Posted on 03/07/2017 10:26:58 AM PST by SeekAndFind
At Middlebury College last week, Charles Murray needed a safe space — literally.
In a significant escalation of the campus speech wars, protesters hooted down the conservative scholar in a lecture hall and then roughed up a Middlebury faculty member who was escorting him to a car.
The Middlebury administration commendably tried to do the right thing and stand by Murray’s right to be heard, but was overwhelmed by a yowling mob with all the manners and intellectual openness of a gang of British soccer hooligans.
Sometime soon, we may yearn for the days when college students were merely childish and close-minded. If campus protests of speech begin to more routinely slide into violence, Middlebury will be remembered as a watershed.
First, there was the target. Charles Murray is controversial — mainly for his book The Bell Curve, about IQ — but he is one of the most significant social scientists of our age. He is employed by the prestigious conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, and his books are highly influential and widely reviewed. His latest, which was to be the topic of his Middlebury talk, is Coming Apart, a best-selling account of the struggles of the white working class that illuminated some of the social forces behind the rise of Donald Trump.
No one is bound to accept any of Murray’s ideas, but they are inarguably worth engaging. He exists in a different universe from Milo Yiannopoulos, the alt-right provocateur infamous for saying or doing anything to try to get infamous. That Middlebury protesters can’t tell the difference between the two shows that their endeavor to know or understand nothing outside their comfort zone has been a smashing success.
Second, there was the venue. No one has ever mistaken Middlebury, a small Vermont liberal-arts college founded by Congregationalists, for Berkeley. It doesn’t have a reputation as a hotbed and training ground for rabble-rousers, and yet has given us one of the most appalling episodes of anti-speech thuggery in recent memory. If it can happen at Middlebury, it can happen anywhere (or at least at Swarthmore or Bucknell).
Finally, there was the violence. The students who brought in Charles Murray framed the evening as “an invitation to argue,” and in that spirit asked professor Allison Stanger, a Democrat in good standing, to serve as Murray’s interlocutor. When chanting students commandeered the lecture hall, Stanger and Murray repaired to another room for a live-streamed discussion. Protesters found the room and pounded on the windows and pulled fire alarms. When Murray and Stanger exited at the end of the live-stream and headed for their get-away car, protesters assailed them. They shoved and grabbed Stanger, who was shaken up and later went to the hospital, and pounded on the car and tried to obstruct it.
Stanger wrote afterward that she “feared for my life.” And for what offense? Talking to someone who thinks differently than the average Middlebury faculty member or student.
Political correctness has been a phenomenon on campuses since the 1980s, but now has become much more feral. The root of the phenomenon is the idea that unwelcome speech is tantamount to a physical threat against offended listeners. If this is true, it follows that dissenting speech needs to be shunned (in safe spaces) and attacked (in protests). Shutting down a speaker and literally running him off campus is, from this warped perspective, an entirely justifiable defensive action.
Of course, speech doesn’t threaten anyone. The appropriate response to an erroneous argument is counterargument. And the free exchange of ideas always allows for the possibility that someone will actually learn something.
If campuses aren’t to sink further into their current miasma of illiberalism, administers will have to actively fight the tide of suppression. It’s not enough to say the right things about free speech; they have to punish thuggish student agitators. Otherwise, college campuses may become increasingly unsafe spaces for anyone departing from a coercive orthodoxy.
— Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review
So Rich, you’re fine with it when it happens to people from Brietbart, but not one of your own?
This is what Milo has been showing you morons for years!
Whenever someone appears at a university at the request of that institution to speak and a crowd gets out of hand like this, the police should be called in to arrest the entire bunch of them and they should all be expelled with criminal records.
This is freedom of speech. This is destruction of freedom of speech.
If it were I, I would insist on continuing to speak.
We did choose to stand up. This is about Trump. Trump is about his supporters. And the nuns of the fifties raised me So they are here. Trump is equipped to stand up to this. At this point the nuns would say pray for him. It’s more powerful than people think it is
It is the ABSOLUTE certainty that they are GOOD that allows Leftist’s to go to the extremes that they have done all through history. The Left”s dead are a mountain that dwarves the efforts of any other group.
Yep, it became hate when it became violent. The hate wasn’t there before then.
“Whatever Charles Murray was speaking about must have really struck a nerve?”
I’d bet most of the people who wouldn’t let Charles Murray speak have never read his books. It is his book The Bell Curve that made Murray a permanent enemy of the left, although its conclusions have been distorted beyond recognition by his critics. People used to say, “Social security is the third rail in American politics.” No more. Now, it’s race, with homosexuality being a close second.
We are extremely fortunate for President Trump, but we must participate in ways to show the liberals that we have had enough of their lunacy. Continue to wear Trump campaign paraphernalia for example, lets them know you will not be silenced about your support.
If it annoys them, remember how you felt for the last eight years.
Brown Shirts.
Ironically enough, Middlebury is a whitebread enclave of a college smack in the middle of a whitebread enclave of a state.
Not likely.
Useful Idiots.
Brown Shirts.
What’s coming is the end of a college education as we used to know it. There will soon not be many people left willing to send their children to these ridiculous schools.
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