By now, I suspect you’ve heard about what happened when Charles Murray went to Vermont to give a lecture at Middlebury College. But perhaps you have not seen it. The video is here. It is instructive.
If you don’t have the stomach (or the time) to watch the whole thing, Murray has written his own reflectionon the event, which is worth reading. After protestors took over the lecture hall where Murray was to speak, he and the host (a liberal political science professor) repaired to a nearby studio in order to stream the talk on closed circuit TV. Here’s Murray on what happened next:
At the risk of sounding alarmist, this is insane.
First things first: This is not a “free speech” issue. It’s an intelligence issue.
Charles Murray is not a “provocateur.” He is—along with Robert Putnam and James Q. Wilson—one of the most important sociologists of the last 30 years. He is consistently incisive and anticipatory. He is careful and diligent. His mind works in interesting ways. One does not need to “agree” with Murray—whatever that means in the social science context—in order to profit from listening to him. He’s a very smart man who has spent decades working on public policy questions in a data-driven and idiosyncratic manner. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if you can sit and listen to Murray for an hour and not learn something, then you’re an idiot.
And anyone who is so stupid that they can’t tell the difference between Charles Murray and Milo Yiannopoulos is too stupid to be in college. Period, the end.
The next problem is that the administration is too caught up in the protest kabuki to do what needs to be done. Whenever there is a campus controversy, college administrators invariably plead with the protestors to “respect freedom of speech” and to remember that “the best way to counter bad ideas is to argue vigorously against them.” But that doesn’t apply to someone like Murray. There’s nothing to argue against. It’s like arguing against linear algebra, or organic chemistry.
What Middlebury president Laurie Patton should have done was tell the students:
Look, if you’re here to protest you’re a doofus. This isn’t the Ann Coulter Power Hour designed to drum up outrage and sell books. It’s a sociology lecture by a distinguished scholar and if you’re too dumb to understand and are hell-bent on signaling your virtue by making a spectacle of yourself, then I will personally write up your expulsion papers. At this very moment there are a hundred kids in New Jersey waiting to pay full tuition and take your slot.
You save the “free speech” / “fight bad ideas” boilerplate for when Steve Bannon comes to campus.
And finally, if we’ve reached the point where protestors are putting on masks and tracking their targets to restaurants even after the events, then we are in a truly dangerous place. And the left can’t blame this on Donald Trump. They own it.
For all our sakes, they better fix it.
