Classics professor Joshua Katz was fired Monday by Princeton’s trustees, according to a University statement released Monday evening.
“The dismissal followed an investigation initiated in February 2021, after the University received a detailed written complaint from an alumna who had a consensual relationship with Dr. Katz while she was an undergraduate under his academic supervision,” the statement says. “That relationship was the focus of a 2018 disciplinary proceeding against Dr. Katz, which resulted in a penalty of unpaid suspension for academic year 2018-2019 and three years of probation following his return to the Faculty in 2019.”
The alumna did not participate in the University’s 2018 investigation but came forward in 2021. The investigation that followed found that Katz “misrepresented facts or failed to be straightforward” during the 2018 investigation and discouraged the alumna from speaking and from “seeking mental health care although he knew her to be in distress, all in an effort to conceal a relationship he knew was prohibited by University rules,” the statement says. “These actions were not only egregious violations of University policy, but also entirely inconsistent with his obligations as a member of the Faculty.”
The University did not revisit issues for which Katz was already punished and complied with all its rules and proceedings in the case, the statement says.
Katz’s attorney, Samantha Harris ’99, told The New York Times that saying Katz tried to impede the 2018 investigation is a “mischaracterization.” Instead, she and Katz have said that he is being punished for offensive speech: In a July 2020 essay for the online publication Quillette, he described a former student group, the Black Justice League, as a “small local terrorist organization.”
Harris told the Times: “The university’s decision will have a powerful chilling effect on free speech, because anyone who might wish to express a controversial opinion knows that they must first ask themselves if their personal life can stand up to the kind of relentless scrutiny that Dr. Katz’s life was subjected to … .”
Katz, a tenured professor, was hired by Princeton in spring 1998. His termination by the trustees, who followed a dismissal recommendation from President Eisgruber ’83, is effective immediately, according to the University statement.
Katz was a faculty representative to PAW’s advisory board with a term set to expire in June 2022.
See PAW’s July issue for more on this story.
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11 Responses
Norman Ravitch *62
2 Years AgoThe New York Times has published an article about the wife of Dr. Katz, a very bright Princeton grad. Why does the Alumni Weekly not feature this article? It would be the decent thing to do after the persecution of Dr. Katz.
Amelia R. Brown ’99
2 Years AgoThe firing of Professor Katz is clearly the right decision under the circumstances, i.e., the discovery that he was having sexual relations with a student while also grading her work (not to mention putting her in a different category from his other students). When the news of Katz’s relationship with a student and subsequent suspension came out in the Prince, then action should have been taken, but it is right that it has happened now. Politics should be entirely beside this point.
A very important aspect of all student-teacher relationships is the power imbalance present in it, which should lead both teachers and students in classics and all other University areas of study to respect one another enough to wait until they are no longer grading and being graded.
Simina Farcasiu ’83
2 Years AgoThe firing of Professor Katz is a direct attack on academic freedom, scholarly excellence, and common sense (Professor Katz was correct in his assessment of the fatuous faculty letter and the Maoist bullying countenanced by University administration). It is a betrayal of the mission of the University. Chris Eisgruber as the face of this travesty should resign, or be fired.
David Barkhausen ’72
2 Years AgoPrinceton’s abysmally low ranking for free and open expression, even among its peer universities that suffer the same malady, made me reluctant to come to my 50th reunion. The sickening and horrendously timed firing of Professor Katz for challenging DEI dogma makes me wonder why I did, in spite of the rare chance to see old friends. The current regime is squandering a precious inheritance.
Mark Ramsay ’76
2 Years AgoBernard Bailyn wrote in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution of colonists realizing that it is their right to have and exercise freedom of conscience. If it weren’t for all the pamphleteers’ publishing tracts of political theory 1- years before 1776, we’d be singing “Rule Britannia” now. Professor Katz would have fit in well within that era. His writings are important now to counter sheepish pseudo-scholarship.
Mark Wallace ’75
2 Years AgoIt’s a sad day when Princeton capitulates to cancel culture and the woke mob and fires a tenured professor because he exercised his free speech rights. No good and honest person would believe the contrived lies Princeton has cited to justify its cancellation of Professor Katz. My recommendation to the Board of Trustees is to immediately rehire Professor Katz and apologize to him and to fire Eisgruber. Additionally, the Princeton undergraduates who launched their campaign of hate against Professor Katz should be appropriately disciplined.
Norman Ravitch *62
2 Years AgoThe three alumni who have commented unfavorably about Professor Katz’s dismissal base their dismay on the timing of the dismissal, the intervention of the female student whose revival of the case may seem providential for the Trustees and the University president, and the fact that Professor Katz has some politically incorrect views on some University policies involving race.
I have no information about all this but would like to express one belief I have from my experience from almost 40 years of university teaching and research. Political views of professors, which may include hot topics like gender, race, and religion, are protected by tenure and academic freedom — at least when these views are legitimately part of one’s field in teaching and research. If they are just casual feelings and beliefs which have nothing to do with the courses at hand they might well be unprotected, but non-professors also have rights to their opinions and professors retain the same civil rights as non-professors. It would not, based on my experience, be unknown that politically incorrect views could be the cause of negative actions against an individual, especially one who had some past history of making life difficult for university administrators.
Thus I read with sympathy the three alumni comments and leave the topic with less than great conviction that justice has been done.
Richard M. Waugaman ’70
2 Years AgoHere is my May 20 online comment on the New York Times website. As of May 26, it leads the 1,538 comments, with 2,052 “recommendations”:
As a Princeton alumnus, I’m especially disheartened by this story. It’s likely that I do not share many of Prof. Katz’s political views, and I strongly endorse Princeton’s wonderfully successful efforts to increase the diversity of its student body, along ethnic and economic lines.
Yet I am deeply disturbed by the erosion of academic freedom. I’m a liberal, so I’m disappointed by the role of the left in this dangerous erosion.
It’s true that romantic relationships between professors and students are inappropriate. However, it is said that such relationships are often tolerated by university administrators, until they can be used as a pretext for firing a professor for something else they have done, such as in the case of Prof. Katz.
Alan Baron ’63
2 Years AgoI revere Princeton University. Going there was a life-changing and formative experience which I have always treasured. The recent uproar concerning Professor Joshua Katz is, however, deeply disturbing (“Princeton Trustees Fire Classics Professor Joshua Katz,” published online May 23, 2022).
Katz is no saint. By his own admission, he engaged in improper and stupid conduct. But dredging up old misconduct for which he had been severely disciplined years ago, and seeming to discipline him for expressing opinions on issues of public concern on which reasonable people could differ, is disgraceful and unworthy of a great university.
I had a perhaps-naive hope that Princeton had avoided the self-immolation being experienced at so many universities. My hope was in vain.
Princeton remains in my heart and memory as “the best old place of all,” but it seems to have embraced the current fashion for “woke” politics, which is the present iteration of McCarthyism.
George Angell ’76
2 Years AgoAlan Baron ’63, in his letter about the firing of Joshua Katz (Inbox, July/August issue), blasts the University for “dredging up old misconduct” and “seeming to discipline him for expressing opinions on issues of public concern.” Boy, Mr. Baron, Tucker Carlson himself couldn’t have taken straightforward facts and turned them into such a knuckleball.
Nassau Hall clearly and compellingly articulated its reasons for Katz’s dismissal. If Mr. Baron wants to search for hidden, darker forces at work, he might consider a more plausible alternative to his suggestion that the administration was “canceling” Katz. In recent years, Katz will have been acutely aware of the extreme jeopardy in which he had placed himself through further instances of the type of misconduct that had already resulted in a year’s suspension. It wouldn’t be surprising if he wrote his screeds against “political correctness” on the Quilette website, in The National Review, and elsewhere, in 2020 and 2021 as a sort of shield — a pretext to be able to mendaciously claim, should his undisclosed offenses be found out (as they inevitably were), that he was a victim of “woke” political pressure. Even if this didn’t save his position in East Pyne, it would probably make his case (as it did) a right-wing cause célèbre and land him a nice job with a sympathetic phrontisterion.
The only real grounds for criticizing University administrators is that they didn’t show Katz the door in the first place, as a result of the 2018 investigation, before additional evidence of his abuse of his position at the expense of undergraduate women forced their hand.
Doug Esson ’63
2 Years AgoIt is a sad day for Salem, excuse me I meant to say Princeton, over the dismissal of Professor Katz.
What an extraordinary coincidence that the alumna who had a relationship with Professor Katz chose to write a letter at the time the administration, faculty, and board were investigating him.
I hope this free speech policy, or lack thereof, will not be applied to anti-woke student activists.