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Conservative female author of ‘The War on Men’ disinvited to speak at Williams College after protests

Irony alert. A student group at Williams College called “Uncomfortable Learning” that asked a conservative female author to speak on campus reportedly rescinded that invitation because – wait for it – students were too uncomfortable over the prospect of her speech.

Yes, the whole point of the “Uncomfortable Learning” group was to bring conversations to the elite private campus that ran against the grain of its left-leaning atmosphere. But the controversial speaker, author and cultural critic Suzanne Venker, explained in an op-ed for Fox News that she was disinvited because, she was told, her pending arrival was “stirring a lot of angry reactions among students on campus.”

Venker – author of “The War on Men,” wrote she had been prepping for her speech for two months, and had planned to “talk about feminism, but from a different perspective than the one students are used to hearing. I was going to tell them why feminism fails. (Hint: because it denies the existence of biology and teaches that equality means sameness, which is a losing proposition when it comes to planning a life—particularly if that life includes marriage and family.)”

Inside Higher Ed reports the title of the talk was to be “One Step Forward, Ten Steps Back: Why Feminism Fails,” but one student complaint over the speech had stated: “When you bring a misogynistic, white supremacist men’s rights activist to campus in the name of ‘dialogue’ and ‘the other side,’ you are not only causing actual mental, social, psychological and physical harm to students, but you are also — paying — for the continued dispersal of violent ideologies that kill our black and brown (trans) femme sisters … you are dipping your hands in their blood …”

Venker wrote that after she asked for further explanation of the abrupt cancellation, the student organizer conceded that Williams College “‘has never experienced this kind of resistance’ to a campus speaker. And so, the ‘Uncomfortable Learning’ speaker series caved.”

To which Venker noted:

That I was passed over is not the concern, though. What is of concern, what should be of concern to all of us, is a new kind of progressive climate that pervades America’s campuses. It even has a name: the “call-out culture.”

The “call-out culture” encourages students to see opposing points of view (read: any argument that’s right of center) as potential threats to their well being and forces groups, such as the Uncomfortable Learning Speaking Series at Williams College, to disinvite or shut down guest speakers whose views are deemed by the campus thought police as intolerable.

Read the full column.

Read a 2014 College Fix feature on the Uncomfortable Learning speaker series.

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IMAGE CREDIT: War on Men by Suzanne Venker (WND Books © 2013)

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About the Author
Fix Editor
Jennifer Kabbany is editor-in-chief of The College Fix.