The Princeton Declaration of Dependence

Have you lately been agonizing, in your own special way, about the loss of freedom in Hong Kong? Do you worry that the inhabitants of the city-state will no longer have the right to speak their minds freely in open forums? Would you be happy to see the Communist Party of China punished for imposing standards of correct and incorrect speech?

If you want to militate against the repression of free speech, you do not  need to go to Hong Kong. You take a short trip down the New Jersey Turnpike and arrive at Princeton University. There you will discover that some 400 faculty members and other factotums have signed an open letter calling for censorship of faculty speech and research. By its terms a teacher's freedom to speak and to write will depend on a special faculty committee which will judge it for racist content.

Powerline offers the salient quotation from their manifesto, along with a list of those who have signed the Declaration of Dependence (via Maggie’ Farm):

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.

This means that everything a Princeton faculty members says and writes can be investigated by a kangaroo court of chosen faculty members and adjudged racist or not racist. As though the only thing that matters in your speech or writing is whether you manage to toe the party line on racial justice. As though race is all that matters, as though America’s and Princeton’s racial problems can be solved by empowering a new, special thought police.

Then again, if I remember correctly, Princeton admissions standard grant to minority applicants around 300 extra points their SAT scores. Asian applicants have around 50 points taken off of his SAT scores. The great leveller, you might call it. Evidently, if different students are admitted according to different standards, you are going to have problems. To solve it, Princeton should rediscover meritocracy and fairness.