02 June 2003

 

 

To the Faculty and Administration of the Woodrow Wilson School and Princeton University:

 

 It is with great disappointment that we write this letter at the culmination of our Princeton academic careers. Due to the systematic bias we have witnessed and been subject to in the Woodrow Wilson School during the final months of our senior year, we feel that attending the Woodrow Wilson School Class Day would be inappropriate, as such bias cannot be tolerated or condoned at this or any university.

 

We have experienced this bias in three ways: the controversy over our senior theses, the WWS sponsorship of the Not-2-Late.com website, and the anti-Catholic art display in the Bernstein Gallery of Robertson Hall.

             

We wrote our Woodrow Wilson School theses based on principled reasoning, justifying all premises and moving from these premises to policy arguments and conclusions. Our arguments may not have accorded with the reigning viewpoint in the Wilson School or with what most professors personally espoused; nonetheless, these arguments were well-reasoned and were not contingent upon our personal belief system, our opinions, or upon religious revelation.

 

Though we wrote our theses on very different topics, our second readers’ comments reflected similar sentiments. We both received A grades from our first readers and then very low grades from our second readers, who claimed that we relied on unjustified assertions of absolute truth or on revelation and then discounted our theses on that basis. Both second readers conceded during the oral examination and surrounding discussion that they had overlooked valid justifications or discredited tenable positions a priori.

 

During our respective meetings with Professor Stanley Katz, we fully justified our positions again and asked him to give reasons for discrediting our theses, and he was unable to give reasons other than that he was personally unconvinced or happened to disagree. Still, we both received low final grades from him which removed our otherwise high academic averages from consideration for academic honors in the Wilson School. We still have not received reasons for such penalization. This incident reveals an embarrassing intellectual bias against objective morality and principled reasoning in department that professes neutrality and academic integrity.

 

Secondly, as students at Princeton University in the Woodrow Wilson School, we are concerned with the biased and misleading information presented on the Not-2-Late.com website, sponsored through the Woodrow Wilson School and Princeton University. This information is quoted and cited by numerous universities, reproductive health organizations, and international news sources as the official position of Princeton University. The website’s statement that “emergency contraception does not cause an abortion” is not necessarily correct, since many people define abortion as the killing of a zygote or a fetus or as the removal from the womb and death of an existing embryonic being, regardless of whether or not it has attached itself to the uterine wall.

 

When we met with Assistant Dean James Trussell, he conceded that the information and definitions on the website are only one among several ways to interpret the relevant biological facts. We simply requested that the WWS, which purports to espouse neutrality, present information in an unbiased manner or mention on the website that these facts could be interpreted differently, in order to ensure that people making important decisions about contraception and abortion can be fully informed. Despite our attempts at discussion and at compromise, Assistant Dean Trussell refused to consider any alterations to the currently-biased and misleading website. The Wilson School appears willing to hinder informed, unbiased deliberation and decision-making – both among its own students and faculty and also among those beyond the University community who look to it for information.

 

Thirdly, it is unacceptable for the Woodrow Wilson School to sponsor the anti-Catholic art entitled “Ricanstructions” that is currently on display in the Bernstein Gallery of Robertson Hall. During a private meeting with Dean Slaughter about the offensive display, she suggested holding a “forum” to discuss the community’s reactions to the display. Anti-gay or anti-Semitic art would have been taken down at a moment’s notice without the need for a “forum” to test how the community feels, and we highly doubt that such artwork would have been sponsored by the School and put up in the first place. Still, we attended the forum, hoping that it would lead to sincere resolutions.

 

During the forum, at which several WWS faculty and administrators were disrespectfully laughing during one female Catholic student’s presentation on Catholic sacred objects, Dean Slaughter made clear that she saw the Wilson School to be capable of choosing which religious objects should be desecrated in order to convey a political message. She refused to set a standard but indicated that the administration’s subjective judgments would dictate which groups would be protected from becoming victims of hate speech through art and which groups would not be protected. She promised to convene a committee to deliberate over art for the gallery in the future, but she refused to reconsider the current offensive display, which had not cleared the standards that this future committee would set. The continued presence of this art in Robertson Hall reveals intolerance, a lack of neutrality, and grave intellectual biases in the Wilson School against Catholicism.

 

Until the administration of the Wilson School attempts to make the department authentically neutral to all members of its community, including those whose reasoning and positions differ from its reigning orthodoxy, we will actively discourage fellow and future students from applying to the Wilson School and from supporting any of its functions. We also will continue to spread the word to current Wilson School students and alumni about the systematic biases in the School. Given our several experiences with the lack of neutrality and of academic integrity in the Woodrow Wilson School, it is inappropriate for us to support the Wilson School by attending its Class Day ceremony.

 

Sincerely,

 

WWS ’03                                             WWS ’03