From Promise to Betrayal: The Class of ’75

SANTA CLARITA, CA - In 1975, as the Hart High Class of 1975 stepped into the world, the country itself was in upheaval. Nixon had resigned the year before in disgrace. The Vietnam draft had ended in 1973, and by April 1975, even draft registration was suspended. The Equal Rights Amendment was at the center of political debate, promising women a new era of equality. We were graduating into a nation already redefining itself.

Fifty years later, we gathered again. At the front of the hall stood a memorial table with twenty photographs, though the truth was harsher. Of our 500 classmates, at least fifty are gone—one in ten erased by cancer, heart disease, drugs, or despair. The glossy pictures reminded me of the newspaper spreads of young Marines killed in combat—faces frozen in vitality, now reduced to symbols of fragility.

The reunion itself was a microcosm of America. About 150 of us, mostly white, married suburbanites in our late sixties, gathered at Hart & Main, a once-gas station turned mid-century modern event hall. The air conditioning was nonexistent, so attendees waved cooler air on themselves using the small hand fans on the tables. The smell of beer from the bar mixed with carne asada from the taco grill. “LGBTQ-friendly” signs around the venue whispered the cultural politics of the present. Looking around, everyone seemed so tall. Or maybe I had shrunk, or worse, locked in poor posture.

Despite the nostalgia and mourning, I thought three great truths stood out: the collapse of blue-collar whites, the corrosive impact of affirmative action, and the consequences of illegal immigration.

1. The Class Divide

The missing faces told another truth. The blue-collar classmates—once destined for factories, garages, or retail—were largely gone. National data confirm it: working-class whites without college degrees have been ravaged by “deaths of despair”—alcohol, opioids, and suicide. Their absence was louder than any speech.

Meanwhile, those who thrived clustered in comfortable security. The teachers, government administrators, and aerospace retirees were easy to spot. They had pensions, second homes, and the assurance of stability. They had been preserved by unions, bureaucracies, and Cold War defense contracts.

One classmate, tooth gaps marking decades of neglect, grinned as if fresh from prison and told me every single friend he’d had in high school was already dead. His confession hung in the air as a verdict on class division.

Charles Murray described this in Coming Apart: the split of white America into two worlds—one stable, professional, educated, and the other sinking into family breakdown and despair. Our reunion was the proof. No drunken antics, no acting out. The addicts and alcoholics had already been buried. The survivors carried themselves with the quiet reserve of people who had endured, but without joy.

2. The Impact of Affirmative Action

The third truth cut deepest. Affirmative action reshaped opportunity—and erased merit. Nationally, surveys show whites increasingly see themselves as disadvantaged; one Harvard Business School study found 11% rated anti-white bias at the highest level, compared with just 2% for anti-black bias. I didn’t need surveys. I lived it.

In high school, I was the prodigy: the highest PSAT score in the school, three track records, the graduation speaker, and a newspaper columnist who learned early how to use words to gain influence—even once trying to use it to get out of a traffic ticket on prom night. (That gambit failed, but it showed how early I was experimenting with power.) I earned a Ph.D. at Cornell. My dissertation later won a national award as the best in my field. Yet the same year I was honored, Williams College stripped me from the tenure track, citing the “low quality” of that very thesis. The real reason was simpler: I was the wrong race, the wrong sex, the wrong ideology.

The white professors who wanted fewer white guys in tenure track positions never considered resigning themselves. Instead, they callously created a world in which the price of change was borne by the poor but talented white kids who should have climbed the ladder. My story was only one among millions.

3. Immigration, Crime, and Declining Results

Hart High itself has become another microcosm. In 1975, our class was overwhelmingly white. Today, the school is nearly two-thirds Hispanic and barely one-quarter white. The results are undeniable.

California’s own data consistently show that white students score far higher than Hispanic students in English and math. If Hart High were still majority white, its test scores would place it among the very best schools in Los Angeles County. Instead, overall averages are dragged downward, not because the teachers suddenly got worse, but because the demographics changed. The academic excellence that once propelled so many of my classmates into STEM careers and aerospace has been diluted.

The same is true for crime. Common sense tells us—and national crime data confirm—that violent crime rates are significantly lower for non-Hispanic whites than for Hispanics. Back when Santa Clarita was overwhelmingly white, crime was so rare we hardly locked our doors, and murder was virtually unheard of. Today, the sheriff’s blotter is busier. Santa Clarita remains safer than Los Angeles as a whole, but it is not the all-white suburb I grew up in. The “deaths of despair” among our white working-class classmates were tragic enough; adding in higher baseline crime from mass immigration has left the community doubly weakened.

Conclusion: Rescued, But Too Late

The night ended as it began, with the memorial table. My classmates remembered me as I had been at 18: funny, compassionate, ambitious, a boy with promise. They weren’t wrong. I had been that young man. But government oppression knocked him down again and again until only the scarred man stood in the room.

And yet, America has finally admitted the truth. The students who died did not live long enough to see Donald Trump and the Supreme Court push back against woke ideology and anti-white reverse discrimination. Their entire lives were lived under a system that denied them fairness. Trump proved there was always a better way. He built his rise on our pain. But for us, the Class of 1975, the rescue came too late.

I listened to their praise of my 18-year-old self with objective distance. It was as if they were describing an idealized boy who was now dead too, lying in spirit alongside the fifty classmates whose photographs glowed on the table.

The Class of 1975 was Santa Clarita’s promise. And we were betrayed.

John C. Drew, Ph.D., is a political scientist and former college professor who earned his doctorate in government from Cornell University. As a young Marxist, he met and debated Barack Obama in 1980. His firsthand account of Obama’s early ideological views has been cited in Rising Star (2017) by David Garrow and Radical-In-Chief (2010) by Stanley Kurtz and reported directly in Obama’s True Legacy (2023), edited by Jamie Glazov.

The Naked and the Damned: Williams College Places Black Queer Feminist Kai M. Green on Medical Leave

Dr. Kai M. Green of Williams College
is away on medical leave. She has
reported on her own psychotic
breakdown in her Facebook profile.

The raw insanity of radical, leftist Williams College is on full display this week as the administration processes the disruptive behavior of assistant professor Kai M. Green, a self-described trans, black, queer feminist. For example, the College Fix reported that Kai M. Green had flaked out on her students and cancelled her spring 2019 classes for the most flimsy of reasons.

Based on Dr. Green's published Facebook report, I'm quite confident in asserting that she is suffering from a chronic form of delusional disorder. Those delusions got so far out of hand in November 2018 that she feared her department chair, Alison Case, was out to "assassinate" her. It makes perfect sense to me that Dr. Green is on medical leave right now.

Apparently, dealing with Kai Green's mental illness has been taxing for everyone around her. As of December 2018, Case is no longer the department chair. This position has been taken over by Gregory Mitchell.

It took me a while to figure out why Kai Green's friend, another black, queer feminist, Dr. Kimberly Love was also placed on medical leave. A lot of this only makes sense if we understand that Dr. Green and Dr. Love are a couple sharing the same home. In this context, it was reasonable for the college to give Dr. Love medical leave too because she is caring for Dr. Green. I don't see any evidence that Dr. Love is psychotic.

Given the desire of the college to keep two gay black female professors on board for affirmative action reasons, it makes sense that Dr. Love, as a contributor at Ephblog said, "was put on medical leave after she didn’t show up to class as that was probably the only way to give her a chance and not terminate her employment."

Dr. Kai M. Green shows off the scars from 

her top surgery in this cover photo from 

No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black 

Queer Studies.

The problem here is that some of the obsessions contained in Kai Green's delusional disorder match up with a prevailing ideological perspective which asserts that black, trans, queer feminists are living in an unhealthy (supposedly violent) environment. As she writes: "My biggest fear, I learned is to be considered crazy. But I have no choice in this world full of a crazy that is not of my own making--Racial Capitalism." In addition, the student activists are seeking to spin this profound and potentially life-threatening mental health crisis as a heroic effort by Green and Love to fight back against the oppression they face as assistant professors at the school.

Maybe it would help the leftist students more accurately frame this situation as a genuine mental health crisis if we called to their attention the ideas contained in Kai M. Green's delusional disorder which are unrelated to politics. For example, she has also reported that...

• She had a delusion that there was a new restaurant in Williamstown that served curry goat. 
• She had a delusion that "Lil Kai" had been murdered by the police.
• She had a similar delusion that her "lil cousin Mekhi" had died instead of "Lil Kai." 
• While experiencing this psychotic episode, she reports, she "started taking my clothes off piece by piece, so by the time I got to the Clark I was completely naked."
• While under arrest, she believed the song she was singing was a "magic spell that would unlock the cuffs." 

Frankly, there is not much that the college can do to protect its students from the reality that Kai M. Green has provided us with compelling evidence that transgender individuals disproportionately suffer from mental illness.

The larger issue, for me, is that we aren't doing troubled individuals any favors when we sign off on their delusions and enable them to take drastic and irreversible actions in pursuit of them.

It is particularly horrifying when society adopts dysfunctional beliefs that encourage the mentally ill to engage in brutal self-mutilation or poison themselves with inappropriate hormone treatments. No one who truly understands the elaborate maintenance needed to keep a pseudo vagina healthy could ever recommend that a man ought to do that to himself.

Likewise, the ugly details of removing a woman's breasts (top surgery), ovaries and womb (bottom surgery) should really be weighed before suggesting this procedure to anyone. By the way, I don't think any sane woman would consider it a bright idea to undergo a bottom surgery that included phalloplasty. As they say: "The long term success rates of implants in constructed penises are lower than the success rates of reconstruction in men born with penises. Good sensation in the reconstructed penis can help reduce the risk of the implant eventually eroding through the skin." Yeah, there's always that...

Protecting the jobs and security of individuals who understand, and speak out about, the life-threatening severity of Kai Green's mental illness should be a top priority of anyone who supports freedom of speech at Williams College. The sane should not surrender our leadership or power to those who agonize over imaginary murders or sing to unlock their very real handcuffs.

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

No More Knockout Games: My Counter Demands to Black Liberation Collective

I noticed the activists behind the Black Liberation Collective (BLC) have issued a set of three national-level demands, demands they want our various colleges and universities to comply with in the near future. Given the publicity associated with these demands, I thought it might be a good idea for those of us who would be harmed by these extraordinary demands to provide our response and our own set of counter demands. 

Reviewing my own counter demands, I think it is fair to say that I believe we have a right to demand more from the black community to address its own grievous failings before we bend over backwards to meet the protester's demands. In particular, I think we need to demand immediate changes in dysfunctional black culture, including its fascination with the so-called Knockout Game as described in the YouTube video below.

Reviewing the actual demands of the BLC, I see they have included the wish list generated by the Oxy United protesters at Occidental College. I will ignore the Occidental College specific demands since I have already dealt with them in an earlier post. Instead, I will list the national-level demands below, provide my own response, along with counter demand that should provoke an opportunity for self-reflection and legitimate debate.

1) WE DEMAND at the minimum, Black students and Black faculty to be reflected by the national percentage of Black folk in the country.

As a political scientist, I have thought about this issue for a long time and frankly it never made sense to me that black students or black faculty should be represented according to the national percentage of black folk in the country. Ultimately, this demand is unrealistic and unfair for everyone else because it fails to take into account the ways in which black under performance in the academic world is caused by dysfunctional black culture. For example, I think that it is more reasonable that we should expect the proportion of black students and black faculty to represent the percentage of black folks who grow up in strong, stable, two-parent families. As long as the black community accepts dysfunctional lifestyles, it is unrealistic to expect black achievement to come any where near to the levels seen in Asian or white communities. 

Reasonable Counter Demand #1: Black folk must work harder and achieve the same standards set for the rest of us. It is not that hard to obey the police, abstain from drugs/alcohol, and avoid having children while you are still a teen or single. It is not too much to expect greater personal responsibility from black folk including a strong commitment to marriage, parenting and family. In the meantime, we should not punish the children of people who are living saner and healthier lives.

2) WE DEMAND free tuition for Black and indigenous students.

This demand seems like a total waste of time and money to me. After all, it is easy to get a free education on the Internet. In my experience, you can pick up just about any skill you want by watching YouTube videos. Moreover, we have free public libraries which provide even the poorest among us with virtually unlimited resources including free access to computers. I don't see the big deal about making education free. If you want to learn about American Government, I will give you a free syllabus and my own lecture notes. Since black and indigenous students already have access to free education, I am not in the mood to give of my money fund some leftist professor to give a way a wasteful, more expensive version of education. 

Reasonable Counter Demand #2: Pay reparations to all the white and Asian students who have been harmed by affirmative action. Due to the injustice of affirmative action, white and Asian students have gone to lower quality schools, absorbed unfair debt levels, and received instruction from inferior faculty members. We need to address the profound injustice of affirmative action by demanding that those who have benefited from it the most devote a significant portion of their incomes to make amends for the damage they have done to poor white and poor Asian students who have been the true victims of institutional discrimination.

3) WE DEMAND a divestment from prisons and an investment in communities.

All these prisons are saving us money by keeping dangerous, unsafe people off the streets. It makes more sense to me to dramatically increase the penalties for crime. If the penalties are high enough, then we would see less crime -- as is the case in places like Singapore. 

In an ideal world, those who cause the most crime should be required to pay the most to suppress it. In particular, we should make life miserable for unwed, single mothers. We should make an example of them so that no one would even consider becoming a single mother in the first place. It is not that hard to use birth control or to abstain from sex until you can handle the responsibilities of being a parent. We need to ask black folk to invest in their own communities by not making the birth control mistakes that cause poverty, criminal behavior, or child abuse and neglect. As the victims of the Knockout Game will tell you, it is no fun to be the victim of black criminals who lack empathy for the people they harm. 

Reasonable Counter Demand #3: We demand that the black community exercise greater self-control, discipline and responsibility. Accordingly, we demand that the black community refocus its efforts on self-improvement and changing its own violent, insensitive and dysfunctional culture.

When the Knockout Game ceases to be cool in black neighborhoods, then maybe I will be willing to think about the rest of the BLC's demands with a little more sympathy. 

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

Spying on College Confidential: Is Williams Safe for Conservatives?

I had some fun this week commenting at College Confidential regarding the recent story in which the student organizers of the Uncomfortable Learning series dis-invited their guest speaker, anti-feminist Suzanne Venker. Apparently, the mere thought of her appearance on campus was thought by at least some of the students to be the cause of actual physical damage. I thought it would be fun to harvest some of my comments from the site and share them with my regular readers. As I feared, College Confidential shut down the thread and apparently blocked me from their site. As they say, "You can't handle the truth." 

At any rate, I saved a lot of my comments. I might pull them together later to create an article about how difficult it is to present independent conservative ideas in our new environment of liberal fascism.

Comment #1: Williams College is in the news after liberal students prevented the appearance of an anti-feminist speaker, Suzanne Venker. Unfortunately, the students who sought to bring her to campus felt there was inadequate security for the event. For my take on what it was like to be a token conservative professor at Williams in the 1980's, see my recent article in The Campus Fix. 

After I did that post, someone suggested that there was never really any security concerns. I simply reported what was written about the matter. I also thought it was silly to suggest that ex-MA governor Jane Swift was a conservative.

Comment #3: I should point out that one of the students organizing Suzanne Venker's visit indicated that security concerns were a concern when it came to cancelling the Venker event in comments he made to Josh Logue at Slate.com. See,http://www.slate.com/articles/life/inside_higher_ed/2015/10/williams_college_uninvites_suzanne_venker_after_student_backlash.html

Second, Williams College has a rather long standing record of hostility to conservatives. For my take on what it was like to be a conservative college professor at Williams in the late 1980's please see my recent article in Campus Reform.

Third, 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 shouldn’t pretend she is the MA version of Sarah Palin.

Comment #7: Part of my job as a consultant to colleges and universities is helping them secure funding to predict and stop violent behavior through the use of behavioral assessment teams (BATs). It would be extremely difficult for BAT programs to work on school campuses if administrators ignored the fears expressed by vulnerable, outnumbered students like Zach Wood. Gavin de Becker teaches us that we should learn to trust our fear instinct as a reliable tool for self-protection. I recommend his book, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence.

Later, I responded to the suggestion that resistance to Venker was limited to a small, extremist group of students by referring the reader to the comments Zach Wood's peers made in their own school newspaper.

Comment #8: To understand how the majority of students at Williams College view freedom of speech for conservatives, I think it is useful to read what their opinion leaders are saying. Check out this opinion piece written by the editor of the campus newspaper, The Williams Record.  Then, check out this opinion piece written by the Williams Record EditorialBoard.  The comments are worth reading too.

Comment #12: I have read Zach Wood's comments in his recent article in the Washington Post, "I ran a speaker series to expose Williams students to unpopular ideas. It was deemed ‘too offensive.’"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/10/27/i-ran-a-speaker-series-to-expose-williams-students-to-unpopular-ideas-it-was-deemed-too-offensive/

The negative response to inviting Suzanne Venker was not limited to "some of the extreme elements on campus." As Zach Wood writes:

Recently, Uncomfortable Learning invited Suzanne Venker to campus. Venker, a noted anti-feminist, has argued that feminism turns women into victims, devalues motherhood and makes male-female relationships a battleground. Just minutes after I invited people to the event via Facebook, my Uncomfortable Learning partners and I started receiving incendiary attacks.

Our peers called us sheltered, privileged men’s right’s activists endorsing hate speech, white supremacy and misogyny. One person accused me of a calculated attack on women at Williams. Another said I had blood on my hands. That post received over 50 likes. I also received a phone call from a private number. 

The person on the line said, “I used to have respect for you, but now I know you’re a sexist. Go to hell.” Then they hung up.

A few days later, after a torrent of online bullying, our board canceled the event because of security concerns. I worry about the message this sends. To outsiders, it may seem like Williams doesn’t believe in free speech. And it makes our student body seem like we need to be coddled and given “safe spaces” that prevent us from having to face views we find offensive.

The fact that a Facebook post accusing Zach Wood of having "blood" on his hands got 50 likes should be a powerful indication that there is something seriously wrong with the state of free speech at Williams College. We should honor and value Zach Wood's statements regarding the way he and his fellow organizers were the victims of online bullying. All the evidence I have gathered about this situation indicates that a lack of free speech is still a profound problem at Williams College. For my take on what it was like to be a young conservative professor at Williams College in the late 1980's, please see this post at my Anonymous Political Scientist blog site.

Finally, one of the commentators started going after me for why I left Williams College in 1989. I hit back with the truth and some snark.

Comment #14: I should briefly respond to comments by Ephman. According to Williams College the only reason I was taken off the tenure track was the supposed low quality of my research work. There were no other reasons ever suggested for this unprecedented action. As Ephman has indicated, he was not on campus at that time so I do not think he is a reliable source for understanding my brief tenure as a Williams College professor.

I have maintained a strong interest in studying the events taking place at Williams College over the years and have been an active participant on the most important website regarding the school, Ephblog, since 2010. I remain in touch with my former Williams College students, many of whom are still dissatisfied with the treatment of conservatives at the school. I made the following points: 

1. Although there have been conservative speakers at Williams College, there are no conservative professors.
2. Jane Swift is a liberal Republican who does not, and has never, represented the GOP base.
3. Absolutely no administrator at Williams has indicated the slightest support for Venker's anti-feminist perspective.
4. Zach Wood has repeatedly indicated that a lack of security in the face of a massive amount of threatening on-line posts was the motivating reason for rescinding Venker's invitation.

Finally, I am not hiding my identity from anyone. My views have been published in reputable publications by editors who have checked my information and experience. I am certainly a more credible, honest and unbiased source than those who may be currently employed by Williams College or whose jobs/careers are dependent on maintaining untruthful information about it.

Comment #19: jersey454, I respect Zach Wood's sincerity when it comes to his report that the Venker event was cancelled for security reasons. If I had been subjected to the same on-line bullying that he experienced, then I would have shared his deep concern for Ms. Venker's safety.

Although you may be friends with those who bullied him (or may have been one of those bullies yourself)

it is difficult to predict violent behavior unless you know key details about these folks including their past criminal histories, use of drugs and alcohol, and ideological leanings. Unless you can provide more detailed information about those who bullied Zach Wood, then I do not think it is fair to suggest there was zero basis for his fears of violence.

There are plenty of conservative thinkers who are skeptical about each of the issues -- anti-feminism, gay rights, discrimination in the workplace -- which you seem to think are completely settled in an intellectual sense. Your apparent unwillingness to even entertain the idea that you might be wrong is part of the reason that so many of us are appalled by the lack of intellectual diversity at Williams College.

A responsible liberal arts education should include a scientific look at the most controversial issues of our day. That is certainly the sort of education I provided when I was teaching in the political science department at Williams College. Much of my own research, for example, destroyed years of liberal settled science on the exact causes of the U.S. welfare state. To see how my research impacted the field of welfare reform, please see this excerpt from Paul E. Peterson, Mark C. Rom's book Welfare Magnets.

Ideally, Williams College should be a place where students confront liberal orthodoxies and make up their own minds based on evidence and independent thought -- not peer pressure or on-line bullying. Williams College should be a place where students benefit from Uncomfortable Learning provided by conservative scholars who are smarter and better read than liberals who simply hang on to the Democrat party's line-of-the-day.

Comment #20: Again, I should point out that Ephman seems to lack basic knowledge of how tenure decisions are made regarding junior faculty members at Williams College who have recently completed their dissertations. In my case, my department read chapters of my doctoral dissertation as their primary assessment of my skill as a researcher. On the basis of reading my thesis - which I completed while I was still teaching at Williams - they decided that the research work done in my dissertation was of low quality.

The error of that determination, however, became apparent only a few months later when this same body of work was judged by a panel of independent political scientists associated with the American Political Science Association (APSA). These readers had the exact opposite reaction. They believed my work to be so exemplary that they awarded me the William Anderson Award for having written the best doctoral dissertation in the nation in my field. This award demonstrated that Williams College gravely underestimated the quality, significance, originality and relevance of my research. I think it is perfectly obvious that I was a victim of racial/ideological discrimination.

The quality of my doctoral dissertation research was so great that it is still cited by authors. To see how my research impacted the field of welfare reform, please see this excerpt from Paul E. Peterson, Mark C. Rom's book Welfare Magnets.

To highlight the extent to which I research skills were disparaged, I should point out that my dissertation was eventually published, almost word for word, exactly as I wrote it as part of an edited volume. You can judge the quality of my research work yourself by using this on-line resource.

As far as I can tell, the extraordinary quality of my research was recognized by both national-level experts in my field, by national-level authorities appointed by the APSA. The only folks who didn't seem to appreciate the extraordinary quality of my work were the left-wing professors at Williams College, the professors who saw me and my opposition to affirmative action as a profound threat to their liberal orthodoxy.

Pushing on, the liberals defending Williams College ran out of steam. They demonstrated an intellectual laziness which seemed epidemic on the left.

Comment 22: I suspect you are the only one in the world who believes that Williams College's hostility to conservatives is negated simply because it imports a tiny number of conservatives to speak to its students once in a while.

Comment 31: The real lesson here is that liberals are lazy and mean. They are unable to respond intelligently, logically, or coherently when confronted with tough evidence that shows how their outmoded leftist ideology is inconsistent with reality, unable to predict the future, and a dead end that leaves them isolated and powerless in the real world.

It makes me worry you are delusional if you sincerely hold to this utterly ridiculous defense. Given the William's long-standing hostility to conservatives -- as reflected in its hiring practices -- I do not think you have made the case that Williams is a realistic choice for conservative, Christian students seeking a quality liberal arts education.

Sadly, Williams is also a poor choice for liberal, secular students who are not being challenged in the classroom with a powerful conservative perspective.

For my advice to conservative students at Williams College, please see my recent opinion piece in Campus Reform. http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=6956

Comment 24: Ephman, you are delusional and full of it. At the national level, the views taught at Williams College are irrelevant to modern life. The silly, childish leftist ideas taught on that campus are a joke to those of us making a good living in the real world. As a former professor, I'm more proud of the fact that I live near the beach than that I once taught at frosty Williams.

Comment 27: Jersey454, you are so brainwashed you are making me laugh. Given the liberal bias of Williams College, I am not surprised at the extremely unhealthy people it attracts. While I was on the campus, no less that two of its professors committed suicide. 

I think you are naive if you think you and your fellow students are fine examples of mental health. I don't see how anyone can be healthy and happy while still holding on to delusional, unrealistic liberal beliefs. The willingness of you and your fellow students to engage in on-line bullying is quite disturbing and potentially an expression of psychopathic tendencies.

1. You would be exposed to even more challenges to your comfortable left-wing orthodoxy. If you had a conservative professor like me you would learn that affirmative action causes incredible resentment and anger and that anger and resentment does not subside over time.
2. You would learn, for example, that twin studies show there are more ex-gays than current gays.
3. You would read studies that demonstrate low IQ is correlated with both poverty and criminal behavior and that this fact makes it difficult to solve problems related to both poverty and crime.
4. You would read studies that indicate how, in Europe, a tolerance for gay marriage actually undermines the prevalence of traditional marriage.
5. You would learn more about why women under perform men at the highest levels of math and the consequences of this difference between the sexes.
6. You would learn the details about how Protestant Christians were the pre-eminent enemies of Hitler's totalitarianism and investigate why atheism is highly correlated with mass murder and genocide in the last century.
7. You would study and read the Qu'ran to help you understand why it is the cause of so much conflict and blood shed. You would review passages in the Qu'ran to help you understand its hostility to gays, women, Christians and Jews.

In other words, you would receive a completely different education. A more valuable education which would put you in touch with higher quality scholarship, a more realistic view of the world, and give you the tools needed to create a fulfilling life for yourself based on the latest and most significant research. You would be studying under a professor who is on the cutting edge of social problems, active in reforming the Republican party, and fearless when it comes to expressing independent thought. Right now, all you get is a pale reflection of the inadequate decisions you made in high school.

As this thread illustrates, leftists also tend to be gutless conformists. Here, they post in complete anonymity. They quickly, almost immediately, fall into vicious, unsubstantiated personal attacks. They cannot be bothered to do the hard work needed to even partially address an intelligent conservative critique of their old-fashioned views. They too lazy to investigate the latest peer reviewed studies which contradict their cherished ideology.

The truth is that the liberal ideology taught routinely at places like Williams College represents a dumbed down education, an education more suitable for sheep than proven leaders. I expect that students and parents searching for a quality liberal arts education will search out alternatives like Hillsdale College which preserves the best of a traditional, demanding liberal arts education. See, http://www.hillsdale.edu/

As I digest all of this, I think I'll do more to shape it into a coherent article that will help clarify the politically correct sickness that has take over places like Williams College. For now, however, I am glad I rescued these comments before College Confidential completely deleted them.

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

White Like Me: Thoughts on Young Obama's Prom Photos

TIME published pictures from Barack Obama's prom night in 1979. For me, these photos are more evidence of something I have thought for a long time - young Obama seemed like a white guy.

Greg Orme, Kelli Allman, Barack Obama and
Megan Hughes at Allman’s parents’ house in Honolulu.

Despite the Obama mythology, these new photos show that the young Obama was dating a white girl named Megan Hughes and hanging out with other white people including his basketball teammate Greg Orme and fellow student Kellie Allman. It was Kelli Allman (née McCormack) who provided these new photos to Time. She is pictured second from the left.

One of the most puzzling things to me about contemporary politics is the way so many people seem to think that Barack Obama is a black man. As one of the folks who got to know him while he was at Occidental College, I can report that I thought of Obama as an average white guy in terms of his IQ and his cultural inheritance. This, of course, should not be so surprising since Obama was raised by his white mother and his white grandparents nearly his entire life.

The young Obama that I knew was mainly interested in hanging out with white guys and white girls (like me and my radical girlfriend) or with his radical Muslim friends. I interacted with young Obama on various occasions between 1980-1981 and I can report that I never saw him hanging out with black students. Never.

Obama, of course, has done a lot of work to create a politically and socially advantageous black image for himself. In his autobiography, for example, I have called attention to how Obama converted my white college era girlfriend into a big black woman.

This ruse needs to end. The young Obama I knew was nothing like the young black people I knew at Occidental College. He did not come from an underprivileged background. He did not have any of the hostility to white people that I sometimes saw among blacks at Occidental College. All the reports we have so far indicate that young Obama was dating white women, hanging out with his white roommate - Phil Boerner - at Columbia, and generally living a white lifestyle imbued with radical, socialist ideology.

I remain amazed that a guy as white as me managed to game the affirmative action system all the way into the White House. I expect future generations, however, will see through this ruse and render judgments that reflect the actual evidence of Obama's life including these new photos.

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

Sotomayor Nomination Brings Back Painful Memories for Augustine 25

The nomination of Sotomayor brought up some bad memories. As a victim of affirmative action, I can feel the pain of those White and Hispanic firefighters in New Haven, CT who were treated so cruelly by the decisions of Judge Sotomayor in Ricci v. DeStefano.

For whatever reasons, I do not think liberals appreciate how painful it was for me to study to be a political science professor throughout my 20s, only to be told at the end of the process..."oops you're White." In my case, I spent about two years coming in 2nd for various full-time political science teaching jobs before I figured out that I was wasting my time and that academic elites didn't like me simply because I was the wrong sex and wrong color.

That 10 year investment of time is particularly painful to remember because I grew up poor and lived in poverty most of those years. Despite a lack of resources and family support, my academic work was good enough to win public recognition, citations, and publication. However, I was rejected for various jobs - not all jobs, of course - simply because of my ethnicity.

Accordingly, I feel a special sympathy for Frank Ricci and others who have studied hard and overcome various challenges only to become the victims of reverse discrimination. I know liberals like to pretend that the victims of affirmative action just get over it and go away.

In my experience, however, the pain is just as fresh now as it was then... It was cruel of the liberals to have me prepare for and perform exceptionally well in a series of interviews when - all along - the decision was going to be made by racial/gender and not merit reasons. This is a humiliation I really don't want to see anyone else endure...

Consequently, I think both Sotomayor and Obama underestimate the degree to which her nomination is a big mistake for the Obama administration - close to his hasty and flawed decision to close the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp without a plan.

Part of the problem is that their liberal "the-ends-justify-the-means" ideology makes all the pain and suffering they cause for other people okay in their own minds.

In a larger sense, however, I think that Obama has made another hasty and unwise decision and that he will be surprised by the outrage and anger caused by his nomination of a prominent promoter of racial injustice. I think Obama’s nomination of Sotomayor may be particularly useful in helping swing voters - particularly Asian-American voters - see that Obama is not the centerist he pretended to be when he ran in the general election.

Justice and Accountability: New "Very Old" Ideas for the Republican Party

New ideas are actually dangerous for Republican success. It is much better for us to fall back on
proven ideas that have been tested by time. I think life is too short to be the philosopher who creates winning ideas and the bright person who puts these ideas into action. Although these ideas are timeless, they can still be fresh and useful if we demonstrate how they apply to contemporary circumstances. Here's a couple of the best ideas I can offer:

1. Break Big Bills Into Smaller Bills: The huge HR1 was so big it was impossible for voters to hold members of Congress responsible for their decisions. Accordingly, one ideal approach for Republicans is to be the party that "restores the power of Congress" by seeking to create and enforce rules that prevent future omnibus legislation. This tool would also improve the accountability of the President too, since it would be possible to understand what he or she is signing into law or subjecting to veto.

2. If Affirmative Action Isn't Wrong...Then Nothing is Wrong: Affirmative action has been a disaster on a number of fronts. It reduced the self-confidence and worth of the people who benefit from it. It causes under-prepared students to fail when they might do better in a different environment. It creates hostility and anger that - in my experience - never really goes away. To suggest that people just get over affirmative action is part of the myth used to defend this unjust policy. The question I like is why should an asian be disadvantaged compared to a latino because of what a white person's ancestor did to a black person's ancestor?

3. Pain is Good: It is physically impossible for a social system to survive without the harsh lessons taught by reality. In this sense, Republicans can be the party that says that pain is a good thing when it motivates a drug addict or an alcoholic to make changes in their lives. The threat of pain does more than any feel good program to bring human behavior into line with positive mutual outcomes. This means that we should not get in the way of the natural and instructive pain (and shame) caused by carelessness, business failures, teen pregnancy, unemployment, alcoholism, and drug use. Pain protects us from even worse outcomes and Republicans should be embracing it as a secret of national and international success. A pain-free society will naturally become a failed society.