Mother Jones illustration; photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; Julio Cortez/AP
As congratulations poured in for the recipients of this year’s MacArthur Award, Dr. Ruha Benjamin, a professor of African American studies at Princeton University, should have been celebrating a career-defining achievement. But the full story was a bit more complicated. Around the same time that she had been awarded one of the most prestigious prizes in intellectual circles, Dr. Benjamin was being chastised for pro-Palestine activism by her university.
She explained the context in a thread on X, which gained wide attention:
Princeton chose not to include my responses to their Qs about the #MacFellow award in this announcement—What it was like when I got the call? What the award means to me? What I’m working on now?—bc I asked them to accurately recount my response to Q1 or to not quote me at all. 1/ https://t.co/iKygbr4zfN
The thread publicized an ongoing conflict between Benjamin and her employer, which had opened an investigation into her involvement in an April protest in solidarity with pro-Palestinian student demonstrators. According to Benjamin, a “tense” phone call with university officials had taken place shortly before learning she had won a MacArthur grant, thus diluting the joy that comes with such an exceedingly rare achievement.
“Receiving this honor encourages me to continue beating that drum in my teaching, writing, and advocacy—that the many crises we face as people and planet are in part due to the fact that we are living inside the imagination of those who monopolize power and resources to benefit the few at the expense of the many,” she said in a post that included her response to Princeton’s question about the significance of a MacArthur fellowship for her scholarship.
I caught up with Benjamin to discuss Princeton’s investigation into her role in April’s protest, academia’s crackdown on speech, and the problems inside the “genteel” culture at the renowned university. Princeton University declined to comment. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Let’s go back to the protests from the spring. Tell me about the atmosphere at Princeton and what your experience was like at the time.
The biggest thing to understand about what we experienced at Princeton is that many individuals, many people outside of academia and perhaps some inside, are weaponizing Title VI of the federal anti-discrimination law, specifically as it relates to charges of antisemitism. They’re both weaponizing and watering down what antisemitism is in order to apply it to a whole host of speech acts and organizing. In the process of watering it down, it both loses its meaning and, rather ironically, it’s wielded against the very people who the word was intended to protect. The result is that faculty and students of color are being targeted through aggression.
“When I say chilling effect, it’s not just simply that individuals are scared; they’re being interrogated. They’re being punished.”
For example, at Princeton, we had a sit-in at Clio Hall back in April, where I was one of four faculty observers—all of whom were faculty of color—who went with students. Now, the four of us are being investigated by the university and targeted by those outside who don’t want to see anyone speaking up against the genocide or in support of the sanctity of all life, including Palestinian life. So I think that’s really the bigger climate, that anyone can be charged with being antisemitic using Title VI.
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