A while back, the New York Times‘s Nicholas Kristof wrote that his fellow progressives “believe in diversity, and we want women, blacks, Latinos, gays and Muslims at the table — er, so long as they aren’t conservatives.” Universities, he continued, “should be a hubbub of the full range of political perspectives.”
While there’s plenty of recent evidence to suggest Kristof’s echo chamber is already upon us, lately it seems good sense is pushing back. In the preceding week, Wall Street Journal editorial writer Jason Riley was disinvited to participate in a lecture series at Virginia Tech. Only after he published an op-ed in the Journal and appeared on Fox News to discuss the controversy was Riley’s disinvitation rescinded.
Also in Virginia—when the faculty senate at George Mason University voted to refuse funding from conservative donors and to keep Antonin Scalia’s name from honoring its law school, the university’s president, Ángel Cabrera, defended intellectual diversity in an open letter to his faculty and in a letter to the editor published in the New York Times. And, as of Friday May 13th, the faculty of the actual law school apologized for their university colleagues and unanimously accepted the Scalia name.
In his May 2 commencement address at the University of Michigan, former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg decried the too-common call for campus “safe spaces,” consistent among the demands made by students—and met by administrators—at Yale, Williams, Amherst, and the University of Missouri in the last year. Bloomberg said, “one of the most dangerous places on a college campus is the so-called safe space because it creates a false impression that we can isolate ourselves from those who hold different views,” to a mix of applause and some boos from the audience.
Last month at Ohio State University, administrators did not oblige student protesters. On April 7, Ohio State president Michael Drake broke up a sit-in by sending his vice president with a simple message: “Dr. Drake will never receive a list of demands and he will not negotiate with you.”
