Princeton Black Faculty Writes Lengthy List of Demands For University to Follow in Order to Fight Racism

On July 4th, a group of Princeton faculty, mostly consisting of Black professors, wrote a letter to the university with nearly 50 demands, all as part of an effort to combat "anti-Black racism."

The letter was written to Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber, Provost Deborah Prentice, Deans Sanjeev Kulkarni and Jill S. Dolan, Vice President for Campus Life W. Rochelle Calhoun, and members of the Princeton Cabinet.

"Anti-Black racism has a visible bearing upon Princeton’s campus makeup and its hiring practices," the letter said. "It is the problem that faculty of color are routinely called upon to remedy by making ourselves visible; by persuading our white colleagues to overcome bias in hiring, admission, and recruitment efforts; and by serving as mentors and support networks for junior faculty and students seeking to thrive in an environment where they are not prioritized."

The group wants the school to implement changes at the university, faculty, postdoc, graduate, and undergraduate levels.

These professors are urging Princeton leadership to give seats at the "decision-making table" to the Black faculty who are "actively anti-racist and inclusive in their practices." They believe that the Princeton community needs to be educated about "the legacy of slavery and white supremacy."

Some of the other demands include addressing Princeton’s history with slavery as part of their freshman orientation process, rewarding the "invisible work" done by faculty of color with course relief and summer salary, elevating more faculty of color to prominent leadership positions, and removing questions about misdemeanors and felony convictions on all applications for both students and staff. These are just a few of the countless demands these faculty have asked of Princeton leadership.

At Princeton 9% of students are Black, 12% are Hispanic, and 25% are Asian. A total of 44% of students at the university are white.

In 2019 the average base salary for a college professor in America was $88,706. The average salary for a Princeton professor is $213,769, according to Business Insider.

"What we offer here are principled steps which, if implemented with care and in consultation with all affected parties, could immediately and powerfully move the dial further toward justice for this campus and, given Princeton’s influence, for the world," the letter concluded.

Princeton has yet to comment on the letter.

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Universities Sowing the Seeds of Their Own Obsolescence

When mobs tore down a statue of Ulysses S. Grant and defaced a monument to African American veterans of the Civil War, many people wondered whether the protesters had ever learned anything in high school or college.

Did any of these iconoclasts know the difference between Grant and Robert E. Lee? Could they recognize the name "Gettysburg"? Could they even identify the decade in which the Civil War was fought?

Universities are certainly teaching our youth to be confident, loud and self-righteous. But the media blitz during these last several weeks of protests, riots and looting also revealed a generation that is poorly educated and yet petulant and self-assured without justification.

Many of the young people on the televised front lines of the protests are in their 20s. But most appear juvenile, at least in comparison to their grandparents -- survivors of the Great Depression and World War II.

How can so many so sheltered and prolonged adolescents claim to be all-knowing? Ask questions like these, and the answers ultimately lead back to the university.

Millions of those who graduate from college or drop out do so in arrears. There is some $1.5 trillion in aggregate student debt in the U.S. Such burdens sometimes delay marriage. They discourage child-rearing. They make home ownership hard -- along with all the other experiences we associate with the transition to adulthood.

The universities, some with multibillion-dollar endowments, will accept no moral responsibility. They are not overly worried that many of their indebted graduates discover their majors don't translate into well-paid jobs or guarantee employers that grads can write, speak or think cogently.

One unintended consequence of the chaotic response to the COVID-19 epidemic and the violence that followed the police killing of George Floyd is a growing re-examination of the circumstances that birthed the mass protests.

There would be far less college debt if higher education, rather than the federal government, guaranteed its own students' loans. If universities backed loans with their endowments and infrastructure, college presidents could be slashing costs. They would ensure that graduates were more likely to get good-paying jobs thanks to rigorous coursework and faculty accountability.

Taxpayers who are hectored about their supposed racism, homophobia and sexism don't enjoy such finger-wagging from loud, sheltered, 20-something moralists. Perhaps taxpayers will no longer have to subsidize the abuse if higher education is deemed to be a politicized institution and thus its endowment income ruled to be fully taxable.

If socialism has become a campus creed, maybe Ivy League schools can be hit with an annual "wealth tax" on their massive endowments in order to redistribute revenue to poorer colleges.

It is hard to square the circle of angry graduates having no jobs with their unaccountable professors who so poorly trained students while enjoying lifelong tenure. Why does academia guarantee lifetime employment to those who cannot guarantee that a graduate gets a decent job?

The epidemic and lockdown required distance learning, but at full price. The idea that universities can still charge regular rates when students are forced to stay home is not just an unsustainable practice, but veritable suicide. If one can supposedly learn well enough from downloads, Zoom talks and Skype lectures, then why pay $50,000 or more for that service from your basement?

Universities are renaming buildings and encouraging statue removal and cancel culture. But they assume they will always have a red line to the frenzied trajectory of the mob they helped birth. If the slaveholder and the robber baron from the distant past deserve no statue, no eponymous hallway or plaza, then why should the names Yale and Stanford be exempt from the frenzied name-changing and iconoclasm? Are they seen as billion-dollar brands, akin to Windex or Coke, that stamp their investor students as elite "winners"?

The current chaos has posed existential questions of fairness and transparency that the university cannot answer because to do so would reveal utter hypocrisy.

Instead, the university's defense has been to virtue-signal left-wing social activism to hide or protect its traditional self-interested mode of profitable business for everyone -- staff, faculty, administration, contractors -- except the students who borrow to pay for a lot of it.

How strange that higher education's monotonous embrace of virtue signaling, political proselytizing and loud social justice activism is now sowing the seeds of its own obsolescence and replacement.

If being "woke" means that the broke and unemployed are graduating to ignorantly smashing statues, denying free speech to others and institutionalizing cancel culture, then the public would rather pass on what spawned all of that in the first place.

Taxpayers do not yet know what to replace the university with -- wholly online courses and lectures, apolitical new campuses or broad-based vocational education -- only that a once hallowed institution is becoming McCarthyite, malignant and, in the end, just a bad deal.

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Because Racism: Charter School System to Remove 'Work Hard. Be Nice.' as Its Official Slogan

On Wednesday the charter school organization The Knowledge is Power Program, commonly know as KIPP, announced that it will be retiring the slogan "Work hard. Be Nice." as school officials believe the phrase is counterproductive to abolishing systemic racism.

Richard Barth, KIPP Foundation CEO, said in a press release that after a letter from KIPP Co-Founder Dave Levin about the ways in which the organization can change its culture, he decided to axe the slogan as it "diminishes the significant effort required to dismantle systemic racism."

"Over the last few weeks, we have all been working hard to turn words into action, recognizing that there is still much more work to be done to eliminate any practice at KIPP that furthers systemic racism, anti-Blackness, and inequities experienced by our students, alumni, families, teachers, and staff," said Barth.

Levin's letter was full of white guilt, expressing how he takes blame for not doing enough on behalf of KIPP to stop racial injustice. The practice of disciplining students of color instead of making them feel "affirmed, uplifted, and celebrated" was wrong, he said.

"In recent years, I have come face to face with the understanding that white supremacy doesn’t just mean the public and hateful displays of racism; it applies to all aspects of the world that are set up for the benefit of and perpetuation of power for white people at the expense of Black, Latinx, and other People of Color," said Levin.

"Work Hard. Be Nice." certainly has the outward appearance of promoting values that would make life better for every person who chose to espouse them. But to Barth, the idea of being nice and working hard offered too narrow of a future for children who might want to be lazy and mean in order to get what they want. 

"[The slogan] places value on being compliant and submissive, supports the illusion of meritocracy, and does not align with our vision of students being free to create the future they want," his statement read.

In addition to the removal of the slogan, KIPP also plans to distribute grant money to communities most affected by the novel coronavirus and from racial trauma, eliminating discipline practices in schools that officials determine to be inequitable, providing a senior equity officer, along with countless other actions spurred by the killing of George Floyd.

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The Decline of Free Speech Zones

The term “free speech zone” can be misleading. While the name implies a policy that promotes free expression, free speech zones do the opposite. They confine political demonstrations to a small, often secluded, area on campus and typically require students to get advance permission to demonstrate.

In Oregon, a pro-life group, Students for Life, filed a lawsuit against Chemeketa Community College in May to challenge the college’s free speech zone policy.

The college restricts outdoor speech to two small “free speech areas” and requires a two-week notice to use them. Students for Life claims that the policy violates their right to free speech and that the required notice prevents them from engaging in spontaneous political expression.

Even at schools that claim to have eliminated their free speech zone policies, though, colleges still restrict speech. In 2003, Western Illinois University said that it would eliminate its free speech area policy. However, when students protested to legalize marijuana in 2019, campus police told them to stop because they were outside the school’s free speech zone.

Thankfully, colleges have been cleaning up their act in recent years: free speech zones are on the decline. According to FIRE’s 2020 Spotlight on Speech Codes, only 8.3 percent of surveyed schools enforced free speech zone policies, down from 10.5 percent in 2019.

State legislatures have also acted against free speech zones. Seventeen states have passed legislation preventing free speech zone policies: Virginia, Missouri, Arizona, Kentucky, Colorado, Utah, North Carolina, Tennessee, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Arkansas, South Dakota, Iowa, Alabama, Oklahoma, and Texas.

Those annoying limitations on students exercising their Constitutional rights on campus may soon be a relic of the past.

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