Trustees Fire Tenured Professor, Citing Investigation of Misconduct
Classics professor Joshua Katz was fired in May
There are two schools of thought on why Princeton fired tenured classics professor Joshua Katz in May.
One, from the University’s statement, says that new information emerged about a consensual relationship Katz had with one of his students about 15 years ago. The other headlines articles like one Katz penned in The Wall Street Journal the evening he was let go: “Princeton Fed Me to the Cancel Culture Mob.”
“Whoever you are and whatever your beliefs,” he wrote, “this should terrify you.”
The University says Katz’s firing wasn’t about free speech. Rather, its statement says that the woman Katz was involved with came forward in 2021, after declining to participate in a 2018 investigation that led to Katz’s yearlong suspension. Her decision to speak in 2021 prompted a new investigation that showed Katz “misrepresented facts or failed to be straightforward” in the initial investigation and had discouraged the woman 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,” according to the statement.
But Katz’s supporters trace his firing to 2020, when he wrote an opinion piece on the website Quillette arguing that Princeton faculty members were going too far in their push for anti-racism changes on campus. He was particularly criticized — including by President Eisgruber ’83 — for calling the student-run Black Justice League “a small local terrorist organization that made life miserable for the many (including the many black students) who did not agree with its members’ demands.” Katz says that because he dared to cross the “mob,” The Daily Princetonian began its own investigation. In February 2021, the newspaper published a story citing alumni who accused Katz of inappropriate conduct with female students.
Katz has rejected the assertions that he had discouraged the woman from seeking care and coming forward, writing that she refused “of her own volition.”
“The University’s decision will have a powerful chilling effect on free speech,” Katz’s attorney, Samantha Harris ’99, told The New York Times, “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.” Neither Katz nor Harris responded to PAW’s requests for comment.
In an essay published online after Katz’s firing, his wife, Solveig Gold ’17, a senior research assistant in Princeton’s James Madison Program and a classics doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge, said the University has subjected him to double jeopardy, punishing him twice for one relationship with a student. She said many have turned on him, but “I am proud to be married to a man who owned up to his one big mistake and repented for it.”
Katz was hired by Princeton in 1998. He was a faculty representative to PAW’s advisory board, with a term set to expire in June 2022.
Eisgruber brought up Katz’s case during his Reunions forum May 21, two days before Katz’s dismissal, saying he couldn’t comment on pending personnel matters but defending Princeton’s approach to free speech. He noted that Princeton has adopted the Chicago Principles, a commitment to free expression, and said he has enforced them “in a number of circumstances involving very uncomfortable speech,” including in a case where a faculty member used the N-word and in conversations about the rights of transgender people.
Eisgruber added that the University has rules for faculty that place restrictions on sexual misconduct. “We take those rules very seriously here, and we believe that a faculty member is bound by those obligations, regardless of how distinguished they may be, and regardless of what their political views may be,” he said.
2 Responses
Harlan Tonie Wright ’63
2 Years AgoPAW’s Report on Dismissal of Professor Katz
The Princeton Alumni Weekly (PAW) has finally reported on the case of professor of classics Joshua Katz and the success of Princeton University in defenestrating him. The brief article posed two different cases, one for his dismissal made by the University and one by Professor Katz in his defense, both suffering from a paucity of facts and information in PAW’s article. The University’s case originated in a consensual relationship that Katz had with a student in 2006-07, for which he had been reprimanded and disciplined after a 2018 investigation for breaking University rules governing faculty-student relationships. The alumna (former student) did not participate in that investigation. In 2021 the investigation was reopened with participation of the alumna and in light of putative new revelations. Katz was accused of misrepresentation of facts and lack of straightforwardness in the 2018 investigation “in an effort to conceal a relationship he knew was prohibited by university rules,” according to the University’s statement. One wonders why this contravention of University rules, to which Katz admitted in 2018, was not sufficient for his dismissal in 2018 but is in 2021. (For details based on more thorough journalistic inquiry see coverage in the Washington Free Beacon on May 17 and June 24.) Only a malignantly biased reading of the reported email history between Katz and the alumna could lead to the inference that he had no regard for her well-being and was not genuinely sorry for the pain he had caused her. The fact that this correspondence continued for 15 years is testimony to his continuing concern.
What had happened between 2018 and 2021 to change the University’s posture and lead it to inflict this double jeopardy? Katz’s case claimed that the reopening of the earlier misconduct investigation was a pretext for punishing him because of a statement he made in a Quillette article criticizing the Black Justice League as a “small local terrorist organization.” PAW omits to mention, in support of Katz’s case, that the University doctored his statement from that article to make him into a poster boy for systemic racism in a freshman orientation video. This was a clear case of slander and character assassination as well as a dismissal of the Chicago Principles to which President Eisgruber with a straight face vigorously claimed the University adhered. Eisgruber contorted the Chicago Principles by intoning that Katz had some obligation under those principles to exercise his free speech “responsibly.”
Princeton has earned its last place standing in the Ivy League for free speech and 135th in the FIRE rankings. PAW’s report on page 16 of its latest issue is an unremarkable professional obituary of an eminent Princeton scholar and teacher. But take heart and read on to page 24 where there is cause for celebration at the filling of four new positions related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, more than making up for the loss of one eminent faculty member. Perhaps PAW should remove its masthead claim to be “An editorially independent magazine by alumni for alumni.”
Ana Samuel ’00
2 Years AgoMore Voices on the Katz Firing
I noticed your very circumspect reporting of Professor Joshua Katz’s firing (On the Campus, July/August issue). I wish you would report more thoroughly on what’s going on, letting both sides speak. The vox populi of Princeton is complex. It’s really quite a riveting drama unfolding and I think alumni should know, as it matters whether Princeton is being led with integrity.
For additional views, I recommend: mathematics professor Sergiu Klainerman’s essay for Tablet, “At Princeton, One Small Step for Free Speech, One Giant Leap for Censorship”; politics professor Robert P. George’s essay in Quillette, “The Case of Joshua Katz”; another Tablet essay by former Scheide Librarian Paul Needham, “Princeton’s Buried Bodies”; University of Chicago professor Clifford Ando ’90’s piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education “Princeton Betrays Its Principles”; and the group Princetonians for Free Speech.