President Donald Trump recently moved to consolidate power in the Office of the President — not the office at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, but the one at Columbia University.
On March 13, the Trump administration sent Columbia an ultimatum. To restore $400 million in frozen federal funds, Trump officials wrote, Columbia must “abolish the University Judicial Board [UJB] and centralize all disciplinary processes under the Office of the [University] President” and “empower the Office of the President to suspend or expel students with an appeal process through the Office of the President,” among other demands.
On March 21, Columbia acquiesced. A statement from the interim university president, Katrina Armstrong, stated that “the UJB will be situated within and overseen by the Office of the Provost, who reports to the President of Columbia.”
Trump’s demands of Columbia were extreme and autocratic — an attempt to employ his own authoritarianism to breed more of it. And by accepting his demands, Columbia allows itself to be restructured as more authoritarian and follows in the federal government’s footsteps. But as our Editorial Board warns, Trump’s actions will not stop in Morningside Heights. When the Trump administration asks Princeton to sell out its community, that community should have real power to say “no.”
At a time when autocracy is rising nationwide, Princeton should respond with democracy here. For too long, the disciplinary and policy-making procedures at Princeton have been opaque and anti-democratic. We ought to move toward the democratization of internal processes, thereby affirming the importance of disciplinary due process and true community input in policy formation.
University democratization is often mischaracterized, including by my former colleague Abigail Rabieh, as reckless direct democracy for undergraduates. But that is not what democratic processes at a university would resemble. Instead, to democratize Princeton would be to integrate democratic values — due process, the presumption of innocence, constituent input on (but not complete control over) policy-making — into our processes.
Princeton should first move towards democratizing discipline processes. While Trump attempts to push Columbia’s disciplinary processes into the Office of the President and remove authority from its University Judicial Board, Princeton should move in the opposite direction, starting with its equivalent, the Committee on Discipline (COD).
As it exists today, the COD lacks guardrails, violating students’ due process rights when it should be affirming them. When speaking to university investigators about alleged disciplinary violations, students are not afforded the same right to silence as in legal proceedings. Instead, their silence may be taken as evidence of their guilt, or as a violation in itself. Rather than gathering information, investigators also operate under a presumption of guilt, working to construct a narrative about accused students instead of listening to them.
No student should be asked to experience emotional turmoil, isolation, and depression as they work frantically to prove their innocence, when the burden of proof ought to lie with their accuser. The presumption of innocence is an essential democratic right, and we should treat it as such.
The normative shift here is twofold: First, it would humanize the discipline process for students accused of violations by shifting the burden of proof; and second, it would legitimize the process by reducing the possibility of an incorrect guilty verdict and aligning with broader due process standards. These shifts, if the University sticks to them, would allow Princeton to resist attempts to curtail free speech on college campuses by unfairly prosecuting or deporting students.
Beyond disciplinary due process, Princeton has plenty of room to move opposite the Trump administration. The University’s policy-making procedures are still a far cry from democratic. Because of the lack of clear processes for policy change at Princeton, coordinated efforts are often necessary to achieve community engagement. And it becomes far too easy for those efforts to fall out of the equation altogether.
Although University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 told The Daily Princetonian that he “encourage[s] [students] to engage with the community-wide processes through which policy is made at the University,” façades of student, faculty, and staff input often give way to an obfuscated and centralized policy-making process mostly controlled by the Board of Trustees.
President Eisgruber points to the Council of the Princeton University Community (CPUC) as a “body which is rare in higher education, in being one that allows for open deliberation.” However, a council of community members whose primary responsibility is to “make recommendations” regarding University policy to actual decision-making bodies is not democracy, but the mere semblance of it. And the CPUC requirement for pre-approved questioning produces sanitized engagement with the University community rather than legitimate discourse.
Other means of expressing community opinion are regularly dismissed out of hand. Student referenda, according to Eisgruber himself, are “not part of [the University’s] governance processes.” The University dissociated from fossil fuel companies based on the recommendations of a faculty panel, but then resumed accepting research funding from those companies without input from any student, staff, or that faculty panel. And every decision and conversation had in a Trustees meeting is secret until the minutes are unsealed … thirty years later.
This lack of transparency, combined with the evident disregard for actually considering community input in policy-making, renders Princeton’s processes exceedingly undemocratic. There is no reason that student referenda, which capture student consensus, should not be considered when making decisions. And if the Trustees were truly working for the good of the University community, they’d have no issue making their meetings public and accepting civil comments from the community.
As they have in the past, universities must be the first to resist authoritarianism. By moving in the opposite direction of the Trump administration, we can stand up for our community even as an autocrat attempts to impose his will on our peer institutions. We are a reflection of America, and must be the bedrock of its democracy.
Democracy is not a radical idea, but a sensible one. We ought to affirm that in our practices for discipline and decision-making — whether or not the Trump administration picks us as the next target for an authoritarian overhaul.
Isaac Barsoum ’28 is a first-year intended Politics major from Charlotte, N.C. He believes that loving Princeton means finding ways it can become a safer, happier, more inclusive place. His column, “A Princeton for All,” runs every other Thursday. You can read his column here. You can reach him at itbarsoum[at]princeton.edu.
Correction: A previous version of this piece stated that the University unilaterally reversed its decision to divest from fossil fuel companies in 2024. In fact, that decision was modified to accept research funds in some instances. The 'Prince' regrets this error.
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