Protesters disrupt speech by ‘Bell Curve’ author
The New York Times
BOSTON — Hundreds of students at Middlebury College in Vermont shouted down a controversial speaker Thursday night, disrupting a program and confronting the speaker in an encounter that turned violent and left a faculty member injured.
Laurie L. Patton, the president of the college, issued an apology Friday to all who attended the event and to the speaker, Charles Murray, 74, whose book “The Bell Curve,” published in 1994, was an explosive treatise arguing that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites because of their genetic makeup.
“Today our community begins the process of addressing the deep and troubling divisions that were on display last night,” Ms. Patton said in her statement, adding that the Middlebury community had “failed to live up to our core values.” She said that some of the protesters appeared to be from elsewhere but that Middlebury students had also been involved.
The chaotic scene at the small liberal arts college in Vermont drew sharp criticism from the right. Conservatives said the students were intolerant, had engaged in mob mentality and were quashing free speech, while those on the left maintained that the speaker was racist and hateful and had no place on their campus.
The left-leaning Southern Poverty Law Center describes Mr. Murray as a “white nationalist” who uses “racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women and the poor.”
As word spread about the confrontation, commentators weighed in. Bill Kristol, the conservative analyst and editor at large of The Weekly Standard, said on Twitter: “What happened at Middlebury to Charles Murray threatens not just campus free speech, but free speech — indeed freedom in America — generally.”
But an open letter to the college from more than 450 alumni objecting to Mr. Murray’s presence on campus said it was not a matter of free speech. The letter, written before Thursday’s event, said his views were offensive and based on shoddy scholarship and that they should not be legitimized. “In this case, there’s not really any ‘other side,’ only deceptive statistics masking unfounded bigotry,” the letter said.
Ms. Patton, the Middlebury president, said in her apology that there had been “clear violations of Middlebury College policy” against disrupting events, with penalties up to and including suspension. University officials said they were investigating both the disruptions inside the building and the violence outside.
Bill Burger, a spokesman for the college, said: “There are people who are eager to portray college students or the entire higher education establishment as hopelessly out of touch, a bastion of liberal indoctrination, and I think that’s fundamentally false. However, events like last night’s do feed that false narrative.”
Mr. Murray had been invited to the campus by the American Enterprise Institute Club, a group of about a dozen generally conservative-leaning students.
Hayden Dublois, 21, a senior and treasurer of the club, said that the students had thought Mr. Murray — whose 2012 book, “Coming Apart,” examines the white working class — would be interesting to hear in light of the presidential election.
But when Mr. Murray rose to speak, he was shouted down by most of the more than 400 students packed into the room, several witnesses said.