Pod Insights On with Kara Swisher Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber About this episode Universities have been in the crosshairs of the White House since President Trump took office — and Princeton University president Christopher Eisgruber is one of a handful of college administrators who have spoken out against it.
Kara speaks to the Eisgruber about his new book, Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right, and right-wing attacks on universities that come under the guise of free speech, including from the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk and his organization Turning Point USA. They discuss why some campus leaders have fought against (and others have complied) with the Trump administration’s investigations into allegations of antisemitism and demands to overhaul diversity programs in college admissions and hiring. And they talk about the long-term impacts of losing academic freedom on the reputation and success of US higher education, the economy and society as a whole.
Please note: this interview was recorded on Monday September 29th, before President Trump said his administration was nearing a deal with Harvard while it also began a process called debarment that could allow it to bar the university from future federal grants.
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Transcript 10,769 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Kara Swisher? I didn't get into Princeton, just so you know.
0:02 Speaker 01 I'm sorry to hear that.
0:04 Kara Swisher? It's all right.
0:04 Speaker 01 It wasn't my decision, Kara.
0:06 Kara Swisher? You know, a lot of colleges now are like, will you teach at our school? I said, you didn't let me in, so I'm not sure why I would.
0:24 Kara Swisher? Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. I've been talking to students and faculty on college campuses recently, and one thing is clear: there's a lot of uncertainty out there. From Harvard to UCLA, the Trump administration has been pulling funding or threatening to if universities don't comply with their new policies targeting diversity in other programs in admission and hiring. Some colleges with deep pockets have pushed back and won lawsuits, but many are complying and even complying in advance. My guest today is one of the university administrators who has spoken out against the Trump administration's move: Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber. Iesgruber is a constitutional scholar, a man of many degrees, and also the author of a new book about the First Amendment,
1:09 Kara Swisher? which is out this week: Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right. In it, he pushes back against the notion that American universities are liberal bastions unwelcoming to conservatives, an idea that was propagated by right-wing conservative activist Charlie Kirk and his organization Turning Point USA. Kirk has been lauded as a defender of free speech by many, so I want to ask Iesgruber about his thoughts on Kirk and the right-wing attacks on universities under the guise of more speech. I also want to talk to him about what colleges and students should be doing right now to ensure we continue to have academic freedom. Our expert question comes from Jason Stanley, former Yale professor who moved to the University of Toronto to escape the political
1:51 Kara Swisher? climate here in the US and also on college campuses. Stay with us.
2:02 Kara Swisher? Support for this show comes from The Guardian and their new show, Stateside, where journalists Kai Wright and Carter Sherman use the entire independent reporting resources of The Guardian to slow down the news and wrestle with the questions we all have about what is actually happening in the world. Join Kai and Carter three times a week as they utilize all the reporting resources The Guardian has across news, international coverage, climate, culture, wellness, and more. And The Guardian's not owned by a billionaire, they fearlessly report the facts without interference. Go to theguardian.com/stateside to learn more and listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube. That's theguardian.com/stateside.
2:46 Kara Swisher? Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow, none of them ever talk to each other. That's where Odoo comes in. An all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all in one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try it today for free at Odoo.com/kara. That's O-D-O-O dot com slash Kara.
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3:51 Kara Swisher? President Eisgruber, thanks for coming on "On."
3:54 Speaker 01 My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
3:56 Kara Swisher? I'm excited. It's hard to pin down a university president.
3:58 Speaker 01 Well, I'm delighted to have a chance to talk to you.
4:01 Kara Swisher? Yeah, and by the way, nice tie with the Princeton.
4:03 Speaker 01 Thank you.
4:03 Kara Swisher? Yeah, you people love that orange.
4:05 Speaker 01 Love the orange, yeah, it's on brand.
4:07 Kara Swisher? It is. So we have a lot to get to, free speech, Charlie Kirk, Jimmy Kimmel, all kinds of things, but also you being the president of Princeton. And you've been a leading voice speaking out against attacks on universities from the Trump administration. I want to talk about that more in a minute, but first, let's talk about your book. It's called Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right. A lot of people in the Trump administration don't think that, but in it, you defend universities against allegations that they are betraying free speech, indoctrinating students, and censoring civil discussion. Those are pretty much the troika of complaints. These are the kinds of accusations that Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk repeatedly magnet about colleges, and others have too. Of course, everyone should condemn Kirk's murder, but what are your thoughts on the
4:50 Kara Swisher? national debate around free speech that has been sparked by his death?
4:55 Speaker 01 Well, 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. So, 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 on 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.
5:40 Kara Swisher? So the accusation that universities shut down discussion, has some credence? No credence?
5:47 Speaker 01 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 the 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
6:30 Speaker 01 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.
6:39 Kara Swisher? And when those incidents happen, of which it typically was the conservatives that were getting shouted down, during that period of time at least, what is the responsibility of a university in that case?
6:49 Speaker 01 The responsibility of a university is to hold students accountable and others accountable if they're breaking 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 in response, 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. You've got to do better in the future.
7:24 Kara Swisher? And when you think about that, I remember when I went to Georgetown University, Roberto Deboisson spoke there, and he was a murderer, as far as I know. He killed Archbishop Romero in El Salvador. He was allowed to speak at Georgetown. There were a lot of protests, but he was allowed to speak. And I remember it being controversial, but not disrupted, I guess. And now today, it's really hard to do that. And the university then has to serve as a security and serve as the decider. And a lot of the times, the decisions are made because of lack of safety, correct?
7:53 Speaker 01 Well, 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 to do that. And when you get into a set of circumstances in a country where you've got rising political violence and As I said, greater polarization, more controversy, that gets harder. But it's our responsibility to make sure that events can take place. And I think, Kara, as I said earlier, most of them do take place, whether there are protests or not. The events where things go wrong are the exceptions.
8:34 Kara Swisher? I am just right now teaching a short course at the University of Michigan. And actually, the first thing I said to the students is, I'm going to say things that are uncomfortable, and you need to be comfortable being uncomfortable, because nothing is safe when it comes to hard ideas, essentially.
8:48 Speaker 01 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's 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.
9:21 Kara Swisher? It's interesting to think about the themes of your book, given Kirk's legacy and what happened in the aftermath of his assassination, including the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel, for example. In your book, you lay out the current concept of free speech in America is tied to the 1964 Supreme Court case, New York Times v. Sullivan, very famous case, protects a lot of newspapers. In Justice Brennan's opinion, he argued that, quote, "debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide open," and that they may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on the government and public officials. Kirk was famous for having heated public debates on college campuses. Talk a little about the New York Times v. Sullivan, and whether that was what Kirk was doing, and whether it was in line with the expansive idea of free speech.
10:04 Speaker 01 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. Was 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
10:46 Speaker 01 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 and what the Supreme Court did around it. You know, 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.
11:30 Speaker 01 That's a legacy of New York Times versus Sullivan, and that changed conception of free speech.
11:35 Kara Swisher? And what he was doing, you thought, was in line with that, even if he was mostly just arguing with kids, really.
11:41 Speaker 01 Well, he was arguing 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
12:25 Speaker 01 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. But we should not be. Promoting inclusivity by censoring controversial speakers. That's the tough assignment we got.
12:44 Kara Swisher? So conservatives like Kirk have argued that American colleges silence or censor conservative voices. It's been a long time complaint of theirs. One of the things Turning Point USA has done is compile watch lists of school boards, professors to quote, expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom, which is a wholly different thing than his, what I consider a lot of performative debates that he did. But reversely, some academics on the watch list says they've been harassed and feel censored. So explain what kind of impact these lists have on free speech on campus.
13:15 Speaker 01 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.
14:00 Speaker 01 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 members.
14:08 Kara Swisher? So these lists are not something you think are a good idea?
14:11 Speaker 01 They're terrible. So, sorry, I gave you a long academic answer.
14:15 Kara Swisher? So there's been a massive fallout in the wake of his death. Obviously, most famously, ABC took Jimmy Kimmel's late night show off the air and then brought him back after a huge public outcry. Same thing with Sinclair and Nextar, who made ridiculous demands, that none of which were met. There's also been, as you said, dozens of cases of regular people being fired, including teachers and college professors who are posting negative comments about Kirk on social media. I know you don't like the term cancel culture, but it kind of looks like that, right? It has that, it smells like cancel culture. And is there a difference between censorship, what you might call a lack of online civility? Is there a line that you, as a university professor, have to draw?
14:52 Speaker 01 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.
15:16 Kara Swisher? Well, not me, but go ahead.
15:17 Speaker 01 You may not. 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'd 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 want a culture in which people are able to say things and to have these kinds of robust discussions that Justice Brennan's ideal that you quoted earlier evoke. The reason I don't like cancel culture as a way of explaining this is I think it suggests
15:59 Speaker 01 that, for example, younger generations or, you know, a certain subgroup of people have been affected with something culturally. I think what's happening, and maybe this is the connection that you were alluding to with the last part of your question, is we're getting a lot of changes in the rules about how we talk to one another that are the result of social media and its different incentives. And at times, people are reacting to those provocations without protecting due process and without protecting the rights of employees or others. I don't think cancel culture is a good way of explaining what's going wrong there.
16:31 Kara Swisher? Well, what I mean by online, you do have consequences. Some people, like yourself, have consequences. Others do not necessarily. But the fact that people are calling for firings over it in the most excessive way.
16:42 Speaker 01 Yeah. Online media changed 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. There are 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.
17:19 Kara Swisher? In other ways, free speech has been weaponized in that regard online. And I often use the line, enrage equals engagement. You write anger rivets attention. Same thing. It's leading to a fostering of increased political polarization. And most college students do use social media or in some form of it, although less and less, I think. So how should universities teach students to engage with ideas or topics that are on opposite sides of the political spectrum?
17:44 Speaker 01 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.
18:25 Speaker 01 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 to live in a really fractious, kind of volatile, speech environment that's going to be with us for a while.
18:45 Kara Swisher? You wrote about the difference between Supreme Court Justice Wendell Holmes' notion of free speech as a marketplace of ideas and Justice Louis Brandeis' vision of a deliberative community. Talk about these ideas. You think Brandeis is the right way to get back to a less polarized world, including online?
19:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, I much prefer Brandeis because Holmes is-
19:05 Kara Swisher? Well, explain them for people who aren't.
19:06 Speaker 01 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.
19:36 Kara Swisher? Sure not.
19:37 Speaker 01 What I like about Louis Brandeis and 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 to be governed on the basis of more deliberative ideas rather than less deliberative ideas. That should be our goal.
20:08 Kara Swisher? So it's opposite from marketplace of ideas. Because marketplace of ideas is sort of the tech bros.
20:12 Speaker 01 I'm going to defer to you on the tech bros and exactly what they view. But yeah.
20:16 Kara Swisher? The difference is that you get to a better place.
20:19 Speaker 01 Brandeis recognizes, look, 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 said to your to your class. Brandeis recognizes that.
21:02 Speaker 01 So I think it's a much better way of understanding what free speech is all about.
21:05 Kara Swisher? So every week we get a question from an outside expert. Here's yours.
21:09 Speaker 03 Hi. My name is Jason Stanley. I'm a professor in the Monks School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, as well as the Department of Philosophy. First of all, I wanted to thank you for being a university president in the mold of my ideal of university presidents growing up, which is all too rare nowadays. You've really clearly seen what's going on right now. But.
21:39 Speaker 03 To me, this clear sighted vision is in tension with some of the arguments in your forthcoming book that was shared with me. You talk about the problem in America being polarization. However, I would have thought that the problem in America is authoritarianism, autocracy, or fascism, whatever you call it. If we are indeed faced with a fascist attack on universities and other democratic institutions, isn't it right to be polarized against it? Isn't polarization a good thing when facing fascism?
22:13 Speaker 01 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.
22:57 Speaker 01 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 is how do we contend with that kind of polarization in our society, whatever its sources, and enable people to have constructive conversations that might eventually pull us, as Brandeis hoped, in a better direction?
23:21 Kara Swisher? So is polarization a good thing when facing being angry like this?
23:26 Speaker 01 I don't think anger is a good thing. I think...
23:28 Kara Swisher? But is polarization okay? Like, no, no, we refuse to accept this.
23:33 Speaker 01 Yeah, I, look, I think there's a lot of partisanship. My, my friend and colleague Julian Zelizer in the Princeton History Department has a book out called "In Defense of Partisanship," where he talks about how partisanship and, and the division into competing parties is, you know, an ordinary part of American life and a functional part of our, our politics. But he agrees, we're in a period right now of what he calls hyper-partisanship, 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 emotions 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.
24:18 Speaker 01 And Kara, that is clearly a bad thing. That is dangerous and we should want to get out of it.
24:22 Kara Swisher? Certainly, but I think Jason's point of view is like, you don't want to have a civil, you know, a conversation to get to a deliberative debate with someone who is a fascist or not, you know, in his case, you don't like chit chat with the Nazis. Essentially, I think that's his larger thing. And just so you, Jason recently, I just interviewed him about his decision to leave Yale and move to Canada to get away from the Trump administration. But with students, you write about, you see, his correlational political engagement and closed-mindedness, too.
24:50 Speaker 01 I think, if I can say this, right, as long as we're dedicated and you can make a decision to move out of a country, I suppose, and, and say, "I'm leaving that."
24:59 Kara Swisher? I don't agree with that.
25:00 Speaker 01 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, our mission. But you're right, when you, when we, you 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, our colleges and universities now, having been raised and
25:40 Speaker 01 having experienced their political life almost entirely in this atmosphere of effective polarization. That does produce closed-mindedness and, and it means we have to work harder to open minds up and get people to think about how they have those conversations across difference.
26:01 Kara Swisher? We'll be back in a minute.
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28:56 Kara Swisher? Of course, the entire conversation about free speech is coming at this time when institutes of higher education, especially elite universities like Princeton, are directly being targeted by Trump. I want to walk you through the timeline. In January and February, Trump signed a number of executive orders directed at universities, including an order to roll back DEI efforts and one directing agencies to monitor and report on campus antisemitism. In March, the Department of Education sent letters to 60 universities announcing investigations of potential antisemitic discrimination and harassment, and the administration started threatening to withhold federal funding if they didn't make changes to their hiring and admissions policies. And over the spring and summer, the responses have been varied. For example, Columbia and Brown agreed to concessions.
29:37 Kara Swisher? Harvard and UCLA fought and beat Trump administration in court on free speech grounds, but Harvard also made many of the changes. And the administration demanded, and UCLA's chancellor said he'd address valid concerns. Recently, the University of California at Berkeley provided the administration with the names of 160 students, faculty, and staff as part of an investigation into allegations of antisemitism. The administration also submitted... The names and emails of all the employees of all the Cal State schools. Finally, this past weekend, The Washington Post reported the Trump administration is considering changing tactics. Instead of awarding federal grants based on peer review and scientific merit, the administration is considering giving schools a competitive advantage if they pledge to adhere to the government's admissions and hiring policies. It's the same thing.
30:20 Kara Swisher? Back in March, let me just say, finally, you wrote in The Atlantic that Trump's attacks present, quote, "the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare of the 50s. Every American should be concerned." So where are we now, given that litany that I just went through?
30:37 Speaker 01 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 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 as 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.
31:22 Speaker 01 And now that compact is being turned into a kind of lever to pressure universities to make concessions around things that are related to 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.
31:52 Kara Swisher? What about Columbia and Brown, very early concessions?
31:56 Speaker 01 I think there are, one of the things that, you know, I feel very profoundly as a university president in 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 may be the wrong concessions to make, or they're leaving their faculty potentially, some of whom are paid on federal grants in a place where not only can they not do their research, they really can't pay their mortgages or afford to continue to care for those families. And I don't want to be judgmental for that reason about the tough choices people make in almost impossible circumstances. But I do think it's important, if you're going
32:39 Speaker 01 to make those kinds of choices, to say, look, we need to stand for academic freedom and there are problems here. So I have, I do have concerns about those deals.
32:47 Kara Swisher? And when you think of valid concessions, are there valid concessions?
32:52 Speaker 01 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 on research. That is, how do you calculate the cost 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.
33:36 Kara Swisher? And not under pressure necessarily?
33:38 Speaker 01 Not, not because of pressure. Those two things were contemporaneous. But look, you know, when we're talking about something like antisemitism 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.
34:11 Kara Swisher? Just in August, the article in The Atlantic claimed this spring that you all but accused some of the university presidents of, quote, "carrying water for the Trump administration." How much cooperation with the administration is OK? And where is that line?
34:25 Speaker 01 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. The questions about what kind of cooperation is OK and what is not are going to be sensitive to those issues about principle.
34:53 Kara Swisher? In a recent New York Times interview, May Mailman, a former senior policy strategist for the Trump administration who was a key staffer on education, said the problem with US colleges is they glorify victimhood and value diversity over meritocracy, especially elite universities. This is what the administration is trying to fix. This is their line, I guess. To me, it's specious, but your thoughts?
35:13 Speaker 01 Well, the first thing I want to say is, you know, 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 its 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
35:56 Speaker 01 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 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 on to the to the merits. But, you know, I think we see people reacting differently from that and understandably on 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 from people when when some were saying arguably
36:41 Speaker 01 offensive things. That's happened on the left. It's happened on the right. It's happened earlier in our history. It's happened. And now what we've got to do is push forward into brave conversations.
36:50 Kara Swisher? Yeah, it's kind of ironic. Last week, the chancellor of the Texas Tech University System told faculty over to restrict academic discussion of gender to the Trump administration's approved definitions of male and female. In your book, you write about how the expansion of free speech has usually gone hand in hand with the push for more equality. How big a deal is this when the administration is literally telling professors what they can and can't discuss in class? I would think that would be a bright red line for you.
37:14 Speaker 01 It's 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, our 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.
37:54 Kara Swisher? But the Trump administration is also targeting students. It's restricting visas of foreign students, threatening student financial aid. It recently announced a new policy that would require employers to pay a one-time $100,000 fee for H1B visa holders. Talk a little bit about the repercussions here, because I have kids who go to universities, and a lot of their friends are telling me who are from other countries are worried about their social media. They're worried about what they say and everything else. What are the repercussions of this? Because foreign students, one, some of them are very wealthy, and they bring in full freight. And two, the ones that are especially graduate level bring in Innovation and excitement to our country. Will that impact your ability to bring in talent, whether they're students, young researchers, or top-tier academics?
38:34 Speaker 01 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.
39:18 Speaker 01 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 when I'm talking to the administration, 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 interest.
39:38 Kara Swisher? How is that being met?
39:40 Speaker 01 I 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 gold standard science. The president himself had signed a letter back in April talking about the administration's commitment to doing gold standard science. That depends on recruiting people from all over the world. It depends on making sure that people can thrive on our campuses. It depends on protecting academic freedom, and it depends on protecting this compact.
40:06 Kara Swisher? When you said it depends on who you talk to, it sounds like they're still using it as a cudgel. What's the long impact on, say, Princeton to financial cuts in research? Are you less dependent than other universities?
40:19 Speaker 01 There are ways in which I think our financial model is stronger. I mean, just to name one, you know, 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
41:04 Speaker 01 will allow us, we hope, to continue, despite the headwinds, to achieve very high levels of excellence.
41:10 Kara Swisher? So they can't shake you down quite as much, in other words, essentially?
41:13 Speaker 01 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.
41:42 Kara Swisher? And the effect on the US economy, too.
41:44 Speaker 01 And the effect on 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.
42:19 Kara Swisher? Right, although if you say Trump should get the Nobel Prize, you'll probably get lots of funding for that. Please don't do that.
42:29 Kara Swisher? We'll be back in a minute.
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45:18 Kara Swisher? Scott Galloway, who's a university professor, has been. One of the things he noted, and he wanted me to ask you, was you have a $34 billion endowment, is that correct?
45:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, roughly, yes.
45:28 Kara Swisher? Incredibly huge. And that's not just Meg Whitman. But you only have 1,400 students. This is an issue Scott talks about a lot.
45:35 Speaker 01 No, that's wrong. We have 5,700 undergraduates and 2,800 doctoral students.
45:42 Kara Swisher? Okay. He thinks that's too small and wonders what universities can do to expand, that they become sort of a luxury item for wealthy people internationally, for students. And he said, aren't many elite universities just hedge funds with really nice campuses? Talk a little bit about that, that idea, that you should be bigger. If you had more of a constituency, these attacks wouldn't land so easily.
46:07 Speaker 01 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 expand it 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, and Shirley Tillman, also a big champion for low income students, was the president, into my presidency. We've gone from 7% Pell students.
46:49 Speaker 01 Which was unacceptable, in my view, that Pell 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 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.
47:17 Kara Swisher? Is there other ways of expanding besides bringing everyone to your very gorgeous campus? Because a lot of people think that elite universities don't have a constituency because they're elite and they make everyone feel bad for not, I was joking about not getting in, but you know what I mean? Like it feels exclusive to people.
47:33 Speaker 01 Well, 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
48:14 Speaker 01 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.
48:24 Kara Swisher? Yeah, that's where Scott went.
48:25 Speaker 01 And it's where Scott went. I did not know that. Well,
48:27 Kara Swisher? Yeah, he was poor and they paid for him.
48:30 Speaker 01 And we are, we are paying for more students coming out of low income backgrounds here at Princeton now to 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.
49:03 Kara Swisher? So before we go, I want to talk to you about how this has impacted you personally. You've been extremely outspoken about these threats and you have been targeted as a result. Conservative activist Christopher Rufo claims you've created a system of widespread racial discrimination, Princeton. Have you felt pressure to back off, to lay low? And if so, from whom?
49:20 Speaker 01 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, when I spoke out in the spring, I had a couple of undergraduates chasing me across quadrangle to say that they appreciated it, that I was speaking up for the mission that they care about. So, you know, as I look at it, it is a hard time to be a university president. It's hard to speak up.
50:03 Speaker 01 There are risks to doing conversations like the one that we're doing right now. But for a long time, American universities have let other people tell stories about us. If we don't start telling our own story and if we don't take the risks that you're talking about, we're going to lose that fight. We got to speak up.
50:20 Kara Swisher? Was there a pressure moment or a pressure from someone, you don't have to say who it was, that really pushed you back a little bit?
50:26 Speaker 01 No, 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 losing 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, somewhat 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.
51:00 Kara Swisher? Yeah, maybe you could speak to Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer right now. I call it push send. I always am like, when everyone's like, I don't. Know what to do. I'm like, push send. Just push it. Push it.
51:11 Speaker 01 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 as a leader.
51:19 Kara Swisher? And yet you need to make him push send a little harder, I would say. You should give him a little backbone.
51:23 Speaker 01 He was an independent minded student. He's an independent minded leader.
51:26 Kara Swisher? All right. Well, he just needs to step it up. That's my opinion. Anyway, so you're, that's funny. You're his student. Your parents were both immigrants also, German immigrants. You grew up thinking your mother was Catholic. But in 2008, you found out that she and her family were actually Jewish refugees that fled the Nazis. Your father had allegedly been in Hitler Youth. And as you look at what's happening right now, did you grapple with your own family's legacy? Has that any impact about how you think about your role at the current moment?
51:53 Speaker 01 Yeah, you know, 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, 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, I think about the obligation that all of us have to, to speak up. And I'm, 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
52:39 Speaker 01 is to speak up and, 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 my, why my mother had come and what her story was, I knew that her family and my father had both come here.
52:54 Kara Swisher? To get away.
52:54 Speaker 01 Because of the freedom that this, to get away and, 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.
53:05 Kara Swisher? That you have.
53:05 Speaker 01 That I have, that we all have.
53:07 Kara Swisher? Right. But I mean, that's, that's something to learn. That would be sort of shocking. Last question. In our polarized society where free speech is being weaponized, what do you think the most important thing we can do? Do to improve civic discourse. What terms of respect do we need? And is there a hope that we can turn it around? I quibble with a lot of people who say, we just need to be more civil. I'm like, we're way past that, right? We're way past that. Don't it's often a certain type of person who's very safe that says we need to be more civil to me. And I'm like, wow, that would be great, but that's not really our biggest concern right now. So talk about what we need to do to improve civil discourse. Part of it is resisting, of course, but what terms of respect do we need? Which is the name of your book?
53:50 Speaker 01 We need to find ways to 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.
54:34 Speaker 01 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 that's human and then manage 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 doesn't mean that we need to insult one another either.
54:57 Kara Swisher? Well, though, there are some bad actors that are just doing it.
55:00 Speaker 01 There are some bad actors, but look, I think our commitment to
55:03 Kara Swisher? There's a lot of bad actors.
55:03 Speaker 01 Our commitment to our democracy depends on finding ways to find the good actors on the other side, to recognize that 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
55:43 Speaker 01 to a shared civic space where the robust argument can happen is really important.
55:49 Kara Swisher? So you're glad you took the job?
55:50 Speaker 01 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.
56:00 Kara Swisher? And plus, you get to wear orange.
56:01 Speaker 01 I got to wear orange all the time. I embrace all the orange.
56:05 Kara Swisher? Yeah, I would be remiss if I didn't say go blue for my son. Anyway.
56:08 Speaker 01 Okay, sounds like Michigan.
56:09 Kara Swisher? Yeah, that's where he is.
56:11 Speaker 01 Okay.
56:11 Kara Swisher? All right, whatever.
56:12 Speaker 01 Thank you, Kara. I appreciate it.
56:19 Kara Swisher? Today's show was produced by Christian Castor-Russell, Kateri Yokum, Michelle Aloy, Megan Burney, and Kalen Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Bradley Sylvester and Eamon Whelan. Our engineers are Fernando Aruda and Rick Kwan. And our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you look good in orange. Actually, nobody but a pumpkin does, everybody, including the people at Princeton. If not, push send. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.
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