...for the holy cause of "anti-racism."   ("Anti-racism" doesn't, in fact, mean opposition to racism any longer, for those who have not been paying attention.  And what is the connection between an abusive cop killing George Floyd in Minneapolis and alleged racism at Princeton?  There isn't any, of course.)  Some portions of the letter are harmless and predictable–the standard opportunism of the moment to claim resources and positions–but this proposal is chilling:

11. Constitute a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty, following a protocol for grievance and appeal to be spelled out in Rules and Procedures of the Faculty. Guidelines on what counts as racist behavior, incidents, research, and publication will be authored by a faculty committee for incorporation into the same set of rules and procedures.

This is simply a call to violate the contractual academic freedom rights of faculty at Princeton.  Have any signatories, one wonders, even thought about academic freedom and its purpose?  Do they realize that the only review of "research and publications" by scholars that is consistent with academic freedom is one based on applicable disciplinary standards?  Vetting the moral or political bona fides of scholarship is what universities without academic freedom do.

Many, but certainly not all, of the signatories come from the more feeble academic disciplines (although a couple of philosophers did sign the letter–one can only hope that they were caught up in the emotion of the moment, and didn't actually read it, and don't actually have such unbridled contempt for the academic freedom of their colleagues).  The letter itself is symptomatic of the phenomenon noted in this open letter. 

Even more remarkable is the moral myopia involved in seriously believing (as the letter appears to) that racism is the most important issue du jour, which hasn't been true even in the U.S. in decades.   Sober reflection, and some knowledge of cause and effect, would suggest that racism is not even in the top five pressing issues confronting humanity.  Who, actually attending to the facts, would deem "racism" a more serious problem than, e.g., the pathologies of global capitalism and the neoliberal policy order that has arisen around it; the evisceration of the organized labor movement and the rights of working people; the nascent (or not-so-nascent) authoritarian and fascist tendencies of the Republican Party in the U.S. (and authoritarian movements abroad, in Russia, Hungary, Brazil, Poland, etc.); climate change; the pandemic and inequalities in access to medical care; the threat of nuclear annihilation due to the collapse of arms control agreements; and so on?  Racism is sometimes a spillover effect of some of these problems, but to treat the symptom as the disease reflects what is increasingly an endemic form of ideological delusion among academics.

I'll conclude by quoting Bayard Rustin, who dealt with actual racism and made a Herculean contribution to defeating many of its manifestations in this benighted country:

[T]he division between race and race, class and class, will not be dissolved by massive infusions of brotherly sentiment. The division is not the result of bad sentiment, and therefore will not be healed by rhetoric. Rather the division and the bad sentiments are both reflections of vast and growing inequalities in our socioeconomic system–inequalities of wealth, of status, of education, of access to political power.

ADDENDUM:  A relevant post from early June.