Amid the ongoing showdown between the Trump administration and the Ivy League, one university president has positioned himself as a leader of the academic resistance: Princeton’s Christopher L. Eisgruber.

Earlier this month, the Trump administration suspended hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded grants to Princeton as part of its investigation into racial discrimination and anti-Semitism at the New Jersey campus. Eisgruber, though, was defiant, telling the New York Times that he’s “not considering any concessions” and calling for other university presidents to follow his lead.

This isn’t Eisgruber’s first bid for the spotlight. After the death of George Floyd in 2020, he declared that Princeton—where he has served as president since 2013—was guilty of “systemic racism.” In a letter to students that September, he went so far as to claim that racism was embedded in the very “structures of the university itself.”

Eisgruber was right to say that he presides over a system of racial discrimination—but not in the way he imagines. The university does not discriminate against “oppressed” groups, such as blacks and Latinos, but against those seen as “oppressors.”