Image courtesy of www.bu.edu.
By now, many of you have heard of the Suzanne Venker debacle. For those of you who haven’t heard about it, here’s a quick summary: a student group called Uncomfortable Learning invited prominent antifeminist Suzanne Venker to Williams College to give a lecture on what’s wrong with feminism. Some of the students who oppose Venker’s views organized a counter-event with the objective of providing a contrasting viewpoint and facilitating debate. Uncomfortable Learning then disinvited Venker, citing student backlash as the cause, and news and media outlets seized the opportunity to write about “coddled millennials” and “censorship of conservative views on college campuses.” However, these media outlets don’t have the story quite right, so I’m here to clear up some of those myths.
Myth # 1: Uncomfortable Learning is associated with the Gaudino Fund and is the same thing as the Gaudino Fund’s “Uncomfortable Learning” series of courses and lectures. This is false on both counts. The Gaudino Fund is affiliated with the college at a much higher level than the student group Uncomfortable Learning. The Gaudino Fund sponsors a fellowship for the Gaudino Scholar as well as courses and events entitled “Uncomfortable Learning.” The student group Uncomfortable Learning is a handful of students funded by a group of alumni who prefer to remain anonymous. It is completely unrelated to the Gaudino Fund, and unfortunately, its student leadership chose a name for their organization that already belonged to an already-established campus institution, causing the confusion. It was the student group that invited and then disinvited Suzanne Venker, not the Gaudino Fund.
Myth # 2: The students who oppose Venker’s views wanted to make sure her event was cancelled in order to silence conservative views on campus. Again, this is entirely untrue. The counter-event consisted of a table in the Paresky Center where students could discuss feminist views as a counterpoint to Venker’s antifeminist views. Many of the counter-events organizers and attendees also planned to attend Venker’s talk in order to engage with the speaker and challenge her views in order to promote healthy intellectual discourse and debate over the issue of feminism and were very disappointed when the event was cancelled.
Myth # 3: The college administration canceled Suzanne Venker’s event because they caved to pressure from students who didn’t want her to be heard. This is so wildly incorrect it’s not even funny. First, it was the student group Uncomfortable Learning alone that canceled Venker’s lecture. The college administration had nothing to do with it. Second, as was emphasized in the discussion of Myth Number 2, the students who oppose Venker’s views and organized the counter-event wanted to hear what she had to say, and the so-called massive student backlash cited by many media and news outlets as the reason for Venker’s event’s cancellation is a gross exaggeration and misrepresentation of the actual reaction of the student body. The actual reason for the Venker’s disinvitation is shrouded in speculation, hearsay, and possible posturing. Zach Wood, one of Uncomfortable Learning’s student leaders, wrote in the Williams Alternative that the event was cancelled due to “the vehement reactions of students diametrically opposed to bringing Venker…to campus.” While Wood did cite certain vitriolic Facebook posts as examples of these “vehement reactions,” it’s hard to believe that Uncomfortable Learning could be cowed into disinviting its speaker by the caustic arguments of a very small number of students, especially since the majority of the student body, even those who oppose Venker’s views, wanted her to come to campus and deliver her presentation. Many students speculate that after seeing online opposition to Venker’s views and the Facebook page for the counter-event, Uncomfortable Learning chose to become a martyr and claim the censorship of any and all conservative opinions on campus rather than face the students opposition to its speaker’s views. A rumor is circling around campus that Uncomfortable Learning uncovered Venker’s prior statements on campus rape and college rape culture (which can be found here and here on her website), chose to disinvite Venker because it didn’t want to bring those particular views onto campus, and then cited student opposition as the cause of the disinvitation rather than admit their mistake. However, this is unconfirmed, and the true reason for the event’s cancellation has yet to be identified and proven.
Myth # 4: Williams College students are just a bunch of voluntarily ignorant coddled millennials trying to insulate themselves from any ideas that make them uncomfortable or don’t 100% align with their own. Nope. We were ready to engage with views that clashed with our own. We were happy to welcome different ideas into our intellectual community. News and media outlets, particularly those staffed by Gen X and Baby Boomer writers, have seized upon this incident to further their argument that millennials have been babied and can’t handle new ideas (yes, FOX News and Washington Post, I’m talking about you). We, both as millennials and students of Williams College, are much more mature and open-minded than older generations give us credit for, and it’s really a shame that what could have been a wonderful opportunity for debate and discourse at Williams was grossly mishandled and turned into a terrible smear on our public image as an institute of higher learning.
While nobody (save for the student leaders of Uncomfortable Learning and others involved in the heart of the controversy) knows the exact details of everything that happened, some of the biggest myths surrounding the issue have hereby been busted. The speech that Suzanne Venker prepared for her lecture at Williams is available here, and the articles about the incident in the Williams Record are available here and here.