Here’s the text of a letter I sent yesterday to Town Topics, the local paper here in Princeton. The Daily Princetonian is the campus newspaper of Princeton University. Town Topics comes out every Wednesday, so I don’t know whether the letter will be printed or not.
To the Editor:
About a month ago, The Daily Princetonian reported that “[t]he 13 members of the Princeton community arrested for occupying Clio Hall during pro-Palestine protests last semester had their first appearance in Princeton Municipal Court on Tuesday” (Christopher Bao and Miriam Waldvogel, “Clio Hall protesters arraigned in court for trespassing charge,” Daily Princetonian, August 5).
The case in question has both local and national significance, and is being tried in Princeton Municipal Court, not within the University’s own judicial system. As the Princetonian story makes clear, the University has gone out of its way to insist that the trespass case is now a municipal rather than a university matter.
Municipal law enforcement is directly within the scope of Town Topics’s reporting, obviously so when the case has national significance. Yet I’ve seen no reporting on the trespass case in the paper. To be certain of this, I did a trio of searches on the Town Topics website for the terms “trial,” “arraignment,” and “trespass.” Ironically, all three searches generated hits on stories on or about Princeton University, but despite some eight pages of searching, I found no hits on the trespass case.
Is there a reason why Town Topics has not reported on this case? Can we expect some reporting in the near future?
Irfan Khawaja
Response from Donald Gilpin, Staff Writer for Town Topics:
Dear Mr. Khawaja,
Thank you for your letter to the Town Topics editor. It is always helpful to receive information about stories that we missed. As fall term activities pick up at the University, we are planning to follow up on last spring’s Gaza Encampment news as well as related University events initiated by students, faculty and administration. And, as you point out, related actions by municipal authorities should also be on our radar.
Sincerely,
Don Gilpin
Staff Writer
That’s good news. I hope it bears fruit. To the best of my knowledge, the court will hold its next hearing on September 10th. The thirteen students have been charged with “defiant trespass.” Here are the elements of that offense per Title 2C of New Jersey’s Revised Statutes.
To belabor the obvious, or what should be obvious: The defiant trespass statute seems obviously ill-suited to adjudicating trespass issues on a university campus. Sit-ins are a tolerated, customary commonplace of academic life, and have been for a very long time. By a strict construction of the statute, any sit-in is a case of defiant trespass. That’s absurd. Full stop.
Beyond this, a person is guilty of “defiant trespass” if he sits in an unoccupied classroom reading a book, is summarily told to leave, and doesn’t leave quickly enough. Equally absurd. Likewise if she has a disagreement with a security guard about whether or not she has the right to stay in an unoccupied classroom, and ends up being wrong because of some arcane provision buried in some arcane part of the university’s by-laws. Another absurdity. Fourth absurdity: a person would be guilty of defiant trespass if the university concocted some ad hoc rule prohibiting, say, students’ presence at a certain arbitrary spot on campus that had customarily been a popular gathering place, passed the rule at midnight, and then arrested someone for being there at 8 am the day after the rule had been passed.
In short, applied to academia, laws like this yield absurdist drama, not justice. Which is pretty much what we have at Princeton.
I can’t pass judgment on the legal question of whether or not the students are guilty of defiant trespass. I can only say that morally speaking, it doesn’t matter one way or the other. Laws of this kind do not, under present circumstances, deserve adherence. No moral censure should fall on anyone who breaks them in the right way, for the right reasons. Not that I’m giving anyone advice about what to do.
Only a university operating in the worst of bad faith would deal with its students (or faculty) in the legalistic way that Princeton has adopted. And no university that operated in this way would deserve anyone’s respect, or deserve to be taken seriously when it blathered on about the imperatives of civility or its attachment to academic values. I lost my respect for Princeton University a long time ago. Christopher Eisgruber and Rochelle Calhoun are impossible to take seriously except as grotesque mimes of academic values. The sheer sight of them now evokes contempt–the only reasonable reaction, I would say, to the Laurie Pritchetts of the twenty-first century. Justice will only come to higher education when people like them are yanked out of the ivory tower, and thrown into the street. It’s tempting to say that that’s “where they belong”–except that saying so insults the street.
(Title renamed. Original title: “Defiant Trespass at Princeton.”)
Policy of Truth 
Defiant trespass? I’m reminded of “oppositional defiant disorder,” a condition whose symptoms are indistinguishable from resentment against oppression and injustice:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppositional_defiant_disorder#Signs_and_symptoms
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Apparently, “defiant trespass” is trespass despite a warning of some kind, as opposed to ordinary trespass, where no warning is issued.
It’s sad that Princeton University regards a one-hour occupation of Clio Hall as “egregious,” but can’t muster up comparable outrage for a brutal, decades-long military occupation of an entire population, or manage minimal transparency about its institutional role in propping it up. But it can’t–or won’t.
As for “oppositional defiant disorder,” the problem is pervasive in mainstream psychology. The summum bonum of contemporary psychology is “happiness.” Happiness requires “well adjustedness.” Well-adjustedness entails adjusting without friction (or with a minimum of friction) to one’s “environment,” including one’s social environment.
Suppose that one’s social environment is deeply fucked up? Well, in that case, one needs to find a way to adjust to it. Obviously, those who don’t adjust, or have trouble adjusting, need further therapy and/or medication. You get something of a pass if you yourself come from a fucked up micro-environment, but the fact remains: the goal of any therapeutic effort is to induce you to escape your fucked up environment, forget it, and move on in the name of adjustment and happiness. You wouldn’t want to “dwell” on it long enough to understand it.
Hot take: mainstream psychology has no way of conceptualizing the demands of integrity or justice without pathologizing them. Psychotherapy is a little better than CBT, but ultimately, neither does the job.
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The goal of adjusting calmly to your social circumstances, however malign they may be, sounds Stoic. But in fact the Stoics were statistically overrepresented among resisters to, and attempts to overthrow or assassinate, Roman emperors and the like. They just did it calmly.
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Maybe, though that suggests that “adjusting” is an equivocal concept, since it potentially includes both accommodation of those in power and resistance to them. Understood univocally, I think accomodation is the more natural meaning. But understood equivocally, it has contrary implications. Problematic either way.
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Indeed. Re the ambiguity: Cicero didn’t accept Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery; he endorsed a theory of universal human equality. But he accepted a (later) Stoic theory [the “later” is crucial because some of the early Stoics seem to have been anti-slavery; but Stoicism grew more accommodating toward existing institutions as Stoics increasingly sought social respectability] according to which slavery was justified, not because of any defect in the slave, but because one should regard one’s social role as like a role in a play, where the casting director is God, and you should play out your role as best you can, whether you’ve been cast as Wealthy Ruler or as Third Guy With Spear.
Cicero seems to have taken it for granted that for a slave to play out his assigned role to the best of his ability must mean for the slave to try to be the best slave he could be. But when Julius Caesar declared himself dictator for life, Cicero didn’t think “well, I guess that means God has cast me in the role of subject under a dictatorship, so I need to be the most obedient subject I can be.” Instead he thought, essentially, “God has cast me as a loyal citizen of the old Republic who is in a position to help resist the rise of dictatorship,” which he did. It’s not clear why a slave couldn’t likewise think “God has cast me as a rational animal who is in a position to resist, and/or escape from, someone who has unjustifiably enslaved me.” I mean, the role of Third Guy With Spear is compatible with various different possible dispositions of that spear ….
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That’s a good analogy for what’s happening on campus. University administrators profess to believe in equality, diversity, and social justice, but inhabit a social role that requires them to maximize return on university investment. So the social role trumps the supposed moral commitments.
Meanwhile we’re told that the “central role of the university is the discovery and transmission of knowledge.” So the ideal student abstracts from the prescriptive content of that knowledge and demonstrates competence on “assessments” designed to test “academic excellence” divorced from real-world moral commitments. Same result.
The idea that you might break out of a social role and wholeheartedly apply moral knowledge directly to the world itself–aka “activism”–is an exotic idea that has little or no place within the American academy as currently constituted. That’s why people like Aysenur Eygi will always seem bizarrely eccentric within that milieu, no matter how much lip service is given to “social justice.” And it’s why the “real world” will so often manage to pass the academy by.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/06/middleeast/american-activist-killed-west-bank-intl/index.html
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Cicero himself says that our basic role of rational and social animal, and the duties associated therewith, should always take precedence over our social role and its duties in the event of a conflict. (With the duties imposed by our individual characteristics somewhere in between.) But his application of that principle was arguably a little glitchy.
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I momentarily had a fantasy of sending copies of De Officiis to all of my favorite university administrators. Luckily it went away–partly because I know it would be a waste of time, and partly because I don’t have any favorite university administrators.
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I have one!
https://lasierra.edu/business/team/gary-chartier/
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Right–but Gary doesn’t need a copy of Cicero’s De Officiis!
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True, but if we could get him a copy signed by the author, it’d be a nice birthday gift.
Better yet, TWO copies signed by the author, so he could keep one and sell one.
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