Hardly an academic semester goes by without a high-profile opportunity arising for the right to address pervasive, perennial anti-conservative animus on the American college campus. And hardly an academic semester goes by without the right, reflexively blinded by righteous indignation, blowing an opportunity to do so.

Too often, conservatives, in a rush to condemn their adversaries, dishonor their own principles, neglect the deeper issue of higher education’s authoritarian left-wing culture, and fail to appreciate the utility of an omnipresent throng of useful idiots. The latest example of this tendency is their impetuous response to Michigan State University creative writing professor William S. Penn and his lecture hall diatribe involving Ann Romney, taxation, voter suppression, and “old Republicans with the dead skin cells washing off them.”