Tuesday 24 May 2022 02:13 PM Princeton professor claims he was fired for his view on campus politics trends now
A tenured Princeton University classics professor who was fired this week has claimed that the move was in retaliation for his criticism of demands that fellow faculty members made in the summer of 2020.
Princeton said on Monday that professor Joshua Katz, 51, had been fired after he 'failed to be straightforward' in a 2018 misconduct probe regarding his relationship with a student.
But in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Katz alleged that he was truly fired for 'publicly criticizing a number of “antiracist” demands, some of them clearly racist and illegal' that hundreds of his colleagues circulated in an open letter.
The open letter in July 2020, shortly after the murder of George Floyd and subsequent protests over racial justice, demanded among other things additional compensation and sabbatical for 'faculty of color'.
Katz responded with a sharply worded essay criticizing many of the demands, and now he alleges that it is this dissenting view, rather than his previously litigated romance with a student, that led to his termination by the board of trustees.
The recommended dismissal accuses classics professor Joshua Katz of not cooperating with a 2018 investigation into a relationship he had with a student in 2006
Princeton said in a statement to The New York Times that Katz was fired after officials received a 'detailed written complaint from an alumna who had a consensual relationship with Dr. Katz while she was an undergraduate under his academic supervision.'
The complaint was filed in 2021. Following an investigation on the back of the complaint, the school discovered 'multiple instances in which Dr. Katz misrepresented facts or failed to be straightforward,' during the original 2018 probe.
Katz was fired following a vote by the Princeton University's board of trustees - who were voting on recommendations from the school's president Christopher Eisgruber, 60, and Gene Jarrett, Princeton's dean of faculty.
According to Katz, the school failed to notify him that he had been fired and that they sent an email to the wrong address.
The professor said that he only learned of his termination from his wife, who learned of the news herself when she was contacted by The New York Times, Katz told the National Review.
In 2018, Katz was suspended by the school without pay for a year due to his consensual relationship with the student. That relationship occurred in 2006.
Katz's lawyer Samantha Harris told the National Review that the professor offered to resign in the weeks leading up to his dismissal.
Harris said: 'I think that it speaks to the climate of pressure in these politically charged situations, that they felt that they absolutely couldn’t forgo the ability to say, ‘We were going to fire him.'
Separately, Harris told The New York Times: 'In our view, this is the culmination of the witch hunt that began days after Professor Katz published an article in Quillette that led people to call for his termination.'
The move by University President Christopher Eisgruber has many accusing the university of targeting Katz for his criticism of the school’s liberal staff and racial politics
The move by Eisgruber, 60, is being viewed by many as a politically motivated one, with many accusing the university of targeting Katz for his outspoken criticism of the school’s liberal staff and policies and not for the settled misconduct claims
There had been calls for Katz to be fired for years following student uproar over the educator's criticism of liberal school policies and racial politics that emerged after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020.
The 2021 probe came shortly after Katz said he was 'embarrassed' by a slew of questionable policies passed by the New Jersey university after the May 2020 murder of Floyd.
Some of the programs Katz found fault with were a campaign to address the school's 'racist' history and requests to give black professors more sabbatical time and higher salaries than their white counterparts.
Katz, who started teaching at Princeton in 1998, slammed the school's proposals in an essay published to online magazine Quillette in July 2020, as Black Lives Matter protests and other racial justice movements quickly spread across the country.
In the op-ed, titled A Declaration of Independence by a Princeton Professor, Katz said the 'proposals, if implemented, would lead to civil war on campus and erode even further public confidence in how elite institutions of higher education operate.'
He also said of the proposals, aired in a 4,100-word Princeton Faculty letter signed by students, staff, and alumni, that he was 'embarrassed' for his colleagues that signed it.
'I am friends with many people who signed the Princeton letter, which requests and in some places demands a dizzying array of changes, and I support their right to speak as they see fit,' Katz wrote.
'But I am embarrassed for them,' he went on. 'To judge from conversations with friends and all too much online scouting, there are two camps: those cheering them on and those who wouldn’t dream of being associated with such a document. No one is in the middle.'
The investigation, which looked into a relationship Katz had with a student in 2006, saw the tenured professor suspended, and was subsequently resolved internally. However, more than a year later, a second student-led probe
