BY JOHN K. WILSON

This week, the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA) wrote a letter to the president of Princeton, asking him to censor a campus website in order to protect a conservative professor’s hurt feelings. This letter is not a defense of academic freedom; it’s an attack on academic freedom. And the AFA is not alone; several other groups funded from the right have joined in this campaign to demand censorship in the name of free speech.

The story began in 2020 when Princeton professor Joshua Katz wrote an article in Quillette criticizing ideas for racial justice on campus, and referred to a defunct black student group from a few years earlier as a “terrorist organization.” Here’s how the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) described what happened: “Even though there was no investigation, no findings, and no formal censure of Katz, ever since then, Princeton has included a description of Katz’s speech in a training module’s ‘virtual gallery’ about the school’s history of systemic racism.”

Like Katz, I denounced the 2020 letter signed by numerous Princeton faculty because one proposal endangered academic freedom, and I would strongly denounce any effort to have Katz investigated or punished for his views. But Katz wasn’t punished. And that standard of free speech belongs to Katz’s critics as well as Katz himself.

The AFA argues that this website is “retaliation” against Katz. Retaliation is most commonly a technical legal term used in harassment and discrimination cases, and has been used to try to suppress academic freedom in cases such as Laura Kipnis, who was wrongly accused of retaliation for publishing criticism of how Northwestern handled a sexual assault case. Retaliation should only refer to some kind of official penalty. Criticism is not retaliation. Criticism may be unfair, but the response should be counterspeech, not censorship. Redefining criticism as retaliation creates the danger of seeking to end the retaliation by silencing the criticism. And that’s precisely what the AFA letter demands.

The AFA overstates what kind of criticism is happening: “Professor Katz is held out as an example of a professor making a racist statement.” In reality, it is a webpage on “Race and Free Speech” that includes a section about Katz titled “Faculty and Free Speech.” It quotes critics of Katz (none of whom call him racist), but everything in it seems truthful and accurate. No one can doubt that Katz sparked a racial controversy at Princeton. Should colleges avoid documenting racial controversies on campus if it might offend a professor?

The AFA claims that “The university climate would quickly become poisonous and intolerable if administrative units on campus made it a practice to hold up dissenting members of the faculty for ritual condemnation.” I don’t think so. What’s so poisonous about condemnation? The AFA letter is condemning the administration, I’m condemning the AFA letter, and condemnation is an essential part of free debate. It’s far more plausible to argue that the university climate would become poisonous and intolerable if it was a practice to denounce people you disagree with as terrorists, as Katz did. But the purpose of academic freedom is not to enforce tone policing or repression of criticism. The criticism of Katz should not be censored for precisely the same reasons why the criticism by Katz should not be censored. Whether you think the criticism by Katz is terrible or the criticism of Katz is terrible (or both), we should all stand for the idea that both kinds of criticism must be permitted at a free university.

Except the Academic Freedom Alliance is taking the opposite view. It says that faculty should be free to say terrible things about students, but no staff can be allowed to say anything mean about a professor. This kind of hypocritical standard is untenable.

Asking the president of a university to censor a university website is no different than demanding that a president censor the alumni magazine if it publishes something critical of a professor. The fact that content is produced by a staff member does not mean that the central administration should be controlling it or banning it.

Princeton’s official Statement on Freedom of Expression (adopted from the Chicago principles) expressly forbids the kind of censorship demanded by the AFA: “Because the University is committed to free and open inquiry in all matters, it guarantees all members of the University community the broadest possible latitude to speak, write, listen, challenge, and learn.” Got that? “All members of the University community.” Not just faculty. So the president of the University cannot order censorship of a website, even if it is run by staff rather than faculty. And the president cannot ban staff from discussing Katz at orientation. “Free and open inquiry in all matters” needs to mean something, and it applies to speech that conservatives don’t like, too.

The AFA letter is similar to a formal complaint filed by eight Princeton faculty last fall seeking to have the website banned and its creators punished as harassers. 

After that call for censorship was dismissed by the administration, on March 15, 2022, Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS) sent a letter to the Princeton trustees demanding that they commission a formal investigation into the criticism of Katz. The PFS letter complained that the ruling made an “extremely narrow definition of ‘harassment’” in the free speech policy by using the standard definition of harassment as a form of discrimination based on certain categories (such as race). Instead, PFS calls for a novel and dangerously expansive definition that says ideological criticism is a form of harassment. The PFS letter asks: “Is the Board of Trustees going let [sic] stand an interpretation that guts the University’s free speech rule?” In reality, it’s the PFS interpretation of harassment that would gut the free speech policy by exempting criticism of others from its protection. When criticism becomes defined as harassment, free speech is imperiled. Indeed, under the PFS interpretation, Katz’s original article could have been deemed harassment when it should be protected free speech.

While PFS called for an investigation, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) wrote a March 4, 2022 letter to the Princeton trustees demanding their immediate intervention to censor the website. According to ACTA, “it is the board’s duty to direct the administration to cease and desist from this damaging assault on a member of the Princeton faculty and to tender an official apology…” It should be noted that the AFA (which is basically Princeton professor Keith Whittington, the chair of its Academic Committee) has done enormous good in protecting academic freedom and until now I have agreed with every statement from the AFA. But sometimes personal friendships can cause principles to go astray. Katz, in an essay defending his Quillette piece (“I stand by every word”) and confessing his guilt about sleeping with one of his students, wrote: “thanks to the Academic Freedom Alliance and many individuals around the world who have reached out to me, I have this year gained more, and better, friends than I lost.” Katz is one of the founding members of the AFA, and clearly his friends are defending him against what they see as an unfair criticism. 

But academic freedom must include the right to criticize faculty, as even the AFA acknowledges: “For university officials in their individual capacities to sharply criticize a professor for his speech is one thing. For the administration to memorialize criticism and to highlight it as the introduction of every student to the university campus is something else.” Is it something else? It sounds like exactly the same thing: Criticism. And criticism is protected free speech. Why shouldn’t we “memorialize criticism” (that is, put it on a website)? Why shouldn’t students find out about what Katz wrote?

Unfortunately, the AFA appears to call for a university-wide ban on any criticism of any faculty in any website, event, or other activity organized by a staffer: “We call on the university to refrain from using its administrative resources to target Professor Katz or other members of the faculty in its official activities and programming.” This would be censorship on a breathtaking scale.

Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber responded to the AFA by noting that he would “resist any suggestion of censorship.” Eisgruber added, “I find that request troubling, and I would need to understand better how you reconcile it with the principles of academic freedom and free speech that you champion.”

It’s astonishing to me that a tenured professor who is not being punished in any way can receive an outpouring of support from numerous national groups demanding the intervention of top officials in order to banish mere criticism of a professor. And it’s remarkable how often “free speech” can be invoked to demand censorship.

John K. Wilson was a 2019-20 fellow with the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, and is the author of eight books, including Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies.