My Family and I by Adam Gussow

Author:Adam Gussow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Emancipation Books
Published: 2025-01-14T17:08:08+00:00

WOKENESS, HETERODOXY, AND DREAMS DEFERRED

Of Dissent and its Discontents

That brings me to the second mode of civil disobedience. There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus—and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it—that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all!!

—Mario Savio, Mississippi Freedom Summer volunteer and founder of the Free Speech Movement (December 2, 1964)

For the past forty years I’ve given faithfully to Princeton’s Annual Giving campaign. My contribution has been laughably modest—one hundred dollars most years, $250 when major reunions come up—but consistent. My rationale has been mixed: grounded in deep gratitude for the ten years I spent on campus between 1975 and 2000 and the two degrees in English, undergrad and grad, I obtained there, but animated by the farfetched hope that small but consistent annual gifting would grace whatever children I someday produced with an incrementally better chance of gaining admission to the university that changed my life.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to suspend my annual gift for the foreseeable future and redirect it towards Princetonians for Free Speech. I’m aware that I may be hurting my teenaged son’s chances of admission by sharing this news publicly, and that saddens me. A Mississippi native and gifted musician, Shaun would have carved his own line across campus, wreaking wondrous havoc in the process. But the Princeton I’ve been hoping he’d attend has been supplanted, over the past five years, by a troubled, wounded institution, one that no longer aligns with its own highest ideals—or mine. So we’ll move on and look elsewhere—perhaps to the University of Mississippi, where I’ve been teaching for the past two decades. And he’ll flourish regardless, even as this regretful decision, one I couldn’t have imagined half a decade ago, now seems urgently important, a matter of conscience.

The proximate cause for my change of heart is the recent firing, this summer of 2022, of Joshua Katz, a tenured professor of Classics. Those who have been following the fraught progress of his case on the PFS website will be unsurprised to know that an academic like me, graced with a humanities PhD but located at a safe remove from Princeton’s disciplinary shenanigans, has finally had enough. But many who know me—my career as a scholar of blues and African American literature, my thirty-year musical partnership with Harlem bluesman Sterling “Mr. Satan” Magee, and of course my interracial family circle—will be surprised that Katz, of all people, is the metaphorical hill I’m prepared to die on. Isn’t he the noted racist? some will ask—the one who showed his true colors in a Quillette essay by deriding the Black Justice League, a

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.