We Are Not Worthy: Thank You to Michael Wang '17 For Stopping Affirmative Action

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - In an odd twist of fate, a graduate of Williams College played a key role in bringing an end to one of the most evil practices on the planet, affirmative action. While the haters on the left will soon brand him as a white supremacist, it is worth it to spend some time and describe the extent to which Michael is a true hero, a courageous student who put it all on the line for justice. 

 
Back in 2013, as a senior in high school, Michael Wang sent a series of emails to admissions offices at the colleges that had rejected him. He asked how race played into their decisions, specifically for Asian American students like him. With near-perfect test scores, stellar grades, and a pages-long resumé of extracurricular activities, he wanted to know why he had been rejected from the nation’s most prestigious universities. 

How good was Michael Wang '17? According to the Williams Record, Michael Wang ’17 was unsure about what he could have done better after rejections from Yale, Princeton, and Stanford. His high school resume was stellar, boasting a perfect ACT score, a 4.67 GPA, a founding role in his high school’s math club, and a piano performance at President Obama’s inauguration, according to The New Yorker. 

Finding the boilerplate responses he received from the elite institutions that rejected him insufficient, Wang '17 filed discrimination complaints against three universities with the federal Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

Unknowingly, Wang helped set in motion the latest movement to end affirmative action on college campuses. 

Wang was an unstoppable hero for American justice. This proactive freaking genius filed a complaint with the Department of Education when it became clear the responses to his email queries did not prompt meaningful relief. Soon, he got in touch with Edward Blum, the driving force behind opposition to race-based admissions. Wang showed commanding courage and self-confidence when he agreed to speak publicly about his own situation. Subsequently, Wang has spent several years challenging affirmative action. His specific complaint was that it entailed discrimination against Asian applicants. 

As the Williams Record reported, Wang viewed affirmative action is necessary in principle but destructive in practice. “Someone has to give up spots for another; it’s a zero-sum [game],” Wang said. But when, in seeking to diversify a college class, another minority group is harmed, it is an indication that the system is broken. 

“Affirmative action is a Band-Aid to patch up these issues,” Wang said. “The root cause is simple: we don’t have a good public education system.” Wang believes that affirmative action appears much too late, and by the time students apply to colleges, disparities have had years to solidify. “If you give everyone the equal tools to start with, you will ensure diversity,” he said.

This, of course, is nonsense. The best public education on Earth would still produce students who score higher or lower on objective tests. It could never make up for family dysfunction, teen parents, hostility to educational norms, or the long-term impact of single-parent families. Nevertheless, Wang's views on the supposed cure for inequality in college admissions are irrelevant. The most memorable aspect of his story is his uncommon courage. In this regard, he is a worthy leader and a blood brother of the military hero who made Williams College a reality, the beloved Ephraim Williams.

Check out this article from the Williams Record for a reaction to the recent Supreme Court decision ending race-based affirmative action from sources close to Williams College.

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.

Williams Grad Christine Wormuth Uses Her Awesome Affirmative Action Powers to Weaken the Army Over COVID Vax Hysteria

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - It looks like one of the students I may have taught at William College, Christine Wormuth, has taken on the job of weakening the Army and leaving us more vulnerable to our enemies. After losing a war in Afghanistan and encouraging Putin to invade Ukraine it is difficult to imagine what else she and the Biden team can do to weaken the United States as a military power. 

Nevertheless, thanks to an observant reader of Williams Liberty, I learned that last week Christine Wormuth, in her role as the Army Secretary, ordered commanders to start involuntary separation proceedings "for those who have refused the vaccine and do not have a pending or approved exemption."

This is, of course, insane. It is a public policy as ripe for ridicule as the Biden administration's plans to issue free crack pipes. 

After all, the long-term consequences of taking the vaccine are, as yet, unknown. Moreover, the actual risk to healthy, military-age men and women is negligible. In this context, removing those who refuse to take the vaccine basically purges the Army of its best and brightest as well as it's most courageous. 

Disturbingly, Christine communicates with the eerie wide-eye intensity of Theranos' Elizabeth Holmes. Similar to Holmes, Christine seems to have an unprecedented capacity to pretend that reality does not really exist. In her view, her clearly dysfunctional behaviors actually have the opposite impact. 

“Army readiness depends on soldiers who are prepared to train, deploy, fight and win our nation’s wars,” she said, according to the Associated Press. “Unvaccinated soldiers present risk to the force and jeopardize readiness. We will begin involuntary separation proceedings for Soldiers who refuse the vaccine order and are not pending a final decision on an exemption.”

Link to AP story

Christine Wormuth would have matriculated while I was still teaching there between 1986 and 1989. Something of a failure by traditional Williams College standards, she graduated from Williams College with a bachelor's degree in political science before earning her master's in public policy from the University of Maryland. From this modest beginning, it looks to me like she leveraged her gender - but not her looks - to advance far beyond her actual talent in a field where she had absolutely no practical military experience. For those paying attention to the intersectional lottery, she is the first woman to serve in the position for the Army.

After contributing to some of the most frightening and disturbing military disasters of her generation, it will be interesting to see where her wide-eyed affirmative action superpowers take her next.

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.

Clueless in Williamstown: Leftist CC Members Ask What's Wrong with Us?

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - The Williams Record printed a brief statement from the Executive Committee of the Williams College Council which displays the profound degree to which student leaders have failed to learn from their self-made disasters last semester including allowing CARE Now activists to brutally demean white male representatives, discriminating against a Jewish student organization on political grounds, and allowing its members to vote secretly whenever the going got tough. Impervious to reality, the authors of the article seem to completely miss why the CC was subject to massive, national level, negative attention last semester.

The article goes off track almost immediately by failing to recognize that the leftist ideologues who dominate the CC are completely responsible for their own failures, failures which, predictably enough are simply the negative consequences of their own leftist ideology. Instead, the student leaders blame an amorphous "system".

...these problems are not something new. They come up each semester, regardless of who is serving on Council. The issue couldn’t be clearer: CC’s troubles are larger than any one person. They are rooted in its own rules and structure.

Oh, please. Where in the rules and structure does it suggest it is okay to verbally humiliate white male representatives as occurred at the famous April 9, 2019 CC meeting? 

What was so alarming about that effort is that the student representatives failed to protect the white students from the bigoted tirade directed at them by Seyi Olaose '22 and Isaiah Blake '21. Instead, the CC's response then, and now, appears to be that this racist, anti-white, verbal tirade was justified because of they way the CC considers requests from black students. Nonsense. No one should be harmed with verbal abuse. There should be absolutely no tolerance for it. No one deserves it. No one at all. 

In a shocking display of self unawareness, the student leaders assert that they have power on campus apart from the school itself, saying: "We, a small group within CC, may not know the answers to all these questions but what we do know is that the future of student government at Williams will be conceived by its students." Please. Someone on campus needs to educate these privileged kids about reality. The CC is simply, always, a dependent, relatively powerless, toothless organization. It is there to reduce the power of students through co-optation. Simple as that. 

Blind to the causes of its national disgrace, the student leaders of the CC announce they intend to fix their existing problems by doing....wait for it...more of the same! In this case, they plan to reach "...out to members of multiple student clubs that have historically been marginalized by our processes." This excludes, of course, the white male students who have been consistently the targets of abusive practices like affirmative action, vile anti-white ideologues, and biased anti-white professors and staff. 

My prediction. Look forward to a humorous year where the CC does exactly the same things that caused so many problems last year. Also, don't send your precious children to Williams College. If they are there now, find them a better place to grow...somewhere they can thrive.

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.