Middlebury College professor injured by protesters as she escorted controversial speaker

Posted on March 3, 2017 |  

• Middlebury
 
• Middlebury College
 

By Addison Independent

CHARLES MURRAY LOOKS out on an audience in Wilson Hall Thursday of students who had turned their backs on him and chanted their disapproval. He was relocated to another room, from where his discussion with Prof. Allison Stanger, below, was broadcast. Independent photo/Trent Campbell 

MIDDLEBURY — Middlebury College Professor Allison Stanger was injured by protesters Thursday evening as she was escorting a controversial speaker from campus. She was treated at Porter Hospital and released.

Charles Murray, a political scientist who has been criticized for his views on race and intelligence, was invited to speak on campus by a student group. He was greeted late Thursday afternoon outside McCullough Student Center by hundreds of protesters, and inside Wilson Hall, students turned their backs to him when he got up to speak.

College officials led Murray to another location and a closed circuit broadcast showed him being interviewed by Stanger, the Russell J. Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics.

As Stanger, Murray and a college administrator left McCullough Student Center last evening following the event, they were “physically and violently confronted by a group of protestors,” according to Bill Burger, the college’s vice president for communications and marketing.

Burger said college public safety officers managed to get Stanger and Murray into the administrator’s car.

“The protestors then violently set upon the car, rocking it, pounding on it, jumping on and try to prevent it from leaving campus,” he said. “At one point a large traffic sign was thrown in front of the car. Public Safety officers were able, finally, to clear the way to allow the vehicle to leave campus.

“During this confrontation outside McCullough, one of the demonstrators pulled Prof. Stanger’s hair and twisted her neck,” Burger continued. “She was attended to at Porter Hospital later and (on Friday) is wearing a neck brace.”

Murray, who apparently was unhurt in the incident, is best known for his 1994 book, “The Bell Curve,” for which he was criticized for an assertion that people of different races have different economic outcomes because of their inherent difference in intelligence.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has called Murray a “white nationalist” who has used “racist pseudoscience.”