RUTHFULLY YOURS

Charles Murray was not met with riots when he showed up to speak at NYU last Friday, as he had been at Middlebury College a few weeks before. Still, his reception hardly served as a model for campus discourse. Security was beefed up, and his hosts, a student group affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute, had to restrict access to the event. A small crowd showed up to protest Murray’s presence — and to hurl insults at attendees and the university itself.

In response to what occurred at Middlebury, the speech’s venue was moved to an underground room in NYU’s Torch Club, and tickets had to be reserved ahead of time, angering many who had hoped to gain admission in order to protest.

The protest was an unimpressive showing. Demonstrators numbered about 20 and brandished signs with such inane slogans as “No Eugenics on Campus — Fight Fascism.” They chanted about Murray but also directed opprobrium at NYU for permitting his visit. Pairing Murray’s alleged prejudice with that of the university, a chant of “How do you spell ‘classist’? N-Y-U!” rang out as I stood waiting to get through security, and many signs accused Murray of racism. Indeed, NYU’s Faculty of Color Caucus wrote a letter indicting Murray’s talk as “hate and fear under the guise of scholarship and free speech.”

The strongest condemnation of Murray focused on his supposed view of the poor as an underclass deserving of their situation. One student, Shirish Sarkar, told me: “Charles Murray is the latest in a long line of people that have been pushing this sort of eugenics-based poverty myth, where there’s a correlation between intelligence and poverty.” The Faculty of Color Caucus summarized Murray’s book Coming Apart, on which the talk was based, as “[blaming] poor whites for their own poverty.” Those of us who listened to what Murray had to say in his talk in fact heard him sharply reprove the out-of-touch elite that had smugly abandoned the working class and poor to their fate.

As Murray entered the Torch Club through a side door, flanked by security, his talk began with shouts of “Shame! Shame! Shame!” faintly echoing from above ground, outside of the restaurant. He referred to the hullabaloo only with an opening joke that it was all wasted on a talk that will make listeners think, “That’s it?”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-ivy-leagues-admission-bias-a-trade-secret-1490740763

Shortly after the Supreme Court’s dispiriting decision last year in Fisher v. University of Texas, which upheld the use of racial preferences in college admissions, Gallup released some encouraging poll results. More than 6 out of 10 white, black and Hispanic respondents said they disagreed with the ruling. And 7 in 10 people—including 76% of whites, 61% of Hispanics and 50% of blacks—said colleges should admit applicants based “solely on merit.”

Of course, the Supreme Court’s job is to interpret the commands of the Constitution, not opinion surveys. Still, the polling results are a reminder that the courts and the college administrators who cheered the ruling are much bigger fans of racial double standards than are the general public—even those who supposedly benefit from race-based affirmative action.

But the Gallup poll also illustrates how our national discussion of racial preferences in higher education has gotten so dated. Nowhere mentioned in the survey—and only glancingly referenced in the Fisher majority opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy—are Asian-Americans, though they are the country’s fastest-growing racial group and have become increasingly fed up with their treatment at elite colleges.

“The old paradigm of affirmative action being about white versus black has been completely upended,” says Edward Blum of Students for Fair Admissions, a group that opposes racial preferences. “California, Arizona, Texas, Florida—these are states that are becoming majority-minority, multiracial, multiethnic. We’re competing as different racial and ethnic groups that really have less and less meaning in our multiracial and multiethnic society.”

Amid the icy Nor’easter that hit the east coast Tuesday, a clear ray of intellectual sunshine emerged: Professors Robert George of Princeton University and Cornel West of Harvard University posted online, for national signatures, a petition in defense of freedom of speech. You may find it at http://jmp.princeton.edu/statement.

Their statement—“Truth Seeking, Democracy, and Freedom of Thought and Expression”—follows on the heels of last week’s remarkable free-speech statement by professors at Middlebury College, which now has more than 100 signatures at that small Vermont institution.

Both efforts come in the aftermath of a protest at Middlebury against scholar Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute. That protest turned into a mob action, including an assault on Middlebury professor Allison Stanger, who had questioned Mr. Murray on stage.

For years, Professors George and West, the former a conservative and the latter a socialist, together taught a class at Princeton on how to listen to contrary points of view. Middlebury’s violence drove home what many in academia have come to see more clearly now—that the most basic tenets of free inquiry and exchange are under unprecedented pressure in the U.S., not least at universities.

The George-West statement stands as a forceful rebuttal to the all-too-frequent attempt to stigmatize opponents into silence. We hope it gains the national support it deserves.

In a letter to the editor posted in last Sunday’s NYTimes magazine, the writer had this to say:

“Thank you Nikole Hannah-Jones for making plain how antiblackness and the effort to subjugate black and brown people and those deemed “other” are enduring subtexts to all our fights around education. There is a direct line from efforts to eradicate the language and culture of native people to the substandard education offered to the formerly enslaved and our ‘no excuses” or test-obsessed charters today….The underlying theory is that schools sort students into winners and losers, that parents want to seek competitive advantage so their children are on top and the means for gaining advantage as well as the results are highly racialized to maintain white supremacy.” (Beth Glenn, Director , Education Justice Network, ( NYT 3/12/17)

Ms. Glenn is obviously unaware that as of 2014, it is Asian “other” students who constituted 73% of the enrollment at Stuyvesant, 62% at Bronx Science and 61% at Brooklyn Tech. So much for white supremacy at those public schools in New York where performance is judged by merit, not by race. Asian parents traditionally resist putting their children into English as a Second Language class where students often languish unsuccessfully for years. They do not consider that their native language is “eradicated” when their children learn the native language of the country where they live. They properly understand that language is a vital necessity in the path to educational and professional success. No black or Latino children today are formerly enslaved but that desire for victim status is a giveaway to Ms Glenn’s mode of thinking and her inability to grasp that “no excuses” is another reality and a character building tool for gaining a foothold in a competitive society

Sadly, black and Hispanic enrollment at these special schools is in single digit percents and surprisingly, the minority with the highest poverty rate among New York’s races is also Asian. Rather than complain about disadvantage, they seem determined to instill the values of hard work, perseverance, willingness to do what is necessary without feeling aggrieved or looking for cop-outs. Unfortunately, too many who determine policy at the Board of Education seem to be more n line with Ms. Glenn’s unproductive attitudes. Standards constantly get lowered so that students who are deficient in English and Math get pushed ahead anyway, though too many drop out and only 65% graduate from high school on time. Currently, students can appeal the grade on their Regents exam if they have taken the test twice, passed the course and scored between 62 – 64; the new proposal is to further lower that to 60. Compare this with the graduation rate of 85% for Asians and 82% for whites. New York has just eliminated a required literacy test for its teachers, further dumbing down the standards for working in the field of education along with the possibility of acquiring one.

In the last few weeks, there has been a spate of columns by writers on the left condemning the left-wing college students who riot, take over university buildings, and shout down speakers they differ with.

These condemnations, coming about 50 years too late, should not be taken seriously.

Take New York Times columnist Frank Bruni. His latest column is filled with dismay over the way Middlebury College students attacked Charles Murray and the liberal female professor who invited him to Middlebury (she was injured by the rioters).

I have no doubt that Bruni is sincere. Sincerity, however, is completely unrelated to wisdom or insight.

Here’s the problem: It is the Left that transformed universities into the moral and intellectual wastelands most now are.

It is the Left that created the moral monsters known as left-wing students who do not believe in free speech, let alone tolerance.

It is the Left that has taught generations of young Americans that America is essentially a despicable society, racist and xenophobic to its core.

It is the Left that came up with the lie that the university has been overrun by a “culture of rape.”

It is the Left that taught generations of Americans that everyone on the right is sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, racist, and bigoted.

It is the Left that is anti-intellectual, teaching students to substitute feelings for reason.

It is the Left that removed the portrait of Shakespeare hanging at the English department of the University of Pennsylvania because Shakespeare is a white male — thereby teaching college students that art is not measured by excellence or by the pursuit of truth but by race, gender, and class.

It is the Left that has transformed the Founders of the United States from great men creating the freest and most affluent society in human society into rich, white, racist males who created a racist, colonialist, imperialist, women-hating, foreigner-hating, non-white-hating society.

“You’re not going to let us speak.”

You would expect to hear those words in oppressive Communist regimes, or in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan where unacceptable speech can get you beheaded.

No — this is what was disgracefully heard this month at Middlebury College, an elite private liberal arts college in Vermont. This was what Professor Allison Stanger acknowledged to an unruly crowd of Middlebury students who decided it was “unacceptable” for Dr. Charles Murray, an invited controversial conservative political scientist and author, to speak on their campus. Among chants yelled by the mob was “Shut it down!” and “Hey hey, ho ho, Charles Murray has got to go!”

Stanger, who had agreed to moderate the discussion then pursued plan B — go to a closed location and live stream the discussion. The angry students pursued and banged on the walls and set off fire alarms to try and stop any talk with Murray. Murray was there to discuss his book called Coming Apart, that details the plight of poor working class white Americans and how whites in America live in a stark two class society. Murray has been vilified for a previous book he co-authored called The Bell Curve. This book had some discussion on ethnicity and I.Q. which has led Murray to be called “a racist” and “white supremacist” among many other nasty labels.

No one seemed to know or care that Murray is the father of two biracial children, has degrees from Harvard and MIT, and even has a daughter who is an alumnus from Middlebury.

During the interrupted live stream talk Murray asked simply, “What is it that is so terrible that I cannot speak?” While Murray was trying to leave the campus, Stanger was assaulted and endured a neck injury and was treated at a hospital. Stanger later wrote, “I feared for my life.”

The incident at Middlebury has received national attention and articles have been written in The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, and many others. Last month a violent protest also broke out at UC Berkeley to stop Milo Yiannopoulos, a controversial conservative writer, from speaking that resulted in $100,000 in property damage. Though the media has portrayed the incidents at Middlebury and Berkeley as a new trend, censorship of conservative speakers on U.S. college campuses has been ongoing. Furthermore, Caroline Glick, writes in the Jerusalem Post, “Jewish speakers and students have been subjected… to campaigns of repressions for nearly 20 years at universities and colleges throughout the US. What is new about the riots against Murray and Yiannopoulos is that they were shouted down despite the fact that they weren’t talking about Israel.”