Smothering Speech at Middlebury

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/opinion/smothering-speech-at-middlebury.html

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How to begin an editorial about a violent free-speech debacle at Middlebury College in Vermont? Maybe with some words from John Stuart Mill about the importance of giving despised dissenters a chance to speak. “Truth would lose something by their silence,” Mill wrote, even if their views go against the entire world, and the entire world is right.

Persuasive words. But not last Thursday in an auditorium at Middlebury, where a student recited that very quotation in introducing the notorious social scientist Charles Murray. Moments later caterwauling erupted, and the event collapsed into a night of turned backs, shouted chants, pounding fists and one wrenched neck — belonging to a professor who was supposed to have provided a counterpoint to Mr. Murray’s remarks, and to lead the Q. and A., but instead was attacked while leaving with him.

Mr. Murray’s account of the evening is worth reading: a depressing tale of a missed opportunity for ideas to peaceably collide. In the years since he drew ridicule for promoting widely discredited race-based theories of intelligence in his book “The Bell Curve,” Mr. Murray has been a frequent speaker on college campuses, and the frequent target of protests. He said these events have taken on the ritual decorum of Kabuki theater — students are allowed to deride him, he is allowed to speak, blood pressures rise and fall, and life goes on.

Now, he says, Middlebury may prove an “inflection point” — where colleges yield the lectern to intolerant liberals, hastening a bastion of free thought toward its demise.

It’s an outcome that many on the right seem to be aching for. Though speakers of all ideologies regularly appear at colleges without incident, a few widely publicized disruptions feed a narrative of leftist enclaves of millennial snowflakes refusing to abide ideas they disagree with. From the president to Fox News, right-wing voices wail, through their megaphones, about how put upon they are, like soccer players collapsing to the turf and writhing in pretend agony.

A letter like the one sent by Middlebury alumni assailing Mr. Murray does not help. “The principle” — of free speech — “does not apply, due to not only the nature, but also the quality, of Dr. Murray’s scholarship.”

Hey, hey, ho, ho — heck no. The principle does not distinguish between great minds and mediocrities. Mr. Murray is an academic with an argument to make about class in America — from his 2012 book “Coming Apart” — and maybe it is flawed. But Middlebury students had no chance to challenge him on any of his views. Thought and persuasion, questions and answers, were eclipsed by intimidation.

True ideas need testing by false ones, lest they become mere prejudices and thoughtless slogans. Free speech is a sacred right, and it needs protecting, now more than ever. Middlebury’s president, Laurie Patton, did this admirably, in defending Mr. Murray’s invitation and delivering a public apology to him that Middlebury’s thoughtless agitators should have delivered themselves.