The Tory obtained a copy of the Acting Chair of the Department of English’s response to a letter signed by over 40 students and sent to the Department of English on February 6, 2023, in response to an event featuring activist and journalist Mohammed El-Kurd that the department is co-sponsoring with the Princeton Committee on Palestine (PCP). In response to El-Kurd’s history of antisemitic remarks, the letter called on the Department to “condemn the event and pledge to work with Jewish partners on campus… [to] host another speaker event to bring healing to the Jewish community for the harm the department has caused.”
Thank you for your message, and for voicing your concerns so clearly and forcefully. You are not alone in them; I have been in correspondence with representatives of the CJL and Princeton Chabad, and Rabbi Steinlauf, as well. As I said to them, the conversation that we have at the University around controversial events can be as important as the events themselves, and I am glad to have the opportunity to share some thoughts with you.
Perhaps I should start by saying something about how talks in the Department work generally. We have always granted great autonomy to faculty in making invitations. Departmental sponsorship is not an endorsement of what a speaker has said or might say—as you can imagine, such a requirement would dramatically restrict the range of voices that could be heard on campus. This openness also means that the Department as a whole does not issue statements. It is an important principle for us that neither I nor anyone else among us attempts to speak for a diverse collective.
I can say of my all colleagues, with personal confidence, that we share a deep concern with the rise of antisemitic violence and speech locally, nationally, and globally.
President Eisgruber’s remarks last fall, which you cite in your letter, have been helpful to me as I have been sitting with your concerns and those of others. Mutual respect, empathy, and careful listening, the values you cite, are our goals and expectations for any public occasion on campus. The president’s address also urges us not to shrink from “very unpopular or shocking arguments.” In practice that means that we work to ensure that all speakers are heard, and that interactions between them and members of our community are open and respectful.
Those can be challenging aspirations to live out, and our commitment to them is most important at those moments when they are tested by reasonable dissent within the community. Reasonable dissent, which I take yours to be. As I wrote to Rabbi Steinlauf, and also to the students of CJL and Chabad, some of the tweets and excerpts from other writings that you cite brought me up short. I have also spent recent days reading his journalism for The Nation, and his new book of poems. As a teacher, I take those contexts and larger arguments to be important for us to encounter, too. My colleagues have invited Mr. El-Kurd to speak to us out of a sense that he has urgent experience and ideas to bring to the campus. The commitment of the English Department is to making sure that his voice can be heard, and that members of the University community are free to listen and respond within Princeton’s tradition of open and respectful dialogue.
That open dialogue is my best understanding of a safe space, one where we care for one another and afford our guests our careful attention. I can promise you that I and my colleagues in the Department and the University will take every measure to ensure that his visit is conducted within such a space—this is our responsibility whenever we bring a visitor into our community. My greatest hope is that you can feel confident of your own place in the room, as in any other on campus. We welcome you and everyone on Wednesday, and I would be very happy to speak with you, too, about this event or others to come, if you would like to continue the conversation.
Sincerely, and with all good wishes,
Jeff Dolven
Professor and Acting Chair of English
Copyright © 2024 The Princeton Tory. All rights reserved.