Princeton’s DisgraceBy Rod Dreher
May 18, 2022
The Anglosphere’s most elite universities continue to beclown themselves: Cambridge University undergraduates are to be taught to regard Mozart’s music as imperialistic.
I know I keep saying that the totalitarian impulse ruining liberal democratic society today is like unto the Soviet Union, but they didn’t go that far even in Soviet Russia. In fact, the pianist who famously rebuked Stalin and lived to tell the tale (this story is recalled in the black comedy The Death of Stalin) was playing Mozart on the radio when the dictator heard her and loved her performance so much he demanded a recording of it. So, wrap your mind around the idea that Josef Stalin was more tolerant of Mozart than Cambridge University instructors.
Meanwhile, in the US, Princeton University advances towards woke madrassah status:
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.
University president Christopher Eisgruber—who in 2020 alleged that Katz had failed to exercise his free speech “responsibly”—passed his recommendation that Katz be stripped of tenure and fired to the university’s board of trustees last week, according to three sources with firsthand knowledge of the situation.
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Why are they going after Katz? It began back in 2020 with an astonishingly illiberal, even semi-totalitarian, proposal by black faculty members and allies that Princeton fully embrace race radicalism, to atone for its alleged racism. Part of the proposal called for:
… 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, following a protocol for grievance and appeal to be spelled out in Rules and Procedures of the Faculty. Guidelines on what counts as racist behavior, incidents, research, and publication will be authored by a faculty committee for incorporation into the same set of rules and procedures.
Like I said, totalitarian.
Katz responded with a public letter in Quillette criticizing the proposal. Though he is one of the nation’s most accomplished classicists, Princeton has endeavored to make his life hell ever since. One of his lead antagonists is Dan-el Padilla Peralta, once mentored by Katz, and who now, as a Princeton Classics professor himself, is trying to overturn the field of Greco-Roman studies to “save it from whiteness.”
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/princeton-disgrace-joshua-katz/
