Should Princeton Exist?
One recent fall morning at a coffee shop in Princeton, I overheard two students chatting about upcoming deadlines for the Rhodes, the Marshall, and the Mitchell—three prestigious postgraduate scholarships so coveted that they’ve become mononymous on elite campuses.
“I don’t love the Rhodes dude from the 1800s,” one student confessed to the other. “Wasn’t he, like, racist?”
Indeed. This is the puzzle of Princeton: How can an institution designed to serve the aspirations of an elite few authentically wrestle with issues of inequality and racism in society? Princeton hosts about 8,200 students on its campus, with more than $3.2 million in its endowment for each of them—the highest ratio of any college in the country.
Christopher Eisgruber, Princeton’s president, has addressed some aspects of the university’s role in making America unequal: After the death of George Floyd last summer, he supported removing the name of Woodrow Wilson, a past Princeton president, from the School of Public and International Affairs, citing Wilson’s racist thinking and policies. But at some level, the very fact of Princeton is itself an enduring legacy of inequality, rooted in a deeply racist past.
I wanted to better understand how Eisgruber thinks about this tension, so I asked him about it. Our conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Emma Green: I promise my first question isn’t facetious. Why should Princeton exist?
Universities are places that invest in human talent, often in audacious ways. The idea of a place like Princeton is that you can identify young people who have extraordinary talent and will benefit from an intensive academic experience. Over the space of years and decades, they will blossom in ways we can’t even predict,
