Latest News and Commentary: Princeton

Back in the Remnant driver’s seat, Jonah invites newly minted AEI fellow Joshua Katz onto the program for a nerdtastic discussion of language and how free we are to use it. Inevitably, their conversation touches on Joshua’s departure from Princeton, cancel culture, and broader illiberalism in American life. But it also explores current issues in linguistics, how much we can really know about classical civilizations, and what “literally” actually means. Tune in to find out whether Socrates had it coming.

Despite enormous endowments and surging numbers of applicants, all is not well in the Ivy League. Next year, SCOTUS will decide whether Harvard has disadvantaged Asian applicants, and meanwhile, a series of freedom of speech cases is tarnishing the reputation of America’s most elite universities.

At Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and very recently the University of Pennsylvania, the incidents are piling up, with some very negative press.

Professor of History Kevin M. Kruse was accused of several instances of plagiarism by conservative historian Phillip Magness in an article published in “Reason” in June.

Kruse expressed “surprise” at the allegations and attributed the lack of citations in one instance to an inadvertent oversight. “While I indicated my intellectual debts to Prof. Bayor elsewhere in the text, endnotes and bibliography of the dissertation, I was surprised to see that there was an instance in the introduction in which I failed to do so properly,” Kruse wrote in an email to The Daily Princetonian. In response to allegations that Kruse plagiarized from his book, Bayor questioned whether such claims even merited discussion.

Excerpt: Alumni groups pressing free-speech issues are popping up at colleges in many states, as debates over academic freedom, “cancel culture” and changes on campus intensify.

More than a dozen groups have joined the Alumni Free Speech Alliance, a group announced last fall that now includes graduates from schools including Harvard, Bucknell, Yale and Cornell universities, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Wofford and Davidson colleges. Organizers say hundreds of people from schools all across the country have contacted them, all graduates who have questions they say their traditional alumni associations are not asking.

Excerpt: Many students may not be familiar with Professor Erin Y. Huang, but we consider her one of Princeton University’s finest instructors. Huang is an assistant professor in the East Asian Studies and comparative literature departments, an executive member of the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program of the Humanities and Committee of Film Studies, and the only scholar at Princeton working on Sinophone studies and critical theory. She is Junnan’s dissertation adviser and Ellen’s senior thesis advisor.

Yet it seems that the University has no desire to retain Huang. To the shock of many students, alumni, and faculty, she was recently denied tenure. The denial of tenure to Huang reveals dire systemic injustices perpetrated by the conservative, non-transparent, and anti-democratic tenure process.

Excerpt: Last week's July 4th New Yorker cover depicts an America divided. On the left side, a progressive lies in a hammock, a Black Lives Matter sign displayed prominently in the front yard. On the right, a paunchy man in a MAGA hat rests on his porch swing, behind signs supporting veterans and the police. The neighbors face opposite directions and stare at their phones. They do not speak.

Many of us would like to see these neighbors turn around and speak to each other again. This will require a multiplicity of ideas; no single approach will work. But I have a modest proposal for how to start. I call it the Heterodox Challenge, or, if you prefer, #HeterodoxChallenge.

Excerpt: In 2008, in conversation (that is, in heated argument) with me about another matter of academic discipline, [Christopher] Eisgruber, then provost of the university, took the position that a Princeton employee who had lied about possessing three academic degrees she did not possess nevertheless should not be fired. What wrong has Katz committed that goes so far beyond the apparently forgivable sin of multiple academic frauds?

Paul Needham was Princeton’s Scheide librarian from 1998 to 2020.

Excerpt: On June 24, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, prompting virtually every university to declare a day of mourning — for women’s autonomy, not for the millions of innocent children who have been aborted.
The Office of Diversity & Inclusion and the Gender + Sexuality Resource Center (GSRC) of Princeton University released a statement condemning the Dobbs decision. The decree stands as an informative exemplar of how universities advance a political agenda, even through non-academic units, by issuing a formal pronouncement on a divisive topic and framing any dissent as morally reprehensible.

Excerpt: A new episode of The Academic Freedom Podcast from the Academic Freedom Alliance is now available. Subscribe through your favorite platform so you don't miss an episode.

In this episode, I talk with co-blogger and First Amendment expert Eugene Volokh about a couple of recent blog posts. He recently wrote about the report of the Georgetown University Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity & Affirmative Action in response to the Ilya Shapiro controversy at the Georgetown University Law Center.

Excerpt: How does tenure end? The question is not simply theoretical, nor does it have a single answer. But one answer has been supplied by the conduct of Princeton University in its recent firing of Joshua Katz, a classics professor. Tenure ends when the president of the university “personally” finds you not to have exercised your right to free speech “responsibly.”