Solveig Lucia Gold
Common Sense with Bari Weiss, May 26, 2022
“The head of Joshua’s department condemned Joshua’s words in an email to the entire Princeton Classics community and issued an official statement on the department website, without ever saying a word to Joshua himself.”
I decided to apply for early admission to Princeton after sitting in on Professor Joshua Katz’s seminar in April of 2012. I’m afraid I don’t remember the content of the seminar, but I do remember the way he captivated the classroom—the way his students hung onto his every word and the way he hung onto theirs.
Last summer, I married him. This week, Princeton fired him.
He isn’t the Princeton Charming I expected to win in my undergraduate years. I entered college in 2013 under the shadow of Susan Patton, a Princeton alumna and mom who had some months before written a widely read letter to female students in the Daily Princetonian, urging them to find a husband on campus before they graduated. My friends and I mocked Patton relentlessly, and yet deep down we knew what she said was true: Smart women have a hard time finding worthy men. We set out to find ours.
Along the way, we’d joke about our professors. I swooned when a handsome Platonist read excerpts from the Symposium; I sighed in a lecture about art and love. My a cappella group laughingly serenaded an instructor on a trip to Greece.
I didn’t joke about Joshua, though—or Katz, as I called him then. It didn’t even occur to me. He was a balding nerd with a belly, and I adored him, but not like that. I adored him because he saw and brought out the best in me as a student and scholar.
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