My alma mater is not the school I once loved. But Joshua Katz is exactly the man I knew I married.

Solveig Lucia Gold

We’ve run plenty of stories about people who have been the target of  mobs—what’s happened to them and their challenges and resilience in the aftermath.

What we’ve rarely heard—here or anywhere else—is what it’s like for the person who loves the mob’s target. What it’s like to watch someone you love being torn to pieces.

Solveig Gold is one of those people. She’s smart, funny, angry and brave. Mostly brave.

Below is Solveig’s story. It’s about bullies and Puritanism and the insane state of our universities, but really it’s a story about freedom and love and the things that endure, no matter what.

—BW 


I decided to apply for early admission to Princeton after sitting in on Professor Joshua Katz’s seminar in April of 2012. I’m afraid I don’t remember the content of the seminar, but I do remember the way he captivated the classroom—the way his students hung onto his every word and the way he hung onto theirs.

Last summer, I married him. This week, Princeton fired him.

He isn’t the Princeton Charming I expected to win in my undergraduate years. I entered college in 2013 under the shadow of Susan Patton, a Princeton alumna and mom who had some months before written a widely read letter to female students in the Daily Princetonian, urging them to find a husband on campus before they graduated. My friends and I mocked Patton relentlessly, and yet deep down we knew what she said was true: Smart women have a hard time finding worthy men. We set out to find ours.