Middlebury Reckons With a Protest Gone Wrong
Last week, Middlebury College, a Vermont liberal arts school with about 2,500 students, became the latest campus to make national headlines due to protesters who so detested a speaker that they tried to prevent their classmates from hearing him speak. Some cast the clash as pitting conservatives against liberals. But that isn’t right.
The social scientist Charles Murray arrived on campus at the invitation of a student group to speak about his book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010. Two students who extended the invitation, Alexander Khan and Philip Hoxie, had been trying to understand the election of Donald Trump, although neither supported him. Intrigued by Coming Apart’s analysis of the growing cultural gulf between the white elite (from which Middlebury draws many of its students) and the white working class, they felt their campus would benefit from engaging with its author.
Many students and alumni and some faculty members disagreed.
Though the would-be censors varied widely in their familiarity with Murray and his beliefs, their objections flowed mostly from the content of his 1994 book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, and its most controversial argument: that the persistence of a black underclass in America is attributable partly to racial differences in intelligence, measured by IQ, that are partly genetic. (Like many of the protesters, I’ve never read the bestselling book, which was published when I was 14. Later, reading up on the debates that followed its publication, I thought the smartest critics of the two controversial chapters that focused on racial differences were more persuasive than their defenders.)
Few nonfiction books have generated such sustained controversy, due largely to the horrific evils justified in bygone decades by pseudoscience positing white superiority and the fear that Murray’s words could be exploited by white supremacists.
The New York Times Magazine put its author on the cover along with a profile by reporter Jason Deparl titled “Daring Research or Social Science Pornography?” The New Republic, then edited by Andrew Sullivan, dedicated most of an issue to debating the book. Sullivan defended that decision two years ago, during one of the controversy’s periodic resurgences, after my colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates, who was attending Howard University when The Bell Curve was published, wrote, “TNR's much celebrated ‘heterodoxy’ was built on a strain of erudite neo-Dixiecratism. When The Bell Curve excerpt was published, one of my professors handed out the issue to every interested student. This was not a compliment. This was knowing your enemy.”
Protesters at Middlebury felt they knew their enemy well enough to justify denying classmates the chance to hear about his new focuses on white people of different classes, and appeared on many lists of books to read to understand Trump. I once took its “” quiz and found it a valuable exercise. After lining up early for seats outside a campus venue that holds 400 people, alongside students who wanted to hear the speech, protesters listened politely as senior Ivan Vallardes spoke about how the campus AEI club, the event’s sponsor, helped him transition from a diverse New York City arts high school to a rural college by offering a setting “where diversity of expression could thrive.”
