Jeering and chanting Middlebury College students disrupted a planned talk Thursday afternoon by controversial author and lecturer Charles Murray.
Murray is the author of the 1994 book The Bell Curve, which sought to link social inequality to genetics.
As he took the stage in Wilson Hall, students booed, rose and turned their backs to the stage before reading a statement in unison. Students broke into chants of “Hey hey, ho ho, Charles Murray has got to go,” and “Racist, sexist, anti-gay, Charles Murray go away!”
Murray, wearing a suit and tie, stood at the lectern and waited to be heard. The shouts continued:
“Your message is hatred; we cannot tolerate it!”
“Charles Murray, go away; Middlebury says no way!”
After about 25 minutes, and when it became clear the chants would not abate, faculty came onstage and announced plans to move the lecture to a different location. The administrators said Murray’s speech would be live-streamed so he could speak without interruption. Questions for Murray to answer could be submitted using a Twitter hashtag, they said.
The Southern Poverty Law Center considers Murray a white supremacist extremist. Murray, according to the site, “has become one of the most influential social scientists in America, using racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women and the poor.”
The Middlebury campus chapter of the American Enterprise Institute sponsored the speech, which has roiled the liberal arts school for days. A letter signed by more than 450 alumni condemned the lecture as “unacceptable and unethical.”
“It is a decision that directly endangers members of the community and stains Middlebury’s reputation by jeopardizing the institution’s claims to intellectual rigor and compassionate inclusivity,” read the letter submitted to the Middlebury Campus newspaper.
Murray’s daughter attended Middlebury, according to VTDigger.org, which wrote about the controversy on Monday.
“As for giving me too big a soapbox, I will have 45 minutes to indoctrinate the students with my pseudoscience,” Murray told the news site. “The Middlebury faculty has had four years.”
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
I completely disagree with Murray and his message, but the way to counter ideas with which you disagree is not to prevent them from being spoken. The way to counter them is through your own right to speak, with rational argument and evidence. Shutting down people with whom you disagree in order that they not be heard is the stuff of authoritarianism and has no place in a free society, least of all at a place that should be dedicated to the sharing of ideas, even distasteful ones. How much more educational would this have been if Middlebury had set it up as a debate so that some qualified person could have shown how and why Murray was wrong, rather than protesters chanting and shutting down free speech. Being educated means being willing to expose yourself to ideas with which you disagree and being able to show through rational discourse that they are wrong.
The enemies of free speech, scientific inquiry, and reasoned debate must be very proud of the yowling yahoos who attempted to silence Murray. Kudos to the administrators who fashioned an avenue to preserve Middlebury’s good name and reputation as a bastion of inquiry, even for views that are controversial, distasteful, and repugnant. I wonder if the yahoos were Middlebury students? The school has a reputation for landing the best and brightest students. Clearly the yahoos could not be Middlebury-quality.
It’s tempting and easy to take the “high road” and look down on intolerant protesters with little appreciation for civil discourse or the First Amendment, but the real failure here is departmental and institutional. “Racist pseudoscience” — if the Southern Poverty Law Center’s characterization is correct — does not merit a platform at our universities to legitimize itself. Such extremism and alternative facts have increasingly been cloaking themselves in the mantle of the normal distribution. They don’t belong, not even for forty-five minutes.
Students of the American Enterprise Institute Club can be forgiven for thinking Murray provocative rather than dangerous and irresponsible, but Middlebury’s academic leaders should have known better.
Under the circumstances, the students who refused to listen politely or to patiently await a chance to ask some pointed questions, made the most eloquent statement .
Murray has no place in college campuses. His pseudo-science and bogus research justify white supremacy. His 1994 book caused so much pain in my own son, I had to spend years reassuring him that skin color had nothing to do with his intellectual abilities. Opportunities and a safe, healthy and nurturing environment are everything a child needs to develop their full potential. Murray justifies the taking of opportunities and the murdering of dreams of dark skinned people. In my view, he is a criminal.
To put it simply, the motivation behind the protest was not to oppose to his freedom of speech. It was in opposition to Middlebury, an academically rigorous school that encourages students to educate themselves with facts – not misinterpreted data and racist/sexist/ableist/homophobic views, approving a student organization to host a lecture by a man who has been labeled as a white supremacist. Allowing such a person on campus is blatantly disrespectful to all that Middlebury states it supports – inclusion and equality of all students despite differences in socioeconomic, gender, racial backgrounds, etc. Giving Charles Murray a platform to try and justify his hate speech is disgraceful and anti-intellectual, especially when considering he has not been published in any peer reviewed journals and scholars have found his research in his books to be misleading at best.
If you shout down a Charles Murray before he could speak at Middlebury, you are one step away from a Buecherverbrennung. One step. Among the Middlebury students today are not only the best and the brightest, but also a violent minority which does not want to face facts, only lives for their dream the world, they think, should be. Alas, facts catch up with dreams, even if you beat an accomplished thinker over it . How this minority ever got into the college is something the college has to answer. Expel them.
Axel M Neubohn.
There is a war going on in America, a war to institute totalitarian rule by the few. When the traitors to American liberties appear, they will be disguised in a cloak of PC. But they are the enemies of freedom.