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.
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.
Report this morning and highlighted the reactions of those of us who were hoping Williams College would adopt the free speech absolutism of the Chicago Principles including Jerry Coyne, Luana Majora and me.
Ethan Berman, a student at the University of Texas-Austin, criticizes the Sawicki Report saying "...this ad hoc committee on 'Inquiry and Inclusion' instead gave the administration plenty of loopholes to regulate both student and faculty speech, including a 'feedback' protocol that resembles a community-wide heckler’s veto."
The article favorably quotes the pessimistic views of Jerry Coyne, a top leader of the New Atheist movement, who asserts it is impossible to reconcile freedom of speech and inclusiveness, and silly to think the Sawicki Report will fix things. “If Mandel and the committee thinks that this policy will quell the discontent of Williams’s woke students when they return this fall," Coyne writes, "they are sorely mistaken."
On a positive note, the article report Coyne was pleased that the committee report dropped an idea floated earlier that would have required each student group to have a faculty advisor who would discuss “the appropriateness of a speaker and its effect on the College community."
The College Fix interviewed Williams biology professor Luana Majora who indicated she was “relieved” the report was “not as terrible” as she feared it might have been. Maroja told The Fix that she agrees with Coyne’s take “for the most part." “I thought [the report] would require an ‘advisor’ approval all invited speakers,” as Coyne feared, Maroja wrote in an email. “We will see what the fall brings to us.”
WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - Williams College has been named as one of the top five worst schools for free speech by civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate, a co-founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). The school won a not so coveted Campus Muzzle Award largely due to highly visible student protests against the adoption of the Chicago Principles and a generally "spineless" faculty response. According to Silverglate, a key moment was when
...a group of about 20 Williams students showed up to the faculty meeting to protest, some waving signs that stated “free speech is hate speech.” Disruption notwithstanding, the faculty was extremely accommodating, inviting the students into the meeting and permitting them to read their response aloud. But the students continued to be disruptive, at one point demanding that white male professors sit down and admit their “privilege,” and at another screaming that faculty members were trying to “kill them.”
Most of Silverglate's ire, however, is focused on the weak response from faculty members who seemed, over time, to give in to the free speech is hate speech mob.
We might expect at least the grownups on campus to safeguard free inquiry, even if those in their charge do not yet recognize how precious it is. Sadly, this is not the case at Williams College. Dozens of professors who originally supported the Chicago Principles caved to the unruly students and withdrew their signatures, rendering the petition all but defunct. These professors do their students a great disservice by denying them the opportunity to critically engage with a diversity of viewpoints, including ones they may disagree with. Such instances of intellectual cowardice by the professoriate are the antithesis of the goals of liberal education.
As you may know, Williams College is a previous award winner. It won a Campus Muzzle Award in 2016 in recognition of Adam Falk's paternalistic effort to protect the fragile students of Williams College from the potential death and destruction which would have ensued if he had not rescinded a speaking invitation to John Derbyshire.
For the record, the other Campus Muzzle Awards for 2019 went to Middlebury College, Roger Williams University, UMass Boston and UMass Amherst. In 2018, the awardees included UMass Boston, Tufts University, Northeastern University, Harvard and Brandeis University. More details on this story are available over at The College Fix.
John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.
The College Council has removed from its Facebook account a controversial video. This video captured an example of profane, incendiary, anti-white bigotry directed at white student representatives by Isaiah Blake '21 - an actor and one of the most prominent black student leaders at Williams College on June 9, 2019.
The video featured a long, stream-of-consciousness rant by Isaiah Blake saying, in part, "...to be here is like sucking white d*** every f***ing day."
"You want a discussion and dialogue. Here’s the f***ing dialog. We don’t have dialogue, because every time we try to talk to you we get shut down by the white moderate, white liberal bull***t."
A link to the video was published on Ephblog on April 15, 2019. A partial transcript appeared at the Anonymous Political Scientist blog on that same day. Finally, The College Fix published a link to the video on April 19, 2019. The College Fix is a national-level conservative website where student journalists write on topics in higher education.
NOTE: A heavily redacted transcript of the June 9, 2019 meeting is still available at 4_9 Minutes.
According to the Williams Record, black student activists planned a demonstration to protest their treatment by the College Council. It was canceled, however, after links to the video of the rant by Isaiah Blake '21 were published at various on-line sites.
Thankfully, there is now a copy of Isaiah Blake's obnoxious rant available on YouTube. Isaiah Blake '21 has appeared in The Rainbow Experiment (2018).
John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.
Is Williams College the new Evergreen State College? No matter the answer, it looks like the divisiveness of identity politics is exploding on the Williams College campus, as seen on the official video recording of a College Council (CC) meeting on April 9, 2019.
NOTE: The CC took the video down from their Facebook site. You can still see it, however, on YouTube. There is also an abbreviated version that includes the most hostile remarks. It is also on YouTube.
In the video, Isaiah Blake '21 complains about having to ask for money from the College Council by saying, "Every time to be here is like sucking white dick every fucking day." According to a report in the Williams Record, black activists planned a large demonstration to further articulate their views, but cancelled it after video of Isaiah Blake's comments appears on various on-line sites.
As you may know, Isaiah Blake is an actor who appeared in The Rainbow Experiment (2018). He is also a member of the search committee responsible for finding a new director of dining services.
The back story is that black student activists wanted money for a special event targeted at black preview students. These are special events for students who have been admitted to the school who want a chance to check it out ahead of time. As I understand it, Isaiah Blake resents having to ask for the money.
It is apparently unfair for them to take out the time to ask for this funding when they have busy schedules. The student pictured above, Seyi Olaose '22, indicated that she came to the meeting after her practice and had not had anything to eat. Seyi Olaose '22 has been visible at other student events including the recent "Considering the Case for Free Expression" organized by the Williams College chapter of the Society for Conservative Thought.
According to one of the student activists, Isaiah Blake '21, quoted below, it is especially difficult for black students to take the time to politely ask for money when they have to deal with the stress of racism all day long. As far as I can tell, he believes that he is being oppressed simply because social pressures do not allow him to spend even more time acting out and verbally abusing faculty members, administrators and his fellow students. I put together a quick, incomplete transcript of the most abusive and threatening parts of Isaiah Blake's high dungeon tirade.
Isaiah Blake: The reason why we’re here is because…I’m here in support of Seyi right here. We already know that the funding for black previews was already supported, but it just in speaking with Seyi after her experience with CC, and with this group of people, was somewhat appalling.
First of all, if you look at this room there’s only one black nigger in here. I’m going to say nigger because I feel I can say that. And then there’s two others that just walked in here. There’s no black women in this room.
So when this black woman comes to speak before this group of people. She had to call me in tears and in frustration about the way in which she was spoken to or treated. I just can’t seem to fathom or understand how that was possible. See, when black people try to create space on this campus, it’s completely and completely, it is always a fucking problem.
When I hearing things like 'Oh why wasn’t black previews called minority previews?' You see I’m looking at this budget that we’re seeing and approving here and I’m seeing all the ways white men constantly get space and affinity, and money and resources afforded to them. And every time we try to create a space for students on this campus, and understanding and create some form of community, we are stopped at every single level. Every single level.
So it is time for you all to really figure this shit out. Because I’m really losing it! We are fucking tired of having to come and beg and suck dick for money. And, of course, when we come and do it we face problems all the fucking time. All the time. Why would it be called minority preview if it’s just black people to be there? I don’t understand that.
At this point in the video, another student activist, Seyi Olaose '22,interrupts his rant to admonish another student to pay attention.
Seyi Olaose: You, Tristan, Tristan Whalen. Why aren’t you listening? It is disrespectful when someone is speaking to you.
Whalen is the white, blond student sitting in the back of the room. During much of the anti-white rant, he appears to be looking down, working on something. He looks surprised to be called out.
Isaiah Blake: So now we’re writing. (To Tristan Whalen.) We’re writing now. Every time we open up our mouths, ears close. I don’t get it. I don’t get it. I have a motion! (BANG!, BANG!, BANG!) The motion is that we be listened to!
At this point, Whalen looks a little startled. Nevertheless, he spends the rest of the time looking right at the speaker. Personally, this is the ugliest part of the video. What we are seeing is controlling behavior. Apparently, Seyi Olaose believes Whalen should at least feign interest in the anti-white bigotry being directed at him. If you have ever been around a domestic abuser, you will quickly recognize this controlling behavior for the abuse it is. No one should be forced or shamed into listening to verbal abuse. No one.
Isaiah Blake: I don’t get it. Every time to be here is like sucking white dick every fucking day. Closing our mouths every fucking day just to be here. And if we dare ask for a little bit of time, money and space we gotta suck some more dick. I’m closing my fucking mouth. So open it to speak. It is so frustrating. It’s so tiring…to be here. To deal with you’all .
We keep our heads down. It don’t work. We try to create space for us. It don’t work. We want some money to fucking cook some fried fucking chicken and be niggers for once. It don’t work. I just don’t get it. We say leave us alone. We don’t want to take your space.
You got half a fucking million dollars. The budget is what? What percent? You want to read it out someone. I have a motion to read it. How many % of the budget is black previews? Someone read it please .42% To have niggers sit in the fucking quad and eat hot dogs. And people have to get eviscerated to do something. So I’m eviscerating niggers today. Cause y’all don’t get this here on this campus. No one will come up to your face and say you fucked up.
We supposed to go and send a fucking e-mail to the president and some shit. You want us to go have a nice little meeting with you - close our legs and close our mouths. You want (BANG!) free speech? Here’s free speech. You want a discussion and dialogue. Here’s the fucking dialog. We don’t have dialogue, because every time we try to talk to you we get shut down by the white moderate white liberal bullshit. That’s what free speech looks like. That’s what communication looks like.
When we try to speak to you eviscerate us and embarrass us. Now we’re embarrassing you, right on fucking on camera. Talk to me about it then.
You come here you have $3 billion dollars to your name. Everybody tells you is the best people in the fucking world. And we just try to create space for our selves. We can't eat. We can't talk. All we do is fucking organize for ourselves.
And that’s why we aren’t here. Why is CC not diverse? Because if we dare try to run, if we dare try to come into this space… we gotta deal with you!
This is what we deal with. So why are we here? Why can’t couldn’t you get anyone to fucking be your president. Because who creates the space on this campus? Fifty years. Africana studies. This same building…occupied. Here I am occupying your shit! I don’t get it. I just don’t get it. We keep our heads down. You haven’t seen me in none of your damn meetings whole time. Until I get a fucking phone call. That shit is going crazy. Yeah we got the money. But all we had to do was suck dick to do it. And we are tired of it. I’m telling you I’m tired of it. I refuse. No more.
You want to have free speech, you want to have a debate, you want to stop and be racist. Say some shit now! Open up your mouth now! Say something!
The rant transcribed above is an excellent example of the sort of black vs. white liberal conflict that tore up Evergreen State College. It is difficult for me to read Isaiah Blake's comments without thinking that he was trying to provoke the white students to create a larger, potentially violent conflict. Then again, maybe his performance was designed to improve his skills as a movie star?
As far as I can tell, the CARE Now activists planned to prolong their righteous indignation by staging a demonstration in support of Isaiah Blake '21 and Seyi Olaose '22. According to a report in the Williams Record, however, this demonstration was cancelled after the video recording was shared on other platforms. "A larger protest had been planned," the Williams Record says, "but cancelled because of student fears about safety after last week’s meeting livestream was distributed by several online sites."
I think it is more likely the protest was called off because the student’s parents learned about their children’s behavior and told them to “knock the fucking shit off you dumb ass fucking dickheads.”
John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.
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.
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 Opinionwebsite. 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.
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.
