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Charles Murray Losing Ground Summary

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We, Lindenwood University’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Task Force are charged with promoting the well-being, safety and security of a diverse academic community in which teaching, learning, and the exchange of ideas can flourish, and where we encounter, encourage, and interrogate ideas that challenge settled notions of truth.

We note that Charles Murray, Emeritus Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has been invited along with another speaker, Dr. Robert H. Frank, to lecture as part of the new Harry Langenberg Speaker Series at the Hammond Institute on May 8, 2018. The event’s pre-publication material indicates that Murray will be discussing “Culture and Opportunity in America.” We write to register our disapprobation with this …show more content…

Although his writings appear to maintain a rhetorical veneer of science, Murray is largely regarded in and outside of academic circles as a rank apologist for racial eugenics and racial inequality in the United States. Murray, of course, is free to publicize his ideas, but we feel it is our duty to object when he does so by disregarding widely-held norms of sound scholarship and intellectual integrity. We are happy to provide a more detailed background on Murray’s writings, if need …show more content…

As a university located in proximity to where the Ferguson incident occurred we are already under scrutiny concerning our race relations simply by dint of geography, and even though these are seemingly unconnected matters, bringing who in fact influenced the current white supremacist ideologies flourishing in this country to speak at a university just down the road from where Michael Brown's death caused a national debate over what lives actually matter, suggests that university's political alignment whether it is intentionally so or not. So, if this talk does proceed without comment, disingenuously presented under the blanket of "both sides" or "freedom of speech" then the message that sends is, "we do not disagree with this man's politics and are allowing him to speak at our university knowing the current political climate." That message can and will translate to "we do not value diverse communities as much as we value this speaker’s right to share and discuss white supremacist ideas on our campus." Resulting as it does from a single Institute on campus’s choice of speaker, yet, the talk thus threatens to negatively impact the entire Lindenwood

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