Eisgruber and Princeton, of course, made headlines last May when the school dismissed a star classics professor, Joshua Katz, who had been a vocal critic of the school’s racial politics. The reason given for the ouster—Katz’s consensual affair with a former student decades earlier—was widely seen as pretextual, and pundits accused Princeton of retaliating against a tenured faculty member for political speech.
Eisgruber had publicly condemned an essay Katz wrote in 2020 attacking the university’s campus activists. And Princeton had included the professor on a list of racists—presented to freshmen at a mandatory orientation session—who’d allegedly harmed the school’s good name.
That history was one of many ironies in a tone-deaf speech. Set aside Eisgruber’s facile distortion of laws like Florida’s, which bar public school instruction on gender identity. It takes a special kind of blindness, hypocrisy, and sheer partisan animus to conclude in this day and age that Republicans are the biggest threat to free expression on college campuses.