The Wisdom of Phoebe Cohen: Intellectual Debate Too Damn White

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - Our dear friends at Powerline have noticed a jaw-dropping comment from

Phoebe A. Cohen, professor of geosciences and department chair at Williams College. She commented in a New York Times article on the Dorian Abbot controversy at MIT with a bizarre, racially charged comment, as follows:

“This idea of intellectual debate and rigor as the pinnacle of intellectualism comes from a world in which white men dominated.”

Williams Liberty certainly agrees with Powerline's suggestion that "...if you are a Williams College alum, cancel any further donations to the place. It is clearly lost."

As you may know, Williams Liberty stands in awe of Jerry Coyne, emeritus professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago. “I thought scientists would not get on board with the denial-of-free-speech movement,” he said in the NYT article, “I was absolutely wrong, 100 percent so.” Elsewhere, Coyne writes: "What? Intellectual debate and rigor are signs of toxic male white supremacy? What an outrageously stupid statement!"

Over at Leiter Reports, Brian Leiter expressed his amazement at Dr. Cohen's comments: "Professor Cohen, in addition to being a threat to the scholarly enterprise, is also completely ignorant about the history of academic freedom and of universities."

Careful Williams Liberty readers may recall that Phoebe was one of the authors of creepy, obsequious email guidelines for Williams College students. The guidelines provided directions on how to email one's snowflake professors in a manner that protects their sensitive feels about their jobs, importance, and worth to society. 

As you may know, Dorian Abbot, 40, is a University of Chicago geophysics professor who the Massachusetts Institute of Technology canceled on because of his opposition to certain aspects of affirmative action. According to Abbot, 

"I was uncomfortable with the variety of, sort of, diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts that to me, appeared to be discriminating against certain groups of people. And I felt that didn't treat them as individuals worthy of dignity and respect. And to me, that has to be the fundamental of any moral system that we're implementing," he said.

"And what I mean by that is I was uncomfortable with ideologies that discourage discourse. Because when you can't speak with the other side, the only recourse is violence," Abbot added.

According to a New York Times article, Dr. Abbot, was shocked by the cancellation. “I truly did not know what to say,” he said. “We’re not going to do the best science we can if we are constrained ideologically.” 

Apparently, this is the sort of unacceptable wrong think which upsets Dr. Cohen. The NYT writes: 

Phoebe A. Cohen is a geosciences professor and department chair at Williams College and one of many who expressed anger on Twitter at M.I.T.’s decision to invite Dr. Abbot to speak, given that he has spoken against affirmative action in the past.

Dr. Cohen agreed that Dr. Abbot’s views reflect a broad current in American society. Ideally, she said, a university should not invite speakers who do not share its values on diversity and affirmative action. Nor was she enamored of M.I.T.’s offer to let him speak at a later date to the M.I.T. professors. “Honestly, I don’t know that I agree with that choice,” she said. “To me, the professional consequences are extremely minimal.”

What, she was asked, of the effect on academic debate? Should the academy serve as a bastion of unfettered speech?

“This idea of intellectual debate and rigor as the pinnacle of intellectualism comes from a world in which white men dominated,” she replied.

Over at the NBC News website, Phoebe was caught sharing her callous attitude toward free speech. They shared the following about her: 

But equating the cancellation of a school’s public lecture to censorship oversimplifies the matter, said Phoebe Cohen, a paleontologist and associate professor of geosciences at Williams College. She said concerns over whether such actions curtail free speech on campuses are overblown.

“It becomes this battle cry of free speech and academic freedom, but he has academic freedom,” Cohen said of Abbot. “He is allowed to say whatever he wants to say, and he has, but that doesn’t mean that he’s free from consequences.”

And while universities should uphold academic freedoms, Cohen said, institutions also have a responsibility to consider the communities their students and faculties are a part of.

“It comes down to who is being harmed,” she said. “Universities don’t have a responsibility to platform people who are harming others.”

The story appears to be gathering some national attention. It has, for example, already been covered by the folks at The American Conservative, Why Evolution is True, MCE Zone, Reason, and Leiter Reports, among others. 

NOTE: Phoebe Cohen has blocked Williams Liberty from viewing her tweets. If you are so inclined please take a screenshot of them and email them to info.williamsliberty@gmail.com. 

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.

 

Quelle Horreur! Wacky Williams College Students to Boycott Violent Racist Leftist English Department

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - It looks like the lesbian, leftist chair of the English department at Williams College, Kathryn Kent '88, is in for a bad week and a fresh bout of negative national attention. Radical identity protesters are seeking to control English professors at Williams College by demanding "an indefinite boycott of all English Department classes (ENGL) that do not engage substantially with race."

I suspect the ideologically privileged proponents of identity politics are targeting the English department because, they would be laughed off campus if they directed their irrational ire anywhere else. In a recently released manifesto, student protesters' endeavor to provide evidence of racial discrimination which includes only a handful of minor league offenses including as a lack of a tenured professor in the exceedingly narrowly defined - whites need not apply - field of ethnic literature. The shrewd observer of all things Williams College, Jerry Coyne, rips apart the protester's nonsense about the departments hiring decisions here.

More evidence of the effort to put black students back in chains is the observation that too many of the hipster leftist white professors are exercising their freedom of speech by using the word "nigger" in their classes. Quelle horreur!

In an attack reminiscent of the hostility directed against Jewish biology professors at Evergreen State College, the protesters are incensed that the leftist lesbian chair of the English department, Kathryn Kent '88, pushed back against the insults leveled at her by a leftist Asian professor, Dorothy Wang.

Most humorously, the manifesto suggests that we will all be shocked, truly SHOCKED, by the question: "Did you know that racism and sexism in the English Department have inspired two open letters by students/alums in the last four years?"

According to the permanently aggrieved protesters,  students should now abandon professors who teach ordinary, leftist inspired nonsense in favor of those who are truly bizarre African-American transgender professor, Kia M. Green '07, who embarrassed herself and the school by displaying the details of her botched top surgery by walking buck naked through the streets of Williamstown in a self-described psychotic episode.

What exactly are the students asking for? More jobs for ideologically motivated bores like Dorothy Wang who seemingly specialize in nonsense valued in the academic world for its edgy anti-white hostility rather than its beauty or excellence. It maybe that the demand for more jobs is so that existing radical Williams College students can grow up to be radical Williams College professors and follow in the steps of both Kathryn Kent '88 and Kia M. Green '07?

Specifically, the manifesto demands 1) a new job for an ethnic literature type to serve as the chair of the English department in place of Kent; 2) four more jobs teaching ethnic literature, one each for African American, Latinx, Native American and Asian American literature; and 3) a consulting contract for some allied ideological goon who will lead a threatening, external investigation of the English department.

The student protesters will apparently shame any student who attempts to include in their English education anything but the offerings of the following four professors:

• Anthony Kim - COMP 128 / AMST 128 / ENGL 128 Reading Asian American Literature
• Kimberly Love - AFR 275 / AMST 276 / ENGL 275 Southern Literary Aesthetics + ENGL 339 / AFR 339 Black Counterpublic Sphere in Early America
• Ianna Hawkins Owen - WGSS 218 / AMST 218 / ENGL 218 / AFR 218 Gender and Sexuality in the Neo-slave Narrative + ENGL 355 / WGSS 355 Asexuality and Other Absences
• Nelly Rosario - ENGL 252 / LATS 222 Ficciones: A Writing Workshop

All in all, it looks like Williams College is steadily moving in the direction of becoming another Evergreen State College where well-meaning white liberals and leftists are attacked simply because they are white. It must be a shock for Kathryn Kent '88 to discover she is being portrayed as an evil insider who promotes "violence" against people of color. 

In a just world, folks like Kathryn Kent '88 would be punished by karma for their mistreatment of young white male graduate students looking for work in the academic world. It would be wonderful if the protesting students would get their way and remove her from her chair position, subject her to a humiliating outside investigation, and stack her department with people who will be promoted and tenured as long as they assert they hate her guts simply because of her race.

UPDATE: According to a report at Inside Higher Education, the proposed boycott has been a bust. A spokesperson for Williams said, “There's no boycott -- it's just a call for a boycott. In fact, there's robust enrollment in English, and quite a few courses are overenrolled.”

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.

No Win for You: Student Member Asserts Sawicki Committee Report Was Not a Victory for Free Speech Watchdogs

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - In a recent Press Record podcast, one of the student members of the Ad Hoc Committee on Inquiry and Inclusion, Eli Miller '21, pushed back on campus watchdogs who believe the Sawicki report supports free speech to the extent that it would allow controversial speakers like John Derbyshire to appear on campus. Miller, a math and statistic major, was interviewed by a fellow student, Rebecca Tower '21.

Rebecca Tauber 

Do you have any last thoughts on the committee, their report, going forward? 

Eli Miller

I think my one concern is that this committee -- which I don’t think I’ve seen very much here, but I’ve seen sort of from like campus watch dogs -- is that this is seen as a victory for people who believe that free speech is like an absolute right and that people on college campuses who try to dis-invite people are like liberal snowflakes.  

That whole narrative is very popular, and my concern that this report gives those people a win.

I don’t think those people are correct in assuming this report supports them. But I think that definitely people have read it that way. And I guess I wish we had done more to resist that reading because I think it is a lot more nuanced and complicated than that. But I think at end of the day people are going to want to read what they want to read. 

As was reported in the Williams Record, the committee recommended the adaptation of both the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and PEN America frameworks for free speech, both of which give student groups the right to invite any speaker of their choosing without prior approval and allow the administration to disinvite speakers only in the “rarest of circumstances.”

Critics of the report including John Drew a former Williams College political scientist and Jerry Coyne a biologist with the University of Chicago, have decried the weakness of the report by pointing out that its recommendations allow for the censorship of campus speakers if those speakers should be a threat to "dignitary safety" or, more specifically, “the sense of being an equal member of the community.” As Coyne has pointed out, it is physically impossible to support both inclusion and freedom of speech. Eli Miller's comments verify the critics' views.

In a Williams Record article, Miller reports he was unhappy with the process because the group never attempted to reach a consensus on whether or not the administration should have had the authority to disinvite John Derbyshire, a political commentator for VDARE, who had been dropped by the National Review for a satirical piece he wrote for Taki's Magazine.

“It became clear that the goal of the committee was less to reconcile the differences that people have — on the most basic level — about whether John Derbyshire should’ve been allowed to speak on campus, and it was a lot more focused on taking the temperature of the campus and doing outreach to as many groups as possible,” Miller said. “It felt like the primary objective was just to calm people down.”

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. 

Jerry Coyne: Williams College Indoctrinates Its Students

CHICAGO, IL - Over at Jerry Coyne's website, Why Evolution is True, we can read an erudite evaluation of the degree to which Williams College has ceased functioning as a liberal arts college and instead become something of a brainwashing facility. In this instance, Coyne tears into the school's absurdly biased insistence that students fulfill a requirement by taking at least one course concentrating on “Difference, Power, and Equity.” There is a pdf of the DPE courses here.

Coyne remarks: "Granted, this is only one requirement, and to fulfill it students need take only a single course. But those courses are almost all about oppression narratives, and all would appeal to the Authoritarian Left. To my mind, they’re intended, as is the requirement, not to convey knowledge or to get students to question things critically—I haven’t found a single course that takes a conservative point of view—but to inculcate students with an Authoritarian Leftist attitude in order to get the students to become agents of change. That means agents who will enact the social changes that their professors and administrators want. In other words, puppets of social change."

The irony is that Coyne is a liberal. He thinking that he is probably in agreement with what Williams College administrator want to see for the future. Nevertheless, he asks: "...should a college curriculum be designed to make the students behave in ways the administration wants them to behave?"

Previously, Coyne criticized efforts by the student activists in CARE Now who sought to prevent the adoption of the Chicago Principles at Williams College.

Banned in Chicago

I was a little startled to learn that DDF has been banned over at the Why Evolution is True blogsite. This is the on-line home of Jerry Coyne, one of our nation's most outspoken public intellectuals. He is a Harvard trained evolutionary biologist. Along with Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, Coyne is one of the world's most prominent "New Atheists."

Coyne's blogsite, Why Evolution is True, reportedly has over 50,000 e-mail subscribers. Lately, Coyne has been especially supportive of Luana Maroja, a fellow biologist. He has used his highly visible site to bring the free speech standards of the Chicago Principles to Williams College.

Earlier, Coyne cited a number of my comments on the Sawacki Report and published them on his site. I was surprised when DDF subsequently went after Coyne and accused him of being a fool. What?! I later got an e-mail from Coyne indicating he was offended by DDF's words and that the intellectual skirmish had continued over at Why Evolution is True. Coyne posted the following statement on his blog:

After letting you use my site to direct traffic to yours, I will ban you for insulting the host (what a rude person you are in your post, a characteristic you must have gotten from the woke Williams students).
First, though, since you had the temerity to call me a fool, let me reply that you are an arrant jackass. The only “mistake” I made in my post was characterizing the universities who use the Chicago Principles as “adopting them” rather than, as the FIRE site says, the 65 schools “Have adopted or endorsed the Chicago Statement or a substantially similar statement.”