Long ago in Atlantic City: I got my palm read by a girl under an aluminum scaffold covered with a cheap, white tarp. It cost $15. She took my hand in hers and led me through the other booths to a canvas folding chair. She traced my palm lines and told me I would be rich. There was salt in the air, and a smell of tar rising from the boardwalk. A fly kept landing on her cheek and she kept extending her lower lip, exhaling a breath to blow it away. She was busy looking into my hand, my eyes, then off into the sea or seemingly within herself, as if divining some deeper meaning. The fly would land again, crawl slowly over her cheek, and rub its two front legs together and over its eyes.
An apology from the PoliSci chair to the ‘community’ at Middlebury:
Earlier this year I, as chair of the political science department, offered a symbolic departmental co-sponsorship to the Charles Murray event in the same way that I had done with other events in the past: on my own, without wider consultation. This was a mistake.’
You’ll have to look elsewhere for vigorous displays of moral courage, character, and independence of mind.
If an echo-chamber of shared belief and distraught racial-identity politics rewarded by a bureaucratic lack of imagination’s your thing: Middlebury might just be for you!
Truthfully, the battle was probably lost at least a generation ago, in many minds, as the logic of radical ideology, once embraced, tends to keep perpetuating and reinforcing itself.
Here’s one answer [above] to Charles Murray’s question of what happens next in the face of actual violence. In his words:
Much of the meaning of the Middlebury affair depends on what Middlebury does next. So far, Middlebury’s stance has been exemplary. The administration agreed to host the event. President Patton did not cancel it even after a major protest became inevitable. She appeared at the event, further signaling Middlebury’s commitment to academic freedom. The administration arranged an ingenious Plan B that enabled me to present my ideas and discuss them with Professor Stanger even though the crowd had prevented me from speaking in the lecture hall. I wish that every college in the country had the backbone and determination that Middlebury exhibited.’
Here’s possibly another answer
48 Middlebury professors signed the following document (WSJ paywall warning…speech on public affairs and civil discourse ain’t necessarily free).