In other academic news, it turns out that if you dare to punish students who use coercive mob tactics to threaten and intimidate non-leftist speakers and those who wish to hear them, then you are creating “an unsafe and threatening environment” for students who want to use threatening and coercive physical tactics. And also you’re racist, which rather goes without saying. Apparently, any hint of consequences for thuggish and censorious behaviour merely affirms “white supremacy” and will “suppress and criminalise” students whose own attempts to suppress veer towards the criminal. 

This, we’re told, is “unfair.”

The thinker of these deep thoughts, Charles H F Davis, a professor of education at the University of Southern California and the director of USC’s Race and Equity Centre, is aghast at the prospect of students being suspended if found to have repeatedly engaged in violence or disorderly conduct with the intention of suppressing debate. The professor also accuses Ben Shapiro, a speaker who’s been on the receiving end of student thuggery, of advancing “racist rhetoric,” while omitting any evidence to support this claim. We are, however, informed that this unspecified “hate speech” is “a form of violence itself.” To which, presumably, any actual violence – say, by leftist students exulting in mob force – is merely a form of payback. Physically coercive tactics are, says Professor Davis, employed only in desperation by “those… willing to labour in the name of justice” and whose “very minds, bodies and spirits” depend on these lively and vigorous forms of expression, which are “clearly a demand for greater racial equity and inclusion.”

Readers are invited to find justice in this short but somewhat instructive video here, filmed during Mr Shapiro’s visit to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in November last year, and in which a lone female journalist experiences first-hand the bottomless compassion of these brave student labourers.

Such is academia’s Clown Quarter, where the best and the brightest are nowhere to be seen.