Last night, I read this deeply saddening and enraging report about Princeton Classics Professor Joshua Katz and the way he, in various positions of power at the uni, appears to have serially preyed on female undergrads for decades, and I've hardly been able to sleep since. 1/ https://twitter.com/princetonian/status/1357488978656649216

The whole thing is sickening for all sorts of reasons, but among the many aspects of the report that made for very difficult reading was this note: "Some [Rhodes and Marshall] scholarship recipients have publicly thanked him for his work". 2/

If you click the embedded link, you will see that this directs you to something *I wrote* and published in the Princeton student newspaper, the @princetonian, in 2009. https://theprince.princeton.edu/princetonperiodicals/?a=d&d=Princetonian20091203-01.2.12.1&srpos=44&e=------200-en-20--41--txt-txIN-joshua+katz------ 3/

Some context: for many years, Katz served as the main faculty adviser for applicants to the Rhodes, Marshall, and Gates Scholarships, alongside Princeton's then Associate Dean of the College, Frank Ordiway. 4/

At the time I wrote the linked piece in the @princetonian, I was a young graduate student at the University of Oxford thanks to my having been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship myself while an undergraduate at Princeton in 2005. 5/

In the years since I'd received the scholarship, Dean Ordiway had started to come under increasingly public criticism for Princeton's "lagging behind" Harvard and Yale in terms of each uni's number of yearly recipients of prestigious postgraduate fellowships like the Rhodes. 6/

I thought (and still think) the particular terms of that particular criticism of Dean Ordiway were misjudged, so I wrote the piece in @princetonian trying to explain why–and also, admittedly, trying to defend someone in Dean Ordiway to whom I felt I owed a great deal. 7/

In any case, as I didn't realize at the time was already in the works, Dean Ordiway would go on to be pushed out of his position as coordinator of postgraduate fellowship advising later that same academic year: 8/ https://paw.princeton.edu/article/pursuit-rhodes

Truth be told, throughout the process of my own applying for the Rhodes Scholarship, I had very limited interactions with Prof. Katz. I was never his student, and I think only met him twice ... 9/

Once was in the context of a uni-wide informational meeting about applying for the Rhodes Scholarship, after which I chatted with him briefly and he kindly encouraged me to apply for the scholarship (which advice I went on to ignore, as I explain in the @princetonian piece). 10/

The second was in the context of a "practice interview" with Dean Ordiway, Katz, and several other faculty members, after it was announced that I'd been named a finalist for the Rhodes scholarship. 11/

Still, in the context of thanking those at the uni who had played a part in my good fortune of being given a Rhodes Scholarship (which inarguably changed the trajectory of my life, I hope for the better), I felt it only right to thank Katz, among others. He had played a part. 12/

And, sentimentalist that I am, among the voicemails that I still have saved to my phone from friends, family, and others after the news broke that I'd won a Rhodes Scholarship, one is indeed from Katz. 13/

I say all that very much not to self-servingly try and distance myself from Katz or the piece I wrote in part thanking him for his involvement in my having received a Rhodes Scholarship... 14/

But rather because, whatever my intentions for the piece, I cannot stop thinking about how it must have read *at the time* to one of those female undergraduates, SOME OF WHOM WERE MY OWN CLASSMATES (I now learn), on whom Katz was attempting to prey. 15/

I can't imagine how corrosive, chilling, or dismaying it must have been to have a recent recipient of one of these prestigious scholarships openly appearing to credit the belief, on which Katz seems to have nefariously relied, that all roads to such successes led through him. 16/

To my Princeton classmates at the time, and to those who came before and after, I am extremely, extremely, extremely sorry for the part I played in helping to burnish the reputation of this figure. 17/

And let me also just say something that is, shockingly, still sometimes treated in certain academic circles as a controversial position, even a puritanical one: 18/

Speaking as the husband of someone who is a medical doctor, I view any sexual relationship – whether consummated or merely attempted – between a faculty member and a student, undergrad or grad, exactly the same as one would a relationship between a doctor and a patient. 19/

Which is to say it is a disgusting abuse of power and trust, and any faculty member who engages in such behavior shouldn't simply lose their position at their given university or college but should, as a medical doctor would, lose their "license" ever to be a professor again. 20/

I say this not only as a faculty member, but as someone with close, personal, family relationships with survivors of sexual abuse, including in cases where, as with any relationship between a professor and a student, the power imbalance was an inextricable part of the abuse. 21/

I hope those on whom Katz preyed and other students who knew of the behavior, all of whom may have had the whole course of their time at Princeton and since shaped by the experience (which is itself part of the despicably widening gyre of such faculty abuse), find justice. 22/

And lastly, to the current student journalists @princetonian who were involved in putting together this exposé of Katz, thank you. The piece is an absolute masterclass in relelentless, probing integrity. You have done yourselves and the university proud in writing it. 23/23