ACTA Welcomes Dr. Joshua Katz to Council of Scholars

Washington, DC—The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) is delighted to announce that Dr. Joshua T. Katz has been named as ACTA’s scholar-in-residence and will serve on ACTA’s Council of Scholars.

“Joshua Katz walks a path of integrity and principle and does not waver to accommodate the campus virtue signalling that too often substitutes for real virtue. It was ACTA’s privilege to honor him in 2020 as a Hero of Intellectual Freedom, observing how he stood up unblinkingly against the unrelenting harassment of colleagues, colleagues who were neither his intellectual nor moral equals,” said ACTA President Michael Poliakoff. “It is now our privilege to name this distinguished teacher and internationally acclaimed scholar our scholar-in-residence and a member of ACTA’ s Council of Scholars.”

Dr. Katz remarked, “Higher education is in crisis, but ACTA is always on the front line, defending and promoting the essential ideas of academic excellence and freedom. I was honored to be named a Hero of Intellectual Freedom in 2020 and am delighted now to be joining Michael Poliakoff and his outstanding team. I aim to help make a difference.”

Since its founding in 1995, ACTA has benefited from the guidance of many of the nation’s leading scholars and teachers. ACTA has routinely called upon esteemed members of the academy to furnish critical insights into campus policies and practices. When developing and launching its flagship publication in 2009, What Will They Learn? (WWTL), ACTA first sought the professional guidance of eminent professors from each of WWTL’s seven core disciplines: Composition, Literature, Foreign Language, U.S. Government or History, Economics, Mathematics, and Natural Science.

An American linguist and classicist of global renown, Dr. Katz taught at Princeton University for over 24 years, where he served as Cotsen Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Classics. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree at Yale University, his Master’s in Philosophy at the University of Oxford, and his Ph.D. at Harvard University. During his tenure at Princeton, Dr. Katz received the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching and the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award. In 2010, he was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and also held a fellowship at Oxford’s All Souls College. 

Widely published on language, literature, and culture, Dr. Katz’s recent public-facing writings have appeared in such prestigious outlets as First Things, Law & Liberty, National Review, the New Criterion, Newsweek, Public Discourse, Quillette, SAPIR, the Spectator, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Wall Street Journal. Dr. Katz is a senior fellow at both the American Enterprise Institute and the Witherspoon Institute, a trustee at the Canterbury Institute, and a member of the advisory boards of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the University of Austin, and the University of Stockholm. He is a founding member of the Academic Freedom Alliance.

Past members of ACTA’s Council of Scholars include Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize winner Saul Bellow, historian and philosopher Jacques Barzun, and sociologist David Riesman.