It’s impossible to feel sorry for the university administrators who found themselves confronted with disruptions on campus this year. As an author pointed out at the Atlantic earlier this month, most of the schools in question trade on their own history as the homes of radical activism. They encourage students to admire the activists of a previous generation, luring them in with the promise that activists are respected figures on campus.
The police activity we are seeing universities level against their own students does not just scuff the carefully cultivated progressive reputations of elite private universities such as Columbia, Emory University, and NYU, or the equally manicured free-speech bona fides of red-state public schools such as Indiana University and the University of Texas at Austin. It also exposes what these universities have become in the 21st century….
