Turf War
Lifted from the comments, more progressive intellectualism at Middlebury College, where female staff get assaulted by students wearing masks, and elderly scholars get chased off campus:
College public safety officers managed to get Professor Allison Stanger and Charles Murray into the administrator’s car. “The protestors then violently set upon the car, rocking it, pounding on it, jumping on and trying to prevent it from leaving campus,” said Bill Burger, the college’s vice president for communications and marketing. “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,” said Burger. “During this confrontation, one of the demonstrators pulled Professor Stanger’s hair and twisted her neck,” Burger continued. “She was attended to at Porter Hospital later and is wearing a neck brace.”
Note that the rather animated protestors don’t seem too familiar with Dr Murray’s research and commentary, and as one of Middlebury’s sociology professors noted, “few, if any” of the protestors had ever read Murray’s books. Evidently, he’s nonetheless someone to be ‘othered’ and to whom the students can attach the usual out-group labels – denouncing him as “sexist,” “racist,” “anti-gay” and a “white nationalist.” (As even the briefest use of Google would reveal, Murray married a Thai woman while in the Peace Corps, has mixed-race children, has tutored inner-city black children for free, and was an early advocate of gay marriage – hardly the most obvious markers of a supposedly anti-gay white nationalist.)
Regular readers will no doubt register the irony that, if you wanted to witness some overt racial zealotry, you’d be much more likely to find it among supposedly ‘progressive’ students – say, the ones assaulting their peers or obstructing their path and making them walk through mud for the sin of being white, or grabbing women’s hair and yanking really hard.
I see no reason to suppose that the mob delinquency illustrated above, examples of which seem to be escalating in frequency and vehemence, will spontaneously improve or cease to be fashionable without some quite significant external pressure. Those directly responsible, and their faculty cheerleaders, show no sign of becoming ashamed any time soon. If their behaviour and assumptions are to change, I suspect it will have to cost them, dearly. And whether there are arrests and/or expulsions following this latest thuggish farce will tell us quite a bit about academia’s ongoing decay.
Update:
And here’s an extract from Dr Murray’s own account of what happened at Middlebury:
We walked out the door and into the middle of a mob. I have read that they numbered about twenty. It seemed like a lot more than that to me, maybe fifty or so, but I was not in a position to get a good count. I registered that several of them were wearing ski masks. That was disquieting.
I had expected that they would shout expletives at us but no more. So I was nonplussed when I realised that a big man with a sign was standing right in front of us and wasn’t going to let us pass. I instinctively thought, we’ll go around him. But that wasn’t possible. We’d just get blocked by the others who were joining him. So we walked straight into him, one of our security guys pushed him aside, and that’s the way it went from then on: Allison and Bill each holding one of my elbows, the three of us ploughing ahead, the security guys clearing our way, and lots of pushing and shoving from all sides.
I didn’t see it happen, but someone grabbed Allison’s hair just as someone else shoved her from another direction, damaging muscles, tendons, and fascia in her neck. I was stumbling because of the shoving. If it hadn’t been for Allison and Bill keeping hold of me and the security guards pulling people off me, I would have been pushed to the ground…
The three of us got to the car, with the security guards keeping protesters away while we closed and locked the doors. Then we found that the evening wasn’t over. So many protesters surrounded the car, banging on the sides and the windows and rocking the car, climbing onto the hood, that Bill had to inch forward lest he run over them. At the time, I wouldn’t have objected. Bill must have a longer time horizon than I do.
Extricating ourselves took a few blocks and several minutes. When we had done so and were finally satisfied that no cars were tailing us, we drove to the dinner venue. Allison and I went in and started chatting with the gathered students and faculty members. Suddenly Bill reappeared and said abruptly, “We’re leaving. Now.” The protesters had discovered where the dinner was being held and were on their way. So it was the three of us in the car again.
Remember, Dr Murray is 74 years old, and the students trying to push him to the ground imagine themselves as leftist intellectuals. Our betters.
Update 2:
And in news that will shock no-one:
Which is why it will happen again.
Heh.
Witch burners don’t care about the details of the witch. They just know that they need a witch to burn.
And volunteers are ever so hard to come by,
Oh, and the habitually self-satisfied Matt Yglesias compared Murray to Hitler, as you do. At least if you haven’t actually read the things you’re tweeting about.
It’s perhaps worth noting that the worst of the thuggery occurred after the disruption of his talk, with all the screaming, pulled fire alarms, and being forced to relocate to another lecture hall, etc. Things got truly alarming after the students had achieved their goal and as Murray was trying to leave the campus. With ‘protestors’ shaking the car, blocking its path and generally trying to terrorise the occupants. Apparently, it’s not enough to use mob coercion to suppress free speech and thwart other students who wanted to hear Murray being interviewed. Murray – and anyone with him – also had to be punished for the sin of thinking differently and daring to venture on their turf.
Why the hell is it left to campus security? Where were the REAL cops?
“With ‘protestors’ shaking the car, blocking its path and generally trying to terrorise the occupants. Apparently, it’s not enough to use mob coercion to suppress free speech and thwart other students who wanted to hear Murray being interviewed. Murray – and anyone with him – also had to be punished for the sin of thinking differently and daring to venture on their turf.”
I’m reminded of a troupe of lower primates chasing a rival troupe off their territory. Without the poo-flinging and sexual dominance displays, thankfully.
It’s almost as if the want to re-create the Cultural Revolution – complete with struggle sessions.
Without the poo-flinging and sexual dominance displays, thankfully.
I was going to make some quip about the students flinging their theses, but in fact they were remarkably ignorant of Murray’s work and didn’t have any rebuttal beyond the usual generic chanted smears. Someone was even holding a sign implying that Murray is in favour of eugenics, which, given his actual writing, is about as perverse as you can get.
Incidentally, if anyone has trouble with comments not appearing, email me and I’ll take a shoe to the spam filter.
the usual generic chanted smears
*fights urge to slap row of idiots*
*fights urge to slap row of idiots*
Well, they were lined up conveniently. And that is what they are. They’re vain, attention-seeking mediocrities who can’t be arsed to do even the most elementary research, and haven’t even read the books they claim to find so offensive, but are nonetheless determined to stop anyone else listening to the author or asking him questions.
*fights urge to slap row of idiots*
Some urges should not be fought.
They’re the brave little warriors of the non-consensual left. Whether you like it or not, they’ll fuck you over.
And here, written anonymously, is the students’ justification for their thuggery. Note again the absurd characterisation of Dr Murray as a “white nationalist” and even a “eugenicist,” and his mere presence as “an intense act of aggression,” and then the inevitable, ludicrous attempt to portray themselves – the instigators of the harassment and violence – as the real victims.
How many times does it have to be said?
Purge these arseholes.
Sack the Professors/Teachers/”Educators” without a cent/penny of compo. Confiscate their pensions.
Automatic expulsion for the student yobs. Surcharge their student loans 10x and collect the money aggressively so the twats will have to win the Lottery to get a penny ahead their entire lives. There are plenty of poor people in that boat. Let these middle-class Marxist pukes have a taste–or better still a life-time of it.
Hit back FFS.
In a saner world, these vain little shits would be expelled as unfit for university.
In a saner world they sent the 101st Airborne was sent in to enforce a Supreme Court decision when the local police couldn’t be trusted, for whatever reasons, to do their jobs. Perhaps we need the same to protect the First Amendment.
The leftist thugs get away with it because the university authorities are dominated by leftists who don’t really want to stop them, and who ensure that the campus security guards understand that they are not supposed to intervene. But each time the thugs succeed in driving a non-leftist off the campus the more bold they become. So the violence will continue to escalate until the degenerate cult indoctrination centres – they can hardly be called “universities” any more – are forced to reform by external pressure.
Unfortunately, I suspect that we won’t reach the tipping-point at which public anger forces politicians to take radical action until somebody is actually killed. You may recall the images of an Islamist mob carrying the body of Ambassador Stevens after they murdered him in Benghazi. I fear it’s just a matter of time before we see similar images of a leftist mob screaming about tolerance as they parade the body of a conservative that they’ve just murdered around the campus.
“It’s almost as if the want to re-create the Cultural Revolution”
Exactly what sprung to my mind, too. The denouncement of one of their own with the list of bogeymen-du-jour is all too familiar.
But Mr. Ecks and David are right. I’ve said this before, but by concentrating on “higher education”, treating them as glorified high-schools, we’ve lost sight of what universities really are: quasi-monastic repositories of learning. These hoologans need to be told that their behaviour is entirely incompatible with the intellectual life and that they are therefore unfit for membership of the university (i.e., to recieve a degree).
You can either be a part of a rioting mob, or you can be an intellectual. Not both.
I have a cure for this.
Needs grapeshot.
…without some quite significant external pressure.
That phrase is doing a lot of work. An example of the blessed “British Understatement.”
Someone was even holding a sign implying that Murray is in favour of eugenics, which, given his actual writing, is about as perverse as you can get.
From the 10th anniversary edition of Charles Murray’s Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980.
Please excuse the length of this quote, but I do believe it’s worth the effort to read (even – perhaps especially – for those who might disagree with him).
To sustain [social] mobility, the United States has depended on the willingness of the poor to make investments – of time, energy, psychic commitment, and money [ … ] The investments are made in the hopes of long-term gains. But the ultimate payoff is remote. To sustain the effort over what may be a protracted period, the system must also offer incentives and rewards before the prize is attained.
The principal ongoing incentives has been faith that investments do pay off, based on what has happened to other people [ … ] Role models have to exist of whom the youth can credibly say, “if he (she) could do it, it is possible that I can do it, too.” [ … ]
The principal ongoing reward has been praise for trying. This regard has been especially important for the largest single class of poor “investors,” students who make present sacrifices to get an advanced education. Under the traditional model [ … ] his parents are proud of him, he is used as a model by other parents in the neighbourhood, his classmates vote him most likely to succeed, and – an important plus – he knows that society itself applauds [ … ] The incentive (“It is possible to succeed”) and the reward (“People admire me for trying”) were both gutted.
The black ghetto again forms the archetypal example of characteristics found (not only in America, but world-wide) wherever some members of society have been segregated and told they are inferior. Virtually every commentator on what it is like to grow up black in America, whether novelist or sociologist or memoirist, has reflected on the devastating effects of racism on self-confidence [ … ]
This debilitating aspect of black socialisation is not a recent creation. The problem is that post-1964 social policy fed it. Every assumption that a young black in the ghetto might make about his inability to compete with whites was nourished by a social policy telling him, through the way it treated him day to day, that he was an un-responsible victim. Society’s actions were at odds with society’s rhetoric telling him to be proud and to believe in himself.
Day to day, going to a typical inner-city high school, such a young person saw that most of the special programs were directed at the most conspicuous failures. There were likely to be special programs for the mentally retarded, for the learning-disabled, and for the emotionally disturbed. The rules of school conduct placated the trouble-makers.
Special tracks for the gifted were attacked as elitist. Where programs for the gifted (or just the hardest-working) did exist, they fell into the magnet-schools trap – to avoid trouble, the course materials were watered down and the demands (and sense of reward) were low. The ambitious and hard-working students were passed along with A’s and with the teachers’ gratitude for not contributing to the discipline problem, but without an education that enabled them to compete in a good university.
Outside of school, the rules of the game argued against the proposition that hard work pays off. The network of social service agencies – the most visible (legitimate) resource bank – existed to help the least provident and least able. The most conspicuous local success stories were drug dealers, pimps, and fences. Friends who were arrested by the police went free or were assigned to educational or counselling programs for which the youth who went straight was not eligible. And when the hard-working student did get into a government-sponsored job program, his first lessons were the ones who did no work were treated exactly the same as he was, except that he was likely to come under attack from his coworkers for threatening to get the others into trouble.
This experience contained only one kind of lesson: In the day-to-day experience of a youth growing up in a black ghetto, there was no evidence whatsoever that working within the system paid off. The way to get something from the system was to be sufficiently a failure to qualify for help, or to con the system. What a racially segregated society once taught the young black about living with his inferiority was now taught by a benevolent social welfare system. The difference was that in an earlier age, a black parent could fight the competing influences. The parent could drum into the child’s head the belief that he could make it – that the people who said otherwise were racists who obviously wanted him to fail. How did a parent in the aftermath of the reform period compete with a system that proclaimed its devotion to equality, but whose purpose was to minister to a black population that it tacitly assumed had proved its inability to compete in the straight, white system?
Let us once again do some role-playing. Let us say that I am an adolescent who has grown up surrounded by longstanding influences that make me doubt my ability to compete in the larger society. I look around and find evidence that others like me are unable to compete. I am told by spokesmen – white and black alike – that it is not my fault, that I am a victim of forces beyond my control. If I expect to fail, it is extremely useful to believe what I am told. In fact, it is essential. If I observe a peer who is studying hard, I am threatened. Such a peer is asserting one of two things, either of which is unacceptable. One assertion is that he is better than I (and is therefore free of the forces that excuse me for failing). The other assertion is even more threatening: that he is not better than I, but rather I am wrong in excusing myself for failing. Either way, I have a motive to discourage such behaviour by my fellow students [ … ]
The situation varies [ … ] but the norm in inner-city schools during the 1970s was that the hard-working student was said to be “acting white” and was subjected to severe criticism, isolation, even physical assaults. There was no “praise for trying”; instead there was social ostracism, which, for the typical adolescent, is perhaps the worst of punishments [ … ] My hypothesis is that white poor communities [ … ] will exhibit the same attitudes among their youth and the same [social] immobility …
No wonder they want to burn him – he’s a heretic.
“In a saner world, these vain little shits would be expelled as unfit for university.”
Make that unfit for society.
“I’ll take a shoe to the spam filter.”
Would that be sabotage?
Nik, thanks for the quote, length be damned.
When one subsidizes, encourages, and incentivizes a behavior, one gets more of that behavior. Of course, the opposite is true, as every “well-meaning” politician who has advocated for increased sin taxes will tell you. Sadly, those simple lessons of economics are lost upon the same politicians when they advocate for ever more expensive programs and hand-outs for those they deem “disadvantaged,” i.e. the poor sods who are cursed by Darwin with being incapable of anything better.
Of course, the above presupposes mere ignorance on the part of the worthies in charge instead of active malice deployed in the never ending quest for more power.
No wonder they want to burn him – he’s a heretic.
The determined attempt to paint him as some bigoted monster is perverse to a degree that’s hard to verbalise, and inexcusable. Murray is a contender for the most polite man on Earth, and is both measured and rigorous – in contrast with so many of the people who smear him out of hand, usually in ignorance. Including, incidentally, one Barack Obama, who, in 1994, dismissed Murray’s book The Bell Curve as “good old-fashioned racism” and something to be “denounced,” while publicly admitting that he hadn’t even read it and wasn’t too familiar with its content. Great role model, Barry. And so statistical analysis is now apparently “hate speech,” a pointedly conscientious book is now deemed beyond the pale, and its remaining author is to be physically harassed and literally chased off campus. By preening morons.
“will spontaneously improve or cease to be fashionable without some quite significant external pressure.”
Recall how the Berkeley police stood by and did nothing as the regressives rioted in response to Milo trying to give a speech. That lack of action on the part of the police has only encouraged the regressives to riot more (again in Berkeley yesterday, at the March 4 Trump”
If it weren’t actually happening, widely, in real life, it might almost be funny. Mentally uniform narcissists holding signs boasting of their “resistance” to imaginary oppression in one of the most cossetting environments in human history, and insisting that, being so heroic, they will tolerate “no hate here,” while freely indulging their own vindictiveness and delight in mob coercion. But this is what happens when you encourage teenagers to gorge on self-righteousness, all but daily, for years, unopposed by facts, realism or any substantive disagreement. It might tempt the best of us. And these clowns are far from that.
My hypothesis is that white poor communities [ … ] will exhibit the same attitudes among their youth and the same [social] immobility …
Having a vacation/retirement home in lower Appalachia, I have definitely seen similar. Remember, LBJ’s anti-poverty crusades got some of its support by publicizing Appalachian poverty. I’ve seen the same memes, the distrust of outsiders, the lazy work ethic, the reinforcement of “poor, poor, me” even in the churches, the free handouts that result in ongoing dependency. Meth is the redneck’s crack. Not that a good number of rednecks aren’t into crack. It’s sickening. But we dare not speak of it.
(again in Berkeley yesterday, at the March 4 Trump”
…it might also be funny
If I live to be 100… this list is growing so fast I must be several hundred years old by now, but … and dare I mention this as I will be presented with worse by our increasingly absurd society…protesters toting hammer and cycle flags mocking supporters of a GOP president about HIS ties to Russia. Based on far less evidence than McCarthy ever had. Were Kafka alive today…
Until the government stops financing the droogs with guaranteed student loans there will be no cessation, the violence will continue to escalate. Turning off the money machine would be the game-changer.
“I was going to make some quip about the students flinging their theses”
But you decided to go through the motions instead.
“Turning off the money machine would be the game-changer.”
It would also put a halt to rapidly rising tuition rates, which are rising at 3 to 5 times the rate of inflation (in the USA).
I feel so sorry for Dr Murray, an erudite and intelligent man whose writings and lifestyle demonstrate the breadth of his humanity.
I’d been hoping that the campus lunacy was reaching a point where the kickback was inevitable. Of course, it would also require that enough of the tenured staff banded together and raised their voices in protest. And, there, we hit the stumbling block: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” As someone else said, it may need a death to force a re-assessment of the status quo. But, should that death be of a ‘righteous’ protester, it would only exacerbate the current trend!
I’ve been sharing snippets of this unfolding drama with two of my African friends (real friends, of more than 30 years’ standing), because I wondered how they might view it. Both had fled their home country’s civil wars and, eventually, acquired the nationality of the European countries that granted them refugee status. Neither has a University degree. Both worked hard in their adopted country (and, yes, there was often blatant discrimination). Today, each of them owns their own home/car. They were both offended at the notion that Uni. standards should be adjusted for students of ‘colour’. For them, it was more important to be accepted on an equal footing with everyone else.
Via Ed at Instapundit, here’s Peter Robinson interviewing Charles Murray in 2012.
Remember, LBJ’s anti-poverty crusades got some of its support by publicizing Appalachian poverty.
The Longest Mile by Rena Gazaway documents the extreme social pathology and dysfunction to be found in an isolated hollow in Kentucky during the 1960s. It is horrifying and fascinating in equal measure, and the author’s commitment to both her fieldwork and her subjects is remarkable. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
extreme social pathology and dysfunction to be found in an isolated hollow in Kentucky
I’ve heard some horror stories that, granted from rumor mill but also locals who should know, and given stories I’ve heard that were corroborated by the legal system and local news, justify the “banjo pickers” stereotype. It’s a sick world out there beyond, and even surrounded by, civilization and that sick world is much closer than we want to believe.
Turf War indeed. Queering Outer Space
we need to pre-emptively Occupy Mars […] and de-colonize Mars in the process.
Go. Now. Do not wait for the tainting influence of blood-soaked capitalist oxygen. I think you will find it very easy to both “occupy” and “de-colonize” Mars in that order, and with very short delay.
In response, we need to pre-emptively Occupy Mars while taking one of the many important lessons offered by indigenous people to the Occupy movement, and de-colonize Mars in the process. Which means injecting all of our queer and indigenous selves into the discussions about “settling” and “colonizing” Mars, into these plans to fundamentally change the surface of another planet, to reproduce Earth there.
Wait, what??? [ blinks ]
[ facepalm.gif ]
Start building the B Ark, it’s long past overdue!
Ya know…Post up thread I was going to make reference to feeling like Zaphod Beeblebrox shaking both my heads but said no, too far out there.
The leftists always pull the fire alarms. You’d think there would be video once in a while. Maybe the organizers could keep an eye on them and be ready to videotape?
In David’s 13:24 comment, the link is to a self-serving justification. “ Professor Stanger’s hair was not intentionally pulled but was inadvertently caught in the chaos that Public Safety incited.” brings to mind the 1956 movie Forbidden Planet with the Krell’s underground complex capable of manifesting thought. The collective mind’s Id seems to take the blame for the mysterious yanking of Professor Stanger’s hair, as the article denies that any protester willfully did so.
but was inadvertently caught in the chaos
But officer, he just accidentally ran into my fist.
brings to mind the 1956 movie Forbidden Planet with the Krell’s underground complex capable of manifesting thought.
Heh. Absolutely. “Monsters, John. Monsters from the Id!”
Or perhaps the car was rendered inexplicably magnetic and then, due to their belt buckles and piercings, dragged the poor students towards it, and on top of it, repeatedly, quite violently.
Or maybe it’s just the convenient moral anonymity of the mob, and the fact that the people who do these things tend to be liars and cowards.
The Tooner suggested “Needs grapeshot”. The more I read about these idiot bigots and their thuggery, the more Kent State comes to mind. I am also reminded of a leftist demonstration in 1970 at an Australian University I attended when a female protester hit an engineering student over the head from behind with a sign on a pole. The engineer swung and hooked her in one movement and she went to sleep. It was beautiful to watch. The engineers, as a group, were definitely conservatives who lived in the real world; the Leftists backed off when faced by them.
. . . Including, incidentally, one Barack Obama, who, in 1994, dismissed Murray’s book The Bell Curve as “good old-fashioned racism” and something to be “denounced,” while publicly admitting that he hadn’t even read it and wasn’t too familiar with its content.
Um. That does seem odd. There are reports of a transcript, where the book gets commented on by Obama. There is a quote of Murray regarding that commentary:
So, noting that commenting on a unknown text is surreal, is there any proof the book never got read by Obama, or is that just being a tenet of alternative faith?
Perhaps instead the reality is that Obama did read the book, and subsequently merely disagreed with the content. If so, one can definitely grant that for someone of the right wing faith, to acknowledge that a lawyer and constitutional scholar such as Obama would have done such elementary research is just not enough fun . . .
I haven’t done masses of googlemancy, but even the most basic bit of digging around rather seems to indicate that any claim the book never got read by Obama is fraudulent . . .
Roger Kimball on the Middlebury meltdown:
What’s wearying, I think, isn’t just the violence and thuggery, which is bad enough, but the display of widespread intellectual conformity, a kind of mental agoraphobia. Not just the students, whose intolerance and self-satisfied morony is a staple of these pages, but also Middlebury’s president, Laurie Patton, who seems determined to hide her ignorance of Murray’s work by airing random PC buzzwords. An ignorance that’s been mouthed by other university presidents and bureaucrats, including Tim Sands at Virginia Tech, whose distortions and outright lies prompted a pointed and well-deserved reply by Murray.
That Murray had to highlight this level of dimness and mendacity from a university president is quite a thing. But this is the new, politically corrected standard of academic enquiry. And this is why political correctness is so corrosive. In order to sustain the narrative, one has to become obstinately ignorant and/or dishonest. Which is to say, corrupted.