Cut Their Pay and Make Them Teach

For years, brave, mainly liberal professors like NYU’s Jonathan Haidt, Penn’s Jonathan Zimmerman, and Columbia’s John McWhorter have urged university leaders to restore free inquiry, ideological diversity, and ethics to higher education – but with little success. As longtime professors, we believe that persuasion has failed in part because too many of today’s university presidents care more about money and power than right and wrong. In addition, leftist activists have spent a decade canceling and terminating anyone whom they disagree with, so many academics are running scared.

If woke activists threaten people’s jobs while supporters of free inquiry do not, we all know who will win. It’s time for academia’s sensible majority to change the game before it’s too late.

To cancel the cancellers, we must demote their enablers: certain university leaders who care little for traditional academic values like free thought and fair play and who use their large bureaucracies to crush dissent. Some of the university presidents who make high six-figure salaries, for example, should be made to suffer 90% reductions in base pay and get busted back to being assistant professors teaching sophomores, under grownup supervision. Recent events suggest that University of Central Florida president Alexander Cartwright and Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber should be among the first to get the treatment.

In his fine book Woke Racism, John McWhorter lauds brave individuals – two from Princeton – who have confronted woke mobs. McWhorter wrote about mathematician Sergiu Klainerman and classicist Joshua Katz, who had “publicly disavowed and critiqued the Princeton manifesto assailing the school as racist.” Despite calls to fire the professors and a campus newspaper unearthing an embarrassing matter in Katz’s past, the two stood their ground and seemed to have survived. McWhorter crowed that neither Klainerman nor Katz would “be selling pencils on the street anytime soon.”

Well, maybe Sergiu Klainerman won’t be selling pencils. Just months after McWhorter wrote those lines, Katz was fired after Princeton reopened a Title IX investigation into a mid-2000s matter that McWhorter referred to, and for which Katz had already been punished in 2018. Supposedly the second investigation was motivated by new evidence. This seems an obvious pretext since the new evidence appeared after the university announced it would investigate Katz’s speech.

Increasingly, autocratic university leaders have created large, nontransparent bureaucracies that can reopen the same investigation multiple times without any statute of limitations, embarking on extended fishing expeditions to catch dissenters. Princeton president Eisgruber oversaw the Title IX process that bagged Katz.

But not all the news is bleak. Just days before Princeton fired Katz, an arbitrator overturned the termination of award-winning University of Central Florida associate professor of psychology Charles Negy. After Negy’s controversial tweet critiquing an article claiming that “the state has failed black people,” a Twitter mob of 30,000 demanded his termination. UCF president Cartwright denounced Negy and publicly recruited students and alumni to report any past instances of “abusive or discriminatory behavior” by the professor to UCF’s “IntegrityLine.” After a seven-month “investigation,” UCF used sketchy reports Cartwright had solicited to justify firing the tenured associate professor. Luckily, the verdict of UCF’s kangaroo court could not survive a neutral arbitrator.

We are fair-minded professors who support due process. Presidents Cartwright and Eisgruber should get to tell their sides of these stories. Accordingly, Florida State Senate Education Committee chair Joe Gruters should call Cartwright to testify in the committee, to determine whether he should be held accountable for his choices.

Princeton is a private university, but the Department of Education should consider withholding federal tax dollars that support its operations. Taxpayer funds should not go to institutions that trample on free inquiry and due process.

From the evidence of available public sources, Presidents Cartwright and Eisgruber seem to lack the ethics and judgment expected of university leaders. Perhaps UCF and Princeton should reintroduce them to classroom teaching.

America has rules and norms safeguarding free inquiry and due process. It’s time to hold university leaders accountable when they deviate from those norms. Given higher education’s bureaucratic politics, the best way to restore free inquiry and basic decency might be an academic version of a trip to the woodshed: cut their pay and make them teach.