The Usual Suspects: Ephblog Searches for the Mystery Professor Who Threatened Violence Over the Chicago Principles

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - Although Maud appears to have got the woke student activists out of the headlines for now, I'm still very interested in uncovering the the identity of the professor who threatened violence to stop the Chicago Principles from coming to Williams College. Earlier Ephblog came up with four professors whose background seemed to fit the report we read earlier from Luana Maroja. Click on the link below for the full Ephblog article.

Admit Your Privilege, 5

The enterprising leader of Ephblog, David Dudley Field '25, is intrigued by the educational benefits of having this potentially violent mystery professor share her personal experience regarding the anti-free speech riots at UC Berkeley. He writes:

A professor threatening violence is nuts! Is anyone else shocked by this? But, at the same time, tell us your story! EphBlog loves a riot. What was the Berkeley riot like? What did you do? What lessons did you learn? Perhaps you could share those lessons with your Williams students . . .

Field '25 recommends the student journalists at the Williams Record investigate Luana Maroja's story and reveal her identity. This might happen. In my experience, Nicholas Goldrosen, the current editor-in-chief, seems eminently fair. He has treated me fairly and I admire his courage for doing so. The work should be relatively easy because Ephblog has already revealed the names of the professors who are the most plausible suspects.

Ephblog reports one useful resource is the Williams College Course Catalog (pdf) which describes faculty backgrounds. The faculty with the most recent degrees from UC Berkeley include Sarah E. Olsen (PHD 2016), Ianna Hawkins Owen (PHD 2016), Kailani Polzak (PHD 2017) and Yana Skorobogatov (PHD 2018).

After a bit of on-line research, I would probably suggest Field '25 cross Sarah E. Olsen off his list. She was teaching at Amherst (or is it amHerst?) during the two years prior to her arrival at Williams College in the Fall of 2018. I think it is safe to assume she wasn't active in the rioting which led to the cancellation of Milo Yiannopoulos’s speaking engagement on February 1, 2017.

Ianna Hawkins Owen is an Assistant Professor of English who took her PhD in African American Studies from UC Berkeley. My Google research shows she was at UC Berkeley at the time of the riots. She was enjoying a post-doctorate fellowship which ran from 2016 to 2017. She arrived at Williams College in the Fall of 2017 and is part of the same cohort which included woke faculty activists Kai Green and Kimberly Love.

Kailani Polzak was probably not at UC Berkeley in January 2017. I'm thinking this only because I found she was a C3 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Art History at Williams College for two years starting in 2015-2016. Accordingly, it doesn't look like she was at UC Berkeley during the riots. Nevertheless, she does seem to be a woke faculty member. She has been involved in the effort to establish an Asian studies position. She is also a member of the same faculty cohort as Green, Love and Owen.

Yana Skorobogatov is a native Russia speaker with a strong interest in the Soviet Union. She is an assistant professor of history. Like Owen, it looks like she was definitely in the UC Berkeley area at the time of the riots. She seems pretty woke too. While at Berkeley she taught a courses on incarceration and global history. The only thing that would make her less likely to be the mystery professor is that she would have been in her first semester of her employment at Williams College. Specifically, she would have been publicly calling for violence within the first three months of her tenure track job.   

"Of course," Ephblog cautiously asserts, "just because this professor was at the riot does not mean that she has a degree from Berkeley, but this is the place to start." Field '25 concludes: "I also suspect that this is more likely to be a new faculty member since most already-hired Williams faculty would have been teaching during the February 2017 Milo riots."

All of this would be easily cleared up if I got a couple of phone calls from participants at the event or if Professor Luana Marojo is willing to give me the name. My number is 949-338-5921. You can email me at johndrew25@msn.com. I'm happy to protect your anonymity.

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

Get Off Your Axis: Chad M. Topaz of Williams College on How to Craft Your Diversity Statement

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - Ever wonder what to say in your mandatory diversity statement when you are applying to teach mathematics at the university level? Lucky for you, Williams College math professor Chad M. Topaz will be happy to get you up-to-speed on how to win your dream job by saying the right things in your diversity statement. To help job seekers like you, he is asking for donors to make tax-deductible gifts to his QSIDE organization.

If you want to get his advice right away without waiting for an academic sugar daddy, then I recommend your read what I take to be his best advice based in an interview he gave in the June 2019 edition of Notices, a journal of the American Mathematical Society. According to Chad:

A strong diversity statement might include one or more of the following components: a discussion of why equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) issues are important; disclosure of your own identities along various axes of diversity; presentation of any formal knowledge you have about EDI; examples of EDI issues at play in teaching you’ve done; descriptions of professional activities related to EDI; and other relevant personal or professional thoughts and experiences. Whether you choose from among these components or include others, a committee will want to see some thoughtful discussion.

So, if you're Chad Topaz, I suppose, you can disclosure your own identities along various axes of diversity by talking about what it is like to be a gay white guy gay-married to another gay white guy and how you're upset that blacks are not flocking to support Pete Buttigieg?

Maybe not...

In his original attack on Thompson, Topaz tries to convince us the use of mandatory diversity statements in the hiring process isn't a backdoor way of discriminating against whites and conservatives who believe such statements are unnecessary or unhelpful. He denies that these diversity statements have anything to do with either politics or affirmative action. "A straight white cisgender man can write a stupendously effective diversity statement," according to Topaz, "if he learns about the issues and thinks about how to address them in his professional life."

Really?...

The bottom line is that these diversity statements - as he recommends writing them - are clearly designed to screen out conservatives who are offended by identity politics and the white men or women who are disadvantaged by it. There is no role in Topaz's world for a scholar who thinks present levels of equity, diversity and inclusion are just fine after you factor in IQ, culture, and personal interests. Or, even worse, there is no role for you in his world if you think we shouldn't be held accountable for the behavior of our ancestors by those who take no responsibility for the behavior of their children.

Simply treating your students fairly is obviously not enough...not even a grade of 2 on a 5 point scale of EDI accountability.

Finally, if you disagree with the discriminatory, politicized, hostile approach of woke activists like Chad M. Topaz, then you should be target of his "you're either with us or against us" extremism. If you are on the wrong side of the latest leftist fad, then it is okay for you to be hectored enough in public and attacked enough by on-line mobs to find yourself in danger of being fired from your otherwise cushy college-level teaching job. This is the world of Chad Topaz, a world of hate, discrimination, anti-white bias, and on-line diversity police.

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.

This Week in Pictures - Williams College Edition

Shut Up, He Argued: Williams College Anti-Free Speech Advocate Chad M. Topaz Tries to Get a UC Davis Professor Fired

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - Williams College math professor Chad M. Topaz is in the news today for fighting to get a female math professor fired from her job at at UC Davis. Her egregious offense?  She had the temerity to argue that requiring diversity statements from young people applying for teaching positions is suspiciously similar to McCarthyism. This is the latest example of woke policing coming from the perpetually offended Topaz whose exploits have already caught the attention of places like Ephblog, the Williams College alumni run blogsite.

Chad Topaz, a professor of mathematics at Williams College
is leading an effort to get a fellow math professor at
UC Davis fired from her job for her opposition to mandatory
diversity statements. 

Tearing into Abigail Thompson, Topaz demands his readers contact UC Davis, Thompson's institution "to express your concerns about diversity in the Department of Mathematics and about Thompson’s role as Chair. If she has gone on record in a very public way as being opposed to diversity statements, and if UC Davis requires them, the school must look into whether or not she has been abiding by institutional policy."

Abigail Thompson

Basically, Topaz is mobilizing a nation-wide effort through his QSIDE organization to get Abigail fired for speaking her mind. FYI: I've taken a screenshot of the above statement so that I'll have a record of it if he is ever forced to delete it.

Thompson wrote an argument against the use of diversity statements for what Topaz believes is the most widely-read mathematics publication in the world, the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. He found her argument so noxious that he refused to provide a link to it. Nevertheless, you can read about it here. 

The other target for his woke vitriol is the publication which published Thompson's statement. Topaz is particularly incensed that the Notices of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) seems to believe that there are two sides to the argument.

"By amplifying Thompson’s views to a large audience, the American Mathematical Society lends legitimacy to them, and in doing so, engages in both-sides-ism," he writes. "It’s ok to use diversity statements, on one hand, and diversity statements are like McCarthyism, on the other hand." 

In his most recent blog post, he complained that the Notices is a little too eager to publish dissenting points of view. He writes, "...it seems the Notices (part of AMS, obviously) holds a value something akin to “let all sides be heard.”

As you might expect, Chad M. Topaz's woke instincts have brought his dopey, totalitarian anti-free speech views to the world of Twitter. The story has also been picked up by Inside Higher Education. Most recently, he was the subject of a blistering attack from the blogsite Leiter Reports.

In his original attack on Thompson, Topaz tries to suggest that the use of diversity statements in the hiring process isn't another backdoor way of discriminating against whites and conservatives who believe such statements are unnecessary or unhelpful. He denies that these diversity statements have anything to do with either politics or affirmative action. "A straight white cisgender man can write a stupendously effective diversity statement," according to Topaz, "if he learns about the issues and thinks about how to address them in his professional life."

The professor he attacked, Abigail Thompson, is quite distinguished. She serves as the Vice President of the American Mathematical Society and Chair of the Department of Mathematics at UC Davis.

In his article, Topaz attempts to mobilize the full hatred of the left against her by suggesting other efforts in addition to trying to get her fired. All of this, by the way, is published at QSIDE. For example, he provides the emails of those who were responsible for publishing her article along with his own suggested text. He calls for us to "stop doing favors" for Notices. "Spread the word about this debacle on social media and in your workplaces," he writes.

He even seeks to dry up the supply of young graduate students for UC Davis, saying: "For those of you who are in mathematics, advise grad-school-bound undergraduate students – especially students who are minoritized along some axis – not to apply to UC Davis." Who knows? In a couple more days, maybe Chad Topaz will call for the utter destruction of the UC Davis campus itself for the sin of not reacting quickly enough to his anti-free speech fatwa?

Previous fatwas issued by the prodigious Chad M. Topaz include his attacks on various institutions which are way too white for his tastes including art museums and or mathematics editorial boards. For more information about his organization the QSIDE Institute, check out the following link.

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. Pronouns - Master/Commander.

Anxious Faculty Leaders Spin Williams College Free Speech Statement to Differentiate It from the Beloved Chicago Principles

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - I looked through the new Williams Record article on the school's new freedom of speech statement. Personally, I thought it looked a lot like the Chicago Principles. I'm happy with the new documents except for a few minor issues. Elsewhere, I have argued that the statement represents a refutation of the prior Sawicki Report which advocated the terrible idea of establishing a mechanism to preserve "dignitary safety." This could have been used to protect students from speech that hurt their feelings.

On campus, however, it looks like the authors of the statement are scrambling to make it look like it is significantly different from the Chicago Principles. In my view, this looks like a lame attempt to appease campus radicals including the Williams College professor who threatened to bring violence to the school if it enacted the Chicago Principles.

Humorously, Sawicki appears to grasp at straws to maintain the fiction that the final result reflected the views of her disappointing and nearly impossible to read report. In her view, the new statement differs from the Chicago Principles in that it requires question and answer sessions and vaguely complains about the challenges faced by those with less power on campus. By leaving out specific words about who has less power on campus, the resulting statement leaves open the obvious possibility that the real victims on campus have been conservative students and faculty who have been routinely repressed and oppressed for their views.

Even worse, Sawicki fails to appreciate the degree to which the statement backed off her earlier trial balloon that each student organization should have a faculty adviser to run their ideas on speaker invitations by prior to inviting someone or her equally restrictive suggestion that students be forced to examine how their choice of speakers might impact others.

Desperate to save face, Sawicki observes the statement makes an “implicit” commitment to empower speech of marginalized groups through reform curricular and pedagogical reform. How silly.

Laughably, Wilcox asserts her committee “...really wanted to be a kind of neutral conduit for what had come out in the report." Anxious to avoid on campus blow back, Wilcox lamely suggests that she views the statement as a “living document” that could be revisited in the future if necessary. Oh, please...

“The statement that we came out with differs from the Chicago statement in that everyone has wanted to express that we have a concern for one another that is not some kind of mechanistic idea of the marketplace of ideas,” Wilcox said. “I could say ‘respect,’ but I think it’s a little bit stronger than that … I think we are interested in enabling one another to speak freely, and that’s a kind of concern that strikes me as being a little bit more generous or more interested in one another as human beings than might be the case in a more Chicago-style statement.”

All in all, today is a great day for freedom of speech at Williams College. The Sawicki report has been rejected, the Chicago Principles have dominated the final results, and the statement's vagueness provides help to conservatives who have been the ones most sorely mistreated and harmed by the schools recent practices including toleration for mob rule and cancel culture. The full text of the article is below the break.