The following letter was emailed and hand-delivered to President Laurie Patton and many members of the Senior Leadership Group (SLG) on Monday, March 2. A list of SLG members is available here.
Parts of this letter have been lightly edited to comply with The Campus’ style guidelines.
To the Middlebury College Administration:
We ask that you reconsider your decision to permit Charles Murray’s visit on March 31. Murray’s third invitation to our campus illuminates the structures of oppression that have both molded and been reproduced by educational institutions like ours. Murray is a white nationalist and pseudoscientist. His presence has already harmed our community, and we are certain that his reinvitation will further this harm. As stated in a letter written by alumni in Beyond the Green in 2017, Murray’s invitation is a “message to every woman, every person of color, every first-generation student, every poor and working-class person, every disabled person, and every queer person that not only their presence at Middlebury, but also their safety, their agency, their humanity, and even their very right to exist are all up for ‘debate.’” Your passive acceptance of Murray’s return reverses attempts at community healing and demonstrates that you have learned nothing from the past three years.
We recognize that you, the administration, did not invite Charles Murray, and canceling this talk would put you in a difficult position. However, we believe that it is well within your interests and duties to refuse to extend your implicit endorsement to Murray’s bigotry on the basis that this event violates the college’s three pillars of mutual respect, academic freedom, and integrity. Our education ought to uphold these values, yet this event violates all three.
Mutual respect is necessary for creating, per the language of the handbook, “an atmosphere in which all of [the community’s] members live and work free from discrimination and harassment.” Murray’s work argues that people of color, poor people, women, trans people and disabled people are genetically less intelligent than those who are rich, white, cisgender, male or able-bodied. It is wrong to expect people whose identities are targeted by Murray’s rhetoric to “engage diligently” with Murray’s work, to “respectfully debate” claims that they are inferior (all of which the College Republicans asked us to do in their January op-ed).
Murray’s visit will also involve the presence of both law enforcement and private security, which poses a disproportionate risk to students of color. This does not encourage mutual respect; instead, it heightens fear and danger for those already most targeted by Murray’s work. And, like the Middlebury Faculty for an Inclusive Community, we question the source of the funding for this security. We find your continued lack of transparency on the matter concerning.
Academic freedom protects the essential right of students “to freely speak, hear, write, challenge, and argue.” Students involved with the planning of the event confirmed with us that many of the event tickets are reserved for members of the College Republicans and the Open Campus Initiative, with the rest left to a lottery system. If the goal of the event is truly to encourage open discourse and debate, then all students should have equal access to tickets. The reservation of tickets and the lottery system instead infringe on the right of students to challenge Murray’s claims at the event.
Integrity is “a key guard against false information and the abuse of power [that] demands honest and transparent reporting of research, observation, and experimental evidence.” Murray’s work is not peer-reviewed and has not been published in academic journals. Not all speakers here must be scholars, but those who claim to be must be held to the same standards of scholarship to which we are held as students. We must not extend academic validation to white supremacy and the many other oppressive modes of thought articulated in Murray’s work.
This event violates the values upon which we have all agreed as members of this community. Our time here must teach us how to pursue justice — starting with our own campus. We demand that you use the power of your position to work with us in building a school and, beyond that, a better world. We demand that you cancel this talk.
Sincerely,
Lily Barter ’19.5
Claire Contreras ’22.5
Cora Kircher ’20
Cara Levine ’20
Rebecca Wishnie ’20
The authors of this piece are among the over 140 student and alumni signatories who signed this letter. For a full list of signatories or to add your support, visit go/cmletters.
Authors’ note: we would like to point readers to a companion letter, “A call to strike on March 31: A letter to faculty from students,” demanding that if Murray’s visit does proceed as planned, faculty strike with us and join in a day of anti-white supremacy teach-ins. If the talk goes as planned, we refuse to be complicit in allowing business as usual to proceed.
It’s time to step up: a letter to the Middlebury College Administration
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