Mark, Padilla has explicitly said that his goal is not to reform the classics — which plenty of others have been doing for years — it is to destroy them. I can’t imagine how a reasonable person could get behind that project.

I’m certainly in favor of cross-cultural studies, but nobody is arguing, for instance, that the teaching of Chinese philosophy should include Kant or Hume. The same goes the other way around.

We should rename the classics “Western classics,” or something like that. But that doesn’t alter the substance of what is being taught.

And it is rather convenient for Padilla to say that “maybe he should” leave, while at the same time drawing a nice salary from Princeton, an institution, as I point out in the article, whose history is marred by slavery.