Princeton discriminates against whites, Asians, Jews, and conservatives as a matter of policy

A reckoning seems likely

This article by Stanley Kurtz describes how two giants of 20th century American conservatism -- William F. Buckley and Russell Kirk -- viewed academic freedom. The very short version is that Buckley was against it and Kirk was for it.

Kirk viewed academic freedom as a vital part of our Western heritage. He saw it as an enabling condition of the quest for truth.

But Kirk was not an academic freedom absolutist. Instead, says Stanley, he insisted that professors have duties along with liberties.

As Kirk put it, “academic freedom consists of something more than merely an absence of restraints placed upon the teacher by the institution that employs him. It demands as well an absence of restraints placed upon the teacher by his political affiliations.” Without such distancing from politics, Kirk maintained, academic liberty declines into license.

At that point, “the persons who pay a professor would be derelict in their duty if they did not endeavor to restrain the man who violates his own privileges.” Kirk’s position, in short, was that “the teacher and scholar ought to be free to speculate about politics and to make his speculations known, so long as he does not abuse his opportunities by indoctrinating his students.”

What would Kirk make of today's Princeton University? Princeton can't match the raw anti-Semitism so manifest at Columbia. But Princeton takes a backseat to no elite institution when it comes to promoting leftist orthodoxy and discriminating against whites and other groups disfavored by the woke.

Consider this article by Christopher Rufo. It consists of an interview with a Princeton professor, one of several to whom Rufo spoke, about anti-Semitism, wokeism, and DEI at his university.

According to this professor, Princeton discriminates against whites, Jews, and Asians as a matter of policy:

We’ve always been told that we have to give special treatment to women and certain demographic minorities.

At one point, I was a “search officer” in my department. When our department was going to make a hire, a search committee was constituted. A search officer has access to demographic data that the search committee does not have and can look at the short list and then look at the demographic data and say, “I think you should maybe consider this person or that person,” i.e., people who belong to certain groups.

In one meeting of search officers, we were told that 70 percent of the faculty are white, and that the faculty composition has to change to reflect the composition of the class of Princeton, which they themselves had curated. Having engineered the class a certain way, they wanted then to engineer the faculty.

I have a colleague in the sciences, and he was told by the department, “You can’t shortlist this person. We can’t hire a white guy.” This colleague went to the chair, who was Jewish, and said to him, “In the 1930s, that’s what they used to say about Jews here at Princeton: ‘We couldn’t hire them because they’re Jewish.’”

Prejudice against Jews and whites runs so deep that photographs of previous chairs of a scientific department —all white men, many of them Jewish — suddenly disappeared one day from the wall where they had been displayed.

The administration had removed them from the wall because someone found it objectionable that all these white men should be staring down at them. And yet, a number of those men were key in bringing black students to Princeton in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. But none of that history matters: it’s just a bunch of whites faces, so they removed all the photographs, and no one objected—no one.

While purging leading white and Jewish professors from its institutional memory, Princeton is rewarding professors who trash Israel. According to the professor Rufo quotes:

The people who’ve been signing these anti-Israel petitions and going to the encampments are being considered for the top administrative positions. For instance, there’s a woman named Ruha Benjamin who has just been given the MacArthur Award. She led a group of students to take over a building here and then exited the building a minute before the police showed up. [Benjamin has claimed that she was a “faculty observer” during the April 29 occupation of Clio hall, though many dispute this characterization.] And she’s on the web page of the university as the “genius,” the most wonderful, incredible academic. In truth, she is the person who led the crazy stuff about Israel and Hamas on campus.

We don’t have the same number of crazies here as they do at Columbia, but we do have them. We have a local chapter of Hamas supporters, and they’re feted by the university. They’re not penalized or punished in any way; they’re feted.

Princeton is ideologically-selective about whom it fetes. Three current members of the Supreme Court graduated from Princeton — Samuel Alito, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor. Can you guess which of the three has been passed over by Princeton for honors?

Right. The conservative male.

Last year, Princeton presented Justice Kagan with its Woodrow Wilson award, one of the highest honors an alum can receive. (Princeton hasn’t gotten around to renaming the award yet). And this year, it dedicated Sonia Sotomayor Hall, the site of programs that support first-generation college, lower-income, transfer, and veteran students. At the same time, Princeton unveiled a portrait of Sotomayor to be added to the campus art collection.

Nor does a liberal jurist need to serve on the Supreme Court to be celebrated by Princeton. Denny Chin, a liberal district court judge in New York, has also received the prestigious Woodrow Wilson award.

Yet, as I understand it, Justice Alito, longer serving and more influential than Kagan and Sotomayor, has never received special recognition from Princeton. He’s kind of like those expunged white male department heads, except that his picture apparently has never been displayed.

I need hardly add that Princeton has ignored the Supreme Court’s command that colleges not discriminate against white and Asian-American applicants for admission. White representation in its first entering class following the Court’s ruling was essentially the same as in previous entering class — about 31 percent — while Asian representation dropped by around two percentage points to just under 24 percent.

As for intellectual diversity among faculty members, the professor quoted by Rufo reports that last year, Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber was on an American Enterprise Institute panel with Ben Sasse. When Sasse asked him, “Other than Robbie George, who are the conservatives on campus,” Eisgruber couldn’t come up with a single name.

The audience started laughing. Russell Kirk would not have been amused.

Eisgruber is the driving force behind the racial discrimination and wokeism at Princeton. The professor Rufo quotes says that Eisgruber went off the rails because wanted to be reappointed as president of the university and feared he would be replaced by a black woman.

Normally, I would discount such an explanation. Self-interest isn’t required to explain a liberal academic’s embrace of wokeism and DEI. However, Eisgruber has taken the embrace to such extremes that I begin to wonder.

Consider his declaration that Princeton, during his presidency, has been guilty of “systemic discrimination” against blacks. There are plenty of woke, virtue-signaling college presidents. I doubt any has taken virtue signaling to such an extreme level.

The potential penalty for the discrimination Eisgruber cynically confessed to is loss of federal funding. Taking Eisgruber at his word, the first Trump administration opened an investigation into whether Princeton has discriminated against blacks. (Presumably, the investigation would have concluded that, to the contrary, it has discriminated against whites and Asians. The penalty for that discrimination is also loss of funding.)

Relying on sophistry only a former law professor could deploy, Eisgruber tried to talk his way out of this pickle. In reality, though, Eisgruber was relying on Joe Biden to win the 2020 election. After Biden’s victory, the new administration promptly dropped the investigation of Princeton.

But now, there’s a new Trump administration, and it’s investigating the real forms of discrimination institutions like Princeton indulge in — discrimination against whites, Jews, Asians, and conservatives.

Christopher Rufo, author of the article on which this post is based, plays a leading role in the Trump administration’s efforts to fight that discrimination. Thus, if you’ll excuse the pun, this exchange at the end of Rufo’s piece is not just academic:

Rufo: And how do you hope that this conflict between Trump and Princeton will resolve?

Professor: I want this university severely punished for its unlawful behavior. I want discovery; I want all the emails to come out that will make it very evident that this university was engaged in illegal discrimination. I want President Eisgruber subpoenaed before Congress to have to account for not only anti-Semitism, but for DEI and for the “systemic racism” arguments that he’s made. I want him to be publicly put on the stand. That’s what ultimately will deeply embarrass this university.

I’m not sure Princeton is capable of being deeply embarrassed. But I second the professor’s motion.