The MacArthur winner being investigated for her pro-Palestinian support
Dr. Ruha Benjamin, a recipient of this year's prestigious "genius" award, discusses her employer's crackdown on speech.
Hasnain says:
“Shifting gears to the thread that went viral this week. What was your initial reaction to realizing that Princeton had chosen not to include your responses in their announcement of your MacArthur award?
The Office of Communications reached out to me saying they had received the news from MacArthur and asked if they could interview me. So they sent me those three questions that I put online, and I wrote out my answers. And in writing the answers, I prefaced it by saying I know my answer to one puts you in a tricky position. But I would ask that if you can’t include the full context of that response, please don’t use any quotes from me in writing.
By then, I was 99 percent sure that they weren’t going to publish any of them. So I was not surprised at all that they didn’t. They were generous enough and wrote back after a few days to let me know that they had opted for option two, which is no quotes. And again, I know this wasn’t journalism. This is PR for the homepage of the university, and the point of that is to make the university look good. So I was under no sort of illusion that they were going to want to put anything in there that would cast doubt on the goodness of the university. There was no surprise.”
Posted on 2024-10-05T05:05:33+0000