Tal Fortgang Universities Are Hiding Behind “Due Process” Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber seeks to distract from his university’s tolerance of anti-Semitism.
“All process arguments are insincere,” political historian Michael Barone once observed wryly. So it’s no surprise that Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber, in defending the nation’s elite universities, has reached for precisely such arguments. After all, insincerity may be all these institutions have left.
Eisgruber has taken a curious stance in an Atlantic essay and a follow-up interview with the New York Times on the Trump administration’s response to anti-Semitic activity at Columbia University. On one hand, he declares that opposing anti-Semitism is “a fundamental responsibility for any university president,” and concedes that it was “legitimate” for the government to “require the university” to address the problem. On the other, he accuses the Trump administration of disregarding “due process” in cutting off Columbia’s federal funds—an action he claims undermined “academic freedom.”
This argument collapses under even minimal scrutiny.
Consider the process “due” under the Civil Rights Act to universities accused of tolerating discrimination. The Department of Education begins by opening an investigation—as it has at Columbia and Princeton. It must then give the university an opportunity to come into “voluntary compliance” with the conditions set to remedy the discrimination.
The Trump administration has done exactly that. It outlined conditions that Columbia must meet to avoid a lawsuit that could result in the full revocation of federal funding. The university now has the chance to demonstrate that the problem is being addressed—that the discrimination, which it does not deny and which is now a matter of public record, is no longer ongoing. The government hasn’t denied anyone due process. The process is underway.
One part of Eisgruber’s argument—that funding shouldn’t be paused while the investigation proceeds—is boring but defensible. The other—that the Trump administration is attacking academic freedom and the pursuit of truth—is a distraction. Even Eisgruber concedes that some government intervention can be warranted. The real question is whether the means fit the ends.
What Eisgruber and other university presidents know, but won’t admit, is that they don’t need more time or better procedures to prove they deserve federal funding—they need entirely different facts. No procedural safeguard will erase the reality that, at Columbia, students occupied buildings, destroyed property, and assaulted staff without, in many cases, facing expulsion. No new evidence will undo the fact that Hezbollah flags flew on Princeton’s campus, or that an anti-Israel group pulled fire alarms to disrupt events featuring Israeli officials.
Each day that passes without expulsions creates liability for these universities, displaying their “deliberate indifference” to hostility on the basis of national origin. Under civil rights law, schools can even lose federal funding if their behavior creates a theoretical chilling effect on prospective students from certain national-origin groups.
No amount of clever lawyering, moreover, can distract from the fact that admissions departments manage to fill campus, year after year, with radicals and bigots. Their failure to reduce the ranks of anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli students, despite the built-in cleansing mechanism of four-year admissions cycles, suggests especially flagrant civil-rights violations. Universities have done more than merely tolerate discriminatory harassment—they have courted it, cultivated it, and sustained it.
Until that changes—through expulsions, admissions reform, and a serious reevaluation of how these schools address anti-Semitism—universities’ lofty rhetoric about academic freedom and the pursuit of knowledge will ring hollow.
Arguments that invoke principle but depend on process are exactly what they appear to be: distractions from acknowledged wrongdoing. Even Americans skeptical of the Trump administration’s approach to higher education should see that our universities can no longer defend themselves without lapsing into insincerity.
Comments are closed.
