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.
