The Latin caption, in translation: “Hercules and Iolaus defend their campus against hate-spewing Prof. Hydra.” Maybe the professor shouldn’t have claimed that Hercules was genetically defective. Hans Sebald Beham, 16th c. engraving, Wikimedia Commons.

The stereotyped student protest narrative

There is a mainstream version of what happened at Middlebury College when right-wing ideologue Charles Murray came to speak. The details hardly matter, because the narrative is so familiar and the conventional wisdom so clear. Student activists disrupt a guest speaker, the protest turns violent, the protesters deny his right to speak, and liberals and conservatives unite in condemning the affront to democratic values.

This sounds also like the Berkeley protest against Milo Yiannopoulos, but for that matter like any student protest against guest speakers that gets headlines. These speakers have included provocateurs like Yiannopoulos, apologists for white supremacy and inequality like Murray, or people responsible for thousands of civilian deaths in unjust wars, like Condoleezza Rice or Ehud Olmert.

The received version repeats these details about the Middlebury protest: Conservative students invite Murray to speak; the Political Science Department decides to co-sponsor and Prof. Allison Stanger volunteers to hold a Q and A with him; Middlebury President Laurie Patton gets behind the event; students organize and demand the college not host him. He comes amid a large student protest; the hall is full of chanting protesters; he and Stanger move to a closed location and stream the event; then as he and Stanger leave, protesters block their way, Stanger suffers a neck injury when her hair is pulled by a protester, the car is surrounded, and they leave. And this is the one detail which everyone who remembers this narrative will remember: Protesters attacked and injured the professor.

Like many stereotyped narratives, you know the outline and the moral before you read it; no need for any effort at judgment, thinking or analysis because, as with all stereotyped narratives, you’ve done that long ago. You can read dozens of reports and opinion pieces in the mainstream media, and they mostly are the same.

Why there is always more to the story

Yet there is much more to each one of these stories, because they are all individual events with different people, different backgrounds, and details you won’t see even in the better mainstream reports. If you read the news critically, the way a historian would, you will ask questions such as, Did the reporter witness the event, and, if not, who did she interview? (“Consider the source,” always!)

The first thing you notice about the Times story, is that it is datelined “Boston,” not “Middlebury.” Who, then, did the reporter interview to establish what happened in Middlebury, both in the hall and after? She quotes three people: the president, a spokesperson for the conservative student group who invited Murray, and VP of Communications Bill Burger. What, no protester? No student or faculty bystander? No campus critic? This reliance on “official sources” is normal in deadline news reporting, though the TV and web coverage also had video footage of disruptions inside the hall. No one would expect a major media organization to have a reporter on the spot, but even on deadline, maybe it is possible to do some networking and get some student voices … even a quote from an activist. Or learn some background from the web.

Berkeley antifa/black bloc activists protesting Milo Yiannopoulos. Such images now frame student militancy whether or not there is violence or black bloc presence. Photo by Joe Parks, CC BY-NC 2.0.

Secret method for reporting on student protests

Message to the media: If you want to know what happens on a college campus, see if there’s a student newspaper. The Middlebury Campus had dozens of news stories, opinion pieces from perspectives of participants and witnesses, as well as video footage. And then there were alternative student media and local media. You will soon learn that the details were not so clear about the violence following the talk, although the “violence” — in particular the injury to Prof. Stanger — are what most outsiders who remember anything about the protest will remember. Stanger’s injury embodies the stereotyped student protest story: Activist mob attacks an innocent and progressive person, a Democrat, a potential ally.

Did a protester deliberately attack Prof. Stanger, as she and college officials say. Or was she, as a student witness says, injured in the confusion caused by aggressive and violent campus police? Did the reporters know or care that students say that the college official driving the car with Murray and Stanger almost ran over a student pinned between the car and a traffic sign, or that he drove the car, very slowly, into the students blocking the way? Do we assume it was only the students who escalated the violence, when we know school security were also involved? Sorry, but if the most detailed account is the student version with these details, and if no reporter was present or questioned Stanger for details about how the hair-pulling happened, I’m going to be very sympathetic to the injured professor but a bit skeptical about the official story.

These details matter. But the real judgment issue for me is this difference between the school officials and the protesters: On one side, the President and the Political Science Department decided to cosponsor the event and host Murray — as if he were a reputable academic and not a eugenicist, and one of the right’s most influential propagandists for racism and inequality. In contrast, the protesters were saying that he should be treated not as a distinguished guest, but as a pariah. (If you watch the video dialogue between Prof Stanger and Murray, you will see him treated as an academic colleague with whom she respectfully disagrees.)

Who is “us” and who is “them”?

We are called on to feel outrage at student attacks on the rights of racist ideologues like Murray or war criminals like Olmert; but we are called on to ignore or dismiss the student outrage, when honored speakers are complicit in vast injustices. We are called on to respect speakers who stand for values we claim to hate and to respect school officials who enable them; we are even expected to support punishment for the protesters who stand up for values we claim to uphold. If you read the university president’s statements, Prof. Stanger’s op-ed in the Times, and the avalanche of liberal protest, it is “us” against “them,” where “us” includes Charles Murray and “them” includes the activists and the minority student organizations.

The protest raises difficult and divisive questions about principles. But the mainstream media story skirts the hard questions and is entirely about violent protesters preventing a scholar from speaking and injuring a professor — or, in Berkeley, about broken windows and bonfires. The other questions don’t get serious discussion except in alternative media, yet these are questions many of us are struggling with.

Free speech on campus — an elective, not a required course

One question is, Where do you draw the line in defending the right to speak on campus? There was mainstream commentary about the right to speak, but it was abstract, as if free speech is an absolute right and particular circumstances are irrelevant. Almost all the media commentary appeals to abstract principles — the right to free expression, the values of the liberal university, the free exchange of ideas as a path to truth; violence and disruption are always wrong and dangerous.

Yet everyone draws a line somewhere, everyone knows we all have other core values besides freedom of expression. Even the Conservative Political Action Conference disinvited Milo Yiannopoulos, when he finally transgressed one taboo too many even for conservatives (where was the conservative media outcry defending free speech then? Even libertarian Charles Murray denies Milo’s right to speak!). Would Middlebury’s president hold a forum for a climate denier and ask a climate science professor to debate him? Would Prof. Stanger dialogue in collegial manner with a holocaust denier? (See “Why We Protest,” for student arguments.)  Free speech on college campuses is apparently an elective, not a required course.

The students were telling the school to draw the line at racist propagandists, even when they dress up like academics; Middlebury officials drew the line not there, but at their anti-racist protesters, and school officials now plan to discipline them.

Who do we like here? Who is “us” and who is “them”? Aren’t these questions a test of our moral values, just as much as the more abstract question about whether we uphold free speech and whether we must prioritize it over other core moral principles, such as opposition to racism?

(This is the first part of a discussion; I will follow with comments on the tactics both of the college administration and the protesters. The college’s rationale is well known, but the thinking of the activists is less familiar and quite interesting. And the tactics on all sides were so “normal,” it might not occur to us that there is always a range of possible responses.)