Try To Cancel Thomas Chatterton Williams

INTERVIEW WITH CLOCKED OUT

Thomas Chatterton Williams is a writer, cultural critic, and visiting professor of the humanities at Bard College currently teaching two courses: "The Rebel: Camus" and "Black Heterodox Voices." He is also, notably, the former professor of Clocked Out Magazine’s Editors-in-Chief. He gave Zoe an A and Fiona an A-. But there are no hard feelings there. I swear. Even though it messed up her GPA in her final semester at college. We sat down with him at Cafe Colette in Williamsburg (his choice)—and discussed academia, Identity Politics, safetyism, free-speech, nuance, normies, and whether Bard kids are based, red-pilled, or woke.
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CLOCKED OUT: How does the political content of your curriculum affect your teaching style?

THOMAS CHATTERTON WILLIAMS: I try to be super objective and I don’t try to force my viewpoint especially since some of the students—I didn’t realize this—already knew what my point of view would be. One of my students told me that last year there had been an Instagram group where people were saying stuff about me–

CO: They were boycotting your class.

TCW: Yeah!

CO: I saw this. People posted not to take your class and they posted an excerpt from–

TCW: From some article, yeah—that wasn’t even a viewpoint that I would say in class. I mean, it’s a viewpoint you can disagree with but it’s not a dangerous point of view.

CO: They were saying it was racist.

TCW: I know, that’s crazy to me. I really was shocked by that.

CO: Have you felt any backlash?

TCW: I mean, in that case, [the group was] a group of students that know absolutely nothing about me. But some of the students heard not to take the class and they still took it, so they ended up being a self-selecting, more open-minded group of students. They seem to like it. I think the students that find–I mean, the one that told me, she certainly knew about it and she wanted to take the class anyway. Still, I just hear things. I live off campus and I teach, and I don’t really know everybody. I had also heard that certain faculty were opposed to me being there to begin with. They were against my hire because of the same reason.

CO: Because of your personal views.

TCW: Yeah, and I don’t think I’m racist. My dad grew up under segregation in Texas as a black man so it seems to me that you could say I’m wrong or I missed something but I highly doubt I’m racist against black people.

CO: It also seems like the ideology supporting an argument against your hiring would be aligned with the belief that black people can’t be racist.

TCW: Exactly. Isn’t that supposed to be, like, fundamentally impossible? I guess you could say I have internalized racism if I’m sympathetic to that point of view.

CO: Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that that’s true. If a professor had internalized racism, or racist point of views, do you think that would prevent them from being able to teach effectively?

TCW: Well, not necessarily. You have to imagine that professors are people in the world with prejudices and biases, but a competent professor is not somebody whose personal views and biases you necessarily even need to know. If you’re teaching material well, then the material speaks for itself and students are coming to their own conclusions. I’m not interested in having students regurgitate back to me what I already think. I’m interested in students developing their own point of view, and sometimes the most interesting students disagree with you but they’ve thought through how they’ve arrived at that. Being a doctrinaire professor where students are supposed to recite back to you your own worldview–that exists, and I think that’s really not doing the job right.

CO: So you’re taking an “academia is an objective, extra-political institution” stance.

TCW: It should be. It should be a place for exploration and obviously sometimes the professor reveals some biases potentially in what they even choose to include in the curriculum. But if you’re doing your job well then you’re including competing points of view. I have authors disagreeing with each other.

CO: What’s the class Bard kids were boycotting?

TCW: It’s called “Black Contrarian Voices,” or it was last year. This year it’s called “Black Heterodox Voices.”

CO: Where does the contrarian come in? What are they contradicting?

TCW: Well, a few of the authors are against the idea of race. I think people are often surprised– when they are not really steeped in the subject matter–that there’s a point of view within the black tradition that’s anti-race, that believes that blackness—like whiteness—should be rejected from the jump. Not just that you should fight for any idea that blackness is important or beautiful, but questioning and rejecting the idea that there’s race or racial difference to begin with, and that sees racism as tied up with conceptions of racial difference, and you can’t solve racism so long as you believe that you’re white and I’m black. Because that implies necessarily hierarchical judgments after you start from that premise. So, usually students are like, “Oh wow, I hadn’t even thought of it that way.” Or there are black authors who we deal with who are strategically passing, and kids are kind of intrigued by that. It’s probably less important nowadays, but last century people passed as white as a strategic way of getting ahead in society and argued for that. And some of the authors argued that slavery had been so fundamentally destructive to black people that black people were made inferior in certain ways. And we read Ta-Nehisi Coates, who argues for reparations, so we can see that. But I don’t present blackness or black people as uniformly virtuous and innocent victims who always simply suffer.

CO: Is that how you feel the air of discussion around blackness in academia presents it?

TCW: It can be very much so. Like, to the point that “you can’t be racist because you’re black.” But there are black authors that argue—like, Richard Wright wrote before that “the way I was growing up, we were so anti-semitic and it was just part of our lives—we didn’t even question it,” and I think that can be shocking to encounter because you’re supposed to think, like, all prejudice or all racism stems from white supremacy, and even when non-white people participate in it that it’s still a consequence of white supremacy. And that’s not what all of the black writers themselves argue.

CO: Do you feel like the general response in the class has been positive?

TCW: I think so. We’ve been having some good classes lately because we’re reading really smart and interesting writers. When we get to talking, students are really willing to get in there and realize that they can have any point of view. I mean, nobody is actually super based. But some people are actually not super stuck in the bubble of what’s safe to say.

CO: Speaking of that, one thing we wanted to ask you about is the trends amongst students, like if there’s a rise in the sort of based, reactionary mentality that seems increasingly popular?

TCW: Yeah, I haven’t really seen anyone actually be that controversial.

CO: At all?

TCW: Not at all.

CO: Do you think people are afraid to be controversial?

TCW: I haven’t seen anyone be controversial—although I do feel like there are a few students who might be open to controversial opinions. I don’t sense that anybody is not to the left of center or far left. And that’s not the case at every school for sure. Bard is kind of a self-selecting group of students to begin with. But also, last year I had no black students in my Black Voices class. And it’s also weird because some of my wokest students last year were really into Red Scare. And I was like, how could you like Red Scare? Because they were like, Oh my god you were on Red Scare! And I was like “yeah, you listen to that?” I was really shocked. I was like, “Isn’t that everything you’re against?” And they were like, “But they’re really smart,” and I was like wow. Are you listening to their politics?

CO: Seems like if anything they would hate listening.

TCW: It’s like the cool factor overrode the content or something.

CO: But they were still into identity politics.

TCW: My MOST identity politics students were also really into Red Scare. It was weird.

CO: That seems really counterintuitive. Also, when we took your class on Camus our friends and people would be like, “oh, he was on Red Scare” and had already been following you on Twitter–

TCW: In a bad way.

CO: Not necessarily. But maybe. There's a subsect of students who are really into being “reactionary” and “edgy” and “having controversial opinions,” and most of the people we knew weren’t really into identity politics or wokeness when we were there. It seemed like a really common Bard thing, but maybe it kind of died out since our class was the last class that started pre-Covid. And I think that may have had an impact. All the kids that are in college right now experienced Covid when they were in high school, so they did most of their formative development secluded and in the wake, also, of the summer of 2020 when identity politics probably reached its peak. So if you enter college—where all of a sudden you’re supposed to have your own opinions on things—already having been indoctrinated into the idea that you have to think “the correct thing,” it’s pretty hard to break out of that.

TCW: I mean it’s hard for me to put myself into that mentality because in high school and in college I was just always contrarian. I was always looking for a debate and playing devil’s advocate and exploring positions that would infuriate classmates, and it felt like what you were supposed to be doing. In retrospect, some people were kind of into identity politics, but a lot of us were just, like, normies. Being like what are you talking about? to people who I realize in retrospect were kind of activists. But we’d be like, “those are activist kind of kids.” It wasn’t like everyone just accepted the activist position, which is now the baseline normal. And normies are just keeping quiet. But normies are by definition what most people agree with.

CO: Now “normies” are “woke.”

TCW: Exactly. That was not my college experience. Normies were normies. They were like capitalism is fine… like, uh…I haven’t really thought about the Middle East that much…

CO: Saying capitalism is fine is a really inflammatory statement.

TCW: In this reading group, this Asian-American professor started saying, “Well you can’t really solve racism.” We were reading this book that asked the fundamental question “Why do black people even invest themselves in democracy at all, since it has always failed them?” And I made the point that the book was not really convincing me that America is the hellscape for black people that the author wants us to believe it is. For one, I don’t think there’s a genocide against black men by the cops.

Black people are disproportionately killed by the cops and we have a police brutality problem compared to other western nations, but then this Asian-American professor is saying “are you really gonna sit here and tell me that black people aren’t in constant danger from the police? Really? Really?” And then also she said she found the book unconvincing too, so I thought we agreed. But then she said it was because we’re not gonna solve race as long as there’s capitalism, because capitalism is inherently racist. And I said, “Well, in my experience, and from what I understand as a scholar, the majority of black people are pro-capitalist.” And she says “yeah, false consciousness.” And I was like… woah. The country is so much more complex. You can’t talk about a black/white binary anymore because we’ve got tens of millions of Asian people and we’ve got all these Latinos, who are the largest minority. The way that we conceive of race as black/white is our heritage, but the country is a lot more dynamic and complicated than it used to be.

And this other guy in the group further says something like, “don’t worry, a lot of us are white-adjacent anyway, enjoying the work of white-supremacy, so it doesn't matter.” And he’s like, “I’m being a little bit glib but you get what I’m saying–whiteness is gonna be doing fine with a lot of non-white people.” He was implying that I’m white. And I thought, this is such a close-minded group of so-called intellectuals. And I was upset! It’s racist–the condescending, patronizing racism that’s like, “You don’t really understand, you black person that wants to be a small business owner and sees America as a land of opportunity.”

CO: It’s pretty classist.

TCW: It’s super classist to be sitting there as an academic and judging black business owners and people. All my black friends from where I grew up that didn’t go to college just wanted a chance to participate in capitalism. They’re super patriotic and into America. I’m through and through liberal and I only vote democrat, but half of these guys are voting for Trump. People I grew up with who didn’t go to college who are working class black kids, they think of academics and liberals and woke people like that as totally out of touch with them and totally condescending and they hate the way they talk.

CO: Trump’s a populist! There’s a class-based and racial realignment happening with the republican and democratic parties where democrats are winning the majority of white elite votes and slowly—we’re not quite at the point where it’s crossed over, but it’s trending that way—the republicans are winning the majority of working class, but also they’re winning back the black vote.

TCW: There are polls that came out last week that are just tracking 25% of black voters for Trump now in these polls. And that’s just crazy.

CO: It’s really crazy. Okay, moving on. Do you think professors should align themselves with a side, and what do you think about the relationship between as a professor generally what the relationship should be between your personal ideology and how you go about teaching?

TCW: I’m lucky that I get to teach the courses that I want to teach, so that’s to a degree my own personal ideology, but after that I don’t believe that my ideology is important. It’s about the material and it’s about the way that the students are exposed to competing viewpoints and arrive at their own conclusions. That’s a hill that I’m willing to die on. It’s not my job. I didn’t know the politics of my best professors and I don’t even know what they were thinking because they were just teaching us, which is the job, as I see it.

CO: But now with social media we kind of know…

TCW: Yeah, social media’s different. I didn’t know back then because that was pre-Twitter. I think it may have damaged something.

CO: The fact that you can just look up what your professors believe in?

TCW: Yeah.

CO: That’s what I would do before every class I was in.

TCW: See their twitter?

CO: Yeah, look them up online to see if they’ve written anything public or have anything interesting on social media.

TCW: I probably would do that too, if I had that available. But for me, my primary identity is not as a professor. I’m a writer who then started teaching because Leon Botstein gave me the opportunity to. It’s also where I think the tension comes from sometimes. It’s not my job to be a professor. It’s auxiliary to my job, which is to be a writer.

CO: Do you like teaching?

TCW: I love it. I always say this, but after I get back in the classroom, sitting around a bunch of 20 year olds talking about books–you’ll never have that type of conversation with a 35 or 40 year old. Most adults don’t have the energy, time, or capacity to just be really into a text anymore. Professional writers don’t talk the way students do. And also, you can’t get back that first experience of encountering certain ideas. It’s so exciting to be 20. I was so excited to be reading Dostoevsky for the first time. You cannot fall in love for the first time again, you know? It’s so infectious, and I really love that. It’s a privilege to be in the classroom.

Some people complain about teaching. I’m also lucky because I’m in smaller tech seminars where the work is to read and to talk. I’m not lecturing to a class where there’s, like, 50 kids and you don’t know the name of everybody in your class. So I feel like that’s a fortunate way to be in the university.

CO: Teachers complain about teaching?

TCW: Oh man, yeah. Especially writers do because they’re like “I’m correcting bad writing instead of writing my novel! I should be writing my novel! But I have to be doing this crap for healthcare!”

CO: Aw, really?

TCW: Yeah, of course that’s what people say. And, “I’m afraid that it’s ruining my writing to read so much bad writing!”

CO: Ouch.

TCW: Some famous writers say that.

CO: Do you have faith in the next generation?

TCW: Yeah, much more than I think people who just deal with them as an abstraction on social media, as part of a culture war. I think a lot of people who think that the youth are so bad are not the people who are in classrooms. There’s a lot of bad stuff going on. And I think that just generally speaking administrators and other faculty can be far less open minded than students can be. Obviously there are some outliers and outspoken students, but generally students are still developing their point of view and are not so doctrinaire to believe they understand everything. But just like with adults in institutions and magazines and such, the loudest voices beat into submission more open minded and modest voices because people are afraid. So there’s a misperception of how prevalent the activists with the hardcore views are.

CO: Do you predict that in the trend swing of ideology or in the culture wars in academia, the loudest activist voices will eventually win out? Like, next ten years?

TCW: No. I'm just an optimist in general, but I’ll never believe that the activists with the worst ideas are gonna win out.

CO: What do you think the worst ideas are?

TCW: Look at you trying to pose that as an innocent question. I’m comfortable saying that I think the worst idea is that our most important qualities are the immutable characteristics of our identities that we have no control over. And that that’s what always has to be emphasized puts us in conflict with each other.

CO: It’s also the easy way out of thinking deeply. It’s the most efficient route.

TCW: The most important thing about you is not that you’re Jewish or female.The most important thing is your capacity to be open to and be in pursuit of the truth, wherever that leads you. And sometimes Jews are wrong about things and sometimes they’re right. And your identity doesn’t pre-determine that, you know? Are you Irish?

Fiona: I’m Irish and Jewish.

TCW: Oh, you’re Jewish too?

Fiona: She’s not Jewish.

TCW: You’re not Jewish? What?

Zoe: No.

TCW: Wait what?

Fiona: She has a semitic look.

Zoe: Everyone always assumes I’m Jewish.

Fiona: I thought she was Jewish when I first met her too.

TCW: Wow. I was totally directing that at Zoe.

Fiona: Oh I thought you were saying that to me.

TCW: I thought you were Irish.

Fiona: I am half-Irish.

TCW: What are you then?

Zoe: I’m Greek and Serbian.

TCW: Oh yeah. I did know that. Djokovic.

Zoe: Yeah we’ve discussed that before I think.

TCW: Oh yeah, you’re so not Jewish.

Zoe: Not remotely.

Fiona: I’m wearing a Star of David right now.

TCW: Oh yeah, you are. And you’re from the country that totally outperforms itself in athletics.

Zoe: Yeah, the Balkans are up.

TCW: Yeah, Jokic is so based. They’re like, “what’s the best part of winning a championship?” And he’s like, “honestly, this sucks. I just wanna go home.” Super cool.

CLOCKED OUT: The idea that your racial, sexual, or gender identity should determine your beliefs is pretty concerning. It’s an attack on individual autonomy. It’s as though room for nuance has died, and the most controversial thing you could be doing right now is to take a nuanced stance.

TCW: Absolutely, because then nobody is on your team to support you. There’s a lot of comfort in the idea that whichever side you choose, you’ll have a lot of support and allies and teammates. But if you’re just in the middle, some people might agree with you on the issue but nobody really feels comfortable being your teammate, so it’s a lonely place.

CO: It’s easy to fall down the rabbit holes on the edges. And I feel like for kids with social media, who are on an algorithmic pipeline of sorts, it’s very easy to sort of just adopt more and more what other people are talking about. Like “if I agree with you on this, then I must agree with you on this” and so on.

TCW: Yeah, it’s like you have to get the whole menu if you order one dish.

CO: Now the dominant thing that people are saying is “this is rooted in this,” and that it all boils down to one thing–

TCW: Settler colonialism. But the country is surprising. And that’s why I think the students are so amazed to read Frederick Douglass who was a slave who escaped and bought his freedom. And he said that America is an amazing engine of prosperity, and we just want to participate. You can’t say America is one way or another because even then, who’s he talking to? He’s talking to a bunch of white people who are like “we’re abolitionists–this man’s amazing,” and as long as there’s been slavery, there've been people who’ve disagreed with it. That's the thing, it was never all unanimous or decided. The country’s a constant negotiation and people have always been in conflict about what our values are and how we’re living them out, so it’s so diminishing to say America’s an anti-black, colonial white, settler-colonialist project. Well, according to who? Because there are people in America who were never about that.

CO: And the people who will say, like, if your feminism isn’t–

TCW: You’re too online. But yeah, I know that. It’s like, if your feminism isn’t intersectional…

CO: You know what I’m talking about.

TCW: It’s funny, I actually just profiled this amazing guy. His name is Michael Jackson.

CO: Wow.

TCW: His name is Michael R. Jackson. His social media is “The Living Michael Jackson,” and he’s this Pulitzer Prize winning playwrite—black, gay—he could be the darling of wokeness but instead he’s like, “I don’t want to be, because this shit is so fucked in so many ways.” He’s like, “my best friend is a black woman in South Carolina who runs a daycare center. She’s not fucking in the knowledge economy online all day, and she’s like ‘DEI is insane, and they’ve probably never made a garbage man do a DEI training, and it’s clearly some class shit that’s gatekeeping the vernacular.’” He’s like, “the strongest woman I know is my black mom who moved to Detroit, raised a bunch of kids, and she’s not even a feminist, let alone an intersectional one, you know? And she wouldn’t want to be called that.” There’s no room for real people. It’s like this country club that you somehow have to be posh enough to be invited into.

CO: It’s like, imagine going up to a homeless person and being like “actually, you’re ‘unhoused.’”

TCW: Exactly. Actually, when I was in Portland, they were saying that. A barista corrected me. She said, “Here, we say unhoused.”

CO: What do you think the motivation is for DEI in academia?

TCW: Well, some of it makes sense. You can say look, until rather recently Harvard had quotas limiting the number of Jews that could be admitted. They artificially kept down the number of Jews that could be admitted because they didn’t want it to be too Jewish–

Fiona: too smart.

TCW: —And they still keep down the number of Asians. You could say these places are super exclusionary. I grew up around a bunch of people that didn’t know how the college application process worked and if I didn’t have a dad like I had, I wouldn’t even have known where I could apply. There are some initiatives to solve that problem. There are smart kids out there, there’s a lot of talent out there, let’s try to make people also feel like this could be a place for them. And once they’re here, let’s make them feel like they’re wanted here and it’s not that they’re just tolerated. And that’s all for the good.

But then where it gets weird is that it justifies its existence by constantly growing, and there are so many administrators who justify their job by constantly saying that there’s a problem. They create problems, because then it justifies their reason to be working. So you get into these weird situations where they claim “Princeton is structurally racist.” Princeton is structurally racist? After George Floyd died, people started saying “This is a structurally racist institution.” The President of Princeton even says that. So then, Betsy Devos–who I’m not a huge fan of in any way–was in charge of the Department of Education–was like, “really? Princeton is structurally racist? Okay, we’re gonna open an investigation, because that’s illegal. You get federal funding. So put your money where your mouth is.” And Princeton’s lawyers are like, “Hell nah, what? We’re not structurally racist!”

If you were actually structurally racist, then that means the US Government is going to sue you because that’s illegal! If you’re actually institutionally, structurally racist?! And of course, they’re not structurally racist. And so when the rubber hits the road, and when the real adults have to get involved, they’ll say “absolutely not, we can back that up. We’re not at all racist, we’re totally in line with policy.” It’s just some bullshit that you say, and it’s insane. And it’s a self-justifying narrative.

CO: And when you call something structurally racist, people tend to agree.

TCW: That’s an example I’m interested in, in my book that’s coming out. What does it mean for people to say these things? Let’s be real. Princeton is not only not structurally racist, it’s actually making extreme exertions to be the opposite of structurally racist, but they perform this kind of weird self-flagellating demonstration of their wokeness to score points, and then when the rubber hits the road it’s just a bluff. They’re just bluffing.

CO: I wonder what’s gonna happen now that affirmative action is overruled.

TCW: The Times has had some good reporting on this, because it’s actually getting worse right now. They interviewed all these kids who would have liked to be writing essays about, for example, their love of film or their grandma or something, but now they know that it wouldn’t check a box, so their whole essay has to be about victimization.

CO: Speaking of The Times, we also wanted to talk about the Harper’s Letter, which Roger signed and which you drafted–

TCW: Me and like four other guys, yeah.

CO: “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” was released in Harper’s Magazine at the peak of identity politics in 2020. It was pretty controversial at the time, and there were a bunch of letters written in opposition to it. I think the general air of discussion around it back then in terms of the mob mentality was to be against it. Did you face any pushback from your colleagues or students for your role in the letter?

TCW: No, but it’s a constant thing that some people think was a very bad thing to do, which was funny because some of the people that really criticized us were like, “standing up for free speech? HA! That’s white supremacy in disguise!” Thanh Nguyen, this Pulitzer Prize winning Novelist was accusing us of white supremacy. And then, he signed a pro-Palestinian letter and his talk got immediately cancelled at the 92nd Street Y, and he was like “This is cancel culture! Where are the free speech advocates!”

And we were like, “Hello, there was a letter that was circulating that was defending exactly this, and you said it was some bullshit, and now you’re like where are the people defending free speech”—everyone is a hypocrite. It’s “free speech only for when my cause matters.” He was saying stuff like “free speech is a fake issue” at the time, and then when his talk got canceled he was screaming about it. And we’d respect him if he was like, “well, I don’t believe in free speech to begin with, so that’s their prerogative.” But that was not his reaction.

CO: What were you setting out to do with the letter?

TCW: Literally just to say “we should be maximally tolerant, even when people are wrong, and we shouldn’t rush to try to terminate people’s livelihood by mob reaction online. That’s a basic thing. Like, your HR department should not be taking its cues from angry mobs on Twitter that are reacting in a moment to what are oftentimes whipped up scandals and controversies that will be over tomorrow. And everybody should have the ability to make mistakes, but certainly there are some things we don’t tolerate. But it still shouldn’t be that a bunch of people online can just get mad and “@” your employer, and suddenly you’re fired for something that may or may not even be relevant, especially surrounding issues that are still being negotiated. With many of these issues, we don’t have a consensus about what’s right and wrong the way we know certain things are explicitly racist.

But, you know, it was a pretty modest letter. It seemed like the right thing to do and it still does. I don’t think people should be fired by mobs online. It was really coming in the wake of this guy at the New York Times who was a sacrificial scapegoat par excellence, James Bennet. The man lost his whole career for publishing a sitting US Senator’s op-ed arguing that violent looting should be stopped and if the police can’t handle it then the national guard and the military should come in. You can disagree with that view, but it’s something that a majority of Americans polled agreed was the proper view, including minorities.

And this guy, he was a sitting US Senator, he’s not a fringe crazy guy. You can disagree with him, but the man was in contact with the President of the United States at the time and the New York Times was publishing a view that intelligent readers should be exposed to, whether you agree or disagree. And the man was thrown under the bus and fired. And the reason for his firing was that he made his coworkers' lives “unsafe.” Crazy. Unsafe.

CO: Once I was accused of making people feel unsafe in class. I said that sex-work is inherently bad for women, and nobody said anything about it. Then in the next class, a few people raised their hands and said they felt unsafe by the remarks made in the previous class about sex-work.

TCW: People in your class were identifying as sex workers? You’re unsafe in a sex-work environment. I’m sorry. You’re safe at Bard. Sex work should make you feel unsafe.

CO: But what is it about the call to feeling unsafe?

TCW: “Safetyism” is what John Haidt calls it. It’s something about your generation that you could explain more to me. I mean, Gen-X helicopter parents, not letting you ride your bikes around town, unlike the way I was growing up. Everybody argues that the students that started arriving in college around 2014, your generation, started safetyism. That’s the safety generation, and it has to do with a few things, but it has to do with the way that your parents chose to raise you. It has to do with technology, the mimetic kind of aspects of tumblr in this kind of way of thinking about social issues.

CO: Back when we were on tumblr it was all about depression.

TCW: Exactly, it was all about therapy culture–we didn’t use these phrases before–“trauma talk,” being pro-mental disorder… Everyone wanted a mental disorder as part of their identity.

CO: And also white people who didn’t have any tools to logically claim victimhood–

TCW: They use mental illness as a tool, yeah.

CO: White people grapple with white guilt by claiming victimhood through some other avenue.

TCW: Right, and also someone at Bard was telling me, “Man, these straight white guys at Bard will say ‘I’m demisexual, so I’m technically queer.’” Like, to get clout. “I’m sapiosexual. I’ll only date girls that I love and that I’m interested in mentally. That makes me queer! I only have sex with people that I’m into!” Literally, that gets you coded on the fringes of queer. Demisexual is a “queer identity.” It’s literally just being a normal person. It’s crazy out there.

CO: Being neurotypical, cisgender and straight is pretty subversive—

TCW: Being neurotypical is kind of a bad thing now. I’m crazy normie. Like, I’m super neurotypical. I’ve never had a learning disability. It’s crazy that these things are even in dispute.

You’re gonna totally get me fired. I just don’t wanna say anything bad about Bard–I really do love Bard. Leon is the don, Roger’s the don.

Did you read the scandal surrounding Guernica Magazine? Go on Twitter and look at discourse on Guernica. One side argues there is no nuance at all. Imagine working at a magazine that says there is no nuance. In what part of human reality is there never any nuance?

CO: I’m trying to think of something unnuanced.

TCW: There is no area of reality–every time you have anything with more than one person there is always nuance. And even in myself, I’m nuanced and contradictory.

CO: Even a mother throwing a baby out the window, there’s nuance there.

TCW: Every single issue you can think of, there’s nuance. Always beware of anyone who says anything like “this is actually really simple.”

CO: And anytime anyone says anything in an absolute. The only absolute that I believe is that there should be no absolutes.

TCW: Everything in moderation including moderation.

CO: Any closing thoughts on the state of academia?

TCW: I just think the most important thing is that we get back to a place where we think of academia as a space to prepare students to think for themselves instead of telling them what to think. I think that’s what a lot of people really want. I really do think that the past few years have shown us that we really do need to find our way back to a genuinely liberal path. There is liberalism coming from the left and certainly from the right, and we have to be on guard. We have to be intolerant of intolerance and make academia a place for people to really think and experiment and even to rethink—you don’t just think once and have the answer, you need to think again and think again and you need a place where you’re able to do those things without being shut down or vilified.

CO: So academia should be a place where all different viewpoints should be taken into consideration and everyone is exploring different issues. Is that also your view of social media and twitter discourse?

TCW: There’s always a line. It’s naive to say there should be no line ever, I don’t think that academia is a place where we should argue for pedophilia and bad things–there are some things that we’ve already reached consensus on as a society. You should be very very very, maximally open to even really upsetting arguments but not all of academia is up for debate. Like, physics class is pretty straightforward on the undergraduate level. Math is not a debate, statistics class is not a debate… not everything has to be like “debate me, bro.” There is a terrible concept which twitter and the internet pushes, which is that every single thing should be up for debate. Like, “the earth is flat.” That's stupid. Academia is not a place for any stupid idea to be put forth and you should have to read something about why we believe the earth is round.

CO: Do you think there’s a pressure on the social studies to become more like the sciences, in the sense that there exists one “correct” opinion?

TCW: I do think there is a pressure for it to go that way. And that’s a fundamental flaw in social sciences. But you could even say there’s more debate in science. We revise theory. Theories only hold until they’re revised. Even Einstein has been revised. But the idea that in the social sciences there should be laws—like, the idea of white supremacy is almost a law that can be invoked, and there is no debate. That’s scary and stifling. And actually, universities are the safest places in America. It’s hard to think of a place safer than a college campus. It’s much more dangerous standing on the street than being on a college campus. And words are not violence. That’s a hill I would die on, too. Violence is violence. There’s a difference between action and speech.

CO: What about words that incite violence?

TCW: Yeah, and we have laws against that. But even in inciting violence, someone still has to act. There is a difference between an action and a speech. Someone like Leon, that’s a great college president. But not everyone is as great as he is, you know? I’m sure he has his own views, but his views do not carry the day. He has people come to Bard and speak and have very different opinions. A very good friend of mine, Nathan Thrall, he’s Jewish by ethnicity and inheritance but he’s very anti-zionist kind of pro-Palestinian writer, and there are people trying to get him cancelled for being Pro-Palestinian.

He was sued, actually, and it was expensive for Bard to defend him. I feel like a lot of people don’t go to bat for free speech in the same way that someone like Leon does. [Thrall] was teaching a class called: “Is Israel an Apartheid State?” or something like that, and there was intense criticism that that word should not be allowed to be used, apartheid. But believing in free speech is believing in free speech, not just in the speech you agree with.

CO: Three books you would have everyone read?

TCW: A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov, The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodr Dostoevsky, and The omni-Americans by Albert Murray.

Parts of this interview have been edited for clarity purposes.