From WNYC Studios, I'm Brian Lehrer.

This is my daily politics podcast.

It's Wednesday, October 1st.

With me now, the president of Princeton University, Christopher Isgruber.

He has a new book called Terms of Respect,

how colleges get free speech right. It's an interesting title at a time when critics on both

the left and the right and free speech purists without a political side all say colleges are

getting it wrong. Christopher Icegruber has been the Princeton president since 2013. He has the

unusual, perhaps, academic track of having been a physics major at Princeton in the 80s, but then going on to

become a constitutional lawyer, including as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Louis Powell. He has written

provocative books before, including one about undemocratic features of the

U.S. Constitution, one that proposed reforming the Supreme Court justice selection process,

and one about the Constitution and religious liberty that argued that religion gets treated as both

too privileged and too punished by modern applications of the wall of separation between religion

and government as people see it. Maybe we'll touch on some of the themes of those older books

as they relate to the new one about speech on campus. In a nutshell, Ice Gruber argues that

there can be a balance between free speech and respectful inclusivity. We'll see how he thinks we get there.

I should also say President Icegruber has been in the news this year for being outspoken early

on about what he called the Trump administration's attack on Columbia University,

presenting what he called the greatest threat to American university since the Red Scare of the 1950s. A lot has happened since

he wrote those words in the Atlantic in March, so we'll talk about that, as well as, of course,

the new book, which again is called Terms of Respect, How Colleges Get Free Speech Right.

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