When I read this week that Princeton University is offering a new course this Spring titled “Gender, Reproduction and Genocide,” my mind immediately flashed back to a 2019 profile I wrote in the Journal of Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber.
In my profile, I referred to an address Eisgruber gave titled, “Contested Civility: Free Speech and Inclusivity on Campus,” in which he argued that universities must be viewed as “truth-seeking institutions.”
That phrase came to mind because I didn’t see any “truth-seeking” in this new course that lists as its central focus “the ongoing genocide in Gaza.” According to the course description, the class will explore “how genocidal projects target reproductive life, sexual and familial structures, and community survival,” comparing Gaza to “the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and genocide against Black and Indigenous populations.”
This is not education; it’s indoctrination.
The instructor is Dr. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, whom Princeton named its Global South Visiting Scholar in October 2024—six months after she was briefly arrested in Israel for suspected incitement.
According to a report in Jewish Onliner, just weeks after the Hamas attacks of October 7th, Shalhoub-Kevorkian signed an open letter accusing Israel of “genocide.” In March 2024, she was suspended by Hebrew University after she appeared on Israeli television and stated: “It’s time to abolish Zionism. It can’t continue, it’s criminal.” In the same interview, she cast doubt on reports of Hamas’ sexual violence on October 7th, saying: “They will use any lie. They started with babies, they continued with rape, and they will continue with a million other lies.”
This is who Princeton chooses as “a visiting scholar.”
In my 2019 profile, Eisgruber noted that “the practice of truth-seeking requires standards and processes to discriminate between truth and falsehood.”
What kind of “standards and processes” allowed a course that is anti-Israel propaganda taught by an anti-Israel propagandist? Where is the discrimination between truth and falsehood?
Yes, this course will only exacerbate the hostility toward Jewish students, and it makes a mockery of Eisgruber’s April 2025 pledge to combat antisemitism.
But this goes beyond the Jews; it goes to the core mission of an institution of higher learning.
It’s hardly news that in recent years America’s colleges and universities have lost their way, allowing leftist dogma to permeate all aspects of their institutions. When universities made a big push for more diversity, for example, they focused on ethnic and racial diversity, ignoring that the most important diversity in higher education is viewpoint diversity.
You can’t have truth-seeking without it.
In blunt terms, given that conservatives represent a fraction of university faculty in most universities, increasing viewpoint diversity means embracing more conservative voices.
That, however, was a bridge too far. If anything, the leftist bias has gotten more entrenched. That’s why it’s so hard for conservative voices to speak on campuses—the college culture barely tolerates them when it doesn’t spit them out.
And yet, you’d never know there’s a problem with viewpoint diversity if you go through Eisgruber’s new book, Terms of Respect, How Colleges Get Free Speech Right. According to a review of the book in Princetonians for Free Speech, Eisgruber believes “all is well with America’s universities when it comes to free speech and academic freedom.” He rejects the view that “America’s colleges and universities have drifted towards activism and political orthodoxy.”
“Eisgruber breezily dismisses voluminous data documenting higher education’s failings,” Paul Du Quenoy writes in Tablet, adding that he “presents no other evidence to contradict study after study showing huge percentages of conservative and moderate students, and even a fair number of liberal students, admitting that they feel compelled to engage in self-censorship and avoid sharing their actual views on campus. At the same time, an alarmingly high percentage of ‘progressive’ students believes it is acceptable to shout down or even physically attack people with whom one disagrees.”
Is it any wonder that a skewed and dogmatic learning environment that essentially silences the views of half of our country would spawn a course on “Gender, Reproduction and Genocide” taught by a “scholar” with blatantly anti-Israel views?
Eisgruber may want to believe that he’s leading a “truth-seeking institution,” but until he seeks out the hard truth about the need for real viewpoint diversity, his claims about free speech and academic freedom will ring hollow.
Eisgruber may want to believe that he’s leading a “truth-seeking institution,” but until he seeks out the hard truth about the need for real viewpoint diversity, his claims about free speech and academic freedom will ring hollow.
Indeed, his critics will use their own free speech to continue taking him to task for allowing indoctrination disguised as higher education.
