Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. The Trump administration is targeting higher education colleges and universities across the United States. It's scrutinizing and criticizing how administrators responded to Hamas's attack on Israel on October seventh, twenty twenty three, Israel's response to it, and the protest that followed. It's demanding changes to the way schools approach free speech on campuses, and it's threatening to freeze billions of dollars worth of federal
funding for research. This is a precarious moment for the academy, worrisome. To Christopher Eisgruber, who's the president of Princeton University, one of the oldest and highest ranked schools in the US.
We've never seen the use of federal funding in the way that it is being used now to try to control universities, and if we really go down that road, that is a very dangerous road to go down.
Icecreuber says. Princeton, like Harford Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania, has been notified that some of its federal funding is under review. Eisgruber confirmed that to Bloomberg a few hours after the Trump administration announced it's reviewing roughly nine billion dollars in contracts and grants with Harvard. This funding is vital, Ice Grouper says, it has been since World War II.
It's one element of a partnership between government and academia that's led to innovations and inventions and fueled a knowledge economy in the US that's been the envy of the world.
Why is it that's such a huge proportion of Nobel Prizes get awarded to Americans? Why is it that the best scientists and engineers from all over the world want to come to the United States. It's because of this extraordinary partnership. We've had here.
Another threat to that knowledge economy, concern among foreign born students and researchers at US colleges and universities that they're no longer welcome. I'm David Gura, and this is the Big Take from Bloomberg News Today. On the show, Christopher Eisgruber, the president of Princeton University, sits down with me for
a wide ranging conversation about American higher education. We talk about free speech, academic freedom, and the Trump administration's cracked down on colleges and universities, its impact on students and faculty, and the future of research and innovation in the US. This interview has been edited and condensed. We're at a moment where there aren't many leaders of colleges and universities who are willing to speak up or speak out about what's happening.
You are.
I'm grateful for that. Why is that the case. Why do you feel it's important to speak up about the challenges facing higher education today.
I think it's important to speak up because there are fundamental principles at stake right now. American universities, in my view, are the best in the world, and I think the best they've ever been, and there are the best they've ever been because of their fidelity to certain principles, including academic freedom and free speech, and because of a very constructive partnership that's existed for about seventy years now between
American universities and the American government. All that is in danger right now, and we have to speak up for those principles in order to defend them.
I want to talk a bit about free speech, which is something I know that you've engaged with for the entirety of your career, and I'll ask you to put it plainly, how do you define free speech in the context of a college or university.
So I think free speech is first of all, the lifeblood of a great university. People have to be able to raise controversial ideas. You have to have vigorous discussion on the campus, and you have to defend it even when people are saying things that are very unpopular or at times that seem zany to the outside world. Because that's how you get at truth, and that's what our universities are about, and that's how you educate students and
prepare them for the world. We believe on our campus that people should be free to ouriculate ideas even if people find them immral, offensive or wrong headed, and that has justice. Brandeis said in a famous concurrence on the Court in the nineteen twenties, the remedy for bad speech is more speech, not intervention by the government or for
that matter, by the university administration. Now you do have to have what the Supreme Court calls time, place and manner regulations, which mean that you can say lots of things. People can criticize me, they can criticize the government They can say lots of other things on the campus, but it doesn't mean that you can pitch tents in an encampment or take over a building, whether you're in Washington, d c. Or whether you're on the Princeton University campus.
Over the course of your tenure, you have talked about these principles with it seems like every freshman class that comes here, is there a universal understanding of them? And has it been more difficult over these last couple of years to communicate two students the wider community or of what those principles are and how you uphold them.
Much more self conscious over the last few years in communicating those principles. I think when I took office, I mistakenly thought free speech was something you could take for granted, that everybody on a college campus believed in it, and that if I had to do anything to defend it, I would be defending it from threats from the outside. And there is some of that right right now. We
are very concerned about threats from the outside. But one of the things we learned is free speech is a hard idea and we have to be explaining it to our own campus and making sure that people understand it. So I think right now, our campus community, partly because I am talking to the students about this every year and we are discussing it on the campus, is well aware of the free speech principles that we apply at Princeton.
Whether they agree or disagree with those principles. You asked in your question whether there's universal understanding, there is not. There's free speech, like other concepts, is contested. It's contested in our society, it's contested in the world, and people
have different views about it. And just as people should disagree about other things on a college campus, it's okay if they disagree about what free speech means and what it entails, but we have to be clear about On the one hand, you can disagree about this, but here are the principles that we will apply as a university.
A recent challenge, perhaps the biggest recent challenge, has been on this issue of anti semitism on college campuses, and there has been a push to I was asking about a universal definition earlier. Come up with a universal definition for antisemitism that would be adopted. Is that something that is in place here that you consider putting in place here?
Well, so let me start by saying that I have been dismayed at the rise of anti semitism in the world. Anti Semitism is clearly a problem in our country and on campuses, and while rare, we've seen manifestations of it on our own campus. And we have to stand steadfastly against antisemitism and other forms of hate. But we do that at Prince and through anti discrimination principles that are broad and that do not incorporate specific definitions of particular
kinds of discrimination. So we expect that people will not be discriminated against on the basis of their religion, or their nationality, or their ethnicity. And we put that in very broad terms, and we don't define it specifically for anti semitism, or for anti black racism, or for other kinds of discrimination. And we think, just as is the case with many American anti discrimination laws, that having those broad definitions is a better and more effective way of stopping the problem.
We're kind of talking about this from a kind of top down way, but I'm curious sort of how you establish this and enforce it in a classroom. So for a student who goes into class and says something that might be construed as controversial or out of mode with what most people in the class I'm think, how do you make sure that he or she feels comfortable doing that and won't face any kind of retaliation retribution from TA or a professor's result of doing that.
Right, So that's a really important question. And when we start talking about what's going on in the classroom, just to draw an important distinction here, we're talking about academic freedom as it applies to faculty members and to students,
rather than about free speech per se. Free speech applies if you're in a park or out in a square on the campus, the campus quadrangle, and it gives you these really broad rights to say things that may be offensive or as I indicated earlier, as any when you're in a classroom, we're part of we're engaged there in a truth seeking endeavor where we have a different set of rules requiring that people be respectful to one another and that they also have the freedom and this is
part of academic freedom, just as as part of free speech to raise controversial opinions and to be able to do so without retaliation. So we have that spelled out in our rules and procedures of the faculty, not just that you won't be retaled against. But they specifically say, for example, that even the professor's viewpoint is open to challenge in the classroom. They say that professors must treat students with respect as well as the other way around.
And we expect students to treat one another with respect because that's in the rules and procedures of the faculty. If there are departures from that, students where others can make complaints about how it is that a faculty member is behaving.
I want to stick with academic freedom. And I've heard you speak out efforts by powerful actors in government and outside it who are trying to control the research that scholars do in the classes they teach. How difficult is it to keep a firewall up, keep insulation surrounding this campus, to keep those powerful actors, as you put it, out of the classrooms, out of the campus itself.
Well, I think it's a It requires a very firm commitment to principle and a willingness to do hard things. University presidents and leaders have to understand that the commitment to allow academics, including our faculty, and including our students, to pursue the truth as best they see it is fundamental to what our universities do. We have to be
willing to stand up for that. In principle, we have to be willing to speak up, and we have to be willing to say no to funding if it's going to constrain our ability to pursue the truth.
Coming up, we discussed the developments at Columbia University, the cancelation of four hundred million dollars in grants and contracts there and Columbia's subsequent agreement to make changes to a raft of university policies, and I get President Ice Grouper's thoughts on the future of academic research. The federal government has taken some dramatic action against universities in the last
several weeks. It's reviewing around nine billion dollars in federal contracts and grants awarded to Harvard University, part of a crackdown on what it says is a tolerance of anti semitism on college campuses. It froze four hundred million dollars in grants and contracts to Columbia University over the way it's handled anti semitism on campus. Columbia responded by announcing changes to university policy on a range of issues, from how it handles protests to the way it defines anti semitism.
Princeton is also in the government sites. Christopher Iiscruber told me government agencies have frozen several dozen research grants.
We had noticed actually yesterday of the suspension of some funds and are still seeking a clarification of exactly why these funds were suspended. So there's no respect in which we're immune from this. As from our standpoint, this compact is important to us, and I think it's important for universities to send shoulder to shoulder as we go forward.
How worrisome is that to you you watch that happen in institutions around the country.
It's deeply worrisome. It's deeply worrisome because, as I said earlier, this pact between the government and research universities, which goes back to shortly after World War Two, has been fundamental to the excellence of American research universities, and it has contributed tremendously to the prosperity, health and security of our country.
And that pact has depended on the idea that the American government will come to universities and ask them to do research that is in the interests of the American people, and universities have done that spectacularly, making both the country and the universities stronger. Throughout that time, the American government has respected this principle of academic freedom. That means that when that research has undertaken, universities and their faculties can
pursue the truth as they see it. What we're seeing now is the use of research and funding and the leverage that it gives the government over universities as a lever to try to change what it is they teach, and that threatens to disrupt the quality of our universities and the principles that are fundamental to them.
What do you make of the agreement that Columbia came to.
Yeah, well, there are two separate questions here. One question is is it a good idea to take particular departments at a particular university and subject them to greater scrutiny and supervision from the central administration. That's a perfectly valid question to ask, and universities, as they pursue excellence, pursue the truth, and seek to ensure quality, will sometimes make a judgment that a particular department needs additional support or
supervision in some way. That's a legitimate thing for them to do. And I don't have a view about whether or not Columbia as a university should be making that judgment about a set of departments there. I'm not in
a position to assess those issues. But a second question is should the government come in and, without running through any of the processes that provide due process protections to a university, take funding that's given to the university for one subject, say medical science, and threaten to withdraw in order to force Columbia to do what the government thinks it should do with regard to one of its departments.
That is, it seems to me what's happened that Columbia, and that is an intrusion on academic freedom that ought to concern every American because what's happening then is the government is withdrawing research funding again without the due process that accompanies any sort of investigation, and using it to try to force a university to move a department in a direction that the government thinks is desirable. And when you ask why is it that's such a huge proportion
of Nobel Prizes get awarded to Americans. Why is it that the best scientists and engineers from all over the world want to come to the United States. It's because of this extraordinary partnership we've had here where the government says we're going to do research through these universities, We're going to fund that, and we're going to enable these universities to become the best in the world and produces
these extraordinary innovations on behalf of the American people. Universities do a broader range of research than that, And then there's research that's done at universities that are funded from other sources, including, for example, endowments or tuition payments that enable universities to contribute to our understanding of great literature, for example, or American history.
Given that history and the breadth that you describe, would it be impossible for the private sector to do the kind of research that's done at American colleges and universities.
Yeah, there's no way the private sector could substitute for what American research universities are doing now, both on their own and in partnership with the government. And I suspect if you ask the private sect, our tech companies or our pharma companies they would agree with that, And the reason is because we do the kind of long term research that doesn't have the payoff that's going to matter, the predictable, immediate term or medium term payoff that is
going to matter to our corporations. Because what we've realized as Americans for a long period of time is that if you ask deep and profound questions about science, they will eventually pay off with innovations way down the road. They're going to make a difference to our country and our world. But you can't put all of that in a corporation where the board the leadership are beholden to shareholders who want to see a return on a faster timeline than from a nineteen eighty two paper to the
twenty twenties. Right, that kind of unpredictability and that kind of path require this partnership, and it is what is unique about the American innovation ecosystem.
So you have the federal government freeze and funding at PEN we've learned that the government is looking at funding to Harvard to the tune of eight or nine billion dollars. These seem like huge numbers. How do you deal with that level of uncertainties? You're putting together the budget and thinking about what research can be conducted at a school
like Princeton. If there's the possibility that a seemingly mercurial government could say we want to pause this, we want to freeze this, we want to look at this, and it's going to effectively stop that funding for research.
Well, that kind of interruption, right what you described as the mercurial character of that kind of intervention, will, if it persists, undermine the partnership that has been so critical to America's success. So one thing is how do I deal with that as a university president. That's a challenge, and you can deal with it through some short term chop but over time, the American government needs to recommit to that partnership and to sustain its commitment if we're
going to succeed. But think about some of the young people who are making decisions. Think about a young woman who is thinking about doing an mdphd and is graduating from college right now. Question is is she going to bet ten years of her life on the idea that there's going to be research funding when she comes out of that so she can make the discoveries that are going to cure cancer or help us address Alzheimer's disease. That committing ten years is a tough proposition, even with
a stable funding arrangement in place. Some of the people are going to make the decision they're going to do something else. Or think about an assistant professor who has to prove their worth in a tenure process and depends on grants to be able to do that, or a graduate student who's coming out and says, do I take a high salary in a private company or do I commit myself to this research that's going to make a difference decades down the road and prove to be the
fundamental source of innovation. We're going to squander that talent pipeline if we have this kind of erratic intervention coming up.
Christopher Eiscreup talks about his options as he deals with the government determined to make fundamental changes to the American university system. That includes how he might negotiate with the government and deploy his university's own considerable resources. Universities are under attack, but they're not exactly a soft target. Many,
particularly the Ivy League, have considerable resources. Harvard's endowment is more than fifty billion, dollars in size, and Princeton has more than thirty three billion dollars under management, but universities are loathed to plunder these nest eggs. I ask Christopher Einsgruber what universities can do to get that frozen government funding unfrozen to get back to business as usual.
I think the following things are clear. Right, we have to comply with the law. If there's an allegation that there's some kind of unlawful behavior, we have to change that. We have to stand steadfast against anti Semitism and all other forms of discrimination, and we will cooperate with the government to address those if that's their concern. But we will also continue vigorously to defend academic freedom, and we will insist on the due process rights of the of
the university. So I think the range of options that a university or anybody else has under those circumstances are, first of all, to litigate if there are concerns, to address legitimate concerns where they exist, and to continue to work with the government to address and and move forward
on what I think are shared goals. And there should be shared goals here of of making sure that the univer that the United States continues to be the world leader in research and innovation, making sure that we address all forms of hate or discrimination on our campus, and making sure that we conduct research lawful. So those conversations I think we can have. You know, there are other people who urge, well, are are there ways that you can accommodate the government in some way or bend to
the government's policy preferences in order to restore funding. I think that's the wrong way, at least for an academic institution to be thinking about what its responsibilities are. We need to be true to our mission, and we need to be true to our values, and I think that's a way of being true to the broader American mission.
So, worst case this funding goes away, are there places that you can turn to replace it? Is that from the private sector, is it from alumni? Is it from the endowment? I know you've said in the past, think of it as an annuity, don't think of it as a saving's account. You're not comfortable saying this is something from which you could draw an exceptional amount of money.
Yeah, David, thank you for making the point that when we talk about the endowment in particular, it functions like an annuity because we spend from it already at five percent a year to defray the cost of research, make it more affordable to the government for us to be able to do research here and also to make our
education affordable to our students. But look, if government funding were to go down, right, we and others would look for other sources that we could use to support the funding to the research that has to take place on our campuses. We would look for things that we could stop doing. They would be real cost to that. Because I'm proud of what we're doing on the campus. We would try to raise other funds. We would look at ways to potentially reallocate endowment funding, which would involve very
difficult choices. But at the end of the day, what would happen here and elsewhere is that less research would get done, and that would be a bad thing, I think for America because we would no longer have the kinds of innovation or the same degree of innovation and leadership that we have had to date.
So with regard to the endowment, it could be used for a rainy day, but the forecast isn't calling for one. Yeah, is that? Well?
The the endowment people. So now I do have to say some things about annuities and savings accounts. People sometimes think about the endowment as something that gets used on a rainy day, like a savings account that you keep
off to the side. We spend more than five percent per year of the annownment and have to be able to do that in perpetuity, or we're not able to answer the able to offer the financial aid that we do to our students, or pay all of our faculty across all of our disciplines, or support the research that we do beyond what comes from federal funding. So if
you're making a choice you can use the annownment. You can start to say, well, look we've got pressures on it here, and we have to use it differently than we were using it before. I was the chief budgetary officer for the university during the global financial crisis, and under those circumstances we had to pull in our wings. We had to cut positions to take financial aid up,
but we froze are hiring. We weren't able to do some things in terms of building new facilities that would allow us to seize new research opportunities during that period. But we made tough choices about what we were going to do, and you can make those choices going forward.
At the end of the day, what those choices will mean is there are certain research projects that would have been undertaken that won't be undertaken because you've had to reallocate what the endowment does away from one project to another.
Something that has been so central to the knowledge economy that we've been talking about has been students who have been born and lived in other countries who've come here to Princeton other universities to study and do research work. Are you worried that, given what we've seen in recent weeks, it'll be a less full pipeline of students doing that.
I'm neabbly worried about that this university, and virtually every America university, depends on talent from around the world in order to reach its excellence. I mentioned earlier in our discussion the circumstances during World War Two that allowed the United States to seize this competitive advantage, and that had a lot to do with emigrants coming to our country
from Europe. Princeton University had a kind of a new birth during that period because of all the extraordinary mathematicians and physicists who escaped the Nazi regime and came to the United States because of the freedom it offered, the freedom to pursue their research and the freedom to live according to the dectates of their faith and without discrimination. And this country and our universities have been a magnet to people from around the world throughout our history, I
would say, in ways that have benefited the country tremendously. Now, with this combination of attacks on universities and some of what we are seeing around immigration and the treatment of Green card holders and visa holders, I think people will ask a second time about whether or not they want to come to the United States. If that happens, it will undermine our ability to attract talent, and it will make us weaker as a country.
I'd like to devetail this with what we've been talking about with regard to academic freedom and free speech. So there's this video that was shot in Somerville, Massachusetts of a tought University doctoral student. I don't know if you've seen it, but she's walking around and six masked law
enforcem missiles come and apprehend her take her away. What do you say to a student here who sees that video, has heard what you've had to say about the climate of free speech on a college canvas, and sees in real terms there the effect that that could have today, That that's a young woman who was here in the United States studying, yes, participating in student life by making her opinions known in the student newspaper, and now finds
herself in an extremely precarious position and threatened with being kicked out of this country.
Yes, so I've had these questions from students, and it's difficult, and I think when I talk to them, I have to acknowledge that difficulty. So part of what I say to them is, look, it's really important that they be able to speak up and participate on campus. And my own view as an American and as a constitutional lawyer is that it's really important for us as a country to continue to protect the free speech rights of non citizens as well as citizens. It has been one of
our great strength as a country. And I also tell them that we Princeton will do what we can do within the law in order to support students. But I have to tell them because I have to be honest with them at the same time that the legal protections that exist for non citizens are not the same as they are for citizens. So I think students have to make a judgment about how and when that they speak up. There are going to be some circumstances in some ways
of speaking that are safer and others. I think classrooms, for example, remain very safe environments for students to speak up, and the kind of conventions of civil discourse and engagement
help to provide protection for students. But I have to be clear with the students, and David, I have to be clear with you, right, these are real risks that interfere with the kind of engagement that we should want from students who are in our country, and with the kind of discourse that has to go on on campuses.
I'm glad you've brought us here because I'd love for you to put this moment in a broader historical context. There have been moments in the past where free speech on college campuses has been tested, where there have been protests where we've seen the government take an aggressive tack against against that. Does this feel like an outlier moment? Does it feel like there are historical analogs that you can look to. How do you see this moment in the broad sweep of American history.
I think it's both true that what we are seeing right now is a kind of manager festation of trends that are always present in the United States, but also a rather acute moment and a deeply worrisome one. So if I may, I would take this back to Tokeville, the great sociologist who came to the United States in the nineteenth century and wrote this tremendously perceptive book that
tells you lots of extraordinary things about Americans. I was getting ready for a speech a couple of months ago and pulled my Toauville off my shelf because I was hoping for a quote from him about Americans and the scientific enterprise here. And I didn't find what I was expecting.
I had forgotten my Tokeville, as it turned out, because what he said was the Americans are never going to be good at abstract science, and they're never going to have a great literature because they're too concerned with the pragmatic and the pressures of the moment. And I realized, Wow, for all the things that Tokeville got right, one thing that he got wrong was he did not visualize the American universities that we have today. He didn't visualize what
happens here at Princeton. He didn't visualize the Iowa Writers' Workshop that happens at the University of Iowa, or the Center for Theoretical Physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara. That wasn't on his radar screen. But I think what he got right was these institutions exist, as I don't know, things that Americans regard simultaneously with pride
and at the same time suspicion. Throughout their history. They take great pride in the excellence that gets manifested at universities, and they can be somewhat suspicious of the extraordinary freedom of thought and academic freedom that exists here and the ideas that emerge out of universities. So we have seen throughout our history times when there are intrusions on free speech and efforts to kind of rein in or control the extraordinary freedom that our country has allowed these universities
in ways that have made them great. But I think this particular period is unusually severe. We've never seen the use of federal funding in the way that it is being used now to try to control universities, and if we really go down that road, that is a very
dangerous road to go down. We've seen various kinds of anti immigrant moments in the past, but the efforts right now to seize on the vulnerability of immigrants in order to control or punish political speech that they're engaged in are unusual by comparison to the sweep of American history.
So we're in a moment right now where education has become politicized beyond the norm in America, and I think we need to return to our root principles as a country and reaffirm the importance of these institutions to what it is we do as a nation. Thank you very much, Thank you, Jesse. I appreciate it. Thank you.
This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gura. This episode is produced by Alex Secura, who also mixed it. It was edited by Patty Hirsh, Sarah McGregor, and Janet Lauren. It was fact checked by Adriana Tapia. Our senior producer is Naomi Shaven. Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Our deputy executive producer is Julia Weaver. Our executive producer is Nicole beemster boor. Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. If you liked this episode, make sure to subscribe and
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