Letter from the Director

The radical upheavals of 2019 to 2020 have affected some far more grievously and personally than others. Writing this letter in June 2020, I must begin by reiterating on behalf of the University Center affirmation of the fundamental human value that Black Lives Matter. The Center calls for

justice for all those who have been the victims of police violence and of other forms of oppression that are unjustly visited upon people of color, including the unequal racialized impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and for the systemic changes that are needed to prevent their further toll. It is a moral challenge to live up to these words in what the Center does, and to learn from those who have been at the forefront of the struggle against racism and for a true justice and equality for all.

As urgent as it is to look ahead to what can be done to respond adequately to the pandemic, to racialized injustice, and to other pressing issues, the task of this report is primarily to look back at the 2019-20 academic year, and to do so frozen in print some months before its eventual publication in the early fall. So please bear with me if this letter emerges into that light as inadequate to a changed moment.

Looking back, for me personally, a different upheaval began in the summer of 2019, with a need for major medical treatment extending through the winter of 2020. I was able to continue directing the UCHV thanks to the generous willingness of faculty and staff colleagues to redistribute tasks and rethink safety in operating procedures. That said, we were able otherwise to enjoy the kind of academic year that we had expected until mid-March, enhanced by the intellectual brio of Renée Bolinger, a new assistant professor appointed jointly with the Department of Politics. Among other highlights, Barbara Herman’s Moffett Lecture challenged conventional readings of Kant on beneficence, while Richard Tuck’s Tanner Lectures on different ways of conceiving citizenship in Rousseau and Sieyès invited stimulating commentaries on topics ranging from the role of women in Rousseau’s thought, to the meaning of acting in concert in politics at all.

The LSR Visiting Faculty Fellows bonded as a group that was enriched in the spring by the return of Joseph Chan as our Global Scholar, who shared somber reflections on the ethics of protest and resistance in light of the experience of Hong Kong, and the return to Princeton of Stephen Stich *68 as Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching, who convened a review of the progress of empirical moral philosophy as a field that reunited key players, many previously associated with the UCHV and so a family reunion of sorts. On the staff side, we thanked Femke de Ruyter for her six years of imaginative and dedicated service as program coordinator, as she moved on to a center manager role elsewhere on campus, and welcomed Kim Murray, who has already brought terrific energy into the team in her stead. And we are greatly indebted to Janine Calogero (Department Manager, German) for covering Regin Davis’ parental leave as assistant director with enthusiasm—and to Regin for exceptional transition planning even as she prepared to welcome baby Benjamin.

But of course, in mid-March, just after hosting the quadrennial meeting of the UCHV Advisory Council, and with plans for an ambitious April celebration of the Center’s 30th anniversary, the intensifying gravity of the COVID-19 crisis led us together with the rest of the university, and the world, to variously postpone, cancel, and more generally rethink the ways in which we work, teach, and learn, and how to deploy resources to address the range of emerging needs and questions. The great transition to online teaching and convening was accomplished in our case thanks especially to the patience of Technical Support Specialist Andrew Perhac, and the energy of Events Coordinator Laurie Skoroda (who is formally retiring but continuing to work part-time through the end of 2020), as well as the continuing stalwart service of staff members Dawn Disette and Kim Girman (and Kim Murray, mentioned above); Julie Clack returned from parental leave to oversee the production of this report with her usual panache. While Anthony Appiah’s Moffett Lecture was postponed to Fall 2020 and Amy Gutmann and Jonathan D. Moreno’s DeCamp Lecture to Fall 2021, and the 30th anniversary conference planned on Universities and the Prospect for Democratic Values had to be canceled, the regular internal academic meetings of the fellows, postdocs, Graduate Prize Fellows, and undergraduate Values and Public Life students migrated online without a hitch. We were also able to launch a research interchange with the political theory community at the Central European University with a virtual workshop on Democracy and Autocracy. Intellectually, Center faculty and researchers tackled COVID-related issues ranging from how to model a range of parameters and policy responses with varying values assumptions; how to defend democracies against authoritarian attempts to exploit the pandemic; how to time the onset of carbon pricing in the changed economic circumstances; how to advise family members and employers on individual ethical choices to be confronted, and more. Research on conventions of communicative signaling and how racism can distort them, on the ethics of violent protest and riots, and on the political theory of

resistance became all the more important. And we convened a UCHV community-wide discussion of how to pursue anti-racism, informed by the work of Princeton faculty member Imani Perry, generating ideas on which we will work to build. We also convened a panel on remote teaching featuring seven rising Values and Public Life seniors whose creative ideas inspired all the participating faculty.

The Center also responded to the pandemic by extending support to affiliated faculty, staff, visitors, postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduates. Keeping the Center’s academic community together with daily email updates and the staff with daily Zoom meetings for the first month-plus of the lockdown, we also helped support repatriation of our 2019-20 visitors and postdocs where needed (all safely, though with a few hair-raising adventures). We quickly designed new programs of financial support for former Graduate Prize Fellows and current postdocs, and offered additional book grants and research funds to both graduates and undergraduates affiliated with the Center. Well over a dozen students are working as research assistants with UCHV-affiliated faculty with Center funding in summer 2020.

At the end of the year, Anna Stilz stepped down as director of the Values and Public Life Program after six transformative years, during which she overhauled the Senior Thesis Workshops, built research field trips around VPL seminars, and in the words of Diana Sandoval Simán ’20, “inspired us to be more curious and open-minded as a community.” We are extremely grateful to her, while looking forward to what Stephen Macedo will bring to VPL as interim director in the 2020-21 academic year, and Sandra Bermann as director from 2021 to 2023. And we said farewell to Marc Fleurbaey, who is taking up positions at the Paris School of Economics and the École Normale Supérieure, and who in nine years as a jointly appointed faculty member with the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the last eight as the Robert E. Kuenne Professor in Economics and Humanistic Studies, has relentlessly but modestly brought formal modeling and normative questioning to bear on bringing about a more equitable, sustainable, and democratic world. He will be greatly missed.

Finally, as you read this letter, Michael Smith, McCosh Professor of Philosophy and longtime member of the UCHV Executive Committee, will have taken up the reins as Acting Director of the University Center for 2020 to 2021 while I am on sabbatical. Notwithstanding the fact that 2020 to 2021 is likely to be as challenging a year as 2019 to 2020, under Michael’s leadership it is sure to be a meaningful one.

Melissa Lane

Director of the University Center for Human Values; Class of 1943 Professor of Politics