Can Elite University Presidents "Resist" Trump?

with John McWhorter, Cornel West, and Robert George

John McWhorter still has the capacity to surprise me. Consider his criticism of Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber in this clip. One would expect John, as a fierce critic of practically everything Trump says and does, to back Eisgruber’s resistance to the Trump administration’s attacks on elite universities. John points to Eisgruber’s June 2020 statement on the death of George Floyd as an indication that he’s at least vulnerable to—if not a committed adherent of—the kind of the “absolutism” that Robbie George names elsewhere in this episode as an internal threat to the mission of universities.

If you’re a university president pushing back on Trump’s policies and you don’t have the enthusiastic support of John McWhorter, you messed up somewhere. And I doubt John is the only one who remembers university presidents’ panicky, faux-moral statements of solidarity with so-called antiracist movements that pressured administrations into toeing the company line on race. I detect skepticism—and perhaps I’m wrong, I don’t want to speak for John—regarding Eisgruber’s fitness for the job of protecting his university’s stated commitment to the pursuit of truth. He caved to pressure. One could argue that he and other university presidents who issued similar statements paying obeisance to the “racial reckoning” helped set us on a path that ended up here, with Trump bringing the universities to heel by force.

I don’t mean to single out Eisgruber. I was very critical of Brown’s president, Cristina Paxson, when she issued a similar statement in 2020. They were in a tough position in 2020. I think they made a mistake, and they were far from alone. Nor am I blaming them for Trump’s actions. But if the universities are going to pull through this crisis, they’ll need public support, and they’ve just about exhausted whatever good will they had with Americans who don’t have Ivy League degrees—and plenty of those who do. It’s hard enough to inspire sympathy over federal funding cuts when you’re sitting on an endowment worth tens of billions of dollars. The legacy of 2020 doesn’t help.

In this clip, Cornel West recounts a 1975 meeting with Princeton’s then-president William G. Bowen. Cornel and some fellow graduate students argued that Woodrow Wilson’s name should be removed from the School of Public and International Affairs. They lost that argument, and they accepted the defeat while maintaining their position. When Wilson’s name finally was removed—less than a month after Eisgruber’s racial reckoning statement—it was done by fiat. Cornel considers this a defeat. Not because he didn’t get what he wanted but because it was done without any deliberation or debate. As he says, raw power trampled reason.

Imagine if Eisgruber and other university presidents had dealt with the racial reckoning the way Cornel would have had Princeton deal with Wilson. Open debate over the direction of the university rather than fearful kowtowing to protesters, a serious, ongoing discussion about the historical, social, moral, and empirical dimensions of race in America rather than the blithe adoption of slogans. Maybe if that had happened, John and all those who think as he does wouldn’t be so hesitant to take Eisgruber’s side.

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GLENN LOURY: Robbie says that the universities had, from within, abandoned or neglected the search for truth. Is that ideologically neutral criticism, or does it have a coloration? Is it that the universities have leaned too far to the left? Is it that they don't have enough intellectual and political diversity in their ranks? Is it that they have become the promoters of critical studies, where taking down the powerful and undermining the structures of order and hierarchy becomes their main purpose? Something like that.

Is it not that they've abandoned the pursuit of truth? It's that they've distorted the the intellectual enterprise on behalf of a particular ideological coloration. Or am I wrong?

JOHN MCWHORTER: I wanna add to your question. Robert, is Professor Eisgruber's first name Chris?

ROBERT GEORGE: Yes. President Eisgruber. He's president of our university.

JOHN MCWHORTER: Yeah. Okay. Christopher Eisgruber would completely disagree with the sermon you just gave, which I agree with completely. He would not recognize himself in it, and he would think that you are distorting what Princeton has become. I haven't met him, but I'm sure he thinks that the way that he thinks and the things that he sanctions are truth. He feels like he's arrived at a truth that other people just aren't aware of.

He has a religion, although he wouldn't recognize it, and he's not an idiot. He's not crazy. He's a very good person. What would you say to him if he were on this show where he would push back against what you said? What would you say in response.

ROBERT EISGRUBER: Chris Eisgruber is actually an old friend of mine as well as the president of my university. We go back more than 40 years. We were graduate students together at Oxford. I bought his bicycle. He sold his bicycle when we were graduate students together. And then we ended up in in the same field. His primary field is constitutional law, my secondary field is constitutional law. My primary field is philosophy of law. But we've done some teaching together, including at Princeton. We've certainly interacted professionally as scholars as well as friends for many years.

We have a number of disagreements. Obviously, he tends to be on the more liberal side of things. I tend to be on the more conservative depth of my criticism. But he doesn't have his head in the sand. He knows there are problems here, and he has publicly said there are problems here. And one of the problems he's identified goes to Glenn's question, and that is the problem of the absence of viewpoint diversity on campus.

He, a few years ago, just before covid, invited my liberal colleague, Steven Macedo, who at the time was heading Princeton's University Center for Human Values, and me, as the director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, to convene a meeting with about a dozen Princeton faculty members and then a dozen scholars from outside the university, specifically to discuss the problem of insufficient viewpoint diversity on campus.

He himself came to the meeting. He spent the entire day with us. He recognizes we have a problem here. Now, does he think the problem is as dire as I think it is? I think the answer to that is no. He doesn't think it's dire, but he also doesn't think it's not a problem. He does think it needs to be addressed.

Now, he thinks we can address it while maintaining some things that are important to him, especially in what we've come to call the potential conflict—he doesn't see it as necessarily a conflict—between his diversity and inclusion goals and academic freedom and viewpoint diversity. I'm more skeptical about than than he is.

But while we differ, we're not so far apart that we can't have an intelligent conversation about it or a civil conversation about it. And he does recognize that we do have problems. He's said the same thing about antisemitism on campus very recently, while he's been in absolutely in the forefront of all university presidents. He's been most in the forefront of criticizing the Trump administration's recent moves.

He agreed that there is a problem with antisemitism. We recently had it right here on our Princeton campus. An Israeli politician came to to speak at our university under the auspices of our Jewish chaplaincy, and his talk was disrupted. He was shouted down. Someone actually pulled the fire alarm, which ended the conversation.

But among the things, people were shouting to the Jewish students and to the speaker was, “Go back to Poland.” Now that's just a straight-up antisemitic statement. That's not the criticism of Israel, which is perfectly legitimate. Any government may legitimately be criticized. There were Jewish people in that room who would criticize the current government of Israel, including its its war policies. But if you're shouting, “Go back to Poland,” we all know what that means. And to his credit, President Eisgruber has acknowledged that we do have problems like that.

John, have I been fair? I don't wanna dodge your question just because Chris is my boss.

JOHN MCWHORTER: No. I just wanna get it out there that I find it very hard to get myself into the mind of someone who says that they realize that there's a problem with the ideological tilt on campuses and a problem with seeking the truth who would also get furiously behind all of that anti-racism agitprop in 2020, 2021 on that campus. For example, that hideous manifesto that went out, he stood behind that and yet feels that Princeton is committed to a search for neutral truth.

I'm not saying that you are a phony, 'cause you're not. I'm not calling him a phony. But I can no more get into that person's head on that than I can get into the head of somebody who I really don't understand.

Cornel, were you not at Princeton in 2020?

CORNEL WEST: No ... I dunno where I was in 2020.

[LAUGHTER]

But you have been at Princeton. You were on the faculty there and you decamped.

ROBERT GEORGE: Can I interrupt there? Because I can remember this pretty well. I think Cornel was at Harvard, and I remember getting a phone call from Cornel when it was suddenly announced that President Eisgruber had decided to remove Woodrow Wilson's name from the building that houses what was the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and is now simply the School of Public and International Affairs.

And Cornel called me. He had been in conversations with his daughter, Zeytun—I call her my niece, she calls me Uncle Robbie—who was here as an undergraduate at the time and is still here as a graduate student. Zeytun said to her father, Cornel, “This is being done with no real consultation. It seems to be just an executive order with no serious discussion about it. No matter how one thinks the question ultimately ought to be resolved, it shouldn't be by some sort of fiat. There should be some broad-ranging discussion and then we decide what to do.”

So Cornel, do you remember that?

CORNEL WEST: Oh, absolutely. I called you right away and said [I] went into the president's office in 1975, as a graduate student. I was a graduate student there in philosophy, with Larry Morris and Hank Coleman in economics, Greg Watson in economics. You might know them, Brother Glenn.

And we sat in the president's office and said, “We have an argument against Woodrow Wilson, given the resegregation and given The Birth of a Nation.” He gave a counterargument and said, “No, Woodrow Wilson was our president.” I agree with Woodrow Wilson trying to eliminate all of the eating clubs on Prospect [Avenue]. I'm in solidarity with Woodrow Wilson in that regard. Also, the graduate college where I lived, as well as my beloved daughter—she's a third-year graduate student right now in the German department.

But we had an argument. We went back and forth. So I agreed with the elimination of the name, I just felt that it was coercive. It was forced. There was no Socratic energy, so that it sent a bad message to students, thinking you don't have to argue your way through. All you have to do is just enact brute force. So you got Thrasymachus trumping Socrates.

And I told the students that themselves. I said, “We put forth arguments in '75. I think we had the best arguments, but we lost. So it stayed around for another 40-some, 50 years.” But then how does it disappear? No argument at all. No deliberation of students, no deliberation of faculty. Just, boom, it's gone. Why is it gone? Fear, force, coercion. That is not a good sign in terms of trying to shape the souls and character and integrity and honesty of young people.

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