Unsafe at Any Speed: Should I Go to Williams College?

I’m a former Williams College political science professor. I highly recommend avoiding it. It is, of course, highly rated by U.S. News & World Report.

This is why I was once proud to teach there and why I suppose so many are still interested in attending it. Its frequent number one ranking, however, conceals a number of problematic aspects of the college which should factor into your decision-making regarding whether or not you should go to Williams.

First, it is ridiculously cold and isolated geographically. My stomach still turns into knots when I remember what it was like to drive from the airport in Albany, NY into Williamstown, MA. The only route was a thin, two-lane highway. In the winter it was covered with ice and snow. The roads to both the north, south and east were also windy, tiny and inadequate. While I was teaching there one of my students died in a winter car accident. The road to the east was so bad that it had what they called a Deadman’s Curve, and it was indeed a place where there had been frequent accidents and deaths. Even in town, I remember the roads were narrow and dangerous. During my first year on the campus, one of my colleagues in the political science department was killed in a car accident as he made a short one-line commute back to his home.

Second, it is unbelievably cliquish. Because the campus is small and isolated you will quickly find that living there means that you are quickly identified, sorted out, accepted or isolated, and conveniently locked into place. For those who settle in the area, the rule of thumb is that you are not accepted by the locals until you are a third generation inhabitant.

The social pressures for ideological conformity are immense and thoroughly enforced on the campus. In particular, Williams College has a long-standing hostility to conservative students, speakers, and scholars. If you are a Christian, a Republican, a conservative or even a middle of the road liberal Democrat, then I highly recommend you find another place to study unless you want to endure four years of hostility and stigma.

The school has recently been in the news for banning conservative speakers including the relatively innocuous Suzanne Venker.

At U.S. colleges, a failing grade in free speech

Opinion | Suzanne Venker is unwelcome at Williams College

Uncomfortable nostalgia: intellectual diversity still missing in action at Williams College

Third, if you are interested in parties and the opposite sex, then I also recommend against attending Williams College. At this school, being in a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship is discouraged by the social pressures which assume that such relationships are unhealthy and probably interfering with one’s academic advancement. The women who were interested in men, in my experience, were mainly interested in dating older men who had good jobs and good careers in nearby urban areas like New York or Boston. For the life of me, I cannot remember if any of the students I taught while I was there from 1986 to 1989 even went out on dates.

The social environment has apparently gotten even worse since I taught at Williams College by new rules and bureaucratic policies which appear to me to place young men at danger of being labeled as rapists simply because they had consensual sex with a girl who has been drinking. If I had a son, Williams College would be among the last places on Earth I would send him for school. As far as I am concerned Williams College is an unsafe environment for young men.

Fourth, the geographic isolation means there is little to do that is fun or interesting off campus. I remember being so bored while I taught there that I would get in my car and drive to the top of the nearby Mt. Greylock to enjoy a view of the surrounding area at the height of 3,491 feet. The nearby city of North Adams is an extremely depressing, poor, rotted out post-industrial population center.

Fifth, perhaps because there is so little to do in the area, the school has a bad reputation for out-of-control drug use. It was, in fact, once rated among the top ten druggiest colleges in the nation.

The 50 Druggiest Colleges, From West Virginia to Williams

Ironically, when I taught at Williams College, one of the students I most enjoyed mentoring and working with as an adviser turned out to be one of the very top drug dealers on campus.

Sixth, I believe there is a lot of mental illness on the campus. I think it is an unhappy place because of the bad weather, the substance abuse, the atheism, the cliques, and the low social IQ’s of many of its bright, but immature inhabitants. It is the sort of place where young, unstable students flame out and end up taking five years instead of four years to finish their college educations. One ex-president of the college, Harry C. Payne, jumped to his death from the eighth floor of a hotel. While I taught at Williams one of the science professors killed himself by releasing deadly gas in his airtight car. As I recall a second professor also killed himself around that time although I did not remember the details. Maybe I was just teaching there at a bad time.

Finally, I would observe that the U.S. News and World Report rankings seem to be heavily dependent on a school’s endowment. I can confirm that Williams College is awash in money. There are plenty of resources available there to the students and the faculty. Thanks to all this money, it is a wonderful place to spend the summer if you are there when the students are gone and the community is packed with movie stars and celebrities who are part of the Williamstown Theatre Festival.

To be sure, not all my memories of the place are negative. I finished up my award-winning thesis while I taught there. I had good friends in the local community and incredible spiritual support from folks I met off campus including an inspiring Quaker group which met up north in nearby Vermont. (Although, come to think of it, I ran my car off the road and into a ditch while driving back from a meeting.)

My neighbors were some of the friendliest and nicest people I have ever known. The students, by far, were the best part of my campus experience. It was fun to teach such bright, energetic young people. Nevertheless, knowing what I know now, I would never have accepted a job there. I got sucked in by the prestige and underestimated how much I would miss a safe, sane, high quality of life.

My recommendation? Look for another college or university. Preferably a college or university near a big city where you can get lost, enjoy some anonymity, and lead a healthy, balanced life. Williams College is a great place to visit over the summer, but a terrible place to spend four years of your life.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.

Uncomfortable Nostalgia: Campus Reform Publishes My Take on Lack of Intellectual Diversity at Williams College

The folks at Campus Reform have published my take on the lack of intellectual diversity at Williams College, our nation's #1 ranked liberal arts college. I taught there between 1986 and 1980 and was shocked at the pure hostility directed at me and the conservative students on campus - particularly the Christian students.

I remember thinking, in the end, that it would have been evil for me to lend my prestige to such a hateful, destructive, unhelpful institution.

Apparently, Williams College long-standing hostility to conservatives is still going strong. Liberal students effectively blocked the appearance of anti-feminist author Suzanne Venker just last month.

I should mention that I saw an article in the Huffington Post by former MA governor Jane Swift asserting that Williams College was friendly and welcoming to her. 

I should just point out that I don’t think it is accurate to label Swift a conservative. After all, she is basically a pro-choice moderate. As you may remember, she was on the cutting edge of liberal Republicanism when she picked the openly gay Patrick Guerriero as her running mate for lieutenant governor. Given Swift’s political history, we should not pretend she is the MA version of Sarah Palin.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.

Uncomfortable Nostalgia: Intellectual Diversity Still a Casualty at Williams College

As a former Williams College political science professor, I got nostalgic this week as I read how student protesters secured the cancellation of a speech by conservative author, Suzanne Venker. Her announced topic, “One Step Forward, Ten Steps Back: Why Feminism Fails” inspired a cacophony of on-line hostility which caused a student organizer, Zach Wood, to share with her that Williams College “has never experienced this kind of resistance” to a campus speaker.

According to Wood, at least one student labeled Venker as a “misogynistic, white supremacist men’s rights activist” whose anticipated presence was causing “actual mental, social, psychological, and physical harm to students.”

What surprised me the most was Wood’s impression that this sort of bizarre, over-the-top, anti-conservative hysteria was unprecedented at Williams College.

As I shared in a recent interview with Jennifer Kabbany, the editor of The College Fix, I witnessed the considerable hostility of Williams College students, faculty and administrators to conservative ideas first-hand when it was directed against me while I taught on the campus from 1986 to 1989. At the time, I was one of only three registered Republicans on the faculty. My status as a registered Republican became public knowledge when I decided to help out the local party officials by running for a state representative seat in the area. Although I was not expected to win, party officials convinced me that my appearance on the ballot would help keep one of Gov. Michael Dukakis’s top allies, Rep. Sherwood Guernsey, from working out-of-state to support the governor’s 1988 presidential campaign.

Within a couple of months, the female students were boycotting nearly all my classes and at least one member of the campus black student organization was denouncing me as a racist. In the spring of 1989, my department chair informed me that I would not be allowed to continue on my tenure-track career path. He told me that this genuinely unprecedented decision was due to the poor quality of my research. Ironically, a few months later, I won a prestigious national award from the American Political Science Association for having recently completed the best doctoral dissertation in the nation in my field. In protest, I resigned from Williams that summer rather than accept an additional year of employment.

Students and faculty at Williams 
College figured out I was a 

Republican when I ran for a 
state representative position 

in Massachusetts. 

As I recall my final year at Williams, I remember how I used my status as a faculty member to make a modest contribution of the preservation of traditional marriage. To satisfy my own curiosity regarding how to achieve a happier life, I developed a special one-course winter study called "Decisions, Decisions."  I remember that course with particular fondness because I added to the syllabus the politically incendiary topic of how to pick an appropriate marriage partner.

Much like Suzanne Venker, I was eager to provide a common sense critique of feminism coupled with a practical understanding that most, if not all, of my students would go on to marry and have children. The class, a surprisingly even mix of young men and women, clearly enjoyed the course. It ended up impacting my own decisions about how to find a suitable wife.

You can sample Venker’s recommendations for living happily ever after by reading the text of her planned speech. It is now available on the Fox News Opinion website. The gist of her message is that feminism fails “...because it denies the existence of biology and teaches that equality means sameness, which is a losing proposition when it comes to planning a life—particularly if that life includes marriage and family.”

As I consider what happened to Venker, I am most interested in understanding why the organizers of this student-run, alumni-funded speaking series would give in to threats of violence. I think part of the problem is that the students who established the Uncomfortable Learning Speaker Series are so isolated that they do not have a faculty adviser.

While I was at William College, I helped the conservative students create their own radio and television shows. I remember that later on some administration officials threatened the conservative students who were seeking to establish an alternative newspaper that would print their articles and opinion pieces. I remember advising them to persist even if they were kicked out. Those young conservatives won that fight. I would have counseled student organizers like Zach Wood to go ahead with their event even if their fellow students threatened to behead the participants.

After all, I applaud the creative realignment contained in the theme of "Uncomfortable Learning." I expect this theme will catch on elsewhere. I think will be a short and simple way of reminding people that an environment of liberal fascism is no substitute for a proper education. If young people need to pick their battles, then this one looks okay to me.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.

The College Fix Asks About My Time as a Token Conservative at Williams College

As you may know, Williams College is in the news this week because radical students on campus successfully prevented the appearance of an anti-feminist speaker, Suzanne Venker. Venker is a fixture on Fox News and is the author of a number of compelling, common sense books including The War on Men and The Flipside of Feminism. 

Since I still pay attention to news about Williams College by checking in on the entirely unrelated Ephblog, I had an on-line, ringside seat as students, faculty and alumni battled out the intricate details of protecting young people from the apparently horrific physically and emotionally dangerous consequences of simply anticipating Venker's appearance on campus.

Given the over-the-top craziness of the resistance to Venker's speech, I did an interview with the editor of the The College Fix regarding my take on what it was like to be the token conservative at Williams College in the 1980's. The title of the article is "Former Williams College professor speaks out: Campus hostile toward conservatives for decades" and here is the link: http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/24821/

It has been a while since I was in the public eye and I was clearly a little rusty. Nevertheless, I am reminded of the large extent to which Thomas Sowell's book, A Conflict of Visions, helped me better understand not only the extreme hostility of the left to conservative thought, but also why being a college professor itself became less interesting to me as I became more conservative. Since leftists believe that human beings are incredibly frail and malleable they are much more protective of the young. This is why the left is always in the business of policing our language, calling attention to our conscious and unconscious biases, and hypersensitive to anything that even looks like a critique of their views. Since people are so easily harmed by free speech, the left has virtually no tolerance for it.

From the conservative perspective, however, our success is largely due to genetic factors which are immune from the impact of language, ideology or even teaching. If success is mainly due to genetics, then it is silly to get overly concerned about whether or not someone feels included in Halloween or not.

While I still enjoy teaching adults at my grant writing workshops or undergraduates, at times, at nearby Soka University, I found I completely lost interest in teaching young people within a year or two at Williams College. Since I was confident that my Williams College students would succeed with or without me, I was completely okay with leaving the teaching field entirely. In fact, the lure of big money in the real estate world was more than enough to cause me to resign from Williams College in 1989.

Nevertheless, I do miss the great things conservative students did on the Williams campus in the late  1980's. They set up a conservative student newspaper that allowed them to present their ideas in an uncensored fashion. They set of a conservative television show on the local public access station that taught them how to appear on camera and in debates. They even set up a conservative talk radio program in which I occasionally helped with voice overs and sound effects.

I sincerely expect that the current attention devoted to the plight of students with non-conforming thoughts reaches the general public. I think more should be aware of how intellectual diversity would improve the quality of the academic research being done at places like Williams College. At the very least, no one should invest in Williams College as a donor until conservatives are allowed to speak freely and criticize affirmative action, feminism, and the considerable dangers of leftist thought.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.