Ryan Ruskin ’90, president of the Alumni Association and chair of the Alumni Council, welcomed the Princeton audience and thanked them for their role in Venture Forward. “Thanks for all you have done for Princeton and for being here tonight. This is our Princeton and this is our time. That’s the theme that I’ve set for the Alumni Council for the next two years,” he said. “What that means is that whoever we are, whatever era we graduated, we belong to Princeton and Princeton belongs to all of us.” 

Following a Forward and Beyond video highlighting the accomplishments of the campaign, President Eisgruber, who grew up in nearby West Lafayette, Indiana, and attended law school at the University of Chicago, noted how nice it was to return to his “hometown” as he and Rogers took the stage. Rogers began their conversation by asking Eisgruber about the original vision for Venture Forward. 

“We ran this campaign in a different way that focused not on dollar totals but on the mission of the University and how Princeton can make a difference in the world for the better,” Eisgruber said. 

Citing some of the campaign’s major accomplishments, he described the expansion of the undergraduate student body, the highest level of student socio-economic diversity in the University’s history, increased graduate student stipends and new graduate housing, the new Princeton University Art Museum, new facilities for the engineering school and three new residential colleges. “Two out of the three [colleges] have important Chicago connections,” he noted, “because one of them is Yeh College and the other is Hobson College.” 

Rogers said that he has known Ariel co-CEO Mellody Hobson ’91 since she was a prospective student and they met for an Alumni Schools Committee interview: “You never know who you’ll meet doing that work.” 

“One of the things that makes me so happy about her decision to create a residential college on the campus is that’s another reason generations of students learn about Mellody Hobson’s story,” Eisgruber said. “More of those stories are being made by our extraordinary students who are on the campus now. I hope people have read about one of our Rhodes Scholars this year, Hadi Kamara, who is the kind of student we could not have admitted 10 years ago.” 

A first-generation college student who will graduate in May, Kamara transferred to Princeton from Northern Virginia Community College in fall 2022 after serving three years in the Air Force. 

Rogers followed with a question about how the current political climate was impacting the University’s ability to attract international students. “Your parents were German immigrants who met at graduate school here in the United States,” he said. “How will the current federal policies that restrict immigration impact Princeton and our nation?” 

“I feel this very personally. When I see [former Purdue University president and Class of 1971 alumnus] Mitch Daniels, I joke with him that I wouldn’t be here were it not for Purdue University, because that is where my parents met,” Eisgruber said. “Throughout the history of this country, we have benefitted tremendously from the fact that our universities are a magnet for talent throughout the world.” 

Eisgruber said he has spent an increasing amount of time in Washington, D.C., meeting with officials and policymakers on both sides of the aisle to encourage them to preserve the supply of international students at American colleges. “If we as a country cut off that flow of talent, it’s going to make us less good as universities and it’s going to make America less strong than it has been in the past,” he said. “Part of what I emphasize to them is that in the United States, we have become the world’s leader in research, and our economy has been the envy of other countries in part because we’ve been open to international talent and received it.” 

Rogers asked about Eisgruber’s latest book, “Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right,” and the kernel of the idea that got him writing it. Eisgruber said it was the perceived tension between free speech and equality on college campuses. “I think universities have to care about both free speech and inclusivity, because we want to be places where people can raise provocative arguments and uncomfortable ideas and discuss them freely,” he said. “But we also want to be places where everybody feels like they are included in and part of the conversation.” 

Another motivation was simply untangling the complex ideas for himself, he said. “For me at least, I find that writing is a way to understand more clearly what it is I’m going through and what it is I’m thinking about.” 

Eisgruber said that he has been reluctant to use his perch as university president to comment on every issue and headline. An exception is when the federal government sets policies that directly impact higher education; in March 2025, he wrote an article in The Atlantic criticizing threats to Columbia University’s federal research funding. (Princeton also had about $200 million of federal grants suspended in Spring 2025, Eisgruber noted, of which about two-thirds has since been reinstated.) 

“It is the responsibility of a university — and I think the right of a university — to make decisions on the basis of its best academic judgement, not because of what some powerful person is trying to get it to do,” Eisgruber said. “That is the essence of academic freedom. I spoke up then because the strength of the universities in this country has, in my view, depended on a combination of two things. One is this principle of academic freedom, which we’ve honored for more than a century. And the second is this partnership between the government and our research universities that has enabled the government basically to contract with American research universities to perform research in the interest of the American people that aids the prosperity, the health and the security of America.” 

Eisgruber noted the importance of a united alumni community during this period. “We’ve had a huge benefit from our community standing together,” he said. “In some other places, communities have divided against themselves and at that point, fissures develop that make them vulnerable to the kinds of attacks that we’ve seen take place. Princetonians disagree about lots of things. We argue and debate. We should. That’s part of what it is to be in a great university. But we also have a shared sense of the principles that define us and a shared love of the institution that we attended.” 

Rogers, a “proud member of the Princeton basketball family” who captained the 1979-80 Tigers, asked Eisgruber if he had concerns about recent developments in college sports that allow for institutions to pay players through Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) opportunities and a transfer portal that provides student-athletes with unprecedented mobility. Eisgruber said he was “very worried” by the current trends, but that he does not expect Princeton to bend its core principles of Education Through Athletics. 

During the Q&A period, President Eisgruber fielded questions from alumni in the audience, including Ronnie Raviv ’95, who asked how the University’s free speech principles can compete with a “firehose of lies” supercharged by the Internet. “It is true that the internet creates a lot of distractions,” Eisgruber said. “I don’t believe it has fundamentally changed that problem. But as has been the case many times in the past, we as a democratic society are being put to a test right now: Are we willing to transcend our differences enough to say, ‘Whatever else we disagree about, we agree about this: We need those institutions, those universities, those newspapers, those other things that enable us to say: This is true and that’s not.’” 

Jim Tuchler ’87 asked if the University was taking any actions to address the impact of artificial intelligence on the classroom, in terms of student performance and teaching innovations. Eisgruber, who said he considers himself an optimist on the matter of AI on campus, noted that the faculty is responding to AI in the classroom in innovative ways. “One of the things that is fundamental to a university’s DNA, that makes this academic freedom that I discussed earlier so important, is that it is very rarely the case where the right solution comes from me or the dean of the college or the dean of the faculty,” he said. “The genius of a university is that you have all these extraordinary faculty members with great freedom to try to figure out how to do something differently. So, there’s a lot of experimentation going on.” 

After President Eisgruber thanked Rogers and the audience for attending, Ruskin thanked him for his “courageous leadership.” Ruskin then introduced Emelda Madrano ’87 and her daughter Isabella Bustos ’27 (a current member of Mariachi Los Tigres de Princeton), who stepped forward to lead the audience in the traditional singing of “Old Nassau.” 

A reception followed the event, and President Eisgruber signed copies of his book for alumni and guests. 

Additional photos from the Chicago event can be viewed here.