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Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague
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Late to the party, but I found this paragraph interesting:
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Some of Murray’s views are indeed odious. Twenty-three years ago, he co-authored The Bell Curve, which argued that differences in intelligence account for much of the class stratification in American life, that intelligence is partly genetic, and that there may be genetic differences between races. Critics called Murray’s argument intellectually shoddy, racist and dangerous, and I agree. (Before I began working there full-time, my old magazine, The New Republic, published an excerpt of the book, along with rebuttals, and thus gave it a legitimacy it did not deserve).
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That is one of the risks of universities permitting speakers whose ideas are abhorrent and do not withstand academic rigour to speak at a university: to the casual observer, observing a speaker giving a speech/lecture at a university may give the speaker a legitimacy he or she does not deserve.
Universities control who they permit to lecture/teach every day. For instance, MIT has repeatedly declined my offer to teach one of its quantum physics courses.
Anyway, I'm not sure where I fall on this debate. Its a very complex problem.