http://themilitant.com/2017/8112/811202.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 81/No. 12 March 27, 2017
(lead article)
Debate rages over attack on political rights
at Middlebury
BY MAGGIE TROWE
MIDDLEBURY, Vt. — Discussion and debate was still raging on the
Middlebury College campus and among working people when members of the
Socialist Workers Party visited the area March 9-10 after conservative
author Charles Murray was shouted down by a large group of students,
professors and middle class radicals during a public talk the week before.
The break-up of the March 2 meeting and the physical attack by a small
group of thugs on Murray and professor Allison Stanger afterwards gained
national and international attention. Stanger, who had moderated the
meeting and challenged Murray’s views, which she strongly disagreed
with, had to go to the hospital for treatment.
We came armed with the March 20 issue of the Militant, which has an
editorial explaining how the “shut them down” strategy promoted by many
liberal and leftist students and faculty is a deadly threat to the
working class.
The pages of the Middlebury Campus weekly paper were full of articles
debating the attack on Murray, who works for the American Enterprise
Institute and is co-author of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class
Structure in American Life.
Murray was invited to speak by the Middlebury College American
Enterprise Institute Club. Student organizations — including College
Democrats, Resistance and Wonderbread: White Students for Racial Justice
— labeled Murray a “white supremacist” and demanded the event be canceled.
Hundreds of alumni signed a letter printed before Murray arrived, marked
by the hysteria about the Donald Trump administration and the
anti-working-class view that racism and opposition to women’s rights are
on the rise among working people. It said The Bell Curve presents “the
same thinking that motivates eugenics and the genocidal white
supremacist ideologies which are enjoying a popular resurgence under the
new presidential administration.”
When the college administration declined to cancel the meeting, some
students and faculty organized to stop it.
Students shouted, “Your message is hatred; we cannot tolerate it!”
Another chant was, “Racist, sexist, anti-gay, Charles Murray, go away,”
which ignored the libertarian’s well-known support for legalization of
abortion and same-sex marriage.
In The Bell Curve Murray posits that the rich are rich, and deserve to
be, because of their high intelligence, in contrast with low-paid,
low-IQ workers. “What’s at issue in The Bell Curve is an attempt to
defend the wealth and class privilege of a so-called meritocratic social
layer — ‘the cognitive elite’ is the euphemism chosen by the authors,”
Socialist Workers Party National Secretary Jack Barnes writes in Are
They Rich Because They’re Smart? Class, Privilege, and Learning Under
Capitalism. “It’s even more about social class than race.”
College officials moved Murray to a studio to broadcast a live-streamed
video of the discussion between him and moderator Stanger. Protesters
tried to break this up too. Some wearing facemasks held a banner that
read, “Choke on your silver spoon, you f---king Nazi.” These were some
of those who attacked Murray and Stanger as they left the building.
We talked with students outside the student union and were invited to
come inside and continue the discussion over lunch. Our table attracted
a number of students with a variety of views. One was wearing a homemade
button saying, “Free expression.” He said a number of his friends had
asked him to make copies for them.
“I oppose Murray’s politics,” Alyson Kennedy, who ran as the Socialist
Workers Party candidate for president in 2016, told Andrew Hennings,
showing him the book by Barnes. “This is not an abstract discussion of
‘rights,’” Kennedy said. “It’s a life-and-death question for the working
class and its allies, who need the political space to discuss and debate
how to build a revolutionary movement capable of taking political power.
Shouting down speakers we disagree with, not to mention physically
attacking them, closes that space down.
“We lose the opportunity to confront and debate reactionary ideas that
are a danger to working people,” she said. “And it introduces censorship
over politics that can lead to attacks among us by those who say someone
else’s ideas are wrong.”
Working people whose doors we knocked on in town were alarmed by the
attack on the meeting. One woman, a group home attendant, said she felt
strongly that different opinions should be heard out and debated.
“It was horrible what those students did,” two cashiers at the college
bookstore told us. Most students we met said they opposed the physical
attack, but many argued that the actions were understandable, saying
Murray’s ideas are dangerous and must be suppressed.
“I’ve heard, ‘everyone has a right to their freedom of speech,’” wrote
Juan Andrade-Vera in the Campus. “With that, I disagree. Allowing
everyone to speak freely, especially on matters of race, creates that
power imbalance my peers agreed existed, thus, not providing
marginalized groups equal paths to success.”
An op-ed signed by several dozen students studying abroad backed
breaking up Murray’s meeting, and charged that criticisms “have
de-legitimized this expression of student will, clinging to flimsy free
speech arguments.” They demanded the administration “recognize attacks
on POC humanity” and “demonstrate a tangible commitment to this
college’s marginalized communities.” POC stands for people of color.
Others we talked to disagreed. “Some students say speakers like him
should be shut down,” Nathalia González, 21, a psychology student who
grew up in the working-class Pilsen area of Chicago, said. “Others say
that attending his talk or protesting it just gives him legitimacy. I
think different points of view should be heard.”
“I am not convinced by arguments for shutting down this event,” wrote
political science professor Erik Bleich in the Campus. “It is all the
less persuasive amid assertions that students were just exercising their
free speech rights of ‘simultaneous dialogue’ when they impeded Murray
from delivering his lecture. This is a fundamental and troubling
misconception of free speech.”
Related articles:
Suppression of rights inevitably targets the working class
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