Three hundred and fifty members of Princeton’s staff signed an open letter calling for extreme measures to fight racism on the school’s campus. The letter contains just short of 50 demands, some mild, many radical. If all of the demands were met, Princeton would be required to hire more people of color, pay them more, remove questions about misdemeanors or felonies from admissions applications, create a center “specifically dedicated to racism and anti-racism”, and much more. 

Perhaps the most troubling demand in the article was to “Constitute a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty.” What counts as racism is to be subjectively determined by this panel.

Well, there ya have it.  You and I don’t have to have a, ahem, Princeton degree to know how this will play out.  Basically a bunch of Social Justice Warrior professors would be peer pressured into silencing conservative voices. We saw it happen recently when a Stockton University student faced disciplinary charges for changing his Zoom background to a picture of the President.

Princeton previously adopted the University of Chicago’s statement on freedom of expression. 

The University’s fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed. It is for the individual members of the University community, not for the University as an institution, to make those judgments for themselves, and to act on those judgments not by seeking to suppress speech, but by openly and vigorously contesting the ideas that they oppose.

Sadly the social justice mob is fighting this sentiment, and the university is caving. 

Journalists for The Atlantic reached out to the signatories of the controversial demands with some important clarifying questions: what is the definition of racism and how can they trust the committee?

Only 17 faculty members had the courage to respond. 

Some were offended.

One professor said, “It is disappointing to me that in a fairly detailed and comprehensive letter concerning anti-racism, journalists such as yourself and others have seized on a single detail and created more discourse about it than about 97% of the rest of the letter.” 

Well, maybe because the one part of the demand list is especially troubling. 

Other signers expressed regret, claims The Atlantic. “Of course I don’t want that,” replied several faculty members. One went as far to say, “I deeply regret signing that letter.” 

“I abhor racism but bristle at the idea of curtailing freedom of exchanges in an academic environment. As we move forward, I believe we will find ways to ensure a balance between open debate and dialogue and a mindful attention to racial discrimination,” stated sociology professor Patricia Fernandez-Kelly. 

Faculty members were signing the demands out of fear of being labelled a racist. The left’s fear mongering is controlling the college campus, indoctrinating the future leaders of the country by threat of public ostracization and shame. 

George Washington once said, “If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”  Who knew these “dumb and silent” sheep would be Ivy League professors? 

Hat Tip: The Atlantic

Image Credit: Wikimedia

About The Author

Mark was a co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, and served as the national coordinator. He left the organization to work more broadly on expanding the self-governance movement beyond the partisan divide. Mark appears regularly on television in outlets as diverse as MSNBC, ABC, NBC, Fox News, CNN, Bloomberg, Fox Business and the BBC. He’s highly sought after for the tea party perspective from print and electronic media outlets, from the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, L.A. Times, Washington Examiner, Politico and the The Hill. Mark blogs at MarkMeckler.com, and his opinion editorials regularly run in many of the leading political newspapers both on and offline. Mark has a BA in English from San Diego State University and graduated with honors from University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law in 1988. He practiced real estate and business law for almost a decade. For the last eleven years of his legal career he specialized in Internet advertising law. When not fighting for the future of our nation, Mark is an avid horseman, and lives in rural northern California with his wife Patty and two children.

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