(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) Professor Joshua Katz of Princeton University, who recently came under fire from college activists, has been fired from his position, with many suspecting he became victim to the woke mob.
While the reported reasoning for firing the tenured professor was not as forthcoming in an investigation about a sexual relationship he had with an undergraduate student 15 years ago, some have suggested it was actually because of his comments regarding a student group, according to Legal Insurrection.
Two years ago, Katz described a student group called the Black Justice League as “a small terrorist organization” and said he was “embarrassed for” his colleagues who signed a letter which stated that “Anti-Blackness is foundational to America.”
Katz “is not facing dismissal for his speech,” a New York Times article on the matter reported, but “for what a university report says was his failure to be totally forthcoming about a sexual relationship with a student 15 years ago that he has already been punished for.”
Katz was investigated and punished in 2017 for the relationship, and the incident was buried until Katz’s comments on the campus advocacy group.
“Princeton will bend over backwards to say this was not double jeopardy; that it wasn’t simply splitting hairs to find new grounds to punish Dr. Katz for a relationship he had already been punished for,” said Katz’s attorney, Samantha Harris.
“But whether it was or wasn’t, the message to would-be dissenters is clear: the price of speaking out is having your personal life turned inside out looking for information to destroy you. How many people are willing to roll that dice?”
Katz wrote a piece regarding his dismissal:
“Nearly two years ago, I wrote in these pages, ‘I survived cancellation at Princeton.’ I was wrong.
“The university where I taught for nearly a quarter of a century and which promoted me to the tenured ranks in 2006, has revoked my tenure and dismissed me. Whoever you are and whatever your beliefs, this should terrify you,” Katz wrote.
“Why would one of the country’s leading educational institutions do this to a successful faculty member who once made a grave mistake, admitted to this mistake as soon as he was investigated for it and served his time without complaint?” Katz wrote.
“Unfortunately, the current environment makes the question all too easy to answer: In the summer of George Floyd, certain opinions about the state of America that would have been considered normal only a few months earlier suddenly became anathema.
“For better or worse, I was the first on campus to articulate some of these opinions, publicly criticizing a number of “antiracist” demands, some of them clearly racist and illegal, that hundreds of my colleagues had signed on to in an open letter to the administration in early July 2020.”
