Last week, political scientist and author Charles Murray spoke at a dinner in Manhattan about the death, as he calledit, of the American Dream. The “Disinvitation Dinner,” is given annually by Lauren Noble’s William F. Buckley Jr. Program to honor a speaker who has been kicked off a college campus for espousing unpopular views.
Murray wished to warn his audience that our unelected bureaucracy, invested with law-making power by a lazy legislature, is threatening Americans’ natural tendency to take care of themselves and their neighbors. These views may not be terribly contentious, but it doesn’t take a lot to upset a college student these days.
And Murray has upset students tremendously: In 1994, he and Harvard psychologist Richard Herrnstein wrote The Bell Curve. The book suggested that, based on available data, one cannot entirely rule out the possibility that some aspects of intelligence are hereditary. Hence, college students believe, Murray is a racist fascist bigot so dangerous that even seeing a photograph of him may cause mental damage.
What is particularly shocking is that students can be so delicate and so violent at the same time, like oversized toddlers who careen around a room smashing into everything.
This is no joke — one year after student protests ended Murray’s visit to Middlebury College, the editor of the student newspaper had to apologize for printing a photograph of Murray, saying, “I recognize that [the picture] may be especially jarring, particularly for students of color who feel that Charles Murray’s rhetoric poses a threat to their very humanity.” In other words, don’t even look at Murray or your igloos will melt.