Williams College has developed a robust curriculum in what its more outspoken social justice warriors call Fat Studies. Regular offerings over the years have included a seminar titled Don’t Tell Me to Love My Body, a workshop on Fatphobia and Body Liberation, and sundry other learning opportunities where undergraduates could expand their consciousness to match their waistlines. A Williams biology professor, troubled by the assault on empirical science these events represent when it comes to health problems caused by obesity, recently published a careful and restrained account in Heterodox STEM, declining to name names out of professional courtesy.

The Babbling Beaver labors under no such compunctions.

The 2026 Michael A. Dively ’61 Lecture on LGBTQ+ Life and Cultures — endowed by a formerly closeted Republican Michigan state legislator who found his true calling funding queer theory at his alma mater — presents this year’s adipose luminary: Da’Shaun L. Harrison, self-described “Black, fat, queer and trans theorist and abolitionist,” and author of Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness.

Harrison’s thesis, stated without embarrassment, is that observing a person’s obesity is an act of racism; that medicine’s interest in weight loss is rooted in white supremacy; and that the entire edifice of nutritional science is a racial project dressed up in a lab coat. Cornell’s gender studies department arrived at similar conclusions and responded with pole dancing therapy.

Harrison made it clear: your scale is racist, your doctor is a Klansman, and the Cheetos are innocent. Corpulent Williams students in attendance, each paying $84,000 a year for the privilege, nodded gravely. One was overheard whispering that the buffet table at the reception was, itself, a form of reparations.

Williams is paying for this. We all may be laughing but Williams’ STEM professoriate is not.