Katz Firing

Alan 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.