Followed by the Prime Minister taking questions from the house of commons. This week, allison stanger, professor of Political Science, she talked about the reaction on the appearance of Charles Murray. What is the famous middle barry protest . Ebury protest . A Student Group invited Charles Murray, a controversial figure, libertarian scholar, to campus. They invited me to ask him the first three or four questions. And it went from there. This is back in march. The event was on march 2 and there was a runup to the event where tensions rose to the point where they were with into a frenzy with into a frenzy where some students organized a shutdown of the speech, which was successful. That is where you got the incident where i was injured outside the lecture hall. Where is the college . In the Green Mountains of vermont. You can explain the reaction because it is almost a bubble within a bubble. Oats liberal arts is something of a bubble. Vermont, the home of bernie sanders, the state of the union with the smallest percentage of voters who voted for donald trump. 2350 is the current number of students. 63,000, that is what tuition and room and board cost for a year. It is an expensive proposition. Are a significant number of students on full financial aid. What is your background . I got my education into cu places. Into cu places two place. Major. Math there was a senior residency requirement. I transferred to Ball State University where i could do applied mathematics. What about did you get a masters and then a phd . Ofi am a living example taking some time to figure out what interests you and why. I went to the London School of economics. And then i went to harvard university. Followed by a phd in Political Science. This trajectory from a set of questions that really have answers to an interest in some of the unanswerable questions, which come from the humanities. I embrace both of those strands. How long have you been at the college . 25 years. Not there this year . Sabbatical. I am currently a scholar in residence. It is a think tank in washington that is enabling me to work on my books. What do you teach . I teach a whole range of courses. I have an interest in a variety of fields. Course i love called the politics of virtual realities. That covers the main courses. What is your view with your what is the view of your relationship with students . Students. My i think i am seen as an honest. Roker i have been very happy because i do teaching, i do research and teaching,ut with the i am absolutely sure ive made some kind of a difference in the world. There is nothing like opening up somebodys mind to new possibilities. Did the students protest Edward Snowden at all . Nodded all. Campuses are left aey are voting democratic and scholar associated with the Republican Party is controversial to them. That is the reality of it. Snowden isvered revered by the left. Important, my students know i am a democrat engageis important to with someone like Charles Murray. I looked up the ethnic population in vermont and there are 2. 5 africanamericans in. 025tate and in the town or Something Like that. What does that do for the bubble . That is a great question. Vermont is one of the widest st states in thetes union. It is easy to paint it as a story of conservatives versus students of color. We have a situation where American Values are at stake and they do not belong to a particular party or identity. Heart of this issue we are discussing. I do not want to downplay the anguish expressed through those protests. The emotions are real and they have to be validated. You feel that way, what do you need to do about it . It is about talking together and how we make the environment a place where everybody belongs. I benefited enormously by interacting with 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 important for my own personal 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. The whole book is about this 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 about the book, and i used it in 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. That is incredibly useful as annexes eyes, so you take that kind of initial shock, if you will that is incredibly useful as an 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. Charles murray, a fellow at the 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 here, even though you cannot substantiate those assertions. They have quotes not linked to the original text. If you look at the quotes in context, he is saying the 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. There 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. Racists, sexists, antigays. Host Charles Murray, go away. Guest racists, sexists, 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 outraged, and so angry, that 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 . Guest 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 . Guest its 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. He 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. You then go to 1960, just eight 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 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 . Guest on the one hand, there is 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 . Guest there were all these 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 . Guest the fact of the matter is, i do not really remember much of it. I cannot even tell you. We were taken out of the hall and confronted this mob of angry people, some of whom were in masks, shoving and jostling. Their target was Charles Murray. And i was a little bit behind him, and it kind 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. We were so afraid we would hurt someone. Poor bill burger was in the drivers seat. He was the one who devised the radio free 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 describe it, your 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 practically 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 . I read somewhere in