Princeton’s War on Civil Rights

The university has entrenched a system of racial discrimination—against whites.

Amid the ongoing showdown between the Trump administration and the Ivy League, one university president has positioned himself as a leader of the academic resistance: Princeton’s Christopher L. Eisgruber.

Earlier this month, the Trump administration suspended hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded grants to Princeton as part of its investigation into racial discrimination and anti-Semitism at the New Jersey campus. Eisgruber, though, was defiant, telling the New York Times that he’s “not considering any concessions” and calling for other university presidents to follow his lead.

This isn’t Eisgruber’s first bid for the spotlight. After the death of George Floyd in 2020, he declared that Princeton—where he has served as president since 2013—was guilty of “systemic racism.” In a letter to students that September, he went so far as to claim that racism was embedded in the very “structures of the university itself.”

Eisgruber was right to say that he presides over a system of racial discrimination—but not in the way he imagines. The university does not discriminate against “oppressed” groups, such as blacks and Latinos, but against those seen as “oppressors.”

“At Princeton, it’s totally common knowledge that there are favored groups and disfavored groups,” one professor said. “And the disfavored groups are whites, Jews, males,” and others commonly disliked by the Left.

A City Journal investigation confirms that Princeton has, in fact, entrenched a system of racial discrimination and segregation. We have obtained more than a dozen internal documents and conducted interviews with a half-dozen employees, who confirm that the university has flagrantly violated the principles of the Civil Rights Act in the name of “social justice.”

The basic structure of this system is the university’s “diversity, equity, and inclusion” bureaucracy, which has expanded dramatically under Eisgruber’s tenure. An infographic circulated by Princeton shows at least 40 academic and administrative departments with established DEI committees, with the express purpose of adjusting the campus’s racial composition. As Princeton’s first annual diversity report noted, “Every administrative and academic leader is being held accountable for demographic evolution.”

According to several Princeton faculty members, “demographic evolution” is a euphemism for racial quotas and outright discrimination in academic hiring. A 2021 internal report outlining best practices for faculty recruitment described how staff were trained to “increase the diversity of the applicants at every step in the process.” The report advised search committees to discount negative references for minority candidates and to ensure that every shortlist included at least “two women and/or two underrepresented minority candidates.”

The implicit message from Eisgruber and the administration: don’t hire white men unless absolutely necessary. According to one professor, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal, this meant abandoning merit-based hiring in favor of race-based preferences—the only way, given the current pipeline, to accomplish Eisgruber’s stated goal of increasing “by 50 percent the number of tenured or tenure-track faculty members from underrepresented groups over the next five years.”

Though many of these policies relied on euphemism, some were openly and explicitly discriminatory. The university’s Target of Opportunity Program, which was cancelled shortly before the 2024 presidential election, made funding available for departments to hire “candidates from groups that are underrepresented on campus.” According to conversations with Princeton professors, this referred primarily to racial minorities and women. The program covered half of each hire’s salary, allowing departments to bring on new faculty without bearing the full financial burden. In effect, the administration created financial incentives to prioritize hiring racial minorities.

The university’s race-conscious initiatives were not limited to faculty hiring. In 2021, Princeton released its multiyear plan for “Supplier Diversity,” which called on departments to award contracts based not on quality or cost, but on race. The report offered staff a step-by-step guide for effectively funneling university procurement contracts to minority-owned or -operated businesses. Failing that, the report suggested, staff should prioritize awarding contracts to companies with a philosophical commitment to DEI. “We will also explore opportunities to highlight relationships with firms that do not qualify [as certified diverse suppliers] but otherwise demonstrate the values to which we aspire,” according to the report. The report also notes Princeton was willing to “[s]upport capacity-building efforts” at “diverse firms” so they could better “meet the needs of the university.”

Dan Morenoff, executive director of the American Civil Rights Project, said Princeton’s Supplier Diversity initiative constitutes a “straightforward violation” of federal civil rights law. “Parties may not decide who to contract with and who not to contract with based on race,” Morenoff said. “It sounds very clear that this is what they were doing, and they were bragging about it.”

These commitments are deeply ideological. In a 2022 speech to the Princeton Mercer Regional Chamber of Commerce, Eisgruber’s top DEI bureaucrat, Michele Minter, explained that the university rejected the principle of colorblind equality—the ideal of the Civil Rights Act—in favor of DEI-style racialism.

“We have to resist the temptation to fall back into the idea that . . . not seeing difference should be our goal,” Minter said. “We’re putting a lot of money into it [DEI]. And by the way, you have to put money into this. It’s very hard to make progress if you don’t actually invest real dollars.”

In her speech, Minter compared today’s anti-DEI activists with the segregationists of the 1960s. But, like Eisgruber, she has it backward. The only racial segregation at Princeton today is driven by the DEI bureaucracy, which allocates programs, funding, and opportunities to certain racial groups while excluding others. Under Eisgruber and Minter’s administration, for example, Princeton has proudly held racially segregated commencement ceremonies, with exclusive events for “Pan African,” Asian, Native American, “Latinx,” and Middle Eastern students; there was no evidence of similar opportunities for white or Jewish students.

The reality is that Princeton has violated the principles of the Civil Rights Act. It may have gone further: in Morenoff’s estimation, its contracting policy likely ran afoul of New Jersey civil rights law (“among the strongest, most sweeping non-discrimination statutes in the nation”) and the Civil Rights Act of 1866. And its hiring preferences may have violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits racial discrimination in hiring unless the employer can fit one of a few narrow exceptions—which, Morenoff said, there is “good reason to doubt.”

While Eisgruber has remained publicly defiant toward the Trump administration, he seems to recognize his vulnerability. The university has been quietly scrubbing its website of DEI materials and recently updated its page to include a statement on Princeton’s ostensible commitment to “equal opportunity and non-discrimination.”

But Princeton’s proclaimed commitment to nondiscrimination conflicts with the internal documents obtained by City Journal as part of this investigation. It also rings hollow to faculty, who tell us that, when it comes to DEI, it’s business as usual at Princeton. “The argument has to be made that this is really about unlawful behavior and not about anything else,” said one faculty member.

And the man responsible is Christopher Eisgruber. “He is in total denial that the problem is internal, that DEI is a problem,” the professor said. “He seems to be doubling down on this insanity.”