WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - It is difficult to describe how refreshing it is for me to read some of the recent writing by a tenured ex-Williams College history professor, Eric Knibbs. The guy is amazing. He tears apart the leftist demons running the school while simultaneously dragging in 5th century Christianity, Plato, and the destruction of previously inoffensive statues.
His latest missive is an insightful response to a complaint over on Ephlog that it is a sign of considerable ignorance to ask for evidence from a black professor who thinks a leftist bastion of Marxist ideology is engaging in violence and murder simply because it does not spin on a dime and give black, gay, transgender professors everything they want now. Like Kayleigh McEnany beating the crap out of leftist writers at a White House press conference, Knibbs responds with devastating accuracy. It is worth reading his response twice.
For me, his best work is the observation that leftist ideology leads to the most predictable loss of freedom:
The more coherent expressions of wokery are nothing but a kind of low-resolution applied Foucaultianism. Its proponents believe some variation upon the proposition that cultural discourses structure power relationships. These discourses must therefore be changed or subverted or inverted in order to achieve more just outcomes.
At the crassest, quotidian level, certain words are therefore tabooed, microaggressions defined, etc. (A lot of this is termed “political correctness” by outsiders to the religion, for whom this is mostly puzzling pedantry.)
At more revolutionary levels, the woke attack racist power discourses by destroying statues and public monuments. This is why the woke opposed some faculty signing a petition about the Chicago principles. A college-wide commitment to free expression threatens their pseudointellectual discourse-engineering agenda.
That last sentence is expresses the observation I admire the most: "A college-wide commitment to free expression threatens their pseudointellectual discourse-engineering agenda."
This puts the fight at Williams over the Chicago Principles into a clear statement that explains what was really at stake for the CARE-Now students who believed humiliating young white liberal students on the College Council was an admirable course of action. It reminds me of why I was exposed to unrelenting hostility when, as a young political science professor, I publicly supported George W. H. Bush and became a Republican candidate for the local assembly seat. At the time, I was startled at how quickly I had gone from being a Marxist acquaintance of the young Barack Obama to my new status as an out and out racist. I was, of course, easy to remove. Embarrassingly, I was perhaps even easier to gaslight.
Luckily, ex-Williams College professors like Eric Knibbs can now leverage the power of Twitter, and their personal blog sites, to get out the news of how they have been intimidated and mistreated. His story shows how risky it is to be even a well-meaning cynic regarding the left. To his credit, his recent article strikes me as the boldest and most courageous statement I have seen from a Williams College professor, ex or otherwise. As far as I can tell, only political science professor Darel Paul has even come close.
At any rate, I am pleased to do what I can through my own blog and Twitter accounts, friendships, and connections to assorted conservative websites, to get the truth out to the public. There are angry mobs dominating schools like Williams.
As Knibbs observes, there are no sensible solutions for "...indefensible demands that the college needs to double down on wokery, triple down on wokery. And, should it do that, the complaint would then be that it has not quadrupled down on wokery, or quintupled down on it, and so forth."
Please enjoy reading his comment in full below the break. You might also wish to follow the debate over at Ephblog by clicking on these links in order.
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.
As to this sub-thread: Nobody is really claiming this anyway, but I would just clarify that structural racism is not wokery. The woke may appropriate words from the academic left and the more fashionable theories that circulate in the social sicences. The same happened with fourth- and fifth-century Christianity, which borrowed a lot of newly fashionable neo-Platonic ideas. The distinction between sociological theories and the woke is important though. The woke won’t go away, if structural racism is abandoned tomorrow. In much the same way, neo-Platonism has long since evaporated as a philosophical preoccupation, but this meant nothing at all for the wider progress of Christianity.
The more coherent expressions of wokery are nothing but a kind of low-resolution applied Foucaultianism. Its proponents believe some variation upon the proposition that cultural discourses structure power relationships. These discourses must therefore be changed or subverted or inverted in order to achieve more just outcomes. At the crassest, quotidian level, certain words are therefore tabooed, microaggressions defined, etc. (A lot of this is termed “political correctness” by outsiders to the religion, for whom this is mostly puzzling pedantry.) At more revolutionary levels, the woke attack racist power discourses by destroying statues and public monuments. This is why the woke opposed some faculty signing a petition about the Chicago principles. A college-wide commitment to free expression threatens their pseudointellectual discourse-engineering agenda.
Put another way: Whereas structural racism is a theory advanced in different forms by some social scientists to explain differences in population outcomes, Foucaultian discourse analysis is an unprovable idea originally peddled by a lot of modern languages and Area Studies scholars who want to make what they study (words and literature) the center of everything.
Now, the woke throw around a lot of terms, and they apply the adjective “structural” to a lot of things. They do that even when it doesn’t make any sense. It has multiple syllables and sounds learned. They complain about the lack of structural changes, and so on. But if you look at what the woke got up to in this case, it was just a lot of racial harassment. That is, I suppose, the way that they hope to change the discourse. If you look at what they claimed to want, it boils down to: a) Demands for more wokery administration, b) demands for more amenities in general, c) demands that woke-adjacent academic programs like WGSS be expanded. The first and the last, a) and c), is the mask slipping; the middle, b), is, well, what everyone tends to demand from administrations. What is not to be found in their demands: Any coherent notion or theory of what structural mechanisms are oppressing “minoritized students”, beyond some unconvincing whining about CSS. (The solutions they propose are just the usual administrative hocus pocus of investigations, training, and oversight committees.) It’s just indefensible demands that the college needs to double down on wokery, triple down on wokery. And, should it do that, the complaint would then be that it has not quadrupled down on wokery, or quintupled down on it, and so forth.
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