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.

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.