Steward of an Institution

When first approached by President Shirley Tilghman in 2004 to become the University’s 11th provost, Christopher Eisgruber ’83 almost choked on his tuna salad sandwich.

“I hadn’t thought about the position,” Eisgruber said, “much less how long I would do it.”

Now serving in his eighth year, Eisgruber is the second-longest tenured provost since the position was established during the 1966-67 school year. He is behind Neil Rudenstine ’56, who served 11 years between 1977 and 1988. By contrast, six of the 11 total provosts in the University’s history have served between one and three years, including Amy Gutmann who left at the end of her third year to become president of the University of Pennsylvania.

The provost, as the University’s chief academic and budgetary officer, manages yearly and long-term financial planning and coordinates a wide range of academic and administrative services. Moreover, in addition to serving as chairs of the Academic Planning Group and Priorities Committee, Eisgruber acts as general deputy to Tilghman, representing her at occasional meetings of the Board of Trustees.

Eisgruber credits his inspiration to serve well beyond any initial expectations to his close working relationships with colleagues and his personal loyalty to the University as an alumnus and professor.

“I feel like I’ve had a chance to steward an institution that has meant a great deal in my life,” Eisgrbuer said. “I’ve valued the opportunity to meet and work with people from a lot of different sectors of the University.”

Collaborative Projects

Indeed, this penchant for collaboration is essential to Eisgruber’s need to managing wide-ranging academic initiatives.

“There really is no personal agenda in how he thinks about this role,” University Executive Vice President Mark Burstein said, calling Eisgruber the closest colleague he’s had in his work life. “He understands what is essential about Princeton — what makes it a special place — and is always trying to find a way to reinforce or enhance that as much as possible.”

One of Eisgruber’s priority commitments is strengthening Princeton’s international presence and offering more opportunities for students to study and intern abroad during the school year. After commissioning the 2007 “Princeton in the World” report with Tilghman, Eisgruber appointed the first vice provost for international initiatives, Diana Davies, in 2008. He has also helped expand the Bridge Year Program, which sponsors admitted students to perform community service abroad for nine months before matriculating.

“I feel this is one of the areas where Princeton can move the needle and become even better than it is right now,” Eisgruber said, who noted key partnerships with history professor Jeremy Adelman, the director of the Council for International Teaching and Research, and politics professor Mark Beissinger, the director of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies.

In a vastly different education project, Eisgruber is exploring Princeton’s online learning presence and publicly accessible scholarship. Responding to the way MIT and Yale have increasingly offered lectures and course material online, the Provost is encouraging faculty members to champion open access. Instead of top-down directives, Eisgruber hopes that spurring faculty energy and “letting many flowers bloom” will engage students both on campus and off.

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As Eisgruber chairs committees on major renovation projects like Firestone Library and the old Frick Chemistry Laboratory at 20 Washington Road, his advocacy for Princeton’s brand of education extends to Washington, D.C., as well. There, as part of a national task force on academic accreditation for the American Council of Education, Eisgruber works with other elite university presidents and administrators to explore more innovative ways to measure a university student’s quality of education. Eisgruber warns against “rote, standardized, one-size-fits-all” measurements, which he said “have a flavor” of No Child Left Behind, the nation’s major K-12 education law.

“We do not try measure exactly how much value a particular comparative literature class or physics class adds. That would be the wrong direction for Princeton,” Eisgruber said, recommending instead a combination of graduation rates, satisfaction surveys, placement rates and other qualitative tools.

Recession and Recovery

Today, the university’s endowment sits at $17.1 billion. But just four years ago, the University experienced a precipitous drop from $16.3 billion to $12.6 billion — a steep 22.7 percent investment return rate descent at the onset of the recession.

Throughout the downturn, Eisgruber said, he and administrators like Burstein and Tilghman identified three key priorities and essential services: the quality of the teaching faculty, resources for research and financial aid. Since layoffs and budget cuts were necessary, the team aimed for transparent communication through open meetings and town halls.

“We had calm people who knew how to keep a sense of humor,” Eisgruber said. “I think the fact that the problems were very real, which the community appreciated, and that everyone was willing to work together made the process constructive even as it was difficult.”

In October 2009, 43 employees were laid off and about a third of the 460 eligible University staff members participated in an incentivized retirement program. Budget cuts were projected at $170 million over two years, with an average cut of 7.5 percent from each department. Eisgruber said that every single unit on campus made its budget target.

Burstein added that the cost reduction strategy of giving individual budget targets to senior managers and requiring them to meet the number rather than the administration’s telling them what to cut seemed especially prudent in hindsight.

By the end of 2010, the endowment rebounded back to $14.4 billion with a return rate of 14.7 percent. The figure is now evaluated at an all-time high, with a 21.9 percent return rate this year. Eisgruber said that the University was not quite in the clear due to labor pool inflation, modest year-to-year operating deficits and the $1 billion worth of taxable bond debt from 2009.

Still, administrators like Burstein and Tilghman said that this recovery had been better than expected thanks to Eisgruber.

“Provost Eisgruber managed the decline in the endowment brilliantly,” Tilghman said in an email. “Throughout the Provost demonstrated good judgment, decisiveness and compassion.”

Constitutional Law Scholar

Between stints at New York University School of Law and the beginning of his tenure at Princeton in 2001, Eisgruber worked a short assignment as a clerk for former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens — a relationship that in many ways came full circle last fall when Eisgruber interviewed Stevens for a public conversation in Alexander Hall.

“It was special to welcome him back to Princeton,” Eisgruber said. “I was struck by how generous he was to me and people he met here.”

In addition to his responsibilities as provost, Eisgruber, a Wilson School professor and a former fellow in the Program in Law and Public Affairs, remains a diligent scholar of Constitutional law. Eisgruber has published four books on constitutional self-government, human rights, religious freedom and Supreme Court history and is a frequent contributor to numerous articles in law reviews and mainstream publications.

In 2007, he coauthored an article “Does It Matter What Religion Is?” for the Notre Dame Law Review with collaborator Lawrence Sager from the University of Texas School of Law. That same year, Eisgruber’s 2007 book “The Next Justice: Repairing the Supreme Court Appointment Process” was reprinted in paperback. In it, he analyzes a broken Supreme Court appointment process mired in partisan politics and advocates for more rigorous investigation of the nominees’ judicial philosophies.

Since its hardcover publication, President Barack Obama has appointed two University graduates to the nation’s highest court — Elena Kagan ’81 and Sonia Sotomayor ’76. While he said he is glad that Princeton is seeing its alumnae selected to the Court, the provost expressed some reservations about the Court’s lack of diversity of perspectives.

“The current court is the most diverse we’ve ever had in terms of basic demographics,” Eisgruber said. “But on the other hand, we have a very Ivy-League, Harvard-Yale-Princeton-centered, geographically limited court. None have political experience or have held an elected office, so there’s a heavy emphasis on one type of experience.”

Eisgruber will be turning to a different subject for his next academic article with Sager: a comparative study in religious freedom and constitutional law in the United States, Israel and France.

In whatever endeavors, administrative, academic or otherwise, he has the full endorsement of his close colleagues.

“He commands the respect of our entire campus community — which is a hard thing to do in such a difficult job,” Tilghman said. “His wonderful sense of humor makes working with him fun, as well as extremely productive.