Something I wrote about this elsewhere: “Charles Murray is someone with whom I suspect I would disagree a great deal if I ever met him. His most famous work, The Bell Curve, has been severely critiqued both for its argument and its method. But he has a Ph.D. in political science from MIT, he has written for many serious publications, and so far as I am aware he is a civil and courteous public speaker. If there was any merit in disrupting the campus visit of an inflammatory troll like Milo Yiannopoulos – and I am not sure there was – then I see none at all in disrupting Charles Murray’s. All this exercise in petulance at Middlebury College has done is to discredit serious criticism of Murray, and to provide the supporters of the current White House administration with another martyr.”
Alan: Yes. My thoughts too. I also suspect that a toxic combination can exist, on campuses like Middlebury, of morally excitable students and violent anarchists. I mean, maybe we’ll find out that the people who attacked the professor accompanying Murray were students; more likely, they were non-students exploiting the conditions that the students helped them create.
UD: there is some dispute about the facts of the physical violence, since the protesters claim it was the heavy-handed action of the security staff which provoked it, and that in any case it was a handful of non-student black hat types who were responsible. Knowing something about students and also something about security staff, I don’t know who to believe. But there is no dispute about the fact of the noisy protest which accompanied Murray’s attempt to lecture, and that’s what’s most disturbing to me.
What happened at Middlebury was bad. But say 95% of what’s held against Murray is the racialism of The Bell Curve; I’ve read it, and I’m pretty sure that faculty protesters who haven’t were not acting under a misapprehension of its contents. As to his other work – sure, Murray has some scholarly chops, but he’s no Shockley.
The Bell Curve is hot garbage. It received a warm reception initially because the publisher sent selected galley excerpts (not full proofs) to a smattering of hand-picked reviewers who were known to be inclined toward a friendly reception. Andrew Sullivan gave it a lot of space in the New Republic when he was editor and was still a Thatcherite trying to turn TNR right. Then not long after the book came out in full the reviews became increasingly scathing — finding rampant misuse of statistics, selective quoting of evidence, using only sources that confirmed their biases, ignoring contrary evidence, overstating what their data showed, and so on. That book is a giant cluster of fuck, pseudo-science couched as dispassionate scholarship that way overdetermines what IQ tells us and ignores the fact that education can, in fact, change an IQ score that they purport to be innate.
Middlebury should have let him speak. What happened there is an embarassment to a liberal arts education (I attended a fellow NESCAC school so know that world reasonably well) and serves no one. But Murray is a modern day eugenecist who comes to his craft with solid credentials to peddle his warmed over bullshit.
dcat: I actually attended a Murray talk once at the AEI and was shocked by his arguments about who gets to have a college education. He’s definitely a malsain character… But – as you say – the Middlebury mob should have done ten minutes of foot pounding and then let him be.
Apologies for the long quote, but this is one of several accounts of the event published in the NYT today. The author is a social science major, and I reproduce it not because I agree with everything she says (I don’t), but because to her credit she is trying to work out a complex issue in her own mind and recognize her ambiguity about her own decisions.
——–
“I fully believed that Middlebury should honor its institutional commitment to academic freedom and debate by letting Charles Murray speak. But I also believed that students’ voices should be integral to this dialogue and so I planned to protest before the talk and ask Murray tough questions in the Q. and A. that followed his presentation.
My plans changed when I arrived at the event and sat next to an activist friend. When Murray began his speech, she said, protesters would stand, turn their backs on him, read a statement in opposition, and then do a few chants. I was hesitant, but when the protesters began to read their statement, many of the students in the room stood with them, me included.
I joined in the chants — “Who’s the enemy? White supremacy!” — but felt uncomfortable that my actions went against my original plan. Still, I didn’t sit down as the noise became louder and more raucous and students began to dance in the event hall.
The choice appeared stark: I could either protect Murray’s academic freedom and our college’s commitment to intellectual debate, or I could stand up for those students — black, Latino, female and lower income — whom Murray, in his book “The Bell Curve,” claimed are in an unequal position in society seemingly because of their genetic inferiority.
I feared that by not participating in this effort, by not expressing my solidarity with marginalized people, I would become what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the “white moderate” in his “Letter From Birmingham Jail” — someone who “is more devoted to ‘order’ than justice.” Someone who “constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action.’ ”
But as the protests continued, and Murray stayed silenced, I grew more and more concerned. It is easy to paint “Resist” on a poster, but harder to define what that should mean. If I resist a speaker like Charles Murray, despite the fact his views have been used in the service of “white nationalism,” am I also resisting intellectually open inquiry? Aren’t we more akin to authoritarian countries if we begin to choose whose speech is acceptable or not? It’s Charles Murray today, but what if it were a communist speaker tomorrow?”
The laymen “pro-IQ-istas” (Murrayites?) really are unable to conceptually sever intelligence (the “brain entity”) from, say, civic virtue, justice, economics, etc. They just conflate their own IQs with virtues and entitlements of all sorts. They’re the philosopher-kings of their own worlds, fretting about what to do about those who dwell on the left side of that friggin’ curve. You can’t talk to ’em. I’d sooner grab a 440-volt power line.
I’m okay with academic research on intelligence. We judge people anyway on “brightness” or “cleverness”. Might as well get some robust understanding of what that means. There’s a UK Professor J. T. Thompson (?) who’s done work on intelligence. He seems a very temperate guy. N. b.: I’m a non-expert on the subject.
Yeah, counterprogramming seems like a better response to speakers like Yiannopoulis or Murray coming to campus than protests — especially scheduling a competing event at the exact same time that will draw people away from the speaker.
But also — all of this kind of reveals UD’s fatuous “this is what $65000 gets you” as being really, really shallow. In America’s intellectual hierarchy Middlebury is WAY UP HERE
and George Washington is
WAY DOWN HERE (and I am being generous) —
So maybe fewer dumb generalizations about really fucking good schools from really kind of safety schools?
March 6th, 2017 at 7:33AM
Something I wrote about this elsewhere: “Charles Murray is someone with whom I suspect I would disagree a great deal if I ever met him. His most famous work, The Bell Curve, has been severely critiqued both for its argument and its method. But he has a Ph.D. in political science from MIT, he has written for many serious publications, and so far as I am aware he is a civil and courteous public speaker. If there was any merit in disrupting the campus visit of an inflammatory troll like Milo Yiannopoulos – and I am not sure there was – then I see none at all in disrupting Charles Murray’s. All this exercise in petulance at Middlebury College has done is to discredit serious criticism of Murray, and to provide the supporters of the current White House administration with another martyr.”
March 6th, 2017 at 7:55AM
Alan: Yes. My thoughts too. I also suspect that a toxic combination can exist, on campuses like Middlebury, of morally excitable students and violent anarchists. I mean, maybe we’ll find out that the people who attacked the professor accompanying Murray were students; more likely, they were non-students exploiting the conditions that the students helped them create.
March 6th, 2017 at 8:10AM
UD: there is some dispute about the facts of the physical violence, since the protesters claim it was the heavy-handed action of the security staff which provoked it, and that in any case it was a handful of non-student black hat types who were responsible. Knowing something about students and also something about security staff, I don’t know who to believe. But there is no dispute about the fact of the noisy protest which accompanied Murray’s attempt to lecture, and that’s what’s most disturbing to me.
March 6th, 2017 at 10:48AM
What happened at Middlebury was bad. But say 95% of what’s held against Murray is the racialism of The Bell Curve; I’ve read it, and I’m pretty sure that faculty protesters who haven’t were not acting under a misapprehension of its contents. As to his other work – sure, Murray has some scholarly chops, but he’s no Shockley.
March 6th, 2017 at 4:12PM
The Bell Curve is hot garbage. It received a warm reception initially because the publisher sent selected galley excerpts (not full proofs) to a smattering of hand-picked reviewers who were known to be inclined toward a friendly reception. Andrew Sullivan gave it a lot of space in the New Republic when he was editor and was still a Thatcherite trying to turn TNR right. Then not long after the book came out in full the reviews became increasingly scathing — finding rampant misuse of statistics, selective quoting of evidence, using only sources that confirmed their biases, ignoring contrary evidence, overstating what their data showed, and so on. That book is a giant cluster of fuck, pseudo-science couched as dispassionate scholarship that way overdetermines what IQ tells us and ignores the fact that education can, in fact, change an IQ score that they purport to be innate.
Middlebury should have let him speak. What happened there is an embarassment to a liberal arts education (I attended a fellow NESCAC school so know that world reasonably well) and serves no one. But Murray is a modern day eugenecist who comes to his craft with solid credentials to peddle his warmed over bullshit.
March 6th, 2017 at 5:05PM
dcat: I actually attended a Murray talk once at the AEI and was shocked by his arguments about who gets to have a college education. He’s definitely a malsain character… But – as you say – the Middlebury mob should have done ten minutes of foot pounding and then let him be.
March 6th, 2017 at 5:07PM
Or just ignore and counterprogram, counterprogram, counterprogram.
March 7th, 2017 at 7:02AM
Apologies for the long quote, but this is one of several accounts of the event published in the NYT today. The author is a social science major, and I reproduce it not because I agree with everything she says (I don’t), but because to her credit she is trying to work out a complex issue in her own mind and recognize her ambiguity about her own decisions.
——–
“I fully believed that Middlebury should honor its institutional commitment to academic freedom and debate by letting Charles Murray speak. But I also believed that students’ voices should be integral to this dialogue and so I planned to protest before the talk and ask Murray tough questions in the Q. and A. that followed his presentation.
My plans changed when I arrived at the event and sat next to an activist friend. When Murray began his speech, she said, protesters would stand, turn their backs on him, read a statement in opposition, and then do a few chants. I was hesitant, but when the protesters began to read their statement, many of the students in the room stood with them, me included.
I joined in the chants — “Who’s the enemy? White supremacy!” — but felt uncomfortable that my actions went against my original plan. Still, I didn’t sit down as the noise became louder and more raucous and students began to dance in the event hall.
The choice appeared stark: I could either protect Murray’s academic freedom and our college’s commitment to intellectual debate, or I could stand up for those students — black, Latino, female and lower income — whom Murray, in his book “The Bell Curve,” claimed are in an unequal position in society seemingly because of their genetic inferiority.
I feared that by not participating in this effort, by not expressing my solidarity with marginalized people, I would become what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the “white moderate” in his “Letter From Birmingham Jail” — someone who “is more devoted to ‘order’ than justice.” Someone who “constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action.’ ”
But as the protests continued, and Murray stayed silenced, I grew more and more concerned. It is easy to paint “Resist” on a poster, but harder to define what that should mean. If I resist a speaker like Charles Murray, despite the fact his views have been used in the service of “white nationalism,” am I also resisting intellectually open inquiry? Aren’t we more akin to authoritarian countries if we begin to choose whose speech is acceptable or not? It’s Charles Murray today, but what if it were a communist speaker tomorrow?”
March 7th, 2017 at 9:08AM
https://www.axios.com/the-book-to-understand-steve-bannon-2303917894.html
March 7th, 2017 at 6:14PM
Alan: Thanks. This excerpt very much has the mark of intellectual honesty and moral seriousness.
March 8th, 2017 at 7:54AM
The laymen “pro-IQ-istas” (Murrayites?) really are unable to conceptually sever intelligence (the “brain entity”) from, say, civic virtue, justice, economics, etc. They just conflate their own IQs with virtues and entitlements of all sorts. They’re the philosopher-kings of their own worlds, fretting about what to do about those who dwell on the left side of that friggin’ curve. You can’t talk to ’em. I’d sooner grab a 440-volt power line.
I’m okay with academic research on intelligence. We judge people anyway on “brightness” or “cleverness”. Might as well get some robust understanding of what that means. There’s a UK Professor J. T. Thompson (?) who’s done work on intelligence. He seems a very temperate guy. N. b.: I’m a non-expert on the subject.
March 8th, 2017 at 1:33PM
Yeah, counterprogramming seems like a better response to speakers like Yiannopoulis or Murray coming to campus than protests — especially scheduling a competing event at the exact same time that will draw people away from the speaker.
March 8th, 2017 at 4:27PM
wayward — Yep. Pay to bring in Te Nehesi Coates and no one even enters Eugenecist Alley.
March 12th, 2017 at 12:51AM
But also — all of this kind of reveals UD’s fatuous “this is what $65000 gets you” as being really, really shallow. In America’s intellectual hierarchy Middlebury is WAY UP HERE
and George Washington is
WAY DOWN HERE (and I am being generous) —
So maybe fewer dumb generalizations about really fucking good schools from really kind of safety schools?