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.
