The Rise of Thompson: Abigail Fights Back Against the Evil Chad Topaz of Williams College in New WSJ Article

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - I was pleased to see this afternoon that Abigail Thompson hasn't backed down from her courageous comments condemning the new, mandatory, politically biased diversity statement screening tools used at UC Davis and elsewhere to keep the unwoke out of their first teaching jobs. She has a new article in the Wall Street Journal which lays out the basics of her case.

The University’s New Loyalty Oath: Required ‘diversity and inclusion’ statements amount to a political litmus test for hiring.

I suppose what is most surprising about her newest report is that she is surprised that so many of her colleagues are frightened of pushing back, even in the slightest, at the woke activists, including Chad Topaz, who have long been hostile to the concept of freedom of speech and more than willing to destroy the lives and careers of those they define as their enemies. As Thompson writes, she received over 150 emails, overwhelmingly supportive, from top mathematicians in the U.S. and the world. Nevertheless, she reports some horrifying news:

Many emails contained a disturbing theme, typified by this line from one of them: “Some day I, too, hope to speak out on this issue, but it is simply too dangerous at present.” This is a frightening sentiment to hear in academia. If expressing a widespread but controversial view is seen as taking a tremendous personal risk, the university system isn’t healthy. Ideas cannot thrive and mistakes cannot be corrected if people are afraid to speak out.

I cannot help but think that Abigail Thompson is a typical leftist, female professor who is surprised to find that she is now considered the enemy by those who have decided that any gap between the percentage of blacks teaching math at the university level and the percentage of blacks in the general population is evidence of a towering level of systematic injustice, an injustice which might easily be fixed by getting rid of white female professors like herself. Out of her alarm, however, Thompson does a great job of sharing some of the reasons why it is actually counter productive to judge job candidates - largely inexperienced young graduate students - according to the content of their diversity statements. Referring to the folks who sent her emails, she writes:

Some pointed out that the diversity statements tend to be formulaic, with many candidates coached on how to write them, and that the content often emphasizes ideology over accomplishments. Others noted that the statements disadvantage foreign applicants and candidates from low-income groups, who may not have opportunities to participate in voluntary activities that demonstrate a commitment to diversity.

All in all, I'm grateful to see academics like Abigail Thompson taking a brave stand to protect those of us who do not agree with either critical race theory, or identity politics. "To its credit, the UC Davis administration has supported my right to speak," she writes. "I hope that continuing discussion will confirm the vital principle that scholars discuss ideas, they don’t silence them."

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.

Campus Reform Takes on Williams College Anti-Free Speech Zealot Chad Topaz

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - A student journalist at Campus Reform, Isadore Johnson, has zeroed in on Williams College math professor Chad Topaz and Chad's over-the-top demand that Abigail Thompson be fired from her job at UC Davis for the wrongthink violation of comparing diversity statements to McCarthy era loyalty oaths.

Prof says college hiring practices include 'a political test,' likens to McCarthyism

The article covers a lot of Abigail's views. It also shows Chad Topaz to be a frightening extremist who will tolerate no opposition to his political views.

“I don’t know why Abigail Thompson would think this stuff, nor why the American Mathematical Society would publish it,” wrote Topaz, adding “There is no room in today’s world for false equivalencies and both-sides-ism.” He encouraged other academics to boycott the publication for publishing Thompson’s thoughts, to publicly shame Thompson on social media, to shame UC Davis for allowing her to be their department chair, and finally to avoid UC Davis as a grad school or a potential employer for his students.

 

Thankfully, Chad's efforts to get Abigail Thompson fired are starting to receive national attention. We have already seen a number of articles written on this topic by those posting at Anonymous Political Scientist, American Greatness, Breitbart, Economics Job Market Rumors, Ephblog, The College Fix, The Other Dunwoody, Post Tenure Tourettes, The Leitter Report, The Reference Frame, Why Evolution is True and Williams Liberty.

The College Fix posted a second article on December 10, 2019 focused on the counter petition condemning Chad Topaz which mentioned it has been signed by four Fields Medalists and eight past presidents of the American Mathematical Society. In addition, there is now a popular meme regarding Chad Topaz which your can view after the break.

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.

Counter Attack: An Intelligent Response to the Goofy Chad Topaz of Williams College

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - Math professor Chad Topaz, who earlier called for UC Davis to fire Abigail Thompson for wrongthink, has now descended to a new low in passive aggressive onanism.

Over on his personal website - https://chadtopaz.com/ - he has given up on making rational arguments for why his fellow college professors should obliterate the careers of liberals with whom he has disagreements. Instead, he is providing his readers with a set of test questions. I'm not joking. His response to the condemnation he has received is to provide his colleagues with what looks like a mid-term exam.

I believe Chad's low social IQ is evidence that he would be an cloying, overly enthusiastic prep school math teacher if he had not been fortunate enough to overcome the disadvantages of being a white dude from Harvard (boring) by leveraging his inter-sectional bonus points for being gay married and woke. For the fun of it, I'm submitting my answers below.

By the way, if you have found Ayatollah Chad has blocked you from viewing his personal or non-profit sites, you can still access them through the internet browser DuckDuckGo. In my case, I access them through links from third parties to which he seemingly has no objections. He has taken both his Facebook and Twitter accounts private. This is a big contrast from when he was using them as the key channels for his anti-free speech fatwa. 

Prompting Reflection

Since an outcry began in mid-November over Abigail Thompson’s essay in the AMS Notices, I have engaged in substantial discussion of and reflection on the events at hand. In case you are involved in our community’s conversation about this essay, and if you would like to reflect further, I offer the questions below as prompts.

1. Thompson’s essay states “Mandating diversity statements for job candidates is [a] mistake, reminiscent of events of seventy years ago.” The sentences immediately following this one discuss McCarthyism. How does mandating diversity statements resemble or not resemble McCarthyism?

ANSWER: It is McCarthyism. You are McCarthy. Your department chair at Williams College is President Eisenhower. Your colleague Colin Adams is leading the effort to stop you. Even one of your female co-authors, Julie C. Blackwood, has turned against you.

2. I have posted several responses to Thompson’s letter through the Institute for the Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity. My initial response called out two entities with statements beginning “What is going on…” What are those two entities? Which entity did I call out first?

ANSWER: No one cares about the details of your previous statements - especially the order of your fatwa demands - all they care about is your call for a white female professor to be publicly shamed and caused to lose her job.  If you are going to be consistent, you should be pushing for a boycott of your own department. For example, Colin Adams has created the counter petition condemning your anti-free speech extremism. Your own department chair, Richard de Veaux against you. If you were a person of integrity you would demand they be fired too. To be consistent, you should resign after reading the petition they signed condemning you.

3. My initial response suggested six actions. To whom was the first action addressed? How many of the actions related to UC Davis? Did any of the actions center disempowered people in professional spheres potentially affected by the publication of the essay? Did any of the actions encourage personal attacks? What is the difference between a professional action and a personal action?

ANSWER: Ouch! You low social IQ is cringe worthy. There is no difference between a "personal attack" and a "professional attack." When you are promoting a nation-wide boycott and pressuring her employer to fire her you are inflicting intense pain. Your vicious attack on a white female math professor was designed to hurt her...not her job title...not her CV.

4. My initial response said that we should be concerned that the AMS published a piece equating diversity statements with McCarthyism, and that we should be concerned about the impact of that stated equivalence on disempowered people in Thompson’s professional sphere. How has the pushback to my response engaged with those points?

ANSWER: You need to get some perspective. Abigail Thompson, Colin Adams, Julie C. Blackwood and Richard de Veaux are all liberals who are okay with affirmative action and promoting diversity. Your bizarre effort to position these people as hostile to the "disempowered" is an illustration of why you are alarming and scaring them.

5. What did my response say about Thompson’s individual, personal commitment to diversity?

ANSWER: Your response tried to make it look like Abigail Thompson was a closet white supremacist trying to pass herself off as a free speech activist. In reality, she is a white female liberal trying defend herself against Maoist totalitarians.

6. What does “free speech” mean, and do you think pushback against Thompson’s piece imperils it?

ANSWER: Free speech will disappear in a generation if leftist extremists like you gain the power to fire anyone who disagrees with them.

7. Are you aware of the paradox of tolerance, as described, for instance, here and here? What do you think about it?

ANSWER: Wow! You just doesn't get it. Your take on the paradox of tolerance is a vivid example of the assumptions which make your hostility to free speech a threat to the academic mission of Williams College.

8. Sixteen co-authors and I drafted a letter (“Letter A”) in response to Thompson’s piece which has now been signed by hundreds people. Then came a counter letter (“Letter B”), also signed by hundreds. How does Letter B engage with the points of Letter A and/or my original response?

ANSWER: You tried to shame Abigail Thompson, get her fired and boycott her department. That effort backfired on you. Now one of your colleagues at Williams College has launched a petition shaming you. Your own department chair, Richard de Veaux, has signed on to the effort to shame you back. So has one of your co-authors. If you are focused on anything thing other than this fundamental reality, then you don't understand their argument.

9. What similarities and/or differences do you notice in the demographics of the signers of Letter A versus those of Letter B?

ANSWER: The most significant difference between your petition and the anti-Chad Topaz petition is their signers include some of the most significant and admired scholars in mathematics, namely four winners of the prestigious Fields Medal including David Mumford and Terence Tao. The anti-Chad Topaz petition is also signed by eight past presidents of the American Mathematical Society. In contrast, the people who have signed your petition are generally unknowns who have a selfish interest in deploying partisan identity politics as a tool for edging white males and females out of the job market.

10. What motivation might I and the other drafters of Letter A have? What motivation might the drafter of Letter B have?

ANSWER: You and your supporters appear to be motivated by greed, the desire to obtain incomes which you would never get in the private sector and which you are only getting now due to the edge you possess in the hierarchy of inter-sectional privilege. The motivations of your opponents are more complex and less easy to figure out. David Mumford appears to be a pro-Palestinian leftist. I imagine he is shocked you have become a virulent opponent of free speech. I'm guessing Mumford probably fought off censorship during his career. Terence Tao's family left Hong Kong for Australia. I'm confident Tao is watching the way the Communist Chinese government is attempting to censor freedom fighters in Hong Kong. I'm guessing Tao gets anxious when he sees the same sort of suffocating totalitarianism coming from you and your followers.

11. Are there any axes of identity along which you yourself are marginalized? Here, I am thinking of gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, race/ethnicity, religion, disability status, family status, and so forth.

ANSWER: I represent the most dis-empowered people in the nation when it comes to starting an academic career a Williams College, white boys and girls. At your campus, two black activists verbally abused white male students during an extended tirade on April 9, 2019. As far as I can tell, no effort was made to punish those students...nothing was done to prevent another bigoted tirade in the future. I'm representing all the victims of your Evergreen State College-style race hatred.

12. Do you think the mathematical sciences community is sufficiently equitable, diverse, and inclusive? If not, do you think members of the community should try to make it more so? If so, and if you are a member of the mathematical sciences community, what work do you yourself do to promote equity, diversity, and inclusion within our field?

ANSWER: Math is one of those fields where it helps to have a high IQ. As far as I can tell, the field of math appears to mirror the incidence of high IQ in the general population. For better or worse, there is nothing you can do to change people's IQ. No amount of shaming, hatred, or reverse discrimination will change it or improve it. What can be changed, however, is the anti-white ideology and undisguised hatred which makes it harder for completely innocent white boys and girls, particularly white working class boys and girls, to eventually secure jobs as math professors.

13. In situations like the one surrounding Thompson’s essay, whom do you choose to center? The powerful or the dis-empowered?

ANSWER: I'm centering the interests of folks like the young white men who were verbally abused on the Williams College campus on April 9, 2019. See, Black students explode in anger at white students in vulgarity-laced rant (VIDEO)

14. What do you think about social justice work given the various responses to Thompson’s essay?

ANSWER: Social justice, as you use the term, is a thinly veiled form of hate speech against whites - male and female - and those of us who identify as white. (I'm Armenian-American.) It is a way for you to advantage yourself politically and financially by heaping condemnation on highly intelligent, well-meaning people who do not deserve to be the subject of your hostility, employment threats or boycotts.

As I said earlier, if you had real integrity you would use Richard de Veaux's willingness to defend Abigail Thompson as a tool for shaming him, getting him fired and boycotting your own department. Until you do that you remain a vile hypocrite.

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.

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.