Princeton Push to Pay Professors Based on Race

BUCK: You may say, “Some professor at Princeton? Why do I care?” Let me tell you the story here quickly, and Clay and I will break down what’s really happening. So, you will recall — ’cause I refuse to let this go. Just like they’re wrong about the masks and they’ve been wrong about vaccine mandates and all these other things — now that we actually have the data — BLM was disastrous for the country as a political movement.

There’s really no data you can point to that does not support that notion, which is that it made people less safe, it meant that there were more and disproportionately more young minority males but more people overall killed, crime went up in city after city, the data is in and BLM and the Democrat left’s approach to law enforcement and systemic racism and the need for all the apologizing and all this other stuff was just bad for everybody. Bad for the whole country.

And it was used to mobilize Democrats in an election year against Donald Trump, of course, and unfortunately, well, we all know who’s sitting in the Oval Office right now. So, with that in mind there were some who spoke out during it. This Princeton professor is one of them. His name is Joshua Katz. Now, Princeton University you all know is one of the big three Ivies and one of the most elite, for whatever that’s worth now. It doesn’t really mean anything anymore, to be honest with you, “elite universities in the country.” And this guy is a tenured professor which, as Clay knows, getting fired as a tenure professor —

CLAY: Virtually impossible.

BUCK: Basically, you have to commit serious plagiarism, a felony, serious sexual crime of some kind. It’s very hard to get fired. Vehicular manslaughter while you’re drunk might get your tenure removed, but I mean in general you’re not getting fired if you have tenure. Unless you speak out against BLM. So, Princeton, which is a universe that has a whole street devoted to multimillion-dollar mansions run by the kids known as “eating clubs.”

So, it’s a very elitist institution but it’s also quite woke. They had an effort underway from the faculty to pay black professors more. As a matter of open policy, they’re going to pay black professors more than white professors to make up for historical discrimination — and give them more leave time, more paid days off.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: And this professor said that’s not fair. It’s actually racial discrimination. It’s actually unconstitutional, and on top of that, he didn’t want a special committee to be formed of some students I believe and faculty to judge racial infractions on campus, separate from the normal disciplinary process, which already… If you call someone a racial slur, you’re basically gonna get kicked out of school. That already exists.

So, this was gonna be looking for more gray area racially, and he said that’s a terrible idea. The faculty freaked out at him, of course. Students started having sit-ins and protests, and, Clay, now the president of Princeton University is going to the board to demand that this guy be fired, not for this — and this just reminds me of the Elon situation: We’ll just throw anything you can — but for a consensual relationship that he had with a 21-year-old junior student in 2006, which he already faced discipline for.

They suspended him for a year, there was no sexual misconduct. She did not want this charge to be brought at all. But they went after him on it, and now they’re reopening it and they’re gonna fire him. ‘Cause this is how the left plays the game, folks. Speak out again against BLM’s excesses; they ruin your career. They ruin your life.

CLAY: Yeah. And this is why cancel culture is so toxic in so many different ways, not this in particular story, but just that there are very few people who don’t have something in their background that they are worried about becoming a major story. And this is what they do to try to enforce silence. Not necessarily, although sometimes people who…

My belief is, Buck, the louder you yell oftentimes in favor of something, the more you’re trying to cover up something in your past, and this is just an example of an institution of higher learning that should be committed to truth no matter what. And, Buck, the idea of paying someone more specifically because of their race or giving them more time off specifically because of their race, we have a word for treating someone differently. It’s racist, right?

And this is one of those cases and I hope this fall we’re going to see an end to much of it because Harvard is on the docket in the Supreme Court right now over its admissions policies, not because of how they’re treating white people but because they are discriminating against Asian people. And this is also interesting, because the Ivy League schools have an incredible history of discriminating against Jewish people, right?

Back in the day, the reason why they implemented — and a lot of people don’t know this — SATs and ACTs and everything else was because they were overwhelmingly discriminating against Jewish students. And so they decided they wanted to have a way to compare students on an even playing field. And now, the people who dominate on standardized testing as a group are Asian.

And if you go look at the rates at which Asian students are being admitted, they’re being definitely discriminated against, and the people who are benefiting the most over this Asian discrimination are black and Hispanic students. And so the Asian students have filed a lawsuit saying, “Hey, wait a minute, this is the next front in this sort of racial discrimination,” and I think these Ivy League schools are gonna lose and it’s gonna be a substantial cultural shift.

BUCK: The current left-wing position, Democrat position — the social justice position when it comes to universities, whether it’s Harvard, Princeton, you name it, you know, great state schools that are very competitive — is that if you are a Vietnamese immigrant whose parents came here with $5 in their pocket and you apply to Harvard?

You should be pushed out of the category that you’d be in based on your grades, your extracurriculars, et cetera — the objective metrics in favor of — say, a black student who weren’t to Deerfield or Exeter or one of these $60,000-a-year prep schools who perhaps has a parent who’s a corporate — dad or mom corporate law Wall Street executive making a couple million dollars a year — based exclusively on racial differentiation. That is the actual position of the left is that the wealthy black students in this case. “Well,” you could say, “Oh, that’s specific,” but that is how they feel.

But a Vietnamese immigrant, for example, is discriminated against in favor of a… Even if it’s a middle-class man, it doesn’t matter. The point is somebody who has clearly more advantages but because of skin color is discriminated against, that is… I have friends who work — worked, not really anymore — in admissions at Columbia University, at Amherst College where I went, and I’ve talked about this, Clay: 100% this is what happens.

CLAY: Racial discrimination.

BUCK: And then these schools pretend like, “No, that’s not it! It’s a holistic admissions process,” like we’re all idiots.

CLAY: Well, and I think this case is going to be big because of the impact there, and it also starts to jumble all of the affirmative action concepts in general. Remember, affirmative action was never supposed to exist forever, and we’re coming up on 60-plus years now of affirmative action existing — and even in those cases that were decided, I believe, back in ’03 or ’04 ’cause I was in law school when those cases were decided, they said, “You know, we hope that affirmative action’s not gonna be necessary in the years ahead.”

BUCK: There was a Sandra Day O’Connor line; I think it was Grutter v. Bollinger.

CLAY: And it’s going to be, I believe, struck down as a part of this. Now, to your point, Buck, there still is an awful lot of leeway in admissions where a lot of these schools are gonna be able to figure out ways to still get the cosmetically diverse classrooms that they so desire, but the bigger issue here that remains really paramount to me is: Almost no poor people ever get to go to these schools.

Like, from a socioeconomic level, regardless of what your background is, the overwhelming wealth that is required to typically get into an Ivy League school is really the lack of diversity, right? Because even if you’re… To your point out, even if you’re black or Hispanic, a huge percentage of those kids are coming from families that are well above average socioeconomically. And so if you’re really wanting diversity, socioeconomic diversity, to me, is more important than cosmetic diversity.

BUCK: And just to bring it full circle here, for a place like Princeton University with a massive endowment — formerly the College of New Jersey, by the way. That’s what it was originally called. But for a place like Princeton to turn on a tenured professor in this way for speaking out against BLM in a way that was principled — and now as we see also, based on what’s happened with BLM — correct.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: Just goes to show you they need to make examples of people still. They cannot win the argument so they want to destroy people, whether it’s destroying Elon or destroying this professor at Princeton, if you deviate from the script and you’re in a position of power, you have a platform, you have some authority, they must ruin you. That is the… It doesn’t matter what they have to do to get there. This is what we’re up against, folks.

CLAY: There’s no doubt, and there’s a lot of people even at Princeton who would have agreed with that professor to your point who are gonna say, “Hey, it’s not worth risking any career, not worth risking my tenure. I’m just gonna shut up about this issue.”