| September 23, 2020 12:00 AM
Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber has gotten himself into a bit of a bind, as the Washington Examiner's Tiana Lowe first reported. Earlier this month, he released an open letter filled with unsubstantiated claims that he runs an institution imbued with systemic racism.
Eisgruber wrote that "racism and the damage it does to people of color persist at Princeton." He further asserted that "racist assumptions" are "embedded in structures of the University itself."
The reader will likely recognize such claptrap for what it is — the completely insincere words of a cowardly, mediocre university administrator, fearful of the damage that social justice agitators could do to his school’s reputation were he ever to fail to act in a sufficiently obsequious manner.
Fortunately, the U.S. Education Department is taking a more rigorous view of his comments. Eisgruber’s admission that he runs a racist university puts his school’s federal funding in jeopardy. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 provides that "no person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance." This means that Eisgruber’s admission, along with an earlier public statement by hundreds of Princeton faculty that “anti-Black racism has a visible bearing upon Princeton’s campus makeup," constitute open confessions that the university is in violation of civil rights law and should be stripped of its federal funding.
The Department of Education replied to Eisgruber’s silly groveling with a letter announcing a new investigation of the school and requesting relevant documents. "Based on its admitted racism,” the letter reads, “the U.S. Department of Education ... is concerned Princeton’s nondiscrimination and equal opportunity assurances in its Program Participation Agreements from at least 2013 to the present may have been false” and that “Princeton’s many nondiscrimination and equal opportunity claims to students, parents, and consumers in the market for education certificates may have been false, misleading, and actionable substantial misrepresentations” under federal law.
Eisgruber now faces a dilemma. One option is to level with everyone and admit that no, Princeton is not a racist institution; that no, he was never sincere about what he was saying. This option would allow him to argue that Princeton’s representations of being an inclusive university were indeed accurate all along.
But if Eisgruber admits that he was merely fudging it — offering a calculated, guileful admission of guilt, he would enrage the social justice crowd, whose dogma holds that America and her institutions are not just racist, but incurably so. In reversing himself and claiming that Princeton is a nonracist institution, Eisgruber would make himself a heretic and set up himself and his school as a target for future hostile activism.
Eisgruber’s other option is to risk going down with the woke ship. Yes, he can maintain that Princeton is a hotbed of systemic institutional racism, but that position could potentially cost the school billions in federal funding.
Until now, virtue-signaling was so cheap and easy. Anyone could do it and come off looking better for it. How refreshing to see that there are limits to such rank dishonesty where taxpayer funding is involved.