Dear President Patton,
We the undersigned faculty respectfully request that you, as our president, cancel your introductory remarks at the Charles Murray event on Thursday.
Mr. Murray is, as you know, a discredited ideologue paid by the American Enterprise Institute to promote public policies targeting people of color, women and the poor. His work has employed a combination of eugenics and other pseudo-science that has time and time again shown to be based on false premises, inadequate research and erroneous conclusions. He is not an academic nor a “critically acclaimed” public scholar, but a well-funded phony. His research is an insult to the intellectual integrity of Middlebury College. To introduce him—even to critique his arguments—only lends legitimacy to his ideas as worth engaging with.
To be clear, this is not a case of disagreeing with the ideas of a fellow scholar. Rather, this is to recognize that this event was organized by a chapter of the American Enterprise Institute, is funded by the AEI, and that Mr. Murray has been peddling AEI propaganda as a “public scholar” since the 1990s. Let the AEI be responsible for explaining to the College and the wider community why they hosted someone whose scholarship has been thoroughly discredited and who denies the basic human dignity of members of our community.
Rather than lend legitimacy to this event, we respectfully request you stand up for a campus that is intellectually open and culturally diverse, but one that does not fall prey to the designs of external organizations who peddle partisan propaganda in the guise of “public scholarship.”
Respectfully,
Tara Affolter, Assistant Professor, Education Studies
Holly Allen, Assistant Professor, American Studies
Molly Anderson, Professor, Food Studies
Dima Ayoub, Assistant Professor, Arabic
Mez Baker-Medard, Assistant Professor, Environmental Studies
Jim Berg, Visiting Assistant Professor, English and American Literatures
Sony Bolton, Postdoctoral Fellow in Spanish
Susan Burch, Professor, American Studies
Maggie Clinton, Assistant Professor, History
Carolyn Craven, Visiting Assistant Professor, Economics
Adam Dean, Assistant Professor, Political Science
Laurie Essig, Associate Professor, Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies
Florence Feiereisen, Associate Professor, German
Irina Feldman, Assistant Professor, Spanish
J Finley, Assistant Professor, American Studies
Ellery Foutch, Assistant Professor, American Studies
Juana Gamero de Coca, Associate Professor, Spanish
Randall Ganiban, Professor, Classics
Eliza Garrison, Associate Professor, History of Art and Architecture
Gloria Gonzalez-Zenteno, Associate Professor, Spanish
Roman Graf, Professor, German
Ben Graves, Visiting Instructor, English and American Literatures
William Hart, Associate Professor, History
Rachael Joo, Assistant Professor, American Studies
Antonia Losano, Professor, English and American Literatures
Joyce Mao, Associate Professor, History
Peter Matthews, Professor, Economics
Bettina Matthias, Professor, German
Tamar Mayer, Professor, Geography
Jamie McCallum, Assistant Professor, Sociology-Anthropology
Sujata Moorti, Professor, Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies
Kevin Moss, Professor, Russian
Linus Owens, Associate Professor, Sociology-Anthropology
Nicholas Poppe, Assistant Professor, Spanish
William Poulin-Deltour, Associate Professor, French
Fernando Rocha, Associate Professor, Portuguese
Daniel Rodrigues-Navas, Postdoctoral Fellow, Philosophy
Marcos Rohena-Madrazo, Assistant Professor, Spanish
Patricia Saldarriaga, Professor, Spanish
Paula Schwartz, Professor, French
Michael Sheridan, Associate Professor, Sociology-Anthropology
Daniel Silva, Assistant Professor, Portuguese
Usama Soltan, Associate Professor, Arabic
John Spackman, Associate Professor, Philosophy
Carly Thomsen, Assistant Professor, Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies
Rebecca Tiger, Associate Professor, Sociology-Anthropology
Jacob Tropp, Professor, History
Ioana Uricaru, Assistant Professor, Film and Media Culture
Edward Vazquez, Associate Professor, History of Art and Architecture
Hector Vila, Assistant Professor, Writing
Max Ward, Assistant Professor, History
Marion Wells, Associate Professor, English and American Literatures
Linda White, Associate Professor, Japanese
Carrie Wiebe, Professor, Chinese
Mark Williams, Professor, Political Science
Catharine Wright, Senior Lecturer, Writing-GSFS
Orian Zakai, Visiting Assistant Professor, Modern Hebrew
Patricia Zupan, Professor, Italian
Middlebury Faculty write in about Charles Murray’s 3/2 talk.
