Anxious Faculty Leaders Spin Williams College Free Speech Statement to Differentiate It from the Beloved Chicago Principles

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - I looked through the new Williams Record article on the school's new freedom of speech statement. Personally, I thought it looked a lot like the Chicago Principles. I'm happy with the new documents except for a few minor issues. Elsewhere, I have argued that the statement represents a refutation of the prior Sawicki Report which advocated the terrible idea of establishing a mechanism to preserve "dignitary safety." This could have been used to protect students from speech that hurt their feelings.

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.

Victory for Free Speech - Williams College's New Free Speech Statement Under Cuts Prior Sawicki Report

Thanks to Ephblog, I read a copy of Maud's e-mail to the Williams College community along with a statement on free speech created by the faculty steering committee. Her e-mail and the statement are available after the break. I read both a couple of times and then reread the iconic Chicago Principles. All in all, it looks to me like the faculty steering committee disregarded the suggestions in the earlier Sawicki Report and embraced the Chicago Principles after all. The document looks like a win for free speech advocates.

What's my hot take? All in all, the new statement seems to hit many of the main points stressed in the Chicago Principles while dropping some of the most dopey nonsense in the Sawicki Report including its unhelpful call for the protection of "dignitary safety," a concept which appeared to me and watchdogs like Jerry Coyne as a loophole that permitted the sort of speaker bans and speech restrictions and speaker bans favored by woke totalitarians.

My fears that the concept of "dignitary safety" would erase free speech from Williams College was inadvertently supported by the comments of Eli Miller '21, a student member of the Sawicki Report, who asserted that the report was not really a win for the advocates of free speech. In a Press Record podcast, he rebuked free speech watchdogs by saying "I don’t think those people are correct in assuming this report supports them."

Thankfully, the new statement appears to dump that blarney in favor of a more absolutist stance on freedom of speech, a stance which seems less likely to protect students from the supposed evil of inviting the mild-mannered John Derbyshire to share his views on campus.

Moreover, the statement is easier to read than the dense, encyclopedic Sawicki Report. Instead of mindlessly repeating existing campus policies, the statement saves time and space by simply providing a link to policies relevant to organizing campus events.

The statement's support for free speech includes a brief caveat aimed at protecting the community from "...speech that threatens, incites violence, or constitutes harassment..." This exception strikes me as reasonable and not too far off from the Chicago Principles which prohibit speech "...that violates the law, that falsely defames a specific individual, that constitutes a genuine threat or harassment, that unjustifiably invades substantial privacy or confidentiality interests, or that is otherwise directly incompatible with the functioning of the University."

This exception might be helpful in punishing the female Williams College professor who threatened to leverage her experience as an activist at UC Berkeley and bring riots and violence to the campus if the school adopted the Chicago Principles.

Likewise, I think the steering committee's insistence on regulating the time and location for free speech does not seem all that different from a similar statement in the Chicago Principles.

Surprisingly, the steering committee statement appears to place a higher priority on free speech than Maud herself. In her e-mail, she stresses the importance of two completely incompatible values - inclusion and free speech - and suggests we should knock ourselves out in the simultaneous pursuit of both. The steering committee, however, drops this theme in favor of a more subtle approach which describes an "inclusive environment" as one where "each member of our community is equally respected and equally invited to speak and to be heard." As such, the steering committee seems to broaden the meaning of inclusion so that it may ideological diversity too.

Laughably, Maud suggests steering committee statement was "based" on the Sawicki Report. This observation only makes sense if you define "based" to mean that the steering committee coughed up the Sawicki Report and spit it out.

Unfortunately, the existing campus policies undercut freedom of speech to the extent that they require the sponsors of a speaker to cover related security costs and further requirements requiring the disclosure of the funders for the event. Both of these policies could be used to make it harder for conservative speakers to appear on campus and result in continued bias against even mainstream conservative views. Finally, it seems odd that the statement forces students and speakers to include question and answer sessions at all of their events. This seems like an unnecessary intrusion on their rights to present their information anyway they see fit.

Nevertheless, our dear friend at Ephblog - David Dudley Field '25 - sees much to applaud in the final product. "All has proceeded as EphBlog forecast a year ago. Well done Maud!" he writes. "Now we just need two things. First, get FIRE to award Williams a green rating. I think we now merit a green rating and such a rating would assuage concerned alumni. Second, we need to bring John Derbyshire to campus. And that, at least, is going to happen, one way or the other."

For me, the final lines of the statement seem to indicate an opening for conservative students. The statement asserts: "We recognize that in the past these freedoms have not been equally available to all people and that inequity of access persists today. The college is committed to supporting equal access to these freedoms and pledges to continue working to realize this commitment fully."

I'm certain the authors intended this statement as a gift to the woke professors and students who sincerely believe the English department is a hotbed of violence and racism.

Nevertheless, I think it is telling that the statement does not single out privileged minorities (or even better highly privileged intersectional minorities) and simply focuses on people. I think we can read this passage as a long overdue acknowledgement that Williams College has a long history of undermining and repressing the opponents of identity politics including many conservative students, faculty and speakers. As I pointed out in an earlier article in Ephblog, the Sawicki Report appeared clueless about the untenable situation of conservatives at Williams College:

The report mentions, then thoroughly ignores, complaints that conservative views are absent on campus and that conservative students and faculty are fearful of speaking up. There is no sense of historical or political context either. It doesn’t seem to grasp the way dis-invitations have been solely focused on harming conservative speakers whose ideas interfere with the college’s institutional commitment to identity politics, feminism and critical race theory.

It would be wonderful if this statement represents straightforward endorsement of the Chicago Principles and a step away from the mushy views articulated in the Sawicki Report. Maud's e-mail and the text of the steering committee statement appear below the break.