“We Can’t Hire a White Guy”—a Professor on Life at Princeton

President Christopher Eisgruber has created a system of widespread racial discrimination.

In 2020, Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber made headlines for declaring the university guilty of “systemic racism.” He meant systemic racism against racial minorities, but in truth, Eisgruber’s institution has practiced the opposite: systematically discriminated against supposed “oppressors,” like whites and males.

Though most Princeton faculty support Eisgruber’s “anti-racism” policy, a faction of dissenters—a few dozen in number—has grown bolder in recent months. In these professors’ telling, Princeton’s president is a vengeful administrator who punishes anyone who questions DEI orthodoxy. They have worked behind the scenes to assemble evidence of his discriminatory policies and hope the Trump administration will restore the principle of colorblind equality on campus.

I sat down with one of these professors for a wide-ranging discussion about anti-Semitism, radical ideologies, and DEI at Princeton. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Christopher Rufo: Harvard and Columbia have drawn the most attention for radical ideologies and anti-Semitism on campus. Set the stage for what’s happening here at Princeton.

Professor: Anti-Semitism is really a symptom of a deeper malaise at Princeton, which is that the university decided to go woke and—as President Eisgruber wrote in the last few months of the first Trump administration—declare that we were “systemically racist.” But if we have been systemically racist, it’s been against whites, Jews, Asians, and Indians, in favor of other demographics. 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.’”

Everyone knows, but academics are cowards. They see the way the wind is blowing and either go quiet or jump on the bandwagon.

Rufo: And paint me a picture of President Eisgruber. He is really trying to make a reputation on this.

Professor: Here’s what I can tell you: he’s very insecure about the fact that he doesn’t have a Ph.D.; he has a JD. He’s a bit of an antisocial person. He doesn’t socialize with faculty at all. He’s extremely arrogant. It may have to do with his insecurity. And he lives in a bubble. He’s created a board of trustees that is entirely sycophantic. Each board member’s dream was to become a trustee of Princeton, and they will never cross him because they would never want to lose that position. This is the pinnacle of social ascension for them.

Last year, Eisgruber was on an American Enterprise Institute panel, in conversation with Ben Sasse. Sasse asked him, “Other than Robbie George, who are the conservatives on campus?” Eisgruber couldn’t come up with a single name, and people started laughing. Robbie is the house conservative, and the general atmosphere is not a good one. I’ve seen a lot of people self-censoring. Certainly, if you’re a conservative student or a Christian or a Zionist, many are afraid and won’t talk. There’s no doubt that, for a while, the woke were ruling the roost.

Rufo: And who are the people Eisgruber has rewarded?

Professor: All 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 disputethis 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.

Rufo: And why is that? Not to be crude, but Eisgruber himself is Jewish. You would think that—

Professor: No, hold on. He discovered he was Jewish as an adult. It was a very late discovery. It was something from Ellis Island that his son looked up. I don’t think he grew up Jewish at all. To me, again, the bottom line is this: he’s bought into the ideology that certain people are victims and certain people are oppressors. I think he’s bought into it completely.

Rufo: In my observation, you have a lot of cynical actors that follow the path of least resistance, and you have some true believers. You put him in the latter category?

Professor: I think he was initially very cynical because he wanted to be reappointed as president of the university and feared that he could have easily been replaced by a black woman. So, I think it started out being cynical and then, once he secured his reappointment for five years, he proceeded to drink the Kool-Aid and felt that he was getting all kinds of accolades because of it. There is an elite in this country that rewards itself for adopting certain ideologies, and he’s one of them.

Rufo: Conversely, how are white and Jewish men on the faculty responding?

Professor: Largely by being quiet and afraid. A scientific department had displayed photographs of all the previous department chairs for the last 70 years—all white men, many of them Jewish. One day, all the pictures disappeared. 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.

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.