Who Can Save College Campuses From Themselves?

(from Forbes):

By Tom Lindsay

In the wake of campus protests spreading nationwide—from the University of Missouri, to Princeton, Smith, Ithaca and Claremont McKenna College, to mention the latest—it is tempting for those who have long been arguing for higher-education reform to remark, “We told you so!” For example, columnist George Will goes so far as to declare, “The institutions have brought this on themselves. So, regarding the campuses’ current agonies, schadenfreude is not a guilty pleasure, it is obligatory.”

The difficulty with this understandable reaction is that those who will suffer from the great campus crackup are not merely the intolerance-fomenting Dr. Frankenstein’s in the Academy. We all will be damaged—students, the economy, and, most threatening of all, democratic discourse, which requires robust freedom of speech and debate. Therefore, after correctly pointing to the self-destructiveness of the politicized Academy, it is time to offer a new way by which to save our schools from themselves. CONTINUE READING HERE