“[A]fter [a] panel discussion [at a prestigious law school], person after person got up, including some of the younger professors, to assert that their goals of social justice for blacks, for women, for… more
PFS editor’s note: Below is the first of what will be an occasional feature written by individual Princeton Alumni, faculty members and students about their experiences with free speech, academic freedom, and related issues.
By Adam Gussow ’79 *00
Excerpt: For the past forty years I’ve given faithfully to Princeton’s Annual Giving campaign. My contribution has been laughably modest -- $100 most years, $250 when major reunions come up—but consistent. My rationale has been heterodox: grounded in deep gratitude for the ten years I spent on campus between 1975 and 2000 and the two degrees in English, undergrad and grad, I obtained there, but animated by the farfetched hope that small but consistent annual gifting would grace whatever children I someday produced with an incrementally better chance of gaining admission to the university that changed my life.
A couple of weeks ago I decided to suspend my annual gift for the foreseeable future and redirect it towards Princetonians for Free Speech.
Excerpt: Here is the real test: Would a professor who also had had an affair with a student and who later wrote something much, much more inflammatory than Katz did – while compiling a record as a left-leaning progressive -- have been fired? Would he have been attacked in the student newspaper in a way that no one in the history of the paper had ever been attacked before? Would his personal life have been subjected to a Javert-like seven-month investigation by that newspaper? Would he have been attacked by Princeton administrators in an official presentation to the entire entering class? Would he have been subjected to double jeopardy over a personal mistake? Absolutely not. But that is what happened to Professor Katz.
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