- What is the percentage of tenured faculty on American campuses who are still unambiguously on the side of free intellectual exchange?
- What is the percentage of them who are willing to express that position openly?
Sociologist Charles Murray asked those questions near the end of his reflections on Thursday’s Middlebury College event, in which his speaking engagement was interrupted by shouting mobs and he and his colleagues were physically attacked*.
Murray thinks the answer to the first question is “more than 50 percent.” He doubts that is the answer to the second.
He is pessimistic about free inquiry on campus.
And has reason to be.
College faculty members are closing ranks, as many at Middlebury did, calling Murray — famous for books such as Losing Ground and The Bell Curve — “a discredited ideologue paid by the American Enterprise Institute to promote public policies targeting people of color, women and the poor”** and “not an academic nor a ‘critically acclaimed’ public scholar, but a well-funded phony.”
Mark J. Perry has listed many more complaints, all offered as reasons not to listen or debate with the famous intellectual.
That was last Thursday. On Saturday, a pro-Trump, “Proud Boys” march in Berkeley culminated not only in violence, bloodied faces, destroyed property, but also in the burning of a purloined “Free Speech” placard.
The University of California at Berkeley seems uninterested in controlling the mobs. Berkeley City Police have poorly defended non-leftist protestors. It’s open season on freedom of speech and the right to peaceably assemble.
Unless something is done, officially, mobbing will be the new normal. And our basic rights? A memory.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* His colleague Professor Allison Stanger was seriously injured in the riotous shoving and grabbing. Murray tweeted yesterday, “Everybody in the mob could be criminally prosecuted, but those who injured Prof. Stranger must be.”
** It is worth noting that his recent Coming Apart was entirely devoted to the economic performance and culture of white Americans.
4 replies on “Campus Freedom in Peril”
Freedom and liberty is all of their forms are always in peril. They are constantly subjugated in the name of order or security. They are then reborn when the oppression becomes so stifling you cannot breath.
The current campus problems are the aftermath of the revolution as evidenced by the last election, as is the dissension in Washington.
This is a battle to determine what will be the underlying and controlling philosophy of the US, and those in the previously converted to collectivist sectors of society are fighting back. What will ultimately prevail is still undetermined, and that is the reason for the discord.
Repression by the socialist educational elitists should be no surprise. They are only seeking to preserve the status quo which was their progressive, but stalling, ascendency of the past century. It is the historical failure of their proposed utopian framework and its unintended consequences which is their real, but unrecognized, enemy.
What I fear will happen next is that the protesters on the Right will resort to violence as well, and the next such incidents will feature far more injuries, especially if someone brings a gun.
The police need to contain this NOW before people decide to fight back on their own.
Campus Freedom? You’ll more easily find a unicorn or a dodo.
Is this really a surprise? We still have the “Community organizer in chief” operating with the assistance of his supporters, and his Janet Napolitano(stupid is as stupid does) as head of the universities in California!