Just Resist - Courageous Ex-Williams College Prof. Eric Knibbs Rips Up Race Theology

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - Thanks to Twitter, I have uncovered a real jewel for the readers of Williams Liberty and our beloved partner in wrong thought, Ephblog.

It is a blog called Pseudo-Isidore.

This blog site is the intellectual gift of a former, tenured Williams College professor named Eric Knibbs. He describes himself as a scholar of early medieval legal history, and the current editor of the False Decretals of Pseudo-Isidore. You can learn more about Pseudo-Isidore here. If that piques your curiosity, then you will enjoy reading about the Decretals of Pseudo-Isidore on Wikipedia.

In one of his most recent articles, Eric describes what it was like to be a recently tenured history professor at Williams College during the 2018-2019 school year. This was a year in which white liberal professors found themselves under attack for not being sufficiently woke. He does a compelling job describing what it was like being besieged by radical CARE Now students. As you may recall, these students were opponents of modest efforts to bring the Chicago Principles to Williams College. Moreover, they were the ardent acolytes of two of the most ridiculous black professors in living memory. Eric describes them and their flimsy cause as follows:

Kimberley S. Love, "storyteller, tree-enthusiast" and Assistant Professor of English; and the "poet, filmaker, and interdisciplinary scholar" Kai M. Green, Assistant Professor of Women‘s, Gender and Sexuality Studies.

These two paragons of learning experienced Williams College as a violent and an unsafe place, in part because of the free expression debates that unfolded during their third semester there. Thus they published a long screed at The Feminist Wire, detailing the hostilities they faced. “We are Black Queer Feminists, serious about our call to research, service, and teaching,” they declared. “We are not safe.”

What we have been doing to fit our bodies in these institutions is killing us and we WANT TO LIVE! And not even tenure is worth our Black joy.

They illustrated their unsafety by relating an argument they had with an automobile mechanic – unaffiliated with the college – who initially refused to give them a ride home after car trouble.

What is most alarming to Eric Knibbs is that the madness he saw at Williams College is a straightforward vision of what Antifa terrorists, enraged peaceful protesters, and statue haters want to impose on all of us. He summarizes his main point in a TLDR (Too Long; Didn't Read) paragraph:

What, a few years ago, seemed like the regrettable yet limited excesses of the campus left, has suddenly become a political force in the wider world. The Race Theology promoted by schools like Williams College is everywhere now. It’s important that reasonable people who are not part of this dubious religious revival voice their dissent.

I think it is important to read his article in full. Mainly, it demonstrates it is not so funny to be face-to-face with leftist, extremist students who are quick to assert racism as the motive for anything they dislike. These students have little to lose and nevertheless appear to have more influence with the administration than a well-meaning professor like Eric Knibbs. I should add that the article also displays Knibbs' entertaining writing, ability to explain things simply, and his conscientious research. His article is a telling reminder of what an elite Williams College professor would be like in a culture that promoted merit rather than identity politics.

By the way, there is now an interesting discussion of Knibbs' article over on Ephblog where it looks like David Dudley Field '25 will be doing a multi-day analysis. Knibbs is replying to comments made on the Ephblog article on his own Pseudo-Isidore blog.

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.

Justice at Last: Free Speech Conqueror Zach Wood '18 Continues to Unload on Adam Falk

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - The most famous and bravest Williams College graduate in a decade, Zach Wood '18, continues to pour fire and brimstone on Adam Falk, the school's disgraced ex-president.

In a new article in The College Fix, Zach shared with editor Jennifer Kabbany the motivations for releasing his newest story on the shaby treatment he received as a free speech activist at the hands of the Falk administration. 

In an email to The College Fix, Wood explained why he is telling this story now.
He said he chose to focus his book more on student backlash to free speech and the broader intellectual arguments at stake, but that more recently “powerful leaders have threatened and tried to intimidate and humiliate people I care about and I want to be fully involved in defending them and the values I believe in.”

“… I want to highlight why freedom of the press is personal for me, and underscore that I have a dog in the fight,” Wood said. “I am fully engaged and I am determined to win. Censorship has no place in our democracy.”

Wood said his piece in NAS aimed to highlight Falk’s “propensity to misrepresent the state of affairs.”

“Leaders who distort the truth like that tend to use intimidation to silence those who criticize them. I want to drill in the point that we should intensely oppose and resist these leaders,” Wood said.

You can read up on the full extent of Adam Falks devious efforts to halt freedom of speech at Williams College in Zach's recent article for the National Association of Scholars.

Zach Wood has had an outstanding experience since his graduation from Williams College. As you may know, he is an Assistant Curator at TED, a former columnist and Assistant Opinion Editor at The Guardian, and a former Robert L. Bartley Fellow at The Wall Street Journal. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, HuffPost, The Nation, The Weekly Standard, Times Higher Education, and Inside Higher Ed. In 2017, he gave Senate testimony opposing the recent string of college speaker disinvitations and in defense of viewpoint diversity. He’s planning to attend law school in the not too distant future, according to Steven Hayward at the Power Line Blog.

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.

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.

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.

Who Is This Mystery Professor? She Threatened Violence If Williams College Adopted the Chicago Principles

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - Williams College biology professor Luana Maroja saw her colleagues behaving badly at a meeting meant to discuss bringing the Chicago free speech principles to campus on November 15, 2018. She wrote about her alarming experience that day in "Freedom of Speech at Williams College: Art the Walls Closing In," an article which first appeared in Jerry Coyne's blog, "Why Evolution is True" on November 29, 2018. Maroja wrote:

While most professors at the meeting were highly supportive of free speech and many sent me grateful emails, I was shocked at the behavior of some of my colleagues. For example, one professor turned to the students and said that they should read the names missing from our list of signatories, as “those were professors that were with the students” (an appalling tactic that created an “us vs them” atmosphere).

Even more appalling than this divisiveness was a threat of actual Antifa-style violence. "Another professor," Maroja said, "stated that she was involved in creating violence in UC Berkeley for Milo Yiannopoulos’s disinvitation and would be ready to do the same at Williams."

Here's my quesiton. Does anyone know the name of that professor?

I'm assuming a lot of people know exactly who Luana Maroja is talking about. There were a number of professors at this meeting and a number of students as well. Maroja, so far, has declined to name the mystery professor. Nevertheless, we do have some interesting clues.

Obviously, we know the suspect is most likely a woman and we can guess that this woman was most likely someone who was at UC Berkeley around January, 2017. Although I'm not an FBI profiler, I think it is reasonable to assume that the mystery professor is someone who is still fairly young, someone who has a grudge, who has poor impulse control, and perhaps has a history of aggressive campus activism. All in all, it is hard to imagine we are talking about an older person when we think about running along with the Antifa crowd.

If you know the name of the mystery professor for sure, then please call me at 949-338-5921 or send an email to johndrew25@msn.com.

I'd be happy to do some research about them. What disturbs me the most about this professor is that her willingness to engage in violence is potentially dangerous to students and other faculty members. Secondarily, I'm concerned that the sight of a Williams College professor willing to threaten violence to stop free speech sets a bad example for student activists and may, in fact, have encouraged the ugly behavior we was during the last school year, particularly the bigoted, anti-white tirade which disrupted the College Council meeting on April 9, 2019.

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.

RealClear Politics Reports Williams College Among Worst of the Worst for Free Speech

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - The stifling, repressive, backward educational environment at Williams College has again risen to national attention. This time a survey of free speech experts (mostly conservatives) rated Williams as among the worst of the worst for free speech.

RealClear Politics asked its 22 panelists for their opinions on which U.S. colleges and universities have the best climate for free speech, viewpoint diversity, and open inquiry. Likewise, they asked them to say which schools had the most room for improvement in these areas. Finally, we asked panelists to share their thoughts on how free speech, viewpoint diversity, and open inquiry relate to the proper mission of a university. (Click here todownload a full report on the RealClear Politics survey.)

Among the worst of the worst was Yale University which has shocked the nation with its politically correct nonsense including the ouster of a professor from his position as a college master, the contentious renaming of a residential building, and the removal or destruction of controversial artwork. Yale was followed by Harvard University, Williams College, Oberlin College, Liberty University, DePaul University, and Brown University among schools identified most often by the panelists as in need of improvement.

According to RealClear Politics, "Our panelists include professors, journalists, lawyers, and scholars who work in the areas of higher education or First Amendment law and policy." The group included a number of folks with practical experience covering or speaking at Williams College including Gregory Lukianoff – president, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), Charles Murray – scholar, American Enterprise Institute, and Jennifer Kabbany – editor, The College Fix.

As Charles Murray, the co-author of The Bell Curve, said: “The telos of the university is truth. It cannot have a second telos. There is no such thing as a university that fully supports the search for truth and also pursues a social-justice agenda, for example — or, for that matter, also pursues a limited-government agenda.”

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.

Global Warning

https://twitter.com/CollegeFix/status/1148668894363525120