Williams College's 'Uncomfortable Learning' speaker series dropped me. Why?

WND Books Author and Staff Portraits

For the past two months, I’ve been preparing a speech for my upcoming visit to Williams College in Massachusetts. I was invited to speak at the school on behalf of its ‘Uncomfortable Learning’ Speaker Series. The purpose of this program, or “club,” is to provide intellectual diversity in an atmosphere in which debate is heavily influenced by left-leaning scholars.

“There is no learning without being uncomfortable,” Williams College student David Gaines said in 2014. “One cannot learn and grow without being challenged and made to think.”

Funny, ‘uncomfortable’ is the exact word I used in the opening remarks of the speech I’d prepared—before I even knew the title of the speaking series. Here’s the exact paragraph:

My goal for you all, my purpose in being here today, is to inspire you to think for yourselves. Do not be swayed by groupthink no matter what your friends, your family or the culture believe. Do not be afraid to ask yourself questions that may make you uncomfortable. And do not be afraid of the answers.

From there I 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.)

Though my contact didn’t give a reason, the day before he’d sent me this email: “Dear Ms. Venker, A quick heads up…We’ve been advertising the event, and it’s already stirring a lot of angry reactions among students on campus. We just wanted to make you aware of the current state of students before your presentation…”

Despite the fortuitous match between my message and the ‘Uncomfortable Learning Speakers Series,’ my talk was cancelled by the group several days prior to the event.

“Thank you for agreeing to speak,” read the email, “but we’re not going to be able to host this event.”

Though my contact didn’t give a reason, the day before he’d sent me this email: “Dear Ms. Venker, A quick heads up…We’ve been advertising the event, and it’s already stirring a lot of angry reactions among students on campus. We just wanted to make you aware of the current state of students before your presentation…”

When I pressed further as to why the event was being cancelled (though of course I knew why), he conceded that Williams College “has never experienced this kind of resistance” to a campus speaker.

And so, the 'Uncomfortable Learning' speaker series caved.

Naturally, all my preparation went down the drain. I’d even pushed aside a book I’m working on because I felt so strongly about sharing with students some critical facts about women, men, work and family—facts that, despite undermining the feminist cause, are nevertheless true and may have changed both hearts and minds. That is the point of an education, is it not?

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.

Some schools actually set up “safe spaces” for students who are overwhelmed by being confronted with ideas they find hurtful. That would be funny if it weren’t so sad.

Even President Obama, the most progressive president in American history, has denounced this new development on campus. At a town hall event in Iowa last month, he said, “I’ve heard some college campuses where they want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative, or they don’t want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African-Americans or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women. And, you know, I gotta tell you, I don’t agree with that either.”

He adds, “You shouldn’t silence [a speaker] by saying, ‘You can’t come because my—I’m too sensitive to hear what you have to say.’ That’s not, that’s not the way we learn either.”

Indeed it isn’t. But the students who took issue with my appearance are as sensitive as their feminist leaders, who are notorious for cowering in the face of opposition. And I understand why: their arguments are weak. And weak arguments can’t hold up to scrutiny.

Feminists and their followers love to define feminism as a push for ‘equal rights’—as Hillary Clinton did in a recent gush-fest with Lena Dunham—because that’s a benign term with which few would disagree. But "equal rights" is not at all what feminism is about.

What today's feminists want is a new world order, one in which men and women become interchangeable. In other words, whatever men do women must do in equal numbers—and vice versa. As Facebook COO and new feminist activist Sheryl Sandberg told a group of college graduates in 2011, “A world where men ran half our homes and women ran half our institutions would be just a much better world.”

To achieve this sexual utopia, feminists use fear. Everything they preach is predicated on the notion that some great calamity will befall women if they don’t insist that society change to accommodate the injustices American women face. And at the nucleus of this fear is men. It is man—specifically: husbands, employers and the government—that holds women back.

To be sure, that is one interpretation of the world. And it will bring women nothing but misery.

Imagine the possibilities if students at Williams College and elsewhere were exposed to a completely different worldview. Something positive. Something uplifting. Something, dare I say it, empowering?