Princeton vs. Dissent

Eminent linguist Joshua Katz was fired Monday by his longtime employer Princeton University in what seems (despite the school’s denials) to be a straightforward act of political retaliation. His offense? Questioning woke orthodoxy.

Katz dared write a 2020 article criticizing a letter signed by many Princeton faculty and students. That missive demanded the school take such “anti-racist” actions as axing SAT requirements, giving extra sabbatical time to “faculty of color” and creating a nebulous committee to hold the entire university accountable for its efforts on this front.

In other words, the signatories demanded a total sacrifice of academic freedom. Katz spoke up to defend the real mission of the university — to educate, not indoctrinate — and now has paid the price.

Princeton claims his firing is due to his behavior during a years-old investigation of a relationship he had with a student, but Katz was already punished for that infraction — and the timing is utterly transparent.

Katz is hardly the only academic purged for speaking his mind. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) reports that at least 111 professors were targeted for ideological reasons last year.

Wokeism keeps piling up heads: Harvard suspended economist Roland Fryer from teaching for two years (citing sex-harassment claims) after his research challenged orthodoxies on race and class. Georgetown Law suspended professor Ilya Shapiro indefinitely over tweets about Joe Biden’s vow to consider only black women for his first Supreme Court pick.

It’s all about imposing draconian rules for what professors (and students) can say, write or think.

Debating ideas you disagree with is the

sine qua non of liberal democracy. That makes the woke effort to destroy campus dissent not just a war on academic freedom, but an attack on civil society itself.