After the Supreme Court of the United States handed down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization early last summer, Princeton University’s Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies issued a statementfiercely condemning the ruling. The director stated that the program stood “in solidarity” with the people whose rights had been allegedly stripped away by five conservative justices doing the “racist” and “sexist” bidding of the “Christian Right,” causing women to endure “forced pregnancies,” and waging an “unprecedented attack on democracy.”
I have no doubt that the statement reflected the views of a large majority of those associated with the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. But was the director, speaking on behalf of an official unit of the university, right to declare an institutional stance on the Dobbs decision?
I am myself the director of an academic program at Princeton—the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. A majority of those associated with the Madison Program believe that elective abortion violates the rights of unborn children. So: Would it have been appropriate for the program to put out the following statement?
The James Madison Program of Princeton University applauds the Supreme Court of the United States for rectifying a long-standing constitutional and moral atrocity. The so-called constitutional right to abortion, which had been imposed on the nation by the Supreme Court nearly 50 years ago in Roe v. Wade, lacked any basis in the text, logic, structure, or original understanding of the Constitution of the United States. It was “an act of raw judicial power,” to quote Justice Byron White’s dissent in Roe, which deprived the American people of their right to work through constitutionally prescribed democratic procedures to protect innocent children in the womb from the lethal violence of abortion. The Supreme Court has, finally, relegated a tragic error to the ash heap of history alongside such similarly unjust and ignominious decisions as Dred Scott v. Sanford, Plessy v. Ferguson, Buck v. Bell, and Korematsu v. U.S.
The Madison Program put out no such statement. Nor did I, as director, consider even for a moment issuing such a statement or asking my colleagues to do so. My understanding of what is proper was and is that, although I may certainly speak for myself, and identify myself as a Princeton faculty member while doing so, it would be wrong for me and my colleagues to identify the university or one of its units with a view of the rightness or wrongness of the Dobbs decision, or to make sweeping pronouncements on the justice or injustice of abortion.