The Joshua Katz affair, my thoughts
Princeton University can no longer be considered a serious place for intellectual development
One reader commented about my apparent ambiguity regarding the Joshua Katz case at Princeton. Let me mince no words, then, in making my position clear:
I deplore any romantic relationships between faculty and their students and consider them deeply damaging to the faculty-student academic relationship. They are a grave conflict of interest that should not be permitted in an academic environment.
Joshua Katz had a consensual relationship with his student. This was wrong, and, after a review, Princeton gave him a mild disciplinary penalty (one year without pay) as a rebuke. This was appropriate, and it should have put to rest the affair, from an administrative perspective.
Everything I have seen suggests that the Princeton administration reincarnated this disciplinary event as a pretext for punishing Katz for a Quillette piece that the university clearly and publicly disliked. This piece represented a legitimate political criticism of the Princeton community, and the administration has not publicly provided any reasonable counter-argument for its treatment of Katz.
As it currently stands, the Princeton administration appears to have abandoned the most sacred principles of academia in its brazen chilling of unpopular speech and subsequent firing of a tenured faculty member.
In my view, Princeton University can no longer be considered a serious place for intellectual development.
The irrepressible Bari Weiss has (yet another) great piece on this affair, from the perspective of Katz’s new wife: What Princeton did to my Husband.
Agreed.