Are We All White Supremacists? Ayatollah Chad M. Topaz Decrees All Links to His QSIDE Website From His Critics Will Be Redirected to SPLC

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - Ayatollah Chad Topaz has decided you are a white supremacist if you are critical of his hateful campaign to get a white female professor fired and to boycott her UC Davis math department. On Facebook, Chad Topaz announced he was setting up redirects for links to his QSIDE website created by bloggers critical of his extremist fatwa. In many cases, he altered his QSIDE website so that clicking on an author's link will now take the reader to a Southern Poverty Law Center web page instead.

Currently, his list of white supremacist bloggers include many of us who are surprised to be labeled as such including those posting at Anonymous Political Scientist, Campus Reform, Economic Job Market Rumors, Ephblog, The College Fix, The Other Dunwoody, The Reference Frame, Post Tenure Tourettes,  The Leitter Report,  Why Evolution is True and Williams Liberty. Chad Topaz's efforts to redirect traffic away from his website have continued as late as December 10, 2019 when he created redirects for a second article from The College Fix which quotes his colleague Colin Adams who reports that the petition critical of Topaz was signed by four Fields Medalists and eight past presidents of the American Mathematical Society.

All in all, it is easy to defeat these redirects. All you have to do is set up a new link, or link to a third party he deems safe which then links to his QSIDE website. For a while, it was a kick to simply use the Internet Wayback Machine to link to the earlier posts.

Now, however, Chad Topaz has used a simple insert to block the the Internet Wayback Machine from scanning his site. This, of course, may be seen as a good thing because it makes his posts at QSIDE less reliable and less accessible to future researchers.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist and a former Williams College professor. He is an occasional contributor at American Thinker, Breitbart, Front Page, PJMedia and WND. His pronouns are Master/Commander.

Darkside: Funniest Ayatollah Chad Topaz Memes

Shameful Chad M. Topaz Meme - UCLA

Chad M.  Topaz fades to Emperor Palpatine.

Quantitative research on being a jerk at Williams College.

Hannibal Lecter Fades to Chad M. Topaz

Pennywise fades to Chad M. Topaz.

Chad M. Topaz Fades to Hannibal Lecter.

Error Code - What's Up with the Institute for the Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity?

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - Williams College math professor, Chad M. Topaz, is asking for donations to pay for consulting services for graduate students seeking to craft winning diversity statements. While this looks like an open invitation to commit academic plagiarism, it may be among the least worrying ethical issues surrounding Chad Topaz and his non-profit organization.

I had an intuition something was up with Chad Topaz when I noticed some odd things in his description of his Institute for the Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity (QSIDE). I have worked for a couple of decades in the non-profit field, so I'm sensitive to the red flags. In particular, I know that it makes board members anxious when the president of the charity is stirring up trouble by calling for employers to fire people and for others to boycott an institution.

This might not be so much of a big deal if Chad Topaz's ranting only endangered himself. Unfortunately, he is using the name and resources of his charity in his attacks and is thus involving others in his shenanigans, particularly the members of his Board of Directors.

In this regard, we can visit the MA Secretary of State's website to get the names and addresses of the board members for Institute for the Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity (QSIDE). They include:

President              Chad Higdon-Topaz         Williamstown, MA 01267

Treasurer              Jude Higdon-Topaz          Williamstown, MA 01267              

Clerk                    GeraldineShen                  Palo Alto, CA 94301

Director                Derek Kaufman                Greenwich, CT 06831     

Director                Noel Bakhtian                   Idaho Falls, ID 83406       

Director                Sharifa Wright                  Williamstown, MA 01267

It would be nice if an enterprising reporter from the Williams Record like Nicholas Goldrosen would look into whether or not the board members who are responsible for Institute for the Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity (QSIDE) have decided whether or not they approve of Chad M. Topaz using the resources of their organization to advocate the firing of an innocent white female math professor working at UC Davis who's only mistake was to articulate her views on diversity statements.

Depending on how he is running Institute for the Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity (QSIDE), Chad's board may have some unwanted legal exposure. As the folks at the Legal Center for Non-Profits write:

We’ve all heard of the all-volunteer nonprofit whose board president—often the founder—runs the whole show, with the board coming together only occasionally to rubber-stamp the president’s acts. It happens in organizations with staff as well, when the executive director is allowed to be the sole organizational decision-maker. In these cases, the board has abdicated its responsibility to oversee and manage the entire nonprofit. But ultimately, the board is responsible, and the officers (volunteer as well as paid) are accountable to it. When things go wrong, the board—collectively and, in certain circumstances, individually—will be liable.

If I was a board member at Institute for the Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity (QSIDE), I would be particularly anxious about whether or not the organization is run in a manner that protects board members from being sued for their decisions. This can happen if the non-profit does not hold its annual meetings on schedule, fails to keep accurate minutes, or allows Chad Topaz to act on their behalf but without their permission.

As an aside, I should point out that it is suspicious Chad Topaz has his significant other, Jude Higdon-Topaz, serving as the treasurer of the organization. This is a situation ripe for the misuse of non-profit funds. This may not be a big deal. As far as I can tell, Chad Topaz submitted one of those cheap quickie IRS non-profit determination applications in which you have to promise that your charity will make less than $50,000 a year for three years. So there won't be much there to embezzle if the temptation become too great. As far as I can tell, the position of clerk, basically the secretary, looks okay.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist and a former Williams College professor. He is an occasional contributor at American Thinker, Breitbart, Front Page, PJMedia and WND.

Chad Topaz - Enemy of Free Speech - Denounced by His Own Math Department Colleagues at Williams College

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - Academics offended by the extremism of Chad M. Topaz, a woke Williams College math professor, have organized a petition in response to his campaign to silence Abigail Thompson, a white female math professor at UC Davis. You can read and sign the petition here. So far, the petition has been signed by over 725 people including the chairman of his own math department, Richard De Veaux and four winners of the prestigious Fields Medal including David Mumford and Terence Tao. Colin Adams has told The College Fix that signatories also include eight former presidents of the American Mathematical Society (AMS).

The petition is worth reading in full. Its authors appear to be most alarmed by the efforts of Chad Topaz made to get Thompson fired from her job because he disapproved of an article she wrote in the December issue of the Notices of the AMS. The petition reads as follows:

To the American Mathematical Society

We write with grave concerns about recent attempts to intimidate a voice within our mathematical community. Abigail Thompson published an opinion piece in the December issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. She explained her support for efforts within our community to further diversity, and then described her concerns with the rigid rubrics used to evaluate diversity statements in the hiring processes of the University of California system.

The reaction to the article has been swift and vehement. An article posted at the site QSIDE urges faculty to direct their students not to attend and not to apply for jobs at the University of California-Davis, where Prof.Thompson is chair of the math department. It recommends contacting the university to question whether Prof. Thompson is fit to be chair. And it recommends refusing to do work for the Notices of the American Mathematical Society for allowing this piece to be published.

Regardless of where anyone stands on the issue of whether diversity statements are a fair or effective means to further diversity aims, we should agree that this attempt to silence opinions is damaging to the profession. This is a direct attempt to destroy Prof. Thompson’s career and to punish her department. It is an attempt to intimidate the AMS into publishing only articles that hew to a very specific point of view. If we allow ourselves to be intimidated into avoiding discussion of how best to achieve diversity, we undermine our attempts to achieve it.

We the undersigned urge the American Mathematical Society to stand by the principle that important issues should be openly discussed in a respectful manner, and to make a clear statement that bullying and intimidation have no place in our community.

What is most interesting to me about this statement is that it was written by liberal academics who are, for the most part, in favor of affirmative action. The issue, for them, is that Chad Topaz has taken on the role of enforcer of the most extreme policy expectations of critical race theory and identity politics. I was surprised to see who has signed the petitions complaining about Topaz.

Other signatories include at least eight from his own college - Luana Maroja, Matt Carter, Joan Edwards, Daniel Lynch, David Gurcay-Morris, David C. Smith, Phebe Cramer and Susan Dunn - and no less than five from his own math department - Colin Adams, Julie Blackwood, Richard De Veaux, Thomas Garrity and Steven J. Miller.

As you may know, the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Williams College was the 2014 top recipient of the AMS Award for an Exemplary Program or Achievement in a Mathematics Department. According to the American Mathematical Society the department was honored for “excellence in providing exceptional teaching and research experiences for its students, as well as those in the wider mathematical community.”

I was startled to see that one signatory might even be the disgraced Williams College trustee, Joey Horn. Check out the whole list below:

Colin Adams Williams College

Luana Maroja, Williams College

Matt Carter, Williams College

Charles Frohman

Rob Kirby, UC Berkeley

Julie Blackwood, Williams College

Clifford Henry Taubes (Department of Mathematics, Harvard University)

Martin Scharlemann, University of California at Santa Barbara

David Eisenbud, U.C. Berkeley

David A. Cox

Michael Freedman Microsoft and UCSB math

Benedict H Gross, UCSD

Steven J. Miller, Williams College

Michael Kapovich, Distinguished Professor, University of California, Davis

D.D. Long UC Santa Barbara

Bruno Nachtergaele, University of California, Davis

Mladen Bestvina, University of Utah

Marc Culler, University of Illinois at Chicago

Laurence R. Taylor University of Notre Dame

Wilfried Schmid, Harvard University

Eric Babson, UC Davis

Joan Edwards, Professor of Biology, Williams College

Dan Romik, UC Davis

David C. Smith, Williams College

Mohamed Elhamdadi

Jozef H. Przytycki, George Washington University

James Glimm Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Stony Brook University

Robert Gompf, The University of Texas at Austin

Ronald Fintushel, Michigan State University (Emeritus)

Darij Grinberg, Drexel University

Emily Hamilton, California Polytechnic State University

Theodore Slaman, University of California Berkeley

J. Elisenda Grigsby, Boston College

William Goldman, Professor, University of Maryland

Elbridge Gerry Puckett, Full Professor, Department of Mathematics, UC Davis

Shiqian Ma, UC Davis

Nicolai Reshetikhin, University of California, Berkeley

Hung-Hsi Wu, Univ. of Cal., Berkeley

Adam Jacob - UC Davis

Louis H Kauffman, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, University of Illinois at Chicago

Vivek Shende, UC Berkeley

William H. Meeks III, Professor of Mathematic, UMass Amherst

Jennifer Schultens

Robert Ghrist, University of Pennsylvania

Barbara Nimershiem, Franklin & Marshall College

Fernando Q. Gouvêa, Colby College

Thomas Garrity (Williams College)

Phebe Cramer Williams College

Marjorie Senechal, Smith College

Sergei Tabachnikov, Penn State

Susan Dunn, Williams College

David Gabai (Princeton University)

Thomas Crawford (Swarthmore College)

Sergiu Klainerman Princeton University

Gigliola Staffilani, MIT

David Auckly, Professor Kansas State University, Director Indigenous Math Circle Communities

Daniel Ruberman, Brandeis University

Hans Riess, University of Pennsylvania

Boris Khesin (University of Toronto)

Dr. Bert Frank Smits

Bastian Rieck (ETH Zurich)

Alek Vainshtein, University of Haifa

Sara A. Solla - Northwestern University

James Arthur, University Professor, University of Toronto. Past President of American Mathematical Society, 2005-2007

Alex Kontorovich, Rutgers University

Lev Rozansky, Professor, Department of Mathematics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Richard Montgomery, UC Santa Cruz, distinguished professor

Richard De Veaux, Williams College

Joey Horn

Michael Stay, CTO, Pyrofex Corp.

Lev Reyzin, Department of Mathematics (MSCS), University of Illinois at Chicago

Dionne Kunkel, The George Washington University

Walter Neumann, Barnard College, Columbia University

Robin Blankenship, Morehead State University

Ivan Izmestiev (TU Wien)

João Nogueira, University of Coimbra

R. Douglas Chatham, Morehead State University

Casey Rodriguez, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Bill Casselman, UBC

Alan Isaac, American University

Carolyn Gordon (Dartmouth College)

Vladislav Vysotsky (University of Sussex)

David Farris, National Centre for Biological Science, Bangalore

Dmitry Fuchs, professor emeritus at University of California, Davis

Chandler Davis, University of Toronto

Vadim Zharnitsky, University of Illinois

Adebisi Agboola (UC Santa Barbara)

Erica Li

Aaron Kaestner, North Park University

Alexandre Chorin, Mathematics, UC Berkeley

Alexander Tumanov, Professor, University of Illinois

David A. Meyer, UC San Diego

Animesh Ray, Professor, Keck Graduate Institute; Extended Faculty, Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Claremont Graduate University; Visiting Faculty Associate, DBE, Caltech

Erik Postma, Maplesoft (on personal title)

Gregory Benford UC Irvine

Mikael Sundqvist, Lund University, Sweden

Daniel Allcock (U.T. Austin)

Yakov Pesin, Penn state University

To understand the full viciousness of Chad M. Topaz's fatwa against Abigail Thompson, you have to read his Facebook post on the topic. It is much more raw and extreme than his later comments, especially one of the last posts I read at QSIDE where he deleted his call for getting her fired for her politically incorrect views. My observation is verified by a bright comment maker at Ephblog who noticed this retreat. He calls it the motte and bailey technique. I'm embedding a link to Chad Topaz's Facebook post and the text of that post after the break.

Finally, I should point out that Chad Topaz has retreated from social media. Initially, he was only blocking Twitter accounts. Later, he took his Twitter account completely off line. Now it is only visible to his approved followers. In reaction to negative publicity, he was quick to remove incriminating statements on his Facebook page. His virtually all of his Facebook posts were removed from public view by November 28, 2019. In inexplicably, Chad Topaz also disrupted links to his QSIDE website that were created by authors critical of his views. These redirects steered readers away from his posts at QSIDE to website of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist and a former Williams College professor. He is an occasional contributor at American Thinker, Breitbart, Front Page, PJMedia and WND. Pronouns - Master/Commander.

For Good? Moody's Investor Services Down Grades Occidental College Debt in Middle of Capital Campaign

Thanks to an article in the Wall Street Journal, I recently learned that I'm not the only white guy who gave up on giving money to Occidental College. According to the WSJ, the school - which is in the middle of a capital campaign - is choking so hard that Moody's Investor Services just down grade its debt from stable to negative. The timing of this announcement couldn't be worse. No rational donor wants to throw good money after bad. There are details on the cringe worthy "Oxy Campaign For Good" on the school's website.

According the the Occidental College spin, the school's financial failures are its punishment for not being nicer to wealthy white families who - perhaps illegally - were willing to pay for their otherwise ineligible children to attend the school. This, of course, is a joke. The school admits tons of black and Latino kids who wouldn't have been eligible to attend the school back when I was a student with extremely high test scores and a number of high school track records too.

In reality, Occidental College has ticked off potential white donors and white alums like me by embracing anti-white bigotry, socialist professors, and identity politics. Moreover, it ruined the prestige of the school by lowering its standards in order to make the school less white.

I remember how its first black president, John Slaughter, told a group of alumni with white faces that he looked forward - essentially - to a future where there were fewer white faces around. I was offended. I still think Slaughter  was a sick jerk. He was completely unqualified to serve as a college president. He had no experience as a fundraiser or as a liberal arts college administrator. Under his feckless leadership, support for students shot up so high and so quick that the Board of Directors had to draw down the endowment to keep the school going.

I complained to him in writing once and he ended up calling me. He denied having said he wanted to see fewer white faces around even though his comments had been printed in the Los Angeles Times. I complained, as I remember, about affirmative action and he said it was clear I had a personal beef with the college. Duh. He was especially incensed when I complained about how admission standards at Occidental College had been dropped to allow for more non-whites on campus. His response, as I recall, was quite odd. "Are you suggesting these students aren't qualified to be here?" This was freaky, in part, because my concern is not whether or not the students were qualified, but whether they were the best of the best. To be sure, I have to give Slaughter credit for calling me back. Subsequent presidents of this declining school haven't done even that...

Since then, Occidental College has been a leader in rolling over to please leftist students and professors with everything from denying guys due process to fight sexual assault and giving in to the demands of black students who took over the administrative building. The article in the Wall Street Journal is reprinted below, after the break. There are a number of really twisted people on the faculty including Lisa Wade, a leader in the fight against toxic masculinity. Or, to be more correct, just masculinity itself. As has been reported by The College Fix, Lisa Wade rejects the notion of "toxic masculinity," saying it is time to recognize that "it is masculinity itself that has become the problem."

Heroes of the school include ethical lightweights like leftist journalist Steve Coll '80 who - as far as I can tell - left his wife Susan for an intern working at his non-profit organization. (I used to be friends with Steve and Susan.) The husband of one of my Occidental College friends, Joe

The capital campaign, of course, is being led by president Jonathan Veitch who distinguished himself as among the nation's most groveling academic leaders who allowed students to occupy his office, terrify his staff, and get away with a number of absurd identity based policy changes. 

I have a couple of hot takes on this....

Occidental College has been a victim of politically correct nonsense for a number of years. It reduced standards to allow more black and Latinos to attend. The negative consequence of this reduction in standards is that subsequent alumni are both less bright and less wealthy than earlier alumni.

Occidental College leaders like John Slaughter, the first black Oxy president, went out of their way to discourage whites from teaching at the school or sending their children there as students. The problem in Slaughter's view was basically that the school was too white.

The school has gone off the deep end in hiring socialist/Communist faculty members who despise whites in principle and who certainly have no respect for those who have acquired any large amount of wealth. Such people, to these socialist/Communist faculty members, are their enemies...not their donors.

I attended at talk at Oxy in 2012 where I overheard Eric Newhall, quoted in the WSJ article, bragging about how much better Oxy was now that it had fewer white people on the faculty. He didn't realize I was a young white guy who was pissed off at the discrimination the school practiced against young white conservative scholars. He looked shocked that a white guy would be upset at a system where he and his relatives got screwed just because of their race.

I wouldn't give a dime to these people. If affirmative action isn't evil, nothing is evil.

I got a request from the school asking me, as an alum, to give to their capital campaign. I've considered the school my enemy for years. I wish I had read this article before I filled out the questionnaire. If they are a bad bet for Moody's Investor Services, then they are a bad bet for me too.