Dr. Joshua Katz: Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and Former Classics Professor at Princeton University

An American linguist and classicist of global renown, Dr. Katz taught at Princeton University for over 24 years, serving as Cotsen Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Classics. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree at Yale University, his Master’s in Philosophy at the University of Oxford, and his Ph.D. at Harvard University. While at Princeton, Dr. Katz received the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching and the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award. In 2010, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a fellowship at Oxford’s All Souls College.

In May 2022, the Princeton University Board of Trustees fired Katz following the recommendation of Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber. The termination is the culmination of nearly 18 months of a campaign to upend the career of this distinguished scholar and teacher in retaliation for a statement concerning campus politics.

Although the university now claims that its action has nothing to do with Dr. Katz’s opposition to a popular campaign to purge Princeton of “anti-Black racism” that supporters claimed to thrive on the campus, the evidence reveals Princeton’s words to be disingenuous. Princeton’s president immediately denounced Dr. Katz for his July 8, 2020, article in Quillette. The student newspaper launched a six-month investigation to find events in the professor’s past that could be used against him, and an official Princeton website vilified Dr. Katz.

ACTA honored Dr. Katz as a Hero of Intellectual Freedom in July 2020 and welcomed him to our Council of Scholars in October 2022.