Christopher Eisgruber has spent over a decade watching Princeton students argue. Not politely debate in seminar rooms, but really argue — occupy buildings, protest speakers, push back against ideas they find dangerous. And he's come to see that as exactly what free speech is supposed to look like.
Speaking at Harvard in early November, the Princeton president defended campus discourse efforts against a backdrop of what he calls a "genuine civic crisis" — the polarization fracturing American institutions. His new book, Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right, draws on those years leading one of the country's most high-profile universities to argue that colleges have actually done reasonably well protecting speech, even as the broader culture has fractured around them.
But Eisgruber doesn't romanticize student protest. When Princeton students occupied campus buildings in 2015 demanding institutional change, he acknowledged the university "faltered" by letting the disruption run too long. There's a difference, he suggests, between inviting speakers who genuinely challenge you and inviting people whose primary goal is to provoke — between engagement and performance.
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Start Your News DetoxThe real problem isn't campus activism. It's the ecosystem that rewards it. Social media creates what Eisgruber calls "different kinds of incentives" that make constructive conversation harder. A nuanced take doesn't travel. A provocative one does. That pressure exists everywhere — but colleges are supposed to be different. They're supposed to be places where "millions of conversations" can happen without an algorithm deciding which ones matter.
What struck Eisgruber as he looked across his campus wasn't students refusing to listen to opposing views. It was students caring enough to argue. "If I'm an accountant looking at an organization," he said, "I want to look for engagement. I want to look for argument. I want to look for controversy." The absence of those things would be the real warning sign.
The challenge ahead isn't protecting speech from students. It's protecting the conditions that let speech — real, messy, sometimes heated speech — actually happen. That's harder than it sounds.
