Sic Notus Ulixes?: Responding to Joshua Katz
The following is a letter I wrote this last Friday as I was trying to process a distressing piece published by Joshua Katz, a Professor in the Classics department at Princeton. Fortunately, since that time others have responded to Katz’s actions with clear and forceful rebuke. I thought, however, it would be worth sharing my thoughts in support of the growing chorus of voices condemning his words:
Joshua Katz is a respected scholar and teacher in the Classics department at Princeton, in which I am currently a graduate student. He has, on a number of occasions, gone out of his way to be kind and welcoming toward me. It was, therefore, with a feeling of sadness that I read his self-styled “declaration of independence,” recently published in the online journal Quillette in response to a Princeton faculty letter making demands for anti-racist measures at the University.
I might normally have some qualms about clashing in public with Professor Katz, but given his own commitment to freedom of expression, I feel emboldened to assume that he will appreciate being challenged.
Professor Katz disagrees with many of the demands made in the aforementioned faculty letter. Fine. So much is his right. And it is his right to say so. He also ought to be able to express a dissent without fear of reprisal.
However, he has no right to expect that his dissent not be sharply criticized in turn. One could object to many of the specific points of his “declaration,” which contains a number of instances of tendentious interpretation and abuse of lexical items that should make any philologist squirm. To characterize a student activist group as a “terrorist organization” without articulating a robust definition of terrorism and demonstrating that the group meets that definition is grossly irresponsible. The fact that some on the activist left are also guilty of imprecise applications of terms of abuse does nothing to cushion this. Perhaps this was a badly misjudged joke?
The best Katz offers to back up his use of the term “terrorist” is an anecdote about an alleged incident on Instagram for which he provides no documentation. Even if some cyberbullying incident took place exactly as he describes, if this is, in fact, “one of the most evil things” Katz has ever witnessed, it is difficult not to envy the cloistered nature of his consciousness. He is, for instance, apparently unaware of the fact that there has recently been widely published a video of a white police officer named Derek Chauvin, aided by other officers, murdering a Black American named George Floyd in broad daylight by kneeling on his neck for at least 8 minutes and 15 seconds, despite the fact that he protested at least twenty times that he was unable to breathe. If Katz is aware of this, he must be arguing in bad faith, or else he entertains some private and inscrutable definition of evil. This all from a man who complains of that others’ letters have been “intemperately worded.”
More broadly, however, I object not to Professor Katz’s dissent from this faculty letter per se, but rather to his means of articulating that dissent. A person finding herself in disagreement with a circulated letter must consider first the nature of her objection. Do I agree with this letter’s premise? If I agree with its premise, do I disagree with its proposed solutions?
In the first case, the appropriate response is an explicit and forthright rejection of that premise. In the second case, a variety of options are open. One can either decide, as Professor Katz himself points out, to sign onto a letter, despite some scruples, for the sake of solidarity. Or else one can decide to withhold one’s signature. One can further seek to suggest a productive set of criticisms and counterproposals.
Professor Katz does not make entirely clear whether he rejects this letter’s most important premise: that anti-Black racism remains a problem on Princeton’s campus that is not adequately addressed by existing policies. He focuses instead on quibbling about some of the letter’s less central premises and some of its proposed solutions. If he rejects the basic premise of the letter, he ought to state this more explicitly. If he primarily objects to a number of the proposed solutions, it is incumbent on him to offer some proposal of his own, beyond conceding that a few of the faculty letter’s demands are palatable. Instead, he has opted for a self-aggrandizing “declaration,” one which casts him as a heroic opponent of a new regime of oppression. Katz speaks of embarrassment — does this not raise a blush? Whatever the precise nature of his objection, his chosen method of expressing himself seems tailored to advance no cause so much as self-regard.
It is hard to deny that there is a form of courage in what Katz has done. He will undoubtedly face some ostracism from undergraduate and graduate students, as well as from fellow faculty. He has, of course, set himself up such that this expected outcome can only confirm for himself, and for others who think as he does, the righteous and necessary nature of his protest. If this happens, I will have complicated feelings about such ostracism. On the one hand, people have every right to choose not to associate with someone if they believe that his publicly expressed opinions are harmful. On the other hand, we can be left with little doubt that any such ostracism will serve to validate the self-valorizing narrative of victimization that so often undergirds rhetorical positions like his.
This, however, is ultimately a question of the man himself, and how I, my peers, and his colleagues will comport ourselves toward him. Ultimately more important are the ideas at stake here. In these terms, I am left to conclude that, whatever he believes he is doing, Professor Katz’s stance of high-mindedness is nothing more than a Trojan horse, barely managing to serve the wily purpose for which it was crafted: masking an essentially regressive response to efforts to forward necessary social progress. In this sense, his letter strikes me as more cowardly than courageous. As such, it can be spared no criticism.
William Dingee
PhD Candidate in Classics
Princeton University
wdingee@princeton.edu
