A Princeton professor who criticized campus activists and now faces termination, ostensibly in connection with other allegations, 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.
Last week, the Washington Free Beacon's Aaron Sibarium reported that "Princeton University is planning to fire one of the most distinguished classics professors in the country, Joshua Katz, after his criticism of the school's racial politics made him the target of student protests and the subject of two separate university investigations." Katz, a public critic of left-wing campus activists, provoked outrage at the university when he penned a piece for Quillette in July 2020 taking issue with aspects of Princeton's political culture, including the behavior of student activists and the proposals for extra pay and vacation time for minority members of the faculty.
Amid the backlash to the professor's comments, Princeton reopened an investigation into "a consensual relationship Katz engaged in with a student more than a decade ago, and for which he was already disciplined by the school in 2018," Sibarium reported. This happened after a Daily Princetonian piece brought up details of the old case as well as new allegations, though Katz's supporters argue that this was used as a pretext to punish him for his earlier comments.
On the heels of the new investigation, university president Christopher Eisgruber recommended to the board of trustees earlier this month that Katz be stripped of tenure and fired. However, while the university already had been moving in that direction, Katz offered to resign weeks ago — but the administration was not willing to go forward without the ability to note his impending termination, Katz's lawyer, Samantha Harris, confirmed to National Review.
"I think that it speaks to the climate of pressure in these politically charged situations, that they felt that they absolutely couldn't forgo the ability to say, 'We were going to fire him,'" Harris told National Review. "This pressure has forced Princeton into essentially saying, 'We have to publicly say that we are doing x and y,' in order to preserve their reputation."
The most controversial line from Katz's Quillette essay was his description of Princeton's Black Justice League, which occupied the dean's office during the group’s 2015 push for "cultural competency training for all staff and faculty" and "a cultural space on campus dedicated specifically to Black students," 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." After an activist-led backlash, Eisgruber personally condemned Katz's comments: "While free speech permits students and faculty to make arguments that are bold, provocative, or even offensive, we all have an obligation to exercise that right responsibly," he wrote in a statement to the Daily Princetonian. "Joshua Katz has failed to do so, and I object personally and strongly to his false description of a Princeton student group as a 'local terrorist organization.'" University spokesman Ben Chang sent a separate statement assuring that the administration would "be looking into the matter further."
Pressure on the professor has steadily built. In 2021, Katz's case was added to Princeton's university website as part of a mandatory freshman-orientation course on the university's legacy of racism, 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 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.
Princeton had not responded to requests for comment at the time this article was published. But during his annual alumni address yesterday, Eisgruber responded to the Katz controversy by saying that, while he could not comment on pending personnel matters, he was not going to accept a nondisclosure agreement "for a solution where somebody finally walks away": "One thing that Princeton University has not done, in any of the years that I've been associated with it, is to accept such a gag order — we're not going to do that," he said.
Comments
Post a Comment