Race-Based Illness at the Best of the BestAt elite universities one must never, ever criticize students of color, especially the black students. Those individuals are sacred.
By Mark Bauerlein
May 24, 2022
It looks like the long persecution of Professor Joshua Katz by his employer Princeton University has come to an end. The Washington Free Beacon reported last week that the school president “passed his recommendation that Katz be stripped of his tenure and fired to the university board of trustees,” and the board rubber-stamped it Monday. The whole episode nicely exemplifies the cowardice and incompetence of the liberals who run elite institutions in the United States today.
The ostensible cause of the termination is a relationship Katz had with a student many years ago, an impropriety that was handled and closed long before the current controversy began. In truth, this current situation has nothing to do with Katz’s private history. The older matter is a false pretext for his termination. Katz’s current sin originates far from the Princeton campus, on the website Quillette, where on July 8, 2020, he published a piece called “A Declaration of Independence by a Princeton Professor.”
That word independence should clue you in immediately to the danger Katz risked when he wrote the essay, for few personality traits are more ruinous in the academic habitat than that of one’s willingness to dissent, to go one’s own way, to gainsay conventional wisdom. For all of the humanities professoriate’s praise of “speaking truth to power,” it is a profession populated by timid conformists with fearful sensibilities. Few fields in the world exert and police their dogmas more vigilantly than does that of our tenured wordsmiths. Katz was doing what all of them pretend to do but don’t—and so he had to pay.
The essay was not an original or separate expression. It followed from something else, an antiracism initiative of his colleagues at Princeton, which they laid out in a forceful letter addressed to Princeton’s high administrators and dated July 4, 2020. (The text of the letter is here—and do note how Katz turned their July 4 timing against them with his own title.) The letter rode the wave of George Floyd protests, asserting that the United States was a fundamentally racist nation whose guilt remains high. Princeton University also has a big race problem, the drafters charged, in that it maintains “anti-black practices” in faculty hiring and service, and it allows “microaggressions and outright racist incidents” to continue to the present day.
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Katz also had something to add about rewards given to antiracist student activists. The demand letter had gone so far as to single out one such group as deserving of apology. Here is the full sentence:
Acknowledge, credit, and incentivize anti-racist student activism. Such acknowledgment should, at a minimum, take the form of reparative action, beginning with a formal public University apology to the members of the Black Justice League and their allies.
The letter doesn’t detail why an apology is due. Obviously, there’s a history here, but the letter doesn’t explain it. It merely demands “reparative action.”
This particular exaction Katz did not let stand. His comment upon it refers to one historical episode—but not one the signatories had in mind. Here is what he says:
The Black Justice League, which was active on campus from 2014 until 2016, was 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. Recently I watched an ‘Instagram Live’ of one of its alumni leaders, who—emboldened by recent events and egged on by over 200 supporters who were baying for blood—presided over what was effectively a Struggle Session against one of his former classmates. It was one of the most evil things I have ever witnessed, and I do not say this lightly.
Read that paragraph twice. Those words are, in fact, the crux of the two-year machinations to remove Katz from Princeton classics. Here we have a contrary judgment of a group the letter framed as a wronged party. The letter cast the League as sinned against. Katz marked them as vicious.
And that ends the story of Katz’s crimes. We can stop right there. Nothing more needs to be pondered or analyzed or debated about the case. Those two sentences say it all; they sealed his doom the moment they were read in central New Jersey.
The reason is simple. In higher education in America in the 2020s, if you have tenure and a decent record of publication and teaching, you can argue over many things, raise doubts about this or that leftist dogma,
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But—you must never, ever criticize students of color, especially the black students. At elite universities, those individuals are sacred. Really, they are. They possess a moral authority that surpasses that of everybody else. Those 19-year-olds scare the presidents and provosts and deans to death. If you ever want to see a $500,000-per-year college leader, usually so composed and involved, turn to stone—no confidence on his face anymore, the firmness gone from his posture—just get eight black students to march down the corridor to his office with menacing scowls on their countenances.
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/24/race-based-illness-at-the-best-of-the-best/
