Mar 11th 2017
The Economist
Middlebury College and the generational clash
within liberalism
Free speech, once a central value of liberalism, has
been claimed by conservatives
“PART of the job
of an intellectual community,” said Laurie Patton, president of Middlebury
College in Vermont, “is to argue.” Introducing Charles Murray, a controversial
author, on March 2nd, she emphasised the audience’s right to non-disruptive
protest. Excitable students who thought Mr Murray unacceptably prejudiced—one
of his books touches on the relationship of race to intelligence, though he has
also written on the white working class—evidently considered that offer
insufficient.
Their protests
quickly escalated from jovial catcalling to prohibitive heckling and then—after
Mr Murray was interviewed on camera by Allison Stanger, a Middlebury professor,
in a separate room—into violence. Ms Stanger’s hair was yanked; the car in
which the pair departed was mobbed. “I feared for my life,” she subsequently
wrote.
In this latest
tussle between campus advocates of free expression and those seeking to banish
views they think lie beyond that concept’s ambit, there is some cause for
optimism. Ms Patton turned up to the talk, organised by a student club, and
afterwards apologised. The college ensured Mr Murray could be heard; it is
investigating the scuffle. Still, like the trouble that erupted recently over
an offensive speaker in Berkeley, California, the violence at Middlebury—real
violence, not the imaginary sort some hotheads think Mr Murray’s beliefs
inflict—is an ominous turn.
Ominous for the
left, in particular. As with previous incidents, this was as much a clash
between different generations of liberals as between left and right. Ms Stanger
made clear that she sympathised with Mr Murray’s critics: “We have got to do
better by those who feel and are marginalised,” she wrote, adding a sideswipe
at Donald Trump. But, as elsewhere, the dust-up pitted her old sense of
openness against students’ moral certitude and tightly circumscribed idea of
proper discourse.
Meanwhile, Mr
Murray was left to worry about academic freedom and to note that many of his
assailants resembled figures from “a film of brownshirt rallies”. Middlebury’s
agitators might ask themselves how a man whose work they decry as racist
acquired the right to compare them to fascists. Students everywhere should
wonder how free speech, a central liberal value, is instead becoming the banner
of conservatives.
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