Photo: Lisa Rathke /Associated Press

Middlebury College students turn their backs to author Charles Murray during his lecture March 2 in Middlebury, Vt. Later, the protest took on a more ominous tone.

Middlebury College students turn their backs to author Charles Murray during his lecture March 2 in Middlebury, Vt. Later, the protest took on a more ominous tone.

The start of something? An assault on free speech at Middlebury

At Middlebury College 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 Murrays 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.

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. He is employed by the prestigious conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, and his books are highly influential and widely reviewed. His latest, 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.

No one is bound to accept any of Murrays ideas, but they are inarguably worth engaging. He exists in a different universe from Milo Yiannopoulos, the alt-right provocateur infamous for saying or doing anything to get infamous. That Middlebury protesters cant tell the difference between the two shows that their endeavor to know or understand nothing outside their comfort zone has been a smashing success.

Second, there was the venue. No one has ever mistaken Middlebury, a small Vermont liberal arts college founded by Congregationalists, for Berkeley. It doesnt have a reputation as a hotbed and training ground for rabble-rousers, 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.

Finally, there was the violence. The students who brought in Murray framed the evening as an invitation to argue and asked professor Allison Stanger, a Democrat in good standing, to serve as Murrays interlocutor. When chanting students commandeered the lecture hall, Stanger and Murray repaired to another room for a live-streamed discussion. Protesters found the room, pounded on the windows and pulled fire alarms. When Murray and Stanger exited at the end of the live-stream and headed for their getaway car, protesters shoved and grabbed Stanger, who later went to the hospital, and pounded on the car and tried to obstruct it.

Stanger wrote afterward that she feared for my life. And for what offense? Talking to someone who thinks differently from the average Middlebury faculty member or student.

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. Shutting down a speaker and literally running him off campus is, from this warped perspective, an entirely justifiable action.

Of course, speech doesnt 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 arent to sink further into the miasma of illiberalism, administrators will have to actively fight the tide of suppression. Its 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.

comments.lowry@nationalreview.com

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