I draw your attention to the New York Times, which earlier this week ran…wait for it…a devastating attack on the students and faculty at Middlebury.
This is the scene in the movie where you hear the record scratch and it goes to freeze-frame.
But wait, there’s more.
The New York Times ran a piece attacking the liberal fascists at Middlebury, and defending Charles Murray, and the piece was written by two college professors.
And you thought the Lord’s resurrection was a miracle.
Here’s what happened: On Sunday, the Times ran an op-ed by two Cornell professors, Wendy Williams and Stephen Ceci.
Williams and Ceci were interested in why the students and faculty at Middlebury reacted so violently (in the literal sense of the word) to Charles Murray’s speech. So they made a transcript of Murray’s remarks and sent it out to 140 college professors. These professors came from different disciplines and different schools. They were asked to read the speech and rate its political character, on a scale of 1 to 9, with 1 being “very liberal,” 9 being “very conservative” and 5 being “middle of the road.” And they were asked to give a brief explanation as to why they chose their score. (Keep in mind, this respondent group was comprised entirely of college professors, so their political frame was likely somewhat to the left of the average person’s.)
Oh, and there was one more detail: Half of the respondents were told that the remarks came from Charles Murray. The other half got only the blind text.
The results will probably surprise you regardless of where you yourself fall on the political spectrum.
The group that read Murray’s speech but didn’t know who had given it gave it an average score of 5.05. That is, as the authors note, almost exactly at the middle of the road. Here are Williams and Ceci explaining some of the reasons that respondents gave for their scores:
Some professors said that they judged the speech to be liberal or left-leaning because it addressed issues like poverty and incarceration, or because it discussed social change in terms of economic forces rather than morality. Others suggested that they detected a hint of discontent with the fact that Donald Trump was elected president. No one raised concerns that the material was contentious, dangerous or otherwise worthy of censure.
Those who know Murray’s work are unlikely to be surprised by these results.
But what was surprising was that the group of professors who knew that the speech was Murray’s came to nearly the same conclusion: They gave it an average rating of 5.77—again, very close to the middle of the road.
Even though their evidence is damning, Williams and Ceci keep their critique measured and collegial, suggesting only that someone like Charles Murray deserves to be treated better by the students and faculty on a college campus. But I’ll go a little further: Their little experiment is further proof that the people at Middlebury who took after Murray have no business being there.
And until college administrators muster the stand to punish students who act like imbecilic fascists, we can expert more of the same.
