Hyperbolic accusations do more harm than good
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Since the 1960s, however, and with increasing momentum, Princeton has persistently made special efforts to recruit, admit, and graduate African American and other minority students. While many have participated in this metamorphosis, no one was more consequential than the late Princeton president William G. Bowen, an impassioned advocate for racial affirmative action as both an administrator and a scholar. His 1998 book (co-written with Harvard University president Derek Bok), The Shape of the River, is an oft-cited brief for race-conscious measures designed to ensure racial integration at selective institutions of higher education. His successors have also been strong proponents of racial affirmative action. A new Princeton is eclipsing the old.
Moreover, Princeton has served as the professional home of a range of distinguished educators of color, including Toni Morrison, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Valerie Smith (president of Swarthmore College) and Ruth Simmons (president of Prairie View A&M University and president emeritus of Brown University). These are formidable personalities with a demonstrated ability to make known their views. None of them have castigated Princeton in a fashion consistent with the charge that it is a place at which racism is “rampant.” When Cornel West retired from Princeton in May 2012, he spoke of having been “blessed” by his association with an institution that had evolved from being known as the northernmost tip of the Confederacy into a community “consecrated by a new legacy.”
Obviously there are differences of opinion among Princetonians of color; some did sign the ultimatum. But if racism is as big and stultifying a presence as the ultimatum suggests, it is a mystery that so many Black Princetonians could have somehow overlooked it.
If Princeton’s racism was as conspicuous as alleged, one would expect the ultimatum’s authors to be able to dash off some vivid, revealing examples. Instead, they refer with unsatisfying generality to “micro-aggression” and “outright racist incidents,” leaving readers uncertain about what, precisely, they have in mind.
To be fair, the authors do get specific with respect to certain matters. They maintain that a “glaring” example of the university’s “failure” to “elevate more faculty of color to prominent leadership positions” is that “never once has the Humanities Council been directed by a scholar from an underrepresented group.” The Humanities Council brings together leaders from a wide range of academic departments, fosters interdisciplinary initiatives, and advises the university administration. The letter writers also assert that “the Council’s most important outward facing program, the prestigious Society of Fellows, has never once had a director of color.” Assuming the accuracy of these facts, do they make a convincing case of racial “exclusion” in the broader context of racial change at Princeton?
No, they do not. The claim of racial exclusion is implausible. For years now, throughout the university, there has existed a self-conscious impulse to promote people of color to positions of leadership. Either today or in the very recent past, Black professors have been chairs of the departments of history, anthropology, English, religion, African American studies, and the Lewis Center for the Arts. Black professors have also served as the dean of the School of Public and International Affairs and as the director of the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Scores of scholars of color have been Humanities Council fellows. The general counsel of the university is Latinx. The dean of admissions is African American. The recently retired vice chair of the university board of trustees, Brent Henry, a Black lawyer keenly attuned to matters of racial equity, has been for at least the past decade one of the three or four most important figures in the governance of the university.
Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
