| By now, I suspect you’ve heard about what happened when Charles Murray went to Vermont to give a lecture at Middlebury College. But perhaps you have not seen it. The video is here. It is instructive. If you don’t have the stomach (or the time) to watch the whole thing, Murray has written his own reflection on the event, which is worth reading. After protestors took over the lecture hall where Murray was to speak, he and the host (a liberal political science professor) repaired to a nearby studio in order to stream the talk on closed circuit TV. Here’s Murray on what happened next: I started to give an abbreviated version of my standard Coming Apart lecture, speaking into the camera. Then there was the sound of shouting outside, followed by loud banging on the wall of the building. . . . And so it went through the lecture and during my back and forth conversation with Professor Stanger—a conversation so interesting that minutes sometimes went by while I debated some point with her and completely forgot about the din. But the din never stopped. We finished around 6:45 and prepared to leave the building to attend a campus dinner with a dozen students and some faculty members. Allison, Bill, and I (by this point I saw both of them as dear friends and still do) were accompanied by two large and capable security guards. (As I write, I still don’t have their names. My gratitude to them is profound.) We walked out the door and into the middle of a mob. I have read that they numbered about twenty. It seemed like a lot more than that to me, maybe fifty or so, but I was not in a position to get a good count. I registered that several of them were wearing ski masks. That was disquieting. . . . I didn’t see it happen, but someone grabbed Allison’s hair just as someone else shoved her from another direction, damaging muscles, tendons, and fascia in her neck. I was stumbling because of the shoving. If it hadn’t been for Allison and Bill keeping hold of me and the security guards pulling people off me, I would have been pushed to the ground. That much is sure. What would have happened after that I don’t know, but I do recall thinking that being on the ground was a really bad idea, and I should try really hard to avoid that. Unlike Allison, I wasn’t actually hurt at all. The three of us got to the car, with the security guards keeping protesters away while we closed and locked the doors. Then we found that the evening wasn’t over. So many protesters surrounded the car, banging on the sides and the windows and rocking the car, climbing onto the hood, that Bill had to inch forward lest he run over them. . . . Extricating ourselves took a few blocks and several minutes. When we had done so and were finally satisfied that no cars were tailing us, we drove to the dinner venue. Allison and I went in and started chatting with the gathered students and faculty members. Suddenly Bill reappeared and said abruptly, “We’re leaving. Now.” The protesters had discovered where the dinner was being held and were on their way. So it was the three of us in the car again. Long story short, we ended up at a lovely restaurant several miles out of Middlebury, where our dinner companions eventually rejoined us. At the risk of sounding alarmist, this is insane. First things first: This is not a “free speech” issue. It’s an intelligence issue. Charles Murray is not a “provocateur.” He is—along with Robert Putnam and James Q. Wilson—one of the most important sociologists of the last 30 years. He is consistently incisive and anticipatory. He is careful and diligent. His mind works in interesting ways. One does not need to “agree” with Murray—whatever that means in the social science context—in order to profit from listening to him. He’s a very smart man who has spent decades working on public policy questions in a data-driven and idiosyncratic manner. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if you can sit and listen to Murray for an hour and not learn something, then you’re an idiot. And anyone who is so stupid that they can’t tell the difference between Charles Murray and Milo Yiannopoulos is too stupid to be in college. Period, the end. The next problem is that the administration is too caught up in the protest kabuki to do what needs to be done. Whenever there is a campus controversy, college administrators invariably plead with the protestors to “respect freedom of speech” and to remember that “the best way to counter bad ideas is to argue vigorously against them.” But that doesn’t apply to someone like Murray. There’s nothing to argue against. It’s like arguing against linear algebra, or organic chemistry. What Middlebury president Laurie Patton should have done was tell the students: Look, if you’re here to protest you’re a doofus. This isn’t the Ann Coulter Power Hour designed to drum up outrage and sell books. It’s a sociology lecture by a distinguished scholar and if you’re too dumb to understand and are hell-bent on signaling your virtue by making a spectacle of yourself, then I will personally write up your expulsion papers. At this very moment there are a hundred kids in New Jersey waiting to pay full tuition and take your slot. You save the “free speech” / “fight bad ideas” boilerplate for when Steve Bannon comes to campus. And finally, if we’ve reached the point where protestors are putting on masks and tracking their targets to restaurants even after the events, then we are in a truly dangerous place. And the left can’t blame this on Donald Trump. They own it. For all of our sakes, they better fix it. | 