“Rough music” or the “Skimmington,” with townspeople assaulting their target with noise and insults. The victim is placed backwards on a horse, with his wife beating him with a ladle. Charles Murray got off easy, compared to this sorry bloke. Wm Hogarth, engraving, 1726.
[This is the second part of an article on the Middlebury College protest against Charles Murray. If you read it, please read it after the first part. The first critiqued stereotyped student protest reporting and the conventional wisdom about the rights of speakers on campus. This post looks at the tactics of college officials and student activists.]
Tactics: What else could school officials have done?
What else could the administration have done? Before the event, the campus newspaper published protest letters from over 600 students, over 50 faculty and over 500 alumni. The college’s response, to give Murray an enthusiastic and generous welcome, was so normal that few thought it odd that President Patton chose to do so despite such widespread opposition from her campus. School officials were clearly out of touch with their students and faculty, had no idea how serious the opposition would be, no idea how quickly they would lose control, and now are in the position of hunting down students whom many in their community feel should be honored. Bad leadership, egregious mismanagement, pitiful listening skills? Yet the college officials escape all criticism from the respectable commentators.
The school not only legitimized Murray and his views by allowing the invitation; they also hosted him and treated him as an honored guest, even taking him out to dinner afterwards. They arranged this as a major college event in a large hall; the school president introduced him, the political science department co-hosted (over the strong objections of some of their faculty), and they made the format a collegial exchange of ideas between Murray and one of their professors. Would they have done more for a visit from a Nobel Laureate? This extra effort was so strange and foolish, so out of touch with the climate on campus, it requires an explanation all its own.
What else could the school administration have done? One faculty critic pointed out, the administration escalated the situation and rejected compromise, doubling down the more opposition they faced. They were locked into abstraction and saw no alternative to supporting “the free exchange of ideas.” Yet they had a range of possible responses, from rescinding the invitation to allowing him on campus without honoring him. They could even have symbolically elevated and given legitimacy to a protest response or a genuine educational event by hosting it in a separate and simultaneous forum — why only legitimize the racist? Or they could have joined Murray’s critics and publicly distanced themselves from him. Absurd thought? Certainly if you prioritize conventionally conceived institutional values over morality, and such prioritization is the default response of many college officials.
Tactics: The protesters
The protesters’ tactics also followed a familiar pattern. They mobilized opposition before the event with meetings, flyers, letters and articles in the newspaper, social media, petitions, classroom discussion. They brought people to the event both inside and outside; disrupted with chanting and noisemaking; embarrassed and harassed the speaker and the school officials who enabled him.
This is a well-established “repertoire” for protesting an offensive speaker on campus. What are the goals? First, obviously, to prevent him from speaking or being heard. More fundamentally, to establish that he is not welcome, not deserving of a hearing, even to identify him as a pariah, an enemy of the community. A skimmington, reasserting community values. There is a strong case to be made against this particular individual; the Southern Poverty Law Center includes Charles Murray in its “extremist files” as a white nationalist. (Did you see Murray described that way in the mainstream media coverage?)
Strategy, please; not just tactics
But there should always be more strategic goals — to build the movement on campus, or to build the broader movement regionally or nationally. All dramatic political actions are going to build both support and opposition, and it is critical for organizers to think strategically and develop actions accordingly.
One question campus activists always have to answer is the fundamental question about strategy, Who are our enemies and who are our friends? Whatever organizers had in mind before the protest, there was a clear answer in the events that followed: The enemies were not only Murray himself, but the school officials and the political science professor who dialogued with Murray. But the protest actions also suggested other enemies on campus. Were the students in the AEI club also enemies? What about the many students and faculty who wanted to hear Murray speak or thought he had the right to speak and yet think of themselves as antiracist? Does preventing the speech send a message to all those people that they are in some sense the enemy of the righteous activists? If the activists didn’t want to say this by their actions, they had some additional work to do, to communicate with those potential allies. Perhaps they did some of that work — outside observers relying on outsider reporters aren’t in a good position to say. I am not here arguing against this or all disruptions; but what I believe I’ve learned over the years is that you don’t risk making friends or potential allies into enemies without good reason to do so.
Whatever happened when the protesters blocked Murray’s escape car, the official version and Stanger’s injury will be a problem for campus activists. The protesters have been widely criticized by liberal, left and progressive commentators — perhaps all who had mainstream media access. Environmental activist Bill McKibben, who is in fact a Middlebury professor, lamented that the protest had “gone sour,” that “goodhearted campus activists … fell for the troller’s bait.”
The result was predictable: Murray emerged with new standing, a largely forgotten hack with a renewed lease on public life, indeed now a martyr to the cause of free speech. And anti-racist activism took a hit, the powerful progressive virtue of openness overshadowed by apparent intolerance. No one should be surprised at the outcome: In America, anyway, shouting someone down “reads” badly to the larger public, every single time. And it is precisely the job of activists to figure out how things are going to read, lest they do real damage to important causes – damage, as in this case, that will inevitably fall mostly on people with fewer resources than Middlebury students.
Mainstream media framing is not destiny
McKibben evaluates the protest as a part of a broader movement. Is he right? Certainly he’s right about the mainstream framing, about how the incident “reads … to the larger public” (though not to many progressive youth and many on the left). But on campus, it’s not obvious how it will “read,” since the students are not just reading the narrative and the issues, they are also writing them.
Judging from the videos, there may have been a thousand students actively engaged in the event and witnessing or participating in the protests, and they and more students will be talking this to death in the next weeks. Many will be getting a political education about Charles Murray and his personal role in legitimizing decades of racist policies, and many will see him as the embodiment of the establishment racism and the right-wing regime they loathe. It’s not predetermined how the activists will fare in the debate; much depends on what they do and how the campus responds.
Nor is it predetermined how school officials will fare. Their role will be scrutinized, and it’s not predetermined how much support they will get as they move to discipline activists — and, especially if they are heavy-handed, how students and faculty will choose sides. Should the activists get punished while school officials and enabling faculty remain unaccountable? Students and faculty will face a choice — to take sides or remain neutral, the kind of decision that does more education than some political science class.
As always, much depends on the particular situation on campus; for all the certainty of the pundits, observers and reporters based miles away are not in a good position to learn much about what follows and evaluate success and failure. Campus disruptions can be successful, even when they are clearly subversive. The first time I saw organized opposition to a guest speaker was when Secretary of Defense Robert S McNamara, architect of the Vietnam War, came to a closed, invitation-only talk before select students at my grad school in 1966. Students for a Democratic Society and a thousand students in the streets discovered the location, saw through the decoy car and found his escape route. They surrounded his car, pounded on it and rocked it, until McNamara got on top of the car to “debate” the war with intolerant students, who heckled and shouted him down. The movement fed on such rare official humiliations, and campus activists were set on an upward trajectory. Three years later, the police beat and dragged SDS protesters out of University Hall, the whole campus went on strike, the faculty ended ROTC and began debating how to meet Black students demand for a now-prestigious Black Studies Department. (McNamara’s protection detail did not drive his car slowly into the crowd, as witnesses allege Middlebury V-P Bill Burger did. But that was then.)
What if activists go off-script?
What if the activists go off script, with creativity, with unexpected and imaginative behavior? I’m not saying the conventional tactics don’t work, but alternatives can be interesting and successful in other ways.
Here’s an example: In Newcastle last year, anti-immigrant racists of the English Defense League marched after the Brexit vote; Newcastle United and immigrant rights groups overwhelmed them with a much larger counter-demonstration. But what people will remember about the action was their chants. Not only “Nazi scum, off our streets,” and “Refugees Welcome, Nazis Out,” but also: “Boring, Boring, Boring!” and “Super Race, you’re having a laugh!”
When the English Defense League marched after the Brexit vote, Newcastle Unites met them in the street. June 25, 2016. Go to link for video.
Here’s another example of the power of organized ridicule, from legendary activist Myles Horton, founder of the Highlander Folk School, a training center for labor and anti-racist organizing in Tennessee.
The Klan wanted to have a march in front of Highlander when we were in Knoxville. I didn’t object or try to stop them. I told the press and the mayor, “They have a right to march, as long as they stay on the public streets. We defend their right to march past Highlander.”
What we did, though, was to invite all the black neighbors and all the white friends of Highlander in Knoxville to come for a picnic on the Highlander lawn and watch the parade. We had seven or eight hundred people there, and we had a hundred kids playing right down by the road, and off-duty black policemen volunteered to come out to see that none of the Klan people got on our land or parked their cars there. The chief of police had told them to take a vacation that day because he didn’t want them near the parade. They didn’t wear their uniforms, but they had their guns strapped around them, which they were allowed to do.
The Klan was humiliated, because we turned the purpose of their march around and made fun of it instead of letting them intimidate us. They looked very embarrassed as they went by, and although they were supposed to march back again, they took another route to avoid having to deal with that crowd jeering and making fun of them.”
—Miles Horton, The Long Haul: An Autobiography (New York, 1990), p. 173.
[Like every one else who writes on these subjects, I do have some thoughts about freedom of expression and democratic values, and supporting protests against speakers does not imply rejecting those values. I plan to write more about these issues, some of which are touched on in the many commentaries on the Middlebury events. I linked to a number of pieces by Middlebury students and faculty in part I. Here is a powerful statement by a Middlebury sociology professor which captures the perspective of campus activists, and here’s a characteristically unorthodox piece by Stanley Fish which I enjoyed. With library access, check out E.P. Thompson’s “Rough Music Reconsidered.”]
