On March 2, 2017, Charles Murray stood before more than 400 students at Middlebury College. Before he could begin his speech, almost all of them stood up and began chanting:
“Racist, sexist, anti-gay, Charles Murray, go away!”
“Your message is hatred. We will not tolerate it!”
“Who is the enemy? White supremacy!”
Murray’s unforgivable sin was The Bell Curve, a 1994 book that posits that human intelligence is influenced by one’s environment and genetics. The book was not the subject of Murray’s lecture that day, but to the clamoring crowd, nothing he could say could absolve his bigotry. Unable to speak over the incessant jeers, Murray was escorted out of the room, only to see the protests turn violent. The crowd pounded on the car he entered, rocked it back and forth, and climbed onto the hood. The professor escorting him ended up in the hospital.
Twenty months later, the small liberal arts college has made a move to repair the damage. The Alexander Hamilton Forum, a new program in Middlebury’s political science department, was launched this fall as a vehicle for civil discourse.
“We aim to encourage the study of American political ideals, their relationship to the enduring questions of political philosophy, and their relevance to contemporary debates in public life,” says Keegan Callanan, assistant professor of political science and director of the Hamilton Forum. “To do this well, we need to engage scholars and thinkers with diverse points of view, including points of view that are uncommon at elite colleges.”
Shortly after the violent protests at the Murray lecture, Callanan co-authored with English professor Jay Parini the “Middlebury Statement of Principles,” which called for civil discourse. Over a hundred Middlebury faculty members signed the statement. Since then, Callanan has spearheaded the program’s formation, modeling it after Princeton’s James Madison Program, where he was a visiting fellow last year.
Although the Murray shutdown sparked discussion about the need for civility in campus discourse, Callanan says he first conceived the idea for the forum in 2013, long before Murray came to Middlebury.
“We even discussed it with a foundation at that time,” he says. The college, he explains, had approved Callanan’s request to seek a grant, but for reasons he leaves unsaid, “it didn’t get off the ground.” At that point, Callanan dropped the plan. After Murray was driven off campus, however, “the idea emerged afresh.”
“There is a rapidly growing awareness in our colleges that an atmosphere of open and civil discourse is essential to the scholarly pursuit and transmission of knowledge,” says Bradford Wilson, the executive director of Princeton’s James Madison Program, in an email. “If the Hamilton Forum succeeds in bringing new perspectives, new voices, and fresh arguments and debates to Middlebury, I don’t doubt that students and faculty alike will be glad to have such an ally in advancing the College’s core academic mission.”
The forum has hosted two events so far. The first was a lecture examining the relationship between church and state. The second event marked the first “Hamilton Forum Dialogue” and brought two legal scholars to debate the impact of President Trump’s judicial appointments.
The Hamilton Forum’s three-person steering committee includes Allison Stanger, the professor of international politics and economics who suffered a concussion as a result of the protest violence. She sees the forum as an important force for change in higher education. “College should be a place where minds are opened and difficult but necessary conversations can take place,” she says via email. “That is why I support the mission of the Hamilton Forum and believe it advances the common good in polarized times.”
Stanger can back up these words with her own experience. As she wrote in an op-ed published barely a week after her injury, she disagreed with Murray’s position but still wanted to moderate his talk.
From the descriptions of the Hamilton Forum’s reception on campus, you’d never know that Middlebury students had ever rejected a speaker for his “hateful” stance, much less break out into violence over it. “It’s been overwhelmingly positive so far, especially among the student body,” says Sam Zieve-Cohen, a senior studying political science. “All events and post-event dinners have been at capacity, and in some cases, demand has far surpassed availability.” Zieve-Cohen works as one of the program’s assistants for the forum. He adds that even before the forum’s inception, “I saw a lot of hunger among the students and among the faculty for a group like this.”
Callanan couldn’t agree more. Despite the 2017 protest’s vehement refusal to grant Charles Murray free speech, he stresses that everyone he has encountered has supported the program’s mission and events. “[The students] want more opportunities for a serious exchange of reasoned arguments across political differences,” he observes. And when it comes to the Middlebury administration, Callanan is emphatic that it “has been wonderfully supportive.”
If the college’s head officials are in fact enthusiastic about the Hamilton Forum, they hesitate to say so themselves. When I reached out to university president Laurie Patton asking what the administration hopes the Hamilton Forum will bring to campus, spokesperson Bill Burger sent a terse reply with a link to the program’s website. “The group operates without administrative oversight, consistent with Middlebury’s principles of academic freedom,” he wrote. He also made sure to note that the program is a “faculty-led organization.”
But even if the administration holds the Hamilton Forum at arm’s length (perhaps to disassociate itself from potentially controversial events in the future), its approval has rendered the Murray nightmare a thing of the past. The forum seems to be carefully avoiding inviting speakers as divisive as Murray, but it has not shied away from bringing weighty and somewhat controversial topics to campus. Upcoming events will examine the fate of Republicanism, the value of capitalism, and the threat of totalitarianism in free societies. As the forum develops, it aims to host approximately one event per month.
Callanan’s vision for the program is both “substantive” and “process-oriented.” In addition to exploring ideas related to the “development of the American polity,” he says, “we want to help cultivate an ethic of fearless questioning that includes a willingness to turn a critical eye upon one’s own opinions and prejudices.”
Zieve-Cohen sees in the Hamilton Forum the potential to rise to the level of the more established programs like Princeton’s. “I hope … that it develops a name for itself,” he says, “such that it can become a program that speakers look forward to visiting and that students and alumni and faculty members can be proud of at the campus.”
The Hamilton Forum could be well on its way to such status—and so preventing the fate of Charles Murray from being repeated in Middlebury’s lecture halls.
