BY JOAN W. SCOTT
Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber has carefully curated his public reputation as a defender of free speech and academic freedom against the wanton attacks by the Trump administration. In a recent book, widely publicized and distributed by his university, he offers advice to others about how to maintain an atmosphere of civility in these turbulent times. Yet, as a scathing review in Academe of Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right classics professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta maintains there is little relationship between the principles Eisgruber preaches and the way he runs his institution in practice. Here is Padilla Peralta:
I’ve seen up close how a university administration can extol free speech and academic freedom while also moving against the faculty (and other community members) to exercise governance. On this campus, as on others, the pro-Palestine encampments of spring 2024 exposed basic truths about the debilitation of shared governance—nowhere more glaring than in the mismatch between professed commitments to free speech and realities on the ground.
Well before the university’s reaction to the pro-Palestine demonstrations, governance at Princeton was hardly shared. A review of the faculty handbook in 2025 by a staff member at the AAUP national office, which measured its provisions against AAUP standards, noted the absence of independent faculty institutions.
Another anomaly… is the number of key faculty bodies that are chaired by administrative officers, a practice much more common fifty or sixty years ago and not entirely consistent with the principles [of the AAUP]. For example, the Committee on Committees, the Advisory Committee on Appointments and Advancements, and the Faculty Advisory Committee on Policy are chaired by the president. The Committee on the Course of Study and the Committee on Examinations and Standing are chaired by the dean of the college. Not all the committees listed in the Rules and Procedures involve decision-making in areas in which the faculty should exercise primary responsibility, but these certainly appear to do so. Evidently, the Committee on Conference and Faculty Appeal is one of the few such committees chaired by a faculty member.
The report didn’t mention, because it didn’t interview faculty on the ground, the process by which even the Committee on Conference and Faculty Appeal (CCFA) is created. As for all committees, nominations are solicited from the faculty by the Committee on Committees; but final appointments to committee membership and chairs are made by the Dean of Faculty and/or the President. As a result, though consisting of faculty, these committees are neither representative nor autonomous because they are not directly elected. They hardly have the ability to challenge the ultimate authority of the administration and it appears that they rarely do. For example, in the wake of warnings and probation received by two professors who brought their classes to the encampment (Gyan Prakash and Max Weiss), the CCFA recommended that their discipline be retracted. T hat recommendation was overruled by the administration.
There is no independent representative body of faculty to turn to. Faculty meetings are convened at the invitation of the President, who sets the agenda. A set of elaborate rules does allow for “new business” to be raised at the meeting and even for a special meeting to be called at the instigation of at least six faculty members. But in both cases, the President determines suitable content and procedure. In 2024, a group calling for such a meeting was told that it had to submit its proposals in advance so that the president could determine if they met his criteria. This is hardly how universities with independent faculty senates (now fast being abolished by red state legislatures) usually operate.
The highly centralized power at Princeton has led, over the years, to the substitution of presidential favorites among the senior faculty, who prefer one-on-one conversations at the top, for collective faculty participation. This encourages a climate of secrecy that the AAUP report on the Rules and Procedures also noted. Whereas AAUP recommends that written statements be provided for all non-renewals and terminations, no such thing is offered to Princeton faculty. Indeed, even the “statement of reasons” (not specified as written) promised in the Rules and Procedures is not enforced in most cases—certainly not in a recent case which I will come to below. Finally, the AAUP report noted the scarcity of references to academic freedom in the faculty handbook (there are but two). Whereas most institutions have a separate section devoted to defining academic freedom, no such documentation of the institution’s understanding of this core principle is available to Princeton faculty.
On governance matters alone, Princeton warrants an AAUP investigation, if not sanction. But, as is well-established, academic freedom depends on procedures of shared governance, the one depends on the other. When faculty don’t have the possibility of weighing in independently on administrative decisions, academic freedom is more likely to be compromised. This has certainly been the case around the question of pro-Palestine activism by both students and faculty. The administration has made it clear that such activism is not protected by academic freedom; it is the exception to what counts as free expression on this university campus. In the wake of the student encampments in the spring of 2024, a number of events have demonstrated that the climate for academic freedom at Princeton University is neither robust nor secure. The so-called market place of ideas does not countenance criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza, even as it does allow those who support Israeli policy to determine what counts as acceptable political expression.
Leaving aside the criminalization of some of the students (who sought to occupy a university building) and focusing on the treatment of faculty members who supported them and who believed in the importance of protest in a democratic society, I want to list examples of the treatment these faculty members have experienced since 2024.
1. Ruha Benjamin, professor of African American Studies, followed the students into Clio Hall as an observer—a self-proclaimed witness to what was unfolding. The university charged her with instigating and participating in the occupation and the Dean of Faculty told her that her action was illegitimate since the responsibility of “observer” was nowhere listed in the Rules and Procedures. In an ironic coincidence, the university launched an investigation into Benjamin’s actions just as she received a MacArthur “genius” award for her innovative work on racial discrimination. While President Eisgruber waxed eloquent about her scholarship, Princeton refused to print her comments on its website. In those she noted that she learned of the award on the same day the arrested student protestors were scheduled to appear in court, where she would attend to support them. “What would have been a moment of pure joy and excitement was tempered by the sense that the same institutions that are quick to celebrate our accomplishments have been slow to respond to students’ demands to disclose and divest from genocidal violence,” she wrote. “I plan to ‘celebrate’ the award by showing up to court.” Professor Benjamin was put on a year-long probation as a result of her support for the student activists.
2. Max Weiss, is a professor of history who works on the modern Middle East. His many publications include a translation of an Iraqi text that was long-listed for a National Book Award. Weiss brought his class for an optional meeting on Israel/Palestine to the encampment, for which (in response to two students’ objections) he was put on probation. Though promoted to full professor, this has not made Weiss less an object of intense scrutiny; the letter about his probation noted that any future instance of “unprofessional conduct” would lead to “further discipline, up to and including dismissal.”
3. Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Ruha Benjamin, Naomi Murakawa, Max Weiss, and Divya Cherian, signed letters of protest to the Board of Trustees about President Eisgruber’s response to a student hunger strike, and to the administration about the behavior of Vice President Calhoun. When they called for a special meeting of the faculty, they were quizzed by the Dean of Faculty about how many “backers” there were of the request. They were also the professors named when the arrested students were interrogated by university investigators. These students were asked if they had taken classes or been mentored by these faculty and pressed as to whether they had received any kind of instruction or encouragement from faculty to participate in the student protests. And when Professor Benjamin was questioned (in August 2024), it was suggested that she had “coordinated” the occupation of Clio Hall (at which she was only an observer) with the students.
4. Resignations of senior faculty. In response to the university’s punitive approach to the encampments (interrogations, warnings, probation, the removal of a chair of a department), and to the hostile atmosphere on the campus, two senior faculty members, who had supported the students, resigned their positions.
5. Denials of Tenure. Three assistant professors, all in the humanities, who not only supported the students, but signed the letters referred to above (3), were denied tenure in the spring of 2026. The case of Tehseen Thaver, in the department of Religious Studies, stands out in particular as an example of political retribution for her leadership and work as part of the Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) during the Palestine solidarity encampment in 2024. Thaver was denied tenure despite a stellar record of professional achievement which includes a prize-winning, widely praised, and well-reviewed book, and major articles published in the most selective journals in Religious Studies. Likewise, her teaching record at both the undergraduate and graduate levels has been superlative, and she is widely credited with fulfilling to great success the mandate for which her position was formed: integrating the subfield of Islamic Studies with the broader department of Religion and the Humanities. She had received a unanimous departmental endorsement for her interim review only three years before her tenure year; her research record only grew in the lead-up to tenure; the only thing that changed between her interim and tenure reviews was October 7. A strong endorsement from an overwhelming majority of faculty in her department was then overturned on the basis of negative votes from an extremely small minority opposed to the Palestine solidarity encampment. No written statement regarding her tenure denial was provided to her, but in a conversation with the Dean of Faculty, she was only given flimsy pretexts such as the lack of endorsement by some external reviewers who expressed unavailability to review the file. Unavailability (which can have many reasons) was taken as a negative appraisal. More seriously, in what is patently illegal, her maternity leave was counted as part of her tenure clock and expectations of productivity. She is yet to be given, by the Dean or anyone else, any substantive reasons for her denial that relate to the quality of her research and teaching.
When Thaver appealed, the CCFA [the appeals committee] refused to interview her or the witnesses she asked to speak on her behalf and, in record time, they denied the appeal in the most perfunctory fashion. It should be noted that two members of the CCFA, including the Chair, were members of the Council on Academic Freedom, a university sanctioned group of faculty that was created as a direct counterweight to faculty activity surrounding the Palestine solidarity encampment in 2024, in a move to quash criticism of Israel on campus, Even if Thaver’s appeal had been granted by the CCFA, its conclusion would have only been advisory to a President who seems determined to clear his faculty of those he considers potential trouble-makers, even as his book waxes eloquent on matters of free speech and academic freedom.
These tenure denials are part of a pattern that affects the humanities more than it does the science side of the campus. It suggests an unannounced policy decision on the part of the administration to promote STEM fields at the expense of humanities, a policy that seems to have had no collective faculty input that anyone can document. The Palestine exception to free speech and academic freedom is a problem in its own right—and is not peculiar to Princeton. But it is one of several ways that the stealth attack on the humanities is being accomplished at Princeton and elsewhere.
Princeton operates as a centralized, hierarchical institution (one scholar has dubbed this form of administration “presidentialized”). There is no shared governance with the faculty as a collective body and, as a result, the administration’s power remains unchecked. This is the power to violate the very principles of free speech and academic freedom its president claims to uphold.
Joan W. Scott is professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, which has no institutional connection to Princeton University, and a former chair and current member of AAUP Committee A. She has long been an observer of events and activities at the university and has consulted on the revival of its AAUP advocacy chapter.
