Have Campus Protesters Given Up on Charles Murray? When he came to Stanford this week, the chants outside were unoriginal, the audience inside polite. By Tunku Varadarajan
https://www.wsj.com/articles/have-campus-protesters-given-up-on-charles-murray-1519427980
“What made the event so memorable was how uneventful it was. This is what counts as a triumph on an American campus today. ”
Waiting to enter the university building that would house Thursday evening’s debate, I encountered a security guard, ruddy and robust. From a private firm, he looked unsure of his role on a college campus. “Expecting trouble?” I asked. He was noncommittal but gave off a whiff of apprehension. “Things could get out of hand,” he said. “A white supremacist’s coming to speak.”
The lecturer to whom he referred so damningly—and inaccurately—was Charles Murray, a libertarian social scientist who’s had more controversy thrust upon him than almost any other American public intellectual. Critics say that the disputation that shrouds Mr. Murray is entirely deserved, and many regard him in precisely the terms the unknowing guard had used.
This is largely on account of a book Mr. Murray co-wrote in 1994, “The Bell Curve.” Sections of it have been brandished as proving Mr. Murray believes that differences in IQ among individuals are attributable to race. Ergo, he’s a toxic racist. Mr. Murray’s lecture at Middlebury College last year was disrupted violently, sending his faculty escort to the hospital. This evening, Stanford took no chances.
Two hundred yards away, at a picturesque spot called History Corner, was a group of student protesters who didn’t want Mr. Murray on campus. “Hey hey, ho ho, Charles Murray’s got to go,” they chanted. Their gusto was impressive, though their lack of originality left me feeling shortchanged. Was that the best they could do with their world-class education? The drabness of their prosody was lifted somewhat by a spirited young rapper, although her punch line, “F— Steve Bannon, f— the Western canon,” seemed misdirected.
Mr. Murray had been invited by Stanford as part of a new university initiative “to help promote discussion of a diversity of perspectives” on campus. He was to debate Francis Fukuyama, perhaps America’s best-known political scientist, on the subject of “Inequality and Populism.” In the weeks preceding the event, argument had raged among students, and some faculty, about the merits of inviting Mr. Murray. Objections to his presence came at a furious pace and fell into two categories.
The first and most lurid—and the most widespread—was that Mr. Murray was racist. In a letter to the provost published in the Stanford Daily, the (left-leaning) campus newspaper, 226 Stanford law students called on the university to rescind the invitation because of Mr. Murray’s “white nationalist scholarship” that “motivates eugenics and the genocidal white supremacist ideologies that are enjoying a popular resurgence under the current presidential administration.” In a separate op-ed in the same organ, a group of student organizations argued that Mr. Murray’s “oppressive, racist and meritless pseudo-science is an affront to all people of color, low-income individuals and female-identifying members of our community.” CONTINUE AT SITE
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