Times of my life — Princeton, Wilson and the pursuit of truth
I saw the email from President Eisgruber entitled, “Message to the Princeton Community,” and my heart sank as I read the words: “I noted that the Princeton University Board of Trustees was discussing how the University could oppose racism and would soon convene a special meeting on that topic. The meeting took place yesterday. On my recommendation, the board voted to change the names of both the School of Public and International Affairs and Wilson College.”
It’s a victory against racism! Why would I be — or how could I be— disappointed with that? One of my friends exclaimed on Facebook with an echo of Princeton’s slogan “three cheers for Old Nassau.” Ironic perhaps as the House of Orange Nassau (after whom Nassau Hall is named) was known for child slaves in their court around the time of Princeton’s founding. Or that Princeton, the town itself, is named after William of Orange, a rather controversial figure in bringing about globally catastrophic policies that perpetuated racial injustice for centuries to come.
But there was the victory. The truth. The decision. The proclamation. The ‘white’ male President of my alma matar proclaiming he had put forth victory for the University. Well I call bullshit. It’s a hollow victory, for a hollow battle that will ultimately undermine the war against poverty, militarism and racial injustice. I know many of my friends will disagree with me — vehemently — about this. I welcome that. As should we all. That is the spirit of the institution I graduated from just over 15 years ago. Let us debate. Let us disagree. Let us find truth to guide us on the path of justice. However — don’t lecture me. Don’t hector others. Don’t silence by calling all disagreement violence. That is dogma, not discourse.
When I arrived on the Princeton campus 20 years ago as of this September, I was a pesky scrawny Canadian, caught between the two sides of my North American identity (America and Canada), with a confusion of Brown, Muslim, East Africa, and Indian Subcontinent fighting to be resolved. I knew very quickly where I was and it was not friendly territory. Throughout all four of my years, I felt I was in the opposition to the powers that be. I was running against the mainstream, like a counter-current to be washed over. Socially I did not ‘fit’. But in Princeton, as any person of color or visible minority or counter-cultural individual knows, you blend. Black and Brown we may be, but on The Street I’ll also be.
The whole experience of Princeton at that time felt so exclusionary. I cannot imagine what it would have been like when Edward Said was there half a century earlier. Or what it would have been like to be the first women on campus in the late 60s. Or as Carl A. Fields, a Black Administrator around the same time. I can tell you that in the year 2000, I felt many times, alone. Nevertheless, in my fellow crowd of a cacophony of culture and color, I found my tribe. You could be LGBT, Muslim, Black, Chicano, Native — guess what — we were going to stick together. And do you know why? We were in this fight together. We were facing the same thing together.
Our narratives were excluded from the classroom. Our voices absent from the discussion. Our representation missing from the faculty. We were there but not to be seen. We were there apparently to just listen. So from Day 1, I fought that. If you saw me on campus during my time there, it was very likely you saw me protesting. Or challenging a University administration official. Or debating the Princeton Committee Against Terrorism, as it was so Orwellionly named. One night, I plastered the whole campus with flyers proclaiming its new sister organization PCOK — the Princeton Committee Opposing Killing — to satirize the empty concept. I didn’t care (I slept through morning classes unfortunately).
One of the most salient injustices that caught my eye and which was the leading global issue at the time, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. At the end of the Clinton administration, as the Second Intifada began, following a massacre in Jerusalem of unarmed protestors, Palestinians were once again in the cross-hairs of mainstream America. So I joined the Princeton Committee on Palestine. I co-founded one of the first modern university movements for divestment (which subsequently has become BDS today and that I no longer believe in). And let me tell you, it was Hell.
I was called anti-Semitic a bunch of times. As a Muslim, it was just assumed. I’m anti-Semitic. As a Muslim, it was assumed, I’m biased. In the classroom, one Professor Gary Bass (still at the ‘Wilson’ School I believe), lambasted me PUBLICLY in the classroom after I challenged his narrative of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict when I sent around to the campus blackboard an article from the Shimon Peres Center for Peace. Privately, he wrote to me — and there’s more but I won’t put it here — “students never win arguments with Professors.” Another Professor, Mike Doran — who I will add, is a friend, and is open to debate — used to throw chalk at me in the class as I would ask impertinent questions in the class on the Arab-Israeli conflict such as “why are we not reading any Arab authors”. I mean God forbid. He even approached me AFTER I submitted an anonymous review for the class.
While on campus, AIPAC decided to name me the campus outrage of the week, after calling out the Israel Lobby in DC (which my subsequent Grad School Advisor, Stephen Walt did much more eloquently many years later). And the Undergraduate Student Government organized a campus-wide seminar to respond an article I had written — which I only fended off by placing Professor West on the panel that had been stacked against any countervailing perspective. This was not today’s university climate. We had to fight, during the Bush Administration, for the right not just to be heard, but the right to not be silenced. We faced intimidation, behind the-scenes, and out in front.
This all unfolded in the backdrop of what also shadowed most of my University experience: 9/11 and the aftermath. I was co-leading the Muslim Students Association (Treasurer and then Acting Vice President) at the time. We had the FBI on campus raiding Princeton University records (was there ever an apology)? We had the aforementioned PACT going around raising hate on campus asking for loyalty tests. And worst of all? As a prominent Muslim student, I got the hate — by email (and otherwise). Once a Trustee of another New Jersey University wrote to me:
“Judging from your name you are probably Muslim from a godforsaken Islamic country. When you are a guest in our country, it is not courteous to defame our heros especially when you don’t have true heroes of your own. If you can’t handle this analysis, I suggest you consider going back to your deprived country and stick your head in your koran for the rest of your life.”
I remember at the time a University administrator called campus public safety. I didn’t understand it at the time, but she said “they would investigate to protect my safety as a student.” I had written to her at the time saying that this was abhorrent but free speech, and it didn’t affect me. I think I was half-truthful. It did affect me. All of it did. But you persevere. Hate isn’t anything new. I always felt these words would make me stronger. And they did. Eventually, all we had to do was out-mobilize, out-flank and out-rank our opposition. And that is where I still believe the fight against injustice should be — not just about shame and names.
Today, the calls are about ‘defund the police’ but quickly people have forgotten about the three-lettered (real) bogeymen of the federal government. Hate mail was one thing, but the FBI, INS, and others would prowl our campuses, intimidate foreign students at the borders, and fail to protect people from hate crimes and violence. In fact, during our time, a fellow Muslim student was attacked off-campus over the weekend. We did not even report it to federal authorities. What would they do? A hate crime was simply not effectively investigated during those years against Muslims. We’d likely just get investigated for being a terrorist.
When I went to Syria for the first time in the summer of 2003, I had no idea it would so incredibly add to the systemic prejudice I would face. Despite legally it not applying to me as a natural-born Canadian (with no other citizenship), I was branded a Special Registrant on my return. For all the people praising Bush. Praising Bolton. Praising the Lincoln Project of hypocrites. They branded me, as a result of being Muslim and traveling to a Muslim country, in big stamped letters in my passport SPECIAL REGISTRANT.
Like a criminal, I would be pulled aside every time I would try to re-enter the US, something I had done 100 times in my life. First you would go to the counter, they would flip through your passport, and then take you to a backroom. After waiting for 2 hours, you would be taken to an interrogation room. Under penalty of perjury you would be interrogated. The muscle (literally) would not just be at the door, but pointed out. I was 20 years old at the time. Today’s young Brownsters, have no idea what it was like to be a criminalized Muslim male during the 9/11 era.
After several hours, I would be ‘released’ only to go back in the border line. This would often be in Toronto (as US border agents are in the departing airports) but sometimes on arrival in JFK. And the story would literally begin again, like Groundhog Day. I’d miss my flight, stay the night, and try again the next day. Often I would laugh it off or make light of it. What else could you do? State surveillance. State intimidation. Not a name. Not a slogan. Once I’d arrive, everything would seemingly be fine. But then I’d have to go within one month to a special appointment at INS in Newark. There they’d interrogate me again (and of course do all the bells and whistles of making you feel like a criminal). Then whenever I would leave the US, I’d have to go to a special backroom where I would have to ‘log-in’ before I could fly. And then you’d go back to campus and be called an anti-Semite. Or be shouted down for daring to say the Iraq War is a bad idea.
Thank God for Professor Cornel West during that time. When we’d be challenging the narrative he was there to stand with us. During that time, you might be castigated, marginalized, culturally expropriated — but you could come together in fellowship and fight the good fight. We took on the University Administration on its Admissions policies. We took the campus to task for labeling the majority-minority culture ‘self-segregation’. But most of all we injected into the heart of the belly of the war beast a message for peace (albeit in vain) against tremendous hostility and cynicism.
Ultimately, Martin Luther King Jr used to speak of the interrelated issues of militarism, poverty and racial injustice, and how all three needed to be fought together to truly provide a pathway to progress. In 2000–2004, the framework for the modern unequal ‘capitalist economy’ was being laid down with Princeton pumping out investment bankers and consultants, and the economic overlords of hyper-capitalism educating all of us. We were simultaneously in the midst of the greatest surveillance operation on racial minorities in the history of the world after 9/11 and in the vicinity of nearby New York, while Giuliani was being lionized over the victims of police violence. Meanwhile, America’s war machine was in full march.
In our timid efforts we had to confront the three-headed hydra of militarism, racial injustice, and policies driving poverty. The Iraq War, may go down as the single-most consequential decision in America’s post-World War II history. It was incubated at Princeton. While we were there. And no one talked about it. Professor Emeritus Bernard Lewis would whisk away to the White House to advise Vice President Dick Cheney, and then saunter on back to Princeton to do brownbag lectures with us in the Near Eastern Studies Department. He was the Godfather of American policy in the Middle East, giving the kiss of death to any questioning of the narrative. And on campus, the Brown, Muslim students who got out of line challenging this were made to feel like they were **it.
When Edward Said died, a Princeton alumnus, we had to make a non-official memorial lecture. Today it’s ‘official’ but rest assured when we fought for it back then — we were roundly ignored. There’s a lot of history there, with Lewis and Said, and Princeton’s orientalism, but it was Professor West, who was a friend of Said’s, who would show up and back us up — literally and figuratively. The first time I listened to Kanye West was actually as interpreted by Professor West at an evening event at Princeton. Of course Larry Summers had driven Professor West out of Harvard — our gain obviously.
I felt that with Professor West’s outlook about religion, humanism and philosophy, we could have an equitable dialogue and pursuit of truth. When he said ‘Race Matters’ people listened. What I didn’t realize is that people would take this to the illogical extension of ‘Race is all that Matters.’ When we hosted Professor West for a Community Dinner at the Fields Center, we felt that we weren’t just a Center on the far-flung edges of campus. We were getting our due. What I didn’t realize was, that the establishment was just waiting to co-opt the fight, when the timing was right and hollow it out of all its meaning. Its truth.
Upon graduation, I was awarded the Frederick Douglass Award, which is given to the senior who has exhibited “courage, leadership, intellectual achievement and a willingness to contribute unselfishly toward a deeper understanding of the experiences of racial minorities and who, in so doing, reflects the tradition of service embodied in education at Princeton.” The bust of this award sits in my parents home but I still have a poster of Frederick Douglass in my apartment. I was really proud of that award, because of what Frederick Douglass represents — intellectual fortitude for justice. His example and that of Malcolm X (his renewal of self constantly drives my own practice of Islam), I carry with me to this day.
Yet, I may not have deserved the Award because ultimately I was naive. I too was caught up in names. In slogans. In labeling. And I forgot all about the essence of struggle. The depth of intellectual fortitude. And the importance of the renewal of self. One of the biggest campaigns I led during my time at Princeton was the change of the name of the Third World Center to the Carl A. Fields Center for Equality and Cultural Understanding (aka the Fields Center). I was elected Political Chair of the Governance Board of the Third World Center on the premise that I would seek to change the name. By the time I was Chair of the Governance Board we accomplished this. There was a lot of opposition at the time from the Black Student Union alumni, who emphasized the history of the name. I thought it was anachronistic. That contemporary students of colors would feel othered by it. And when we named it after the first Black Administrator in an Ivy League school, Carl A. Fields, I felt proud.
The Third World Center was a place where people like Michelle Obama and Sonia Sotomayor called a home on campus. We could have dinners or have tutorials. We could throw our own salsa parties away from the eating clubs. Here we wouldn’t be othered. And sure we had changed the name, but in my final year, I still felt we had the right spirit. One of the final events while I was there was when we hosted Kadijatou Diallo. Her son Amadou was shot in 1999 with 41 bullets (19 striking him) and to this day he awaits justice. It was truly moving. Indelible. Before George Floyd, there was Amadou. And no one cared from the establishment.
I remember going back to campus for my 15th reunion last year. I went to find the Fields Center — aka TWC — but it had been ‘moved’ to a brand new facility. The original building? Razed to the damn ground in 2011. During the Obama Administration. With Michelle Obama in prominence. The establishment doesn’t care unless it is forced to. Of course, a new pantheon do the grift and graft of corporate diversity was created next door. The problem with the Center was always we were on the edge of campus. The new building was still relegated to the corners. Still on the outside. And what of the student governance board, from the student body, elected from the people who used to lead the center? No more. Demolished as well. Now a six-figured university administrator would lord over and educate people on truths, rather than debate and discuss action.
Princeton University manufactures the elite. The lawyers. The bankers. The consultants. The intelligence officers. The professors. It’s one big elite-making factory. And the Third World Center — the Fields Center — was always a blot on this record of elite-making. It confronted not just racial injustice, but poverty and militarism as well. It wasn’t co-opted by the establishment, it challenged it. And there I was changing the name. Thinking I had done something. I only hastened a more tone-deaf approach to social justice.
Today, when I see President Eisgruber change the name of the Wilson School, I wonder what people see. I will tell you what I see. I see a White Male professor who is so stooped in an American worldview that he looks right through you when you meet him if you are Brown (last year at an alumni breakfast). I see an establishment that is willing to trade a name of its international affairs school rather than understand its complicity — and that of its international affairs history— for the single biggest blunder in America foreign policy of the last 75 years that led to millions of deaths.
But most of all, I see a community of color ready to claim victory with a name and a slogan while forgetting what the struggle is all about. I see many of my Black and Brown friends, from when I was at Princeton now safely ensconced in the elite, myself included. Cashing in. On fame. On money. On power. I see all of us now in the establishment, fighting for the image of what is right, rather than digging our hands into the ground to shovel away at the deep injustices that not only still persist but that we are now also a part of perpetuating. I do not see the intellectual fortitude of Frederick Douglas. I do not see the self renewal of Malcolm X. And I do not see the example of Carl A. Fields.
I see a hollow victory far away from the real battlefields of today.
Taufiq Rahim was a graduate of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University (2004). This article is a raw personal reaction and not intended to answer all questions regarding Woodrow Wilson’s legacy, racism in America and racial equality at Princeton University.
