Professor, can I ask you a question? What does Sophocles want?
–Exasperated student to my friend Charles Persky, Professor of English at Hunter College, City University of New York (1970-2017)
Tag Archives: academia
Loyalty and Academic Freedom
The case of Jonathan A. C. Brown
A friend is circulating an Open Letter to Interim President Robert Groves of Georgetown University in defense of Professor Jonathan A.C. Brown, the Alwaleed bin Talal chair of Islamic Civilisation in the School of Foreign Service. Apparently, during the recent US-Israel-Iran war, Brown made this comment on X:
“I’m not an expert, but I assume Iran could still get a bomb easily. I hope Iran does some symbolic strike on a base, then everyone stops,” Brown wrote on X.
Brown has tenure and a chaired professorship at Georgetown, but apparently the comment was regarded as frightening enough to call for his suspension. The President forced Brown to delete the tweet, and he’s now been suspended. He’s also been removed as chair of his department, which I believe was intended as punishment. Continue reading
Kalven’s Complicit Executioners
I’ve previously mentioned that I’ll be giving a presentation on institutional neutrality at the Heterodox Academy Conference in Brooklyn a couple of weeks from now, Tuesday, June 24th. I have yet to write the paper up, but here’s the abstract, below. I’d be interested in/grateful for any comments, questions, objections, etc. I’ll probably be posting on material related to the paper over the next few weeks. Continue reading
Alasdair MacIntyre (1929-2025)
My mentor Alasdair MacIntyre died this past Wednesday, at the age of 96. The last time I spoke to him in person was 2008, on the occasion of my dissertation defense. It had taken me seventeen years, from matriculation to defense, to finish the degree, and even at the defense itself, it was very far from clear whether I would actually finish. A minor civil war broke out within the defense over the merits of my work, but after tense negotiations, I passed. MacIntyre, amused by the fracas, described my having completed the degree as the best of the arguments for the existence of God: only a God, he said, could have ensured that Khawaja crossed the finish line. I laughed at first, but was then given pause. And that, in microcosm, describes my relationship with Alasdair MacIntyre. Continue reading
Karl Ameriks, RIP
I wanted to note the passing of Karl Ameriks (1947-2025), the Emeritus McMahon-Hank Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame. He died yesterday in South Bend, Indiana at the age of 77.
I didn’t know Ameriks particularly well. My first memory was a conversation I had with him in 1991 about what little I knew about Kant’s first Critique. I’d taken an undergraduate course on Kant with Wolfgang Carl, the eminent Kant scholar, and was flattered to learn that Ameriks was interested in my lecture notes. He read them, thanked me for them, but never commented on them. I think he found them more amusing than anything else. Continue reading
Meir Kahane at Princeton: April 1984
Princeton in the Service of Ethnic Cleansing
Here is the first installment of the supplementary posts to my April 5 post, “Princeton’s Genocide.” This one consists of screenshots from the Daily Princetonian (April 27, 1984) of Meir Kahane’s first visit to Princeton in April 1984, at the invitation of Yoram Hazony. As you’ll see from the last screenshot, Kahane explicitly advocates the apartheid and ethnic cleansing likewise defended in his book, They Must Go. “If necessary to maintain a Jewish majority in Israel, Arabs might need to be deported.” Since Kahane regarded Israel as encompassing everything it held in 1984, that meant that “Arabs” would have to be deported from the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, Golan, and Israel proper. Continue reading
Princeton’s Genocide
In October 2024, after several years of activism (most recently spearheaded by Princeton Israeli Apartheid Divestment, or PIAD), the Council for the Princeton University Community (CPUC) invited written comments from members of the Princeton University community weighing in for and against divestment from Israel. The CPUC rejected the bid for divestment about a month ago.
What follows below is my written statement to the CPUC, which essentially speaks for itself–and likewise speaks to the title I’ve given this post. I will, in the near future, be posting some supplementary material, including screen shots from The Daily Princetonian of Meir Kahane’s two appearances at Princeton advocating ethnic cleansing and genocide (April 1984 and February 1988), the written version of my follow-up question to the CPUC about the issue of complicity, and the transparently evasive “response” to my question offered by Hilary A. Parker, Vice President and Secretary of Princeton University. I’ll also be posting a written response here to John Groves, chair of CPUC’s Resources Committee. Both Parker and Groves refused my repeated requests to offer a candid disclosure of the facts concerning the University’s investments, opting for concealment and evasion. Continue reading
Naftali Bennett at Princeton
What follows are screenshots of a long message from the Instagram page of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) of Princeton University (with the Princeton/Palestine Liberation Coalition and SJP’s national and state affiliates), regarding the forthcoming visit to campus on April 7th of Naftali Bennett. I’ll write up a longer comment this weekend, but for now, suffice it to say that I agree with SJP, and wanted to amplify its message. If you click the first thumbnail to enlarge, you should be able to click directly through the whole series. Otherwise, click each thumbnail to enlarge, reading them left to right across the page.
By Diverse Means
I saw a news item the other day that wasn’t funny, but still made me laugh. “Trump Pauses Dozens of Federal Grants to Princeton,” read the headline:
The Trump administration moved this week to suspend dozens of federal grants to Princeton University, the fourth Ivy League school that has seen its financial support from Washington reduced or explicitly threatened since March.
Christopher L. Eisgruber, Princeton’s president, told the university community in an email late Tuesday morning that “several dozen” grants had been suspended. …
Mr. Eisgruber said that the university had been told on Monday and Tuesday that it was losing at least some research support from the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy and NASA.
You don’t see the humor? Let me explain. Continue reading
Fear of the Dark
This ridiculous letter to the Wall Street Journal is making the rounds in certain quarters as though it enunciated some profound “gotcha”-level truth.
