The Left Can’t Stop Campus Riots Like Middlebury’s Because Their Ideology Deserves Blame: Peter Wood *****
https://thefederalist.com/2017/03/14/left-cant-stop-campus-riots-like-middleburys-ideology-deserves-blame/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=The%20Middlebury%20Paradox&utm_campaign=3-17%20Newsletter
Liberals need to appreciate the dangers posed by a radical movement that rejects the principles of intellectual freedom and freedom of expression.
The Middlebury College protest on March 2 that silenced an invited speaker and hospitalized a popular professor has continued to garner attention.
More than 100 Middlebury professors—included the one injured in the encounter—have signed a statement of principles, Free Inquiry on Campus, upholding the classic virtues of “free, reasoned, and civil speech.” The document implicitly repudiates the actions of some other Middlebury professors who instigated the effort to deny Dr. Charles Murray the opportunity to speak on campus.
How Liberals Are Responding To Middlebury’s Protest
Harry Boyte, founder of the Public Achievement movement, has written in The Huffington Post to condemn Middlebury students’ intolerant, violent actions. Boyte pointedly evoked his memories of the 1960s: “the student actions recalled the mob violence across the South which I often saw as a young man in the civil rights movement working for Martin Luther King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).” Boyte also underlined the essential point: “Free speech is a crucial value for education.”
The liberal commentator Frank Bruni devoted his Sunday New York Times column, “The Dangerous Safety of College,” to lamenting “the recent melee at Middlebury.” Bruni’s point is that “somewhere along the way,” the Middlebury protesters “got the idea that they should be able to purge their world of perspectives offensive to them.” Instead of using the occasion “to hone the most eloquent” arguments against Dr. Murray, “they swarmed and swore.” Indeed they did worse than that, but Bruni provides a nice round-up of comments from liberals who firmly reject the tactics of the Middlebury protesters, if not their message.
One notable figure Bruni failed to cite is Bill McKibben, the radical environmentalist who may well be Middlebury’s best-known professor. In the same vein as Bruni, McKibben took to the pages of The Guardian to chastise his fellow activists for choosing the wrong tactic to express their disdain for Dr. Murray. McKibben explains that by preventing Murray from speaking, they conferred on him a “new standing” and made him “a martyr to the cause of free speech.” It would have been better to have “taken all the available seats, and then got up and peacefully left.”
Many other Middlebury students, alumni, and faculty members have been writing and posting about the events as well, and because I published one of the longest and mostdetailed accounts of what happened, I received many private communications as well as pointers to other items of interest.
Interest in the story seems to be growing because it has implications well beyond the one small college in Vermont where the events took place. In that light, I think it useful to summarize the discussion so far, starting with the microcosm of Middlebury itself.
Yes, The Protest Really Became A Riot
I heard from quite a few people at Middlebury who praised my account of what happened during Dr. Murray’s visit to campus and who upheld its accuracy. But I also heard from two who disagreed. One appeared to be an undergraduate student who was incensed at the word “riot” in the title of my essay, “How Middlebury College Enabled the Student Riot During Charles Murray’s Visit.” That title, assigned by The Federalist, was accurate.
As riots go, the protest against Dr. Murray was not in the same league as the February 1 protest against Milo Yiannopoulos at the University of California Berkeley. That caused more than half a million dollars of property damage, as well as criminal assaults on individuals. Yet the Middlebury protest took the form of a series of lawless acts carried out by a mob, i.e. a riot.
This student’s objection to the word shines a light on what the Middlebury protesters thought they were doing. Some at least continue to imagine they stand on high moral ground. They protested; they didn’t riot. The distinction, I suspect, is that their actions were executed according to plan rather than helter-skelter. But while riots may turn helter-skelter, they are almost always in their initial phases staged.
The Middlebury riot, we now know, was planned days in advance. The college administration thought it had worked out a deal with the organizers. The arrangement was that the protesters would turn their backs and walk out. Some of the students who stood up still thought that was the plan and were caught by surprise when the leaders kept them locked in place and turned the protest into sustained chanting and clapping, in defiance of the college’s rules.
The Proper Balance Between Emotion And Restraint
The college officials believed the protesters would let off some steam and then let Dr. Murray proceed with his speech. What they got instead was a mob in which the disdain for Dr. Murray intensified by the minute.
This presents a good question for social psychologists. When does a protest moderate emotional intensity, and when does it heighten it? All the vitriolic accusations against Murray (e.g. “Racist, sexist, anti-gay, Charles Murray go away”) repeated loudly over and over in unison surely did nothing to relieve tensions, but only to exacerbate the crowd’s feeling of righteous indignation.
There was also at play a tension between the euphoria achieved by seizing control of the room, on one hand, and the protesters’ underlying sense of powerlessness, since they could not through sheer declaration make Dr. Murray disappear. Feeling powerful and powerless at the same moment is a dangerous combination. The events that followed—fire alarms, rampaging in the hallways, and ultimately the physical assault on Professor Stanger—testify to that combustibility.
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