Boycott of English Department Collapses from Apathy and Disinterest

Looks like the student activists fighting the horrifying racism and violence of the Williams College English department just learned that sometimes your best just isn't good enough.

Given a report from Samuel Wolf '19 in the most recent Press Record podcast, it looks like the call for students to boycott all English classes that “do not engage substantially with race” has become a pathetic fractal failure - that is a failure at every conceivable level of resolution. (In other words, zooming in on any part of the fail reveals just as much fail as the entity of the whole.)

Chair and Professor of English Katie Kent ’88 confirms the failure of the boycott by reporting that pre-registration in the department was not substantially changed from previous years. “Our enrollments show no significant difference when compared to our usual averages over the last few semesters,” she said.

In the podcast, Wolf told Rebecca Tauber '21 that the entire effort only involved about 10 students, all of whom chose to remain anonymous. Reportedly, this was because they feared academic retaliation by the evil, white supremacists who haunt the English department, rather than the large number of amused readers who followed this laughable controversy through social media sites including Breitbart, The College Fix, Ephblog, Legal Insurrection, Powerline, Reason, Why Evolution is True and Williams Liberty among others.

The whole boycott was apparently sparked by a liberal, well-meaning English professor, John Kleiner, who apparently made the mistake of reading a quote including the word "nigger" in class. Unfortunately for the outraged boycott enthusiasts, the vast majority of his students were okay with saying the word "nigger" in class. Wolf indicated that there were 14 in Kleiner's class and of those eight responded to his inquiries. Of them, six were okay with Kleiner's comments. Kleiner himself sent in a letter to the Williams Record which cleared up the matter and made the student protesters look like Maoist idiots.

Of course, the failure of the boycott was a huge disappointment to all of us who sincerely hate identity politics and believe that Williams College has become little more than a leftist Marxist Madrasa kept afloat only by the historic good fortune of its endowment investments.
Watching leftists attack other leftists is wonderful entertainment. I was sorry to see this episode die out so soon.

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.