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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. With me now, the president of Princeton University, Christopher Eisgruber. He has a new book called Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right. It's an interesting title at a time when critics on both the left and the right and free-speech purists without a political side all say colleges are getting it wrong. Christopher Eisgruber has been the Princeton president since 2013. He has the unusual, perhaps academic track of having been a physics major at Princeton in the '80s, but then going on to become a constitutional lawyer, including as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell.

He has written provocative books before, including one about undemocratic features of the US Constitution, one that proposed reforming the Supreme Court justice selection process, and one about the Constitution and religious liberty that argue that religion gets treated as both too privileged and too punished by modern applications of the wall of separation between religion and government as people see it. Maybe we'll touch on some of the themes of those older books as they relate to the new one about speech on campus. In a nutshell, Eisgruber argues that there can be a balance between free speech and respectful inclusivity. We'll see how he thinks we get there.

I should also say, President Eisgruber has been in the news this year for being outspoken early on about what he called the Trump administration's attack on Columbia University, presenting what he called the greatest threat to American university since the Red Scare of the 1950s. A lot has happened since he wrote those words in The Atlantic in March, so we'll talk about that, as well as, of course, the new book, which again is called Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right. President Eisgruber, thanks for coming on to discuss this vital topic. Welcome to WNYC, Brian.

President Christopher Eisgruber: Brian, it's a pleasure to be here with you. Thank you for that generous introduction. If I can correct just one detail on it.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, sure.

President Eisgruber: I clerked for John Paul Stevens rather than Lewis Powell, both great justices, but I owe that to my boss.

Brian Lehrer: I don't know how I got that wrong, and I apologize.

President Eisgruber: Everything else was right. I appreciate it.

Brian Lehrer: You argue there's a gap between the perception and reality of campus free speech in general, driven by a few incidents that get a lot of press. You could take a few minutes at the outset here if you'd like, and lay out your thesis of what you think is happening on college campuses and why people might think it's worse than it is.

President Eisgruber: Thank you, Brian. Yes, my thesis in the book is that colleges and our country have a responsibility to support both free speech and equality at the same time. We need people to be able to speak up for their views, and we need everybody to feel like they are included and they've got a place at the table. It's true in our national political discussions. It's got to be true on college campuses.

That's a demanding assignment for us as a country, and it's a demanding assignment for college campuses. As you said, I think college campuses are doing that much better than people appreciate. There are some things that have been gotten wrong. There are terrible incidents that have taken place. Think about the shouting down of Judge Kyle Duncan at the Stanford Law School, for example, or the attacks on political scientists Charles Murray and Allison Stanger at Middlebury back in 2017.

Those examples get a lot of attention, but there are millions of conversations that take place. Speeches, classes, lectures, other kinds of exhibitions and discussions on college campuses successfully every day. Colleges respond when these incidents happen, and vital subjects get discussed in the way that they should be. I do say in the book that I think we as a country face a crisis right now that affects colleges, along with everybody else.

We are polarized to an extent that we have not been in the past. It makes it harder for people to talk to one another across differences and have the kinds of constructive discussions that matter. Social media makes that even harder. Colleges have a difficult assignment right now, but I think if one looks at the overall record, it's much better than people suppose and something we should be proud of.

Brian Lehrer: Well, recently, after the killing of Charlie Kirk and the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel, we had Greg Lukianoff, president of the group FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. I know you've addressed this group in particular in writing. You've taken some issue with their conclusions. Here's a clip of Lukianoff on the show talking about a 10-year arc of speech issues on campus as he sees it, and here's part of what he said.

Greg Lukianoff: The free-speech crisis that I was seeing was primarily a combination of students and administrators getting together to punish their political enemies or speech that they didn't like. This is one of the reasons why conservatives are so angry at the moment, is they feel like this crisis that had been going on on campus for a long time was pooh-poohed. The media didn't pay a lot of attention to it. Now, when it's actually the backlash happening to it, this is something that's getting a lot of coverage in mainstream media, so I get the frustration on the right.

Brian Lehrer: He thinks the media downplayed the anger of campus conservatives. Pooh-poohed it, he said there. You think you argued in your first answer that the media gave it too much exposure when incidents were high-profile, but do you agree that many campus conservatives have felt they risked expressing their views, they risked backlash for expressing their views as students or faculty, for fear of being denounced or even punished?

President Eisgruber: Look, I think we're in a set of circumstances today. We're on college campuses and off them. We are polarized into groups that not only disagree with one another but dislike one another. There are opinion polls, one of them out of Johns Hopkins, for example, that says that 50% of Democrats and 50% of Republicans believe that people in the opposite party are downright evil. "Downright evil" is the term. It's not just a disagreement. It's a real moral judgment.

When you get circumstances like that, as I said earlier, tough to have discussions, hard for people to speak up because they are going to be criticized by the other side. We have to worry about that on college campuses. On this point, I agree with Greg Lukianoff. You can always find examples. You can find them from the left. You can find them from the right, where there are reactions that are impermissible. Whether they're coming from college administrators or whether they're coming from politicians, it's wrong to shut down speech.

One of the things that I say very strongly in the book is that we need to have wide-open discussions, and we need to build cultures where people can be courageous. Yes, Brian, when it comes to what's the overall state of affairs, how are we coping in a more difficult free-speech environment than we have seen in a long time? Again, I think that colleges are doing, in general, what they should be doing. I give some suggestions about how they can do that better, but they're doing what they should be doing to make that free speech possible.

Brian Lehrer: We'll get into a few of those suggestions that you make. Listeners, we can take a few calls and texts for the president of Princeton, Christopher Eisgruber, with his new book, Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right. We have one caller who's called in already. I was just giving you some critiques from the right about the free-speech environment on campus. I think this is going to come from a different point of view. Elena in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Elena: Hi, Brian. Hi, President Eisgruber. Thanks for taking my call. My name is Elena. I'm a graduate student at Princeton, actually. I'm very proud of all the ways that President Eisgruber has been standing up for free speech. At the same time, I can't help but to think of the fact that the encampments for Palestine two years ago were shut down within five minutes, which is actually one of the fastest of the Ivy League.

I am just curious for President Eisgruber. How does your defense of free speech relate to the university's stopping of peaceful speech about Palestine? To those of us who care about genocide, it seems as though the defense of free speech is actually only for certain types of speech or speech on certain issues. I would love for you to reconcile your defense of free speech with the quenching of student activism about Palestine. Thank you.

President Eisgruber: Elena, thank you for your question, and thank you for calling in. Let me start with some general observations. When it comes to free speech under our Constitution or on college campuses, I think there are a couple of different propositions that are really important. One is that we have to have broad rights of free speech that allow people to speak up even when they're saying things that are offensive to their peers or to professors or to me or to other people.

In the United States and on our college campus, we have broader freedoms to do that than just about anywhere else. You can say lots of different things. At Princeton and other college campuses, we emphatically affirm the right of people to be able to have these debates. At the same time, you need time, place, and manner rules that allow people to go about their business on university campuses, that allow people to listen as well as to speak, and that create the right context for constructive discussions.

As a matter of constitutional law, you've got a lot of freedom to go down to Washington and criticize the government. Criticize the individuals in the government doesn't mean that you can set up an encampment on the National Mall or spray paint the Washington Monument or occupy the lobby of the Commerce Department. The same things have to be true on college campuses.

We were very clear as we went into the difficult spring of 2023-'24 that people had the freedom to say things that, on some campuses, were actually being suppressed, and I think wrongly so. There were slogans that other presidents were saying, "You can't say that," or they were condemning the slogans. We avoided doing that because we have a very strong commitment to allowing people to say what it is that they want to say. We also have a commitment to allow people to protest, but there are limits to that commitment. Time, place and manner rules that apply without regard to what the speech is about.

One of those prohibits putting up tents or other structures on campus. The other prohibits the occupation of buildings, and there are a number of other rules. All of those are essential to providing the fora in which people can actually interact and have the discussions that matter, so we allowed a lot of speech. When people started to put up tents, we immediately put a stop to it.

Brian Lehrer: Elena, I'm curious if that satisfies your concerns to any degree.

Elena: Yes, it doesn't, Brian, and I appreciate the response, President Eisgruber. The reason it doesn't is because I think about two things. Number one, I think about the protests for Vietnam that were led at Columbia University that similarly set up encampments. The university has always been a safe ground for student activism. Right now at Princeton, at the beginning of every term, every semester, there are little placards on every dining table hall that say, "Here are the rights, rules, and regulations about protests." There are signs on university fields, greens that say, "By the way, you cannot protest here." What that does is not only set limits on where we can protest, but creates a broader culture where people are actually quite afraid to speak their minds.

Brian Lehrer: One more time on this, President Eisgruber, then we're going to move on.

President Eisgruber: Yes. Elena, I appreciate your comments. What I would say is you have to have those rules in order to enable people to both express themselves and be able to listen and be able to go about and do the other things that happen at universities. I think it's really important that we be clear about what the rules are. One of the initiatives that we've undertaken is to make sure that people understand, "All right, here are the ways in which we've drawn these lines."

There are places where you can protest. As I said, you can protest in ways that some people are going to find offensive. There are people writing to me saying, "You got to shut that down." I hear that from people on the campus. I hear it from people off campus, including people in government. Our answer is people have to be able to protest, and they have to be able to say what it is that they want to say. We are going to draw those lines about time, place, and manner, how you can do it, where you can do it, when you can do it.

Those are essential. When we do that, we have to put out clear communications to folks so that people can make a judgment about whether they're going to cross those lines. In which case, they're engaging in civil disobedience and will bear the consequences, or whether they want to protest in ways that are quite, I think, effective and valuable, but that are entirely within the limits. We, I think, leave room for a vigorous culture of protest on the campus, but one with distinct limits to it.

Brian Lehrer: My guest is the president of Princeton, Christopher Eisgruber, whose new book is Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right. Let's keep exploring where that line is a little bit. The review of your book in The New Yorker keyed on your line that it's possible to believe in free speech and insist that people ought to address each other civilly and politely. It noted that Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes emphasized free speech includes "opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death," from Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Also about civility, New York Times columnist Roxane Gay had a column last week called Civility is a Fantasy, and it included this line, "Calling for civility is about exerting power. It is a way of reminding the powerless that they exist at the will of those in power and should act accordingly. It is a demand for control." Just one more further to this point, because we have a text that just came in that said, "I am so tired of civility, politics, time, place, and manager of the language of the oppressor. It feels like whites on the right win this argument." Those were two different texts that I put together. Your response on civility?

President Eisgruber: Let me say first that civility and time, place, and manner are a little different from one another. Time, place, and manner, again, limits, for example, whether or not you can put up tents on a college green or whether you can occupy a building, or the times when you might be able to use very loud speech that interferes with other activities. That by itself doesn't say anything about whether or not you have to be civil.

Again, to repeat, we allow for protest on the Princeton campus. I think colleges have to allow for protest that can include some distinctly uncivil speech, slogans that people find offensive and combative. That's consistent with the kind of free speech that I think needs to be able to occur on college campuses, but I do make an argument in terms of respect, and hence the title, that we all ought to be talking to one another in ways that are respectful, and that is really important to what goes on at colleges and universities.

Protest gets a lot of attention on our campus, but what we are doing principally is scholarship and research and discussion that is trying to be rigorous and truth-seeking. We need norms there where people can come in from different positions and different sides, hear one another, talk to one another, and learn from one another. I saw that column by Roxane Gay, and I get it when she says, "We need to be able to take strong stands."

I think she talks about, "Look, it's not okay to say whatever you want to say just as long as you're polite," and that's the critical test. I don't think that undermines the case for civility. The case for civility is a case that says, "Hey, we need fora at universities and elsewhere, where people with really strong disagreements are able to come together and not only say what it is that they believe or shout at the other side or insult the other side, but actually have constructive arguments that are designed to persuade and designed to deepen our understanding." That's part of what we try to create at Princeton University and what other universities should try to be doing.

You quoted Oliver Wendell Holmes, and he has a lot of great things to say about the First Amendment and free speech. In the book, I prefer the work of Louis Brandeis, the great civil rights lawyer who was his contemporary, who talked about the need for courageous, self-reliant people to be using speech in ways that allow to govern ourselves deliberately and his words to develop our faculties. Those things depend on civility. I think it's just wrong to believe that if you have strongly-held convictions and values, you have to give up on civility.

Brian Lehrer: We have a few minutes. I cited your Atlantic piece in March in the intro when Columbia was the first school being punished and threatened by Trump, and they were acceding to some of his demands. You wrote that this is "the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare of the 1950s." A lot has happened since then. Where do you think we are today on that arc?

President Eisgruber: Well, I regret to say that I think we're still in what I would call a crisis and one of historic dimensions for universities. What I said in that Atlantic piece and what I continue to believe is that the strength of our great research universities depends on, among other things, two fundamental facts. One is this commitment to academic freedom that allows people to explore ideas that may be unsettling or threatening to society, including to people in power.

The second is a long-standing pact that dates back about 70 years now to just the post-World War II era, in which the federal government has helped to fund research that is in the interest of the American people, that aids the prosperity and the health and the security of this country, and does so in a way that continues to respect the academic freedom of the universities.

That has made these universities the best in the world, and it has contributed tremendously to the strength of our country. If you look at what's going on at Harvard now, where Harvard has taken a strong stand that I support, what's going on with the University of California, perhaps the world's greatest public university, and with UCLA in particular, you see the continuation of that threat that concerned me so much in the spring.

Brian Lehrer: One more on the bounds of civility and where that line should be. Aminata in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hello, Aminata.

Aminata: Hi. I just have a quick question in regards to the civility issue. I think I understand where you're coming from, but I wonder what your advice would be for people who are dealing with folks who believe they deserve human rights. A lot of the issues that I think we're finding and dealing with in terms of protest in relationship to the genocide that's happening in Gaza, but also LGBTQ rights, all of these things that are happening, immigrants, you're dealing with folks who believe that these people do not have a right to exist here, should not be here, should be hunted down and killed. I'm not being hyperbolic. How are you civil with that? I think that it's a very hard line to draw when your personhood is being threatened, not only with emotional violence but, literally, physical violence.

Brian Lehrer: Aminata, I'm going to invite you to take us one step further into that, because I'm sure you're not promoting violence. What is it that's uncivil that you're saying should be more in the bucket of what President Eisgruber endorses?

Aminata: I'm not saying it should be more. I'm saying that the idea that we should be civil with people who are literally disagreeing with our ability to have human rights is a very difficult thing. I think that that's a hard ask for a lot of people. That's what I'm saying. I think that needs to be recognized in your argument.

Brian Lehrer: [unintelligible 00:21:10] polite conversation is what you're getting at?

Aminata: Yes, absolutely. I'll speak plainly. I was born in this country. My mom is an immigrant. When Trump was talking about, "Oh, we need to reverse birthright citizenship," I was immediately worried that ICE was going to come after her, even though she has her citizenship. She got it when I was eight. If I were to come into contact with someone who believes that she shouldn't be here and should be kidnapped by ICE and thrown into a detention center, I don't know that I would react civilly to that. I'm not saying I would fight them. I'm not a violent person, but I don't think my words would be kind.

Brian Lehrer: Got it. Thank you for your call. One more time on this, President Eisgruber.

President Eisgruber: Yes, so thank you for the question and for your observations. Let me be clear about what I'm saying. I'm not saying that speech always has to be civil, or it's the only kind of speech that we should respect. Indeed, in the book, I make a case for protest. I talk about why it's important for colleges to accommodate protest on their campus. As I've said earlier, I think we have to draw lines about how those protests can take place so that everybody is able to speak and be heard and do what they need to do on a college campus.

There is an important role in the First Amendment, as well as I think the best kinds of college rules make allowance for this. There is a role for speech that can be uncivil. I also agree with your observation that speaking civilly in lots of different contexts can be hard. I think one of the things people don't understand about free speech is that it is often hard. People talk about it as though it's an easy thing. It's often a difficult thing.

Your own call illustrates, I think, how it is that one can speak civilly about really difficult topics. Your argument and presentation to what was a large radio audience was entirely civil. I think to the extent that we can do that, that we can take strong stands on behalf of critical constitutional values, including equality for the wide variety of people in our communities. If we can do that civilly, we will be more effective in having the kinds of discourse that will drive this country toward justice and the kinds of outcomes that we want.

Brian Lehrer: Before we run out of time, let me ask you about one more thing regarding you that was in the news. The Atlantic last month, among others, wrote up an exchange you had at a forum with some other university presidents about Trump's critiques of universities in general, Ivey's in particular. The article in The Atlantic included this. "Those other university officials, led by Washington University's Andrew Martin and Vanderbilt's Daniel Diermeier, the chancellors who sparred with Eisgruber on the panel, make up what they call the reformist camp."

"They accept some of Trump's complaints and believe that the best path forward for higher education is to publicly commit to a kind of voluntary, modified de-wokeification. They argued that some campuses," and this uses Cambridge and Morningside Heights, meaning Columbia and Harvard, "and departments like humanities have leaned too far into leftist ideology and allowed anti-Semitism to fester under the guise of protesting Israeli policies. They want the American public to know that they are different from the Ivies, and they think that higher education needs new representation if it's going to regain the country's trust." What's your take today on that difference, at least as described in The Atlantic?

President Eisgruber: Well, look, I can't comment on the specifics of an off-the-record meeting, which that was, but let me say this. First of all, university presidents, and I would include my friends at Vanderbilt and Washington University in this description, agree about far more than they disagree about in this regard. I would note two particular things there. We agree, I think, about the importance of academic freedom.

We agree about the importance of this pact between the federal government and our research universities that I described earlier. We agree, too, that where there are things we can do better, we ought to change and get better, and we ought to reform. Then I think there are healthy differences of opinion, as there should be, about exactly how well it is that we are doing and where those reforms need to take place and how to characterize the reforms.

A point that I've made before publicly and will reiterate now is I actually think that the universities we have in the United States today are the strongest universities we've ever had and some of the strongest that the world has ever seen. I think on issues like diversity, we have become stronger institutions by virtue of our greater diversity and our greater inclusivity.

These universities are better because they attract talent from all sectors of society in a way that they did not do in the past, and that has made them even better than the very strong institutions that used to exist. There are fine points of disagreement, but also, I would say, very strong points of agreement about the strength of these institutions and the need to proceed forward.

Brian Lehrer: We have about a minute left. I wonder if I could get one thought from you on one of your previous books. I mentioned in the intro that we might be able to get to a point or two from some of your books from the past that I haven't read. The one that I'm interested in is the one about the Constitution and religious liberty, in which I've read that you argue that religion gets treated as both too privileged and too punished by modern applications of the so-called "wall of separation" doctrine. Can you give us a very quick primer on that?

President Eisgruber: Yes, I'm happy to. The basic point, which I made with my co-author, Larry Sager from the University of Texas Law School, is that we think that the Constitution's commitment to religious freedom is best understood as a kind of equality commitment, that people should be treated neither better nor worse by virtue of the foundations of their spiritual or moral commitments. That applies to secular commitments as well as to religious ones. It is a broad and powerful anti-discrimination and equality principle.

Our complaint about Supreme Court jurisprudence, and I'm afraid we haven't managed to persuade the current court about this, is that religion is too often treated as something different from that, either a ground for privileging people and treating them better, or at times as something that's particularly dangerous. We think that the real constitutional concern there should be about the idea that people are treated less well or better. Either one of those things is a problem because of their foundations of their religious beliefs.

Brian Lehrer: There is a proposal out there now. Let's see. I'm actually looking for the reference. Well, there's some activism in religious liberty circles that churches should be different from other nonprofits in that they should be able to make candidate endorsements in political races. Have you seen that and have a reaction to it? Literally, 20 seconds.

President Eisgruber: Yes. Our view would be that churches and other nonprofits, and particularly associations brought together for spiritual, moral, or intellectual purposes, ought to be treated on the same ground. I don't know the details, so there may be some argument that's being made here about why equality would require the difference, but I think that's the right question. My take would be skeptical about that proposal.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, there actually is reporting that the IRS has taken the position that churches can now endorse political candidates. I'm sure that's a fight that's just beginning.

President Eisgruber: Not something I would want for universities.

Brian Lehrer: The president of Princeton University, Christopher Eisgruber, he has a new book called Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right. Thank you so much for having this conversation with us and our listeners.

President Eisgruber: Thank you, Brian. It's been a pleasure.

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