The #1 Strategy of Speaking at a College Campus Should Be to Get Silenced by Protestors
Charles Murray tried to deliver a lecture at Middlebury College, where his daughter attended. Radical students cut him off. He could not finish. His account of the event is here. It downloads slowly.
It costs $61,000 a year to attend the school.
U.S. News & World Report ranks it number four in the nation academically among four-year colleges. Its main claim to fame is its training in foreign languages.
For what it costs to send a child to the school for foreign language training, you could send your child to the foreign nation that speaks the language, and in one year your child would be fluent. That would surely cost no more than $60,000 a year. In most countries, it would cost about a third of this. For the amount of money that Middlebury costs, you could then send your child to at least six other nations, and your child would be fluent in at least seven foreign languages.
Here is how to learn a language: immerse yourself in the culture of the country, including watching television four or five hours a day, which you can do on the Internet at home for free. So, parents who send their children to this school to master foreign languages do not understand how to learn foreign languages.
The students who get in are very bright, and their parents are either rich or are being subsidized by parents who are rich.
The dummies are the parents.
Murray wrote the following:
Much of the meaning of the Middlebury affair depends on what Middlebury does next. So far, Middlebury's stance has been exemplary. The administration agreed to host the event. President Patton did not cancel it even after a major protest became inevitable. She appeared at the event, further signaling Middlebury's commitment to academic freedom. The administration arranged an ingenious Plan B that enabled me to present my ideas and discuss them with Professor Stanger even though the crowd had prevented me from speaking in the lecture hall. I wish that every college in the country had the backbone and determination that Middlebury exhibited.
Backbone? The moment the students threatened to protest, the president of the college should have threatened to expel every person in the room. After the protest, she should have done it.
They never do.
The college had threatened expulsions. The college is toothless and feckless, and the students know it. Students know how the power game is played. They never confront direct opposition.
How many students would have to be expelled to send the message to the rest of them? I think half a dozen would've done it. Then the president should have said the following: "The next time, every student protesting will be expelled within a week. Don't call my bluff."
The president would then have sent out a discussion of this to every alumni member, and the amount of money coming in in instant donations would be in the millions. The alumni are fed up. They want to see some backbone. That is because they have never seen it.
APOLOGIZING FOR GUTLESS WONDERS
Murray's attitude is apologetic.
Both Bill Burger, who made the initial remarks in the lecture hall, and President Patton spelled out Middlebury's code of conduct and warned that violations could have consequences up to and including expulsion. Those warnings were ignored wholesale. Now what?I sympathize with the difficulty of President Patton's task. We're talking about violations that involve a few hundred students, ranging from ones that call for a serious tutelary response (e.g., for the sweetly earnest young woman) to ones calling for permanent expulsion (for the students who participated in the mob as we exited), to criminal prosecution (at the very least, for those who injured Professor Stanger). The evidence will range from excellent to ambiguous to none. I will urge only that the inability to appropriately punish all of the guilty must not prevent appropriate punishment in cases where the evidence is clear.
Absent an adequate disciplinary response, I fear that the Middlebury episode could become an inflection point. In the twenty-three years since The Bell Curve was published, I have had considerable experience with campus protests. Until last Thursday, all of the ones involving me have been as carefully scripted as kabuki: The college administration meets with the organizers of the protest and ground rules are agreed upon. The protesters have so many minutes to do such and such. It is agreed that after the allotted time, they will leave or desist. These negotiated agreements have always worked. At least a couple of dozen times, I have been able to give my lecture to an attentive (or at least quiet) audience despite an organized protest.
I have never heard of any university anywhere since the fall of 1964, when the Berkeley free speech movement began, that expelled any student. Not one student. It may have happened, but I have never heard about it.
The radical students know their targets. Their targets are university administrators.
As I've said for 40 years, a university administrator is a hybrid: half jellyfish and half chameleon.
If this becomes the new normal, the number of colleges willing to let themselves in for an experience like Middlebury's will plunge to near zero. Academia is already largely sequestered in an ideological bubble, but at least it's translucent. That bubble will become opaque.
Murray is terminally naïve. Virtually all conservative intellectuals are. No major university has been translucent in my lifetime. They have all been ideologically liberal, and they have been sitting ducks for radicals since the fall of 1964.
Ludwig von Mises was once asked to give a lecture at some college. He wisely refused to do it. Afterwards, he said that the students were being taught Keynesianism, and bringing him in to give one lecture was not going to change the students' minds. "As soon as I left," he said, "the professor would have spent time refuting me. He would have had the last say." But in letting him come, it would allow the college to parade itself as if it were open to ideas. He refused to cooperate. I agree with them entirely, given the time in which he spoke, which was long before the Berkeley free speech movement. Today, it's different. He should have taken the opportunity to speak to a group, hoping for a protest.
The correct strategy for a conservative to speak on campus is to generate a protest: the more obstreperous, the better.
Middlebury tried to negotiate such an agreement with the protesters, but, for the first time in my experience, the protesters would not accept any time limits. If this becomes the new normal, the number of colleges willing to let themselves in for an experience like Middlebury's will plunge to near zero. Academia is already largely sequestered in an ideological bubble, but at least it's translucent. That bubble will become opaque.
Negotiate? There should be no negotiation here. The university should have expelled these students permanently, and never let them back. It's called a nonnegotiable demand.
Worse yet, the intellectual thugs will take over many campuses. In the mid-1990s, I could count on students who had wanted to listen to start yelling at the protesters after a certain point, "Sit down and shut up, we want to hear what he has to say." That kind of pushback had an effect. It reminded the protesters that they were a minority. I am assured by people at Middlebury that their protesters are a minority as well. But they are a minority that has intimidated the majority. The people in the audience who wanted to hear me speak were completely cowed. That cannot be allowed to stand. A campus where a majority of students are fearful to speak openly because they know a minority will jump on them is no longer an intellectually free campus in any meaningful sense.
The students who showed up to hear the speech are clearly vulnerable. They know that they will not be backed up by the school's administration. The protesters also know this. The protesters know they will get away with it. There will be no negative sanctions brought against them. So, they bring negative sanctions against the speaker and against all the students who show up to hear the speaker. This has been going on since the middle of the 1960's. I was in graduate school in those years. I speak from memory.
A college's faculty is the obvious resource for keeping the bubble translucent and the intellectual thugs from taking over. A faculty that is overwhelmingly on the side of free intellectual exchange, stipulating only that it be conducted with logic, evidence, and civility, can easily lead each new freshman class to understand that's how academia operates. If faculty members routinely condemn intellectual thuggery, the majority of students who also oppose it will feel entitled to say "sit down and shut up, we want to hear what he has to say" when protesters try to shut down intellectual exchange.
Where has this man been living? There has no been a faculty like this since 1964. These people are either hard-core liberals or else hard-core leftists who got their PhD's in the late 1960's, and who have run the show on campus for a generation.
That leads me to two critical questions for which I have no empirical answers: What is the percentage of tenured faculty on American campuses who are still unambiguously on the side of free intellectual exchange? What is the percentage of them who are willing to express that position openly? I am confident that the answer to the first question is still far greater than fifty percent. But what about the answer to the second question? My reading of events on campuses over the last few years is that a minority of faculty are cowing a majority in the same way that a minority of students are cowing the majority.
It doesn't matter what good people think in the safety of their offices. The only thing that matters is sanctions. Either the protesters are going to bring negative sanctions, or else the administration is. Anything else is just liberal pablum.
ADOPT ALINSKY'S METHODS
Now, following Saul Alinsky, what is a conservative to do about it?
He should do whatever he can do to generate a protest on campus. The goal is to expose the universities as the gutless left-wing institutions that they have always been. A protest helps you do this.
The goal is to get shouted down.
Always bring somebody along to take videos of what is going on. Then, before the evening is over, have the other person upload the video to YouTube. Then do a series of follow-up videos explaining what happened.
Your goal is to get a series of videos on-line: 2 minutes, 8 minutes, and 25 minutes. Tell what happened, but with spliced-in segments of raging students. Why do this? In order to embarrass the administration. Your goal is not to get your ideas across in 40 minutes to a group of students who will forget 95% of what you said within 72 hours (the normal retention rate). Your goal is to create enormous pain to the university's administration. What you want to do is to get a few multimillionaire donors who would have given money to the school as a legacy to write the president and say, "Either you get tough, or else you don't get my donation." The university administrators don't know how to get tough, so they won't get the donations.
A conservative who gets protested at a university can probably cost that university several million dollars in lost donations. This should be the #1 goal of going to speak.
The goal is to expose these people for what they are, and what they have been since the 1960's. The goal is to enrage a certain number of rich donors, and hope that these donors will come to their senses and not subsidize this nonsense with multimillion dollar legacies.
The university administrators are bureaucrats. Bureaucrats respect two things: bad publicity and reduced budgets. They respect nothing else. They are immune to every other kind of criticism. But conservatives, never having read Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, do not understand this.
JAMES O'KEEFE
One conservative does understand: James O'Keefe. He runs Project Veritas. He has inflicted more pain on more hard-core liberals than anyone in my lifetime. He goes around with concealed video cameras, gets liberal activists to admit that they are breaking the law, and then he goes online to expose them.
His most famous event was in 2009 when he pretended to be a pimp, and he got Project Acorn staffers to agree to cooperate, despite his status as a pimp. That stunt shut down Project Acorn. The federal government cut off the funding. Why? Because of his videos.
The Left was outraged. "Why, he used deception!" Their protests did not get a resurrection for Project Acorn.
O'Keefe had read Alinsky. He learned well. He went on the attack. He is still doing it. This time, his target is CNN.
Conservative intellectuals do not know how to play to win. They do not know how to inflict pain on their ideological enemies.
The enemies are not a bunch of loudmouth kids who protest. They are the victims. The enemies are the people who staff the educational system in the United States above grade 7. They are the ones who should have the funding cut off. Instead, Americans support higher education in the United States to the tune of $500 billion a year. This is suicidal. Parents are suicidal. Politicians who vote for university funding are suicidal. There is no will to resist, let alone a will to overturn these people.
CONCLUSIONS
So, I'm happy that Charles Murray got a taste of the real world. Better late than never. This poor guy sent his daughter to Middlebury and probably spent a quarter of $1 million to do this. He is one of the gullible parents who was dumb enough to send his daughter into that school, instead of keeping her at home and letting her earn a bachelor's degree for about $15,000, and then use the rest of the money to send her to foreign countries to learn half a dozen languages.
The stories like Murray's do not discourage me. If I got discouraged by stories like this, I would have been discouraged ever since the fall of 1964.