An unnamed Princeton University professor told investigative journalist Christopher Rufo that the administration removed portraits of a scientific department’s past chairs solely because they were all white men.
In that same conversation, the professor also addressed antisemitism and the university’s diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.
“Anti-Semitism is really a symptom of a deeper malaise at Princeton, which is that the university decided to go woke and — as President [Christopher L.] Eisgruber wrote in the last few months of the first Trump administration — declare that we were ‘systemically racist,’” the professor stated.
“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,” the professor added.
The professor recalled that, during his time as a search officer with access to demographic data, he learned that 70% of the faculty members were white. He mentioned that he and other search officers were informed by the department that the faculty’s composition needed to reflect that of the student body, which the department itself curated.
“Having engineered the class a certain way, they wanted then to engineer the faculty,” he said.
“Last year, Eisgruber was on an American Enterprise Institute panel, in conversation with Ben Sasse,” the professor noted. “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. … Certainly, if you’re a conservative student or a Christian or a Zionist, many are afraid and won’t talk.”
Asked by Rufo which people Eisgruber had rewarded, the professor responded:
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. 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.
“A scientific department had displayed photographs of all the previous department chairs for the last 70 years—all white men, many of them Jewish,” the professor told Rufo. “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 white faces, so they removed all the photographs, and no one objected—no one,” he said.
