MEGAN COURTNEY | A&E Editor
Facebook posts concerning controversial speaker Charles Murray’s talk Tuesday evening resulted in the Scheidegger Center putting security measures in place.
Charles Murray and Robert Frank will be speaking at 6:30 p.m. as part of the H.F Langenberg Memorial Speaker Series.
Bill McClellan, a columnist from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, will be moderating the event.
Photo by Megan Courtney
Murray, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, is a white nationalist and “has become one of the most influential social scientists in America, using racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women and the poor.”
According to the SPLC, Murray has said that disadvantaged groups are “disadvantaged because, on average, they cannot compete with white men, who are intellectually, psychologically and morally superior.”
Frank is a professor of economics at Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management and his “economic view” column appeared monthly in the New York Times, according to his biography on Cornell’s website.
Tony White, manager of the Scheidegger box office, said some emails directed at administrators said that protests were being planned but that the groups “have the right to protest peacefully.”
Security measures that were put in place included the stopping of ticket sales. According to Director of Public Safety and Security, John Bowman Jr., anyone who wants to protest at the event, but does not have a ticket, will not be allowed in.
This event, coordinated by William Rogers, an associate professor in the Plaster School of Business, will focus on how culture, skill, diversity and luck plays a role in opportunity in the U.S.
Rogers said in an earlier story he is hoping to pull the audience out of their “bubble” and surprise them a little. Rogers refers to the Bubbly Quiz Charles Murray created which can be taken here.
Murray’s talks have sparked protests at universities in the past, including Middlebury College and Harvard University.
Editor’s note: An earlier headline of this story may have been misleading to some readers. It has since been corrected. We apologize for the error.
