Hell Froze Over: Dr. Drew Gets a Respectful Call from the Williams Record Editor-In-Chief

LAGUNA NIGUEL, CA - I was surprised to receive a polite, professional phone call from Nicholas Goldrosen, the Editor-in-Chief of the Williams Record evening. He  a clarification in his paper regarding statements published about me last month.

John Drew, at home with his neighbors, in Williamstown, 

MA in 1988.

I think I would gotten to this good news more quickly, and would have been nicer to Nicholas too, if I had been certain of his identity. Initially, I hung up on him.

After years of seeing my name in print, usually for something embarrassing, I'm careful about talking to strangers on the phone. I remember I once reacted to a phone message from Dinesh D'Souza - the Indian-born American conservative political commentator, author and filmmaker - by first calling his office at Kings College in New York, NY to make sure it was really him.

When I first got a call from David Garrow asking to interview me for his biography on President Obama, I listened to YouTube videos of Garrow speaking so I might be able to verify his identity from his voice.

My goal in all of this is simply to avoid ending up like Rep. Adam Schiff who was the victim of a prank call from two Russian radio comedians. They convinced Schiff that he was talking to Ukrainian politician Andriy Parubiy and that they could send him compromising pictures of Donald Trump.

After doing a little research, I called Nicholas back. The reason for his call, as far as I can figure it out, is that I wrote a piece for Williams Liberty complaining about how I was unfairly smeared by a Williams Record reporter, Samuel Wolf.

Wolf had written a piece about a truly evil Williams College professor who had engaged in multiple sexual relationships with his female Williams College students now named David Sanford and formerly named David Weisbord. David Weisbord had been an associate professor of philosophy from 1989 to 1991. He arrived on campus after I had already resigned. Sanford was in the news mainly because he and his wife were listed as the hosts of a Biden fundraiser in Bronxville, New York.

Wolf dug up a one-sided attack on my character and intelligence which had been published in a letter to the Williams Record back in April 25, 1989. His aim was to suggest that my views at that time were a reflection of the same, creepy, permissive attitudes which foreshadowed Stanford's exploitative behavior. Ideally, Wolf should have investigated why it took the libertine, out-of-touch leadership of William College so long to prohibit the practice. Prohibitions against professors having sex with their students were not part of the employee handbook at William's College until the spring of 2018.

I can report that Nicholas was gracious enough to hear my side of the story, take down my views, and offered to publish a correction to Wolf's earlier article.

UPDATE - November 20, 2019

The Williams Record has revised an earlier article which I have complained included an unfair gratuitous smear against me. The revised article deletes the text that included me adds a statement regarding the changes made in the article. I could not be happier.

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.

Boycott of English Department Collapses from Apathy and Disinterest

Looks like the student activists fighting the horrifying racism and violence of the Williams College English department just learned that sometimes your best just isn't good enough.

Given a report from Samuel Wolf '19 in the most recent Press Record podcast, it looks like the call for students to boycott all English classes that “do not engage substantially with race” has become a pathetic fractal failure - that is a failure at every conceivable level of resolution. (In other words, zooming in on any part of the fail reveals just as much fail as the entity of the whole.)

Chair and Professor of English Katie Kent ’88 confirms the failure of the boycott by reporting that pre-registration in the department was not substantially changed from previous years. “Our enrollments show no significant difference when compared to our usual averages over the last few semesters,” she said.

In the podcast, Wolf told Rebecca Tauber '21 that the entire effort only involved about 10 students, all of whom chose to remain anonymous. Reportedly, this was because they feared academic retaliation by the evil, white supremacists who haunt the English department, rather than the large number of amused readers who followed this laughable controversy through social media sites including Breitbart, The College Fix, Ephblog, Legal Insurrection, Powerline, Reason, Why Evolution is True and Williams Liberty among others.

The whole boycott was apparently sparked by a liberal, well-meaning English professor, John Kleiner, who apparently made the mistake of reading a quote including the word "nigger" in class. Unfortunately for the outraged boycott enthusiasts, the vast majority of his students were okay with saying the word "nigger" in class. Wolf indicated that there were 14 in Kleiner's class and of those eight responded to his inquiries. Of them, six were okay with Kleiner's comments. Kleiner himself sent in a letter to the Williams Record which cleared up the matter and made the student protesters look like Maoist idiots.

Of course, the failure of the boycott was a huge disappointment to all of us who sincerely hate identity politics and believe that Williams College has become little more than a leftist Marxist Madrasa kept afloat only by the historic good fortune of its endowment investments.
Watching leftists attack other leftists is wonderful entertainment. I was sorry to see this episode die out so soon.

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.

Butthurt: Feckless Williams College Student Journalist Smears the Beloved Dr. Drew

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - I woke up this morning to discover that a lame Williams College journalist, Samuel Wolf  '21, had smeared me this morning in a bizarre story about an ex-Williams College philosophy professor who has been busted for banging his students back in the early 1990s.

Williams College professor David
Weisbord remembered 30 years
later for having sex with his students. 

The primary aim of the article was to tell a creepy backstory regarding Joe Biden. Biden was planning to attend a 2020 campaign fundraiser hosted by a lawyer who changed his name after having an affair with a student while he was professor at Williams College. David Sanford, formerly named David Weisbord, and his wife were listed as the hosts of a Biden fundraiser in Bronxville, New York.

According to press reports, Sanford - then David Weisbord - was an associate professor of philosophy at Williams College from 1989 to 1991. A unnamed former student said she had a months long sexual relationship with Sanford as Law & Crime reported in May. Sanford told Law & Crime that he changed his name for "private, family reasons" unrelated to the complaint from the former student. 

The woman in question has gone public and refers to him as an "unscrupulous predator." The irony of this complaint is that Sanford is now a prominent #MeToo activist who is making money going after colleges and universities. 

My name popped up, gratuitously, as a far-fetched example of the how women were treated callously back in 1989. Wolf cited a letter to the editor from April 25, 1989 which went after me for my comments on a radio talk show I did with the honored and courageous John Berger '89 on the topic of abortion. The full text of the letter is below. You should be able to read it better if you click on the image. 

I remember the American Inspiration radio show with great pleasure. John and I worked hard on it every week and included taped comedy bits, political observations, and critiques of the campus left. 

This particular show was a Morton Downey Jr. style broadcast which discussed the pro-life perspective, which was a topic that most at Williams College students and professors were loathe to discuss. In the letter to the editor, the authors suggest, without any quotes or other evidence, that I made what would appear to be a ridiculous statement to the effect "every time a woman enters into a sexual relationship with a man it is willingly." 

Since I was one of the few political scientists in the nation interested in the topic of child abuse and neglect and the sex abuse of children, it seems implausible that I ever said anything to that effect. Even if I did, it would be a bizarre stretch to suggest that I was unaware at the time of the existence of either rape or date rape which, of course, are all rape anyways. 

I don't remember much of what I said on the radio that evening. At best, I might have said something to the effect that women can control whether or not they get pregnant and that there are better ways to practice birth control that aborting your baby. The letter to the editor writers appear twist that sentiment in to the bizarre suggestion that I was unaware of the reality of rape. In all fairness to the letter writers, they appear much more angry at my on-the-air personality than anything I had to say about either abortion or consent in sexual relationships. 

Nevertheless, the feckless Samuel Wolf uses this 30 year-old letter to the editor as a piece of evidence designed to characterize the Williams College culture in which the administration and the Board of Trustees was perfectly okay with male professors banging their undergraduate students. As Wolf writes: 

The College did not explicitly prohibit student-faculty sexual relations at the time, and only officially amended the Faculty Handbook to prohibit such relationships in all cases in spring 2018. Nevertheless, during Sanford’s time at the College, three professors were fired for sexual misconduct with students, and faculty misconduct was a source of campus discussion. A Record article published in 1988 drew attention to male professors at colleges nationwide who coerced female students into sex (“Women suffer peer harassment,” Nov. 15, 1988). A letter to the editor in 1989 critiqued one professor for implying that every sexual encounter between a woman and a man is consensual (“Drew’s behavior on radio show inappropriate,” April 25, 1989).

The actual text of the letter to the editor does not support Wolf's bizarre insinuation that I approved of faculty members banging undergraduates or that my radio performance was some how sexually inappropriate. Logically, my view at the time was most likely that professors (who were overwhelmingly Democrats) should not be having sex with their students because this might cause even more abortions.

Dr. Drew at his home in Williamstown MA with his Oxy
friend Gil Roeder. 

I suspect that Wolf's one sided smear - I was never contacted for a comment - is a sign of desperation among Democrats seeking to get rid of Donald Trump and hide information on their own hypocrisy. As far as I can tell, Wolf is a New Yorker who is well connected with Democrat party officials. He has worked this summer as an intern for U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-Washington) and last summer as an intern in the office of the president for the leftist Brennan Center for Justice.

In a larger sense, however, this article is an attempt to harm the interests of white male students on campus by smearing me, one of the few conservative, Republican, white male professors who ever taught at the school. It is an effort to smear one of the folks who resisted affirmative action and then paid a steep personal and profession price for following his convictions, convictions which have not changed 30 years later.

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.