Eminent linguist Joshua Katz was fired Monday by his longtime employer Princeton University in what seems (despite the university’s denials) to be a straightforward act of political retaliation.
His offense? Questioning woke orthodoxy.
Katz, long a beloved professor, had the temerity to write an article in 2020 criticizing a letter signed by many Princeton faculty and students. That missive demanded the university undertake such “anti-racist” actions as axing SAT requirements, giving extra sabbatical time to “faculty of color” and appointing a nebulous committee to whom the entire university would be accountable for its efforts on this front.
In other words, the signatories demanded a total sacrifice of academic freedom. Katz spoke up to defend the real mission of the university — to educate, not indoctrinate — and now has paid the price.
Princeton claims his firing is due to his behavior during a years-old investigation of a relationship he had with a student, but Katz notes he was already punished for that infraction — and the timing of the university’s move is utterly transparent.
Katz is hardly the only academic purged for speaking his mind. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) reports that at least 111 professors were targeted for ideological reasons last year. And it’s not even exclusively the left doing it: Brigham Young University axed Sue Bergin for her support of gay marriage and wearing a rainbow flag pin.
But much of it is “wokeism”: Superstar Harvard economist Roland Fryer was suspended from teaching for two years over sex-harassment claims in a blatantly political slapdown after his research cut against dominant orthodoxies on race and class. Georgetown Law suspended professor Ilya Shapiro indefinitely over tweets about Joe Biden’s unprecedented promise to consider only black women for his first Supreme Court pick.
San Diego State booted philosophy professor J. Angelo Corlett from teaching for verbalizing racial slurs in a lesson on racism he’d used with zero issues for more than two decades. Christopher Newport University didn’t renew Sophia Nelson’s contract after she asked whether it was necessary for a comic-book character to come out as bisexual.
Defenders of this practice cite the “harm” that, say, questioning a cartoon’s sexuality somehow does to marginalized groups.
But the real damage is in establishing draconian standards around what professors — and students — are allowed to feel, think, say and write and leaving them open to punishments based on administrative caprice or personal enmity.
Encountering and debating ideas you disagree with is the sine qua non of liberal democracy, not just the academy. That makes the woke effort to destroy campus dissent not just a war on academic freedom, but an attack on civil society itself.