At the New York Times academics Wendy Williams and Stephen Ceci do their level best to determine and quantify just how objectionable the talk Charles Murray attempted to give at Middlebury College that provoked a violent protest was. What did they find? It was pretty darned mild:
Our data-gathering exercise suggests that Mr. Murray’s speech was neither offensive nor even particularly conservative. It is not obvious, to put it mildly, that Middlebury students and faculty had a moral obligation to prevent Mr. Murray from airing these views in public.
What then should we conclude about the protests and the protesters? It’s possible that the protesters are just brownshirts. They’ve been told that Chareles Murray is doubleplusungood and must be opposed by every means at hand.
It may be that the protesters were simply demonstrating their power—showing who’s boss. They’ve shown it. The inmates are running the asylum now.
It may be that the protesters were far outside the mainstream, not just of American thought but outside the mainstream of notoriously left-leaning academic thought.
Don’t confuse vehemence with rectitude. These protests are just more evidence that we’re entering a post-literate world which will be one that is much more agonistic and untethered to evidence or critical thought.
“The inmates running the aslyum” theme has been slowly growing over the years. IMO, it’s now in full bloom, overwhelming any semblance of common sense or the ability to critically think through issues – let alone support a social environment of tolerance allowing the free speech of different opinions.
The will always be provocateurs. To me the problem is school administrators who lack the stomach to oppose them.
Perhaps it simply means that racists cannot hide from their past. Charles Murray has spent much of his career using bad statistics to justify racist views, and having him speak on campuses, about anything, across the country is normalizing that.
Wonder when “banned on college campuses nation wide” will be used to hype book/video/etc sales.
How much longer until we have a new Index Liborum Prohibitorum and all publications must contain a secular nihil obstat?
Strikes me as more of a consumer thing. They, or their parents have paid a lot to go to those schools so they are entitled to whatever they want. On the college administrators side, they don’t want to lose a single paying customer.
Steve