Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right by Christopher L. Eisgruber. Basic Books, 2025.
Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right is a weird book. I offer that impression with no intention of slighting the acuity of its arguments or the erudition of its author. The timing of its publication is awkward, to say the least: The book was drafted before the escalating and exhausting onslaught of federal initiatives targeting higher education. By comparison with the torrent of proclamations and the grinding gears of extortion, yesteryear’s fake tears over cancel culture and the like now seem like an epiphenomenal sideshow—except that, as Christopher Eisgruber also recognizes without quite stating it explicitly, the fomenting of hysteria on the right about universities has provided a pretext for federal efforts to gut academic freedom. But what makes the book uniquely weird, and exasperating, is that the personal courage of its author in standing up to the current US presidential administration clashes jarringly with the tepidity of the book’s recommendations.
I’m an academic laborer at Princeton University, where Eisgruber is president, with several protections afforded to me by tenure and seniority. Together with other faculty and community members, I’ve organized to the left of many of the positions taken by Eisgruber in Terms of Respect. In that context, I’ve seen up close how a university administration can extol free speech and academic freedom while also moving against the capacity of faculty (and other community members) to exercise governance. On this campus, as on others, the pro-Palestine encampments of spring 2024 exposed basic truths about the debilitation of shared governance—nowhere more glaring than in the mismatch between professed commitments to free speech and realities on the ground.
Eisgruber writes in a genre that may best be termed “presidential protreptic,” the type of quasimemoir from top academic administrators that comes packaged with recommendations for more effective university management. But Terms of Respect is not a full-blown retrospective from a former president, in the manner of Clark Kerr’s The Uses of the University or, more recently, Nicholas B. Dirks’s City of Intellect. (Lee Bollinger, president emeritus of the University of Michigan and of Columbia University, joined their company earlier this year.) Rather, it is penned from what I would call the “locus of active authority,” to modify and repurpose the title of a 2015 study coauthored by William G. Bowen, who served as Princeton’s president from 1972 to 1988, and Eugene M. Tobin. In this sense, Terms of Respect shares some affinities with the publications of another sitting university president, Arizona State’s Michael M. Crow, except that Eisgruber’s book is not so much focused on the future of higher education as it is a vindication of the university in the here and now.
These are challenging times for university presidents. As it turns out, their staggering levels of compensation relative to tenure-track faculty members and, especially, those on contingent appointments offer little protection from being dragged through the mud: Witness the 2024 congressional hearings and their sordid aftermaths. Such high levels of compensation should invite some suspicion—not only or exclusively about the endowments of hypercapitalized institutions but also about the types of financial exploitation that underwrite the entire enterprise. But for all that it reads as a product of an educational system deeply deformed by its relations to capital, Eisgruber’s book traffics in a different kind of currency. It’s the currency of the university president as “awe-some,” whose circulation Kathryn J. Gindlesparger has tracked in her 2023 book Opening Ceremony: Inviting Inclusion into University Governance.
Gindlesparger’s stimulating contribution to the University of Minnesota Press Forerunners series makes for a perfect pairing with Terms of Respect, not least because it brings into the light some of the avowals and disavowals that trail Eisgruber’s book. She writes compellingly about the immanent potential of shared governance as “a stance of spectatorship that, on the one hand, maintains the status quo but, on the other, calls new participants to join.” At first blush, the notion of shared governance may seem peripheral, if not irrelevant, to the arguments put forward in Terms of Respect. On closer examination, though, Eisgruber’s book offers a disquieting perspective on the erosion of shared governance and the deleterious impact of that erosion on free speech and academic freedom. It accomplishes this in two ways.
First, Terms of Respect frames its claims about free speech and academic freedom such that the center of authority is largely absent, save for when it manifests itself in the exercise of power through the affirmation of norms and, more emphatically, the imposition of punishment. This book issues from the pen of a president whose selection of vignettes makes plain how others recognize him as powerful and how he has wielded power. And yet both the real and ideal relationship of that power to the exercise of free speech is regularly mystified, even (or especially) in those moments when Eisgruber exposes self-proclaimed victims of cancel culture as mythologizers and prevaricators. There is no example in the book of faculty members who are not administrators participating in the work of deliberative governance through which appropriate and productive protocols for speech are articulated, expounded, and institutionally enshrined. Indeed, the idea that such governance may function independently—as productive complements of or at corrective cross-purposes to the norm-setting of centralized administration—is entirely absent.
Second, the book construes academic freedom as a prerogative in need of defending for the sake of research and teaching and free speech as a right whose untrammeled exercise powers the pursuit of that research and teaching. Sensible enough. But the notion that such research and teaching should be brought directly to bear on the design and morphologies of the university itself through the exercise of faculty academic freedom, and the accompanying idea that free speech and academic freedom come to be most fully realized through governance, is only fleetingly countenanced in these pages. One revealing exception involves the assignment to entering undergraduates of a book on free speech by a faculty member whose conservative politics were apparently a complete mystery to Eisgruber until he read the book’s preface.
For all that Terms of Respect aspires to defend the contemporary American university against its critics, it is mainly concerned with interlocutors and (mis)representations on the right. Meanwhile, the Left’s critical moves around the university come up only in mentions of student protest. While the book should get some credit for recognizing that these protests have yielded beneficial outcomes—though on this subject the book hedges and on occasion obscures—it is unsettling and frankly dismaying to read a reflection on the contemporary university that blithely ignores those forms of disciplinary knowledge animated by student (and faculty and staff) struggle.
The book is written from a position of presidential enunciation content with pretending that the works of scholars such as la paperson or Roderick Ferguson (to name only two of many) do not exist. At no point in its pages does a reader even glimpse those fields that have set out both a historical critique of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century Euro-American university and roadmaps to more liberatory futures. The instruments of analysis perfected in ethnic studies and critical university studies are nowhere acknowledged, and much the same could be said for the robust theoretical and practical literature on protest. In seeking to elevate itself above the fray of debates about the historical function of the university and its contemporary responsibilities, the book takes itself out of a richly developed scholarly conversation on those topics.
In a moment of autobiographical revelation, Eisgruber nods to the “liberal Republicans” of his college years—a genus extinguished in the decades-long transmogrification of Tea Partiers into MAGA adherents. The intellectual architecture of Terms of Respect bears witness to a residual attachment to their memory and inclinations, and not only in the book’s choice of issues and figures to engage. Those histories and theories of the university that came to be incubated within periods of civic agitation are briefly hailed in the book’s pages but soon recede into the background.
Terms of Respect offers remarkable and at times jolting insight into the blinkered cynicisms of university leadership. Take, for example, the retrospective on the Black Justice League’s 2015 sit-in at Princeton’s Nassau Hall, one of the first crises of Eisgruber’s presidency. Eisgruber first characterizes the wisdom then prevalent on how to handle student sit-ins: “The idea of a sit-in excites students, but the experience quickly becomes boring. . . . Once the students are primed to leave, administrators can offer token concessions that allow the protesters to save face.” In 2015, we learn, this approach didn’t work because “the internet had changed the world since 1995,” the last time that students organized a sit-in at Princeton. Students could now communicate with the outside world (and with lawyers) more effectively—in other words, they could exercise greater power. Eisgruber derives from the 2015 sit-in a lesson or two about the “new communications environment” brought about by the rise of the internet and social media. He does not explicitly acknowledge the possibility that the power balance between students and university administrators has shifted. But knowledge of what that shift has spurred is in the book, or at the very least can be gleaned interlinearly from the recommendations in its penultimate chapter concerning those ever-more restrictive policies on student protest that are euphemistically veiled as time-place-manner regulations and the evolution of new disciplinary systems to calibrate and impose punishments for violations of these policies.
Here and throughout, tone and substance converge to disclose one of Eisgruber’s intended audiences: alumni. He is explicit that addressing and mollifying the complaints of alumni about current students, especially on the topic of free speech, is one of his chief responsibilities as university president. Key to his seeming success at managing the disaffection of alumni is reframing speech that they might find insulting or disrespectful as productive. So, and again with reference to the 2015 sit-in, Eisgruber writes about the “valuable but uncivil speech” of the students: “What began as a rude and disruptive protest became an extended civil discussion that addressed topics about race, equality, and history. . . . The students were neither crybabies nor fascists. The university responded to them in a way that protected its commitments to both free speech and inclusivity.” Unstated is the recognition that these alumni need to be persuaded because they, too, hold power over the university, in the form of their donations. That recognition is telling, though perhaps not nearly as telling as Eisgruber’s policing of the distinction between civility and rudeness.
The relevance of that distinction to the more overarching program of democratic persuasion is one of the book’s major themes. Never confronted directly is the fact that speech exists to do many things other than (simply) persuade.
Following a recapitulation of the on- and off-campus uproar in response to an anthropology professor’s use of the n-word—the flames fanned in large part by Fox News coverage—Eisgruber offers a recommendation for how students could present their complaints more persuasively: “Students sometimes phrase their objections to racial slurs or other language in terms of the ‘pain’ they feel, and that formulation lends credence to the view that the issue arises from excessive sensitivity. Their arguments might be more persuasive if they emphasized dignity rather than pain: The critical question about the explicit mention of racial slurs, I would suggest, is whether that practice shows appropriate respect for all members of a campus community and thereby promotes the likelihood of constructive dialogue among people of different backgrounds, not whether it makes someone feel bad.” The move to dignity as a rhetorical strategy, while not without its merits, tips Eisgruber’s hand in the great parlor game of which scholars from which political persuasions he finds persuasive. But the ghosting of the audiences that are held to be persuadable intrigues me even more. Is it Fox News anchors and their viewers, who are repeatedly invited into a multimedia spectacle of hate-reading and conspiratorial suspicion that, as the scholar Moira Weigel documents, craves not persuasion but stimulus? Campus administrators, who are confronted with the fallout from episodes of this kind and with calls to intervene? The alumni donor class?
It’s appropriate to sit for a beat with Eisgruber’s characterization of “rude” and “civil” forms of speech, both of which he presumes have persuasion as their primary aim. An encompassing awareness of speech acts and their manifold properties is firmly embedded in the First Amendment jurisprudence surveyed by Eisgruber, which makes the book’s insouciance toward the full spectrum of speech’s efficacies all the more confounding. For example, it is a truth almost universally recognized that chants at protests have much more than propositional persuasion as their aim. They function to herald and direct collective action as well as to elevate moral urgency around a specific subject or crisis, and neither function inheres so much in the words themselves as in the alignment of speech with circumstance. This is one reason why time-place-manner restrictions in university settings compromise the quality of speech itself. The articulation of any complaint or grievance to authority is vitally dependent on its spatialization. To insist otherwise, by claiming that the quality of such speech can be maintained by its confinement to predetermined and prenegotiated locations, is simply special pleading.
More broadly, and with another nod to Gindlesparger, many university campuses are showcases for epideictic rhetoric—from speeches by university administrators to monuments and statuary—that is principally concerned with modeling communally endorsed values. The intention in many cases is not so much to persuade as to overwhelm. Or rather, such persuasion as does occur is not the fruit of some dialogically intersubjective process. Speech inspires, energizes, quickens, infuriates; it is embodied, material, proprioceptive. Student protesters challenge that epideictic rhetoric with their bodies. As Beatriz Balanta, Rachel Price, and Irene Small observed some years ago, “To speak of free speech is to speak with, and of, the body”: We should for that reason be deeply skeptical of “abstracting the bodies from which speech issues,” a maneuver with which Eisgruber is all too comfortable. Student protest, with its concern for the vital materiality of speech on campuses, not only practices but in crucial respects theorizes a more fully rounded conception of free speech than what Terms of Respect offers its readers.
This point brings me to another eyebrow-raising dimension of Terms of Respect. Earlier I remarked that Eisgruber’s description of the technological changes that intervened to make the 2015 sit-in different from its 1995 predecessor papers over a shift in the types of power available to protesting students, as well as their intra- and extramural antagonists. The broadcasting of Eisgruber’s book through Princeton’s various communication organs is also, at its core, a technological innovation. In a development that should raise questions about the privileging of certain kinds of speech over others, not to say the material benefits that accrue as a result, Princeton’s public-relations arm has trumpeted Terms of Respect on the university’s home page. Irrespective of the existence or realization of such benefits, the morphing of Princeton’s formidable communications team into an amplifier for the book’s contents does not bode well for the health and vibrancy of speech on campus. The legal historian David Pozen has posited that the presidentialized university comes to be defined increasingly by the subordination of the institution’s component parts to the president’s own agenda. We should ask whether the use of university communications to advertise Terms of Respect represents another instance of this phenomenon, and whether the material overrepresentation of the president’s own intellectual output on the subject impinges on the prospects for that free speech’s unfettered expression.
But ultimately, I’m much more worried about unequal access to the material conditions for exercising free speech. Only certain types of (perceived or reputed) inequality with respect to these conditions seem credible to Eisgruber. For example, Terms of Respect embraces the idea that, in order to level the representational-discursive playing field, conservative-leaning groups on campus may need not just space but institutional resources to flourish. He cites Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions as one example (note, too, his fourth recommendation for “strengthening campus discourse”: “Be visibly open to conservative viewpoints”). The book confronts without fully defanging right-wing bellyaching about the liberal composition of university faculties. As Eisgruber is aware, claims to this effect usually cite polls about individual faculty members’ political leanings, but these leanings do not have substantive impacts on the nature and parameters of research and teaching for most academics. The claims are also belied by the many nonprogressive—because static—elements of university institutions, such as undergraduate curricula. In any case, Eisgruber’s justification for the subvention of conservative viewpoints overlooks the success of institutionally backed conservative vehicles at representing themselves as truer to the institution’s mission than comparable left-leaning groups.
These left-leaning groups often work from a position of disadvantage, in not being nearly as well funded by extramural donors and in being regularly targeted by off-campus actors. For that reason alone, they should have a stronger valid claim to institutional resources (material as well as representational). The reproduction of this disadvantage is most obvious in those cases where groups organize around positions that face seriously disruptive sanction, backstopped by the strong arm of injustice. I am here speaking about the genocide in Palestine, of course. On even the most charitable reading, Eisgruber’s appeal to “deliberative community” offers scant comfort to university community members who exercise free speech in the teeth of state-authorized reprisals.
However one chooses to plot the rewards and harms that accrue to some extra- and cocurricular campus units and not others—a political economy reshaped by the recent and rapid surge of institutions and centers underwritten by conservative donors—the impacts of university decision-making in one specific domain of knowledge production are very tangible. At Princeton and elsewhere, the loudest proponents of viewpoint diversity are either indifferent or antagonistic toward the near-total absence of institutionalized structures for Palestinian studies, a fact made all the more stark by the continuing expansion of Jewish studies (one of the few growth fields in the past two North American humanistic job cycles). On this, and on other developments in academic hiring that would seem to be consequential for the robust exercise of informed free speech on college campuses, Terms of Respect is primly silent.
Another of the book’s silences deserves comment, not least because it exemplifies how disconnected its arguments are from the regimes of precarity that have configured the twenty-first-century American university. Reading Judith Butler’s “Academic Freedom in a Time of Destruction” with a group of junior scholars this past summer, I was reminded of how often hierarchy and fear conspire to deny full free speech rights not only to untenured and contingent faculty but also to staff. Much like faculty, staff appear in Eisgruber’s book either as recipients of guidance and instruction (on subjects such as “how to navigate difficult conversations and fraught confrontations”) or as petitioners for help. But the possibility that they might labor under constraints on their free speech that are directly rooted in their precarity by comparison with tenured faculty or administrators on long-term appointments is never acknowledged. So long as the number of tenured faculty members continues to contract nationwide and the number of contingent faculty appointments continues to climb, this imbalance in the practice of free speech on campuses will persist.
Between its bothsidesism and its touting of civility as virtue, the book’s defense of the university has strong Boomer vibes. But Terms of Respect also slots into a much larger social and generational narrative about the refusal to cede power. Its failure to practice the kind of self-reflection that would be required to recognize that our authoritarian present is the output of a lifetime of crippling moral compromises, all ostensibly in the name of civility, is one hallmark of that refusal.
Inattention to dynamics of power mars the book’s few bright spots. “Conversations that matter,” reads one of the newer entries in the Princeton public-relations amplification of Eisgruber’s philosophy. There is something at once enticing and deflating about the slogan, in that we could be thinking about bodies that matter, or even about how perspectives and orientations come to matter, in the university. There is something institutionally solipsistic about it, too, in its pining for an earlier era of great conversations.But the relationship of speech to actions that matter is given short shrift, in the book and in its attendant media blitz. Eisgruber takes the magic of that transformative educational encounter whereby conversation spurs action and profanes it into the banality that conversation is important—without telling us anything about the matter that goes into it, or about the power structures that make some conversations matter far more than others.
Terms of Respect seeks not so much to persuade readers to act as to reassure them that everything on college campuses is okay, presumably in order to dissuade those with (political and financial) power from inflicting harm on the university. But the shakedowns are upon us, with no obvious end in sight. To paraphrase Alexander Herzen, it mortifies many of us to realize that ideas alone are impotent, and that truth exercises no binding control over the real world. But to respond to this state of affairs by pleading for more civility is to double down on impotence. Must those of us laboring within the university be content merely with playing defense all the time, on terms and terrain not of our choosing? Do we not have the power to organize and strive for much more than even a maximalist commitment to free speech? Or have we already abdicated any claim to that greater power, choosing instead to retreat into the sound and fury of conversations signifying little if anything? This last question I pose not out of gratuitous caviling or grievance but in mourning.
Dan-el Padilla Peralta is professor of classics at Princeton University. In August 2026, he will join Arizona State University as professor of classics in the School of International Letters and Cultures. His email address is [email protected].