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Charles Murray has been attracting protests (including one at Middlebury College that prevented him from speaking and where students turned their backs on him) as he goes from campus to campus on a lecture tour. Most of those protesting denounce Murray as the co-author of The Bell Curve, which many consider to be racist and based on faulty social science. But most of his speaking of late is not on The Bell Curve, but about a more recent book, Coming Apart, which is largely about working-class white people.
Wendy M. Williams and Stephen J. Ceci, both professors of human development at Cornell University, wanted to see what professors would say about the talk Murray is giving about Coming Apart. So they transcribed his Middlebury talk (he gave it for broadcast by livestream). Then they sent the transcript to 70 professors at colleges around the United States, without telling them it was by Murray. The professors were asked to rank the talk politically, on a scale of 1 to 9, with 1 being very liberal and 9 being very conservative. Based on 57 professors who responded, the average score was 5.05, or decidedly middle-of-the-road. Then Williams and Ceci sent the speech to 70 other professors, this time telling them it was a Murray talk. The average score was 5.77, a more conservative ranking than that the first group but still in the middle-of-the-road category.
Williams and Ceci described their findings in an essay in The New York Times. Of their findings, they write, "Our data-gathering exercise suggests that Mr. Murray’s speech was neither offensive nor even particularly conservative. It is not obvious, to put it mildly, that Middlebury students and faculty had a moral obligation to prevent Mr. Murray from airing these views in public."
