Over the weekend, the New York Times published a Letter to the Editor expressing support for students who derailed Charles Murray’s Middlebury lecture earlier this month, brazenly referring to Murray as “an advocate of eugenics-oriented bigotry.”
The letter, written by Robert Weisbuch, professor emeritus of English at the University of Michigan, baselessly recycles widely-debunked smears against Murray’s scholarship to depict him as an unequivocal racist.
“African-American children are exposed continually to the insidious cultural message that they are inferior in cognition to whites,” Weisbuch writes, continuing to ask, “When an advocate of eugenics-oriented bigotry appears on campus, is it any wonder that students of color and their friends would cry out: No more! We won’t hear it!’?”
Weisbuch also accuses Murray of “[packaging] hate speech in a box of scholarly jargon,” something he calls an “old, old meanspirited ploy.”
The letter comes in response to Frank Bruni’s column on the Middlebury incident wherein Bruni condemned the “ideological conformity” of campus liberals, but contends his “application” of that argument is “misplaced” when it comes to Middlebury given the allegedly objectionable nature of Murray’s work.
After enduring more than two decades of similar attacks, Murray is accustomed to swatting away unfounded accusations of racism derived from egregious misrepresentations of his scholarship. After the president of Virginia Tech last year iterated claims similar to those Weisbuch made this weekend in the paper of record, Murray penned a comprehensive rebuttal, debunking common misconceptions point by point.
“For two decades, I have had to put up with misrepresentations of The Bell Curve. It is annoying,” he wrote, noting, “so many of the book’s main arguments have been so dramatically vindicated by events, and […] our presentations of the meaning and role of IQ have been so steadily reinforced by subsequent research in the social sciences, not to mention developments in neuroscience and genetics.”
Respected academics across the ideological spectrum acknowledge the value of Murray’s work and have defended him vehemently against claims of racism. In direct response to the Middlebury protest, conservative Princeton professor Robbie George and liberal Harvard professor Cornel West issued a powerful statement on free speech that has since been signed by dozens of academics, including the female Middlebury professor who was hospitalized by her own students.
More importantly, Weisbuch’s reflexive opposition to Murray appears to have clouded from his interpretation the single most important point Frank Bruni made.
In the very column Weisbuch is objecting to, Bruni expressed firm support for protests, which he sees as “vital.” In fact, the most critical element of Bruni’s argument was to distinguish healthy protests from what happened at Middlebury. “The protesters didn’t use Murray’s presence as an occasion to hone the most eloquent, irrefutable retort to him,” Bruni observed, “They swarmed and swore.”
Though he condemned the violence, Weisbuch defended the decision students made to “turn their backs on Murray” and exclaim their refusal to “hear” his lecture.
But can any of those students actually express that “most eloquent, irrefutable retort to him” Bruni challenged them to? Can Weisbuch himself make that argument? I ask only because it was entirely absent from his letter to the Times, which belied a familiar but tired misunderstanding of Murray’s work articulated for years by people who have not bothered to truly engage with it.
That is exactly what happens when we “turn our backs” on our ideological opponents.
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
