I remember how it was -- JR
Inside the Investigation of Axed Princeton Prof Joshua Katz
Princeton University ignored extensive exculpatory evidence in its investigation of Joshua Katz, the tenured classics professor axed last month over alleged actions related to his consensual relationship with a former student.
Announcing the unceremonious dismissal, Princeton said Katz had dissuaded the former student from participating in a 2018 probe into the affair and discouraged her from "seeking mental health care" while she was an undergraduate. Both findings were based on excerpts of a voluminous email correspondence between Katz and the alumna, exchanged over 13 years, in which she sent him professions of love, allegations of "abuse," and threats of suicide.
This report is based on a review of all the materials Katz provided to the university, according to two sources with knowledge of the situation, including more than 3,000 emails between Katz and his former student. That broader correspondence suggests that Princeton seized on unrepresentative exchanges to make its determinations, cherry-picking Katz’s messages and ignoring inconsistencies in the alumna’s story.
In fact, their exchanges show the alumna declined to participate in the 2018 inquiry of her own volition and that Katz went out of his way to avoid pressuring her into that decision. "I honestly don't want to put any pressure on you whatsoever to do or not do anything," he wrote on April 11, 2018, as Princeton was investigating the affair. "The decision here has to be yours."
Katz did admit in three 2018 emails to dissuading the former student from seeking therapy her senior year. But the emails show Katz admitted to many things he did not do when the alumna accused him of wrongdoing, casting doubt on the veracity of that admission. The emails also show that, at other times, Katz told the alumna to seek psychiatric care. "Please remember that the most important thing is that you take care of yourself," he told her in March 2008. "I'm counting on you to do this—and if you feel you can't, then you *must* get help immediately."
The university’s investigative report, which formed the basis for Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber’s recommendation to dismiss Katz, ignored those emails, according to four sources who reviewed the report, one of whom provided the Washington Free Beacon with a list of the emails cited in its appendix. It also ignored a forensic evaluation of Katz by one of the most distinguished psychiatrists in the country, Frank Dattilio, who concluded that the beleaguered professor would admit to "behaviors that he never engaged in for the sake of placating" the alumna.
Katz retained Dattilio, a household name among forensic psychiatrists who has provided hundreds of psychological evaluations to federal courts and law enforcement agencies, to shed light on why he "might admit to doing things he has not done," according to a copy of the evaluation Katz shared with the Free Beacon. That evaluation offered critical context for Katz’s apparent admission, in his email exchanges with his former student, that he had discouraged her from going to therapy.
Katz was "genuinely concerned" the alumna would harm herself, Dattilio, who holds joint appointments with Harvard Medical School and the University of Pennsylvania, told Princeton. He "does not handle intense, volatile emotions very well" and will admit "to doing or saying things he has never done in order to quell emotional upheaval."
Princeton’s investigative report, according to the sources who reviewed it, dismissed Dattilio’s conclusions in a couple sentences, describing them as a "post-hoc, self-serving interpretation" of Katz’s emails.
The report’s omissions bolster the argument, made by liberals and conservatives alike, that Princeton’s investigation was a pretext to fire a tenured professor for political speech. The university disciplined Katz for the relationship in 2018 as a result of a third-party complaint, but decided to reopen an investigation after Katz panned the school’s racial politics in 2020, incurring the wrath of Eisgruber.
The second time around, his former student—a seasoned Democratic operative who worked for Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and her local party chapter—participated in the proceedings, supplying Princeton with a handful of incriminating emails.
In response, Katz turned over every exchange he could find between himself and his former student. "Anyone who reads through all of them," he wrote in a statement to the university in October 2021, "will see two deeply troubled people, not a saint and a psychopath."
The emails tell a tragic tale of unrequited love and unintended consequences, sparked by Katz’s relationship with the student in 2007. The fallout of that relationship would upend her life and haunt his own, driving them both to say they were on the brink of suicide, their emails show. Then an activist bureaucracy used Katz’s decades-old mistake to push him out of his job.
The alumna did not respond to a request for comment. Instead, the Free Beacon received a veiled legal threat from her lawyer, Jennifer Salvatore, warning: "To the extent that media outlets are participating in efforts to rehabilitate [Katz’s] reputation by violating my client’s privacy and/or defaming her, she reserves all rights and will take appropriate legal action to defend herself."
Princeton University did not respond to a request for comment.
The affair began in June 2006 and lasted until the alumna’s graduation in 2007. It was dysfunctional but unremarkable, filled with petty resentments and jejune fights: Katz did not take the alumna out for Valentine’s Day in 2007, she complained in a 2018 email. He would ignore her at events and "talk exclusively to other people."
These slights nonetheless appear to have had a profound effect on the alumna, who said in her emails that she fantasized about killing herself during the course of the affair. "A few times I went to the CVS and stood in front of the sleeping pills for a while trying to figure out how much I'd need to buy," she recalled in one April 2018 email. "I got really, really close."
She would later conclude that Katz had abused her, though Princeton’s Title IX office dismissed that charge in April 2021.
During her senior year, the alumna stopped going to therapy—but her emails offer inconsistent explanations as to why. In one message, she claims Katz discouraged her from seeing a therapist because he was afraid the university would discover the affair. But in another, she indicates she stopped going of her own volition in order to protect Katz. In a third, she suggests she became so depressed that "I couldn’t even go to therapy anymore."
Katz pointed out these inconsistencies in an April 2021 statement to the university reviewed by the Free Beacon. Princeton ignored them, according to the sources who reviewed the university's report.
The report also ignored Katz’s persistent and passionate pleas for the alumna to see a therapist, which came in response to what Dattilio described as a "deluge" of emails that, per his evaluation, revealed "emotional volatility." The affair ended when the alumna graduated in 2007, but her correspondence with Katz did not: She would accuse him of giving her "PTSD," then say she missed him. She would call him a "monster," then beg him to marry her. She would apologize for how "worthless" and "repulsive" she was, blame him for "wrecking" her life, and then ask if he was "doing OK," sometimes within hours.
The alumna would also say she was suicidal—at times implying she was moments away from killing herself—and would grow agitated if Katz didn’t respond within minutes.
With her life seemingly on the line, Katz bent over backwards to calm her down. He would apologize profusely for his "monstrous" conduct—"I’m sorry for being a monster," he wrote in November 2010—and beg the alumna to seek help.
Sometimes the alumna would accuse Katz of things he had not done, only for him to apologize anyway. In April 2018, for example, the alumna berated Katz for refusing to leave Princeton during class reunions, which she wanted to attend without running into him. Katz apologized immediately—even though dozens of emails show him coordinating with the alumna to ensure they were never on campus at the same time.
The alumna’s volatility reached a fever pitch when an anonymous third party reported the decades-old affair to Princeton in February 2018—the height of the MeToo movement.
The investigation came as an unwelcome surprise to the former student, who for months railed against the university for prying open a chapter in her life that she’d tried desperately to close.
"I didn’t want this," she wrote on March 12, 2018. "I was doing better at pushing it all down and I am so angry at whoever made this complaint."
When Princeton’s deputy dean of faculty, Toni Turano, asked the alumna if she wanted to participate in the investigation, she refused and contacted Katz to warn him it was coming. She even offered to intercede on his behalf, either by asking Princeton to call off the probe or by expressing support for "the most lenient possible penalty."
Katz said it was up to her. "Thank you for protecting me," he wrote on April 10, 2018. "I can't ask you to do it, though, especially if it's making things worse for you." The next day, he told her that he didn’t want to say anything that might pressure her one way or the other.
The alumna ultimately decided against contacting the university. When Katz told her on April 23 he would be suspended for a year without pay, she replied: "I'm sorry I couldn't fix it."
At the same time she was offering to intercede on his behalf, the alumna was sending Katz messages that oscillated between pleas for love and weekly threats of suicide. Katz himself said he contemplated "jumping" after receiving dozens of emails from her in the course of a few hours.
It was during these weeks that the alumna accused Katz of talking her out of therapy, extracting several apologies from him. The investigative report described those apologies as "clear and persuasive evidence" that Katz "acted to dissuade" the alumna "from seeing a therapist," according to Katz’s October 2021 statement. It did not address the alumna’s threats of self-harm or Katz’s pattern of false admissions.
When the alumna learned on April 30, 2018, that Katz had once attended an academic conference in the city where she lived without telling her, she changed her mind about participating in the investigation and began threatening to get him fired.
"If I can’t trust you to respect my boundaries, I’ll have to enforce them," the alumna wrote. In another email, she told Katz she would give him "a chance" to "convince me I shouldn’t."
"Please, please don't," Katz responded—a plea the university would seize on to argue he tried to discourage the former student from coming forward. Princeton ignored the context of that plea, as well as the alumna’s consistent opposition to the investigation over the preceding two months.
After the 2018 investigation, the alumna continued writing to Katz. Now, with MeToo in full swing—and with Katz becoming more vocally critical of campus progressivism—the alumna, a longtime Democratic operative, began to articulate her grievances in political terms. During the confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, for example, she repeatedly likened Katz to the embattled judicial nominee. A few months later, she likened him to a Republican state defending itself against charges of racism.
"When Texas comes to you and says, of course this law that happens to disenfranchise tons of black people wasn’t *intended* to be racially discriminatory, you don’t just *believe* them," she wrote in January 2019. "Do you understand the analogy here?"
In 2020, Katz wrote a controversial essay that attacked the notion that Princeton was systemically racist. Then in February 2021, the Daily Princetonian published a story about his decades-old affair. The story also reported, based on anonymous allegations, that Katz had "behaved inappropriately" with two other former female students.
As part of his evaluation, Dattilio administered a test to gauge Katz’s propensity for predatory behavior. Katz scored in the lowest possible percentile, Dattilio said, suggesting that "he has no antisocial traits or propensities toward sexually violent or exploitative behaviors."
The alumna submitted her complaint on February 26, 2021, less than a month after the student newspaper painted Katz as a predator.
The resulting investigation had few due process protections for the accused. The university did not share the full complaint with Katz until it had already completed its report, sources involved in the process said, nor did it give his legal team a chance to cross-examine the alumna, as would have been required by Princeton’s Title IX procedures. Because the Title IX office dismissed the complaint, however, the investigation fell to the office of the dean of faculty, whose disciplinary process has fewer due process protections.
That lack of due process meant that investigators could introduce a new allegation whenever Katz provided evidence against an old one. An initial hearing, held in early April 2021, focused on the alumna’s claims that Katz discouraged her from seeing a therapist and dissuaded her from coming forward in 2018, Katz’s statements to the university show. But in a second hearing—held just weeks after Dattilio submitted his forensic evaluation—investigators took Katz to task for not being "forthcoming" during the 2018 inquiry.
By the final hearing, Katz said in his October 2021 statement, "I no longer had confidence that the investigators were being objective. They seemed to want me gone from the University."
https://freebeacon.com/campus/inside-the-investigation-of-joshua-katz/
**********************************************Pointless splurge on pre-school education in Australia
It only has point as a child-minding service. Its educational benefits are illusory. But a free child-minding service will be popular with women who want or need to work.. It's only free to the user, however. The cost to the taxpayer will be huge
The huge "Head-start" progam in the USA started out with similar bright-eyed hopes but had no lasting benefit
On June 16, the Premiers of New South Wales and Victoria announced ‘the greatest transformation of childhood education in a generation’.
The Victorian government will spend $9 billion to provide 30 hours a week of play-based learning for four-year-olds, with a rollout from 2025. They will also provide free kindergarten for three-year-olds, for up to 15 hours.
The New South Wales government will spend $5.8 billion on a similar scheme with later commencement, it reports that this would somehow eventually translate into $17 billion in increased economic activity; this is in addition to the federal government committing $5 billion to the cost of childcare.
Following Covid, the federal and state finances are in disarray.
Federal debt has ballooned towards $1 trillion. NSW debt stood at $50 billion in 2019, heading to $140 billion this year and under $200 billion by 2025. Figures for Victoria are equally parlous, increasing from under $50 billion in 2019 to $150 this year and $210 billion by 2025. The other states and territories have had relatively smaller increases as they were less damaged by Draconian, and perhaps unnecessary, lock-downs.
With these economic threats, it seems a bad time to introduce yet more welfare demand, a demand which we know, once introduced, will never be rescinded. Should we need a better example of where this leads, we have to look no further than the sky-rocketing cost of the NDIS.
Apart from the financial consequences, there are a number of political imperatives at work here. There is a belief that early commencement of education will result in improved educational outcomes; teachers and other unions are in favour of this job creation.
Also, that greater child care will allow more parents to return to the workforce. Underlying this debate is the changed concept of parenting, with the welfare state increasingly expected to take over the traditional role of rearing children, a role which was once considered not only a parental obligation but also their financial commitment.
Currently, there is a shortage of workers in many areas, it is tempting to think that freedom from the (self-inflicted) demands of parenting, would allow many women to return to work to fill those shortages. There are, fortunately, still some who consider involvement in their children’s development to be an obligation and a source of iuytrsatisfaction. At the other extreme, there are a number who look on this as a release from responsibility, but who have no intention of going to work. In view of the cost, it would seem logical to provide child-care, if considered appropriate, only for those who do return to work. There may also be only a short-term demand for workers, if predictions of a recession come to pass the situation may change dramatically, with unemployment rising.
The other big question is the predicted educational outcome, there is no doubt education is in disarray. A UNICEF study in 2017 showed that Australia had slipped down the league tables of educational achievement, coming in at 39 out of 41 in high and middle-income countries, ahead of only Turkey and Romania. In 2003, the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) ranked 15-year-old Australian students 10th in maths, 4th in reading, and 6th in science; 15 years later the results were 23rd in maths, 16th in reading, and 14th in science.
The problems besetting education relate to classroom discipline, distorted curricula, declining teaching standards, fad-driven teaching methods, and reduced parental input. As classroom size has declined and more money is invested, ($36 billion in 2019-2020), the deterioration continues, now enhanced by the Covid pandemic. It is nothing short of scandalous that after 12 years of schooling, 40 per cent of adults have achieved only a basic level of literacy; for many of my parents’ generation, leaving school at 14 had educated them better than those with 4 extra years
A quarter of a million children were enrolled in pre-school activity at 3 years age, part of Julia Gillard’s “education revolution” to develop a child’s “social and cognitive development”; this number had risen to 330,000 by 2021. The traditional education starting point had been at age 5 years, prior to commencing year 1 schooling at 6. Studies from America (whence all good things come) in the early 2000s suggested that improved economic outcomes could be achieved with an earlier start, but that misguided philosophy seems to have persisted. It is also concerning that children of this age are being subtly targeted by left-wing ideology in areas such as trans-gender, climate change, anti-colonialism, etc.
Parents in America have complained about drag queens in classrooms to promote ‘inclusivity’, New York schools have spent $200,000 on this activity; at least the parents (when informed) have the ability to demand change.
A suggestion of early improvement following pre-school does not carry through to later years. Several studies, both in Australia and overseas, have failed to show any long-term benefit from early education, in literacy and numeracy, on NAPLAN (National Assessment Program, Literacy and Numeracy) testing. The latest 2021 US study has confirmed no academic benefit, it did suggest it resulted in better-adjusted children, but without considering the input of motivated parents who had to pay for this activity. NSW and Victoria appear intent on following the Biden playbook with free pre-schooling, in the case of America, an eye-watering extra $1.8 trillion over 10 years, would be needed from the debt-ridden economy.
We are already breaking the bank with debt, yet politics indicate, without evidence, we ‘must do more’ to improve both education and employment prospects. As is often the case, with welfare, education, health, care of the disabled or elderly, or the NDIS, we must be governed, not by what we would like, but by what we can afford.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/06/nsw-and-victoria-meddle-in-pre-schools/
**************************************************Australia: NSW Auditor-General warns universities of China risk
NSW’s top universities are now much more reliant on Chinese students than before the Covid-19 pandemic and are creating risks for the entire sector, the state’s auditor-general has warned.
Chinese students accounted for 50.5 per cent of the state’s foreign students in 2021 – up nearly 6 per cent on the previous year – due to an enrolment boost of nearly 2300 more students from China, while the number of students from other countries fell, according to the Auditor-General’s latest report on NSW universities, released on Monday.
Chinese students flocked to the University of Sydney, whose revenue from Chinese students rose by a massive 35 per cent to $1.2bn last year.
Figures calculated from university financial statements and the Auditor-General’s report also show that the University of NSW’s revenue from Chinese students rose 12 per cent to about $580m last year.
The rise comes despite repeated warnings from governments and national security figures over the past two years on the need for universities to wean off the Chinese student market, amid growing tensions with Beijing and increased concerns about foreign interference on Australian campuses.
In her report, NSW Auditor-General Margaret Crawford slammed universities in the state for their failure to diversify their foreign student intakes and warned of a “concentration risk”.
“Seven out of the 10 universities now record China as the leading source of overseas student revenues. This creates not only a concentration risk for each university, but for the NSW university sector as a whole,” she said in her Universities 2021 report.
“For two universities, the University of Wollongong and Southern Cross University, the top country of origin changed from India to China in 2021.”
In her report Ms Crawford repeated warnings the Auditor-General made in previous years about universities’ over-reliance on students from a limited number of countries. “Unexpected shifts in demand arising from changes in the geo-political or geo-economic landscape, or from restrictions over visas or travel can impact revenues, operating results and cash flows,” she said.
Group of Eight universities CEO Vicki Thomson, who represents both the University of Sydney and the University of NSW, said the higher education sector was not different to any other sector of the economy, including mining, in its exposure to China.
“Our universities are very aware of the commercial risk and the need to balance their portfolios in their recruitment strategies, including with students from China. But, like other industry sectors, we will not walk away from the Chinese market,” she said.
Ms Thomson said Chinese students were choosing Australia because of its “quality offering”.
“We want Chinese students to continue to see Australia as a destination of choice. We are looking at other markets, as we always have, but building alternative markets takes time, investment and resources,” she said.
Overall the number of international students in NSW fell by 12.5 per cent in the first two years of the pandemic, the Auditor-General’s report says. Other universities highly reliant on Chinese students include UTS and University of Newcastle.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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