JIM SLEEPER is a lecturer in political science at Yale, and an author and former columnist at the New York Daily News. He wrote a column for the Yale Daily News on April 14. We can assume he knows about the need to choose words carefully, and we can assume he chose his words below carefully. Eliana Johnson and Jamie Kirchick are freshmen at Yale. They are members of Yale Students for Democracy. They are not professional pundits, though Johnson is a contributor to one of Minnesota’s leading blogs, www.powerlineblog.com.

Johnson and Kirchick filed an online report with Frontpage Magazine on April 11. They recounted the goings-on at a Yale “teach-in” held the evening that Baghdad was liberated. Professor Dmitri Gutas used the occasion to raise the specter of a neoconservative cabal–the names he listed were all Jews–running American foreign policy. Professor Glenda Gilmore spoke on the attempt to silence voices of the left. It sounds like a typically silly session of the tenured left, and Johnson and Kirchick report the posturing with gusto, and with a tough conclusion: “Indeed, the conspiracy theories espoused by Gutas and Gilmore are a symptom of the hateful bitterness that characterizes the campus left in the face of American success.”