In November 2015, student protesters from the Black Justice League (BJL) occupied the office of University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 during his office hours, commencing a 33-hour sit-in. The students came prepared with a list of demands, which included mandated cultural competency training for faculty and staff, an ethnicity and diversity distribution requirement, and the removal of the name of Woodrow Wilson Class of 1879 from the then-named Wilson School and College.
The protesters had ensured — through hand delivery — that their agenda came across Eisgruber’s desk. From the vantage of this desk, the University president then considered the unexpected visitors sitting in 1 Nassau Hall, their demands, and his next course of action.
After the protesters walked out of Nassau Hall nearly two days later, Eisgruber had agreed to a list of revised demands.
Reflecting on the moment, President Eisgruber told The Daily Princetonian this fall that it was “a bad idea” to have discussions with protesters while they occupied his office.
Following prolonged pro-Palestine activism in the spring, this scene of the BJL sit-in takes on new relevance — not for its impact on the University’s history of racial reckoning, but for how the sit-in permanently altered Eisgruber’s understanding of his own role in responding to student demands.
“It’s not the particular conclusions that I think we could have done better with, but that the process felt unfair to a lot of the other parts of the community,” Eisgruber said. He observed that community members felt “some people were getting a greater say” in decision-making and that “moreover, they were getting a greater say in them by virtue of having done something that broke the rules in some way.”
He cited two particular lessons that he has carried with him since the BJL sit-in: “the importance of being clear about notice around the rules,” and “the importance of respecting our community-wide open processes.” In the decade since, Eisgruber has been stricter with the rules, guarding his office door by referring the demands of protesters to formal administrative processes.
“Whether students protest or not, I encourage them to engage with the community-wide processes through which policy is made at the University. That is how change happens at Princeton,” Eisgruber later clarified in a written comment to the ‘Prince.’
In interviews with the ‘Prince,’ student protesters who participated in activist movements at various points across Eisgruber’s 11-year tenure expressed the same frustration. They view his steadfast commitment to procedure as a roadblock in the path to progress, making change feel problematically slow-moving and impersonal.
Others in the University community see things differently. Some faculty members stand with Eisgruber’s by-the-book approach, lauding official processes as a fair and measured way to handle ideological disputes. For some, this support is caveated by the belief that more can be done to engage critically with students.
While Princeton’s processes to assess contentious issues have been tested time and time again over Eisgruber’s tenure, they’ve come under heightened scrutiny in the past year after a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” arose on Cannon Green at the tail end of the spring semester.
The sit-in was driven by a perfect storm — a divisive and controversial conflict in the Middle East, steadfast commitment to protests throughout the fall and spring semesters, and a wave of similar encampments on college campuses across the country. As a result, protesters actively sought disruption and pushed the boundaries of what protests could look like on Princeton’s campus — employing tactics ranging from vandalism and occupying a building to peaceful marching and hunger strikes. In this new culture of protest, rigid, distant procedure no longer seemed to meet the moment
When the protesters attempted to cooperate with formal channels early in the spring — submitting a petition to the Council of the Princeton University Community (CPUC) in February demanding divestment from Israel — their efforts were initially rejected without the promise of a formal process. It was not until the prolonged sit-in took hold on north campus, 15 students were arrested, and 17 students resorted to a hunger strike that pro-Palestine activists were offered a formal channel. Their divestment petition is now being considered by the CPUC Resources Committee.
Emanuelle Sippy ’25, a student organizer who participated in negotiations with administrators in May, told the ‘Prince’ she trusts the Resources Committee’s evaluation process. But when asked if she has faith in the processes to follow, governed by Nassau Hall and the Board of Trustees, she responded, “No.”
With a University president who has tightened his grip on procedures, and activists who claim that they stall change and lack clear direction, students are left to wonder: does procedure lead to change, or beckon students to disrupt it?
The ‘promise’ of a process
There is no monolithic process — and in some cases, no formally outlined process at all — to bring about policy change at the University.
Advocates backing demands that do not explicitly target the endowment — like the BJL’s call for a University-wide racial reckoning — are left without formalized guidelines to affect change. Without a clear process, their demands simply faced Eisgruber — or rather, sat at his feet.
Following the 2015 sit-in, some community members expressed dismay at Eisgruber’s approval of the BJL’s demands. Students created petitions condemning the demands, with one calling “for increased dialogue and the creation of a process that properly considers the input of all students and faculty, not merely those who are the loudest.” Prominent alumni, including Ted Cruz ’92, weighed in with their own op-eds and petitions.
Retrospectively, Eisgruber shared that the changes that came out of the 2015 sit-in “were regarded with suspicion or with greater opposition than they might otherwise have been,” because they were not evaluated through community-wide processes.
For advocates specifically seeking changes in the management of the University’s endowment, such as the 2020 fossil fuel divestment petition and this fall’s Israeli divestment proposal, there is a clearer path.
First, a proposal must be introduced and considered by the CPUC Resources Committee, which considers policy questions about the University’s financial resources. Once the committee agrees to take up the proposal, they formulate a method to collect community feedback and determine whether there is “consensus” — a process which concluded four weeks ago for the Israel divestment proposal. The committee then deliberates and decides if it will issue a recommendation, which is delivered to Eisgruber and the Board of Trustees.
Eisgruber’s emphasis on procedure, in part, moves the focus off of him and onto the undefined threshold of community consensus.
“The discussions actually have to take place as part of a community-wide process. It can’t be that the University talks to some people who have an interest in an issue, but not to others on the basis of a protest,” Eisgruber said.
While the feedback process engages the community, the final decision belongs to Nassau Hall.
“At Princeton, power lies in Nassau Hall alone, and ultimately President Eisgruber himself,” longtime public policy professor Stanley Katz argued in an interview.
“Princeton has become an unusually hierarchical, top-down institution,” he noted. “And I think everyone is really aware that on matters like this, the only opinion that really matters is that of the President.”
Eisgruber concedes that community-engaged processes still ultimately come down to him and the board. When asked if he would advocate for a recommendation from the Resources Committee in good faith to the board, Eisgruber said, “Depends what the proposal is, right? That is, in other words, I don’t regard it as my role in that process to simply be an advocate for a committee.”
“I do think I need to be an advocate for a process and a protector of that process, but it’s really important that our process involves independent judgments, both by the committee and by the Board of Trustees,” he continued.
Daniel Kurtzer, professor of Middle East policy studies at SPIA and former ambassador to Israel and Egypt, judges Eisgruber’s approach as diplomatically sensible.
“What we try to do in diplomacy is think very carefully about what the national interest is before we even get started,” Kurtzer said, likening Eisgruber to a statesman. “It sounds terribly boring when you want something to happen yesterday, but it can lead to better decisions and better outcomes.”
When do we want it? Now.
Student activists, no matter the movement, almost always feel a sense of urgency and importance for their cause. This sentiment echoes in a popular call and response chant used in protests by many activist groups: “What do we want? CHANGE. When do we want it? NOW.”
“The processes really don’t act fast enough to deal [with] issues — whether climate change, whether it’s genocide, whether it’s other issues that are really timely and don’t have years,” Hannah Reynolds ’22, a coordinator of Divest Princeton, said in an interview with the ‘Prince.’
But at Princeton, change can’t happen “yesterday.”
Since 2015, several student movements have attempted to follow procedure, using protests as a way to get their demands heard by the proper committees. Often, access to the processes Eisgruber promotes has required escalation.
In 2019, students staged a sit-in on the lawn in front of Nassau Hall protesting the Title IX office’s handling of sexual misconduct complaints. Nine days into the demonstration, Eisgruber walked past chanting protesters and into Prospect House to meet with student organizers from Princeton Students for Title IX Reform (PIXR).
The meeting came amid national media coverage of the sit-in, alumni withholding donations from the University, and impending preparations for large end-of-year events widely attended by alumni, like Reunions and Commencement.
In an audio recording of the 75 minute meeting, Eisgruber consistently reiterated the importance of procedure.
“I think it’s really important that those changes go through University governance processes. There are a lot of reasons for that. One reason is that those processes allow people with different interests and different viewpoints to participate fully, and that enables us to produce better policies that really have the support of the community,” Eisgruber told protesters.
Throughout Divest Princeton’s campaign for divestment from fossil fuel companies, organizers felt a degree of escalation — like the sit-in — was necessary to have their demands considered.
Reynolds specifically identified the campaign to withhold alumni donations as a moment that seemed to give them “more leverage than the process itself,” Reynolds said.
Reynolds claimed that in private meetings with administrators, the University was not engaging in “good spirited debate,” but rather placing emphasis on the integrity of University processes.
“They were trying to push us to give up or just trust in the professors who are making these decisions or trust in the board. It wasn’t something where students and faculty and alumni all have this equal input into the process,” Reynolds said.
Reynolds said she felt like Eisgruber in particular attempted to discourage further protests in these discussions. In one such instance, she claims President Eisgruber called her to his office to get a better sense of where protesters were coming from after students reportedly heckled and chased him and his wife. He reportedly specified that the meeting would not be about divestment, yet shared his own perspective on the issue during the interaction.
“It is the kind of thing that we’ve seen time and time again — the administration trying to, in some ways, turn student activists against their own work by trying to convince them that they’re just not seeing the whole picture,” Reynolds shared.
In a comment to the ‘Prince,’ Eisgruber disputed this claim, emphasizing the University’s vigorous protection of the free speech rights of students and faculty.
“Activism has a long and important tradition on this campus and in this country, a tradition I honor and respect,” he wrote.
In his view, he invited Reynolds to his office to better understand her views and “identify opportunities for constructive dialogue.”
“As far as I could tell from the meeting and the emails we exchanged afterward, we both thought that the conversation served those purposes,” Eisgruber stated.
Both the Title IX meeting and Divest Princeton meetings left students feeling frustrated over the purpose of the meeting, which seldom deviated from previous University statements emphasizing procedure.
A day into the Title IX sit-in, the University responded by sharing that they referred students’ input to the appropriate committees, namely the Faculty-Student Committee on Sexual Misconduct and the University Life Committee. A few days into the protest, Eisgruber also approved an internal and external investigation of Title IX procedures.
Most frustrating to organizers, however, was the slow-moving nature of the procedures Eisgruber advocated in meetings. Throughout the meeting with PIXR organizers, protesters became more and more agitated about the sluggish nature of the University committees evaluating their demands.
Eisgruber clarified to the protesters in 2019 that he had no say over the schedule of meetings within the committees and had to respect the committees’ “responsibility and authority to set its own agenda.”
Despite going through the official channels, organizers told the ‘Prince’ they feel there has been minimal consideration of the 11 demands first presented on the lawn of Nassau Hall in the four years after the protests. In an op-ed published in 2023, PIXR co-founder Tori Gorton ’21 expressed her grievances over the little change that occurred after the creation of the CPUC Ad Hoc Committee on Sexual Climate, Culture and Conduct, which was formed to consider the group’s demands.
Changes have occurred since 2019. Reports outline changes like one new SHARE clinician, a new four-year curriculum being developed by SHARE, a new Global Safety and Security unit, and new websites with more information about Title IX procedures and emergency funds available.
Divest Princeton organizers say they also faced a long and confusing path to change through these procedures.
After several years of protests, the passage of an Undergraduate Student Government referendum on divestment from fossil fuels, and a recommendation from the CPUC Resources Committee for divestment, the Board of Trustees announced their decision for selective dissociation in 2021.
Slow action has led to distrust with these processes.
In an interview with the ‘Prince,’ Gorton said that PIXR leaders were in communication with students from the Black Justice League sit-in who warned them not to put their faith in the University’s committees.
“The Black Justice League was saying, ‘This is what the University does. They’ll slap a working group or a committee on anything that students bring up to make it look like they’re doing something,’” Gorton said. “But really, it’s a way to dilute what the problem is into lots of different buckets … it’s a very, very, very slow path to any change.”
Necessary escalation
When asked if they felt escalations were necessary to have their demands considered by the University, both postdoctoral research scholar Jessica Ng and Urvi Kumbhat GS, organizers for Princeton Israeli Apartheid Divest (PIAD), answered yes.
Nine days into this year’s encampment, PIAD announced students would be participating in a hunger strike until administrators met a list of demands. The first demand, a meeting with administrators, was fulfilled soon after the strike began.
Sippy, who was present at the meeting, said that organizers were again deferred to institutional processes.
“I think that they wanted the hunger strike to end, and they wanted the encampment to end, because it is in their interest for things to appear pristine for alumni-facing, end-of-school events,” Sippy explained in an interview.
Prior to the encampment, student protesters attempted to have their demands for divestment from Israel considered by the Resources Committee as far back as February. Yet, the process was not activated until the encampment.
Describing the group’s strategy going forward, Ng shared that they will be using the existing channels despite feeling they are insufficient while “applying pressure at every point to actually move [demands] through the existing channels,” signaling the continued use of protest.
“It’s also important to question, really, the utility of these processes in the first place and their ability to respond to protest,” Kumbhat said.
These organizers cited concerns that echoed organizers of past protests; namely, the slow-moving actions of the committees and confusion over what it meant to reach consensus.
Although pro-Palestine protesters submitted a formal proposal to the Resources Committee in June, they had to wait over summer recess for the first step of the community consensus evaluation process to begin at the October CPUC meeting. It is unclear when the Resources Committee will conclude deliberations.
When the feedback system was introduced, Chair of the Resource Committee and Professor of Chemistry John Groves explained that the Resources Committee operates by considering three criteria. The item must “have a sustained interest on campus,” there must be a “direct contradiction with the simple value of the University,” and there must be a “strong consensus regarding what to do,” he told the CPUC.
“This whole idea of consensus is quite unclear. What defines consensus?” Ng asked. “It was unclear if they were seeking consensus on whether these violations of international law and human rights were actually occurring … or whether those violations are contrary to Princeton’s core values of humanity and scholarship,” Ng told the ‘Prince.’
At the Nov. 11 CPUC meeting, Ng posed the same question. University Chief Financial Officer Jim Matteo responded, “the University is seeking consensus on the actions the community believes we should take in relation to the proposal it receives.”
During the same meeting, Matteo shared that there is “no prescribed timeline” for when the committee might submit a report.
In a comment to the ‘Prince,’ Groves wrote that the Resources Committee will use “its judgment, informed by community input” to determine whether there is consensus around divestment. He further defined consensus as “widespread deliberative agreement.”
University Spokesperson Jennifer Morrill explained in a statement to the ‘Prince’ that “the trustee guidelines on dissociation ask the Resources Committee to determine whether ‘consensus is possible’” on “both the general issues and the specifics of the proposed action.”
“The trustees noted that the guidelines are ‘not automatic or definitive,’ but rather are intended to serve as a ‘practical and useful tool,’” Morrill added. “In establishing them, the trustees recognized that it will be necessary to make case-by-case judgments.”
Capacity for a new ‘process’
Several members of the faculty told the ‘Prince’ that administrators need to balance procedure with more informal responses, like face-to-face time with students.
“I understand you have zillion and other things to do, but at the same time, I think it should be viewed as part of what administration is — its responsibility to have faced our students, formally and informally,” Lecturer of Public Policy and former Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority Salaam Fayyad shared in an interview with the ‘Prince.’
Katz said he would advocate for a middle ground in which there is ongoing communication between students and administrators. “The University has to protect itself, but students have to be heard, and these are students who are there because they think important principles and interests are at stake,” he said.
Katz criticized the deferral of demands to the CPUC committees, many of which evaluate the demands of student protests.
“I don’t think it would be a meaningful way for students to express discontent, and that there ought to be more informal and more direct modes,” he said. “I think that’s too lawyerly a response.”
Katz noted that the CPUC was founded in 1969 in response to student activism, saying, “The University was trying to figure out how to bail itself out of the Vietnam protest mess, [when] a very smart faculty member … was asked by the President to figure out a way of calming the community down. That way was to create the CPUC.”
Now, minimal communication between students and administrators leads activists to escalate protests in hopes of securing face time with the president.
Eisgruber’s sparse interaction with students has been a point of scrutiny throughout his presidency, especially following the BJL sit-in. In a 2023 interview with the ‘Prince,’ Katz shared that he felt President Eisgruber was “notably isolated.”
“I think he can be more effective if he could manage to spend more time with more people,” Katz added. Eisgruber holds scheduled conversations with students at residential colleges.
Eisgruber’s approach has mostly kept Princeton out of the national spotlight, even as elite universities have increasingly served as battlegrounds for culture war issues and media frenzy. A 325-page October report by House Republicans criticizing universities’ handling of pro-Palestinian protests made no mention of Princeton, despite calling out peer institutions such as Columbia, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
But while University procedures are seemingly successful in placating outside observers, on the inside, community members are walking away from them unsatisfied.
“Telling someone to go to the ‘committee on policy’ or something is telling them to forget about it until next term, right?” Katz reflected.
“That’s not an answer — that’s not a satisfactory answer.”
Bridget O’Neill is a head News editor for the ‘Prince’ from Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. who typically covers the University administration.
Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.