From MassLive:

A “standard liberal” feminist author Williams College hosted this week ran afoul of some students in her audience, who ended up branding her “racist” and “white supremacist.”

Christina Hoff Sommers, resident scholar at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, shared her views on feminism and identity politics at the Western Massachusetts institution.

Some of the attendees, including several students in the gender and women’s studies department, took issue with her talk.

Video was shot of the tense question and answer section featuring several students’ profanity peppered rants, insults on the Brandeis University alum’s scholarship and disruptive, derisive snickers.

1) I hope that the Record will provide thorough coverage of this event. Kudos to Zach Wood ’18 and Uncomfortable Learning for arranging the event!

2) In my fantasy world, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies paid for, or at least sponsored, the talk, all in the best spirit of uncomfortable learning. Odds of that being true?

3) It is good news that Williams, as an institution, is still bringing alternative viewpoints to campus. Very few among the powerful alumni who matter want Williams to turn into Swarthmore, much less Oberlin. Alas:

One student expressed frustration that Sommers was allowed to share her “harmful” message at the school and another, with contempt, referred to “people like you” before accusing the registered Democrat of being a white supremacist due to her chosen reading.

Over the last 15 years, the opinion that certain views — almost always views on the right — should not be allowed at Williams has grown shockingly common. I did not predict this trend. Did you? Yet the trend seems to be, if anything, getting stronger. How long before someone like Sommers (or Charles Murray) is prevented from coming to Williams?

To be fair, there is a bit of quote-mining going on above. It is not clear that this student really wants to prevent Sommers from speaking at Williams. Also, the Williams students in the clip are well-spoken. However, they also want to get rid of “capitalism!”(Start around minute 8:00.) And that get fairly angry toward the end . . .

The finger-snapping is annoying. When did that become common?

More video:

Zach does a nice job moderating and moving on to the next questioner.

Great question to Sommers at the end (paraphrased): “If US society is as fair toward women as you claim, then why aren’t, for example, women 50% of all Fortune 500 CEOs?”

In reply, Sommers declines to offer students the red pill . . . Does she even know about it? John Derbyshire would have given a very different answer to that question . . .

All-in-all, it is a good thing that Williams put on this event, bringing an outside speaker with a very different viewpoint to campus and making some students, at least for a bit, uncomfortable.

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