George Mason University economics professor

TUESDAY, APRIL 11, 2017
…And Finally Being Told To Grow Up Or Get Out!

Here’s how our good friend, veteran George Mason University economics professor Walter Williams says he would respond to disruptive campus protests if he were a university president.

Greg Piper at The College Fix says Williams would tell protesting students that their disruption is not “the arena for the expression of ideas, and if you can’t handle ideas, you ought to leave the campus.” And it’s not just presidents but also boards of trustees that need to “have the guts to enforce the policy” against students’ shouting down speakers.

Any time you have the kind of reception that [libertarian social scientist] Charles Murray encountered at Middlebury College and at Villanova and at Notre Dame, I think that the presidents of those colleges ought to round up the students who are raising hell and suspend them. You know, arbitrarily suspend them. That conveys a message to other students that you don’t behave this way. It’s good to have debates and conferences, but you have to act civilized.

He said it was a good practice for colleges to require student ID to get into such events – as Villanova University did when Murray spoke – so that violent outsiders can’t get in and evade punishment.

Williams said he derives a “source of comfort” from seeing how many of his incoming Ph.D. students, who learn microeconomic theory from him each fall, have gone on to “very illustrious careers” in the quarter-century he’s taught them.

“I think that I qualify as one of the more honest professors,” too, he said, explaining how he doesn’t “proselytize” his students with his own views. (MORE)

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