The following are guest submissions and reflect the authors’ views alone. For information on how to submit a piece to the Opinion section, click here.
On Wednesday, in response to a wave of national campus encampments in response to the war in Gaza, Vice President for Campus Life W. Rochelle Calhoun wrote in an email to the student body that “any individual involved in an encampment, occupation, or other unlawful disruptive conduct who refuses to stop after a warning will be arrested and immediately barred from campus.”
On Thursday, President Christopher L. Eisgruber ’83 penned an op-ed in The Daily Princetonian expanding on Calhoun’s message and outlining the University’s enforcement of “time, place and manner” restrictions on the exercise of free speech. The publication of President Eisgruber’s piece coincided with the establishment of the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” in McCosh courtyard and the arrest of two graduate student protesters. Guests from across the Princeton community weighed in with their thoughts on free speech, institutional neutrality, and the role of the ‘Prince’ in publishing this work.
Free speech can only go so far
By Edward Yingling
The rules laid out governing protests at Princeton in Vice President of Campus Life W. Rochelle Calhoun’s email to students and President Christopher Eisgruber ’83’s statement in the ‘Prince’ are entirely appropriate. Those who argue that these rules and their enforcement violate protesters’ free speech rights are simply wrong about free speech.
Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS), of which I am a co-founder, is an alumni group created to support free speech and academic freedom at Princeton. PFS supports robust free speech by all members of the Princeton community and on all topics. PFS wholly supports VP Calhoun’s and President Eisgruber’s statements, which merely restated Princeton’s existing rules.
While Princeton is not bound by the First Amendment because it is a private entity, PFS has always believed that First Amendment principles should be applied by Princeton. In adopting the Chicago Principles on free speech as the basis of its rules, this is what Princeton has done. But rules do no good if they are not enforced.
Both the First Amendment and the Chicago Principles allow for targeted “time, place, and manner” restrictions on speech. Following the adoption of the Chicago Principles, Princeton also adopted these restrictions, long before the current protests began. These restrictions are what allow municipal requirements for permits for protest marches when they may cause harm, the type of requirements the Supreme Court has routinely upheld.
The Calhoun email reestablished these same restrictions. These are legitimate limitations and the way they have been enforced is in line with University policy. Such restrictions are designed to protect students from harassment and to enable universities to carry out their educational missions. At Columbia and other universities, disruptive protesters have argued that their actions are protected free speech. They are wrong.
Some have claimed the Calhoun email was an inappropriate prior restraint on free speech. This is also simply wrong. Under such false reasoning of prior free speech restrictions, there could be no rules in advance containing appropriate time, place, and manner restrictions. The statements issued by Eisgruber and Calhoun are wholly consistent with the First Amendment and Chicago Principles’ limits on free speech and are completely appropriate.
Edward Yingling ’70 writes on behalf of Princetonians for Free Speech. He served as Legislative Counsel to Senator J. William Fulbright, was President of the American Bankers Association, and was a partner in the international law firm Covington & Burling. Princetonians for Free Speech can be reached at princetoniansforfreespeech[dot]com.
Don’t platform the President
By Ezekiel DouglasRosenthal
It is with great shame that I write this piece of passive activism action, while my friends here at Princeton and other students across the country do the hard work of being disruptive in solidarity with millions of displaced Gazans. But, I woke up on Thursday to see that the ‘Prince’ had published a reaffirmation of Nassau Hall’s thoughts on free speech and protesting. The opinion, penned by President Christopher Eisgruber ’83, states nothing that the administration has not made clear to us before countless times, including in Vice President of Campus Life Rochelle Calhoun’s recent letter. The ‘Prince’ should not have published this column.
Eisgruber’s commitment to spreading his own free speech ideology, even taking steps to disguise policy as opinion coming from a community member, is admirable. But he misses the point of why many of us — if I may be bold enough to speak for the diverse group of students and community members that find ourselves united by this issue — are protesting. I believe that many protesters know that there is a “right place” for free speech and protest, one that falls within the spaces outlined by Rights, Rules, and Responsibilities, one that adheres to juvenile restrictions on amplified sound, and one that exists exactly so Eisgruber can tell us to stay within it.
But I and many of my peers do not care about what the administration deems right and the ‘Prince’ should not platform voices that do not need platforming. We do not just want to speak so that Eisgruber can say that there is no consensus on divestment and we have said so in the past. We want to be heard. We want to be answered. We know that you see our encampments, as evidenced by the need you feel to repress us. And so we will continue being disruptive while we wait to be heard.
Seeing Eisgruber’s name in the opinion column felt like a slap in the face to me because it asks us to pretend that Eisgruber is just another member of the community who has thoughts on how to change campus for the better. But Eisgruber’s opinions about campus issues do not just represent one voice in a community: more often than not, they are enforced by the administration.
As my friend Kristin Nagy ’27 wrote last week, activism at Princeton often feels discouraging, precisely because we can often feel like we are doing nothing but benefiting from injustice while we can do nothing to stop it. To me, the Opinion section of the ‘Prince’ should work towards the goal of making every voice that is not already listened to heard, from service workers, to students, to faculty. The administration cannot add anything that has not already been said, and to pretend otherwise is to ignore the realities of the power imbalance on this campus. Ultimately, the administration’s opinion is already known, and we do not need our speech or discourse to live alongside its constraints in the ‘Prince.’
Ezekiel DouglasRosenthal is a first-year student from Lakeville, CT. He can be reached at zd8993[at]princeton.edu.
Leave speech for the students
By Wyatt Browne
Following his opinion published this past Thursday, it has become increasingly clear that President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 lacks a principled approach to his public responses to social and political issues. This shortcoming chills free speech on campus and results from the University’s failure to embrace the Kalven Report as a strict standard for limiting administrative influence over campus dialogue.
As Eisgruber asserted in his column, “time, place, and manner” restrictions do form a necessary component of free speech protections on college campuses. However, as the Editorial Board identified on Thursday, the same University leadership who directed the arrest of two students for their participation in Princeton’s “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” “has not disciplined students for occupations in the past.” The discrepancy suggests that the enforcement of “time, place, and manner” regulations has transformed a theoretically viewpoint-neutral policy into one that the University invokes to restrict certain kinds of speech.
Overall, Eisgruber’s public statements surrounding escalating violence in the Middle East reflect a similar inconsistency. Princeton has adopted the Chicago Principles for free speech as a framework for protecting expression on campus. As a result, Eisgruber opts for “institutional restraint” as opposed to the more strict “neutrality” demanded by the Kalven Report.
These findings, shared by the University of Chicago’s Kalven Committee in 1967 following an investigation into the role of educational institutions in moments of social and political upheaval, contend that “The instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.”
Pronouncements like Eisgruber’s recent opinion article and his October “Statement on Terrorist Attacks and War in the Middle East” serve as examples of the University becoming the critic. Eisgruber should not set the tone for political discourse on campus through commentary on current events. Doing so preempts the ever-important expression of students and faculty as instruments for change.
Wyatt Browne is a sophomore in the English department. He can be reached at wb0787[at]princeton.edu.
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