At Middlebury College last week, 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 Murray’s 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.
Sometime soon, we may yearn for the days when college students were merely childish and closed-minded. 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 bestselling account of the struggles of the white working class that illuminated some of the social forces behind the rise of Donald Trump.
Watch disgusting anti-free speech behavior by Middlebury College thug students:
Second, there was the venue. No one has ever mistaken Middlebury, a small Vermont liberal-arts college founded by Congregationalists, for Berkeley. It doesn’t have a reputation as a hotbed and training ground for rabble-rousers, and yet has given us one of the most appalling episodes of anti-speech thuggery in recent memory.
Finally, there was the violence. The students who brought in Charles Murray framed the evening as “an invitation to argue,” and in that spirit asked Professor Allison Stanger, a Democrat in good standing, to serve as Murray’s interlocutor. When chanting students commandeered the lecture hall, Stanger and Murray repaired to another room for a livestreamed discussion.
Protesters found the room and pounded on the windows and pulled fire alarms. When Murray and Stanger exited at the end of the livestream and headed for their getaway car, protesters assailed them. They shoved and grabbed Stanger, who was shaken up and 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 than the average Middleburg faculty member or student. – NYP
WFB- Jay Parini, a left-leaning English professor at Middleburg College, condemned students at his school during an appearance Tuesday night on Fox News for not letting the prominent conservative political scientist Dr. Charles Murray speak on campus last week.
Host Tucker Carlson started the segment by assuming that Parini does not hold conservative political views.
“Oh God no,” Parini responded.
Carlson noted that Parini was distressed by the unwillingness of Middlebury students to hear viewpoints with which they disagree.
Watch the condemn the actions of leftist students for their violent actions against conservative professor Charles Murray:
