Fired for Not Saying the Girl is Crazy

I mentioned that Princeton fired a tenured professor. The reason appeared to be to silence his reasonable opinions, but the official reason has now been revealed:

So, basically having no choice, Professor Katz told the story. Most unfortunately, at this point, the alumna with whom he’d had the affair (by now, nearly a decade and a half earlier) turned on him and filed complaints with the university. She made various claims, but only one survived and became the focus of a new investigation. This was the claim, now publicly known, that during their affair, Professor Katz discouraged the woman from receiving needed mental health care in order to prevent their relationship from being revealed.

Of course no one knows whether he discouraged her 15 years ago.

Say it is true. What could be wrong with giving her advice?

Offficially, Katz is not being punished for having an affair with an undergraduate while being her thesis advisor, as he was already punished, and not for speaking out against BLM groups, and not for complaining about being called a racist, and not for marrying an ex-student.

Katz is being fired for supposedly advising a student not to get counseling.

I suppose you might say that the advice is problematic because his motive was to keep the affair secret. But the affair was only secret because they both wanted to keep it secret. And counselors have an ethical duty to keep info secret anyway.

Why would she keep quiet for 15 years and suddenly make a complaint that he did not recommend counseling? Did she become jealous when she discovered that he married another student?

This does not add up. Katz is being fired in order to intimidate the rest of the faculty into silence.

Update: A law professor writes:

Based on Professor George's account, if I have understood it correct, there seem to have been two differnet wrongful acts: the affair itself (for which Katz was previously punished), and then discouraging the student involved in the affair from seeking mental health counseling, a wrongful act not known about at the time of the first proceeding. It’s not “double jeopardy” if Joe is punished first for robbing a bank and then also punished for extorting someone afterwards not to alert the police to Joe’s participation in the robbery: there are two wrongful acts, each of which can be tried and punished.

I am pretty sure that would be double jeopardy. Every bank robber discourages his collaborators from calling the police. If that were a separate crime, you might see someone charged with that after a robbery acquittal.

No, Katz had no power over the student getting mental health counseling. She could have gotten that confidentially, and no one would know. Maybe she did.

What was confidential then, is not anymore. I think the woman's identity should be revealed, if she is going to bring forward such a silly complaint with such big consequences.

At least that professor criticizes Georgetown U. Law for announcing that: Offensive or even possibly offensive extramural speech is forbidden by Georgetown faculty.

It used to be that professors could be fired for advocating a violent Communist overthrow of the government. Now they can be fired for saying that a Black women is not the best Supreme Court candidate.

Here is another employee punished for expressing an opinion:

Washington Commanders head coach Ron Rivera on Friday fined his defensive coordinator, Jack Del Rio, $100,000 for calling the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol a “dust-up” and referring to the racial justice protests of 2020 as a “summer of riots.”

He was telling the truth.