The Post-Truth University: Academia in the Age of the Great Awokening, Cancel Culture, and Identity Politics
Alejandro Zaera-Polo received his diploma in architecture with honors from ETSAM Madrid and his master’s with distinction from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. He worked for the Office of Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam before establishing Foreign Office Architects in London in 1993. He started AZPML as a legacy practice of FOA after its dissolution in 2011. He has completed many buildings across multiple typologies (institutional, residential, commercial, transport, and retail) across a wide geography, with projects completed in the UK, Spain, Japan, South Korea, Switzerland, China, Austria, and Luxemburg. Besides his professional practice, Zaera-Polo was dean of the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam from 2001 to 2006, and of the Princeton School of Architecture, where he was a professor from 2012 to 2021. He has been Visiting Professor at Yale, Columbia, and UCLA, and was a unit master at the Architectural Association in London. He is the author of The Sniper’s Log: Architectural Chronicles of Generation X, Imminent Commons. Urban Questions for the Near Future/The Expanded City, and The Ecologies of the Building Envelope: A Material History and Theory of Architectural Surfaces.
Alejandro Zaera-Polo’s book is a first-person account by the former dean of Princeton University’s School of Architecture, an international architect who served as a professor who worked at the school for ten years. The book describes the climate of ideological suppression in an elite American university and the mechanisms involved in the process. After an accusation of plagiarism forced him to step down, Zaera-Polo sued Princeton for defamation, but remained a professor until the ideological impositions over his advisory duties forced him into a public conflict with the institution. He persisted doggedly in his claims to academic freedom and free speech and kept the records of the process for publication to document how identity politics, groupthink, deception, and peer pressure can be harnessed to curtail academic freedom and shield the inquisitors from scrutiny. Zaera-Polo tells the story of his challenge to the post-modern culture, critical theory, and the “alternative truths” that have taken root in American universities, a story we should all consider to preserve academic rigor and free expression on our campuses.
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