I agree with my classmate, Tizgel High ’00: Princeton and its peers need to focus on truth, and its corollaries understanding and atonement will follow. However, in this essay’s call for “defense of free speech, academic freedom, and the rule of law,” I do not quite hear the focus on truth that I think necessary for a university whose ancient motto is, after all, Dei sub numine viget, “under the presence of God she flourishes,” which surely implies a commitment to the pursuit of objective truth wherever it leads. Scholarship does not need to be “woke” to acknowledge our nation’s grievous record of racism, it simply needs to be honest — and there are undeniably political schemes afoot from certain conservative quarters which would suppress such honesty.
But I also agree with Jordana Rothstein ’05. While there certainly have been justified, intelligent academic criticisms leveled at the State of Israel before and after Oct. 7, there has also inarguably been a great deal of nonsense, lies, and slander, some of it emanating from the Princeton professoriate. President Eisgruber would not simply double down on a commitment to free speech in the face of other forms of patent prejudice, he would also signal a commitment to contesting such rank dishonesty — a commitment which, in the face of so much unmeasured, ill-informed anti-Zionist and settler-colonialism “scholarship,” has been lacking.
As Danielle Allen ’93, a classicist of the first rank, could surely tell us, the ancient Greek ideal of parrhesia that has informed her so much of her own important scholarship translates not so much as “free speech” as “speaking truth no matter the consequences,” and this, rather than academic freedom per se, should be Princeton’s guiding light.
I agree with my classmate, Tizgel High ’00: Princeton and its peers need to focus on truth, and its corollaries understanding and atonement will follow. However, in this essay’s call for “defense of free speech, academic freedom, and the rule of law,” I do not quite hear the focus on truth that I think necessary for a university whose ancient motto is, after all, Dei sub numine viget, “under the presence of God she flourishes,” which surely implies a commitment to the pursuit of objective truth wherever it leads. Scholarship does not need to be “woke” to acknowledge our nation’s grievous record of racism, it simply needs to be honest — and there are undeniably political schemes afoot from certain conservative quarters which would suppress such honesty.
But I also agree with Jordana Rothstein ’05. While there certainly have been justified, intelligent academic criticisms leveled at the State of Israel before and after Oct. 7, there has also inarguably been a great deal of nonsense, lies, and slander, some of it emanating from the Princeton professoriate. President Eisgruber would not simply double down on a commitment to free speech in the face of other forms of patent prejudice, he would also signal a commitment to contesting such rank dishonesty — a commitment which, in the face of so much unmeasured, ill-informed anti-Zionist and settler-colonialism “scholarship,” has been lacking.
As Danielle Allen ’93, a classicist of the first rank, could surely tell us, the ancient Greek ideal of parrhesia that has informed her so much of her own important scholarship translates not so much as “free speech” as “speaking truth no matter the consequences,” and this, rather than academic freedom per se, should be Princeton’s guiding light.