Campus protests became of fixture of late-1960s radicalism, and have had an iconic status in pop culture ever since. There is something almost pantomime about them now, as if they are French revolutions in miniature but without so much bloodshed and little in the way of long-term purpose or effect. It seems the further left a college campus goes socially and politically, the more ritualized such protests become.
That’s the thought which has occurred most to me in the recent protests against the performance artist Milo Yiannopoulos, and most recently the libertarian sociologist Charles Murray, whose March 2 lecture on sociological fragmentation in America provoked a violent protest at the elite Middlebury College. But where the protests against Yiannopoulos, whose entire brand is predicated in trolling the agitated political left, were entirely to be expected, there is something different about the protests against the professorial Murray.
Campus protests always have a ritual quality about them, and if one takes a kind of functionalist, Durkheimian approach to religion, one can observe a good amount of religious zeal producing the mind of social unity that only religion can provide. It is a kind of social fact one expects, especially at so-called secular colleges and universities. The campus protest is a social fact that controls the behavior of all the individuals involved. It has a kind of coercive power. It can be seen in the administration, faculty and students alike, though in different registers.
The Middlebury faculty who signed a protest letter against Charles Murray described him, following the Southern Poverty Law Center, as a “white nationalist” seemed to play a role in fomenting student protest. Most of the letter-signers were clustered around a few humanities disciplines such as English, History, Politics, and Sexuality. Not a single professor from Math or the physical sciences signed the letter. No physicists, no biologists, no calculus professors. Which either means that professors in the much-lauded STEM fields have no conscience, or they quietly observed that what was going on among their colleagues was a kind of madness. One of the professors hosting Murray, Allison Stanger, was appalled that none of her colleagues protesting Murray had ever read anything by him.
Administrators played the role of mediators and guardians, and according to Murray himself, it seems admirably so. The university’s president, Laurie Patton, upheld the importance of free speech and argument: “If there ever was a time for Americans to take on arguments that offend us, it is now.” Indeed. But such high-mindedness was lost on the mob. It is unlikely that Patton will punish those who put Professor Stanger in a neck brace. The college administrators have already played their part.
But it’s Murray’s fear for the students that is especially striking. The students were the ones most caught up into the ritual aspect of the protest, perhaps unsure of what they were doing, but certain that they were required to do something: scapegoat some peripheral member of their community for sins against race, class and gender. The great force controlling the students is evident in Murray’s observation of them:
“Some were just having a snarky good time as college undergrads have been known to do, dancing in the aisle to the rhythm of the chants. But many looked like they had come straight out of casting for a film of brownshirt rallies. In some cases, I can only describe their eyes as crazed and their expressions as snarls.”
That’s bad religion, folks. It’s bad social cohesion. It also happens to be bad politics, and worst of all, it is a bad education. How ironic that it was all in response to Murray’s book — which none of them read — on Americans who live in ideological bubbles, Coming Apart.
There is a sense in which this is something greater than any of those involved. Murray himself called this an “inflection point” for American liberal education. I am not sure if it will be such an inflection point or not. History is often surprising, futurists are often fantasists. But one thing is clear: Murray is right that our elites are in an ideological bubble that has been bad for all of us.
As a professor, it’s the students I care most about. I’d never send my children to a college campus like this one, where professors play out their late-1960s fantasies and foment a mindlessness unworthy of the name “higher education.” The students are each culpable for the part they played, but they are all quite ignorant of the way progressive ideology deforms them.
Murray writes most poignantly of one student in particular: “I remember one in particular, from whom I couldn’t look away for a long time. She reminded me of my daughter Anna. … She looked at me reproachfully and a little defiantly, her mouth moving in whatever the current chant was. I’m probably projecting, but I imagined her to be a student who wasn’t particularly political but had learned that this guy Murray was truly evil. So she found herself in the unfamiliar position of activist, not really enjoying it, but doing her civic duty.”
Conservativism may be falling apart, but so is progressivism, and it will fall apart by failing young women like the one Murray describes. Let’s hope the fever breaks soon.
C.C. Pecknold (@ccpecknold) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is an associate professor of Theology at The Catholic University of America, located in Washington, D.C.
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