On College Campuses, 'Freedom Is Under Assault'

"Let’s be clear," William Kristol writes in The Weekly Standard ("The Self-Destruction of the American University"), "about what is happening at Yale and Missouri, and at colleges and universities all across the nation: Freedom is under assault." 

But things have gotten bad enough, the situation has become dire enough, the decadence is now obvious enough that civic and political leaders can no longer watch from the sidelines. It’s time to add the defense of intellectual freedom, of freedom of speech and of the mind, to the more familiar agenda—economic freedom, social and religious freedom, the defense of freedom abroad—that the party of freedom intends to place before the American electorate in 2016.

"For decades," Mark Hemingway adds in the same issue of the magazine, "the American university system has been creeping towards both moral and intellectual bankruptcy."

But the events last week at Yale and the University of Missouri suggest we are reaching a tipping point, and that campus culture is transitioning from painfully idiotic to wantonly destructive. Even at the height of the Vietnam war protests, administrators endeavored, with varying degrees of success, to keep the inmates from running the asylum. Now it appears that students can invent accusations for the sake of validating narcissistic identity politics and bring institutions to their knees.

As the transition "from painfully idiotic to wantonly destructive" continues, the least we can do is have a good laugh. And maybe lay down a wager on how long it will take before the University of Oklahoma gets rid of the title residential college "masters."