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.
