Middlebury College Students Traumatized by Photo of Charles Murray
“I wish to explain the photograph on page A1 to the readers”
These students should be embarrassed, not indulged. The school paper actually apologized for the picture.
Reason reports:
A Photo of Charles Murray Is Too Traumatizing for Some Middlebury College Students
One year after Middlebury College students shut down a planned debate between the American Enterprise Institute’s Charles Murray and Professor Allison Stanger—injuring Stanger in the process—the student newspaper decided to print a retrospective photo of Murray taken at the aborted event.
This decision was apparently controversial: An apologetic note from The Middlebury Campus’s editor-in-chief revealed that “most of the section editors, and the managing editor” thought it would be inappropriate to print a photo of Murray. A photo.
According to Ethan Brady, the editor-in-chief:
I wish to explain the photograph on page A1 to the readers. I recognize that it may be especially jarring, particularly for students of color who feel that Charles Murray’s rhetoric poses a threat to their very humanity. I also recognize that Murray’s visit to campus last March is an open wound for a campus trying desperately to move forward from it.
During a heated debate in the newsroom on Tuesday night, most of the section editors, and the managing editor, said that running this photograph would be inappropriate. Though I deeply respect the input of my editors, I decided to run the photograph anyway. I take full responsibility for this decision. It was mine alone, and any criticism should be directed at me alone.
This photograph is not meant to troll, or to cause pain, but to ask how that protest still lives with us today, one year later. For many, this image is burned in our collective memory. As much as we try to distance ourselves from that moment, we are made from it.
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Comments
I weep for the future of this country.
Oh, poor Ethan.
You are made from your ‘decision’ to publish a photograph of a guy you rioted to silence. That’s what you are made of, really?
You should have listened to the lecture. Your fellow students should have been expelled, and your school president should have been fired. Life is a lot more complicated than your underdeveloped brain can comprehend. Dr. Murray’s lecture would have helped make you more. Good luck!
How about a picture of Hitler, or Stalin? How about all 3 and a caption saying, “One of these persons is not like the others?” Or would it be too challenging for them to have to pick out which one?
Increasingly, I believe that the point of these hysterics is never what they say it is. No one really thinks a picture is that bad. They just want to establish the habit of policing thought.
particularly for students of color who feel that Charles Murray’s rhetoric poses a threat to their very humanity
So listening to Murray makes them act less than human? Because I don’t see how else to read that.
Why is Middlebury still solvent?