Princeton University was publicly celebrating a professor’s selection for a prestigious award at the same time it was investigating her for her pro-Palestinian advocacy, the professor says.
On Tuesday, Princeton announced that Ruha Benjamin, a professor of African American Studies, was awarded an $800,000 “genius grant” from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Roughly 20 minutes after the university published its celebratory announcement, Benjamin shared on X that university officials had omitted her quotes about an investigation the college had opened into her involvement in a pro-Palestinian demonstration in April. The thread also includes the quotes she gave to the university.
Staff members from Princeton’s Office of Communications contacted Benjamin on September 24 to ask if she could answer a few questions about the award for an announcement article. In response to a question about her reaction, Benjamin wrote about how the news came amid an investigation into her support for pro-Palestinian student protesters.
“I received the call from the MacArthur Foundation the morning after a tense call with Princeton University officials investigating my support of students protesting the genocide in Gaza,” she posted to X. “In fact, the date of the award announcement [Oct 1] also coincides with a court date for students who engaged in a campus sit-in last spring. I plan to ‘celebrate’ the award by showing up to court.”
Benjamin included a note with her responses to the university, acknowledging that the answer to the question about her reaction put them in a “tricky position.” She wrote that if university staff could not include her account of receiving the news, she did not wish to be quoted in the announcement at all, according to emails obtained by The Chronicle. She also mentioned this in her X posts.
Princeton didn’t include any of her quotes. However, the announcement cites a statement from the MacArthur Foundation lauding Benjamin’s activism: “By integrating critical analysis of innovation with attentiveness to the potential for positive change, Benjamin demonstrates the importance of imagination and grassroots activism in shaping social policies and cultural practices.”
Benjamin, an advocate for pro-Palestinian student protesters at Princeton, says she was questioned by university officials on August 27 about her participation in the student occupation of the campus’s Clio Hall in April. The demonstration resulted in 13 arrests. Benjamin attended as one of the four faculty observers at the request of students, she said.
Princeton declined to comment on the investigation or on its decision to omit Benjamin’s quotes from the award announcement.
Benjamin’s X thread has been viewed by over one million users and received roughly 10,000 likes. She spoke to The Chronicle on Wednesday about the incident and how it reflects administrators’ attitudes toward free expression. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What motivated you to submit your responses knowing that requiring your mentions of Gaza and Princeton’s investigation would possibly result in your comments being completely omitted from the announcement?
I’m used to the institutions that I work at, or have gone to school at, being very happy to celebrate my and others’ accomplishments, but not willing to hear our voice when it comes to critiques or concerns about, in this case, the investments of the university.
I didn’t want my words to be used in a story that was purely celebratory at a time when I was under investigation for my support of students.
I felt that I would be helping them be hypocritical in terms of their celebration of a faculty member because it’s not only a reflection on the individual faculty member, but these kinds of awards give shine to the institution. I didn’t want to be involved in giving them shine when at the same time, they’re trying to dampen me and dampen my shine behind the scenes.
I wanted to give them a choice, and in giving them that choice, I knew what the answer was going to be.
Did you have any hesitations or doubts about moving forward with your responses?
Not at all. You know, since we got back this fall, there’s been so much talk on our campus and other campuses about free expression.
One of the first things our president did was hold a huge assembly for the first-year students to celebrate Princeton’s commitment to free expression. I was just walking through the Frist Campus Center the day before yesterday, and there were these signs on tables publicizing a new website about free expression and protest.
I think the university and university officials should feel troubled or concerned that they’re giving so much lip service to free expression, but anything that casts the institution in an unfavorable light seems to be where they draw the line, and so I didn’t have any hesitation at all.
What was your reaction to the omission of your responses?
They sent me the transcript of the story beforehand to fact check it, so I already knew.
Why did you decide to share your responses on social media?
I want for myself and others to be able to both celebrate but also stay aware of the context in which we’re working and living right now.
Part of it is to pull back the curtain to what our institutions are actually standing for. What are they actually doing? It was a way for me to instigate that reflection that goes well beyond my case to what many of us experience in higher education, which is a deep-seated hypocrisy in the front-facing image-making of our institutions and the backstage policing, surveillance, intimidation, and chilling effect on free expression that we’re experiencing on a day-to-day basis.
Have you received a response from Princeton following your social-media posts about the announcement?
No, and I don’t think I will. I think their approach is “No comment, hope this goes away.”
What has your experience been like as a Princeton faculty member who has shown public support for Palestinians?
I think I, relative to many of my colleagues, both at Princeton and elsewhere, have been relatively buffered from the more-aggressive feedback and responses for reasons I can only guess.
For example, with the observer situation, among the four faculty, I’m the most senior, so I don’t have to go through any more promotion evaluations from the administration. It puts me in a slightly more secure situation. This makes me feel more responsibility to use that position to say things that others can’t.
You know that for all the talk of free expression that our institutions do, many people who have sympathies towards the student movement, who are opposed to genocide, who believe in the sanctity of life for everyone, feel they can’t even act on those basic values because there will be repercussions. That’s in part what motivates me to be a little troublemaker.
What are your main takeaways from this situation?
I think the big picture, beyond my little interaction with the Office of Communications at Princeton, is that what we’re seeing across our campuses is the weaponization and the watering down of antidiscrimination law and rhetoric.
We’re seeing the charges of antisemitism in particular as an extension of Title VI and antidiscrimination law being wielded against students, against faculty and staff. And the irony of it is that it’s being wielded, it seems, disproportionately against Black faculty and other marginalized faculty. [All of the faculty observers at the Clio Hall sit-in were faculty members of color, Benjamin later noted.]
Muhlenberg [College], which fired Professor [Maura] Finkelstein, invited me to give a Black-history keynote last year, and now they’re punishing their faculty member, who’s taking the ideas that I was talking about, and acting on those ideas. Hosting a fancy keynote, but then suppressing those words and ideas, is the kind of hypocrisy I think is characteristic of this moment. But it’s also being resisted and subverted, in large part, by student activists and protesters across our campuses.
