‘I Don’t Want to Back Down’

Mark Abramson for The Chronicle

In the fourth grade, when Zachary R. Wood was attending public school in Detroit, a teacher told him he was being disruptive because he was asking too many questions.

Mr. Wood, now a junior at Williams College, was not deterred. Today he is questioning why, in his view, conservative thought is suppressed on the campus.

Mr. Wood spent much of his childhood living in disadvantaged neighborhoods in Detroit and in Washington, D.C. Thanks to a scholarship, he was able to transfer to a private school in the fourth grade, where the ambitious student found his footing academically.

During the summer before eighth grade, Mr. Wood began to devour the work of thinkers like Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Cornel West. As he read more and more, he shaped his ideology: a liberal Democrat who nevertheless wanted to hear all perspectives. He enrolled at Williams in 2014.

That October, Randall Kennedy, a Harvard Law professor, came to speak on campus about his 2002 book, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. Mr. Wood asked some of his friends what they thought of the speaker. Their response: He shouldn’t be there; a man arguing that it’s not necessarily wrong for white people to use a racist epithet has no place at Williams. Mr. Wood was taken aback.

Soon after that, he joined Uncomfortable Learning, a student group that aims to promote intellectual diversity by bringing a range of speakers to the campus. It’s funded through anonymous alumni donations. Once he secured a leadership role as a sophomore, he was “ready to make waves,” he says.

That academic year, Mr. Wood invited Suzanne Venker, a longtime critic of feminism, and John Derbyshire, a conservative commentator. He was forced to cancel the former after students protested; Williams’s president canceled the latter.

Mr. Wood also invited the provocative scholar Charles Murray, who spoke with little fanfare; some of his other campus appearances have been far more tense.

Mr. Wood, who recently signed a book deal, spoke with The Chronicle about his experience as a student, the backlash he’s faced for inviting controversial speakers, and why colleges need to fix what he sees as their one-sided ideological approach.

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When you came to Williams as a freshman, what were you expecting it to be like, and what did you actually find?

I was expecting to find a community of inquirers, in an intellectual sense. I was hoping to develop meaningful friendships, relationships with professors, and to really throw myself into the life of the mind and sort of get lost in the world of ideas. I wanted to debate, I wanted to engage, I wanted to challenge. The understanding that I had coming to the college was that gaining a deeper understanding of the world and of humanity means not just that I can defend my own positions and strengthen my ability to do that, but that I can understand what matters to other people and why.

I did develop a number of meaningful relationships with my professors. But a number of my professors would present pretty much exactly what they thought and present it as just the truth: This is what needs to be accepted, this is not something you question.

I can think of a class I’m in right now where it’s already assumed that everyone in this class is on the left. And therefore we don’t even need to think about what conservatives would say. Even questioning a fundamental progressive ideal, which was something I was very interested in doing because I wanted to challenge myself, is not well received.

Can you recall any specific examples of courses where you felt that you couldn’t question something?

I can remember a tutorial that I was in, a course on the history of racial and sexual violence in the United States. The professor was brilliant, and I learned a lot from her. But she came into class with the assumption that there was nothing to learn from our founding fathers, nothing to admire about them. What we needed to understand, according to her, was that they were walking contradictions who said they believed in liberty but they held slaves, and for that reason they were just utterly disreputable and not even worth engaging.

It’s not that I don’t find anything correct or accurate about that perspective. It’s that I honestly felt like I couldn’t even say, “Yes, but there are important things that we learn about the ideals of democracy and pluralism and free speech and the world of ideas from Thomas Jefferson, from Washington.”

Academia is really all about contributing your knowledge, adding and critiquing and refining opinions and beliefs. And to think that we could just leave one side of the ideological spectrum out entirely — I find that to be at odds with the intellectual character of the institution itself.

Talk about your first experience with backlash from a controversial speaker, Suzanne Venker.

Yes, in 2015. At the time, I was part of Uncomfortable Learning. We knew it was going to be controversial, but we didn’t know how controversial it would be.

As soon as I made the Facebook page and booked a room, I was bombarded with phone calls, text messages, posts on the event page itself. So now you’re a men’s-rights activist. So now you’re an antifeminist, huh, Zach. So is this how you deal with your male insecurities. I was getting messages from people saying things like, Make sure you sleep lightly. Watch out when you walk outside your front door.

There were two other leaders of Uncomfortable Learning, and they came to me and said, We’re getting heckled on campus, people are saying things behind our backs. We cannot see how this speech is going to be productive. We think we should cancel. I really didn’t want to cancel, but I understood their reasons. Williams is a very small place, and it’s not easy to have a quarter of the student body resent you. I told them, We’ll do majority rules. So we canceled it.

People were still not happy. Now they were like, You guys are chickens, you couldn’t take being uncomfortable. I said, I’m not going to let this fly. I wrote a scathing critique in the Williams Alternative of everyone who protested thinkers’ right to speak on campus. Eventually I ended up writing something in The Washington Post about the experience, saying, I don’t want to back down on this, I don’t want to let this go.

Then both of my co-presidents said, We’re done, Zach. It’s all you. We can’t deal with this anymore.

You wrote in an op-ed last year that, to your friends and mentors, “There is simply no way a black liberal Democrat from a disadvantaged background can support the idea of a speaker who questions feminism or the number of campus sexual assaults.” Have you felt pressure to conform to the views that others expect of you as a black man?

Yes. It means that you support affirmative action. It means you understand that welfare is important and that poor people need more help. It means that you feel like racism is not just significant but almost paralyzing in this country, that it’s constraining opportunities. And I agree with these things.

But I cannot tell you how many times I have sat down with professors one on one, and I happen to agree with something that a conservative thinker said on a particular issue. And it’s automatically clear to me that if I were to say that, they would be utterly repulsed.

Earlier this semester, I was talking to a professor about Black Lives Matter. I said, I understand the anger. I admire the commitment and the moral compass that guides that commitment, and I support what they’re pushing for. But the issue is far more complicated. Police kill far too many people who are black and white, and police have a difficult job, and we need to consider that. This professor was like, Hold on, hold on, wait a minute, wait a minute. Come on, Zach. Listen. There’s a reason why black people are afraid of the police. And I was like, I agree, sir.

You’ve written about receiving random pat-downs from the police in D.C.

I could sit here if I wanted to and just tell you story after story of the time I saw police do this. But I also understand that there’s a lot of crime in these areas, and that they have jobs to do: protecting communities, preserving order. And there are things that make people look suspect and threatening, and I find them suspect and threatening, too — it’s not just a white police officer. We have to acknowledge that.

Recently we’ve seen intense protests of controversial speakers at the University of California at Berkeley and Middlebury College. Much of the violence was perpetrated by outsiders, but many students did want to shut down the events in question. You’re planning to bring more speakers next academic year. Are you worried about violence at Williams?

It’s something that’s always in the back of your mind, that students will react in a way that’s not just unproductive but destructive. What I’d like to think, though — and I have to give the Williams administration some credit for this — they have made it clear that they want to discuss security and accommodations beforehand and make sure that students like me, who are involved in bringing in the speaker, feel safe, and that they’re committed to trying to make it work.

Will they be willing to do that if I want to bring a very controversial speaker? That remains to be seen. I do think some strides are being made around preventing these destructive things from happening.

You can never really know. All it takes is for one person to start chanting, or one person to start heckling the speaker, and then another person gets up and then another person gets up, and then people storm out. All of these things are sort of socially facilitated.

Where do you draw the line on controversial speakers?

I believe that every citizen of this country who is not inciting violence directly or making a threat has the right to speak. But in terms of speakers I would invite to speak as part of Uncomfortable Learning, I have to think that there is some intellectual value — not that they are right, not that the majority of the evidence is on their side, but that there is intellectual value in engaging with them.

Take Charles Murray. I vehemently disagree with his argument in The Bell Curve. But he wants people to understand what he thinks; he doesn’t just want to incite protest. Someone like Milo Yiannopoulos is a little different. Would I invite him to campus? He would certainly not be the first on my list.

Who is on your list?

One person — and this person isn’t even on the right — is Reginald Dwayne Betts. He has a nuanced perspective on the issue of incarceration that is informed by personal experience in the prison system, and he has an incredible story. I’d also be interested in bringing Alan Dershowitz. I want to find speakers who can speak on issues of religion, so Sam Harris is on my list.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.