Is Charles Murray Racist? 'The Bell Curve' Author Reacts To Middlebury Protests Where Students Shouted 'White Supremacist'

Libertarian author Charles Alan Murray was surrounded by an angry mob of protesters Thursday in Middlebury College, Vermont, when he went there to speak at an event, he wrote in his blog Sunday. Murray mourned about how the institution failed to live up to free speech ideals.

Murray, also a member of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think-tank based in Washington, D.C, was not allowed to speak at the event as students shouted "racist, sexist, anti-gay, Charles Murray, go away!” when he took the stage. College officials then shifted the venue of his speech to an undisclosed campus location where it was live-streamed back to the original venue but nothing could be heard as protesters continued shouting and kept stamping their feet with occasional smoke alarms, he wrote in the blog.

During the incident, a professor, who was moderating a question-answer session with Murray and the students, was also injured and taken to emergency.

Murray wrote in his blog: "I sympathize with the difficulty of President Patton’s task. We’re talking about violations that involve a few hundred students, ranging from ones that call for a serious tutelary response (e.g., for the sweetly earnest young woman) to ones calling for permanent expulsion (for the students who participated in the mob as we exited), to criminal prosecution (at the very least, for those who injured Professor Stanger). The evidence will range from excellent to ambiguous to none. I will urge only that the inability to appropriately punish all of the guilty must not prevent appropriate punishment in cases where the evidence is clear."

Murray is best known for his controversial book, "The Bell Curve," which he wrote with Richard Herrnstein. The book was designed to explain by using empirical statistical analysis the variations in intelligence in American society. The book was widely criticized, particularly in reference to portions where the authors wrote about racial differences in intelligence and discussed its implications. The book pondered over how intelligence was the predominant factor in a person's life and decides factors like socioeconomic status and tendencies toward criminal behavior.

After the book was published in 1994, many criticized him and the co-author for their comments on racism. "Many criticisms of The Bell Curve, most notably Charles Lane’s thorough takedown in The New York Review of Books, have pointed out that Murray’s attempts to link social inequality to genes are based on the work of explicitly racist scientists," according to Southern Poverty Law Center.