I want to say is I'm proud of the efforts that American universities have made around diversity and inclusivity. They have made American universities better because to be the best we can be, we need to be getting talent from all sectors of society and we need to be allowing that talent to flourish on this campus. A little over 50 years ago, the university I lead wasn't admitting women to a student body undergraduate or graduate. It wasn't appointing women to its faculty. We are much stronger right now because we are more diverse. And that is true across the board with regard to our diversity effort. Doesn't mean everything done in the name of diversity has been a smart thing to do, but our efforts around diversity are essential to our campuses, to our pursuit of excellence, and to this country. With regard to victimization, frankly, I find that a bit of a red herring. I agree on one critical point, as I said earlier. We should all be courageous.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Honestly, I don't think that was an accurate article. And the all but is an interesting. It was an off-the-record meeting. So I can't speak to that. But what I can say is every university has to be very clear about what its mission is. And it has to know exactly what the values are, how it understands academic freedom. questions about what kind of cooperation is okay and what is not are going to be sensitive to those issues about principle”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not because of pressure. Those two things were contemporaneous, but look, you know, when we were talking about something like anti-Semitism on our campuses or making sure that a wide array of viewpoints are represented on the campus or that people are able to speak up on the campus, we should all want that. And the fact that they get caught up in some of this pressure which doesn't respect due process or which invades academic freedom is not a reason to reject good suggestions when they're made or to act on things the university was planning to do anyway.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are valid concessions. Look, I'll give you a couple of different kind of varieties of them. There's one issue that's going on right now more broadly about how it is we calculate what are called indirect costs. That is, how do you calculate the costs of facilities, shared staff, equipment, and other things that are used on federal grants? Those formulas are very complicated. And there are concessions that can be made there around purely economic and financial matters and room for discussion about how you negotiate that. You mentioned that Harvard made some changes. My understanding as I read what Harvard has had to say about those changes is they felt there were things where they could do better. They wanted to do better. And these were the right things for the institution.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there are one of the things that I feel very profoundly as a university president and what has been an extraordinarily difficult time to be a university president is that we are faced with choices that are just heartbreaking and agonizing. So you get university presidents who are in a position where they're either making concessions that maybe the wrong”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Academic freedom, how they admit students, how they organize academic units. So I support Harvard and what they've done in taking the strong stand that they have done and UCLA and taking the strong stand to date, I think it is important that those of us who lead colleges and universities stand up for these principles that are essential to our institutions.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the risk remains. And we continue to be in a crisis where fundamental aspects of universities are under threat and at stake. The basic argument that I made in the Atlantic was, first of all, that universities depend on a commitment to academic freedom that it enables them to decide what it is they're going to teach, how it is they're going to teach it, whom they hire, and whom they're going to admit its students. And secondly, the United States has benefited tremendously from a 70-year kind of compact between the federal government and our research universities where the government has supported research that's in the interests of the American people, enhances our security, prosperity, and health, and has done that while respecting our academic freedom. And now that compact is being turned into a kind of leverd, a pressure universities to make concessions around things that are related to activities.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That political state of affairs to others, but our challenge in the United States throughout our history has been to find ways to come together across differences. So from my standpoint, and maybe it's an act of heroic optimism under the circumstances, but I think it's a necessary act for an educator, I want to be able to have constructive conversations across differences, even with people with whom I profoundly disagree. And I think as a university president, that has to be our mission. But you're right, when we think about what do we confront when we're dealing with students and trying to get them to have those conversations, people are coming into our colleges and universities now having been raised and having experienced their political life almost entirely in this atmosphere of effective polarization. That does produce closed-mindedness. And it means we have to work harder to open minds up.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think if I can say this right, as long as we're dedicated and you can make a decision to move out of the country, I suppose and say I'm leaving that.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, look, I think there's a lot of partisanship. My friend and colleague Julian Zalazar in the Princeton History Department has a book out called In Defense of Partisanship where he talks about how partisanship and the division into competing parties is, you know, an ordinary part of American life and a functional part of our politics. But he agrees we're in a period right now of what he calls hyperpartisanship, which is damaging what other political scientists say is that we're in a position of what they call effective polarization, effective meaning in terms of our motions or how we feel so that we don't just disagree about positions. We really dislike or even hate the people on the other side. And Kara, that is clearly a bad thing. That is dangerous and we should want to get out of it.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me start just by saying, Jason, thank you for your comments and thank you for the question. What I would say about what the book tries to do is to describe some conditions that give rise to our current politics that we are confronting. And I don't take a position pro or con on polarization. I certainly don't say we should just get rid of polarization. I don't think we can. We really are divided as a country right now. And your characterization of the division that we face is in many ways in line with the way Americans on both sides of the aisle think about our political divisions. So about half of Republicans and half of Democrats think that the other side is morally evil. That makes it hard to have conversations. It makes it hard for people to be transparent about what their own political viewpoints are. It may or may not be a justifiable view. It's what we've got to live with. And the question that we face as colleges and universities.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Brandeis recognizes, look, whatever, it's not necessarily the case that what is ever popular in a kind of free for all, unregulated marketplace is good. He says we want speech to do certain kinds of things. We want it to produce a more deliberative kind of governance. We want better opinions rather than worse opinions. And it's not just about the more popular. We want to develop people's faculties. And he says getting there requires people to be courageous and self-reliant. If you just want to be comfortable or happy with whatever ideas are around, you're not going to have that discomfort cara that you talked about earlier when you were describing what you say to your class. Brandeis recognizes that. So I think it's a much better way of understanding what free speech is all about.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, Oliver Wendell Holmes is the source of this metaphor that most Americans, I think, know and resonate to about a marketplace of ideas. And it's one idea of what free speech is all about. Let's just put the ideas out there and in some sense whatever is most popular will get the most support. Lots can go wrong in marketplaces. We know that. And the most popular ideas are not necessarily the truest or best ideas. What I like about Louis Brandeis, in his opinion, he was one of the contemporaries of Holmes and is often lumped together with him, but he's a great civil rights lawyer and in a case called Whitney versus California. He writes a concurring opinion in 1927 where he both recognizes the goals of free speech differently and he talks about what they presuppose in terms of our culture and about the goals, he says free speech is allowing us”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, one of the things we need to do is teach the techniques basically of slow thinking and deliberate argument. There's a lot in our culture that just accelerates everything into faster and faster responses. When we talk here to our students about free speech, we also talk about the importance of civil discussion and we talk about the importance of treating people respectfully and not only speaking up, but listening to and learning from others. And that happens in a lot of places, right? There are some that get attention, but the meat and potatoes of it goes on in every seminar room where we want every faculty member to be modeling that kind of a process for students. We want it to be happening in their extracurricular activities. We want it to be happening through the Office of Religious Life and in the residential colleges. And again, there are times when things go wrong, but I think on our campus and on both college campuses, there's a lot of good being done in teaching people how”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, online media change a lot of things for all of us, for college students, but for all of us, right? All of a sudden people have this almost magical power that we couldn't have imagined when we were young. You get an idea and you can publish it immediately. And on top of that, there's an incentive to say something provocative because there's so many people talking and you get more attention if you say something provocative. And then sometimes the things you say in one arena get transferred into a different reader. So your employer knows about something that you thought you were saying just to your friend group. That makes things a lot more complicated.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You may not. Okay. All right. Well, I certainly do as a university president. What I say in the book is there are lots of things that I could say where I still might be protected by my academic tenure. I continue to be a professor at the university, but I want to be able to stay as president. And for most people, not you and not a lot of my tenured faculty, for most people, that's true about their jobs. But we should watch.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So let me start with the cancel culture point. It is really important that we allow people to be able to express themselves and that we recognize that something is going wrong when if somebody says something in an offhand way, they're paying for that with their career, with their jobs. Now, look, both you and certainly I have obligations in terms of what kinds of things we can say and what kinds of things we can't say.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, these lists are very damaging to free speech on college campuses. And right now, if you're a university president or a dean of the faculty at a major research university, you're dealing with things like this. Faculty members, principally, but not exclusively those on the left, getting incoming hate speech or harassment for things that they've said in their scholarship. And we have to take steps in order to protect them. We've also seen, obviously, universities pressured sometimes to take disciplinary action or fire faculty members on the basis of what it is that they've said. And sometimes, I regret to say we've seen some colleges or universities, including recently, react rather precipitously. One of the things I say in the book is that you've got to let those storms die down and you've got to respect due process and you've got to respect academic freedom for the faculty.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it was argued with kids. He was arguing provocatively. At times, he was saying things that were very controversial. The idea was that you're going to have these debates. And you can agree or disagree. You can object vehemently. Some people find what he was saying unacceptable. And there are a number of very provocative things that he said. But that's consistent with the idea that Brennan laid out in Times versus Sullivan, and it's consistent with what we now protect on university campuses. I do want to add this, Carol. One other theme in the book, as you know, is that it's really important for us to be supporting equality and inclusivity on these campuses. We want conversations where students of all backgrounds, and I'm talking about political backgrounds, I'm talking about ethnic backgrounds. I'm talking about socioeconomic backgrounds, feel able to participate fully in the conversation. So you've got to care about free speech and you've got to care about inclusivity.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and what the Supreme Court did around it. In the 1950s and up until the 1960s, for example, the University of California had a rule that prohibited even speakers like Harold Lasky or Adlai Stevenson from appearing as speakers on the campus and prevented protests from taking place on the college campus. Nowadays, we think about controversial speakers and protest as being an essential part of campus life. That's a legacy of New York Times versus Sullivan, and that changed conception of free speech.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, I think that the sentence that you just quoted, Kara, is the beginning of the current era of free speech in the United States. And I do think what Charlie Kirk was doing on college campuses is consistent with that vision of a vigorous, uninhibited discourse in the country that it's sometimes vehement and sometimes caustic times versus Sullivan comes out of a suit against the New York Times when it published an advertisement defending student civil rights protests in the South and trying to raise money for that. And the Supreme Court, which had often been kind of wavering at best in its defense of free speech in prior decades, came out with that tremendously strong opinion that protects journalists, but also articulated that idea from Justice Brennan about an uninhibited discourse. And I think we often don't appreciate how much things changed after that opinion and because of the civil rights movement.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely right. You know, I speak to our students at the beginning of every academic year, speak to the incoming undergraduates. And I quote to them from Louis Brandeis' great opinion in Whitney versus California back in 1927, where he said that our First Amendment presupposes courageous self-reliant people. If you're going to have conversations on a college campus about hard topics, they are going to be uncomfortable because we should want a circumstance where somebody challenges you when you say something. That's a sign of respect, in my opinion.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our commitment is to allow students and faculty to invite the speakers that they want to hear. And then we try to find ways to make sure that they can appear here securely on the campus. And I think that's what most universities are doing. And with public universities, they have an obligation under the First Amendment.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Responsibility of a university is to hold students accountable and others accountable if they break in rules, the responsibility is to make sure you've got a clear set of rules that allow controversial speakers to appear on the campus. They should also, by the way, allow protesters to speak up and respond, but without disrupting the presentation, and they should enable listeners who want to hear somebody speak to participate and attend their events. And if a university gets it wrong, which we all do at some point, then you've got to up your game. You've got to make clear that you recognize that and you've got to do better in the future.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think universities do that. On the contrary, I think universities generate discussion and there are sites where controversial speakers come. They are places where robust conversation happens principally in classrooms and in other kinds of venues that don't really get covered. But what I do think is true is there are times when there are events that are embarrassments, right? I think about, for example, the shouting down at Judge Kyle Duncan at the Stanford Law School or the tumult, there was both a physical assault and a shouting down with Charles Murray's appearance at Middlebury some years ago. Those are things that are really wrong. And I think all of us have to raise our game around free speech in a time when we're dealing with a lot of polarization and it's hard for people to talk to one another. So we've always got to be looking for ways to do better. But I think in general, universities are doing a good job of supporting free speech and robust discussion on their campuses.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, I think free speech is a fundamental principle of our country and our colleges and universities. It's also something that's always hard to pursue. It's easy to express support for the idea of free speech. It tests us when we get real circumstances where it puts demands on us to accommodate speech with which we disagree. You know, the argument that I make in the book is that there's a lot of really important free speech and robust discussion going on in college campuses. It doesn't mean that things are perfect. They're not college campuses make mistakes. Our country right now, and we've seen this in the wake of the horrible murder of Charlie Kirk, is riven and polarized in ways that make it hard for all of us to speak to one another.”
2025-10-02 · On with Kara Swisher · Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT