Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right, Christopher L. Eisgruber, Basic Books, 2025, pp. 307, $30.00 hardcover.
The subtitle of Christopher L. Eisgruber’s disappointing disquisition on campus culture prepares the reader for an apologia, though not for the tendentious argumentation, nor the questionable self-congratulation that ensues. Eisgruber depicts colleges as the best places to encounter freedom of thought and expression in an American society riven by stark political divides and given to outrageously bad manners in its civic exchanges. Princeton University, where Eisgruber is president, emerges as a clear favorite for the best-in-show prize in the college free speech sweeps. They do things the right way there. In Eisgruber’s telling, Princeton’s programs and pronouncements may need the occasional tweak, and he concedes that, in managing one major controversy and issuing a public statement at the height of George Floyd-mania, he might have handled things somewhat differently. Nonetheless he assures the reader that these and other widely reported Princeton events that seem prima facie instances of outright fiasco and educational/cultural meltdown are better read as signs of energetic free-speech health. Members of the public who are troubled by such events are at best media naifs unaware of how colleges function, and at worst mere ideologues arguing from bad faith.
If college students do err in their understanding of free speech, Eisgruber argues, if they zealously overstep bounds of proper time, place, and manner—say, for example, by being allowed to take over the office of the Princeton University president and shout down would-be interlocutors with bullhorns—they are no worse than the culture that has brought them up. Indeed, student excesses and intimidations must be considered—and nearly always—excused in light of their high-minded ideals—that is, if the students in question are coming from the left. Zealous conservative students who go too far in their remonstrations, on the other hand, are self-evidently never motivated by principle, never justified in feeling beleaguered or in exposing dubious faculty or administrative practices to public scrutiny.
When these students use reprehensible tactics (which they have done), it must be understood that they are participating in an “unrelenting right-wing intimidation campaign” (199). They have been riled up by a “far-right outrage machine” from outside the university (197). No discussion of left-wing students being riled up by far-left faculty from within the university is anywhere to be found.
When students of all political persuasions express worry and dissatisfaction with the free-speech climate on their campuses, the author launches a thoroughgoing examination of the surveys and questionnaires used to establish these findings, turning every question inside and out. Healthy skepticism of surveys is wise, but there is a distinction to be made between intelligent probing of methodology and carping pedantry, especially when such probing is inconsistently applied. The exhaustive parsing and construing used to cast doubt on findings uncongenial to Eisgruber’s thesis is set aside in other instances.
Eisgruber does admit that cancellations, deplatforming, and campus ructions are “real problems,” but repeatedly states that they are rare and that “we need to get beyond the shocking anecdotes” (91, 93). He complains that such instances receive wide reportage, and he castigates the press and watchdog organizations such as FIRE for exaggerating their importance. On the one hand, he is correct that extreme cases are not representative of what occurs on four thousand American campuses day in and day out, where students go to classes, clubs meet, invited guests lecture, and no one mobs the quad, chases down speakers or takes over the president’s office (with or without the president’s consent). Let us agree that much good goes on in American colleges. Still, his complaint is the complaint of the politician who objects that negative media coverage amounts to distortion.
Let us set aside for a moment the banal observation that the news media devotes itself to the outstanding, unusual, and dramatic in all walks, not just those that irritate university presidents. Yes, most colleges have few dramatic episodes, but it does not follow that lack of drama equates to a healthy climate for free speech. Maybe campus climates are healthy, maybe they aren’t. As noted above, Eisgruber works overtime to cast doubt on studies and surveys which conclude that even outwardly peaceful campuses are full of students and faculty who stifle themselves.
There are other problems with his efforts to minimize the importance of extreme cases. They may be the tip of an iceberg, sharp outcroppings that betoken a larger “invisible” mass implied beneath them. Likewise, their symbolic importance and the importance of the issues involved may outweigh the fact that only some students (or faculty, or administrators, or institutions) are directly involved. Are only frequently recurring problems or problems that involve many people worthy of concern?
Take another example familiar to universities. Millions of interactions between men and women professors occur every year on American campuses, only a vanishingly small percentage of which constitute harassment. Would Eisgruber decry reportage of harassment cases as media distortion? Or would he think that failure to report on them was a breach of duty, a de facto judgment by the media that such events need not be taken seriously? I cannot imagine him declaring publicly in such a situation that the media is making a big fuss over nothing and anyone paying serious attention is a gull acting in bad faith.
Finally, Eisgruber does not address the fact that the unquiet colleges and universities cluster at the top echelon of American education, that is, at schools that continue to produce a disproportionate number of leaders and elites. The higher up the reputational scale, the more likely one is to find illiberal and reckless behavior that poisons the climate for free speech and threatens proper conduct of the university.
The book is glowingly blurbed by several academic luminaries whom I admire. Their apparent willingness to give a pass to half-told tales, to overlook double-standards and forgive passages of outright sophistry is disconcerting; however, praise is justified regarding the book’s cogent summary of relevant legal cases. “The American doctrine of free speech as we know it today emerged in the 1960s,” Eisgruber argues, when various cases “created a new constitutional regime of free speech” (29, 39). New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), a case that set a high bar for litigants claiming libel, is marked for its particular importance. Other cases provided protection even for racist and antisemitic speech. One such is Brandenburg v. Ohio, a 1960s precursor to Snyder v. Phelps, the 2011 decision that upheld Westboro Baptist’s right to spew noxious proclamations within earshot of military funerals. From such cases, Eisgruber argues, the U. S. arrived at its current understanding of strong free speech rights. In the only part of the book that might occasion substantial discomfort in progressives, Eisgruber defends the American legal system’s tolerance of hate speech in plain and forthright language. He is sage enough to recognize what many progressive opponents of vigorous free speech rights cannot or will not see: that controversial progressive opinions and underdog constituencies—as with the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, for example; as with gay rights, for another—benefit from such a view, lest their utterances be cynically proscribed and those who propound them threatened with punishment.
Eisgruber lays out the competing visions of free speech expounded by Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Louis Brandeis, favoring the more idealist and philosophically civic-minded pronouncements of Brandeis over Holmes’s famous “marketplace of ideas.” Brandeis linked speech to “deliberative democracy,” and Brandeisian values and tropes inform Eisgruber’s advocacy of “terms of respect” as the basis for serious argument. Cultivating an ideal civic culture “has never been easy,” the author opines, noting that “human beings tend to protect their prejudices, not reexamine them” (158).
Though not a particularly fresh observation, it is a sound one, but not one that the author shows himself inclined to follow. The rhetorical formula throughout is as follows: pronounce fair-minded generalizations but follow up with left-leaning partiality and tendentious exemplifying, occasionally including an anecdote that faults the left.
His discussion of campus hoaxes and the “yearning for victim status,” for example, focuses on a 2007 instance at Princeton in which a member of a conservative pro-chastity organization falsely claimed to have been beaten up and threatened. Eisgruber ignores another case from the same era, this one much more far-reaching in both coverage and consequences: the 2006 fabricated rape allegations against the Duke lacrosse team. Taking up this example would have forced the author to confront the fact that Duke faculty members fell over themselves in their rush to make public declarations of guilt and to acknowledge that a prosecutor was politically motivated. The prosecutor was eventually disbarred for, among other things, lying and withholding exculpatory evidence. In any event, if the author is interested in hoaxing as a means of claiming victim status, he might turn away from a single outlier instance on his own campus and read Wilfred Reilly’s accounting of over 400 false claims of racially motivated hate crimes.
Eisgruber analyzes the concept of institutional neutrality, as outlined most famously in the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report, and adopted in the last several years by a growing list of universities, often in the wake of regret for their excessive institutional virtue signaling. Eisgruber calls the Kalven Report “a misleading muddle.” Some of his demurrers with institutional neutrality make fair points; some tend toward nitpicking. He prefers that universities adopt a posture of “institutional restraint,” which “recognizes that universities and their presidents must speak up for their values” (168). But when and how? And which values? This seems to be left to the judgment of presidents on an ad hoc basis. No abstract concept will be fool proof. Institutional restraint will also inevitably lead to inconsistencies and “muddles” once confronted with actual cases. Eventually Eisgruber plumps for avoidance of controversy. Decisions about whether to pronounce on hot-button issues and high-level public controversies must be guided by “prudential” considerations (175). How this PR-driven declaration squares with “speaking up for values” is not clear. Meanwhile the author’s own forays into outspoken DEI advocacy and his dramatic 2020 public mea culpa regarding Princeton’s supposedly ongoing structural racism are quickly brushed aside.
We can hope that Eisgruber means what he says about making universities more welcoming to conservative and classical liberal thought and speech, and that his interest in strengthening the free speech climate on campuses is sincere. Neither his administrative history, nor the burden of his argument in this book are cause for confidence.
Matthew Stewart is associate professor of humanities and rhetoric at Boston University and the author of Modernism and Tradition in Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time (2009); mstewart@bu.edu. He last appeared in these pages in summer 2025 with “The Always Evolving Academic Freedom,” a review of David M. Rabban’s Academic Freedom: From Professional Norm to First Amendment Right (2024).
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