The Diversity, Equity and Inclusion office of Princeton University has a message for incoming students: It wants them to participate in “tearing down” the very institution they have worked so hard to attend. And to drive this message home, the office is more than happy to tear down those who dissent from its official orthodoxy.
As members of the class of 2025 arrive on campus, they receive a mandatory injection not of a vaccine against COVID, but of indoctrination.
An official video freshmen are required to watch presents an utterly one-sided and negative picture of Princeton’s history. The video and the accompanying Web site are expensively produced. Yet slick production values do nothing to offset the tendentious slant.
The video/site includes a two-minute discourse in which classics professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta characterizes free speech as a “privilege,” rather than a right, and in which he disparages the speech of others with whom he disagrees as “masculine-ized bravado.” Padilla Peralta goes on to extol “free speech and intellectual discourse that is [sic] flexed to one specific aim, and that aim is the promotion of social justice, and an anti-racist social justice at that.”
While he is certainly entitled to his opinions, the absence of other perspectives on free speech suggests a jaundiced version of our fundamental commitment to free speech, codified in Princeton’s “Rights, Rules and Responsibilities” document.
There’s also a weird, out-of-context presentation of racist views, such as those of the 20th-century physicist William Shockley, a figure with no notable connection to Princeton.
Worst, the site singles out classics professor Joshua Katz in a manner designed to stigmatize him as racist, based on his criticism last summer of a defunct student group calling itself the Black Justice League in an article in Quillette.
The D.E.I. office needs to D.I.E. It serves no valid purpose and it should be shut down, with its budget redirected to actual education.
Plus, from a friend who’s a Princeton alumn: “President Eisengruber, do you endorse the official orientation poisoning the well against a particular tenured faculty member? If not, will you issue an official disavowal and apology? Will you discipline or terminate those responsible?”