Answer - Pamela E. Harris, Question - Who At Williams College Supports Chad Topaz's Campaign to Get a White Female Math Professor?

Pamela E. Harris, Ph.D. Mathematics
at Williams College.

I scanned the list of people who signed the petition favoring Chad Topaz's efforts to silence, boycott, and fire a white, female math professor named Abigail Thompson. I was curious to see if anyone from his own department at Williams College was supporting him. I found there is only one signatory who claims Williams College as their institutional affiliation: Pamela E. Harris.

According to a recent article in the AMS Notices, it looks like she was an illegal immigrant from Mexico. She came here with her parents when she was 12. She appears to have lied on her paperwork to get into a community college. The article states: "It took some creative form-filling, and hoping that nobody found the inconsistencies in the paperwork, for Pamela to be on her way to the Milwaukee Area Technical College, where she earned two associate degrees."

She arrived at Williams College about four years after getting her doctorate. Here is how Williams described her in 2016:

Dr. Pamela E. Harris received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee in May 2012. Her research interests focus on combinatorial problems related to representation theory. Dr. Harris has previously taught courses in number theory, linear algebra, calculus, and statistics and probability. In addition to enjoying working with students on original research, Dr. Harris actively works to improve diversity and retention rates among women and minorities in the mathematical sciences through her work and involvement with the Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS). Dr. Harris enjoys cooking all types of spicy food, playing tennis, and she is looking forward to joining a new jiu jitsu dojo.

As far as I can tell, she is used to teaching Linear Algebra and Calculus 1. Her CV is largely filled with travel, small grants, woke activities and articles on which she is a contributing author. I looked through a talk she gave at a conference and she talks openly about how she feels less pressure to perform when she is just one in a series of authors and not the sole author of an article herself. She claims she has found her "place" in the mathematics community as a member of one of these teams.

I believe her husband, Jamual Harris, works as a campus safety and security officer. I'm assuming this is how she ended up with a non-Mexican last name.

Curiously, I found that she was one of the "co-authors" of a paper Chad Topaz did about the horrifying shortage of non-white guy artists in the major collections of prominent art museums. The paper was written by a number of Williams College math department professors including Chad M. Topaz, Bernhard Klingenberg, Daniel Turek, Brianna Heggeseth, Pamela E. Harris and Julie C. Blackwood. Of these, only Harris appears to have signed up with Topaz's attack on Abigail Thompson.

Julie Blackwood, however, signed the anti-Chad Topaz petition. This puzzled me a little because Blackwood, who recently got tenure, appears to be deep into ecology, global warming, and anti-Trump ideology. Nevertheless, she took a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics (2010) from UC Davis, the same institution as the beleagured Abigail Thompson. Awkward...

Listening to Pamela E. Harris speak, I think she is someone, like Chad Topaz, who has been taking advantage of an unearned, inter-sectional harvest of academic privilege including being Mexican, female, and - best of all - an illegal alien DREAMER. She is the sort of person who - for purely selfish reasons - I would expect to support a partisan, anti-white, McCarthy-like purity test designed to screen out the job applicants, the sort who might always beat her at theorems but will never enjoy her ethnic, sex or legal status advantages.