The Ivy League Apology Show: Princeton and Penn as Case Studies

By Tal Fortgang '17

When Plato titled his account of Socrates’ trial “Apology,” he was not describing an expression of regret or remorse. The Greek word “apologia” meant something quite different: a reasoned defense, a careful explanation of one’s actions and beliefs in the face of grave accusations. For “corrupting the youth,” Socrates did not apologize in our modern sense. Instead, he offered a spirited justification of his life’s work, defending the examined life even as it led him to his death. The contrast with our contemporary understanding could hardly be starker. Where Socrates’s apology countered his prosecutors with courage, today’s apologies are more often exercises in damage control and strategic retreat. Perhaps most of all, they tend to be forced – if not by a victorious opponent, then by one’s own HR or PR team -- and therefore meaningless.

The apology has become a peculiar ritual in American public life. Our age of perpetual offense is also one perpetual contrition. For every “call-out” of some public wrong there is a mea culpa, usually “for the offense” others took or “for the hurt” caused. (The most durable cliches emerge from the least meaningful statements.) An apology is the go-to demand of the social media mob, which seeks nothing more than to establish which opinions are unacceptable. A mob has no expectation that whoever is to apologize will come to see the wrongness of his or her actions – only that they will regret touching a third rail and show others that they will regret doing the same. Young people trying to break into politics or commentary are now advised, reasonably, never to apologize. Just “Tweet through it” because apologies are just signs of weakness.

Altogether, the serious matter of the adult apology, with its capacity to restore trust, repair relationships, or genuinely address tensions between people, has been thoroughly infantilized.

Nowhere is this dynamic more pronounced than on university campuses, where the machinery of apology has become as essential as the campus bookstore or dining hall. If you didn’t know better you would think there was an office of We Promise to Educate Ourselves and Do Better. Administrators apologize for speakers they invited; faculty apologize for research they conducted; university presidents even apologize for trumped-up histories of systemic racism. Occasionally students even apologize for taking their activism too far.

Two recent cases suggest that the apology has reached the logical end of this trend. It is fully a magic incantation, there to rescue you from trouble even if you don’t believe a word you say. When it is not demanded by the mob, it has the same qualities but the opposite valence. In other words, it is equally meaningless, but in a way that benefits the apologizer.

The first case emerged from Princeton, where 13 anti-Israel demonstrators, including six Princeton graduate students, briefly occupied Clio Hall in April 2024. After more than 14 months in municipal court, the prosecutor dismissed criminal trespass charges in June in exchange for community service (which had already been completed) and the students submitting a letter of apology to the University and its staff. Remarkably, the demonstrators couldn’t even do that, not even with the assistance of legal counsel. They wrote a screed about their own righteousness instead. The presiding judge instructed them to take a do-over. Submit “a written apology that is indeed an apology, and not a political manifesto with references to our constitutional rights to take over Whig-Clio,” and charges would be dismissed. Apparently they got the magic words right the second time, and their records have been expunged.

Does anyone believe these demonstrators, who knowingly violated time, place, and manner restrictions by occupying a building, regret their actions? Their failed first attempt at an apology puts that question to rest. If, like Socrates, they wanted to defend the rightness of their actions, let them suffer the consequences. But what good does an apology that they got right only the second time do? Perhaps, for the prosecutor, judge, and University, it makes the case go away. Yet it does not even do that. By establishing the precedent that the supposed adults in the room – the ones with the power to force the juvenile apology – don’t take the flagrant violation of rules seriously, they only encourage more disruptions. They show that the children have power over the adults.

The second case involves the University of Pennsylvania’s recent agreement with the Trump administration regarding transgender athletes competing in women’s sports. As part of the agreement, Penn sent letters of apology to female swimmers “who experienced a competitive disadvantage or experienced anxiety” due to the presence of transgender competitors. The Trump administration doubtless views this part of the agreement as ritual self-abasement for institutions that have taken progressive views on hot-button social issues. But the actual apology comes off exactly as one would expect from an institution that knows it has gotten out of jail free, so to speak: corporate, half-hearted, utterly forgettable. Without a mob behind it – not that there should be – apology as self-flagellation doesn’t quite sing.

Does anyone believe that Penn has been persuaded that they were wrong to have followed “NCAA rules at the time,” as they put it? Putting aside one’s substantive beliefs about the issue of transgender athletes, is there any indication that Penn would not return to its prior policy as soon as political winds shifted to allow it? Of course not. The apology is an escape hatch. Though it does not constitute the full extent of Penn’s settlement, its magic words sealed the deal.

What role is the apology playing in these two cases? In neither instance is the apology functioning as a genuine expression of contrition or even as an explanation for one’s behavior. Instead, these apologies serve as a script, almost certainly welcomed by the party doing the apologizing. They are performances, and everyone knows it. What’s new is not that the apologizing party knows they are saying “sorry” with their fingers crossed behind their back; it’s that the party being apologized to knows it just as well – yet insists anyway. All parties are choosing to avoid the harder question of responsibility and judgment.

This represents a particularly odious form of compelled speech that cheapens the very value of words themselves. When we require apologies as performative acts divorced from genuine conviction, we transform language from a vehicle for the power of reason into a collection of sounds we make (or characters we type) to get others off our backs. Words lose their connection to thought and belief. The result is a degradation of public discourse, where the very possibility of meaningful speech is undermined by the expectation that speech is something to be performed rather than intended, directed, and taken seriously. We do this to children in the hope that they will soon think about the words they are saying and take the idea of contrition seriously. But when we do this to adults, we reverse that process, affirming that we have no expectation that they take responsibility for their actions – in other words, that we are prepared to treat them like children forever.

The two cases are not alike in every way, of course. Penn’s magic words allow it to escape responsibilities imposed upon it ex post. Its administration thought its transgender-athlete policy was the correct one, and they were on good legal footing to think so. The Princeton demonstrators, by contrast, knew they were breaking rules all along. Their hollow apologies confirm that they do not think they did anything wrong, yet are not ready to bear the consequences of their actions like true civil disobedience activists.

But in both cases, the scandal is that those with the power to demand responsibility and judgment have abdicated their roles as the “adults in the room.” The Trump administration could have set a new transgender-athletes policy without cheapening the enterprise by turning it into a performance of penance. And the prosecutor, judge, and University who could have held trespassers’ feet to the fire made the parent’s cardinal error: they caved. It would have been one thing to drop charges early on or choose not to prosecute from the outset. But after more than a year of holding their ground, they allowed these adults to escape accountability by reciting magic words.

Message received: We don’t take you, ourselves, or what we purport to believe, seriously.

Tal Fortgang ’17 is a Legal Policy Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a regular contributor to PFS and a contributing writer at The Dispatch.