By Robert P.
George
Friday, June 10,
2022
My longtime Princeton University colleague
Joshua Katz, a distinguished classicist and linguistics scholar, was
recently dismissed from his tenured position by Princeton in a case that has received
international attention. I was Professor Katz’s official Adviser in Princeton’s
disciplinary system through the course of the entire four-year long ordeal that
resulted in his dismissal. In that capacity, I came to possess information that
is privileged or confidential, and therefore cannot be shared. I will herein
discuss only information that is already publicly known.
As a matter of full disclosure, I should
note that when Professor Katz asked me to serve as his Adviser, which is
something I had done for others over the course of my time at Princeton, he and
I were mere acquaintances (though I knew him by reputation as an outstanding
scholar, and an exceptionally gifted and dedicated teacher). We have since
become close friends.
Princeton conducted two investigations
into conduct by Professor Katz in connection with a consensual but (under the
university’s rules) impermissible relationship he had with a student under his
supervision in the mid-2000s. The first investigation was conducted a bit over
a decade after the affair had taken place, when a third party informed
university officials about what had happened. When those officials confronted
Professor Katz, he immediately admitted to the offense. Essentially, he pled
guilty to having had the affair.
The former student with whom Professor
Katz had the relationship was asked by the university’s investigators to assist
in the investigation and disciplinary process, including by making any claims
she had against Professor Katz arising out of the affair and providing
evidence. She declined to make allegations of any kind, refused to participate
in the proceedings, and expressed disapproval of the proceedings going forward.
Unbeknownst to me, she and Professor Katz
had remained in communication (though with no personal meetings, or romantic or
sexual elements in the relationship), and she expressed to him the desire to
have her privacy respected and not to be dragged into the matter. He told her
that he would answer all questions put to him by the investigators fully and
truthfully, but would not on his own initiative discuss or seek to involve her
in any way. The proceedings went forward, eventually resulting in a punishment
consisting of a one-year suspension without pay. Professor Katz was also
required to meet regularly for four years with a counselor. Properly, none of
this was publicly disclosed at the time.
After serving his sentence, Professor Katz
returned to teaching, but soon became the subject of controversy when he
publicly criticized a July 4th, 2020 “Faculty Letter” from colleagues making demands for new Princeton policies (or
alterations of existing policies) in order to combat alleged systemic racism.
Some of the demands were aimed at creating university policies that would
jeopardize academic freedom. Others would have subjected the university to
possible legal liability for violations of laws prohibiting differential
treatment based on racial classifications (including Title VII of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964).
As Professor Katz noted, the Faculty
Letter contained
dozens of
proposals that, if implemented, would lead to civil war on campus and erode
even further public confidence in how elite institutions of higher education
operate. Some examples: “Reward the invisible work done by faculty of color
with course relief and summer salary” and… “constitute a committee composed
entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of
racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty.”
In his article, published by Quillette,
Professor Katz also referred to a by-then-defunct student organization (whose
members had graduated) as “a small local terrorist organization that made life
miserable for the students (including the many black students) who did not
agree with its members’ demands.” This language outraged some on the campus
left, and Professor Katz’s article, titled “A Declaration of Independence by a Princeton Professor,” was condemned by Princeton’s president, Christopher Eisgruber.
A university spokesman—not the
president—went further by suggesting that Professor Katz might be subjected to
some sort of investigation for his words. A little over a week later, President
Eisgruber made clear that this would not happen, and reaffirmed Princeton’s
strong respect for freedom of speech. I praised President Eisgruber for standing firm on the principle of not
punishing protected speech, even when he himself regarded the content of the speech
as profoundly wrong. (As it happens, I had intimate personal knowledge of the
mistreatment of black students by the group that Professor Katz had criticized.
Based on that knowledge, I did not think what he said about the group was out
of line. It certainly was not racist—quite the opposite.)
That is where the matter should have
ended. Regrettably, it did not.
Woke elements on campus, including at the
student newspaper, were angry with President Eisgruber as well as Professor
Katz. They began trying to dig up dirt, to find another way to get the
professor disciplined—even fired. They had heard rumors of an affair with a
student and noticed that Professor Katz seemed to have had an unexplained
off-cycle leave of absence. They demanded information about the matter from the
university.
Initially, the university was prepared to
stick to its standard practice of responding to such “demands” by saying that
it does not discuss personnel matters. Soon, however, university officials
informed Professor Katz that either he would have to tell campus media about
the disciplinary action that the university had taken against him, or they
would do so. We pleaded with university officials to stick to its standard
practice. But they refused.
So, basically having no choice, Professor
Katz told the story. Most unfortunately, at this point, the alumna with whom
he’d had the affair (by now, nearly a decade and a half earlier) turned on him
and filed complaints with the university. She made various claims, but only one
survived and became the focus of a new investigation. This was the claim, now
publicly known, that during their affair, Professor Katz discouraged the woman
from receiving needed mental health care in order to prevent their relationship
from being revealed.
In certain subsequent
(non-contemporaneous) email communications with the woman, he seemed to have
confessed to doing this. This “confession,” however, was in the context of
trying to calm her down when she was obviously extremely upset; and, as the
full email record shows, he was “confessing” to every allegation
she made against him, including ones that were demonstrably untrue.
In my official role as Adviser, I argued
that a second investigation should not take place because it resembled what, in
the criminal justice system, would be double jeopardy—i.e., subjecting an accused person to a second prosecution for the same
offense. The woman had been given every opportunity, and had indeed been
encouraged, to make allegations and provide evidence of wrongdoing in the first
investigation. She declined to do so. Indeed, she opposed the investigation and
refused to participate. It would therefore be wrong to investigate and
discipline Professor Katz a second time for allegations arising out of the
nexus of facts that gave rise to the first investigation and to the punishment
imposed in light of Professor Katz’s confession of guilt.
Although I continue to believe that my
argument regarding double jeopardy was sound and should have been accepted,
ending this whole business, it was rejected at every level of the disciplinary
proceedings, including when the university president recommended to the Board
of Trustees that Professor Katz be fired.
My difference of opinion with top
university officials does not concern free speech. It concerns due process.
These officials, as I understand their position, believe that because the specific allegation
made by the woman was new, investigating it, prosecuting it, and punishing
Professor Katz on this basis did not amount to trying someone twice for the
same offense. For the reasons indicated, I disagree (even if what we are
talking about here is a university disciplinary proceeding, to which the
constitutional prohibition on double jeopardy in criminal cases does not
apply).
Having said that, however, it must be
added that the second investigation would not have been initiated if it hadn’t
been for student journalists and others with a vendetta against Professor Katz,
and who were seeking to dig up dirt on him because they disliked his expressed
views. This element really makes the whole business a terrible injustice as
well as a personal tragedy—as well as drawing in the issue of free speech,
albeit in an indirect and complicated way.
I should add that I personally do not
believe that Professor Katz actually tried to prevent the woman with whom he
was having an illicit affair from getting the mental health care she needed: As
noted above, his emailed assent to this accusation came in a context in which
he might have confessed to any number of fictional crimes. But again, this
difference of opinion between me and university officials is not about free
speech, but rather about interpreting the available evidence. (There were other
claims against Professor Katz that arose during the second disciplinary
procedure, and which were mentioned by the university. On these, too, I
disagree with the findings that President Eisgruber ultimately accepted, though
I won’t go into the details here, as they are secondary to my broader argument
that the entire second investigation was a form of double jeopardy.)
There was also a separate scandal that
arose from the manner by which (as yet still unidentified) university
bureaucrats smeared Professor Katz as a racist through a freshman training program
called “To Be Known and Heard: Systemic Racism and Princeton University”—even going so far as to bowdlerize a quotation from him as a means to
support this defamation. Specifically, the words “including the many black
students” were removed from the aforementioned quotation, “a small local terrorist
organization that made life miserable for the students (including the many
black students) who did not agree with its members’ demands.” The document also
contained statements from detractors, such as “[Katz] seems not to regard people like
me [a Black professor] as essential features, or persons, of Princeton,” with
no opportunity for Katz or anyone supporting him to reply.
I can think of no possible explanation for
this outrageous conduct other than it being a form of harassment and
retaliation against Professor Katz for his speech. When the office responsible
for the freshman-orientation materials was called out for the doctoring of the quotation (Professor Katz’s lawyer,
Samantha Harris, had complained to the university counsel’s office directly
about this issue) someone restored the full quotation on the “To Be Known and
Heard” website. But the university refused to apologize to Professor Katz
or—and this is critical—inform the students to whom he had been smeared that
the quotation had been bowdlerized and had to be corrected. So the correction
was essentially meaningless and did not undo the injustice to Professor Katz.
A group of professors led by
mathematician Sergiu Klainerman filed a grievance in their own names, not on behalf of Professor
Katz himself, demanding an investigation into who had retaliated against him by
weaponizing the university’s freshman-orientation materials in this manner. Two
Princeton officers, the Vice Provost for Institutional Equity and Diversity,
and the head of the Human Resources department, were evidently assigned to look
into the matter and respond to Professor Klainerman and his co-complainants. In
a ruling that I found ridiculous, these officials rejected the complaint on various grounds.
Professors Klainerman et al. eventually
appealed to a standing faculty committee that has the power to review faculty
complaints against administrators’ actions and make recommendations (the
Princeton Committee on Conference and Faculty Appeal being its full name). I
understand from reports that I regard as completely reliable that the
committee ruled in favor of the Klainerman group, and against the two officers who had
dismissed their complaint, unanimously on every count.
And so even though Professor Katz has
already been terminated, important issues surrounding his mistreatment persist,
as the Committee on Conference and Faculty Appeal’s apparent recommendation of a full investigation of the defamation of Professor Katz by
university officials now sits with President Eisgruber. A public statement by the president made in response to a public letter authored on
behalf of the Academic Freedom Alliance by Keith Whittington—a Princeton professor and an eminent scholar
of constitutional law who’s literally written the book on campus free speech—suggests that the president views the statements about Professor Katz
contained in the freshman orientation materials as themselves protected speech
under Princeton’s free-speech policies. I strongly disagree with this
characterization, as Princeton’s free-speech rules expressly exclude expression
that “falsely defames a specific individual.” And I hope that, on reflection,
and in light of the findings by the aforementioned faculty committee, President
Eisgruber will order an independent investigation of the smearing of Professor
Katz, with attendant disciplinary proceedings concerning those responsible.
There is no question in my mind as to
whether Katz was defamed—treatment exacerbated by the fact that the
freshman-orientation materials are promulgated to a captive student audience.
Nor am I in any doubt as to whether the underlying motives were malicious. The
bowdlerization of Professor Katz’s words was done with the evident intention of
depicting him as racist—which he is not. The only real questions are who is
responsible, and what is the proper disciplinary action under the university’s rules.
If Princeton bureaucrats, whoever they
are, can get away with retaliating against a professor for his protected speech
by smearing him in this way, then the university’s formal free-speech
protections are mere parchment guarantees. President Eisgruber, himself an
eminent First Amendment scholar, should understand what is at stake here. He
has always been a powerful defender of free speech and other basic civil
liberties. (I should add, again as a matter of full disclosure, that he and I
are old friends.)
I have publicly praised him for those
qualities and, as noted herein, acknowledged that his decision regarding the
second investigation of Professor Katz does not directly compromise free-speech
principles. Thus, I have reason to hope that a proper understanding of what is
and isn’t protected speech under university policies will guide him toward an
appreciation of the injustice done to Joshua Katz.
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