This is an interesting op-ed by Professor Allison Stanger, who along with Charles Murray, was assaulted by rioting students at Middlebury College when Murray attempted to give a lecture there. Dr. Murray, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is a conservative/ libertarian as well as a serious and thoughtful academic by any objective measure. However, he also has been a political lightning rod since publication of his 1994 book, The Bell Curve, which expressed highly controversial theories about race and intelligence. (Actually, Murray’s attempted lecture at Middlebury was not about this subject but focused on his much more recent book, Coming Apart (2012), which presciently forecast the decline in White working class America that we are now witnessing.)
The closing paragraphs of Professor Stanger’s op-ed are worth emphasizing:
“[W]hat the events at Middlebury made clear is that, regardless of political persuasion, Americans today are deeply susceptible to a renunciation of reason and celebration of ignorance. They know what they know without reading, discussing or engaging those who might disagree with them. People from both sides of the aisle reject calm logic, eager to embrace the alternative news that supports their prejudices.
“More broadly, our constitutional democracy will depend on whether Americans can relearn how to engage civilly with one another, something that is admittedly hard to do with a bullying president as a role model. But any other way forward would be antithetical to the very ideals of the university and of liberal democracy.”
Stanger is justified in pinning some of the blame for the sorry state of our civil discourse on Trump. However, liberals have their share of responsibility as well. Her op-ed notes, for example, that the Middlebury mob was apparently incited at least in part by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s description of Murray as an “extremist” and “white nationalist” who practices “racist pseudoscience.” It’s particularly unfortunate that an organization whose vital role is to expose real bigots and hate groups squanders its credibility on over-the-top political demagoguery like this.
In any event, it’s heartening that the Middlebury incident has been thoroughly condemned by a number of pundits on both the left and the right who evidently share Professor Stanger’s concerns.