Solveig Gold is proud to be the wife of a 'cancelled' Princeton professor

But she also wants to be better known. At dinner with the budding public intellectual and her "cabal."

PRINCETON, N.J. — Solveig Lucia Gold was setting the table in her garden, next to the house once occupied by Albert Einstein. His garden is a wide field of emerald green grass leading to the 18th century blacksmith's house with stone floors which houses his home office.

Mrs. Gold, 27, was preparing for an intimate dinner with some of the few people — “our little cabal,” she said — who publicly admit to being on good terms with her and her recently fired husband (she prefers "canceled") Joshua Katz, former Princeton classics professor.

Most of the guests were much older than Mrs. Gold. This included Dr. Katz, who is 52 and was once her teacher. They tied the knot last July, four years after graduating from Princeton with a summa cum laude degree in Classics, and a year after Dr. Katz began his public fight with the left on campus.

The couple ran with open arms into the culture wars, which Ms. Gold said was characteristic of her, but not of him, the low-key teacher everyone loved, who previously didn't ruffle feathers at the university where he had worked since 1998. ("I'm the alpha," she wrote in an essay about their relationship.)

"I am not Lady Macbeth in this story, but I am obviously implicated in some way in her involvement," she said.

"She gave me some courage to do this kind of thing," said Dr. Katz. . "She was not responsible for my action in doing so."

The problems began on July 4, 2020, when a group of Princeton professors sent a letter to the university's president, demanding that the university combat institutional racism. "Anti-darkness is fundamental to America," he said.

Four days later, Dr. Katz responded with a manifesto, “A Declaration of Independence by a Princeton Professor,” to Quillette, which is something of an inside organ of the so-called intellectual Dark Web. He took issue with proposed changes that “would lead to a civil war on campus and erode further public confidence in the workings of elite higher education institutions".

But the part that caught the most attention was his characterization of the Black Justice League - a group of students who had called on Princeton to recognize Woodrow Wilson's racist legacy about six years before he finally stripped his name from his school of public policy, in June 2020 - as "small local terrorist organization".

It turns out that when she was a student at Princeton, Ms. Gold had helped found a group called the Princeton Open Campus Coalition for the express purpose of opposing black justice. League and its requirements.

ImageDr. Katz and Mrs. Gold prepare for their guests.Credit...Bryan Anselm for The New York Times