So the eminent author and social scientist Charles Murray gave a speech at Harvard last week. Ordinarily that wouldn’t be terribly newsworthy—eminent authors give speeches at distinguished universities every day of the week and sometimes even on weekends.
But these are not ordinary times. When Murray visited Middlebury College in March, his public engagement had to be canceled for fear of violent protests. Instead, a video interview with a faculty moderator was streamed from a secure location. As Murray and Professor Allison Stanger left that location to depart for dinner, they were set upon by a mob that roughed up Stanger, who was taken to the emergency room with a concussion and other injuries.
The news last week was that nothing like that happened at Harvard. Murray was kind enough to write an after-action report for The Weekly Standard’s website. Here is part of what he had to say:
I was apprehensive as I flew to Boston on Wednesday [Sept. 6]. Protests were being organized for the lecture I was to give at Harvard that evening, and the intel made me think that another Middlebury might be in the works. Many of Harvard’s undergraduates are infected by the same virus that’s been going around elsewhere (“There’s no right to free speech for evil people, and we know who’s evil.”) And there were the guys in ski masks to worry about. Surely antifa and Black Bloc have flourishing chapters in a place like Cambridge. Getting beaten up wasn’t a concern. At Middlebury, Professor Allison Stanger did get beaten up, badly, as we struggled to get to the car, and that did not go unnoticed by college administrators. Since then, every campus I have visited has made sure that I got lots of police protection. But I did think it was likely that the students would be chanting and wouldn’t stop, fire alarms would be set off, and I wouldn’t be able to speak. For that to have happened at Harvard would have been a disaster. If a nerdy, inoffensive speaker like me, lecturing on themes from Coming Apart (not a controversial book), could be shouted down at Harvard, we would be faced with a scary new normal. If not even Harvard, with all its resources, would protect free speech against the mob, then why would less exalted institutions be expected to do so? If a small minority of students gets to decide who is allowed to speak even at Harvard, what institution would hold the line? But happily, my lecture went off without a hitch. The audience was attentive, or at least quiet. About 10 minutes in, a dozen students, a few holding signs, got up and left, but they made no attempt to disrupt the lecture. There was half an hour of Q&A, with no holds barred on the questions I was asked and no holding back on my answers—just as a Q&A should be. How did Harvard do it?
For the answer to that question, The Scrapbook encourages you to read the rest of Murray’s article. But we will summarize the answer: The grownups did what grownups are supposed to do. And so did the students, for that matter.
Still and all, The Scrapbook confesses to feeling both cheered and depressed by the story. In our younger days, the late Ben Wattenberg wrote a book with one of the most memorable titles ever, The Good News Is the Bad News Is Wrong. It came to mind when we heard Murray’s Harvard appearance had come off successfully: The bad news is that this good news is newsworthy.
