A robust defense from his wife; this bit was striking:

As was widely reported, Princeton’s department last year voted to eliminate its language requirement for undergraduates. Now it has eliminated its most legendary language instructor. The great irony is that the elimination of the language requirement was, in part, to encourage students to take ancient languages other than Latin and Greek . . . and Joshua was the only member of his department qualified to teach multiple such languages: Egyptian, Sanskrit, Tocharian, Syriac, Akkadian, Old Norse, Old Irish, etc. Indeed, Joshua’s earliest academic publications concerned Native American languages. His work was the least Eurocentric in the department.