Hell Froze Over: Dr. Drew Gets a Respectful Call from the Williams Record Editor-In-Chief

LAGUNA NIGUEL, CA - I was surprised to receive a polite, professional phone call from Nicholas Goldrosen, the Editor-in-Chief of the Williams Record evening. He  a clarification in his paper regarding statements published about me last month.

John Drew, at home with his neighbors, in Williamstown, 

MA in 1988.

I think I would gotten to this good news more quickly, and would have been nicer to Nicholas too, if I had been certain of his identity. Initially, I hung up on him.

After years of seeing my name in print, usually for something embarrassing, I'm careful about talking to strangers on the phone. I remember I once reacted to a phone message from Dinesh D'Souza - the Indian-born American conservative political commentator, author and filmmaker - by first calling his office at Kings College in New York, NY to make sure it was really him.

When I first got a call from David Garrow asking to interview me for his biography on President Obama, I listened to YouTube videos of Garrow speaking so I might be able to verify his identity from his voice.

My goal in all of this is simply to avoid ending up like Rep. Adam Schiff who was the victim of a prank call from two Russian radio comedians. They convinced Schiff that he was talking to Ukrainian politician Andriy Parubiy and that they could send him compromising pictures of Donald Trump.

After doing a little research, I called Nicholas back. The reason for his call, as far as I can figure it out, is that I wrote a piece for Williams Liberty complaining about how I was unfairly smeared by a Williams Record reporter, Samuel Wolf.

Wolf had written a piece about a truly evil Williams College professor who had engaged in multiple sexual relationships with his female Williams College students now named David Sanford and formerly named David Weisbord. David Weisbord had been an associate professor of philosophy from 1989 to 1991. He arrived on campus after I had already resigned. Sanford was in the news mainly because he and his wife were listed as the hosts of a Biden fundraiser in Bronxville, New York.

Wolf dug up a one-sided attack on my character and intelligence which had been published in a letter to the Williams Record back in April 25, 1989. His aim was to suggest that my views at that time were a reflection of the same, creepy, permissive attitudes which foreshadowed Stanford's exploitative behavior. Ideally, Wolf should have investigated why it took the libertine, out-of-touch leadership of William College so long to prohibit the practice. Prohibitions against professors having sex with their students were not part of the employee handbook at William's College until the spring of 2018.

I can report that Nicholas was gracious enough to hear my side of the story, take down my views, and offered to publish a correction to Wolf's earlier article.

UPDATE - November 20, 2019

The Williams Record has revised an earlier article which I have complained included an unfair gratuitous smear against me. The revised article deletes the text that included me adds a statement regarding the changes made in the article. I could not be happier.

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.