Christopher L. Eisgruber

Christopher Ludwig Eisgruber (born September 24, 1961)^[2][3] is the 20th and current President of Princeton University.^[4][5]

Education

Eisgruber is a 1983 graduate of Princeton University, where he earned an AB magna cum laude in physics and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.^[5][6][7] His senior thesis addressed topics in the theory of general relativity.^[7] He also studied political theory with Jeffrey K. Tulis "Presidential Installation: The Ideal of a Liberal Arts University".  During his junior year at Princeton, he was a member of the Elm Club.^[8] In 1987 he received an MLitt in politics from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and he earned a JD cum laude from the University of Chicago Law School in 1988,^[5][6] where he served as editor-in-chief of the University of Chicago Law Review.^[9]

Career

Following his graduation from law school, Eisgruber served as law clerk to Judge Patrick Higginbotham of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and then Justice John Paul Stevens of the Supreme Court of the United States.^[5]

After clerking, Eisgruber taught at New York University Law School for eleven years, from 1990 to 2001, before coming to Princeton.^[5] From 2001 to 2004, Eisgruber was the director of Princeton's Program in Law and Public Affairs.^[6] He served as the provost of Princeton from 2004 to 2013.^[6]

Eisgruber was elected as Princeton's 20th president on April 21, 2013, and assumed the office on July 1, 2013.^[10] A formal installation ceremony was held on September 22, 2013.^[11]

Eisgruber has served on several boards, including the academic advisory board of Coursera, a provider of massive open online courses; the Board of Trustees of the Educational Testing Service; and the Board of Trustees of Princeton University Press.^[12]

Presidency

Eisgruber was formally installed as Princeton's 20th president on September 22, 2013.^[13] Eisgruber is the first Princeton president who received his undergraduate degree from the university since Robert Goheen, who served from 1957 to 1972.^[14] He is also the first Princeton president not to have a PhD since Francis Patton, who served from 1888 to 1902.^[7]

Personal life

Eisgruber is a native of Lafayette, Indiana.^[3] His wife, Lori A. Martin, is a partner in the New York office of the law firm WilmerHale,^[15] and they have a son, Danny, who is 18 years old and a freshman at the University of Chicago as of September 2016.^[12]

Eisgruber captained the 1979 U.S. National High School Chess Champion team in his senior year at Corvallis High School ^[16]

Eisgruber was raised Catholic and married his wife in an Episcopal church. While helping his son, then in the fourth grade, with a school project, he discovered that his Berlin-born mother, who had arrived in New York as an eight-year-old refugee, was Jewish. Today, Eisgruber identifies as a nontheist Jew.^[17] His wife is Episcopalian.^[1] In 2009, a Holocaust claims tribunal awarded Eisgruber and his three sisters 162,500 Swiss francs, representing the value of the bank account of their maternal great-grandfather, Salomon Kalisch.^[3]

Eisgruber is a lifelong fan of the Chicago Cubs.^[18]

Publications

Books

• The Next Justice: Repairing the Supreme Court Appointments Process (2007)
• Religious Freedom and the Constitution, with Lawrence G. Sager (2007)
• Global Justice and the Bulwarks of Localism: Human Rights in Context, ed. with Andras Sajo (2005)
• Constitutional Self-Government (2001)

References

External links

• Office of the President of Princeton University