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According to knowledgeable sources, the Princeton Committee on Conference and Faculty Appeal, comprised of 9 faculty members, issued on Tuesday a strongly worded rebuke to a high-ranking official’s summary rejection of a formal complaint seeking an investigation into attacks on the University’s official website portraying Professor Joshua Katz as a racist.
The committee’s detailed letter was in response to an appeal by Professor Sergiu Klainerman of the official rejection. Professor Klainerman's original complaint, joined by seven other Princeton faculty, was that unnamed officials had violated University regulations in using the website to discredit Professor Katz, by smearing him as a racist for a controversial 2020 article criticizing certain race-related demands by activist faculty members.
The appeals committee’s letter found fault with multiple aspects of Vice-Provost for Institutional Equity and Diversity Michele Minter’s December 7, 2021 ruling dismissing the October 4, 2021 complaint, the sources said.
The faculty committee is chaired by Professor Jean Schwarzbauer. Its letter said that all members agreed that the Minter letter dismissing the complaint was contrary to University policies and that the complaint raised a number of issues that should be investigated.
The committee’s harsh assessment contrasted starkly with the tribute to President Eisgruber’s "outspoken defense of free speech” by the Princeton Board of Trustees the day before, in its announcement that it had extended his tenure for “at least five [more] years.”
The Trustees’ high regard for Eisgruber’s stance on free speech also contrasts starkly with a March 15 letter from PFS urging the Princeton Board of Trustees to commission an investigation into the University’s persecution of Katz. And with the blistering assessment by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) of Princeton’s attacks on Katz’s free speech in a March 9 letter sent to the Princeton Board of Trustees. And with the similar assessment by the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA) in a March 29 letter to President Eisgruber. And with a harsh criticism by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) on the same issue.
ACTA, AFA, and FIRE are among the nation’s most respected organizations supporting campus free speech. Yet Eisgruber and the Board of Trustees have ignored the criticisms by ACTA, FIRE, and PFS. Eisgruber rejected the AFA’s criticism in a March 31 letter that implicitly endorsed the same arguments that the 9-member faculty committee has now spurned. Eisgruber’s letter contained numerous misleading statements, which are detailed in a three-part analysis on the PFS website.
The faculty appeals committee has recommended a full investigation. The question is whether the Princeton administration will continue to stonewall.
Open PFS critiques of Eisgruber letter to the Academic Freedom Alliance configuration options
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Free speech is usually described as a right one either has or does not have, relative to the laws of one’s residence. But a right, like a muscle, is only as strong as its use. When my family flew to the United States in 2018, I naively thought that I had escaped the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) systematic suppression of free speech. I believed that I would access Google, YouTube, and Winnie the Pooh without any need for a VPN to circumvent the “Great Firewall of China,” a term used to describe the CCP’s firm control on online content. But I was clueless: I unknowingly carried a part of the repression within me.
In April 1995, University maintenance crews spent two days cleaning “walkways, benches, plazas and walls on campus,” working to remove not dirt or debris, but simple sidewalk chalk. The chalk drawings, according to a report from The Daily Princetonian, consisted of “pro-gay messages” written by hand during Pride Week. After the removal, advocates were rightly in uproar. Following the incident, the University, claiming that the discrepancy had transpired because of “cross-office confusion,” clarified its chalking policy — it was henceforth banned, in all cases.
Three decades on, chalk at Princeton has found itself relegated to dusty trays in classrooms and lecture halls. Hardly anyone — students, activists, artists, campus organizations, candidates, schoolchildren — chalks University grounds anymore. Simply put, the University’s ban has worked. But the question remains: Why is Princeton so afraid of chalk?
There is exactly one kind of institution in the world whose product is “thinking” — the university. This is an existential challenge for every university, Princeton most definitely included, now that nearly all artificial intelligence is purpose-built to offload the hard work of thinking.
Universities need to return to the foundations of learning with trust — and verification — at the heart of their relationship with students. They also need to be far more prescriptive about what learning looks like so that students who arrive with limited capacity for deep reading have the time and space to develop their critical thinking skills.
