Princeton Betrays Its Principles
Chronicle of Higher Ed | Clifford Ando
A professor of classics and history at the University of Chicago is the latest voice raising alarms around the firing of tenured Princeton professor Joshua Katz, arguing that it portends the death of tenure and academic freedom. “Tenure ends when the president of the university ‘personally’ finds you not to have exercised your right to free speech ‘responsibly.’”
Clifford Ando’s article doesn’t focus on litigating Katz’s story, but on the roles and responsibilities of Princeton as an academic institution supposedly committed to free expression (they adopted the Chicago principles in 2015).
Ando explains, “In clear violation of [its own rule]… Princeton and its officers repeatedly and publicly announced their loathing of Katz’s speech. But this is not the reason for which he was ostensibly fired. Instead, Princeton allowed its mechanisms of adjudication to be mobilized and remobilized on grounds that appear pretextual — and which disregarded any respect for the principle of finality. It is this disregard for fundamental principles of procedure on which defenders of academic freedom should focus their attention.”
The article documents how student/professor relationships have proved of non-interest until now, how the student newspaper obtained personal, confidential records, how the faculty’s own judgement against featuring Katz on the University’s “wall of shame” was ignored, how Katz’s words were unscrupulously edited to suit the wall’s theme of historical racists, and how University leadership blatantly disregarded the Chicago principles it purports to honor.
More than anything, the exhuming of a prior, already-adjudicated incident for revenge and ideological servicing has important consequences, Ando explains— “For one thing, it allows third parties to instrumentalize university procedures to pursue private forms of vengeance in reaction to political speech. It also serves the interest of the university as a business, or a brand. Whenever some matter arises that risks causing the university reputational harm, it is free to start an investigation, or repeat an investigation — no matter how long ago the events occurred, or how little parties in power had cared at the time, or even that it had already ruled in the matter.”
In sum, the treatment of Katz, Ando argues, lays bare how “Academic freedom at Princeton was…corrupted… Princeton can continue publicly to genuflect before the Chicago principles and the sanctity of tenure, but its conduct is not worthy of the name of university.”
Related
Princeton’s Journey to Fire a Tenured Professor (multiple stories)
