Princeton’s Shame — and Ours

A day after celebrating its first in-person reunions in three years — a wonderful orange-and-black pageant of ritual and ridiculousness — Princeton University fired Joshua Katz, a classics professor who embodies all that is good and true about liberal-arts education. As detailed by Nate Hochman, who’s been an indefatigable reporter of campus craziness in this first post-Covid year, the pretext was that Katz hadn’t fully cooperated with an investigation into a relationship with a student he’d had in the mid-2000s (for which he’d already been disciplined). But the real reason was that the award-winning teacher and scholar, who’d been on faculty for nearly 25 years, dared to criticize progressive orthodoxy.

In the wake of George Floyd’s killing, Katz criticized a July 2020 Princeton faculty letter asserting that “Anti-Blackness is foundational to America” and demanding assorted “anti-racist” policies at the university, such as preferential treatment for minority faculty, training that “moves participants through stages of vulnerability, productive discomfort, and reflection,” and the creation of panels to police colleagues’ work for hints of racism. He also described a now-defunct student group, the Black Justice League, as “a small local terrorist organization that made life miserable for the many (including the many black students) who did not agree with its members’ demands.” (BJL itself had engaged in the sort of struggle sessions the letter seemed to call for.)

For this grave sin against the Church of Social Justice, Katz became a pariah, losing prestigious appointments and speaking opportunities as academics around the country accused him of inciting violence. Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber denounced him for his “irresponsible and offensive” writing.

Although a spokesman said ominously that the university would “be looking into the matter further,” officials quickly realized that they couldn’t punish Katz because Princeton, to its credit, had adopted the gold standard for campus-speech protections, the University of Chicago principles on free expression. Still, Princeton featured him on a website detailing “what crosses the ‘line’ between free speech and freedom of expression, and racist statements and actions,” which it made part of mandatory freshman orientation. It doctored Katz’s line about BJL and put him in the same category as slaveholders and segregationists among its historic leaders (most notably Woodrow Wilson), and discriminatory admissions policies.

A group of Katz’s colleagues filed a complaint on his behalf last October, which the diversity bureaucracy dismissed, a decision that, amazingly, the faculty-led Committee on Conference and Faculty Appeal rebuked last month. To its shame, the administration ignored that ruling, culminating in Eisgruber’s recommendation to the trustees that Katz be stripped of his tenure and fired. Eisgruber himself, meanwhile, was recently rewarded with a five-year (“at least”) extension of his contract.

What the hell has happened to my alma mater? Once known as the Ivy League’s shining beacon of free speech — it’s a low bar, I know — it’s now 135th out of 154 schools evaluated by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education on that measure. Once the bastion of organization kids, it now teaches the new generation — who still go into banking and consulting at higher rates than from peer institutions — to “tear down this place and make it a better one.” I’ve heard more about sit-ins, protests, moral panics, and mob actions in the last half decade than in the previous 20-plus years since I matriculated.

In late March, I went back to “Old Nassau” to participate in an event titled “Mob Rule: The Illiberal Left’s Threat to Campus Discourse.” This was a panel discussion that also featured Professor Peter Boghossian — who resigned from Portland State under a cancellation cloud — and my classmate Samantha Kors (Katz’s lawyer), moderated by Solveig Gold (Katz’s wife). The student organizers had prepared for the worst, hiring campus-security officers and inviting university “First Amendment monitors” (an Orwellian title for people there to vindicate the school’s free-speech policy). Unlike so many other “controversial” campus events this spring, there were no disruptions, which allowed us to make our points and discuss often-difficult issues with an engaged audience of more than 100 people.

That “lived experience” gave me hope that Princeton was actually living up to its stated policy that “it is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive.” And yet, less than two months later, Joshua Katz was still fired.

So where do we go from here? It’s all well and good to adopt the Chicago Principles — and more broadly that same university’s 1967 Kalven Report, which states that “the neutrality of the university . . . arises out of respect for free inquiry and the obligation to cherish a diversity of viewpoints” — indeed, it’s essential. But it’s not enough. If deans and department chairs aren’t willing to stand up to left-wing activists and instead kowtow to prevailing woke winds, no pixel barrier will prevent abuses of free speech, due process, and common decency.

What’s worse, the problem isn’t simply cowardly administrators, because the illiberal mob has, to mix metaphors, a fifth column within the ivory tower. Not only does expanding administrative bloat work against the interests of students and faculty, but also too many of these educrats are opposed to the values that academic life has traditionally elevated: the disinterested quest for truth based on evidence and reason. The proliferation of DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) officers, whom even Ivy League presidents buck at their peril, has enforced an orthodoxy that stifles intellectual diversity, undermines equal opportunity, and excludes dissenting voices. It has also accelerated the loss of grace in our culture, the desire to ascribe malign motives to one’s political enemies and an unwillingness to think of them as merely wrong rather than evil.

It’s such a shame that these trends have come to Princeton, a place that to me had always stood for tolerance, respect, good faith, and excellence. When I return for my 25th reunion and sing the school song, I will be giving no cheers for Old Nassau.