“PART of the job of an intellectual community,” said Laurie Patton, president of Middlebury College in Vermont, “is to argue.” Introducing Charles Murray, a controversial author, on March 2nd, she emphasised the audience’s right to non-disruptive protest. Excitable students who thought Mr Murray unacceptably prejudiced—one of his books touches on the relationship of race to intelligence, though he also written on the white working class—evidently considered that offer insufficient.
Their protests quickly escalated from jovial catcalling to prohibitive heckling and then—after Mr Murray was interviewed on camera by Allison Stanger, a Middlebury professor, in a separate room—into violence. Ms Stanger’s hair was yanked; the car in which the pair departed was mobbed. “I feared for my life,” she subsequently wrote.
In this latest tussle between campus advocates of free expression and those seeking to banish views they think lie beyond that concept’s ambit, there is some cause for optimism. Ms Patton turned up to the talk, organised by a student club, and afterwards apologised. The college ensured Mr Murray could be...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/2mFEALs
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