Joshua T. Katz is a linguist, classicist, and Indo-Europeanist known for his scholarship in ancient, medieval, and to some extent modern languages and literatures. Formerly the Cotsen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University, he was renowned for his undergraduate teaching, receiving the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching, the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award, and the Sophie and L. Edward Cotsen Faculty Fellowship. A class of his made The Daily Beast's list of "hottest college courses" in 2011, and he was the only member of the Princeton faculty profiled in The Best 300 Professors (Random House, 2012).
In July 2020, in the wake of the George Floyd protests, Prof. Katz published an essay in Quillette critiquing proposals for so-called anti-racist reforms that had been advanced by several hundred of his faculty colleagues. This prompted Princeton to reopen a past case in which Prof. Katz had received a one-year suspension as punishment for a consensual relationship with a student fifteen years earlier. The second investigation led to the termination of Prof. Katz’s tenured position—a move widely perceived as retribution for his criticism of the proposed policies.
Prof. Katz is now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and serves on the board of advisors at the University of Austin.
For his courageous defense of free speech and academic freedom despite severe personal consequences, the Columbia Academic Freedom Council is honored to present Prof. Joshua T. Katz with the 2025 Academic Freedom Award.
