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. Poo