College students should resist – not silence – their political foes
by Bill McKibben
Campuses can be Sites of Powerful Protest and Activism – if Students and Faculty use some Care
Canniness
is a virtue, at least for organizers. When protest goes well – the
Women’s Marches, the airport demonstrations – it helps immeasurably,
limiting the right’s ability to act or at least exacting a high price in
political capital. But protest can go badly too, and when it does it
gives the bad guys a gift.
I should have gotten a chance to see
this close up last week, because Middlebury College in Vermont, where I
teach, had a protest go mostly sour. But since my mother was taken to
the emergency room early in the week, I was camped out in her hospital
room, not on campus. Still, the picture of events that emerges from
Facebook and campus chat rooms is fairly clear.
It began when
conservative students at the college invited a man named Charles Murray
to speak on campus. Murray is a professional troll – “Milo with a
doctorate”, as one observer described him – who made his bones a quarter
century ago with a vile book, The Bell Curve, arguing that intelligence
tests showed black people less able. Academics of all stripes have
savaged the book’s methodology and conclusions, but back in the day it
was one of the many bulwarks of the nation’s ugly rightward and racist
shift.
So, many students and faculty at Middlebury were mad that
he was coming, as they should have been – it’s gross, in particular,
that students of color should have to deal with this kind of aggressive
insult to their legitimacy. But of course, that was the point for Murray
and his enablers at the American Enterprise Institute: they’re trolls.
They
want these kinds of fights, over and over, as part of their campaign to
discredit academia and multiculturalism. And once some students had
made the invitation, the die was cast, if only because Americans by and
large believe that colleges and universities should be open to all ideas
(and they’re probably right to think so, if for no other reason than
it’s hard to imagine the committee that could vet what was proper and
what wasn’t).
College authorities made their share of mistakes in
the days that followed: there was no real reason for the political
science department to officially support Murray’s visit, for instance.
But other parts of the college reacted the right way: the math
department, say, which held a series of seminars to demonstrate why
Murray’s statistical methods were rubbish.
Instead, it was goodhearted campus activists – both some students and some faculty – that really fell for the troller’s bait.
Some
began demanding that the college cancel the visit, and others
threatened to prevent him from speaking. They failed at the first task
but they largely succeeded at the second: when Murray arrived on
Thursday he was greeted by a wall of noise, as protesters chanted and
screamed him down.
When administrators took him off to a room
where his remarks, and questions from a professor, could be
live streamed, a few people pulled fire alarms. When they tried to rush
Murray from the building, a small throng, many in masks, blocked the car
and sent the professor who had been escorting the racist to the
hospital with a concussion.
The result was predictable: Murray
emerged with new standing, a largely forgotten hack with a renewed lease
on public life, indeed now a martyr to the cause of free speech. And
anti-racist activism took a hit, the powerful progressive virtue of
openness overshadowed by apparent intolerance. No one should be
surprised at the outcome: in America, anyway, shouting someone down
“reads” badly to the larger public, every single time. And it is
precisely the job of activists to figure out how things are going to
read, lest they do real damage to important causes – damage, as in this
case, that will inevitably fall mostly on people with fewer resources
than Middlebury students.
