Princeton Professors Want The Power To Punish Research They Deem Racist

Over One Hundred Princeton professors, across virtually all academic departments, have signed a letter demanding a myriad of changes in how the university deals with issues of race. Some of these demands are probably uncontroversial, such as a greater short term housing allowance for new faculty. Other demands focus on the race-based reallocation of resources such as “Reward the invisible work done by faculty of color with course relief and summer salary.”

The letter is long and contains many demands. This post will focus on only one of those demands—one that cuts to the heart of academic freedom and undermines the central mission of any university. That demand is: “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, following a protocol for grievance and appeal to be spelled out in Rules and Procedures of the Faculty. Guidelines on what counts as racist behavior, incidents, research, and publication will be authored by a faculty committee for incorporation into the same set of rules and procedures.”

Empowering a committee to investigate and discipline other faculty for research and publications that it considers racist is a terrible idea. The question of what research or publication is racist is not only highly subjective but, at this moment in history, the definition of racist scholarship has expanded beyond all recognition. A good example of this is the case of David Shor, who worked for Civis Analytics, a data analytics firm. His case is discussed in greater detail here.

Briefly, Shor tweeted a scholarly article written, ironically, by a Princeton professor, titled: “Do Protests Matter? Evidence From the 1960s Black Insurgency.” The Princeton professor is African American and he expressed no animosity towards any race. However, his paper did find that violent protest was politically counter-productive and that peaceful protest was more effective.

These days, the view that violence is not only immoral but politically counter-productive is seen by many as racist. The idea is that criticizing violent protests implicitly criticizes the Black Lives Matter movement and deflects attention from social injustice.

Shor, the data analyst who tweeted the Princeton professor’s article, was denounced as racist. Along with a link to the professor’s research, he wrote: “Post-MLK-assassination race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2%, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon. Non-violent protests *increase* Dem vote, mainly by encouraging warm elite discourse and media coverage.”

Some of his fellow employees claimed that Shor’s tweet made them feel unsafe and Shor was accused of pushing “anti-blackness.” Shor tried to save his job by apologizing. He tweeted that his “background” made him an “inappropriate messenger” for the Princeton professor’s research. Presumably, he meant that he now acknowledged that a white person should not have tweeted the scholarly article. He was fired anyway. His employer has not commented on the reason for his termination, but there is no known reason other than the offending tweet of the academic article.

Many other examples could be used to illustrate the vague, ever-shifting definitions of racism that can cause a person to be investigated, punished, or even fired. (I review a few more examples here.) This post highlights Shor’s example in particular because it demonstrates the problems with the demands being made by Princeton faculty for a committee to investigate and punish fellow professors for what the committee may deem to be racist scholarship.

First of all, if enacted, this would be the first modern example of a major research university disciplining professors for ideological reasons. No one has shown that the research of Professor Omar Wasow, who wrote the article tweeted by Shor, is flawed. The criticism is that the implications of the article are racist: it supposedly blames minorities for poor democratic turnout and it aids and abets conservative efforts to paint civil rights protesters as violent. But any research can be inappropriately used by partisans to buttress a particular point. If Wasow’s research goes too far, how will any faculty member be able to safely pursue research about any issue concerning racial matters?

As long as a professor’s methodology is sound, they should be able to publish their conclusions without fear of being disciplined by their university. That should be true even if the research concludes that various social ills are not driven by racism or that certain actions, such as violent protests, are counterproductive.

It is true that Shor’s former employer is not a university and that Shor was therefore not protected by academic freedom. But what could the purpose of the proposed committee at Princeton be other than to punish scholarship that is currently protected by academic freedom? After all, any scholarship published by a serious academic journal has already passed a rigorous review of its methodological soundness. And nobody can achieve tenure at Princeton unless they have already shown that their entire body of work meets the highest standards for sound research. So what would the proposed committee add to all of this? The only possibility is that professors would be punished for purely ideological reasons as a result of work that meets the highest standards of methodological rigor.

This is the absolute opposite of what universities should be striving for. The fact that so many professors at a university of Princeton’s stature would sign such a letter is a sign that the faculty either have lost interest in freedom of inquiry or that they now place ideological conformity above methodological rigor. Hopefully, the administration will reject this ill-thought-out Star Chamber.