Wrong lesson

Middlebury too lenient with attackers of speech

Middlebury College officials have sent the protesters and rioters who shouted down Charles Murray and injured a professor a very clear message: We may not approve of what you did, but we’re not going to do much about it.

Mr. Murray, a political scientist, went to Middlebury in March. Since his 1994 work “The Bell Curve” set off controversy, he has been reductively tagged as racist. His recent work, however, focuses on the growing divide between white elites and the white working class, which was the topic of his address. Yet the crowd shouted him down, charging racism. Mr. Murray went to another room to be interviewed, but someone pulled a fire alarm.

Out of the roughly 100 to 150 students who stopped the conservative scholar from addressing his audience in person, the college managed to sanction 67. Some of them got probation. Some got notes in their records. Nonegot suspended or expelled.

Meanwhile, local police said they weren’t charging anyone for the disturbance outside a college building that sent professor Allison Stanger to the hospital with neck pain. Not only could they not identify any individual sufficiently clearly, they said, they didn’t think anyone had the intent necessary for assault.

A conservative speaker was shouted down; rioters gathered around his car and injured the liberal professor who dared to interview him. And this is the outcome: no charges and only minor college penalties. Students who think silencing is an acceptable response to ideas they disapprove of, and who acted on that by trying to close their campus to a speaker, will be permitted to graduate froma prominent liberal-arts college.

The point of a liberal-arts education is to prepare students to deal with ideas, including by engaging people they disagree with in productive, mutually respectful conversations. Mr. Murray may hold strong views, but he has always been willing to debate them fairly. He deserved vigorous engagement, not a menacing shout-down.