In June, Middlebury College announced it had officially disciplined students for disrupting a forum featuring sociologist Charles Murray two months earlier. In a Wall Street Journal editorial trumpeting the college’s dedication to free speech, President Laurie Patton described how dozens of students not only forced Murray and Professor Allison Stanger to relocate to a makeshift studio to livestream the event, but physically attacked them afterwards as they walked to their car.
After completing an investigation, Patton and her staff decided to place letters in the permanent files of the more serious student malefactors; the rest were merely given probation. As Murray noted in response, the upshot of Middlebury’s months-long investigation was that “[n]ot one single solitary person” was actually punished, neither for disrupting the event nor for hospitalizing one of the school’s professors.
The first amendment.