March of the Credentialed Morons

1. Academic Disaster

For at least the past two decades, our colleges and universities have devolved into leftist training camps where free speech is labeled hateful and induced leftist conformity is the order of the day. Even professors at the University of Chicago, famed for its free speech code, fear to speak out.

Mr. Cochrane wrote on June 15, “I spent much of my last few years of teaching afraid that I would say something that could be misunderstood and thus be offensive to someone. Many of my colleagues report the same worries.”

If that level of fear accurately describes the situation at the University of Chicago, where the university administration has deservedly won national attention for coming down clearly, decisively, and publicly on the “open debate” side of the campus speech wars, imagine just how bad things are in the rest of academia.

In a moment when black Americans fear being killed by police, the concern that tenured professors might be inconvenienced might seem trivial. The worry at Chicago, as described by Mr. Cochrane, was less that university administrators would, on their own initiative, rule speech out of bounds.

It was more that a student would lodge a grievance that would in turn generate an investigation that would then accumulate a momentum of its own -- with no due process. It could end with a teacher falsely labeled as a racist, one of the worst things a person can be called in contemporary America.

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