Green mountains of vermont, the champlain valley, so in some sense, you can in part explain the reaction because it is almost a bubble within a bubble. Every liberal Arts College Campus is something of a bubble, which is a good thing, because liberal learning takes place there, but it is in vermont, the home of ben jerrys, the home of bernie sanders, and also the states in the union with the smallest percentage of voters who voted for donald trump. That context is very important for understanding what transpired. Host how many students . Guest 2350 . Fairly small. Host i saw the Number Online that says that is what tuition and room and board costs for one year. Guest it is an expensive proposition, but we make a real effort to make the experience available to as many bright, capable young people as possible. Ahere are significant number of students on for financial aid. A greater number pay that enormous amount, which is quite extraordinary. Host where did you get your education . Guest in two places. Outside Amherst College of chicago for three years. I was a math major, and i loved mathematics at the time. Iran out of math classes to take my senior year. There was the senior residency requirement. That is not what i wanted to do. I wanted to do applied mathematics and graduate in the great state of indiana. Host your city is what . Guest fort wayne. Host did you get a masters and then a phd . A livingkind of am example of taking some time to figure out exactly what interests you and why. I did an undergraduate degree in athematics and then a did diploma in economics and a masters in soviet era studies at Harvard University followed by a phd in Political Science at harvard. From a settrajectory of questions that really have answers, which is what i like about mathematics, to an interest in some unanswerable questions which come from the humanities. I am braced both of those in my thinking and teaching. Host how long have you been at Middlebury College . Because iot a pin have been there 25 years. Directly after graduate school. Host you are not this semester or this year at middlebury . Guest i am on sabbatical. I had a scheduled sabbatical. I am a scholar and resident at the foundation. Washingtonnk tank in that is pretty much going to enable me to work on my book, and provides a great environment for me to do that. Host when you are asked middlebury, what do you teach . Guest i teach a course in american foreignpolicy. I am trained in international relations. I have an interest in a variety of fields. The Political Development of western europe. Firstyear seminar in empires. A new course i love called the politics of virtual realities. The main courses i am known for. Host what is your view of your relationship with students overall the 25 years . Guest i love my students. I think they love me back. Broker. N as an honest a Student Group asked me to interview Charles Murray. I interviewed Edward Snowden. I am kind of any girl itunity interlocutory am kind of an equal opportunity interlocutor. With teaching, i am sure at the end of the day that i have made some kind of difference in the world. There is nothing like opening up someones mind to two possibilities, and that is what teaching is all about. Host did the student protests Edward Snowden at all . Campuses areollege leaning left or whatever you want to call it. Dont meanhey anything today. Aey are voting democratic, so scholar associated with the Republican Party is controversial to them, which is unfortunate since the Republican Party is the other major party in the united states. That is just the reality of it. Snowden is revered by the left so there are no protest when he o appears on campus. I want to see that remedied. I think it is important. My students know i am a democrat. It is important to engage with someone like Charles Murray because it shows them i believe in a free and Fair Exchange of views in my classroom, which you have to have for liberal education to take place. Ethnic looked up the population in vermont and found that there are two point 5 africanamericans in the state and the city of middlebury. Something like that. I think almost nonexistent. What does that do for the bubble you are talking about . Guest vermont is one of the whitest states in the union. Colleges are what doing is bringing in students from a vast array of different backgrounds, students of color. There is no one who can cut their hair. They feel completely out of place. The institution has to try to do something to make them feel like this is their institution. That is the heart of what is going on here. It is easy to paint it as a story of, you know, conservatives versus students of color, but really, what is taking place is that we have a valueson where american are at stake, and they do not belong to a particular party or a particular identity group. They belonged to all americans. That is up a heart of this issue we are discussing. I would not want to downplay the english that was expressed through those protests and shut down. The emotions are real. They have to be validated. The most important part is thinking about feeling that way, and what do we need to do that we can move forward and make this a better place for you . For my perspective, that is not about shutting down speech or banning certain speakers from campus. It is about talking together about how we make the environment a place where everybody belongs. Host how often have you met someone who teaches at middlebury who is conservative . Guest there is not that many. Host have you ever met anybody . Guest they are some of my good friends because they are interesting to talk to. Part of the reason i want my students to engage with these people is because i benefited enormously from interacting with some of the great conservative thinkers there. People like harvey mansfield, james wilson, signal huntington. These are professors with whom you could disagree profoundly. That interaction was so own personal my development that i want it to be available to other students. Host Charles Murray, 1994, appeared on this program, talked about the bell curve. I just want to run this. About thise book is distribution and this change. We heard it and it was one of those cases where he said yeah, that is a wonderful title. It refers to the picture on the front of the book that looks like a bell. It is a phenomenon you see in all kinds of things in nature whether it is height and weight or iq. They distribute themselves so you get most people in the middle and you get few people out on each end, and the book is about the people on each end. Host how much did you know about this when he was slated to come to middlebury . Guest i know about the whole bell curve controversy. I used a symposium which had murray and their critics write inut the book, and i used it a firstyear seminar on constitutional democracy. I found it a really effective pedagogical device precisely because it provoked students and out the main great, but then you could take them to the text and say you think it says that. Where does it say that . And then they begin to realize that they do not like the bottom line of the argument, but they need to focus on what chain in the logical reasoning and what about those set of assumptions is problematic for them. Useful ascredibly annexes eyes, so you take that kind of initial shock, if you will that is incredibly exercise, so you take that initial kind of shock, if you will. Host you heard about the incident in march. I saw some reference to the Southern Poverty Law Center in the description of Charles Murray as one of the reasons why these students reacted the way they did. They had on their website, and i want to be to you the beginning of what they say and ask you what you think of this. At the murray, a fellow American Enterprise institute, has become one of the most influential social scientists in america, using racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and latino communities, when in, and the poor, and it goes on women and the poor. It goes on to say that disadvantage groups are disadvantaged because they cannot be with white men who are intellectually, psychologically, and morally superior. Murray advocates the total elimination of the welfare state, affirmative action, and the department of education, arguing Public Policy cannot overcome the innate deficiencies that caused unequal social and educational outcomes. The question to you, is that accurately portraying Charles Murray . Guest of course not. I would see no point in engaging with him if that was what he was writing. The frightening thing about that website is that in the runup to his appearance on campus, you had faculty and students taking what you had read to me and saying this man cannot speak even though you cannot substantiate those assertions. Toy have quotes not linked the original text. If you look at the quotes in thetext, he is saying opposite of what they are saying he is saying. It was a terrible situation that i think led to what happened, that people did not think for themselves him and did not read for themselves, did not just hear what he had to say first before drawing conclusions about his character and his past work. That it was like something you could not control, because people just kept waving that website and saying that is all they had to know. We had faculty members at Middlebury College who had openly acknowledged they had never read Charles Murray, but because of the Southern Poverty Law Center website, this is all you needed to know to know what you had to do to be a righteous human being. That is problematic to me. Host 25 seconds of the footage at middlebury protest so people can get a sense of what it was like in the room. Before we do that though, where was this room, how big a room was it . Guest i think it seats 300. It is wilson hall, mccullough student center. It is the same place, the same place two weeks later in which i interviewed Edward Snowden. Host and the format for the evening was how did this come about . Guest it was restricted to students only, so you had to have a middlebury id to be admitted to the lecture hall. Were outside agitators that people referred to, but they were not inside the lecture hop your it what you are seeing inside the lecture hall is all middlebury students. Host just look at this and get a feel for it. [video playing] [students chanting] Charles Murray, go away. Ists, antigay s. Charles murray, go away. , sexists,cists antigay. Host is any of that true . Guest his daughter went to middlebury. I would not use any of those terms to describe the man that i met, no. Host from what you know of the students, why were they doing that . Guest this is a tragedy shown on your screen. It was a small minority of students who wanted to shut the speech down, and then there were allies who wanted to be supportive. Student after student went there and did things they were not planning to do precisely because that small minority was so angry, thatd so they felt like if you are a good human being, it you have to stand by their side and do the same thing. Host what are they angry about . Guest about gross inequality in the united states, the existence of unequal treatment before the law and our criminal justice system, about the election of donald trump, which none of those students wanted, all of those things. We have real problems in the country that need to be addressed. They are legitimate in being concerned. The tragedy to me is that the strategy they pursued actually brought about the very opposite of what they had hoped to accomplish. Host Charles Murray is at the American Enterprise institute. This was the American Enterprise institute on campus, i mean, a Student Group . Guest it is a club, like any other kind of club on campus. Host was he paid to go to middlebury . No, nobody from middlebury paid him anything, that i know of. I am not part of the club. I dont know. Host did you have to pay snowden . [laughter] guest he was paid a large amount of money. Host who paid that . Guest the Student Activities board. That was the students choice speaker. Host we have some video of you after this directed. You this erupted. How long did the demonstration go on . Accelerated because the speech was not shut down. That enraged that small group of people who were determined to shut it down. There were fire alarms going off, people screaming obscenities to the window. I dont know what clique youre going to show. I have not watched any of it. Host you sitting down with Charles Murray guest it is so unsettling to me. Precisely because they used these directional mics, so what we were hearing is not what youre hearing on the tape, because it is enhanced so you can youre the conversation, but it was absolutely terrifying to try to continue that. Host ahead of this, did you know something was going to happen . Guest i did not think anything was going to happen. I have never seen anything like this in my life. Before i walked out the door, we were confronted with the crowd that injured me. Before saying i left my computer in the car. I will go separately and you up a dinner. I had no clue that was going to happen. Host had you met Charles Murray before . Guest no, but i had read his books, and i knew of him. Is someone the Republican Party takes very seriously. To me, this is precisely this sort of person i want my students to engage with. If we are a department of Political Science that only allows the views of democrats to appear on our science, we are just an indoctrination center, not an institution of higher learning. Host let us go back to you moved to this other room. Was that set up in advance . Guest yes. Host with Television Cameras . Guest it was a plan b so we could continue even if it shut down. Host how far away from where the auditorium is was this room . Guest i wish it had been further away. It was in the basement of that building. Host this is only 30 seconds. [recording] this is a place with a lot of rich kids. Eighten go to 1960, just years later. I told people to put on the fire alarms. They have hold on. [fire alarms] i think they will be able to shut that off. This is yo unique in my academic career. Guest pretty funny. Host in the home state of indiana, in richmond. Go back to that setting. How long did he talk to Charles Murray . Guest roughly im not sure. He spoke first and then we did the q a and to questions from students on twitter. Host did any of the students they with this whole process . Hand, there isne a coalition of students who are united in wanting to challenge Charles Murray. You have some who want to shut him down, you have some students who participated in, you know, the broken inquiry statement, who actually asked questions on twitter. They stayed with it. They wanted to engage him. I guess the main message i would want to give to your audience is that there is a variety of views at middlebury, not this monolithic, extremist place. Just certain small segments of the populations boys was amplified. You can draw all sorts of erroneous conclusions about middlebury students. Host did this start with the students or one of your fellow professors or both, a combination of that . Guest the shutdown . Host the whole idea of trying to shut it down . These there were all meetings beforehand and a number of my colleagues attended them, where they were discussing resistance. This is the interesting thing. A lot of the students who organized the resistance were used to being you notice me used to being unanimously applauded by the faculty. With the executive order against immigration, some of the same students involved in the protest against Charles Murray were leaders in that resistance. They had the whole faculty behind them. I was there with my constitution, at a rally, waving my american flag. I like to keep those front and center. Everybody supported them. Part of what was so disappointing to them with this is they thought they were taken into the next level in shutting it down, and everything fractured, and they were condemned by a large number of people, and they were expecting to be praised. That is part of the educational process. They made a mistake, and they have got to think about what that means from there. Host at the end of your discussion with Charles Murray, you left that room and when where, and what happened . The fact of the matter is, i do not really remember much of it. I cannot even tell you. Of the halln out and confronted this mob of angry people, some of whom were in jostling. Ving and their target was Charles Murray. And i was a little bit behind of intensified. It looked like he was going to alter the ground. He was a 74yearold man, so i did what any decent human being would do when you see a 74yearold man on the verge of falling to the ground. I grabbed him by the arm. It was a large i dont know how many. I was really fearful of being separated from them and left behind. So i took his arm, and when i did, that is when it all turned on me. Someone pulled my hair, body slammed me from the other direction. We finally made it to the car, and it was a horrific getaway scene where students were climbing on the car, shoving traffic signs under the car to keep it from moving forward, banging windows windows. We were so afraid we would hurt someone. Poor bill burger was in the drivers seat. He was the one who devised the middlebury alternative plan. He was taking directions from Public Safety outside about how to go. Move forward, retreat. I was in the passenger side, screaming stop your your going to hit someone the car was stopping and starting and stopping and starting. That is what exacerbated my injuries. Host how badly were you injured . Guest i kept saying im going to ice it, but it was worse than i thought. Host you had a caller on for a wild. It for a while. Guest it was a slow realization. I was taken the hospital. I realized i was driving the wrong way on the street in my hometown. I could not find something where i knew where it was. I realized, you know, i needed to go back to the hospital. Host after you were out of the hospital and after things quieted down, what did you do about all this . Guest it was awful. Have you ever had a concussion . Host no. Guest for all those people out there who had concussions, your brain gets scrambled. The way they describethe way thr brain is like a computer, and you can only you just need to keep one window open at a time. You cannot have multiple windows open. Everything we do in life involves multiple windows. So that was deeply frustrating for me because i was supposed to stay in a dark room. I was cheating and violating that. It was pretty frightening. Host for how long . Guest i was in physical therapy until last month, so it took a while to get better. Host how did you feel emotionally about all of this . And did you do anything with middleburys administration . Did you talk to them . Did you want to do anything about this . Guest sure, i was putting in my two cents as best i could. Host what though . In all of this, 74 people were disciplined. Were those only students . Guest i dont really know. I was not involved in disciplinary procedures. I did not testify at the hearings. Host how much did they do on campus . How many hearings did they have . Guest i am not sure. I was disengaged from it, trying to get better. Host were you doing this on purpose . You wanted to stay away from the whole thing . , this is thewell first interview i have done. I am glad to be doing it with you as we can have an extended conversation, but i did not want to speak to journalists until my brain had been restored to me. When you feel like this happens, you are angry. It is emotional. At stake for me was i wanted to model the behavior i wanted to see, if you will. I did not want to respond emotionally. I wanted to talk constructively about where we go from here, what it all means. You cannot do that until you are healthy. I waited until now. Host if this happened again at middlebury, do you have any idea what they would do . You have a woman president. Guest yes, we do. Again, what do you mean . Shutting it down . Host if another lecture was shut down like this let me put this in the mix. Of sure there are a lot people out there saying these students were great, think goodness they were there, they did the right thing. And there is another group watching this that says you know, i have given a lot of maters, a lotma of money. People are saying to themselves i did not give my money so that they would cost 53,000 a year for a student to go to school there so they could do this kind of stuff. What would you say to them after all of the dust settles . President isk the trying to stand firm for the values for education and american democracy. And i am hopeful she will be able to prevail. I am not a good person to ask about what is going on right now may to i left vermont in do my convalescence in michigan, which is where my family has been going to since i was born, my hometown, if you will. I have not been on campus, so i am not a good person to comment. Host i assume you have tenure. You will go back to middlebury after this is all over . Guest that is the plan. Host and if you are asked to moderate another discussion with a conservative republican like this man is supposedly, would you do that again . Guest of course. I do not regret a single thing i did. I mean, to me, it is just enormously important that students be unafraid to confront controversial ideas, and in my , androom, speak their mind what concerns me is that i see some students i have been told us repeatedly. They are afraid to speak their minds because they might offend someone. To me, that is catastrophic, because if you cannot speak your mind and make mistakes and learn the end ofit is liberal education, so what i do in my classroom what is interesting is, in my classroom, i continued to teach my one class in the Political Development of western europe after the incident. It was the one thing i would do, teach them allison even in the midst of other controversies swirling over the Charles Murray bought. To me that is deeply significant. It is in the hands of every supervisor professor to create an environment where everyone doesnt think and belong, mind. I say we dont even speak our minds. If you offend someone, i want that person to call you out and i was a person want the person who offended to apologize and then we will move on. Everybody makes mistakes, we are all human. We cant limited offense from the world. Offense from the world. We have to be able to say the wrong thing and correct it to have those conversations that educate us as human beings. Here is a segment talking about the incident. I have been breached by the people of middlebury. What we do know is if they would keep it up forever. Minas thought was i will stand up your all night if i have to do with them out. This will not be a lecture demonizing welfare and other things like that. I said you as members of the new elite have to be aware of all the ways in which the elite is screwing the working class in this country. What do you think of that statement . Allison i think he has a point. That is a tragic irony of what transpired. He wasnt even speaking about the bell curve which was written over 25 years ago. There were all these advances in Genetic Research sense. He was coming to speak about his 2012 book coming apart. It had a message about how the couldon of donald trump transpire. It is said that we are having a conversation about that book instead of looking back at something britain long ago. Brian what is a microaggression . Allison that is when somebody assaults only without even knowing it. Even when you pointed out, youre being too sensitive or you should not be pointing it out. Brian how much complaining goes on in middlebury about microaggressions from the students to professors . Allison my own take on trigger warnings is that those are good things, if you are saying something and you are unaware that it is deeply upsetting to another human being, we need to know about it. You need to reflect on it. I dont have a problem with the concept. I have a problem with people who people to preempt their mistakes before they make them. That is the Chilling Effect that is so damaging to the Free Exchange of ideas. Brian how much interest was there in the media to get you to talk . Allison tons of interest. Anybodysologize to whos email i did not respond to. Oftill have this large trove unanswered emails. I was able to look at screens and read them and i hope i respond to people who do time. There are people all around the country who wrote things that made me go so much better. I am deeply grateful to them. Brian you did write some oped pieces for the New York Times. Allison i had to do that, that was probably not wise but i had to. I was not supposed to be on a computer. I had to sneak to do it. To definet like i had the situation as i saw it. Brian you are interested on march the 13th understanding the angry mob in military that gave me a concussion. Allison i did not come up with that headline, that was the New York Times. Brian the second was on the third, professor leuchtenburg middlebury my divided campus. Brian what do they want for rom you . My perspective. The New York Times was great about that, i was on a panelist that wrote the definitive justification of shutting down speech. He wrote a piece in the new york gets called snowflakes ripe. Brian what was the broken inquiry . Allison that was a heartfelt statement by students at Middlebury College. They were trying to explain why they had done what they had done. It was a response to another piece i ran in the wall street journal on principles of Free Expression written by my colleagues. There attempt was to respond point by point to what they were reading. People can read it for themselves to understand the perspective. Brian how often is a conservative of anytime invited any kind invited to speak on the middlebury campus . Allison a lot of times. On campuses, there is conservative faculty who camouflage their real views. Thats until they get tenure. They are a minority but they are there. Through this Charles Murray incident, i became aware that there were some conservatives on my faculty and i did not realize previously that that was the political leaning. That saddens me to some extent, why should they not be able to talk openly about their politics . We would have a better conversation about policies, we need to debate together, to move the country forward. The people to be more open about thinking for themselves. Are you one of the 900 plus members of the heterodox . No. Are you aware of what it is . Of course. Brian what is your opinion . Allison i dont join things. Of some ofad a list the leading schools in the heterodox space. They judge on whether or not the universities are open or closed on all of this. I want to put on the screen the schools. Or six that just happened. Purdue. University of chicago, george masons number two. Tennessee and there is a whole scale of how they judge and ive no idea what that is. Lets look at the bottom. They are at the very bottom. Allison northwestern . Uc berkeley . Brian i know that you and harvard are right there at the bottom. Allison but theyre making such efforts to uphold freedom of expression. I would want to dissect those rankings. They could be right. Anything that will capture a particular moment of time, when you ask the question, you have to look at the methodology to understand what you want to take away from it. Brian they judged it on the basis of how open the campus is and all of that. Some campuses have more activity than others. The university of chicagos number one and people often cite them as having the strongest statement. I have a john ellison he wrote to the class of 2020 you know that person in chicago that did a study on this. Just dont let the committee. Committee. Ne led the brian it says here that one of the university of chicagos defining characteristics is our freedom of inquiry and expression. We dont support trigger warnings, we dont cancel invited speakers because there topics microcontroversial and we do not condone the creation of the intellectual save space where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own. You said you liked the trigger warnings. Allison how you parse that is very important. I have been on a panel with university of chicago. Agree that an university can be a safe space. Place, yous to take have to let ideas collide but there can be safe spaces within the university. If youre a student from a disadvantaged backgrounds, you might need a place to retreat where you can feel completely safe and at home but that doesnt mean youre not engaging in larger issues in the classroom. What is interesting to me is that there are safe spaces that we dont call safe place safe spaces. Athletic teams, liberal arts colleges are safe spaces. I want those guys and women out of their safe spaces as much as out ofstudents of color their safe spaces and interacting. Through that interaction we can create a dynamic intellectual life. When i grow up grew up and went to college, it was a quiet. What happened . Allison the pendulum swung back, it was a renewal of some of the same sentiment and feelings. What caused it . Allison brian what caused it . Allison the privatization of government. We take all kind of things that were done by Government Employees and turn them over to the private sector. Wet could be a good thing, can let market values drive things and that is good but i think it has changed the tenor of government. Increasinglyt made large proportions of the population go that there leads dont represent them, dont speak for them and are acting in their own top interest rather than the interest of the common good. I think that is directly linked to the privatization of so many functions. In 2009, one nation under contract talks about privatization a lot. You said that the word elite you heard that from Charles Murray, you hear from conservatives, Newt Gingrich talked about delete media all the time. How would you define elite . Those are the people with the power and lets face it, this town washington has become enormously affluent over the past three decades. We can speak to this, as it not changed . We have all these Amazing Restaurants they are upscale. People have gotten rich and there is a consequence to that. The people were running our government institutions are increasingly part of an elite that is detached from ordinary people. That is not just true of government elite, it is financial elites. Part of what we are seeing on our politics is ordinary people realizing that you have the you aref power and doing is to benefit yourself, youre not benefiting me. That is a legitimate response from both left and right. In 2015, 60 8 billion was sent to american universities for research and development. The pell grants are up to over 30 billion, that is over 100 billion going to college campuses, what about the academic elites . Tenure, nobody can touch them, many of them their life revolves around the next grant that comes in from the government. Talk abouten you academic elites, i think it is important to talk about was disciplines are we talking about natural sciences, social sciences . I can speak from my own experience and what ive seen over the course of my career is when we were at harvard, the idea of the best and the brightest matt bundy, henry was toer, the idea educate yourself and then go make a difference in the world. Is thinkened over time tanks developed in washington and they are more concerned with the policy and realworld issues. There are exceptions to this but the department of political silence science are talking about debates that are less directly connected to real life policy issues. In some sense, that is a horrible thing. People with tenure are the ones that can really street speak truth to power. Able in think tanks dont have that freedom. They can be fired. I would like to see the premise of Political Science back in the fray, debating policy issues. Something that the rest of the chattering classes dont have which is tenure. Tenure means you cant be fired. That is a big thing in washington. Ive seen a myself, when i have testified before congress. His is an enormous asset i can speak the truth and no identical in my livelihood. That makes me feel like i have a moral obligation to not be partisan, speak freely, encourage people to speak for themselves. I am in a unique and privileged position in that regard. Brian here is a recent incident, this is 30 seconds, back on september 27, at the college of william and mary, the the aclusctor virginia chapter black lives person,hallenge this lets watch a live it of this, lets see what your take on this is. About going to talk a bit the demonstration, i appreciate it. Then were going to respond to questions from the moderate and then any questions from them. Shame, shame, shame. Brian they are saying that the aclu protects. Allison they need to be educated. When you see 18 and 21 euros doing stuff are those students or activists . On,have two things going dudes that are 18 and 21 years old, their learning and growing. They dont have a real historical sense. They can make things that statements like that and they had no historical context. They understand how this operates and for me, my job as an educator is helping them have that context, not to tell them to think a different way but to have to say look out extremist actions or violent actions have played out in history, have you ever led to the things you want to see realized . Once you become educated, you realize the role of unintended consequences and you realize that most of the