A Princeton Classics Professor Gets Railroaded

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Friday, May 20, 2022

 

‘Show me the man,” Stalin’s enforcer, Lavrentiy Beria, liked to say, “and I’ll show you the crime.”

 

Beria would have done well at Princeton.

 

In the New York Times, Anemona Hartocollis reports the story of Joshua Katz, a classics professor at Princeton who is set to be fired soon. Ostensibly, Katz is being fired for “his conduct with female students.” Really, he is being fired because, two years ago, he described a student group called the Black Justice League as “a small local terrorist organization” and suggested that he was “embarrassed for” any of his colleagues who had signed a letter insisting that “Anti-Blackness is foundational to America.” Katz, “who is tenured,” Hartocollis writes, “is not facing dismissal for his speech,” but “for what a university report says was his failure to be totally forthcoming about a sexual relationship with a student 15 years ago that he has already been punished for.”

 

This is a flagrant, insulting lie on Princeton’s part. Katz’s “failure to be totally forthcoming about a sexual relationship with a student 15 years ago” was investigated and punished in 2017. Until his words “sent up a flare,” as Hartocollis put it, the incident had passed into history. Katz’s real offense was running afoul of the woke pieties that now dominate American campuses. And so, unable or unwilling to call for his firing on the grounds that he had hurt their feelings, his critics have gone back to a well that had already been capped. To muddy the water, they have insisted that they discovered important “new issues” in the 2017 case. But that is pretextual guff. Clearly, the move to fire him followed — and was motivated by — his criticism of certain progressive students’ activism. “There is no doubt,” Scott Greenfield observes over at Simple Justice, “that but for his hated article, tenured classics prof Joshua Katz’s firing would not be imminent.”

 

Indeed.

 

What Princeton is doing to Katz is a form of cultural double jeopardy. Yes, yes, I know: legally, that concept applies only to criminal trials. But the principle is the same, and it doesn’t matter any less here. A few months ago, Andy McCarthy noted that constitutional rights are “a reflection of what a body politic perceives to be fundamental.” It is true, Andy conceded, that the First Amendment protects the citizenry only from the government, and that, in consequence, private institutions are allowed to be as intolerant as they wish. But, in a free and open country, those private institutions should tend to err on the side of tolerance, because “whether freedom of speech truly exists is a cultural question, not a legal one.”

 

So it is in this case. We did not write double-jeopardy rules into our fundamental laws on a random lark; we wrote double-jeopardy rules into our fundamental laws because we wished to save people who had been taken to court from spending the rest of their lives wondering if, at any moment, they might be hauled back in to discuss a crime that had already yielded punishment or acquittal. In the United States, we investigate, we prosecute, we try, we decide — and then, when that is done, we call it a day. Because they involve a potential loss of liberty — or even of life — criminal trials are usually more weighty than private investigations. But to observe this is not to propose that private investigations are a breeze, or to submit that we should adopt an entirely different set of standards when engaging in them. Fear is fear, no matter whence it derives.

 

As Katz’s case demonstrates, there are a whole host of reasons why a private individual might want to ensure that an investigation into his alleged misconduct happens only once — especially if that investigation leads to his being found guilty of wrongdoing and punished. Absent such a habit, Americans in all contexts would spend every waking hour wondering if a change in administrative staff or prevailing tastes or professional circumstances might lead to an old, already-punished infraction’s being summarily revisited and used as a cynical pretext for the punishment of an unrelated act.

 

Which, of course, is precisely what has happened to Joshua Katz. He offended the powers that be at Princeton, and those powers are now punishing him for it, fully hoping and expecting that next time, would-be dissenters will just shut up.

 

“Under God’s power she flourishes,” reads Princeton’s motto. “Not if we have anything to do with it,” counter the Jacobins.