At this point, you have to imagine Charles Murray is used to being hated. In 1994, Murray, a political scientist, co-wrote The Bell Curve, which claims that, in the words of a New Yorker review, "race and class differences are largely caused by genetic factors and are therefore essentially immutable." Over the years, he's stuck by his position that poverty is not simply the byproduct of being born in the wrong place or to the wrong family—to simplify, his view is that poor people are generally dumber than rich ones.
He's been denounced as a racist who's based his life's work on pseudoscience and eugenics; he's also newly relevant. On his recent college speaking tour he became a symbol in the debate over free speech on campus, with some left-leaning students questioning why he should be allowed to spread his message at their schools. At Middlebury College, protesters shouted him down and the resulting fracas turned violent. A faculty member was injured, and a slew of op-eds were penned by Gen X-ers scolding students for disrupting Murray's freedom of speech. The arguments are well worn at this point: Should someone with Murray's views be given a platform by a school? Are schools obligated to bring speakers on campus if a student group (a young Republicans club, for instance) invites them? Is the First Amendment damaged when these speakers are driven away?
It's a sticky, complex debate. So I did what the student protesters don't want you to do: I went to see the man speak.
I arrived early at Columbia University's Lerner Hall last Thursday to find a mere two protesters—neither of them were Columbia students—who assured me they would not be the only ones. They were holding homemade signs that respectively read "CHARLES MURRAY IS A RACIST" and "NO FREE SPEECH FOR RACISTS!" Near to the back entrance of the building, two members of the local Socialist Workers Party had set up a table selling books that challenged Murray.
That was the extent of the anti-Murray protest, which is probably why his appearance didn't become a national news story as the Middlebury incident did. Demonstrators didn't even enter the auditorium, even though it wasn't sold out. As the New York Times noted later, it was a pretty sleepy affair. As for the Columbia faculty, they didn't protest the talk but noted their objections to him—the professor who introduced him before the audience called his work "insulting to intellectual integrity." Additionally, dozens of faculty members signed a letter denouncing Murray:
Beginning with his 1984 book Losing Ground and taken up more fully in The Bell Curve in 1994 and through his most recent writing, the corpus of Murray's work has amounted to an ideological polemic that justifies the ongoing disenfranchisement of African Americans and other people of color, and more recently, poor and working class white people. Although his writings carry the rhetorical patina of science, Murray is largely regarded in academic circles as a rank apologist for racial eugenics and racial inequality in the United States.
When I asked Murray about these criticisms over the phone, he laughed. "They are disputing what the SPLC [the Southern Poverty Law Center] says about me. They aren't disputing what Richard Herrnstein and I wrote in The Bell Curve... They've never read The Bell Curve. They've never opened the cover of it. They have no idea what's in it."
But neither has Jonathan Schatz-Mizrahi, the Columbia sophomore who booked Murray to speak on campus. In fact, Ari Boosalis, the vice president of Columbia University College Republicans, told me he hadn't even heard of Murray before the talk. (The university itself did not pay Murray to come to campus; it was organized through the American Enterprise Institute, where Murray works, in partnership with the CUCR.)
Schatz-Mizrahi booked Murray to come to campus because he read his 2012 book, Coming Apart, which heavily draws on the same research Murray references in The Bell Curve. But the book is about a divide between the upper classes and the alienated white working class—the same white working class that is generally credited for putting Trump in the White House.
At the talk, Murray made it clear that he isn't aligned with Trump, his poor white supporters, or the nationalists who worship the president. "I despise the alt-right," he told me after his talk.
Murray has a heterodox set of views to say the least: He dreams of an America that more closely resembles the 1950s, where the rich live among the poor. He also thinks elites should stop using the derogatory "redneck" to describe the rural working class, a term he likened to a racial slur. "Get out of this claustrophobic class... Learn to love America," Murray preached. "I love traditional American culture and I don't want to lose it." It's crumbling now, he reckons, because of the growing divide between the elites and the impoverished American heartland. But he also thinks CEOs deserve the salaries they're getting. To top it all off, he wants to replace the welfare state with a small universal basic income.
"I think the arguments he makes in Coming Apart are extraordinarily relevant to the rise of the Trump," Schatz-Mizrahi told me, "and I think that cultural division between the coastal elites and white working-class was a huge factor in the rise of Trump. Those arguments are really valuable, and beneficial for my peers to hear."
Unlike Milo Yiannopoulos, the alt-right famemonger whose transparently trollish positions brought out protests at whatever college he visited, Murray doesn't particularly welcome controversy. In appearance, he's old-school, professorial, boring. "We can all relax now, nothing exciting is going to happen," is how he began his talk in a basement. On this at least, he was right.
Most of the 50 or so students sitting in the gym-turned-auditorium were white and male. Many I spoke to were CUCR members who weren't too familiar with Murray. Columbia student Caitlin Carey told me she was there because she had written a paper about Murray. She said she didn't agree with the ideology he espouses, but went because she wanted to ask him a question. "Rather than having people yell and scream," she explained to me, "let's have a dialogue." Another Columbia student in the audience, who did not wish to be identified by name, told me he decided to see Murray speak after learning about the protests; he was curious to see what the fuss was all about.
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