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 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; the Board of Trustees of Princeton University Press;[11] the Board of Trustees of ITHAKA and Artstor; and the Board of Directors of Liulishuo. He is also a steering committee member of the American Talent Initiative and a member of the Global University Leaders Forum of the World Economic Forum.[12]
Eisgruber was named as Princeton's 20th president on April 21, 2013, and assumed the office on July 1, 2013.[14] A formal installation ceremony was held on September 22, 2013.[15][16]
Eisgruber is the first Princeton president who received his undergraduate degree from the university since Robert Goheen, who served from 1957 to 1972.[17] He is also the first president since Francis Landey Patton, president from 1888 to 1902, who does not hold a PhD.[18]
Eisgruber captained the 1979 U.S. National High School Chess Champion team in his senior year at Corvallis High School[21]
His wife, Lori A. Martin, is a partner in the New York office of the law firm WilmerHale,[22] and they have a son, Danny, who is a graduate of the University of Chicago.[11]
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.[23] His wife is Episcopalian.[24] 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.[2]