HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: A Campus Free Speech Case Study Emerges In Vermont.
Vermont’s elite Middlebury College is gearing up for a test of its commitment to open discourse and free speech this week, when political scientist Charles Murray visits the school on Thursday. . . .
As must be expected every time a speaker to the right of Noam Chomsky visits campuses these days, protests are being planned for the day of Murray’s visit and dozens of recent alumni have signed a petition condemning him. Fliers have been circulating on campus accusing Murray of denying the “humanity” of persons of color in a book he coauthored called “The Bell Curve”, which analyzed sophisticated but controversial data sets which purported to show that black Americans and poor Americans have lower average IQs than wealthier and whiter Americans.
Middlebury College will not be paying Murray to speak; a student chapter of the American Enterprise Institute is using its own funds to bring him to Vermont. Middlebury’s Political Science department, however, has agreed to promote and co-sponsor the event. Department chair Bertram Johnson says he asks two basic questions when considering whether to sponsor a lecture: “Is it related to political science and is there sufficient interest that it would generate student interest and attendance?” Meanwhile, Middlebury College President Laurie Patton plans to attend the lecture because, as her spokesman put it, “Our view is that if we stand for anything, it’s the free exchange of ideas.”
Good for Johnson and Patton. This is precisely the kind of statement that administrators should be making in favor of open political discourse. Others, meanwhile, can protest if they would like to, but we hope they will give Murray a chance to speak. As the prominent liberal commentator Van Jones eloquently put it earlier this week, administrators and faculty who restrict speech on campus and the students who demand such restrictions “are creating a kind of liberalism that the minute it crosses the street into the real world, that is not just useless, but obnoxious and dangerous.”
It also encourages ignorance, which is fitting given that the subject of Murray’s lecture is his 2012 book “Coming Apart”. In the book, Murray argues that upper middle class whites have no awareness of how most of the country lives, what it believes, or the challenges their fellow citizens face with drugs, family breakdown, economic headwinds, and declining social trust.
Students at elite institutions are demanding to remain ignorant. But why should anyone care what they think? They don’t know anything.