Princeton University is on the verge of promoting a professor who participated in the occupation of a campus building that disrupted university operations and led to more than a dozen arrests, according to an email reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
The university has recommended that the classics scholar Dan-el Padilla Peralta, who along with 13 anti-Israel student protesters stormed Princeton’s historic Clio Hall in April, be promoted from associate to full professor, pending the approval of the university’s board of trustees. Peralta already has tenure, but the promotion would make him eligible for university leadership roles, including deanships.
"I'm sure you will want to join me in congratulating Dan-el on his promotion to a full professorship," the chair of the classics department, Barbara Graziosi, wrote to her colleagues on July 18. "This is still 'unofficial' news, because the Board of Trustees will have to rubber stamp the recommendation made by the committee that oversees promotions, but I was told I am allowed to share the news internally and do so with glee."
The board is all but certain to accept the recommendation, professors familiar with the matter said, given that the group signs off on virtually all appointments. Princeton and Peralta did not respond to requests for comment.
The promotion comes as Princeton’s peer universities have taken a soft-on-crime approach to the unlawful and at times violent protests that have rocked campuses since the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks. The Harvard Corporation this month reversed its decision to withhold degrees from 11 students who led an encampment in Harvard yard, one of whom is a Rhodes Scholar set to attend Oxford University next year. Other schools, including Northwestern and Middlebury, ended their encampments by negotiating with protesters and acceding to many of their demands.
At Princeton, Peralta played a leading role in the most disruptive protest the campus had experienced in years. He and another professor, sociologist Ruha Benjamin, joined 13 students in occupying Clio Hall, the home of Princeton’s graduate school administration, as 200 additional protesters cheered them on from the outside.
Police eventually warned the occupiers that they would be arrested if they did not exit the building. Peralta and Benjamin did so, but the students did not.
After a chaotic effort to stop the police—at one point the crowd surrounded a bus where two of the protesters were being held—all 13 students were arrested while the professors who had encouraged them escaped without sanction.
The showdown followed a four day sit-in in the university’s McCosh Courtyard, where several Princeton faculty members, including Peralta, had delivered remarks. Though the sit-in relocated to another part of campus after the occupation of Clio Hall, it was allowed to continue in its new location for over a week.
A classicist who argues that "whiteness" is inseparable from classics, Peralta is perhaps Princeton’s most prominent scholar-activist.
He spearheaded a faculty letter in 2020 that called on the university to give minority professors extra pay and sabbatical time—compensation for their "invisible work," the letter said—and is a vocal supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which calls for an economic boycott of the Jewish state.
During the sit-in in April, Peralta also proposed a faculty resolution granting amnesty to "students and other university affiliates involved in peaceful free speech and assembly for justice in Palestine." The non-binding resolution passed narrowly in May and condemned the university’s decision to discipline the students who stormed Clio Hall.
Unlike Harvard, which promised harsh sanctions before walking them back, Princeton was lenient from the get-go: A university spokeswoman announced in May that the students were unlikely to get more than probation.