Editor’s note: This commentary is by Gwendolyn Hallsmith, a lifelong activist and author who is a founder of Global Community Initiatives, Vermonters for a New Economy, and Solidarity Vermont, a clearinghouse for people who are interested in active resistance to injustice, poverty, environmental destruction, violence, and oppression in all their forms.
[T]he finger-pointing, blame and negative publicity from the incident at Middlebury College has been a wake-up call for a rather sleepy corner of Vermont, best known until now for cows, maple syrup and Bill McKibben. Do brown-shirted thugs hide in the bushes over there, waiting to pounce on unsuspecting conservative authors? Are the faculty and administration ready to roll out a new eugenics program and restart the horrific process of sterilizing people considered genetically inferior?
The Middlebury incident unfortunately provides those of us who adhere to non-violence an excellent case study about how things can go really, really wrong in an otherwise successful political action. I’ll begin my critique with an acknowledgement of my own bias … I support the long tradition of civil disobedience that was at the core of the incident. Non-violent protests against the structures of oppression like racism, environmental destruction, fascism and human impoverishment are important forms of expression and are one of the only ways that ordinary people have effected positive, democratic change over time. Defining violence carefully is an important part of this work, and the Middlebury incident gives us fresh insight into all its obvious and hidden forms.
Mistakes were made by people with good intentions — on both sides. There is no question about that. Both sides have also engaged in a bit of what we might generously call “spin” to deflect their own level of responsibility for an unfortunate sequence of events. This is normal human behavior, to be sure, even if it clouds the truth.
Yet demonizing the other side with judgments like fascist, brown shirt, white supremacist, thug, eugenicist, the sad list goes on, is another form of more subtle violence that makes matters worse. The structural, embedded violence of historical white male privilege, which has victimized people of color, women … anyone, really, who is not wealthy, white and male, also lies at the heart of the matter here. These two forms of violence take place on the level of our human spirit, our sense of dignity, our sense of self. For the students of color at Middlebury, the college was inflicting this form of violence on them when it agreed to let Charles Murray speak.
Mistakes are human. If we could set the demonization aside and learn from our mistakes, perhaps there could be a positive result that comes out of a bad situation. I have listed what I consider the mistakes on both sides, in the hopes of being a voice that acknowledges both sides – sides which could start to demonstrate a bit more willingness to walk in the other’s shoes.
Middlebury College
As a respected institution of higher learning, Middlebury plays an important role in shaping dialogue and knowledge. They are expected to be objective, and to allow all points of view to be heard. Yet even with that in mind, here are some of the mistakes I believe Middlebury made:
• Middlebury failed to either develop or enforce a reasonable policy for what constitutes scholarship on controversial subjects worthy of their imprimatur. I do not think Middlebury would invite widely debunked lecturers on whether the Holocaust was real, or whether all Caucasian professors were descended from alien illuminati, even though books by people who are considered academics have been published on these subjects.
Charles Murray’s writings on genetics, intelligence, gender and race demonstrate such serious flaws in method and assumptions that any respected institution of higher learning might question his conclusions and overall scholarship prior to giving him a platform that, in the words of professor Allison Stanger, lent him “academic credibility.”
• Middlebury’s administration failed to listen to and accommodate the students and faculty who objected to Murray’s talk. Murray is a highly questionable person to bring to a campus where students and alumni of color complain about the low level of awareness and training staff and faculty have about racism. Eight hundred people on campus, including the vast majority of Middlebury’s students of color, objected to his talk in advance. Their requests for accommodation were ignored — everything from having a balanced debate to asking the president not to introduce Murray. The college inflicted institutional violence on their own students with the level of support they showed Murray in advance and following the incident.
• The Middlebury administration failed to recognize a clear and present danger to their faculty and students when negotiations with the protesters in advance of the talk did not result in agreement on limits to the action. In the Trump era, their choice of topics can be seen as more than provocative, much more than a simple question of “academic objectivity.” Even in a First Amendment case (which this isn’t), yelling fire in a crowded theater is not protected speech.
In my opinion, the students’ First Amendment rights to protest and assemble are much more of an issue here than Murray’s “right” to speak.
• When protesters were blocking the entrance to the building and/or their path to the car, Middlebury’s faculty and security failed to insure that both those inside and outside the building could be safe, choosing instead to force their way through an angry crowd. Local police could have been called to provide everyone with safe passage. The faculty and speaker could have waited in the makeshift studio until the coast was clear. There were lots of options, none were taken. Injuries resulted.
• After making these four mistakes, the ongoing posture of the college to sponsor, support and provide Murray with the full college backing to the national press and the Vermont community was, in hindsight, one of their biggest mistakes. It came at the expense of their faculty, students, and ultimately their reputation as a college.
I listed Middlebury’s mistakes first because I think the weight of responsibility for this incident falls on their shoulders. It was an event on their campus, college faculty and official student organizations were involved, and college security staff took steps that escalated a highly charged situation. For students who have not attained the age of majority, the college is “in loco parentis,” and their actions should put the safety and well-being of these young people above all else. All else – including especially the privileges (not rights) of this dubious academic to speak.
All the sturm und drang about Murray’s First Amendment rights are nonsense – Middlebury is not the government and they have both a right and a responsibility to limit what is said in their name on their campus. If Middlebury punishes the non-violent protesters for their very effective closure of his talk, then Middlebury students will find this out the hard way. In my opinion, the students’ First Amendment rights to protest and assemble are much more of an issue here than Murray’s “right” to speak.
The Protesters
As I said earlier, I generally support the efforts of the protesters to use non-violent direct action to demonstrate their opposition to the ideas Murray espoused. I don’t think there is any contradiction in this … he represents a form of institutionalized violence and oppression that is worthy of censure and ridicule. That said, they also could have been more effective if they had avoided any actions that could be construed as violent, and if they had avoided what I think are these mistakes:
• Failing to involve all those who were planning to attend the protest in planning and training in advance. Clear objectives needed to be set, and leadership was needed to make sure everyone understood what they were. Clear guidelines about the limits to the actions at the protest and non-violent discipline were also needed.
It makes no sense at all to me why protesters thought that blocking him leaving the building or leaving campus would be a good idea. The optics of an action should always be at the forefront of your mind … not merely seizing the opportunity for any possible act of resistance, as futile and counterproductive as it might be.
• Putting out a call for non-violence monitors, and training as many people as possible to be monitors would also have been a wise thing to do. These monitors might have dissuaded the people blocking an entrance or interfering with a vehicle with adequate advance training.
I recognize it is not always possible to limit who shows up to a widely publicized event like this, but with all the communication channels we have available, we can at least try to insure that it is clear to people who want to participate that they need to receive training, and that all the advance planning and training includes how to deal with outside provocateurs. I personally don’t think that truly “outside” provocateurs were involved here, i.e., misguided people who came to intentionally make the protesters look bad. But from the outside, it seems there might have been better coordination between the students and the members of the greater community who came.
I was not there. I did not see what happened. There are so many discontinuities with the different firsthand accounts I have read (Murray, Stanger, students, community members) that I think unless videos and photographs surface of the incident, it will be hard to get to the truth, if there is such a thing hidden in the chaos that occurred.
Why is non-violence the only way forward? This incident demonstrates that truth so clearly it screams at you. All the talk in social media about “punching a fascist” that might have been emulated by the people who blocked Murray is not going to get us anywhere except deeper into fascism and violence. One commentary in VTDigger said that proper response to this event should be for every leader in Vermont to give Murray a platform to speak. The incident was covered by national media, making Murray a victim and a folk hero to people who already sympathized with him, which ultimately made matters worse, from the point of view of the protesters – it seriously detracted from the legitimate goal of taking away his platform. Was Vermont, and Middlebury, “played” by Murray and the American Enterprise Institute? If not, the incident certainly gave them more positive publicity than they ever could have hoped.
What is violence in the context of political action? This requires a lot more space than I will use here, but in my practice it has included property damage, physical confrontation of any sort – pushing, forcing, anything that is intended to achieve a dominant force over someone else, and judgmental language that labels, blames, shames, and again, aims at dominance. People disagree with me, quite often, on this point, but I think the relatively small bit of violence at this event shows how true it is.
It is heartening to learn that the Addison County Restorative Justice Services have been engaged to help find a path forward for the students and the others involved in the incident. Given the context, treating students like criminals or taking academic disciplinary action that would further subject them to institutionalized violence would be entirely the wrong path. My hope is that in the restorative justice process, the college is also held accountable for their actions that led to this regrettable story.
Gwendolyn Hallsmith and her colleagues will be offering training in non-violent direct action this spring and summer, people can write to her at gwenhs@gmail.com for more information.
