Despite the complaints of some progressive activists, the American Enterprise Institute’s Charles Murray spoke at Harvard Wednesday night, drawing a small but peaceful protest.
That wasn’t the case when Murray spoke at Middlebury College earlier this year. Those protesters, inspired by poor interpretations of his work, shouted over Murray’s speech and turned violent, leaving one professor hospitalized. Similar complaints, that Murray’s 1994 book The Bell Curve made racist assertions about intelligence, were echoed before his address at Harvard (from which he graduated in 1965), but the event went as planned and 300 students took the opportunity to hear his ideas.
I couldn’t help but narrow in on one passage from the Boston Globe’s report on the lecture, which was planned by Harvard’s Open Student Initiative. “Some students who attended said they appreciated that Murray took a respectful tone,” the story noted.
“Erin McCarthy, a sophomore, said she was expecting Murray to say things that were much more controversial and inflammatory,” the authors continued, quoting McCarthy saying, “I came in feeling heated and came out feeling a little confused.”
That is what happens when universities give speakers the right to actually come to campus and defend their beliefs. If Murray’s work is taught in classrooms, it’s through the prism of progressivism and not fairly represented. But when given the opportunity to actually engage with an outside lecturer, fair-minded students tend to realize they’ve been misled about their ideas.
Progressive student activists are not fair arbiters of what constitutes reasonable speech. They sincerely do not believe it is safe for universities to give speakers to the right of Angela Davis a platform. When schools indulge their heckling by allowing them to veto speakers, it seals campuses off from a wide swath of valuable ideas, most of which happen to be conservative. That leaves students with one (increasingly extreme) ideology to engage, and it’s not healthy.
Harvard’s Open Campus Initiative understands the dangers of that process, appealing to their peers before the lecture on Wednesday by saying, “For all those who have a bone to pick with Murray, we propose joining the discussion, and interrogating him rationally instead of turning your backs on the event. To listen is ultimately an act of courage, and to speak an act of generosity.”
And in a powerful statement on how far campus culture has fallen in recent decades, the Open Campus Initiative reminded protesters that, in fact, the very first organization to host Murray at Harvard was the Black Students Association, who asked him to speak on The Bell Curve in 1995.
“We’re doing this in the spirit of continuing dialogue, discussion, and debate on the issues,” its president said at the time.
On Wednesday night, the Black Students Association protested Murray, saying they found his presence at their school “unacceptable.”
Times have changed, and not for the better.
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
