Summing up the totalitarian state's attitude to those who stray from dogma, Stalin's chief of secret police Lavreti Beria said something like "show me the man and I'll show you the crime." In other words, in a state without freedom of speech and the rule of law, a pretext can be easily found to get rid of anyone with inconvenient views. This is the climate of American, and increasingly Canadian and British, academia today, the latest example of which is the firing on Monday of renowned Princeton professor Joshua Katz. His 25 years at the Ivy League university in New Jersey were, according to most reports, extraordinary not just for his intellectual power and range but for his skill and care in teaching, which is not always the hallmark of star professors.
What brought Katz down was ostensibly the resurrected case of an affair he had with a (then) 21-year old graduate student around 2006, for which he had already been disciplined in 2017 by, inter alia, losing a year's pay. He had committed no crime in having a relationship with a grown woman; it was just a breach of the professional rules he had signed onto at Princeton. The real reason Princeton wanted him gone was his refusal to toe the leftist party line on race after George Floyd's death in May 2020, in an article he wrote in Quillette, an online publication that encourages heterodox thought and writing (unlike college campuses).
There is no space to go deeply into what he wrote on the subject, but one thing he objected to was the overt racism of "antiracism" in advocating perquisites and pay for faculty 'of colour' that was not available to white (or presumably Asian, since they don't seem to count as 'colour' in this context) faculty. Katz also dared criticize a short-lived, radical campus group called the Black Justice League. One could debate the merits of his argument, and should, but while acknowledging that as a tenured professor he should be able to say anything he likes, short of breaking the law or advocating the commission of a crime. But as Katz said later, "In the summer of George Floyd, certain opinions about the state of America that would have been considered normal only a few months earlier suddenly became anathema."
A few minutes on YouTube watching some Princeton students critical of Katz tells all you need to know about their views. Their understanding of history is sophomoric, their expectations of the world are as arrogant as they are puerile, and their inability to comprehend the enormity of their good fortune to be living in our present age, let alone attending Princeton, is breath-taking.
When Katz dared to challenge the Maoist student mob to consider another viewpoint, Princeton's president Eisgruber and most of the faculty turned on Katz in lockstep. The student with whom he'd had an affair 15 years earlier insisted for no apparent reason that Princeton look into her case again. An investigation (double jeopardy applying only in criminal law, not in campus kangaroo court) was resurrected, and Katz was eventually found guilty (again). A professor who actually knew and taught ancient and obscure languages, and whose talent as a lecturer and teacher were celebrated, was sacrificed by a University to the woke gods. Lest you be tempted to take it seriously as the top national university it once was, know that Princeton has recently decided that in order to attract more minority students to its classics program, they will no longer require classics students to actually learn to read or write Greek or Latin. Because that's, like, hard.
Katz is the latest but is not alone. There are many other cases over the past few years of academics being driven out for having thoughts and opinions and testing them in the marketplace of ideas, as academics (and students) are supposed to. Peter Boghosian of Portland State, Kathleen Stock of Sussex University, Dorian Abbot of Chicago, and many others were all driven out of their institutions by craven administrators in fear of their ill-informed and intolerant student masters.
Roland Fryer is an economics professor at Harvard who according to the polymath (and economist) Glenn Loury is "not the most gifted black economist of his generation, but the most gifted economist of his generation." Fryer poked the woke bear by defying the cannon popularized by lower-wattage academic Ibram Kendi that all achievement gaps between races must be due to racism to the exclusion of all other factors. Fryer, who grew up poor and overcame many challenges himself, dared to ask hard questions of the 'antiracist' grifter establishment and, worse, crunch some numbers. His research found that little of the efforts so far - pouring more money into school infrastructure and equipment, paying teachers more, or adopting woke curricula to pander to supposed cultural values - did much good in closing the enduring black-white/Asian achievement gap in school test scores.
What worked, not shockingly, was to set high expectations of poor and disadvantaged students and help them achieve them through longer hours working at school and home, rigorous academics, and strong class and self discipline. Fryer dares ask questions and research taboos, like whether black students in some schools equate academic success, and the habits that bring it, with 'acting white' and thus race betrayal. His goal is to actually help struggling students to do better. Kendi and his ilk would rather throw in the towel and lower the bar for what is considered success, damning yet another generation to the "soft bigotry of low expectations."
Like Katz, Fryer was brought down by a sex scandal, in his case vague accusations of sexual harassment that appear to boil down to coarse language used too freely among easily-offended colleagues. Despite its best efforts, Harvard's internal Star Chamber faculty discipline process could only manage to get Fryer recommended for additional sensitivity training, but that didn't stop them using the accusations and the investigation itself as an excuse to curtail his teaching, research, and campus profile. As Loury says, "Those at Harvard responsible for this state of affairs should be utterly ashamed of themselves...I can't help but suspect that they have effectively buried vital research not because it was poorly done but because they found the results to be politically inconvenient." A documentary by Rob Montz lays all this out in damning detail, but don't expect anyone at Harvard to watch it.
In August 2020, after the rabid reaction to his Quillette piece but before the resurrected sex accusation, Katz said at a seminar that "Free speech is a bedrock principle. If we cannot agree on this, then we are lost as a nation." His wife quotes journalist and professional illegal alien Dan-El Padilla Peralta as telling a Princeton freshman class that they need to "tear down this place and make it a better one." These fragile, angry, sanctimonious young people will find that the first part is easy, with the connivance of cowards and sycophants in university administrations. The second, without any values, loyalty, courage, or conscience to hold it together, will be impossible.