Editor’s note: Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political columnist.
[S]ome people never learn. Or even if they do, they are unable to change.
Compulsive gamblers. Love-struck teenagers. Reality show fans.
And it seems, college professors, as illustrated by the latest effort by some of them at Middlebury College to prevent someone of whom they disapprove from making a speech there.
The disapproval may be well-placed. Over the years, Charles Murray has done much to deserve it.
The effort to stop him from speaking is simply inane, and not just because it is contrary to the values of free inquiry and open discourse that colleges and universities are supposed to protect.
But also because it’s politically brain-dead.
The surest way to build someone up is to try to shut them up. By raising objections to Murray’s appearance at the college, the protesting professors have awarded him thousands of dollars worth of free publicity.
It took roughly 48 hours to prove that point at Middlebury. According to Bill Burger, the college’s vice president for communications, Murray was originally scheduled to speak Thursday at Dana Auditorium, capacity about 250.
All it took was some kvetching from a couple of professors to raise the profile of Murray and his speech, now tentatively scheduled to take place in Wilson Hall, where more than 400 can fit. Thanks to that kvetching, among that 400 will likely be reporters and TV news crews who otherwise wouldn’t have bothered.
[O]ne would have thought that by now professors would have figured this out. They are scholars, who presumably understand how to extrapolate what will happen on the basis of what has happened.
What has happened when students and faculty try to stop someone from speaking is that: (1) the speaker speaks anyway; (2) to a larger crowd; (3) making him a bigger draw on the lecture circuit; (4) making the college and the faculty that tried to prevent the speech look like would-be totalitarians.
Or worse. At the University of California at Berkeley a few weeks ago, when some students and faculty objected to an appearance by alt-right bad-boy Milo Yiannopoulos, non-student troublemakers joined the demonstration and turned it violent. The speech was cancelled, but the loser was not Yiannopoulos; it was the university.
The debate at Berkeley revealed academia at its most pompous and ignorant. At one point, a statement from some faculty members proclaimed “we support robust debate, but we cannot abide by harassment, slander, defamation, and hate speech.”
Somebody should tell those professors that it is not up to them to determine what they will abide (much less “abide by”, which is simply the wrong term). They will abide whatever happens.
Then remind them that slander, defamation, and hate speech are constitutionally protected even if some of it can get one sued.
[T]he comparable declaration at Middlebury came from professor Laurie Essig of the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies who said she was “saddened and perplexed that a person who has no scholarly record – that is, he has never held an academic appointment nor published in peer reviewed journals-is being presented as a scholar rather than a right wing polemicist.”
Well, bully for you. Since when did one have to have been published in peer-reviewed journals to be allowed to speak at Middlebury? Students should hear from right- (and left-) wing polemicists from time to time. Surely Middlebury has hosted politicians, businesspeople, poets and novelists without peer review credits. Perhaps students there have even heard from that lowest form of professional life, the journalist, with or without publication in an approved scholarly journal.
In fairness, some of the Middlebury professors don’t want to ban Murray, merely to adjust the program.
“It’s OK to listen to him,” said Michael Sheridan, chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, “but in order to really serve our community the way to plan this event is not for him to just stand up and give a talk but to engage (in) some sort of structured discussion or debate.”
Maybe a good idea, but this is not Sheridan’s business. Murray was invited by the college’s American Enterprise Institute club, a recognized campus club. It is paying him. Its leaders get to decide what kind of event to hold.
There is no mystery about why some Middlebury professors are ill at ease about Murray’s appearance. Murray has written several books, but he is best known for “The Bell Curve,” the 1994 book he co-authored with psychologist Richard Herrnstein.
“The Bell Curve” is often assailed for being racist. It is, but it is worse than that. It is possibly the greatest social science fraud since “The Protocols of the elders of Zion” of 1903.
Not the same kind of fraud. The authors of that Russian forgery knew they were being dishonest. Murray and Herrnstein may have believed what they wrote, that blacks have less intellectual ability than whites. But when other scholars examined their sources, they found countless errors, misinterpretation (or downright misuse) of statistics, distortion of data. All this is spelled out in the book, “The Black-White Test Score Gap,” edited by Christopher Jenks and Meredith Phillips, published in 1998.
It gets worse. Everything about “The Bell Curve,” including the way conservative advocacy groups (including the American Enterprise Institute, the parent organization of the campus club) used their money and connections to buy intellectual respectability for a book that didn’t deserve it, reeks of dishonesty.
But it was almost a quarter of a century ago. Murray was invited to Middlebury to discuss his more recent book. “Coming Apart,” which has been respectfully reviewed even by some liberal critics who disagree with him. Perhaps he has something to say worth hearing.
Or perhaps not. It doesn’t matter. Some students invited him. People who don’t want to hear him can stay home. Politically, that would their smart move.
Sheridan and some other professors are unhappy that the political science department is co-sponsoring Murray’s speech. The department chair, Bert Johnson, said the club “wanted a symbolic co-sponsorship from the department. My standard is – is it related to political science and is there sufficient interest that it would generate student interest and attendance?”
There is hope for academia yet.
