After months of speculation, Eisgruber '83 named next Princeton president

University Provost Christopher Eisgruber ’83 was named the 20th president of the University on Sunday.

The selection was announced at a press conference held at Nassau Hall, where the University Board of Trustees unanimously approved the search committee’s recommendation of Eisgruber. He will succeed President Shirley Tilghman, who announced in September that she was stepping down after 12 years on the job.

In a November email to The Daily Princetonian, Eisgruber said he did not consider himself a candidate for the presidency.

“It is flattering that people would mention my name in this connection, but I do not consider myself a candidate,” he wrote. “I have always assumed that I would return to my teaching and research — which I love — after my time as provost is done. That remains my (happy) expectation.”

At the press conference, Eisgruber was asked what changed between November and last week, when he was formally offered the position of President.

“I realized this was a very important time for the University. This was also a very important time in higher education, and one where ideals that I care deeply about are going to be affected in very significant ways,” Eisgruber said. “I have loved serving as Provost for the last nine years, in addition to spending time teaching and doing research ... And as I talked to people about those challenges, I became convinced that if this opportunity were available I would very much want to take it.”

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who serves as an ex-officio member of the board, said he was thrilled with Eisgruber’s appointment.

“The prerequisite of Chris is that he’s not going to need a manual to run this place, right?,” Christie said, laughing. “So what he’s going to be able to do is focus his time on getting both from inside himself and from the faculty and the supporters of the place a vision for what’s next and that’s I think really important and one of the great advantages I think he brings to the job.”

Tilghman, who will begin a one-year leave of absence from the University in June, expressed equal excitement.

“I think April 21 is going to go down as a great day for Princeton,” she said. “I think we have in Chris the leader that we’re going to need for the next decade or so, and I don’t think we could be in better hands.”

Eisgruber graduated magna cum laude from Princeton in 1983 with a degree in physics. On Sunday, Eisgruber said the time he spent at Princeton as an undergraduate were some of his defining years.

“My four years here were transformative, happy, they were years that stretched me, that gave me friendships that have lasted a lifetime since then that forced me to rethink the ideals that I brought to the University and enabled me to come away with understandings of ideas and of people and of places that I didn’t have before I came,” he said.

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He then went on to earn an M.Litt. in politics from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and received his J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School in 1988. While at U. Chicago, Eisgruber served as the editor-in-chief of the University of Chicago Law Review.

After serving as a clerk first to Patrick E. Higginbotham of the U.S. Court of Appeals and then to Judge John Paul Stevens of the Supreme Court, Eisgruber obtained his first academic appointment in 1990, when he joined the New York University School of Law as an assistant professor. Eisgruber taught at NYU until July 2001.

In September of 2000, Eisgruber began a Visiting Research Fellowship at Princeton in the Program in Law and Public Affairs, for which he later served as the director for nearly three years. After completing his fellowship, he was hired as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Public Affairs in the Wilson School and the University Center for Human Values.

After former Provost Amy Gutmann resigned to accept the presidency at the University of Pennsylvania, Tilghman offered the position to Eisgruber in 2004.

In an interview with the ‘Prince’ last spring, Eisgruber said he had been shocked to be in contention for the position of provost.

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

In June, Eisgruber will complete his ninth year as provost and will end his tenure as the second-longest-serving provost in the University’s history. Since the Office of the Provost was first established in the 1966-67 academic year, only Neil Rudenstine ’56, who served between 1977 and 1988, has held the position for a longer period.

During his time on the Princeton faculty, Eisgruber has remained an active scholar in the legal community. His first book, “Constitutional Self-Government,” was published in 2001, and was followed in 2007 by “The Next Justice: Repairing the Supreme Court Appointments Process” and “Religious Freedom and the Constitution,” which he co-authored with Lawrence G. Sager from The University of Texas at Austin.

One year after those books were published, the University faced its most significant financial setback in decades at the onset of the financial crisis. In the 2008-09 fiscal year, the endowment contracted in value by 22.7 percent — shrinking from $16.3 billion to $12.6 billion. By instituting sweeping cost-cutting measures, which included laying off 43 employees in October of 2009, Eisgruber helped re-balance the University’s books.

In her remarks on Sunday, Tilghman praised Eisgruber’s “instinct for transparency” throughout the process.

“I think the work that Chris provided to us during the depths of the recession in ‘08 and ‘09 were absolutely critical to the way in which the University ultimately successfully navigated those years,” she said. “And I would just point out one really important aspect of his leadership, and that was the transparency with which he went about explaining to the campus over and over again what the circumstances of the decline in the endowment were and what we needed to do and why ... I think that instinct for transparency was one of the most impressive things during the depths of the recession.”

In the fiscal year which ended in June 2012, the University did not draw on one-time reserves for the first time since the 2008 recession, indicating renewed fiscal health and stability.

Andy Golden, President of the Princeton University Investment Company, joined Tilghman in singing Eisgruber’s praises.

“Chris and PRINCO have worked very closely through the ultimate stress test,” Golden said. “So it’s hard to imagine anything other than a productive, effective and efficient relationship.”

As provost, Eisgruber has also made strengthening Princeton’s international presence a priority. After co-commissioning the 2007 “Princeton in the World” report with Tilghman, he appointed Diana Davies as the first Vice Provost for International Initiatives in 2008. Eisgruber has also worked to strengthen the Bridge Year and International Internship Programs.

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