The Battle of Middlebury

Rich Lowry

At Middlebury College earlier this month, 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 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. His latest book, 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.

Second, there was the venue. No one has ever mistaken Middlebury, a small Vermont liberal arts college founded by Congregationalists, for Berkeley, and yet it 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 headed for their get-away car, protesters shoved and grabbed Stanger, who was shaken up and later went to the hospital, and pounded on the car and tried to obstruct it.

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 editor of the National Review.(c) 2017 by King Features Synd., Inc.