By Nate Hochman
Monday, May 23, 2022
Joshua Katz, a tenured classics professor
at Princeton whose criticism of left-wing activism at the university provoked
outrage and protests on campus, has officially been fired. Zachary Evans reports:
Princeton
University’s Board of Trustees fired classics professor Joshua Katz, the
university said in a Monday statement, claiming that the longtime faculty
member “failed to be straightforward” during a 2018 investigation into a
relationship between Katz and an undergraduate student.
Katz
told National Review that
he learned that he’d been fired only after the New York Times called
his wife, and said the university sent his notice of termination to the wrong
email address. The Washington
Free Beacon first reported that Princeton was
planning to fire Katz.
Katz was
briefly suspended from the university in 2018 over the consensual relationship
with a student, which occurred about 15 years ago.
But for anyone who’s been paying
attention, it’s pretty obvious that the real reason for Katz’s termination was
political. In particular, as Evans notes, allies of the professor “have claimed
that the firing was motivated by the professor’s criticism of Princeton’s
‘anti-racism’ initiatives. In a 2020 essay for Quillette, Katz criticized a faculty letter stating that ‘Anti-Blackness is
foundational to America,’ and referred to a student group called 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.’”
As a result of the activist-led backlash
to those comments, the Princeton administration has been gunning for Katz’s
head for some time. Katz’s controversy-inducing comments about the Black
Justice League being “a small local terrorist organization” were added
to Princeton’s mandatory freshman-orientation course on
the university’s legacy of racism, posted on the school’s official website. The
section added denunciations of Katz from his colleagues and the university
president himself, noting that “President Eisgruber condemned the words used by
Katz” and that “the Classics Department made a strong statement against his
views as well, arguing that they were ‘fundamentally incompatible with our
mission and values as educators.’” But most scandalous of all, the portrayal of
the comment itself was dishonestly edited to make it sound more provocative. As
I reported
earlier today:
The line
that was initially included on the webpage conspicuously omitted the
parenthetical clause “(including the many black students),” without any
ellipsis to indicate that part of the sentence had been excluded, thus framing
Katz’s comments in more racially charged terms.
In
October, eight Princeton professors filed an
internal complaint demanding “an investigation into who
doctored Professor Katz’s quote and who edited and posted the page without
identifying and correcting that error.” The Princeton website has quietly
revised the passage, adding the “(including the many black students)” clause
back to the quote. But no investigation appears to have occurred, and the
school has not issued a public correction or an apology, nor has it contacted
the freshmen who went through the orientation to notify them of the omission.
It has subsequently refused calls to take the quote down, with Eisgruber saying earlier this year that he would “resist any suggestion” to edit
the website.
And not only did Princeton not give Katz
the courtesy of notifying him before publicly announcing his termination;
administrators didn’t even allow him to resign. As I wrote today, Katz “was in
talks about a tentative deal that would have allowed him to resign — but
negotiations broke down after the university administration insisted it retain
the right to publicly say the president had recommended his dismissal, the
professor’s lawyer confirmed to National
Review. . . . Katz offered to resign weeks ago — but the
administration was not willing to go forward without the ability to note his
impending termination.”
Shameful, cowardly stuff. But what else can
we expect from the leadership of our elite universities these days?
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