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.)
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