As I recall, last year Charles Murray was disinvited from speaking at one school (at least) because his talk was “too controversial” for the snowflake students to handle. (Or maybe because the possibility of an ugly scene was too much for the snowflake administrators to handle.) History has not quite repeated itself this March.

Murray was invited to speak at Virginia Tech, where he was going to discuss the themes of his recent book Coming Apart. That led the president of VT, Tim Sands, to write an open letter to the university community. Sands did not act to cancel the talk (as happened at Williams recently) but instead he saw fit to denounce Murray in a way meant to either keep students away or provide them with ammunition for scurrilous attacks. Sands, referring to Murray’s 1995 book The Bell Curve, declares that it advanced “a flawed socioeconomic theory that has been used by some to justify fascism, racism, and eugenics.” Wow — that as much as writes the protest signs for those students who are eager to have a riot.

Sands is acting just like most academic leftists who want to feel good about themselves by attacking dark and satanic right-wingers for their presumably atavistic ideas. He is not acting like an educational leader who encourages students to listen, learn, and then form their opinions and arguments.

To his great credit, Murray has written an open letter of his own. In it, he demonstrates that Sands, like so many others, has a shallow and erroneous view about his earlier book. “For two decades,” Murray writes, “I have had to put up with misrepresentations of The Bell Curve. It is annoying. After so long, when so many of the book’s main arguments have been dramatically vindicated by events, and when our presentations of the meaning and role of IQ have been so steadily reinforced by subsequent research in the social sciences, not to mention developments in neuroscience and genetics, President Sands’s casual accusation that our work has been ‘largely discredited’ was especially exasperating. The president of a distinguished university should take more care.”

Indeed so, but the problem is that taking intellectual care these days often plays second fiddle to scoring cheap ideological points. Furthermore, it is simply venal for an academic leader to throw around inflammatory terms like “fascism, racism and eugenics” when they are so patently inappropriate.

How this now plays out will be very interesting.