If you do a Google search on the term “Woke Princeton,” you’ll find dozens of hits, in both the mainstream and conservative media, laboring to prove that Princeton University is a “woke” place dominated by “The Left.” So powerful is this dominance, it’s alleged, that Princeton’s beleagured conservatives are afraid to speak their minds on campus. The poor dears are obliged to creep their way through campus life, blending in with the ivy, habitually looking over their shoulders, fearful of cancellation or even physical assault, unable to exercise their rights of free speech, or to engage in authentic discussion of the contested issues of the day.

If you have the patience to work through this material, you’ll find that it consists largely of the following:

(1) elaborate belaborings of the same handful of sensationalized cases, with no attempt to summarize the facts of the case in an impartial way, and no attempt to show how any given case is representative of life at Princeton (e.g., the Katz case, the Witherspoon statue controversy, the woke ballet horror story, etc.);

(2) breathless, unverifiable stories of innocent conservatives (or Zionists) being intimidated, threatened, or cancelled by ferocious leftists (or conveniently unidentifiable anti-Semites)–stories unimpressive enough in their unverifiable versions, and progressively less impressive the more closely they’re scrutinized.

That’s about it. Otherwise, it’s pretty much a mystery what these conservatives are complaining about. I can’t speak for other campuses elsewhere, where, for all I know, Maoist Cultural Revolutions are undergoing a recrudescence. But Princeton is not one of them.

I don’t dispute that Princeton has its share of problematic leftists engaged in problematic behaviors, but that’s a garden variety problem that cuts many different ways. Princeton has its share of problematic right-wingers, too. The more salient fact is that I happen either to know or to be well-acquainted with many of the principals involved in promoting the “Woke Princeton” story, and know from hard experience that they, too, fall into two categories: (1) some of them are credulous enough to say anything that promotes the Right-Wing Narrative Du Jour, and (2) some of them are simply full of shit, willing to say anything damaging to “The Left” in the hopes of fooling the credulous and ultimately, in the hopes of successful fundraising.

I attended Princeton as an undergraduate (1987-1991), lived in town almost continuously from 1996-2005, taught at the university between 2002-2004, visited weekly from 2005-2020 when I wasn’t living there, have lived in town since late 2021, do alumni interviews for the university’s Admissions Committee, and am on campus twice a week, every week, about five or six times a week. So I have more than a passing acquaintance with the place. The “Woke Princeton” of right-wing lore bears no resemblance at all to the actual institution called “Princeton University.” It’s a piece of mythology tailor-made for media consumption, generated almost entirely out of the febrile imaginations of conservative intellectuals who seem to have nothing better to do than manufacture persecution where none exists, and cash in on the outrage generated by their confabulations.

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s an article recently published in JewishCurrents–a left-wing magazine of Jewish affairs. The article has a relatively narrow focus, but goes some of the way toward rebutting the “Woke Princeton” narrative. What it shows is not simply that Princeton has a right-wing infrastructure to rival the “Woke Left” that everyone wants to talk about, but that the campus Right has (and has always had) plenty of clout, money, and influence in the political world beyond campus.

The first paragraph (consult the original for hyperlinks):

ON MARCH 27TH, several dozen protesters gathered in front of the Center for Jewish Life (CJL) at Princeton University and chanted, “Shame! Shame! Shame!” The object of their outrage was a right-wing Israeli activist named Ronen Shoval, who was giving a talk at the CJL that day. In Israel, Shoval is best known as the founder and former leader of the ultra-nationalist political action group Im Tirtzu, an organization infamous for its belligerent campaigns against progressives and academics; since leaving Im Tirtzu, he has become dean of the Tikvah Fund, an American Jewish nonprofit that has helped finance the ongoing rightward shift in Israeli politics. Shoval wrapped up a yearlong appointment as a lecturer in politics at Princeton last month, and will hold the role of associate research scholar at the university’s James Madison Program for American Ideals and Institutions—which is devoted to the study and promotion of conservative ideas—through the summer. At the CJL event in March, he was speaking in favor of Israel’s proposed judicial overhaul—legislation that aims to subordinate the country’s judiciary to its far-right legislature, and the impetus for months of protests in Israel.

We’re talking about a Princeton so woke that right-wing Israeli activists use it–with the eager acquiescence of the university’s administration–as a base of operations for the nationalist government in Israel. They have comfortable offices, comfortable salaries, access to university facilities, and all the time and opportunity in the world to network with like-minded activists, officials, and constituencies. A couple of dozen leftists (“leftists”) show up at the Center for Jewish Life, wave Israeli flags, and express their disapproval, and stark terror grips our campus conservatives. Because Princeton “leftists” are really scary, but the nationalist coalition in Israel is not.

This right-wing infrastructure didn’t just come into existence yesterday; it was there when I was an undergraduate back in the late 80s and early 90s. How do I know this? Because I was part of it. I was for four years a writer for The Princeton Tory, the campus conservative magazine (funded by by the right-wing Institute for Educational Affairs), and eventually its Editor-in-Chief; my position at the Tory got me a nearly four-year paid internship with the National Association of Scholars, whose raison d’etre was (and is) the creation of free-floating anxiety over the terrors of political correctness in academia.

Since then, my political views have moved left-ward, or at least away from the Right, but that hasn’t been true of my erstwhile right-wing colleagues. They’ve diligently been working away at building a right-wing political infrastructure at Princeton to rival the power of the campus Left. And as the JC article documents, they’ve succeeded in spades, all the while managing to give the impression of marginalization and victimization.

I had a nice chat with the article’s first author, Dahlia Krutkovich, as background for the piece. She ended up not quoting me in the article, but that’s understandable; I talked her ear off, so I’m sure she ended up with more material than she knew what to do with. Whether the JC article will make a dent in the mythology of Woke Princeton remains to be seen. Whether it should is a simpler matter.