This Week in Pictures - Williams College Edition

Totally Woke: Williams College Museum of Art Promotes Lame Crayon Drawing as Significant American Art

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - As a Sunday painter, I'm proud to announce that I'm starting to sell my paintings. Not for much, but enough to cover the cost of my art lessons. Along the way, I have developed an intense interest in traditional representational art and a commitment to restoring its pre-WWII glory. Accordingly, I'm a little sensitive when I see traditional American and European art being slowly suffocated in a thick cloud of noxious anti-white hatred. This hatred is on display at the formerly prestigious Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) in their new show, SHIFT: New Interpretations of American and European Art, starting September 6, 2019.

There, the woke staff is fully cucked and convinced that a straightforward display of American and European Art - without genuflections to the evils of patriarchy and white supremacy - is probably the worst thing that could ever happen on Earth. A you can read on the notice above, the WCMA believes it is important to "be transparent about the ways the museum's collecting practices have helped to reinforce systems of power that privilege white men."

As such, the WCMA's commitment to wiping out white male privilege is consistent with the ill-treatment of young white students at the April 9, 2019 College Council meeting. There, as you may recall, white male students were the targets of an extended, bigoted, anti-white tirade at the hands of two black student activists affiliated with CARE Now. Neither of the blacks students was punished for their hates speech. One continued to serve on a hiring committee despite his obvious anti-white racism.

As far as I can tell, the museum staff believes the WCMA's collection of American and European Art is morally objectionable because a previous focus on collecting beautiful, skill-based visual art somehow prevented the collection of art from queers, blacks, and everyone else who didn't have training in skill-based visual arts. To make up for this historic sin, the WCMA's upcoming exhibition, The Shift: New Interpretations of American and European Art, seeks to atone for social injustice by placing extraordinary attention on works like the small crayon and pencil drawing below.

"Chee Foo, China," William O. Golding (American : 1875-1943),
1932, crayon and pencil mounted on board. Overall 8 7/8 x
12 3/16 in. Gift of Mrs. Mills B. Vane.

This example of affirmative action art is the creation of William O. Golding, a self-taught African American artist. I doubt the WCMA would feature it if it was drawn by a white adult...or even a white child. Golding produced about sixty drawings like this between 1932 and 1939 when he was near the end of his life and getting treatment as a patient at the U.S. Marine Hospital in Savannah, GA. Our appreciation for this crayola artist is supposed to be dependent on elements of his backstory including his involuntary introduction to working on ships and his visits to a large number of ports.

In every possible sense, however, Golding's work is the product of an untrained amateur. The artists shows no knowledge of color theory, perspective, or proportions. The key elements of the work are dull, cliche and boringly repetitive. The fact the WCMA would highlight an amateur crayon and pencil drawing like this demonstrates that it has lost all sense of artistic taste and expertise. Instead, it is going full on political ideology. This once prestigious institution is now, officially, a joke.

In response to their choice, I thought it would be fun to compare Golding's crayon and pencil drawing above with a simple plein air study I did this weekend up in Big Bear, CA.

"Big Bear Peak," John C. Drew (American 1957-), 
oil on canvas panel. Overall 11.5 x 8 in..

The most important point I would like to make is to say that if you look at my painting and blur your eyes you will notice that the sky and the foreground look surprisingly realistic. That, dear reader, is one of the most important standards used to judge high quality representational art. As they say, I managed to accurately captured the light.

Typical for plein air painting, I spent about two and a half hours on this painting. I did it alla prima which is just a fancy way of saying I did it all at once while all the paint was still wet. Painting later on to correct errors may actually damage a painting like this because the paint is no longer fresh and the vitality of the moment has been lost. This painting, one of my best, is the result of about five years of practice under the tutelage of two of the finest representational artists in the State of California, Ebrahim Amin and Peter Adams. In this context, my painting is a relevant example of traditional, skill-based visual art or, as I like to say, the core values of Western Civilization.

My increased skill level is getting me greater attention. I sold five similar pieces to collectors over the last month.

Perhaps someday my "Big Bear Peak" plein air painting will be purchased by the WCAM. Following their current ideology, they could interpret my painting anew by understanding it in the context of my painful backstory including the way I persisted in developing my talent despite my poverty as a child and young adult, elite social rejection, and the institutionalized racial discrimination I faced at the hands of both Williams College and the U.S. Supreme Court.

I hope whoever sells this painting to the WCAM gets an exorbitant amount of money for it. They will deserve it as a reward for their uncanny ability to invest in high quality, truly courageous and significant art.

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.

This Week in Pictures - Williams College Edition

Williams College Poo Professor: Everyone Poops But Only a Few Obsess About It

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - Political theory professor Laura Ephraim is continuing her quest to educate us on how Locke's inattention to excrement is a serious flaw in his theory of property.

Her premise seems to be that everything in the world is best understood by 1) linking it to stool, or 2)  using stool (or bowel movements) as a metaphor, simile or analogy.

I'm not joking. Read her cringe-worthy abstract here.

Locke, she complains, presents an idealized view of the abundance of God's natural world because Locke leaves out how everything in nature is actually the result of human or non-human feces. She believes she adds value by rethinking Locke through the perspective of peristalsis. As you may know, peristalsis is the involuntary constriction and relaxation of the muscles of the intestine which push the contents of the intestine out.

She ominously links Locke's inattention to stool to the way he labeled people without property as "noxious" beasts. Drawing on my own history as a Marxist, I think what she means is that Locke's inattention to the ownership of one's excrement makes it easier for Locke to dehumanize the human casualties of our economic system. It is ironic, in her view, that Locke paid so little attention to poo and yet nevertheless describes the victims of capitalism as being like poo. In her The Politics of Waste course, for example, Ephraim explores the how we deal with unwanted noxious people through a special course offered at the Berkshire County Jail which is composed of nine Williams students and nine inmates.

Given her poo tinted glasses, you will probably not be surprised to learn that Ephraim is concerned that neither political scientists or political philosophers have displayed insufficient interest in waste. I think she is on to something. As far as I can tell, discussions of excrement are also absent from the works of Thomas Jefferson, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates and even Immanuel Kant. In her upcoming fall course, The Politics of Waste, she informs students that "...we will openly discuss unmentionable topics and get our hands dirty (sometimes literally) examining the politics of waste."

If we take away the high dungeon histrionics and I think Ephraim is basically advocating that we set aside our routine social manners and substitute the word poo for the more widely used phrase "negative externalities." I think those of us with normal levels of emotional IQ will quickly see it is best to base their vocabularies on economics rather than coprology or - even worse - coprophilia.

Williams College Bed Bug Policy: Leave Your Old Mattress at Home

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - Public interest in bed bug infestations has increased after it was reported by the New York Times they found evidence of bedbugs on every floor of their newsroom. Yuk! One of the most interesting comments on the topic is that the bed bugs had been complaining for days about an infestation of journalists. At any rate, concern over bed bugs is addressed at Williams College too.

According to the school's website, bed bugs are basically wingless mosquitoes. They have been an increasingly significant problem due to greater resistance to pesticides and increased international travel. The school's website seems to blame any bed bug issues on campus on the students. In particular, they warn the students not to bring their own mattresses from home.

The most important role you, as a student, can play is in preventing bed bug infestation in the first place, and the principal means of prevention is to leave your own mattress at home.

In general, bed bugs move from infested areas to non-infested areas when they latch onto someone’s clothing, or climb into their luggage, or nestle themselves into furniture or bedding that is moved into a dorm room. It pays for Williams College students to understand the geography of bed bugs if they wish to protect themselves from having bed bugs feed on them at night.

For example, as the experience of the Gray Lady indicates New York City is one of the worst places in the nation for bed bugs with a jaw-dropping 4,490 bedbug incidents reported. But New York City does not top the list of worst cities for bedbugs, that honor belongs to Baltimore, followed closely by Washington D.C. and Chicago. We see a lot of bed bug reports concentrated along the east coast and in California. The states of  New Jersey and Massachusetts have a significant concentrations of bed bug reports as illustrated below.

If a student believes they are being attacked by bed bugs, the school asks them to immediately contact Student Life at 413-597-2555. Student Life will schedule an inspection and if bed bugs are discovered a pest control company will take over the situation.

The school's policy seems to be that anyone with a bed bug problem will be in a certain level of quarantine. They will be required to stay in their room as the pest control treatment moves forward. It is particularly bad if the student dumps their bed bug infested mattress in the hallway because this will promote the spread of bed bugs to other areas. The website notes that"...placing infested furniture (particularly mattresses) into common areas or on the street may simply help to spread bed bugs to the rooms of other students."

Since a student with bed bugs might bring bed bugs with them where ever they go the school recommends that you "don’t make plans to sleep in a friend’s room or at an off-campus residence" since this will only spread the infestation to others.

Williams College Speaker Martha Jones Defended Elizabeth Warren's Pocahontas Status

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - It looks like the left-wing indoctrination of William College students continues unabated. Next up? A visit from Martha S. Jones. According to the Williams website, Martha Jones is Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University. She is a legal and cultural historian whose work examines how black Americans have shaped the story of American democracy. She will be on campus to speak on Thursday, September 12, 2019 from 4:15 pm - 5:30 pm.

I did a little research an found that Martha was one of the folks defending the absurd notion that it was okay for places like Harvard to treat the obviously blond, white Elizabeth Warren as if she were a native American. You can catch up on this insanity by reading the article connected this link.

Why calling Elizabeth Warren ‘Pocahontas’ is a slur against all mixed-race Americans

At the time of the article, Jones apparently thought Warren was legitimately 1/32 Indian. Warren's later blood test demonstrated she essentially had less Indian genes than her fellow native born Americans. Those of us who are angered that Warren leveraged her phony Indian story to obtain high paying academic jobs are perhaps out of line. She writes:

Other alarmists ask, if we permit people to be mixed-race, don’t we open the door to fraud and abuse? Mixed-race people, they warn, will use their complex heritage to material advantage — claiming to be black, white or Indian depending upon the benefits attached to such categories.

The bottom line is that when you advantage privileged minority groups against everyone else, there will always be people like Warren who abuse this system for selfish ends. When she arrives on campus, it might be helpful for conservative students to ask if they should give up employment opportunities for anyone who claims to be 1/32 black?

Show Me The Money: Williams College Ranks in Top 40 for Early and Mid-Career Pay

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - As you may know, PayScale’s 2019 College Salary Report shows Williams College graduate in the top 40 in terms of estimates of early and mid-career pay. You can see the article by clicking on this link: http://at.pysc.al/csr19
On the surface it seems odd that one of our nation's number one ranked liberal arts colleges produces graduates who don't earn so much compared to students who attend Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT, the famous HYPSM, who all rank in the top 16. Surprisingly, Williams also lags behind the Dartmouth, Colgate, Brown and Cornell.
Part of the problem is that Williams College does not graduate enough STEM students to fill the highest paying jobs. At Williams, only 32% of the students graduate with STEM degrees. At Cornell, in contrast, 43% graduate with STEM degrees.
As a conservative, of course, I imagine that the relative unattractiveness of Williams College grads on the job market is also due to the school's embrace of divisive identity politics. With so many less qualified students on campus, I have no doubt that the diversity the school advertises also reduces the average income of its alumni. On top of this, as a rural school, Williams College students are less likely to have valuable big city experience and big city contacts. It may also be that Williams College students are attracted to lower paying professions like teaching.
When I taught at Williams College in the 1980s - while the school was number one in the U.S. News & World Report rankings - I remember being surprised by the number of students who were seriously positioning themselves to take jobs as elementary and high school teachers. I honestly thought this was the waste of a good education. I saw it as an example of crippling low self-esteem. I'd be curious to know if this is still the case. I know from Ephblog experience that some of the participants openly talked about their low pay...and their belief they had chosen these low paying careers on purpose. (Like being a tutor, for example.)
Clearly, Williams College graduates would earn a lot more if the school chose students on the basis of merit and put less emphasis on the all too popular grievance study majors. It will be interesting to track alumni earning power to see if anything changes for the better.

This Week in Pictures - Williams College Edition

Shock! Williams College Barely Makes Top 20 in Newest Forbes Ranking

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - According to Forbes, Williams ranks 19th in the nation. For purposes of comparison, Williams ranked number one in both 2010 and 2011.

It is my understanding that the Forbes ranking prioritizes getting value out of one's educational investment. I assume they are still using the same criteria they reported in 2011 which reads:

Forbes' rating system utilizes five categories to determine school rankings. Student satisfaction includes analyses of teacher quality and student retention rates, among other indicators. The debt category accounts for the average dollar amount students owe upon graduating. The rankings also factor in 4-year graduation rates as well as the number of students winning prestigious fellowships and scholarships. Finally, evaluators account for post-graduate success by examining how school alumni fare in the professional world.

Today, Forbes places Williams behind other notable colleges including Cornell where I did my graduate work. Other familiar institutions rated higher than Williams include Brown, Dartmouth and Pomona. Part of the problem seems to be that Williams costs more that Harvard and yet is students end up earning less than Harvard graduates.

Why is Williams College falling out of its previously coveted number one ranking? At the root of most of these measures is the merit of various participants in the college's life. Here, identity politics looks like the most reasonable cause of the drop in status. For example, faculty members picked for their diversity instead of their excellence will naturally reduce the quality of teaching. Bringing in unqualified students will decrease retention rates since these students will most likely crumble under the pressure of competing with their brighter, more together peers. Likewise, a lower quality student body will also be less likely to win awards including fellowships and scholarships. Finally, students who have been largely studying in the great grievance fields will be unlikely to do well in the professional or business world.

Although I've been proud to say I taught at the top liberal arts college in the nation, I've always known that liberal arts colleges are not in the same league as research universities. I've known that Williams benefited in the U.S. News and World Report rankings because of the size of its endowment. Now, I imagine, the proponents of identity politics, who have dominated the campus for years, will finally back off because they realize they have damaged the brand. Not.

Williams College Elites: Now Environmentalism Is Racist Too

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - I was just scanning the Williams Magazine and I noticed the an article on the topic of environmental justice. Apparently, protecting the environment is now racist. (Isn't everything?) As you might expect, it is filled with an overwhelming amount of impossible to understand annoying politically correct babble. 

"Building a relationship between the Davis Center and the Zilkha Center allows our students to think about these terms as complementary," says Cecilia Del Cid, Assistant Director of the Davis Center, "to recognize that capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy have allowed corporations, colonialism, imperialism to continue to perpetrate many of these injustices."

In reality, of course, the U.S. leads the world in terms of protecting the environment and creating clean, safe, healthy places to live. However, if you think that white people would get credit for protecting the environment, then you don't know how wily and evil white people really are since they are actually harming minorities when they make efforts to protect the environment. For example, as I understand it, foolish racist white people thought they were making the world better by creating Central Park, but in reality they made the world worse by forcing blacks (and Irish) out of Central Park. 

One of the most bizarre comments comes from James Manigault-Bryant, the moderator, Associate Professor and Chair of Africana Studies. He focuses on how protection of the forest actually harms the interest of blacks and other minorities.

He ominously asserts: "What strikes me is how central the forest is physically, but symbolically as well. What draws people here is an opportunity to have the privilege of being removed, of being in the wilderness to come to a sense of themselves. What you’re challenging us to think about is: At what cost is Williams able to sustain that forest?" He adds, later on: 

The ways land is apportioned and protected for certain purposes has an effect on who comes and lives here. As the college continues to pursue this aim of diversity, particularly among faculty, this is central. Will people come here and stay? Can they imagine having a life here? It’s dependent upon the uses of land—the way you put it earlier... about protecting the forest and how that comes into tension with other perspectives.

Accordingly, he wants to see us develop "an alternative, more inclusive definition of “environment,” which is crucial to the conversation." As far as I can tell, James Manigault-Bryant is seeking to promote a new way of thinking about environmentalism that changes the word to mean that messing up the environment is okay as long as it benefits non-whites. Or something like that.

Ken Cuccinelli Tears Apart CNN Anchor Erin Burnett '98 on Historic Public Charge Rules

NEW YORK, NY - In a recent CNN broadcast, CNN's Erin Burnett '98 challenged the acting US Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Ken Cuccinelli on the Trump administration's new immigration regulation, a regulation which would tighten up the enforcement of existing laws requiring that immigrants not become a burden to society. You can click on the blue start button below to watch the segment in question.

CNN's Erin Burnett challenges acting US Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Ken Cuccinelli on the Trump administration's new immigration regulation, saying her grandparents came to America with no education and that the rule would exclude people like her. pic.twitter.com/kyzZLpW5lj

— OutFrontCNN (@OutFrontCNN) August 13, 2019

Burnett argued that her grandparents came to America with no education and that the rule would exclude people like them. Cuccinelli tore apart her argument, however, indicating that public charge rules applied to her legal immigrant relatives as well as his. In fact, the public charge rules existed at the same time as the stirring poetry on the Statue of Liberty. Cuccinelli pointed out that the impoverished huddled masses welcomed to America were Europeans who suffered from the restrictions of an ossified class-based society. According to Cuccinelli, the federal level public charge regulations were enacted a year prior to the completion of the Statue of Liberty.

Moreover, as one Twitter user observed, it seems disingenuous for Burnett to position her family and perhaps herself as poor beleaguered illegal immigrants just like those unlawfully coming across the border from Mexico. It is ironic because the Burnett family appears to have done well in the U.S. According to Wikipedia,

Burnett was born and raised in Mardela Springs, Maryland. She is the youngest daughter of Esther Margaret (née Stewart) and Kenneth King Burnett, a corporate attorney. She is of Irish and Scottish ancestry. Burnett attended St. Andrew's School, a private co-educational college preparatory boarding school in Middletown, Delaware, graduating in 1994. She returned to the school in 2009 to deliver the commencement speech. She then attended Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where she studied political science and economics, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political economy. As an undergraduate, she played lacrosse and field hockey.

You can check out the Twitter comments going after Erin Burnett '98 below.  

— BellaDonna 🇺🇸 Let Freedom Ring ⭐⭐⭐ (@Aster56) August 14, 2019

Stiff and Obsequious - Williams College Profs Promote Their E-mail Ideals

I saw on Twitter that one of the campuses woke professors, Phoebe Cohen, has signed off on a special document meant to tell students how to send e-mails to their professors. While some of the advice is just common sense, parts of it reflect the anxieties and fears of our left-wing professors. Here is a JPEG of the full document.

As a former Williams College professor, I'm interested in some of the details here. First, they insist that you call all your faculty members "Professor." In the first place this is just silly. No one with any sophistication would capitalize the word professor if they used it in a sentence. We don't even capitalize the word president.

I assume that this is done in place of the more normal "Dr." As far as I can tell, this change is recommended because not all your professors have the doctoral degrees? I would have thought it weird to be called a "professor" in a salutation as if my job is a defining aspect of my identity. Yuk! It also strikes me as terribly old-fashion. It is just the sort of salutation I expect an immature, insecure, female professor might crave as a designation which made up for the fact that she never got married and never had any children. Too bad, identity politics has erased virtually all of the status formerly assigned to real professors who were picked for their excellence instead of the contribution to the diversity circus.

The most weird part of the document is that way each of the faculty contributors/reviewers are repetitiously refereed to as Professor X. This is just extreme silliness.

Based on Twitter comments, it also seems to hurt "Professor" feelings if you signal that you don't have the slightest idea of what they do or why it is extremely important. Moreover, if you refer to your desire to become an attorney, a military officer, or a medical doctor, you again hurt their feeling by even suggesting that their careers are not important or valuable enough to emulate.

The larger issue is that this odd, controlling document is designed to teach students to be subservient and obsequious. We are apparently in a new era where being bold, funny, and outspoken is considered a lower value and an inappropriate approach to life. For me, encouraging students to model their work on the inappropriate e-mail would do more for building their character and promoting their success than the timid e-mail promoted by the responsible faculty members.

There is a truly funny example of an acceptable vs. unacceptable e-mails after the break.