Patterico's Pontifications

3/4/2017

Sad Irony: Women’s History Month Ushered In At Liberal College With Assault Of Female Professor Trying To Flee Violent Mob

Filed under: General — Dana @ 11:56 am



[guest post by Dana]

On Thursday, noted author Charles Murray was scheduled to speak at Vermont’s Middlebury College. Things went as you would expect when a guest speaker at an institution of higher learning seeks to challenge the views of college-aged individuals with left-left wing authoritarian issues. Unable to even listen to a different viewpoint and engage in rational debate with those who don’t toe the liberal line, they silence the speaker. Unfortunately, this shutting down of speech is usually followed by violence. And in this case, the mob violence led to a female professor ending up in the emergency room:

Charles Murray, a political scientist who has been criticized for his views on race and intelligence, was invited to speak on campus by a student group. He was greeted late Thursday afternoon outside McCullough Student Center by hundreds of protesters, and inside Wilson Hall, students turned their backs to him when he got up to speak.

College officials led Murray to another location and a closed circuit broadcast showed him being interviewed by Stanger, the Russell J. Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics.

As Stanger, Murray and a college administrator left McCullough Student Center last evening following the event, they were “physically and violently confronted by a group of protestors,” according to Bill Burger, the college’s vice president for communications and marketing.

Burger said college public safety officers managed to get Stanger and Murray into the administrator’s car.

“The protestors then violently set upon the car, rocking it, pounding on it, jumping on and try to prevent it from leaving campus,” he said. “At one point a large traffic sign was thrown in front of the car. Public Safety officers were able, finally, to clear the way to allow the vehicle to leave campus.

“During this confrontation outside McCullough, one of the demonstrators pulled Prof. Stanger’s hair and twisted her neck,” Burger continued. “She was attended to at Porter Hospital later and (on Friday) is wearing a neck brace.”

It’s instructive that neither the The New York Times, nor the The Washington Post mentioned the assault of a woman in their respective headlines. Instead, this act of violence against a woman was nearly set aside in order for both outlets to earnestly inform readers that their go-to arbiters of hate, the disreputable Southern Poverty Law Center, have determined that Charles Murray is nearly Hitler:

From the WaPo:

The Southern Poverty Law Center considers Murray a white nationalist who uses “racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women and the poor.” Protests of Murray’s lecture forced the college to move it to another room.

And from the NYT:

The left-leaning Southern Poverty Law Center describes Mr. Murray as a “white nationalist” who uses “racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women and the poor.”

This is the same Southern Poverty Law Center that labeled Ayaan Hirsi Ali as an anti-Muslim extremist, and included Dr. Ben Carson in their Extremist File (since removed after protests). This a group that even the FBI has rejected as an authority on hate groups.

And equally troubling is the view of the educated elites that free speech is conditional:

We are Middlebury alumni/ae who were disappointed, confused, and alarmed to learn that Charles Murray has been invited to speak at our alma mater. The Southern Poverty Law Center considers Dr. Murray a “white nationalist” who “us[es] racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by… genetic inferiority.” Why has such a person been granted a platform at Middlebury?

This is not an issue of freedom of speech. We think it is necessary to allow a diverse range of perspectives to be voiced at Middlebury. In college, we learned through thoughtful, compassionate, and often difficult discussions inside the classroom and out—conversations in which our beliefs were questioned and our assumptions challenged. We fully support the core liberal arts principle that contact with other intellectual viewpoints and life experiences than one’s own is integral to a beneficial education.

However, in this case we find the principle does not apply, due to not only the nature, but also the quality, of Dr. Murray’s scholarship.

….

When we were students at Middlebury, we felt it was our responsibility to ensure that perspectives like Dr. Murray’s were not legitimized by hollow appeals to tolerance and the power of “dialogue.” As graduates, we still feel that responsibility, and we expect that current members of the Middlebury community feel similarly obligated to support and protect the most structurally vulnerable amongst us. We believe in a Middlebury that invites, and pays, those guests who will most enrich the education of every student. We believe in a Middlebury whose students exercise their own constitutional rights to free speech and peaceful assembly by protesting this event.

Thus far, no search has turned up any major protests about the attack on a female professor by an ugly mob of intolerant bigots. Even Middlebury College president Laurie L. Patton gave the assault short-shrift :

Following the event, protests continued outside of McCullough as well. Unfortunately, one group of demonstrators aggressively confronted Mr. Murray and Prof. Allison Stanger as they left McCullough Student Center. That confrontation turned into a violent incident with a lot of pushing and shoving, and an attack on the car in which they were leaving campus. We believe that many of these protestors were outside agitators, but there are indications that Middlebury College students were involved as well.

I can only say that, given Professor Stanger being the victim of mob violence, and in light of this being a month that Congress has set aside to honor and recognize women, this comment from Hillary Clinton seems a fitting response:

I stand with the people gathered across the country tonight defending our values and our Constitution. This is not who we are.

(Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.)

–Dana

Trump Tweet of the Day/Open Thread

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 10:50 am



I do not intend to spend a single moment of my day dissecting a Donald Trump tweet or series or tweets based on something he saw on TV. YMMV and if it does there is this comment thread. Happy Saturday.

UPDATE: Here is a piece on this that lays out the facts. Kinda useful on a day when the entire world is spouting nonsense they scraped up somewhere on the Internet.

[Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.]


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