Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and author of Unlearning Liberty, writes on Huffington Post about the shameful affair at Brandeis.
He points out that quite a few other schools have seen similar moves — students, faculty, and others ganging up to demand the disinvitation of someone who had been invited to campus because they don’t like what that person has said or done. It’s all part of the absurd notion that people (at least people in certain groups) have a right not to be offended, and thus they’re entitled to demand that anyone whose views might offend them be kept away. He observes that this is “a formula for turning today’s crop of our best and brightest into an echo-chamber generation.”
I take an even darker view. Our “best and brightest” will probably be able to shrug off the demands by the academic equivalent of street mobs that certain voices be silenced if possible. The problem is that the un-bright take this as proof that intimidation and coercion are all right. Those are the people we (or any other society) must worry about.