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Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber said at Harvard talk on Wednesday that universities should enforce clear time, place, and manner rules against student protesters — and refuse to negotiate with activists while they are violating university rules.

The Princeton president’s talk, which was moderated by Harvard College Dean David J. Deming drew dozens of students and faculty to Sanders Theatre. Deming spoke with Eisgruber about the themes of his recent book — Terms of Respect, which was published in September and focuses on free speech on college campuses — and Eisgruber’s own observations from his 12 years leading Princeton.

Deming asked Eisgruber about his response to the 2015 occupation of his office by the Black Justice League, a group of more than 200 Princeton students who demanded the creation of affinity housing and spaces for Black students, as well as the removal of former President Woodrow Wilson’s name from Princeton’s public policy school and a residential college.

The sit-in began during Eisgruber’s office hours, when the doors of Nassau Hall and his office were open. Eisgruber told Deming on Wednesday that he regretted not closing the doors of Nassau Hall, which houses his office, when protesters showed up outside.

“It’s a lot easier to try to avoid a set of circumstances where you’ve got violations of college rules and potentially a need to make arrests in order to stop disruption — better to avoid that than to get into it,” Eisgruber said.

In addition to maintaining clear limits on protests, Eisgruber said, university administrators should also enforce those limits as soon as student demonstrators begin to violate them, rather than first waiting for the situation to deescalate.

“The playbook at Princeton used to be, you would let students violate the rules for a while, and then you try to coax them out of offices,” Eisgruber said. “Maybe that worked at a different time. It doesn’t work under the current set of circumstances, and it’s not a good way to run one, a university, or achieve a constructive set of discussions.”

Eisgruber’s reversal echoes changes in how Harvard has handled student dissent — including a shift toward stricter and more formalized limits on when and where protests can take place.

In winter 2024, after months of pro-Palestine protests brought fierce scrutiny to Harvard, then-interim University President Alan M. Garber ’76 rolled out additions to campus rules that specified protests were not permitted in classrooms, libraries, dormitories, dining halls, or offices.

Garber’s statement affirmed that Harvard should continue to offer space for protest and dissent in campus spaces, such as courtyards and quadrangles. But a separate set of regulations, rolled out in summer 2024, imposed new requirements for event organizers to get approval from administrators for both indoor and outdoor gatherings. The rules were used this fall to cancel a pro-Palestine vigil on Harvard Medical School’s campus.

Time, place, and manner rules should be accompanied by a “clear commitment to free speech,” Eisgruber said.

He also reflected on his decision to negotiate with the Black Justice League protesters, ending the sit-in after 32 hours by agreeing to some of their demands — like the designation of certain rooms for use by affinity groups — and promising to initiate conversations on other concerns, like cultural competency training and the use of Wilson’s name.

“If you form those committees and it looks like you were forming them in order to get students out of your office or to stop violating some rules, the committees lose legitimacy in the eyes of at least part of the community,” Eisgruber said. “You’ve got to end the violation of rules before you set up those committees.”

Eisgruber previously told The Daily Princetonian, Princeton’s student newspaper, that it was “a bad idea” to speak with protesters as they continued to occupy his office.

But Eisgruber did not walk back Princeton’s eventual decision to remove Wilson’s name from several campus buildings and its public policy school. He said the committees formed to consider the decision helped turn “a process that began with angry protests” into an inclusive discussion among Princeton affiliates that allowed historians to weigh in.

At Harvard, administrators have historically avoided directly conceding to demonstrators’ demands on explosive campus issues — like divestment from South Africa and fossil fuels. Protesters, however, have rarely been met with severe discipline in recent decades — even after disruptive demonstrations.

But pro-Palestine activists have perceived Garber’s response to their protests, especially the spring 2024 Harvard Yard encampment, as more heavy-handed and punitive than actions against similar demonstrations in the past.

Unlike presidents at some other universities, Garber did not call in police to break up the encampment — but he also did not make substantive concessions to participants’ demands. The agreement that ended the encampment in May 2024 included a promise to speak with protesters.

After a meeting with activists in September 2024, Garber rejected their proposal to review Harvard’s investments for ties to human rights violations.

On Wednesday, Eisgruber praised Harvard for what he described as its commitment to free speech in a challenging environment for academia. The University’s decision to refuse a series of intrusive demands by the Trump administration in April drew plaudits from university leaders — including Eisgruber, who has consistently indicated that he would rebuff any demands against Princeton.

“Harvard University has taken a strong and principled stand for academic freedom in circumstances where I think values of higher education were at stake,” Eisgruber said on Wednesday.

Eisgruber said that a good free speech environment on college campuses might well leave some students and faculty uncomfortable — and required frequent and rigorous debate.

“Comfort is the wrong metric. If you’re in a place where people are going to challenge you on your views, which is a great free speech environment, you will sometimes feel uncomfortable,” said Eisgruber.

He criticized the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s annual college free speech rankings, which he said make Harvard and other institutions vulnerable to political attacks while actively penalizing them for controversial speech on campus. Harvard was consistently last in the rankings, which penalize schools for protests that interrupt speakers, as well as for administrative decisions to suppress dissent, until this year.

But Eisgruber said it was telling that the universities ranked highest under FIRE’s system were technical schools that might simply have fewer intense political debates on campus.

“What FIRE does, both in its rankings in its database, is look for evidence of controversy, of people getting upset around things,” Eisgruber said. “And things sometimes go wrong. But the more conversation we have about difficult subjects, the more often things go wrong.”

In response to a question posed by Dean Deming about institutional neutrality — a norm against political statements that has taken root at Harvard and elsewhere — Eisgruber said it was a contradiction to expect university leaders to be neutral in their speech or decisions.

“You can’t get away — if you’re a university president and doing the job well — from making contestable judgments for which people will take you to task,” he said.

Princeton maintains an “institutional restraint” policy that, like Harvard’s “institutional voice” statement, encourages administrators to be cautious when deciding when and how to weigh in on current events. But Princeton’s norms, adopted under Eisgruber, are less prescriptive than Harvard’s guidelines for issuing public statements, which ask its leaders to refrain from statements on controversies unless they directly implicate the “core function” of the University.

Some principles, Eisgruber said, were too important to Princeton’s mission — or to American values — for him or other university leaders to stay quiet.

“I’m going to continue to speak up for the rights of our trans students and our international students,” Eisgruber said. “I’m going to speak up for the rights of students who are coming from minority ethnic backgrounds. I’m going to speak up for the importance of respecting all of the different groups on our campus.”

“Does that inhibit people from speaking up? I don’t think so,” Eisgruber said. “Part of what we have to do is create circumstances where students and others are strong enough to disagree.”