2017 May 1^st

Mona Charen has a point in her column today. She begins by lamenting the unwillingness of students on some campuses to even listen to unpopular viewpoints. These students protest against speakers before the speakers have spoken. There should be a policy for any campus speaker that at least a third of their speaking time be devoted to student’s questions. If questions are not allowed, then the speech is simply propaganda.

Charen mentions the assaulting of Charles Murray and Allison Stranger on Middlebury College’s campus because the students apparently disapproved of ideas published in Murray’s book “The Bell Curve.” Murray presents the view that black citizens are reproducing much faster that white citizens and discusses the ramification of that fact, as well as other concerns. There is much to debate about this book and many declare Murray’s position to be racist. Physical violence against the promoters of Murray’s campus presentation is certainly not acceptable.

While Charen rails against these Middlebury students, she does not mention that the Middlebury College administration took punitive action against 30 of the protesters. I wonder why Charen doesn’t mention that. Maybe it doesn’t fit her agenda.

Then there is the protest against Milo Yiannopoulos who was scheduled to speak in Berkeley. This man is a promoter of man-boy love, a promoter of pedophilia. Yiannopoulos’ positions on pedophilia have been such as to ban him from posting on Twitter, but Charen believes he should have a platform at Berkeley to air his views.

There is an outstanding omission from Charen’s complaints about these awful student protests: It seems that Richard Spencer, the producer of The Daily Stormer a virulently anti-Jewish web site, was scheduled to speak at Texas A&M University. The A&M students protested his bigotry and Spencer was denied a platform. Mona Charen makes no mention of this university’s protest against Jewish bigotry. Students’ protests against Jewish bigotry are fine with Charen but protests against promoting pedophilia are not. That is curious.

Then Charen switches to the Students for a Democratic Society, The SDS came into being about 1960 when Caren was three years old so she has no experience with the SDS other than reading about it. SDS arose as a protest against the way adult students were being treated by many colleges. This protest didn’t last very long, by about 1970 the SDS was largely forgotten but it was a powerful protest group while it existed.

Charen mentions the SDS protests at many colleges and glorifies Professor Hayakawa’s brave effort to pull the plug on an SDS loudspeaker at San Francisco State. This action, she believes, won him a senate seat. Charen mentions the failures of many colleges to stand up to the SDS protests. Barnard College, Charen’s alma mater also had protests with students occupying several buildings. Charen makes no mention of the Barnard College student’s protest. Curious.