This is an amusing piece, e.g.:
Having lost the battle of persuasion, and largely swept from the campus environment, right wing speakers have to be foisted onto universities from the outside. When characters like Ann Coulter, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Charles Murray appear on campus, their appearances are funded by extremist donors and their events are orchestrated by outside groups. Finding students among the organizers, attendees, protestors, or counter-protestors is a challenge. This is theater and the university is a prop.
There is virtually no support for, or interest in these events at the schools being targeted. At universities with tens of thousands of students, campus Republican organizations can seldom recruit more than a few dozen participants. For people too young to have ever sipped the cool, sweet waters of the whites’-only fountain, much of modern conservatism feels morally equivalent to Fascism or Communism – a repugnant, cultural cancer than can’t be eradicated quickly enough. Conservatives aren’t sending Ann Coulter to Berkeley as a missionary. They are sending her to get B-reel footage they can play in fundraising pitches to aging Alabamans. She is there to incite violence. If no one sets anything on fire, then they’ve failed.
Apart from the political theater, however, there have been plenty of genuine incidents that reflect poorly on the mostly elite colleges (think Yale, Middlebury, Oberlin, Claremont-McKenna) where they have occurred and the often spoiled children who perpetrated them; but I agree it doesn't add up to a "crisis" for free expression on campus and hopefully it won't given the importance of such freedom at universities in particular. The biggest threat to freedom of expression–remember Steven Salaita?–has always come from forces external to the universities who sometimes succeed, as in the Salita case, in getting administrators to do their dirty work.




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