Princeton and peers soften opposition to attacks on higher education in graduation speeches

Since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, top colleges and universities have faced an onslaught of federal attacks: slashing grant money for research, pressuring schools to end diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, cracking down on visas for international students, and ending graduate program sponsorship for active duty military at top schools. However, some Ivy League universities — the center of many of Trump’s ongoing attacks — have decreased messaging on the potential consequences of these federal directives.

“One thing that’s been clear is that a lot of universities have felt that publicity would bring no advantage or do them no good,” history professor David Bell GS ’91, who has been outspoken about federal actions against universities, said in an interview with The Daily Princetonian. 

In Spring 2025, University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 pushed against attacks on higher education. In March 2025, he published an op-ed in the Atlantic, entitled “The Cost of the Government’s Attack on Columbia.” He later gave a 40 minute interview to Bloomberg following Princeton’s grant suspensions, discussing Princeton’s willingness to “say no to funding if it’s going to constrain our ability to pursue the truth.” Appearing on the New York Times podcast “The Daily,” he spoke again on Princeton’s commitment to academic freedom. The University also launched a fundraising program called “Stand Up” for promoting higher education, which further addressed these values.  

“I think we’re always careful not to be seen as wanting to gush about our own president, but I think it's simply a fact that Chris Eisgruber did something that a lot of us are very thankful for,” politics professor Jan-Werner Müller, who has written extensively about Trump’s attacks on higher education, said in an interview with the ‘Prince.’ 

Not all schools followed suit. Cornell, Brown, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania made deals with the Trump administration to have funding restored, and other institutions, like Vanderbilt, have embraced some of the messaging from the White House around free speech and gender definitions. 

“My sense is that [Eisgruber] himself was pretty disappointed that his own attempts to lead a fight against the administration … didn’t actually have more of an effect, that so many places were, from the beginning, much less eager to do this,” Bell said. 

Since the initial wave of federal attacks in the spring of 2025, elite universities have faced persisting challenges. At Princeton, the government has restored roughly half of the grant money initially cut in a move where “no deal” was made with the Trump administration, as of last summer. Professors have previously shared concerns about self-censorship in research proposals, potentially leading to fewer research projects in certain fields that are targeted by the Trump administration. 

Peer institutions continue to fight for the reinstatement of grant money, and while the federal government’s case against Harvard for alleged antisemitism was recently dismissed, other legal battles remain. The Department of Justice has also appealed the dismissal of the antisemitism lawsuit.

More recently, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ’03 ended programs for active duty military to attend top schools for graduate programs. In his video announcement, he described Ivy League universities and similar institutions as “factories of anti-American resentment and military disdain.” 

“They were simply firing on so many fronts at once that it was dizzying a year and a half ago,” Bell said. “The [Trump] administration clearly has, in a sense, moved on. … They simply haven’t had the bandwidth to try to fight the universities quite as hard as they had been doing.” 

New reporting has detailed the subtle ways the Trump administration is draining federal funding dollars through the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Additionally, the number of international student visa approvals dropped following federal attacks last May. 

“I have, at this point, three Ph.D. students who are from abroad, and I’m worried about their situation,” Bell said. He added that drops in international Ph.D. students may be particularly harmful in science and engineering fields, as Ph.D. students in these programs often conduct research integral to the professors’ work. 

Now, though, Princeton and some Ivy League universities may no longer be speaking out as directly. 

“Publicity draws the attention of the people in D.C. and then it leads them to strike out again, or it leads them to renege on deals that they had already made,” Bell said. 

One of the most typical settings for university presidents to make public comments is in yearly graduation speeches. The ‘Prince’ analyzed speeches given by Ivy League university presidents in 2025 and 2026. A trend in some of these speeches is a shift from direct criticism of the federal government in 2025, to general messaging about integrity, open mindedness, and being comfortable sharing unpopular views in 2026 speeches. 

A University spokesperson declined to comment. Communications offices at all other Ivy League universities did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

Toning down the rhetoric 

In 2025, Eisgruber gave one of the most direct speeches in the Ivy League addressing attacks on higher education. 

“Tensions between the academy, public opinion, and government policy have ebbed and flowed over the course of American history. They are now at an unprecedented high point,” Eisgruber said in his 2025 address. 

“Universities risk losing public support if they deviate from their core mission of teaching and research, or if they appear to become organs of partisan advocacy rather than impartial forums for the pursuit of truth and the dissemination of knowledge.”

He further advocated for academic freedom.

“[Critics] appear to become uneasy when, for example, scholars expose and analyze the role of race, sexuality, or prejudice in society and politics,” Eisgruber said.

Ending the speech, Eisgruber highlighted Princeton’s core mission to “inculcate a fierce independence of mind” for undergraduates, and urged the graduates to maintain habits they learned at Princeton as they venture forth into a world that needs valor. 

In Eisgruber’s 2026 speech, on the other hand, he addressed courage more broadly. The address notably lacked the specific criticisms of the Trump administration present in the 2025 speech. 

“Dissenting from a popular opinion — in politics, in a committee meeting, or in a discussion among friends — will often feel uncomfortable,” he said.

The speech continued to enforce this idea of unpopular dissent as an ideal for citizenship and scholarship.

“Courage is necessary not only to assert dissenting opinions but also, and equally importantly, to admit error or change one’s mind.”

Columbia and Cornell similarly toned down messaging in their 2026 speeches after making deals with the Trump administration. 

Columbia’s 2025 speech, delivered before its final deal with the government in July 2025, was highly critical of directives by the Trump administration to target international students and free speech. 

“Academic institutions like ours, and even this moment right now, are pillars of a healthy, functioning, democratic nation,” Columbia University president Jennifer Mnookin said in her address. 

“We firmly believe that our international students have the same rights to freedom of speech as everyone else, and should not be targeted by the government for exercising that right,” Mnookin said. 

There was no similar criticism in the 2026 address. 

“For 272 years now, Columbia has been sending graduates into the world. Our institution was an incubator — for the ideas and for the leaders — central to the creation of this nation, 250 years ago this summer,” Mnookin said.

Cornell faced an initial freeze of more than $1 billion in federal grants, and, like Columbia, reached a deal with the administration last November in which it agreed to several demands, resulting in a partial restoration of funds. 

In 2025, before his university’s November deal, Cornell University President Michael Kotlikoff delivered a speech criticizing what he framed as increasing skepticism of an Ivy League education.

“Today, great universities are accused of political bias and intolerance. Our ability to foster discourse and dialogue is doubted. And the value of a university education, and particularly a so-called ‘elite’ education, is questioned.” 

In 2026, Kotlikoff’s speech shifted away from direct criticism. It addressed the importance of sharing views, even if they are unpopular.

“In our democracy, everyone must be able to air their views, to protest and debate, to say things others might find offensive. And all of us need to understand not only how to exercise those freedoms but how to respect them.”

Unlike other Ivies, Yale did not face major federal funding cuts in the spring of 2025, but it still suffered an increased endowment tax, a new tax hike which is affecting many other top schools.

Yale is currently in negotiation settlement talks with the Trump administration, and a committee of its professors released a university-commissioned ad-hoc report in April, partially blaming universities for declining public trust in higher education. It notably did not address the Trump administration’s rhetoric towards universities. 

While neither of Yale’s speeches from the past two years directly addressed concerns about federal government intervention, the 2025 address was more focused on the ways in which the school was able to foster communication across political divides. The theme of the 2026 speech, however, was about gratitude and collective memory.

The remaining Ivy League schools did not have a noticeable shift in rhetoric. Penn, Harvard, Brown, Yale, and Dartmouth did not discuss federal involvement in higher education as a theme in presidents’ speeches in either 2025 or 2026.

“I could speculate that maybe some leaders are basically continuing what some of them were already doing from the beginning, which is that if we don’t make a lot of noise, [the Trump administration] will not target us,” Müller said. 

Though the onslaught of federal directives has slowed over the past year and a half, it remains to be seen if and how the Trump administration will target institutions of higher education during his remaining years in office. 

“If it looks like things are dying down a bit, if it looks like litigation is proceeding, if time is ticking towards presumably Jan. 21, 2029, it may not be worth stirring the pot and provoking yet more attacks from Washington by continuing to make very combative statements,” Bell said. 

Devon Rudolph is the head Podcast editor and a senior News writer. She is from Fairfax, Va. She can be reached at devonr[at]dailyprincetonian.com.

Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.