This is so ridiculous. This professor is well-regarded and maybe right of center but so what? The minute people start talking about feeling unsafe in a case like this, they should be ignored.
From the Daily Princetonian:
We must not let eating clubs be ideological safe spacesOn Feb. 14, just like many hundreds of other Princeton students, I stopped by my eating club — Charter — to have lunch. I brought two guests, one of whom is a professor who has taught me in several courses and is also my senior thesis advisor.The lunch was pleasant and uneventful; it was Ash Wednesday, so neither my professor nor I ate very much. I was careful to follow the club’s internal procedure for sponsoring guests, filling out the appropriate guest meal slips under the supervision of a club staff member. After we finished, we went to class — he’s teaching a graduate seminar this semester in which I am a student.I thought nothing more of it — until more than a month later on March 26, when Charter’s president, Anna Johns ’25, announced an abrupt change to the club’s visitors policy. In order to maintain an “inclusive environment” and communicate that Charter is a “sanctuary” for its members, Johns wrote in a club-wide group chat, visitors who are not family members or friends would henceforth not be permitted to enter the club during its “hours of food service operations” without prior approval from undergraduate officers, club staff, and the alumni Board of Governors.Within minutes following the announcement, I learned from friends that the policy had been crafted in direct response to student complaints about my Feb. 14 lunch with my professor. After seeking out the club manager, I learned more: A “group of membership” — whose identities and precise numbers were unspecified — felt “caught off guard” when they saw my professor in Charter, and they were deeply upset by his presence. In the future, at minimum, they wanted “the right to not be in that space” at the same time as him. After receiving their complaint, the club acceded to their demands.While the club manager attempted to assure me that the new policy was viewpoint-neutral and not meant to single out any particular “belief systems,” claiming it was merely intended to further the value of “inclusivity,” she declined to affirm that my professor would be permitted to enter Charter’s premises in the future. The undergraduate officers, the alumni board, and club staff would have to consult with one another “to make sure it’s okay” — and, even in the event his entrance was approved, a “general consensus notice” would have to be sent out beforehand to all Charter members, warning them of the date and time the professor would be in the building so they would have the opportunity to stay away.Despite the club manager’s assurances, the claim that Charter’s new policy was neither ideologically-motivated nor intended to target anyone on the basis of their beliefs is clearly false.
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