Editor’s Note: Read senior editor Elliot Kaufman’s response to this opinion, published in Stanford Politics on Feb. 21.
The Hoover Institution’s invitation to Charles Murray is a sad excuse for intellectual engagement. The Bell Curve aside, he hasn’t earned the stage we’re giving him.
Murray is coming to Stanford’s campus this Thursday for the second event of Hoover’s new speaker series, Cardinal Conversations. The event will also feature Francis Fukuyama for a discussion with Murray on “Populism and Inequality,” moderated by Niall Ferguson.
As expected, Murray’s invitation has drawn criticism from students who take issue with his most famous work, The Bell Curve.
Students for Sustainable Stanford, an environmental student group, wrote in a statement to university president Marc Tessier-Lavigne:
While we respect and encourage debate from diverse perspectives about difficult topics, Murray’s history of racism and using pseudo-science to further racist ideas is deeply disturbing. We disagree with Stanford allowing him to perpetrate his views at an institution as prestigious as this one, because it lends undue validity to dangerous ideas masquerading as academic thought.
And a “Coalition of Concerned Students” wrote in an op-ed in the Stanford Daily:
Charles Murray is not one of today’s leading intellectuals. He has never been an intellectual at all. Over the course of his career, Murray has cited flimsy evidence, relied on flawed statistical procedures and miscalculations and ignored data that contradict his theories, all the while capitalizing on the controversy generated by his ideas… Providing Charles Murray a platform as an intellectual undermines the university’s commitment to academic integrity and exposes the racism, sexism and classism that has thrived at Stanford since its foundation.
The editorial board of the Stanford Review wrote an impassioned defense of Charles Murray in which they questioned if his critics have even read the book they so loathe:
Throughout their jeremiad, the [Coalition of Concerned Students] slander Murray as a “white supremacist,” a term that should not be thrown around without serious consideration. Murray’s theses as a social scientist are rooted in data, questionable as those datasets may be. Nowhere in his work does he assert racial inferiority…The Coalition should realize that Murray’s academic peers treat his work not as hate speech to be censored, but as an argument based on flawed data with which they must “engage in order to disagree.” Stanford students should hold themselves to the same standard.
The Review may be right, partially. As Harvard PhD student Nathan J. Robinson wrote in left-wing magazine Current Affairs:
Murray’s self-perception as a persecuted truth-teller, who uses real facts that the politically correct simply don’t want to hear, is reinforced by the fact that many people who hate him haven’t read his work. Press coverage of Murray has distorted his positions, and it’s frequently true that people label him a “white supremacist” or “eugenicist” without knowing what he actually says about race, genetics, and intelligence.
Robinson writes:
Charles Murray does not conclude that the black-white gap in IQ test scores must entirely be the product of genetic inferiority, nor that black social outcomes are entirely genetic in origin. The Bell Curve is not, strictly speaking, “about” race and IQ. And Murray does not argue in favor of a program of eugenics (though the error is easy to make, as Murray speaks positively of the work of previous eugenists and seeming to lament that the Nazi “perversion of eugenics… effectively wiped the idea from public discourse in the West”). Nor should Murray necessarily be called, as so many label him, a “pseudoscientist.” His writings are above-average in their statistical scrupulousness, and he uses no less logical rigor than many highly qualified social scientists do.
However, Robinson also writes:
It’s nevertheless extraordinary that Charles Murray can believe the negative reaction to him must be irrational and politically motivated. For while it is true that people unfairly attribute positions to Murray that he does not hold, the positions he actually does espouse in his work are, if anything, more extreme than even the most unsympathetic public portrait of him has depicted… Any serious inquiry into Charles Murray’s actual body of work must conclude that, if Murray is not a racist, the word “racist” is empty of meaning. I do not necessarily believe Charles Murray thinks he is a racist. But I do believe that a fair review of the evidence must necessarily lead to the conclusion that he is one…Murray’s intellectual project does involve passing off bigotry as neutral scholarship, and people who worry about “legitimizing” prejudice by giving it a platform should very much be worried about giving Charles Murray a platform.
Those interested in reading more on the debate over the merits of The Bell Curve can find plenty of material on the Internet, including these critiques in Scientific American, Slate, and Vox, and these defenses — penned by Murray himself — in Commentary and on the American Enterprise Institute’s website.
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However, while any guest speaker should be liable to be made to defend any of their viewpoints regardless of the specific matter at hand for which they were invited, in the case of Thursday’s Cardinal Conversations event, Murray was invited not for his work in The Bell Curve but rather for his ostensible expertise on inequality and populism, the subject of his 2012 book Coming Apart.The Hoover Institution’s home page for Cardinal Conversations describes the initiative as “a new series of conversations on burning issues of our time, featuring some of today’s leading thinkers” as well as “a series of discussions with well-known individuals who hold contrasting views on consequential subjects.”
Only one of those descriptions holds true for this Thursday’s event: Populism and inequality are without a doubt burning issues of our time. Unfortunately, Charles Murray doesn’t deserve to be called a leading thinker on these topics nor is he that politically different from Fukuyama.
Fukuyama and Murray have each written about populism and inequality, differing slightly in their diagnoses of the cause for their rise in America. But both men are conservative, and their views on these particular topics are not very radical.
In fact, an analysis of the speech Murray famously gave on Coming Apart at Middlebury College found that the actual text of the transcript was “decidedly middle-of-the-road.”
So, if not to put forth an ideological take on the topics of populism and inequality, why did Ferguson and the Cardinal Conversations steering committee invite Murray to speak at all?
It certainly couldn’t have been for his expertise. Hoover’s event page only cites Coming Apart in describing what Murray brings to the table, but upon cursory examination, that text actually brings with it very little of value.
The overall theme of the book is that the cultural gap (which supposedly underlies the economic gap) between the upper and lower classes and the social problems of poor, white America are the real issues of inequality in the United States.
In a review for The New Republic in 2012, Timothy Noah described Murray’s Coming Apart as wholly unremarkable and somewhat unoriginal.
Furthermore, Noah wrote, “Murray’s claim to possess superior knowledge of proletarian culture isn’t entirely convincing in an age when Google makes the acquisition of superficial expertise faster and easier than ever.”
Liberal commentator Jonathan Chait wrote in New York magazine:
I haven’t read Murray’s book, so I can’t evaluate the argument. I have many reasons for skepticism that it actually explains what it purports to explain. There’s Murray’s non-confidence-inspiring history, the intuitive possibility that deteriorating social norms are at least partially the result and not the cause of economic stagnation (it’s no longer easy for a blue-collar earner to support a family), and the simple fact that, you know, many Americans are not white, which limits the value of a book about white people as a totalistic social explanation. But even if we grant, for the sake of argument, all the claims being made on Murray’s behalf, the basic point is that [cultural reevaluation]is not a plausible response to the problem of income inequality.
“It isn’t clear what’s the point of Coming Apart,” wrote Andrew Hacker for the New York Review of Books in 2012.
And David Frum’s scathing review should disabuse anyone of the notion that the only critiques of Coming Apart come from the left. Frum, a Republican speechwriter and commentator, described Coming Apart as “unfortunately not a good book.”
In a five-part review for the Daily Beast in 2012, Frum wrote:
Murray nostalgically regrets the lost America of his 1950s Midwestern boyhood. But to describe in any true way how that America was lost would require a reckoning of how that America was made. Unwilling, as he acknowledges, to submit his politics to the check of uncongenial evidence, Murray prefers to avoid encountering the evidence that might shake his politics…
[Murray’s] polemical use of data is one—but only one—of the things that discredits Coming Apart as an explanation of the social trouble of our times…
At the end of the book, without ever suggesting any reason to believe that government is the problem, he insists that the reduction of government is the solution.
I found myself flipping from beginning to end of the book, punching searches into my Kindle, questioning whether I’d perhaps carelessly missed some crucial piece of evidence. But no. There is no evidence, not even an argument, just an after-the-fact assertion, pulled out of the hat.
It’s puzzling, truly. The prescription comes without an etiology, the recommendation without any discussion of causation, verdict without proof or trial. Social science’s claims to be science are troubled enough without this wholesale jettisoning of—not only scientific method—but even the scientific outlook.
The odd thing is: I’m exactly the right market for Murray’s rhetoric. I’m predisposed to accept everything he says about the importance of individual achievement and the negative consequences of government that provides too much. All I ask is some skein of connection, no matter how thin and fragile, between the “whereas” and “therefore” clauses of the Murray argument. Murray doesn’t draw any at all, and doesn’t seem even to be aware that any such skein is required. The conclusions of Coming Apart are pure dogma, not only unsupported but even unrelated to anything that went before.
Frum did give Murray credit where credit was due:
Despite all its perverse omissions and careless generalizations, Coming Apart deserves credit at least for this: It takes seriously the challenge of reconstituting America as a middle-class republic. At a time when many conservatives refuse to acknowledge the simple statistical fact of intensifying inequality, Murray has at least joined the discussion. Congratulations for that.
But having merely joined the discussion of how to address inequality in 2012 should not merit a platform and billing at Stanford as a “leading thinker” on inequality in 2018. Heck, Tim Noah, who wrote The New Republic’s review of Coming Apart (as well as a seemingly better 2012 book on inequality, according to the New York Review of Books’ review) seems a better speaker. (I checked to see if Noah was invited. He wasn’t.)
The Bell Curve may or may not be racist. Coming Apart is by all appearances uninspiring. Many will protest Murray’s invitation on the basis of the former text; but even on the basis of only the latter, on an intellectual level, we should all expect more of Stanford.
Ruairí Arrieta-Kenna, a senior studying political science, is the editor in chief of Stanford Politics. He was recently added to the steering committee of Cardinal Conversations, though after all the events for this year had already been planned. This is his personal opinion, not that of the publication.