On July 4, 2020, a few hundred of my then-colleagues at Princeton University signed an open letter endorsing a number of student demands made in the name of “anti-racism” and proposing such alarming policies as the creation of a faculty committee to police “racist behaviors.” Four days later, I published a lone dissent in which I acknowledged the signatories’ right to express their views. I also suggested—and a month later, Conor Friedersdorf came to a similar conclusion—that most of them probably didn’t believe all the things to which they were putting their name or maybe hadn’t even read the document.

Jump to October 7, 2023. In the days after Hamas invaded Israel and committed unspeakable acts of brutality, I was pleasantly surprised that Princeton faculty didn’t issue another such letter. Perhaps, I thought, they had learned that it was unwise to support groups like Princeton’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which had scheduled a pro-Hamas “teach-in” for the same time as a previously announced vigil for the Israelis whom Hamas had slaughtered and issued a screed blaming Israel for Hamas’s evil.

On October 22, however, the Daily Princetonian published “An open letter from Princeton faculty and students in solidarity with Gaza.” This new letter has so far received 664 signatures from people with Princeton affiliations, 69 of them university employees.

Because this letter was not published in the heat of some traumatic moment, instead appearing more than two weeks after the surprise Hamas attacks on Israel, there is little chance anyone signed it without understanding what’s at stake. The fact that it must have been produced with “care” makes its contents especially horrible: far worse, in my view, than the knee-jerk reaction of a bunch of college kids.