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In response to the Trump Administration’s recent efforts to suspend $400 million in federal grants to Columbia University and $210 million to Princeton University, professors and administrators have rushed to the defense of “academic freedom.” In a recent op-ed, University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 charged President Trump with launching “the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare of the 1950s.” At stake, he argues, is the notion that “people and ideas [should] be judged by scholarly standards, not according to the whims or interests of powerful trustees, donors, or political officials.”
What Eisgruber doesn’t consider, however, is that the threat to academic freedom comes not from the government but from the universities themselves. Rather than focusing on external threats, Princeton should turn the microscope inward and acknowledge the recurring problem of intellectual diversity in its ranks. Allowing faculty to write and research freely, although admirable on its face, ignores a deeper problem. Faculty might indeed be unencumbered by external threats, but they will be constrained, internally, by the ideas and methods incentivized by the academic monoculture in which they work.
Consider a few statistics. First, according to a 2020 study, Democratic registration of Princeton faculty outpaced Republican registration by a staggering 40:1 ratio. Across the universities surveyed, the average was 8.4:1. When it came to donations, none of the surveyed Princeton faculty reported donating to Republicans. What’s more, a 2017 study found that between 1969 and 2014, the conservative-liberal ratio among American college and university faculty rose from just under 2:1 to just below 5:1.
Contrary to President Eisgruber’s assertions, there is little threat that future “left-leaning politicians may demand that universities do their bidding.” For all intents and purposes, the universities already do — and this is a problem that shows only signs of worsening.
A few years ago, then-professor Joshua Katz was ousted after a University investigation said he was not forthcoming about an inquiry into a consensual relationship with an undergraduate. But the circumstances under which the charges were brought — after he had made controversial comments about a student organization — raised doubts as to the University’s true motives. Moreover, Princeton violated the sacred tenet of professorial tenure in firing Katz, precisely meant to protect academic freedom. Elsewhere, Princeton departments have relentlessly pushed diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives on their own faculty, with some including anti-racism or diversity statements on their websites.
This cultural problem has spread to the University administration’s decisions around the system of no-communication orders — reserved for victims of sexual harassment and stalking — which was allowed to be weaponized against Jewish student journalists trying to cover campus protests for my student publication, The Princeton Tory.
As long as they receive federal funding, universities cannot be as independent as they claim. James Madison, a member of the Class of 1771, warned in the Federalist Papers about worthless written demarcations of authority. The ideal of “independent academic institutions” may sound great in principle, but in a monocultural academic system tied incestuously to the federal government, such a promise is nothing but a parchment barrier. Indeed, now, universities also cannot expect to shirk public accountability for their commitment to progressive ideology. Universities should not pretend to be independent when they are not.
President Eisgruber’s response thus betrays an entitlement that only decades in academia can cultivate. The American people have little patience for institutions of higher education, especially given decades of cultural and economic preferentialism given to college graduates, years of discrimination in admissions practices, and months of destructive protests. They see their hard work being exploited to pay the debts of college graduates, watering the ivy of academia with the sweat of their brow. When institutions like Princeton betray their academic mission in pursuit of ideology, they break the social contract made with the American people, adding the insult of hypocrisy to economic injury.
In his article, Eisgruber exposes his own ideological bias by asserting that research universities exist to “challenge political power” and “overcome injustices.” In his 2025 State of the University letter, he writes that “diversity and inclusivity are essential to the excellence of our campus communities and the achievement of our educational mission.” Academic freedom, which exists to protect faculty in their pursuit of truth in teaching and research, has been appropriated to catechize university communities in the credos of diversity and identitarianism. Ideology threatens academic freedom because it narrows the scope of the ideas that will be entertained, disfavoring ideas not for lack of intellectual rigor but simply for ideological non-alignment.
Such a politicized conception of a university’s mission breeds disaster, especially in the sciences. During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, the scientific establishment squashed the opinions of thinkers whose findings went outside the academic mainstream. Stanford health economist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was ruthlessly shamed for his independent findings on the adverse effects of lockdowns, incurring the wrath of the scientific establishment and some in the Stanford faculty. Hoover Institution fellow Scott Atlas was censured by an 85 percent vote of the Stanford Faculty Senate for the crime of “promot[ing] a view of COVID-19 that contradicts medical science.”
America’s universities have an ideological problem on their hands, but their leaders refuse to admit any wrongdoing nor propose any improvements. Rather than honestly and humbly justifying their work to the American people, administrators exploit their institutions’ successful pasts to maintain their current cultural standing. At the same time, like at Princeton, they attack the figures who contributed to the very prestige they now wield as a weapon. Until they either admit their actual intentions or reform their institutions to truly reflect the principles they claim to value, these universities should expect continued pressure from both the public and the federal government.
If President Eisgruber is right about one thing, it is that America’s universities have contributed mightily to its greatness. Many, like Princeton, were crucial to the nation’s founding, and they have proven crucial to its climb toward global leadership. But we cannot trust these institutions with prestige and public funding if they use them without regard for the people, and country, they claim to serve. If Princeton wants to regain the trust of the American people, it should start by ditching ideology and pursuing truth. Only then can true academic freedom flourish in its halls.
Zach Gardner is a junior majoring in Politics and minoring in English and History. He is the publisher of The Princeton Tory, the President of the Princeton Federalist Society, and the President of the Princeton Open Campus Coalition. He can be reached at zachgardner[at]princeton.edu.
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