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Foreign.
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Welcome to Talking Feds. One on one deep dive discussions with national figures about the most fascinating and consequential issues defining our culture and shaping our lives. I'm your host, Harry Littman. I doubt there's ever been an easy time to be a university president, but these days it seems incredibly challenging to. The federal government is looking to withhold or claw back billions of dollars in federal grants from various universities, while at the same time seeking to control employment policies, admission practices, even curriculum. And in recent years, university administrators have tried to manage spirited and at times violent demonstrations, especially about the war in Gaza. And more generally, campus life seems to be embittered with intense polarization among students and pitched battles about proper speech. Into this maelstrom, or series of maelstroms walks Chris Eisgruber, president of Princeton since 2013, as well as chair of the association of American Universities Board of Directors. He has been the president of Princeton for some 12 years, and in that time he has, especially these recent months, he's managed to steer his institution with a cool head and a clear sense of mission. Chris has now set down his thoughts about free speech on campus in a new book, Terms of Respect. Chris Isgruber, and I'm going to take the liberty of calling him Chris as he's my old friend and boss. Welcome to Talking Feds one on one, Harry.
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It's great to be with you. So it's a pleasure to be on Talking Feds.
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Thanks very much. A word, maybe, about the title. It reads at first blush as if it might be prescriptive, but in fact it's also descriptive. Right? You think that colleges largely get free speech. Right. And that they've gotten something of a bum rap for their records, Is that right?
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Yes, that's true, Harry. And I would say, just to start with the idea of terms of respect, I think our colleges and our country depend on simultaneous commitments to free speech and to equality. We need to be able to have conversations where people express themselves freely and where they not only express themselves, but where they listen to one another and where people from all backgrounds and viewpoints feel like they have a place at the table. We need to deal with each other, in other words, on terms of respect. And it's tough in times, as you say, that are really polarized. But I think colleges, even though there are ways in which we could do better, are doing a pretty good job. And I will say, Harry, you led off with a number of the things that I and other university presidents face right now. I agree with a whole lot of it. But I have to say, on a campus like this one, we approach things with a vibrant spirit and a lot of joy. So the videos and visuals are often of the protests taking place, but there's a lot of great and very constructive conversation and interaction happening.
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Yeah, it's a really important point we have seen in part of your, I think, thesis, is how there's a kind of tyranny of certain anecdotes, either well taken or not. But that point, it's not a word I've heard in respect to this whole set of issues, Joy. But having spent a lot of time at Princeton, including in the Ice Gruber era, I think it's fair. Let me just. So I want to follow up on this idea about terms of respect, because you suggest, Chris, that people often misapprehend the stakes of supposed free speech disputes, that the most bitter or impacted ones are less about speech itself, but about terms of respect. Is that fair? And why did you choose it for the book's title?
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Yes, that's accurate, Harry. And I think that, look, there are some kind of famous events that have taken place on college campuses. A good example is the heckling of Judge Kyle Duncan at Stanford law school in 2023 that really are about free speech, where things went wrong. You know, at Stanford, Judge Duncan was unable to give his talk. Jenny Martinez, who was then the dean of law school and is now the provost, wrote an excellent letter about Stanford's need to make free speech happen and about the problems with what occurred. But I think those events are really exceptional. And a lot of times people are actually pointing at events that are arguments about free speech. There are uses of free speech and that can include occurrences, for example, where a controversial speaker gets invited to campus and students don't disrupt the speech, they don't prevent the speaker from talking, but they say that person shouldn't have been invited to this campus. Now, I don't think that the university should respond by canceling the speech. That would be wrong. But we need to recognize that what the students are doing under those circumstances is exercising their own speech. And it's speech about what kinds of discourse are respectable today. And sometimes they may be right about the claim they make. It may be an improvident invitation.
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Yeah. And sometimes, as you suggest, it may be spirited or not right or whatever, but that's part of the free speech cluster of ideas. And you draw a line, you know, at Duncan, or I would say a little bit before, where people are actually silenced, but robust discussion about should this person be on campus. That seems, you know, I think, to your view, totally free game. The mindset know that we bring to these free speech battles is a robust, almost absolutist view of First Amendment protection. And you make what I think is a really great historical insight, Chris, that I hadn't thought about that. This very formulation that the Supreme Court instituted when it had been indolent basically in free speech matters was designed itself to protect equality. It grew out of the real need to assure that all state actors would indeed respect it in order to enforce the equality movement, especially in the south and around race. And that's part of your argument that equality. It's already built into our very strong commitment to free speech. So that pitting free speech and equality against one another is a profound mistake that seems to be a central part that may seem a little abstract to listeners. I wonder if you can illustrate it or elaborate.
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Yeah, Harry, thank you for that. Because it really is a critical point of the book, and I think it's a critical point for all Americans. So a lot of times free speech battles get set up or described in ways that pit free speech and equality against one another. And that's easy to do if the speech involved is hate. Hate speech of some form or another. Americans have unbelievably broad free speech rights. Right. Our. Our free speech rights in this country are probably broader than they are in any other democracy, certainly any that I know about, including.
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Yeah, I think that.
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I think.
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I think that's really undisputed.
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Yes. And so you can say all sorts of offensive things. And so some people sometimes think, okay, we got to choose up between these broad free speech rights and a genuine commitment to equality. But I think that's wrong. And I think it helps to understand the history, which is, as you accurately say, Harry, the Supreme Court's record on free speech, which is now kind of the paradigmatic constitutional right. And the entire court has been strong on it. But the history was not good until the early 1960s. And then things really change with Times vs. Sullivan, the case that first applies the First Amendment of the Constitution to libel provisions in around 1964. And Harry, I was struck by this when I was teaching a course to freshmen back during the pandemic. I taught a freshman seminar since I was grounded and I couldn't go out and visit people. And I was kind of running for that.
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Not because you had been bad, but.
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Because it was the pandemic and we couldn't go anywhere. And so I love teaching. It gave me a chance to get back in the classroom. It was sort of a surreal experience that the students were masked, I was masked. But we were doing a seminar, and I taught the Court the Supreme Court cases in historical sequence. And all of a sudden you hit Times versus Sullivan in 1964. And not only does the Supreme Court apply the First Amendment to libel law for the first time and protect newspapers and others, but the whole tenor of free speech law going forward changes after that. Justice Brennan has this great line there which I think becomes the signature for the Court's jurisprudence after that, that we national commitment to a public discourse that is robust, uninhibited, and wide open, including caustic attacks on public officials. And I'm not sure that was true before Times versus Sullivan, but it's really true afterwards. And part of what's important to understand about that case and what you mentioned in your question is it comes out of the civil rights movement in the South. No coincidence that the text that's being protected by the Sullivan decision isn't a New York Times news story. It's an advertisement called Hear Their Rising Voices that is about protecting the rising voices of student protesters in the American South. So our commitment that we have right now in the United States to free speech actually comes out of the racial equality movement in the south in the 1960s. And I think that's both historically and conceptually important. Yeah.
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And Sullivan, if I'm not mistaken as a local sheriff or official, who. They were going after them. And the Court said, we're going to impose an extra protection here. You're going to have to show people not simply that they got it wrong, but they knew it was wrong and purposely got it right. Yeah. But still going, you know, going off of the Brennan idea, we also, I think, tend to think of free speech as its own social good. Free speech, Just saying that is enough to settle debates. You insist, most people insist, but you have a particular view that it's actually instrumental. It's bound up with certain social goals. And that leads, I think, to a theory of why we tolerate stupid or hateful speech. Not because they are social goods in and of themselves, but as part of a broader cluster of certain dedication to certain values. Can you explain?
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Yeah, I agree 100% with what you said, Harry. I mean, look, there are lots of great reasons to protect free speech. And frankly, before I became a university president, I thought, well, you know, it's maybe not even worth writing about this. Right. There are so many good reasons to protect free speech. But on the other hand, whatever those reasons are right, if you talk about, look, it's just good from the standpoint of personal development or it's good from the standpoint of politics. It's a little harder to explain why we protect hate speech and why we protect libel of speech to the extent that we do in the United States.
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Fatuous speech, right? Yeah. Sophomore you could say, right, yeah, exactly.
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There's a huge range of different things. It's not all edifier and the protections are really broad. So I think part of what I do in the book is to say look, I like Louis Brandeis explanation a lot better than the more often quoted Holmes version. Holmes said marketplace of ideas and I think it's one of the few Supreme Court cases or phrases he said in dissent. Right, he said it in dissent. That has really entered into public discourse. Whereas Louis Brandeis. And again it's a concurrence which is why Sullivan gets so important in the 1960s. But Louis Brandeis said look, that for a courageous self reliant people, what free speech can do, what allowing more speech to be the remedy for bad speech can do, is allow us to develop our faculties and allow us to be governed by deliberative reason rather than by fatuous speech or fatuous ideas. So I think that's important for two reasons. One it says what free speech is for, for it's not for protecting hate speech, it's for these democratic and truth seeking ideals that Justice Brandeis mentioned. And the second really important thing in that Brandeis opinion is he says it presupposes a courageous and self reliant people. So it's not just like you can be a customer in the marketplace. It's a hard thing and we have to live up to the ideal.
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Yeah, and you mentioned it really is a divide that continues at least at the theoretical level. You mentioned Robert Post, former dean of Yale, who I think adopts also this deliberative community view. But some people point to, well we need to scream or do whatever necessary because then the truth will out. And they are I think two very different views.
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I mean I. Harry, I agree with you about, about Robert's position in mine. They have, I owe him a debt and I, and they have some similarities. I do want to emphasize that I at least am and I think Robert to do protect the people who need to scream. And this an important part of this. Right. It's, it's important that even though free speech is not for the protection of hate speech, it does protect hate speech and a lot of other offensive speech.
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Yeah, I mean 100%, I'm sorry if I implied otherwise. The question is, what's the reason for protecting that. That speech.
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Exactly.
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And by the way, you write that free speech by itself won't produce the deliberative community that Brandeis envisioned. Society requires citizens. There's a few different aspects of this, but one thing you write is society requires citizens with fortitude to engage in painful discussion and debate. In what sense painful, Chris?
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So we have to be willing to engage in kinds of debates where we're going to hear things that force us to challenge ourselves about our most deeply held conviction. So I actually think there are two aspects to the painful. One is we've got. We're part of a commitment to deal with a lot of speech, including at times, raucous speech, as you say. That's designed to get our attention and maybe bruising in some way. We make a commitment to put up with that partly because we don't trust anybody, including university presidents. Right. I don't think I should be trusted to be censoring speech. So we got to put up with a lot of stuff that may just be, I don't know, damaging in some ways. But it's also the case that even for the edifying and constructive stuff, if we're not listening hard to people who are challenging the ideas that we cherish and believe in, we're not going to get the full benefit of free speech. And that is, if not painful, at least uncomfortable.
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Yeah. I mean, you lay out some very specific stories. Your own experience with the. With what had started as agitation that you weren't sure about, about whether to rename the Woodrow Wilson School based on Wilson's experience with racism, how you went back and looked more carefully at it. So. And you yourself changed your mind.
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That'S.
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Kind of a lead in.
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Let's get.
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Let's get down a little more the nitty gritty of the last few years. Yeah. Both within campus, but and also between campus administration and government. A few questions about that. For starters, you write in the book that the use of the punitive machinery of the state to limit how colleges teach about sexism, racism and the like is far more dangerous to free speech. Can you elaborate?
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Yeah. You know, again, from my standpoint, the critical ideas about free speech come out of the two opinions, the Whitney opinion and the. Yeah. The Brennan opinion. And, you know, the core of that, that Brandeis opinion in Whitney is the remedy for bad speech, is more speech, not censorship. And when you get the state coming in and using its extraordinary power to shut down what people can say that interferes fundamentally with the ability of, of scholars to work out ideas of ordinary people to have the debates that they need to be able to, to have, of students to be able to learn and students to be able to advocate for change. And so, you know, we can worry about the climate for speech and we should worry about the climate for speech on campuses, in workplaces, in the media, in other places. But our fundamental commitment is to the idea that there's a kind of self correcting mechanism there as speech gets hammered out. If people don't like what I'm saying about it or what you're saying, Harry, there's an opportunity for us to go back and forth in lots of different ways. I mean, people can argue, people can make fun of things, they can caricature, they can satirize, they can shout. Under certain circumstances, when the government comes in and uses its coercive power, that fundamentally shuts down this basic process of deliberation that is fundamental to a democracy and to good colleges.
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Yeah, and the free speech. Well, we're now in this period where having gone to real kind of war with different universities, they're talking about, and overall with especially elite universities like Princeton Compact for Academic Excellence, which incorporates a lot of, I would say, management of the lifeblood of what universities do and teaching, hiring and the like, I'm wondering, is in this, in the current cluster of challenges with government, are the, are the things and the points you're making in the book, you know, a kind of bible and blueprint, or is, is that basically separate?
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Well, here's what I would say, Harry. I would, I would start just by saying that, that, that so called compact is a dangerous step in the wrong direction. It's something that I would not sign. And I think it's something where every American, whether Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, should be concerned about the effects that it would have on higher education and on some of the free discourse in our country. Basically, the great research universities of the United States, which are the envy of the world, have been built on two different kinds of principles and practices. One is a commitment to academic freedom, which really is connected to what I talk about in the book. The freedom of people to, to speak, listen, learn from one another and make mistakes. By the way, they can blunder around things. That's part of the formula, it's part of the recipe. It's going to happen. There's that commitment. And then secondly, and this does go a bit beyond the book, although I talk about it to some extent at the end of the Book. There's been this 70 year genuine compact between the American government and the American universities where administrations, both Republican and Democrat, have funded research that is in the best interest of the American people at American universities, while simultaneously respecting academic freedom. And that has made our universities magnets for talent from throughout the country and around the world. And it has made them the best in the world. And we've benefited tremendously from that. This, you know, I keep referring to the so called compact because there are various people who have said, look, it's more like an ultimatum in a way. The idea is if you want research.
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Funding, you need to use the word coercion.
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What it effectively does is to violate, I think, two basic principles at the same time. One is instead of allocating research funding on the basis of the merits of the scholarly project and the cost effectiveness of the scholarly project, it allocates them based on fidelity to, to a political agenda, basically. And then the second is that some of those provisions are very intrusive into the fundamental aspects of academic freedom, about whom universities can admit, whom they should be hiring, how they're going to teach and what they're going to teach. I hope the administration pulls this back. I think all of us should be willing to work together and certainly I'm willing to work with the administration to ensure that American research is as strong as possible and in the interests of the American people. I don't think this compact takes us there.
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Yeah, so first that is a point you make. The support they get entitles them to some dialogue and, you know, and even criticism. But you were very early on this point, Chris, will be well before the book. I think it was in an Atlantic article and I've appropriated it shamelessly ever since. But that the real, the real victims here of this stuff really are the American people. If you look at the bounty that this partnership has Produced since the 50s or so, it's enormous for American people and the best and brightest. We've been this magnet. And besides just the attacks on universities, all the immigration difficulties have so imperiled that the, you know, international students don't know what to do and the like. That's a whole nother episode. Let me say I wanted to ask one more thing about government because there have been recent controversies where you've seen universities stumble and presidents heads roll when commenting on world events or confronting government criticism. And to navigate those rapids, Princeton now has adopted the so called Chicago Principles. What are the Chicago Principles and why did the university adopt them?
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Yeah, so there are two kinds of Chicago Principles. And one is the Chicago principles.
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The White Sox and the, and the Cubs.
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But you're for the Cubs principals, I'm for the Cubs principals. And we're hanging on right now. Another game this evening, obviously, but the. So the two, two sets of Chicago principles related to free speech, Harry, and one of those which we've adopted, I think written by my former teacher and good friend Jeff Stone, and significant part basically says look at Chicago, at Chicago. And Chicago was the first university to adopt these. And I think they're very healthy, they're very clear. And they basically say when it comes to the content of speech on a college campus, we are going to protect speech, even if it is more than uncomfortable, if it's wrong headed, immoral, if the majority of the community just thinks it dead wrong. Again, the, the response is answer that speech, don't come to the university and expect the university to protect you from it or censor it. The principals sensibly note that you have to have time, place and manner regulations. So this doesn't mean you can take over a building or spray paint your message on a wall, but it gives you a lot of freedom, just as the First Amendment does, to say things that other people may find offensive. There's another set of Chicago principles called the Calvin Report that we have not adopted. Although I'm sympathetic to the basic idea. The Calvin Report is about when does the institution take positions? So the first set of principles are about what freedoms do people on the campus have to say things? And the answer is a heck of a lot. And then the Calvin Report is when should the institution speak up? And the answer is not often. Right. And I agree with not often. I agree especially with. There's a line in the Calvin Report says the universities should be the sponsor of critics, not itself the critic. And I agree 100% with that. It talks about institutional neutrality, which is now kind of out there as a kind of political buzzword. I don't love neutrality as a word because I think for all the reasons you and I are talking about right now, Harry, universities are shot through with values, right? Free speech is a value, equality is a value, truth seeking is a value. And I and other presidents have to speak up for those values. So I say institutional restraint, but it's very close to the same position.
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Yeah, no, I see that. And you've talked about the few instances where as a president you felt you needed to speak up. But okay, let's move to within campus life, which I think is A, more important. And B, you're better positioned to bring the message to the public that it's different from what you think it is and not as bad as what you think it is. There is a set of criticisms in wide currency. The foundation for individual Rights and expression, or fire, which you talk about a lot and others suggest. These are your words, I think. But saying what FIRE says, students have become weak kneed and unable to engage with ideas they dislike. You think it's misguided. So you don't see a problem with students being scared to sort of go outside accepted cultural lines are only a very minimal problem. Why do you think fire and just the general. There is a pretty widespread public impression here. Why do they. What are they missing?
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There are a few things there, Harry. First of all, I do say in the book, and I do believe there is a civic crisis right now that affects college campuses. It's a civic crisis in America. Right. So I think that's it.
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I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I just want to say you make the valid point repeatedly between social media, which we haven't figured out, and the general political polarization. Some of this is just a reflection of broader society and that's that. Yes, but. Sorry, go ahead.
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So we got a lot of stuff going on in our society and a lot of circumstances where all of us have some trouble speaking to one another across political differences in particular. And I don't want to say colleges are immune to that, that we're not and we have to work harder at it than the rest of society because speaking across differences is so essential to what it is that we do. But I do think that the current generation of students has gotten a bad rap. Colleges have gotten a bad rap largely because there's way too much focus on the occasional events that go wrong and not focus on all that goes right on college campuses. So things like the Kyle Duncan controversy at Stanford that I mentioned earlier get repeated again and again. You have to. Something went wrong there. But you have to remember first, the university immediately responded and corrected it. That's a good thing. And I think that's the way most universities respond. And secondly, there are millions of conversations every day at universities like Stanford and Harvard and this one and throughout the country that go right. And yeah, they're not, in some ways they're not special. They don't get the same newsworthy attention they couldn't. But that's the essence of campus life. There's. You mentioned fire, and I do want to say something there because they put out this poll that ranks universities on their free speech Environment. I have a lot of respect for fire and a lot of the things they do. They've taken some very principled stands about free speech, and I appreciate that. But I think this poll is misconceived and quite destructive. It ranked Harvard a couple of years ago as the worst university for free speech. And that got a big headline in the the New York Post. And most of the article focused on how bad Harvard was. But then they asked the director of polling about the university that had come out number one on the poll, and the university that had come out number one was Michigan Technological University. And so they asked the fire. Yeah, the fire director of polling. Right. Okay. Did this surprise you? Right. Because it might surprise most people. And he said, and this is literally the answer. No, I wasn't particularly surprised that a technological university would come out on top of. For the reason that they talk less about controversial topics and therefore there's less. Right now I'm adding, therefore there's less disturbance. But, Harry, I mean, you're smiling, right? So you get this. Not talking about controversial topics is not a free speech victory. It is a free speech disaster. And this is the problem with what goes on, Right. All the attention is on the controversy. People code controversy as equivalent to censorship. And there's not attention on what should go on, rather on all the things that go. Right. Which is what we should be measuring. It would be, we're in playoff season. I know you're a baseball fan, right? So it'd be kind of like if someone said, you know, is Clayton Kershaw a good pitcher? And the answer was no. Right? I mean, he had a bad outing last night and he had a bad outing in 2023, therefore he's not a good pitcher. Well, yeah, he had those bad outings, but he won, what, 220 games or something, Right.
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B
He's in the hall of Fame pitcher, couple years. A miracle.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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B
But that we can talk.
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We'll talk baseball later.
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B
Exactly. Okay. But I do want to say you actually, Chris, provide a lot of practical guidance here. If I were becoming a university president, be one reason to read this. You know, stay calm, don't act too quickly. Above all, I think the message, it seems to me, is apply the civic rules and values, the terms of respect, rather than abstract notions of equality and free speech, which won't solve these individual problems and the like. I do have a follow up, though, because your point about the robust. The millions of conversations, at least as you write in the book, seem largely across groups. And you do portray Princeton and other elite universities as being really kind of riven by a sort of jet sharks ethos between liberals and conservative. I wanted to ask you about my experience as a teacher and a parent really, which is intra group. So it seems to me a lot of students, especially on the left, report fear or don't even report it, but have it and self censorship, not about confronting the other camp, but within their own. Lest they seem, you know, not woke. A term I know that you find not very helpful. But you know, young people want badly to be accepted by their peers. So what about within the, you know, various tribes on colleges, that kind of self censorship, do you see that side of the problem or do you think that too is greatly exaggerated by outside critics?
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A
You know, I will say I don't find woke a helpful term for thinking about any of this. And I think it's only used as.
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B
Kind of a critical term.
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A
Well, yeah, canceling more complicated story woke just not helpful. I don't think it's how students from any background think about the conversations that they're having. Look, Harry, I quoted Brandeis earlier. You have to be courageous and self reliant to really get the benefits of free speech. And it means a willingness to enter into arguments and to have people come back at you and to have people criticize you. I do think it's true, and I say in the book that in this age of social media in particular, the place where I think we have to work hardest is to help students and others, frankly, because again, I don't think this just affects students deal with the concern they have. Wow. Within this polarized society, I say something that offends you, right? I could get ostracized and it could haunt me for a while because it could end up being put onto social media. And something I say to you in, in what I thought was confidence certainly becomes part of my reputation. That's hard.
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B
Parents live in fear of this.
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Parents live in fear, parents live in fear. You know, people. I think people learn to behave differently as a result of that and all of us have to contend with that. I think it's part of this real civic crisis that we have in America. I also think it's true that students on college campuses, even from the time. I know it's long ago and we have a hard time remembering it now, Harry, but when you and I were on student. I mean, people worry about ostracism from social groups. They feel peer pressure, they want to get into the in groups. And part of our job is to help students cope with that. So I think the peer pressures are real. And when you go to those recommendations that you mentioned earlier, part of what I say there are that I think it's important for colleges and universities to create various kinds of groups. I don't think they're formal public debate groups. I think they tend to be more informal, quieter kinds of discussion groups where people feel like they can have discussions across difficult lines on difficult topics without that risk of ostracism. But I just don't think it's quite so new, Harry. And to the extent it is new, I don't think it's a feature of this generation, actually. I think it's a feature of the world in which we're living. Talking Feds is supported by the Brennan center for Justice. In this new political era, the Brennan center will do what they do, defend the Constitution and the rule of law. They're prepared to fight against presidential overreach and will continue advocating for reforms to resist weaponized government, stop billionaires from corrupting our elections, and ensure every eligible American has the freedom to vote. Stay informed by visiting BrennanCenter.org There was.
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B
An aspect of this, and I want to be clear that it was something you just said in passing, but it really struck me, again based on my experience as a teacher and a parent. But you've noted that. And this I think maybe is new, I'm not sure. But a tricky aspect of modern day campus debates is assertions of not ideas, but emotional harm or pain or discomfort. And sometimes, as you note, I think this is really trenchant and tricky. But expressions of pain may be assertions of power. Can you explain and what's the right way to sort of regulate or navigate that dilemma?
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A
So let me give you a couple of examples, Harry, that are both very prominent from the news. I mean, one of them I'll start with just from my own campus and actually from the office that you see behind me here as we're on this podcast, right. I had students back in 2015 occupying this office, right. They were in here for actually they treated the office very well, I have to say, while they were in for but for about 36 hours to protest the presence of Woodrow Wilson's name on what on our School of Public and International Affairs. And as you alluded to earlier, eventually those protests led to a years long process where we eventually ended up changing that name. And part of what they said at the time was, well, it's painful for us to have to be a part of that school and deal with the name and Another very famous example from around the same time was at Yale with Halloween costumes, where the question was, right, I mean, are these.
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B
You know, you go into that at length. Yeah, yeah.
- [36:12]
A
So. And people say, well, what's with these students? They're snowflakes or something, right? They were in pain as a result of Halloween costumes or the name of a building. What's going on? You know, I wish they wouldn't put this in terms of pain. I understand why they are, and who am I to dictate the terms of their arguments, But I think what they're really saying is, look, we want to be treated with dignity here. We want to be at this place, this college that matters so much to us on terms of respect, with full respect. And if you're in the case of Woodrow Wilson, taking somebody who was a racist and actually took the United States of America backward on the issue of race because he resegregated the civil service, if you're holding him out as the ideal of a Princetonian and as of a statesman, by putting his name on your most prominent school, you're not treating us with respect and it's the wrong way to constitute a community and a conversation. And I think the Halloween costume issue is on the same kind of. And what I want to say about these students, right, they're making these arguments to faculty members, to presidents of the university, whatever else they are, they're not snowflakes, Right? They are. They are raising causes here about justice and about what equal treatment means. You can agree or disagree. You might say, I don't care. You know, people should be able to wear insulting or offensive Halloween costumes. Just put up with it. Right? That's part of what it is to be. Be in the kind of community that we want to be. That could be an argument, but I. But I think to say that the students are somehow weak or unable to engage in real argument because of this is getting it exactly backwards. They're very engaged in the arguments. They're pushing us on what it means for us to be faithful to our own ideals.
- [38:00]
B
Yeah. And you lay out the scenarios. We won't go into all of them, but there's also the singing group that with. And words that might have seemed fine 30 years ago, maybe not so much now. I mean, things do. They do change. One quick point about Wilson that I want to note, because when these come up, you know, was Lincoln racist and the like, I think it's really important for people to see them within their own socio, you know, their own time. But you really looked into this and the things you're saying about Wilson came as sort of unpleasant surprises to you and others. And that really influenced the debate. All right, so just briefly then, because there's a lot of nasty, aggressive, but non canceling speech that you see as perfectly consistent with indeed maybe triumphs of first Amendment. So what's your view? Somebody comes to camp, a speaker now comes to campus. What should they be prepared to expect when they go there? Including, I mean, you make it clear, look, if you've really terrible ideas, we should be prepared to have to have people judge you based on those. But what should speakers you think be prepared to expect when they go on campus? And what guidelines should people who oppose their ideas bring to bear?
- [39:22]
A
Yeah, terrific question. Because I think, as you say, beyond principle. We need to have clear rules about these things. So let me give you some of ours. One is our students have, and our faculty have nearly complete freedom to invite whomever they want to the campus, controversial or not, extreme or not. So that's the first proposition. We hope people will make wise choices. We hope they will bring the people here who have the most serious ideas, but we don't limit that. Second, your question about what should people expect? Well, I think it's our obligation once somebody is invited to give them a venue where they're able to express their ideas, where others are able to listen to those ideas, and where those who come ideally are able to ask questions. I say ideally because we actually allow speakers. Some speakers will come and say, I don't want to take questions. I think that's a lost opportunity for them and for the campus if they do it that way. But ideally we want that exchange to happen. So it's on us. And it can be really hard if the speaker is controversial enough, but it's on us to try to provide and successfully provide a forum of that kind. At the same time, our students have a right to protest without disrupting. And so that protest. There are things that can be done outside of the venue and again, it cannot interfere with the ability of people to get into the venue. There are things that are non disruptive. So holding a sign at the back of the audience where it doesn't block anybody's view view is something that is in general permissible with our, our rules. I, you know, again, I'm the target of these protests. Sometimes it is, it is distracting and can be quite uncomfortable to, to speak while there's a sign up complaining about what, you know, who you are or what you're doing. But, but that's part of the free speech environment. And you can draw some of these lines a little differently. You have to be clear about them. Right. So I. Someone could argue and we have to tighten the rules sometimes in order to be able to provide the secure venue. But someone could say, okay, no signs inside. We're going to let the speaker focus on their speech. But that's what speakers should be able to expect, and it's what our students are entitled to, both those who want to hear the speaker and those who want to protest.
- [41:42]
B
Yeah, I mean, you make the point that sometimes it involves fine line drawing problems that people could disagree with. But it's one of the reasons, I think, you insist, insist, you know, you want to do it in terms of these values and not some automatic answer from free speech or equality. I just have one more question for you, and we're almost out of time, but I was going to initially ask about your apparent superpowers, Clayton Kershaw, like in writing this thoughtful treatise while navigating unprecedented demands from government, putting out five alarm fires on campus. But it turns out I was interested to learn you've been writing this for some time in sort of stolen hours from your day job. Tell us a little bit about the writing process when you began to put pen to paper and the like.
- [42:32]
A
Yeah. So for me, Harriet, it starts from the fact that, you know, I'm an administrator and president now, but I begin as a scholar and somebody who loves to write. So I just want to be able to find ways to work through my thoughts. And a few years back, four or five years back, I began to realize I would like to have a more kind of what, full statement of what I believe about these things and be able to share that with people and work things through. So what I began doing was, I think what just about every writer does when they try to get something out was be to get up and at the same time, every day, do some writing. And my commitment was, right after breakfast, I'm going to sit down, I'm going to write for as long as I can. The one variation in my job was some days, as long as I could was like 10 minutes and I'd write two sentences, you know, and they. Yeah, and they. And they might be crappy sentences, and I would erase them the next day. But what that meant was that the book was always in my head. And so if I was having a conversation with you. Right. Or a conversation with one of my colleagues and stuff was coming out that was relevant to the book, I was thinking it through. And then when I got five or six hours one day I would just sit, sit down and I could write for five or six hours. And so I wasn't sure that, that I was going to be able to finish this. I didn't tell anybody. I didn't even tell Lori, my wife, whom you know, that I was writing it. And you know, at one point it was, honey, I've sent a book off to the publisher, but but I was glad to be able to I was glad to be able to finish. And that's how it worked.
- [44:03]
B
The book in question is Terms of Respect. I think it's destined to be a really important part of the current debate and it stakes out certain claims, emp and theoretical or philosophical that, you know, really amplify, add to. They're just not part of the the current way of thinking. So for that reason, everybody really ought to order it. Chris Eisgruber, thanks so much for spending time from your very busy administrative schedule and scholarly schedule and really appreciate it. And again, Terms of Respect How Colleges.
- [44:40]
A
Get Free Speech right Harry, thank you so much. Been a pleasure to talk to you.
- [44:46]
B
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