That liberals run American universities is never going to be a man-bites-dog news headline, but the urgent question ought to be: When are university liberals going to stand up and defend liberalism?
For most of the last few years, it has been possible to regard the antics of the campus left with a mixture of benign neglect and schadenfreude at the supine reaction of college administrators, who seem not to have read the chapter on appeasement in their history books. The obsession with “microaggressions,” the insistence on “trigger warnings,” and the demand for “safe spaces” amply supplied with plush toys and grief counselors are pathetic compared with the campus left of the 1960s. In those days the campus left meant business—the black activists who occupied the student union building at Cornell had loaded weapons; the bombs were real at the University of Wisconsin and Claremont Men’s College. When protesters lacked bombs, they resorted to arson and mass vandalism (Columbia, Oregon, UC Santa Barbara, etc.). Until recent weeks, the closest thing we’ve seen to overt 1960s-style violence is the University of Missouri’s assistant professor of communications Melissa Click calling for “some muscle” to rough up a journalist during a campus protest two years ago, a plea whose meager result would have embarrassed a rookie Teamster. And Black Lives Matter, for all of its rage and impulse to disrupt public events and block highways at rush hour, is a far cry from the Black Panthers. This has made all the more disgraceful the capitulations of so many administrators. It’s one thing if, like Cornell University’s president James Perkins in 1969, you have a loaded gun pointed at you. But caving to hysterical and whining students?
